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That sinking feeling

We are now 25 months on from the Brexit referendum. Theresa May filed notice of departure from the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on 29 March, 2017: on 29 March, 2019 (in 8 months' time—approximately 240 days) the UK, assuming nothing changes, will be out of the EU.

In the intervening time, the UK has undergone a disastrously divisive general election—disastrous because, in the middle of an unprecedented (and wholly avoidable and artificial) national crisis, it returned to power a government so weakened that it depends on an extreme right-wing sectarian religious party to maintain its majority. The DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) stands for Union with the United Kingdom, and hostility towards Ireland (in the form fo the Irish Republic); they will veto any Brexit settlement that imposes a customs border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. However, this implies that a customs border must exist between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and the two economies are so entangled that this is impractical. (The border between north and south cuts across roads, railways ... and also through farms, living rooms, and business premises.) Creating a hard border in Ireland is anathema to the government of Ireland, which will therefore veto any Brexit agreement with the UK that posits one. (It would also violate the Good Friday Agreement, but hey, nobody in Westminster today cares about that.)

The Electoral Commission has uncovered evidence of electoral spending irregularities in the Leave.UK and Vote Leave campaigns serious enough to justify criminal investigation and possible prosecution; involvement by Cambridge Analytica is pretty much proven, and meddling by Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer has also been alleged in testimny before the US Senate judiciary committee. There's also an alleged Russian Connection with Aronn Banks (the main financial backer of Brexit) having been offered too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities in a Russian gold mine (according to The Observer newspaper).

But not to worry, the will of the people has spoken! (Although it's actually the will of these peope—a mixed bunch of right-wing Atlanticists, hedge fund managers, warmed-over neo-Nazis, and disaster capitalists. Never mind, I'm certain they have only our best interests at heart.)

For added fun and optimism, back in the summer of 2016 it looked reasonably likely that over the next few years we would see business continue as usual, on a global scale. This was before the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the USA. Trump doesn't understand macroeconomics—he's convinced that trade is a zero-sum game, that for every winner there must be a loser, and that trade tariffs and punitive sanctions are good. He's launched attacks on the World Trade Organization (as well as NATO) and seems intent on rolling back the past 75 years of post-WW2, post-New Deal global free trade. The prospects for a favourable post-Brexit trade deal with the United States went out the window on January 20th, 2017; Trump perceives isolation as weakness, and weakness in a negotiating partner as an opportunity to screw them. (So much for the Conservative Atlanticists and the Special Relationship.)

The EU is the UK's largest trading partner, with roughly 44% of all our foreign trade going through our EU siblings. This includes food—the cramped, densely populated UK hasn't been self-sufficient in food since the 19th century, and we import more than 50% of what we eat.

A customs union with the EU has been ruled out unless the UK agrees to cooperate with certain EU "red line" requirements—essentially the basis for continuing free trade: for reasons too preposterous and stupid to go into this is unacceptable to the Conservative party even when national food security is in jeopardy. In event of a no-deal Brexit, Operation Stack will become permanent, causing gridlock on motorway routes approaching Channel ports. Perishable goods and foodstuffs will be caught up in unpredictable protracted delays, resulting in dairy produce (including infant formula) becoming 'very scarce'. Large manufacturing concerns with cross-border supply chains such as BMW, Airbus, and Toyota are threatening to shut down production in the UK in event of a hard Brexit; Amazon's UK manager warns of civil unrest in event of a no-deal Brexit, and in event of a no-deal that doesn't include services (as well as goods) it's hard to see how the Amazon supply chain can continue to function in the UK.

(Note: Online sales account for 18% of all UK retail and Amazon is the proverbial 500lb gorilla in this sector. UK customers who purchase from Amazon.co.uk are, however, doing business with Amazon SarL in Luxemburg, who then subcontract fulfillment/delivery to a different Amazon company in the UK—Amazon SarL takes advantage of one of the lowest corporate tax regimes in the EU. This is obviously not a sustainable model in event of a hard brexit, and with shipping delays likely as well as contractual headaches, I think there's a very good chance of Brexit shutting down Amazon.co.uk and, thereby, close to 20% of the British retail distribution system.)

Current warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent; supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well.

Note that this warning comes from the civil service, not anti-Brexit campaigners, and is a medium-bad scenario—the existence of an "Armageddon scenario" has been mooted but its contents not disclosed.

In the past month, the Health Secretary has admitted that the government is making plans to stockpile vital blood products and medicines in case of a no-deal Brexit, and the Brexit secretary is allegedly making plans to ensure there are "adequate food supplies" to cover a no-deal exit.

But before you say "well, then it's going to be all right, we'll just go back to 1939-54 era food ration books and make do and mend", we need to factor in not only Donald Trump's latest bloviations, but Global Climate Change! Europe is facing one of the most intense regional droughts in living memory this summer, with an ongoing crisis-level heat wave. Parts of the UK have had the least rainfall in July since 1969, with a severe heat wave in progress; Greece is on fire: Sweden is having a wildfire problem inside the Arctic circle this summer).

A Hard Brexit, on its own, would be a very dubious but probably long-term survivable scenario, with the UK economy taking a hit not much worse than the 10% downsizing Margaret Thatcher inflicted on it in 1979-80. But a hard Brexit, coinciding with the worst harvest failures in decades, ongoing climate destabilization, a fisheries collapse, and a global trade war being started by the Tangerine Shitgibbon in the White House is ... well, I'm not optimistic.

Right now, the British cabinet seems to be locked in a suicide pact with itself. Theresa May is too weak to beat back the cabal of unscrupulous opportunists within her own party who want the worst to happen—the disaster capitalists, crooked market short-sellers, and swivel-eyed imperialist revenants of the European Research Group. Any replacement Conservative PM would face exactly the same impedance mismatch between reality and his or her back bench MPs. On the other side of the house, Jeremy Corbyn's dislike for the EU as a capitalist entity has combined with his fear of alienating the minority of "legitimate concerns" racist voters in Labour's base so that he's unwilling or unable to adopt an anti-Brexit stance. Brexit cuts across traditional party lines; it's a political Outside Context Problem that has effectively paralysed the British government in a time of crisis.

So I'm not optimistic that a no-deal Brexit will be avoided.

What happens next?

On a micro scale: I'm stockpiling enough essential medicines to keep me alive for six months, and will in due course try and stockpile enough food for a couple of weeks. I'm also going to try and move as much of my savings into other currencies as possible, preferably in financial institutions accessible from but outside the UK. (I expect a Sterling crisis to follow promptly in event of NDB. We saw Sterling drop 10% the day after the referendum—and certain people made a fuck-ton of money by shorting the stock market; I expect it to go into free fall if our trade with the EU is suddenly guillotined.)

On a macro scale:

Airports and the main container freight ports for goods entering the UK will shut down on day 1. There will be panic buying. I expect widespread rioting throughout the UK and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland (contra public received wisdom, NI is never quiet and this summer has been bad.)

A currency crisis means that goods (notably food) entering the UK will spike in price, even without punitive trade tariffs.

There will be mass lay-offs at manufacturing plants that have cross border supply chains, which means most of them.

You might think that as an author I'd be immune, but you'd be wrong: although paper editions of my UK books are printed in the UK, you can bet that some elements of the wood pulp and the ink that goes on it and the glue that binds them are imported. About 90% of my UK ebook sales are made as (contractually speaking) services via Amazon.co.uk (see above), the fuel that powers the trucks that ship the product to the bookstores is imported, my publishers (Orbit and Tor) are subsidiaries of EU parent companies (Hachette and Holtzbrink), and anyway, people are going to be spending money on vital necessities during the aftermath, not luxuries.

(Luckily for me, many of my sales come from other EU territories—in translation—and from the USA. Unfortunately, getting paid in foreign currency may become ... problematic, for a while, as Brexit jeopardizes both currency exchange and the UK retail banking sector's ability to exchange funds overseas.)

After week 1 I expect the UK to revert its state during the worst of the 1970s. I just about remember the Three Day Week, rolling power blackouts, and more clearly, the mass redundancies of 1979, when unemployment tripled in roughly 6 months. Yes, it's going to get that bad. But then the situation will continue to deteriorate. With roughly 20% of the retail sector shut down (Amazon) and probably another 50% of the retail sector suffering severe supply chain difficulties (shop buyers having difficulty sourcing imported products that are held up in the queues) food availability will rapidly become patchy. Local crops, with no prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the fields as the agricultural sector collapses (see concluding remarks, section 5.6).

Note that during her time as Home Secretary, Theresa May presided over 30% cuts in police numbers. During the recent state visit by Donald Trump, virtually every police force in the UK had to cancel all leave just to maintain cover for those officers temporarily assigned to POTUS' security detail (the policing operation was on a scale comparable to the 2011 summer riots ... when there were many, many more officers available). Also, police and emergency service workers will be trying to source food, medicines, and the necessities of life for themselves and their own families: there may be significant absenteeism from critical posts just as everything comes to a head.

I expect the government will collapse within 1-4 weeks. There will be a state of emergency, managed under the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) (which replaced earlier civil defense emergency legislation). Emergency airlifts of medicines, food, and fuel may take place—but it's hard to see the current US administration lending a hand.

Most likely the crisis will end with the UK crashing back into the EU, or at least into Customs Union and statutory convergence—but on EU maximalist terms with none of the opt-outs negotiated by previous British governments from Thatcher onwards. The negotiating position will most likely resemble that of Greece in 2011-2015, i.e. a vastly weaker supplicant in a state of crisis and near-collapse, and the British economy will take a generation to recover—if it ever manages to.

(This is, by the way, not the worst scenario I can envisage. The worst case is that the catastrophic collapse of the world's sixth largest trading economy, combined with a POTUS whose understanding of economics is approximately as deep as that of Louis XVI, will lead to a global financial crisis on the scale of 2007-08—but without leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown to pull our collective nuts out of the fire. In which case we're looking at a global banking collapse, widespread famine due to those crop shortages, and a wave of revolutions the like of which the planet hasn't seen since 1917-18. But hopefully that won't happen, right? Because only a maniac would want to burn everything down in order to provide elbow room for a new white supremacist ethnostate world order. Oops, that would be Steve Bannon.)

Anyway: the most likely historical legacy of a no-deal Brexit will be the final refutation of the common British misconception that the UK is still a global superpower, possibly accompanied by Scottish secession and re-entry to the EU, Irish reunification in some sort of federal system, re-acquisition of Gibraltar by Spain, and the disintegration of the Conservative (and possibly Labour) parties at the next general election.

I just hope I'm still alive at the end of it.

Thoughts?

882 Comments

1:

MODERATION NOTE: Despite mention of Donald J. Trump, this is not a thread for discussion of US politics Thread hijacking on the subject of DJP will therefore be considered grounds for a red card and deletion of comments.

2:

If djt unleashes on Iran, it will drive (Russian) oil and gas prices high. Which will flow thru to uk gas and electricity prices.

Good luck paying for those with collapsed currency.

3:

Where do you see Scotland in this ? Rapid independence, then (re)join EU ?

Indyref2 even before march 30 even, to create legal fiction of never leaving EU ?

Is Irish reunification a realistic possibility if the grass is suddenly much greener south of NI ?

4:

I see big employment opportunities in the field of customs inspection.

5:

If possible, on a very personal level, I would attempt to also make sure that my affairs are in order and that during the event itself I am on sabbatical, extended leave or otherwise engaged in parts I expect to remain stable, even if I might need to apply for refugee status... Maybe other EU countries, Norway or Switzerland?

I know that my acquaintances that did work in UK (academia and research all) have moved or are in the process of doing so. Many of them were immigrants even if some techincally had citizenship and did not wait to see how hostile the environment becomes after a NDB, given how hostile it already is. The rest were born and raised in the UK but still found positions abroad to make sure they and their dependants are safe (although from what I was able to hear, extracting extending familiy is proving difficult for multiple reasons.)

The only ray of hope is that most of the people I could interact with would like to return, and hope that somehow the whole s*show might get canceled somehow...

From the european mainland, what I hear is concern for the UK as a whole and disbelief at what those in charge are not doing.

6:

As a British immigrant in the Netherlands, and with an American partner, these past 18 months have been emotionally draining for us (our radio is lightly pebbledashed with granola every morning). I sincerely hope you are wrong on your points, but I really fear that you will be proved right. I was unable to vote in the referendum, which frustrated me far more than I thought it would - and I'm wondering if a hard Brexit will lead to stringent visas being applied. I'm actively avoiding any travel in March and April next year.

7:

What do you think the odds are for something like this coming to pass? (assuming Brexit is cancelled at the 11th hour) odds for better? odds for worse?

8:

What currency, though? I suspect that the probably inevitable crash in the pound will be masked by a lesser but concurrent fall in the Euro (yes, "they need us more than we need them" is bluster and bullshit; but a hard Brexit will affect the EU negatively as well, and I don't see the Euro being a safe haven). The dollar? Not a safe bet either with a trade war in progress. Yen? Gold?

9:

IndyRef2 can't happen and be binding without the consent of Parliament, and would probably take at least six months to put in place. The nearest that could happen at short notice would be a snap referendum called by the SNP with support from the SGP, on a platform of "if we get a 50%+ margin we will have a mandate to run a new independence referendum" — which would be very hard to deny, if they got it.

I will note the Nicola Sturgeon is playing a very canny long game and is on the record as having said that she doesn't want to run another independence referendum unless she's sure of getting a 60% or greater "yes" vote. (We've seen how effective a 52/48 referendum outcome is at uniting a polity behind an issue and damping dissent. Ahem.)

Irish reuinification ...

It won't be reunification the way the Germanies reuinified. The unionists would never accept that, and it'd lead to street fighting and civil war. It's more likely to be two countries with different parliaments and electoral systems but a federal identity within the EU.

10:

Canned food I suspect might be the best currenct if push comes to shove... Gold is not as good for digestion...

11:

I see big employment opportunities in the field of customs inspection.

It takes roughly 2 years to train a customs officer.

The Netherlands began recruiting them by the thousand last year, to cover hard Brexit. The UK government? Nope, tumbleweeds. And we're now out of time.

The best suggestion the tories have come up with is to abolish customs checks on imports (thus opening us wide open to narcotics and firearms smuggling, but hey), to prevent bottlenecks on our side of the frontier. But the EU is very unlikely to reciprocate, so there will still be queues of outgoing trucks.

12:

While I suspect nothing this bad will happen, I agree that it is quite possible that it will and it's worth trying to plan for. If it does, then the long-term consequences of something like this are, I think, terrifying. If we assume the course of events is something like: hard brexit followed by food shortages, general disruption within weeks, financial & economic collapse followed by eventual rescue by the EU on (inevitably) far worse terms than we have now then what comes from that?

Well there will be a large number of people in the UK who will have had a really seriously bad time as a result of this: people will have died, many people will have lost everything. And the EU will have come in to rescue us as a result of which the UK will lose a lot of the rights it now has, as you say. People are going to hate the EU and foreigners in general for the perceived insult to their national pride, and they're going to hate the 'liberal elite' or whatever we are meant to call them now. It does not matter that this is a catastrophe that we have brought upon ourselves: Someone is going to have to take the blame, someone is going to have to suffer for what they did not, in fact do or ever want.

Well, this is the sort of thing that happened in Germany in the 1920s & 1930s, and we know where that ended up. I know this is perilously close to Godwinization, but I am not saying it because I'm playing some rhetorical game, I'm saying it because I am really frightened: the end point of this could easily be fascism. And I'm living in the middle of poor, rural England which is going to be fucked by this and I'm one of the people they will come for.

13:

Don't get your hopes for "never mind" resolution up.

A lot of hard-core EU people, both inside the machinery and in the political layers in the member countries don't much care how UK leaves, but they are adamant, as Charlie mentions, that if they ever come back, it is with no special "arrangements" (Ie: Start going metric, plan to convert to Euro, and then we'll talk...)

UK is, rightly, perceived as having hindered at lot of EU's grand and tiny plans for self-improvement, from unified time and measures to a EU-military, and very much in focus on both sides of brexit: UK has vetoed any serious, systemic attack on tax-evasion.

(This may become quite a problem for my own country Denmark, which has always cruised its EU-scepticism in the shadow of UK's veto power, but the brexit will probably effectively innoculate against a dkexit)

The sentiment I hear right now from EU world is that patience is running out, there are 12 weeks left of negotiations and either there is an agreement or there isn't and that's that: "Nothing is concluded until everything is concluded."

And yes, one doesn't have to fish much to find a quite gleeful schadenfreude at the prospect of a hard brexit either, and true to form, one of my french contacts suggested the official EU response, when UK begs for food-aid, should be "Let them eat financial derivatives then"

14:

Invest in rat farming futures. Or maybe a cryptocurrency for buying and selling rat pies?

(Only half-sarcastic. This is an entirely-self-inflicted WW2/Great Depression-scale economic own-goal.)

15:

the end point of this could easily be fascism

I agree 100%.

16:

As noted above, a War will make even your worst scenario seem warm and fuzzy.

17:

Problem is the next door neighbor, and traditional sparring-partner, also have nukes.

UK attacking Norway or Denmark is probably not a good idea either, so that leaves Iceland, or depending on the state of the UK armed forces, the Faeroyar Islands with Greenland as a final fall-back.

I really don't see that happening any time soon.

18:

Do you tihnk the Pratchett estate owns the trademark for Gimlet's Hole Food Delicatessen or will that be the next franchise to rise in the UK?

Pizza "Quatre rodenti" anyone?

The problem with this own goal, is that it isn't. Those that metaphorically got the ball, passed it back, kneecapped the goalie and, slammed the ball between the posts aren't those that will have to eat at the establishment above...

19:

I suspect the current US government would jump at the chance to ride to our rescue (on their terms) and shut out the EU. After seeing most of our remaining assets bought out on the cheap I'd guess we would end up with the same status as Puerto Rico.

20:

And if fascism is a plausible end point then people who might end up as the targets (the elite, anyone not sufficiently 'british' for the normal not-so-crypto-racist version of that) needs to be planning to leave. If the bad thing happens it will not be enough to have stocked up on supplies or to have saving denominated in Euro: indeed having done those things will make you a target: 'look at tfb, he moved all his savings to Euros in 2017, he knew what was coming, he's one of them, off to the camps with him'. No, you need to not be here if you might be seen to be one of them.

And if it is even plausible this means moving now: before the borders are closed, while it's still easy to move money out of the country.

21:

You were looking for Bad Guys for your space opera the other day. Space Steve Bannon seems like a solid choice. Have we found his underground lair yet? What uniform do his henchmen wear? Does he have a cat?

Seriously though, once the trend curves go asymptotic and if say the govt collapses, it's all chaos in the mathematical sense after that and there's no predicting where the 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' will lead. Pad out your bunker as best you can; keep your peeps as safe as you can.

My guess based on the reign of GWBush was that Pres. Orange would collapse the US economy during his second term. A 25-28 month timeframe for Brexit slots right into that theory. If it all goes to hell it won't go to hell in one isolated country. Most of us will sink together. Oh joy...

22:

I'm going to second Naive Optimist's suggestion that you take a March-April sabbatical to a country that isn't proceeding to shoot itself repeatedly in one vital organ after the next.

How about Canada? Our election isn't until October 2019 (when the f-ing Tories might take power after a Trump-Lite campaign).

23:

Sorry Charlie, I normally agree with much of what you write but this is nonsensical alarmism.

Any food from the EU that would have been perfectly safe to import on the 28th March 2019 isn't suddenly going to become toxic on 29th March. The only thing that would stop food supplies coming into the country would be if the government was stupid enough to order it stopped, and even this lot of halfwits should see that's a very bad idea (if only because they'd be booted out at the next election). Same applies to any other import. If the EU wishes to get bureaucratic, which it undoubtedly will, goods going to the other way will get held up, but that should be at the French end, not Dover. Ultimately, like any tariff or non-tariff barrier it will hit the buyers who impose the tariff more than the sellers.

Incoming tariffs are something we get to decide on, not have imposed on us. The WTO agreement only sets the maximum tariff levels, we're perfectly at liberty to have 0% tariffs on anything we like, which would reduce the cost of all food from outside the EU (like New Zealand butter and lamb).

The "dairy as a rare luxury" report was commissioned by a dairy company, I'm only surprised the LSE put their name to it because it was rubbish. The UK is pretty much self sufficient in milk and cream (https://dairy.ahdb.org.uk/market-information/processing-trade/imports-exports/uk-dairy-trade-balance/#.W1A-g5DTW9c). We import a lot of cheese, but delays in cheese imports don't matter as the entire point of cheese is that it's time shifted milk. We also import some butter, but again it doesn't matter if it takes 6 weeks to come from NZ to get here.

As for Amazon walking away from the UK, IIRC the UK is their second biggest market after the US. Why the hell would they want to hand that over to anybody else?

24:

Whilst some people may see this as unnecessary alarmism, the facts and statistics are not exactly a source of unbridled optimism either.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have an opportunity to move out of the UK for some years, an opportunity that I am inclined to take up -- just to be on the safe side.

25:

Actually, I think that they may paper over the most obvious cracks in the short term. Yes, it will be bad. I have already moved my money into medium-safe havens (mostly index trackers based on non-UK industry)m but that wouldb'e be safe against a real meltdown.

What I see is us signing a 'trade deal' with the USA, which will be TTIP dictated by the America Firsters and not cover simply trade. We are already disgustingly subservient to the USA military-industrial complex, and I expect that to make it a LOT worse. Despite the hysteria, the worst problems will not be food quality, but things like being forced to accept USA legal rulings, especially on things like patents, copyrights and restrictions on industry. We KNOW that the USA wanted to impose those on the EU, so that it could use its lawyers to milk the EU for all it was worth. Worse, that also blocks any chance of independent (i.e. British) innovation and industries becoming established in any areas that the USA lawyers care about - I have personal knowledge of how much that already cripples us, partly because of treachery within Whitehall.

26:

Another data point: We are not alone in this.

Two other families in our neighbourhood are leaving the UK as well. In both cases their decisions were strongly influenced by increased racial harassment following the Brexit vote.

Admittedly, this is only anecdotal evidence, and vanishingly small numbers at that, but it does make you start to ponder if this is the beginning of something more significant?

27:

tfb writes:

And the EU will have come in to rescue us as a result of which the UK will lose a lot of the rights it now has, as you say.
Those aren't rights, they're privileges.

28:

Unfortunately as discussed elsewhere in comments, suspending customs means all sorts of things like drugs and weapons and Russian agents can get into the country. If the French want inspections done in Dover, and we don’t, they are perfectly entitled to stop the ferries landing - or restrict the quantity to a level that they feel inclined to manage - which I don’t think would be very high!

29:

<Insert long and convoluted discussion of preppers/survivalists and prepping here, which got removed due to going off on too many tangents> In conclusion, if I were in the UK (inc. NI), I would be stocking up on misc. products (particularly food with a long shelf life, such as flour, rice, dried legumes, canned goods; batteries, candles and matches; solar powered stuff; etc.). In fact, even though I'm not in the UK, come February next year (if not January), I'll slightly re-up my level of stocks of stuff, in preparation of possible bullshit. I would encourage everyone to also consider their situation and attempt to get at least a few /months/ worth of food (that you actually would eat, and like to eat) into their kitchen cupboards by March 2019.

If nothing happens, you'll have spent slightly more money on food for a while, and then eat the food regardless. If the economy does melt down, you'll have a bit of a buffer against job loss, or even food shortages.

30:

the final refutation of the common British misconception that the UK is still a global superpower, possibly accompanied by Scottish secession and re-entry to the EU, Irish reunification in some sort of federal system, re-acquisition of Gibraltar by Spain, and the disintegration of the Conservative (and possibly Labour) parties at the next general election.

The predicted cost is obviously too high(*), but basically all of this looks like a good outcome to me.

(*) I'm not convinced by predictions of immediate civil unrest. It took a lot of targeted deprivation and bad racist policing to bring us the sporadic localised riots of the Thatcher era. A spike in hate crimes as happened after the referendum result is probably inevitable though.

31:

Oh, but overall, I tend to be a bit of a cautious optimist. I don't think things will be as bad as some people think they might be. Sure things can get bad, but will they really get that bad? The UK has historical connections to various countries that would, I think, happily go back to pre-1973 status with regards trade. That would make it easier for the UK to adopt to leaving the EU (in the medium to long term).

32:

I totally agree that Amazon UK won't collapse. Sure, it's going to be more expensive for them to do business, but it's not going to be more expensive for them than for all the other businesses. Yes, the money currently flows through Luxembourg, but a huge portion of that 18% of British retail that you cite is Amazon sales on behalf of British retailers. Everything's going to get more expensive, and Amazon's portion may shrink, but not so much that it will disappear.

33:

I hope you're wrong, Charlie. My Brexit bag is packed. I only moved back here from Canada in 2015, and always intended to return there by 2028 at latest, but I brought over a lot of money to buy my flat (which I purchased just this year, gambling that you are wrong). If things really do go belly-up, you guys are on your own.

"the most likely historical legacy of a no-deal Brexit will be ... re-acquisition of Gibraltar by Spain

I really don't see that happening at least until Spain cedes Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco.

34:

Your acquaintances have left? None of mine (in Marine biology) have. We even made two Italian PhDs redundant last year (shortly before the vote) and they're still in town.

We have easily a dozen research scientists here who have other EU citizenship, and only two scientists (of any nationality) that I recall have moved in the past year—and one of those moves was planned well before the Brexit vote.

Now, that may well be because marine biology jobs are in short supply, everywhere—which is why I'm here and not in Canada.

35:

We have already had more widespread and serious targetted deprivation than in the Thatcher era. I agree that the government may be able to hold things together in the short term, but I don't see it being feasible for very long. Inter alia, where will the money for all the fixups needed come from?

36:

If I had other EU citizenship I would not leave either, because if the bad thing happens I can just go (let's assume there's some warning before they close the borders). But I don't, because I'm British, so if the bad thing happens I won't be able to go because who will take me?

In fact, if the bad thing happens it is probably already too late for British people without other EU citizenship who may end up being regarded as undesirable.

37:

The "dairy as a rare luxury" report was commissioned by an expensive dairy company

Seriously; I looked for that company's products in my local shops, and the ones that are carried all cost as much as or more than other brand names and the chain's own brand products.

38:

Here's another cheery thought for you all. Everything our host just said about the police (redundancies and budget cuts, personnel having their own families to worry about when things start to get bad etc) also applies to the Army.

39:

Our field is computer science, so young-ish people can quite easily pick the city of their choosing to live, especially within EU and especially if they are willing to accept the local conditions including wages. We are hiring at the moment, and unlikely to soon fill all vacancies created by the glut of new projects granted in CS.

40:

Charlie's predictions might be a wee bit apocalyptic, but this...

"The only thing that would stop food supplies coming into the country would be if the government was stupid enough to order it stopped"

...is not quite right. Delays - any delays - will propagate through the system in similar ways to how spontaneous traffic jams form. I experienced this a couple of weeks ago when crossing the Croatian / Slovenian border. It was a mere formality, as almost all the traffic was EU and the border guards literally just counted the number of burgundy passports and checked against the number of passengers, yet we were stuck in a queue for a good 45 minutes.

Now imagine that effect, but for large, slow trucks, many carrying perishables and more carrying JIT components designed to fit into a fairly precise processing schedule. Even a few extra minutes per vehicle could cause hours of tailbacks in the ultra-short term (ie on the first day), and far longer if protracted. Then think of the knock-on delays for the channel crossing infrastructure (think of what happens to flight schedules when a plane is delayed). Then think of how those delays permeate through at the other end. The missed delivery schedules resulting in further delays in getting things where they need to be, for instance. The buildups of goods that cannot be processed until the arrival of others - backlogs of unfinished components building up due to the late delivery of parts (remember the KFC fiasco). And then the drivers who end up overrunning their max working hours, and the need to find replacement drivers (from where?). And so on.

You imply, too, that obstructionism from the EU (by French customs, say) would not obstruct imports. Remember the migrant crisis? That led to colossal delays in exports even though there was never any added obstacle to Britain-to-France transport. The same would happen in reverse: any delays in Britain-to-EU shipping would result in further delays to imports even if Britain were to throw the ports open. (Which they won't be able to do anyway because Brexit was all about Taking Back Control - which demands at least a nominal move to increased border scrutiny).

tl;dr Deliberate obstructionism could create a colossal crisis, but the system is fragile anyway.

41:

I agree that the government may be able to hold things together in the short term, but I don't see it being feasible for very long.

One thing I'm getting at with my scepticism about civil unrest is that there's a tendency for people() to assume that civil unrest is the natural state of society absent the wise/ruthless/loving/pragmatic [delete as appropriate] rule of the Designated Authorities and predict rioting in the streets(*) any time there's big change they disapprove of. History doesn't really support that. Actual civil unrest needs some combination of long-standing active grievances, an immediate tangible cause, and a lot of organising work. Tottenham and Toxteth were anti-police riots. Tahrir Square began with student-led protests about the price of food.

(*) Generally middle-aged men, but I think that's just because they do most of the talking. The actual opinion is probably more widespread.

(**) Not our streets, of course. But... you know... those people over there. The scummy underclass and/or authentic revolutionary vanguard we project our unfiltered fears and desires onto.

42:

Make it still cheerier. I can't remember the details of which Acts say this, but the Home Secretary has the power to authorise anyone (including foreigners) to carry weapons, and to deputise them as police, for deployment anywhere in the UK. The former facility is used, sparingly, but the latter has only been dabbled with. If the shit really hits the fan (as the government sees it), especially if the police and armed forces refuse to carry out a dubious or improper order, it wouldn't surprise me if G4S, Blackwater or even the USA were called in.

43:

Good time to try out LED agro as back-up or even primary food supply. Also, laying hens don't need much space, special tech or feed.

44:

"Any food from the EU that would have been perfectly safe to import on the 28th March 2019 isn't suddenly going to become toxic on 29th March."

Remember the horse meat scandal?

without any downside to the senders we WILL start getting rubbish shipped to us. That stuff in the warehouse that someone left out in the lorry for too long? send it to the UK, that expired stuff? send it to the UK... & won't be long before we start getting stuff that is deliberately unsaleable elsewhere

you could say "we won't check anything" and manage a couple of days extra but ultimately you run into the same problem

45:

Charlie:

I haven't yet read through all the links you posted but feel that the article below should be added to the reading list. Please note that I posted the below link on the other comment/Frank's thread before coming over to read your new thread.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-real-story-of-the-fake-story-of-one-of-europes-most-charismatic-ceos

Here are the first four paragraphs:

'Laboratoires Berden had quite a run. Founded in 1996 by Eric Dumonpierre, who also served as CEO, Berden successfully commercialized Mutorex, a drug to treat obesity. Dumonpierre quickly became a star chief executive, winning several awards for corporate social responsibility. He invested in an all-hybrid vehicle fleet well before it was fashionable. He planted trees in and around Paris to stop deforestation. His employees loved him; they were given “solidarity leave” — full pay while on humanitarian missions, and he instituted a 32-hour workweek. Dumonpierre was celebrated at industry conferences and political forums, and was cited in the media.

But in the mid-2000s his impeccable reputation took some hits. There was disquiet over Berden’s intent to offshore some operations, potentially leading to layoffs in France. Then a philanthropic venture of Dumonpierre’s was exposed as a front for an organization that employed child labor in Asian factories. Rumors of serious side effects to Mutorex surfaced, and an executive committed suicide under circumstances that are still mysterious.

Still, by 2009 Berden and Dumonpierre had weathered the storms — and profits skyrocketed.

What’s most incredible about Berden and Dumonpierre is not their success or how their reputations recovered from scandal. It’s that neither the company nor its CEO exists. Every iota of information was fabricated — by college students — starting in 2005 and kept alive for a decade. This is the story of how, in our classroom, we at HEC Paris created false news before anyone understood the phenomenon — and what we’ve learned about the techniques that make false news spread and stick.'

46:

"The Shirley Exception is a bit of mental sleight of hand that allows people to support a policy they profess to disagree with. It's called the Shirley Exception because … well, I mean, surely there must be exceptions, right?" – Alexandra Erin (@alexandraerin) on Twitter., https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1004400861865488384.html

I do not see England or the UK or GB or whatever rejoining the EU, if the EU makes it hard; after starvation no-one says, "Oh, we're friends again." And no country ought to subject itself to the tender mercies of the ECB and its ordoliberalism.

I suppose trade with other regions is possible: the Americas, China, Russia, various Asian nations, but they will all demand their pound of flesh and then some.

Hard times, hard times.

Croak!

47:

You are (slightly) mistaken there. Long-standing active grievances? Tick, got them. An immediate tangible cause? We are speculating that. A lot of organising work? Not really, because that can follow the initial unrest, if it is mishandled, thus adding more grievances and tangible causes to those existing.

An example was in Northern Ireland. When the disorder started (1968 or so), it was NOT organised except by small gangs, and the IRA was in abeyance (and that led to the Official/Provisional split). Stormont completely fucked up its response, and it exploded from there.

48:

If this blog prediction were likely, it might be expected to be reflected in today's stock market and currency prices. By that metric there's good reason to be skeptical about these predictions.

49:

predict rioting in the streets(**) any time there's big change they disapprove of.

i'm positing rioting that gets started as food banks run out of food (although the folks dependent on food banks are generally already too beat down to complain) and then supermarkets that Folks Like Us shop in run out of staples like milk and bread. In other words, it starts as panic buying and then gets worse (as seen in the build-a-bear chaos earlier this month.

Obviously, running out of food is going to be a whole lot worse than running out of plush toys. Especially when it coincides with petrol shortages, traffic jams due to heavy goods vehicles, and "the sky is falling" news.

50:

"People are going to hate the EU and foreigners in general for the perceived insult to their national pride"

Half of them are. The other half are going to hate the first half for dropping us in this shite.

I am reminded of the Civil War(s) (as in Cromwell). It's something that everyone has strong views about, with the same religion-based inflexibility (note: using "religion" to describe a class of behaviour rather than the specific subclass that involves gods), and while there is some regional separation there is still a lot of mingling of people of opposite views; it even divides families and "sets father against son". No, I don't think it's impossible that something similar might happen again.

(And of course the eventual outcome of that episode, 28 years later, was that we invited a chap from the Continent to come and rule us and welcomed him with open arms...)

51:

"If this blog prediction were likely, it might be expected to be reflected in today's stock market and currency prices. By that metric there's good reason to be skeptical about these predictions."

what. the all wise all knowing market traders?

those magic people are just that: people. The things that Charlie is talking about are just becoming apparent - the more forward looking (and I would suggest that someone whose actual job is near future prediction might be at the forefront of that) are just getting there now. It will slowly sink in as people put the pieces together. I also think that there is a large amount of "that couldn't possibly happen. could it?? could it?..."

the thing is - history tells us it can. The markets will start reacting when it becomes clearer - right now there is room to be optimistic - people might come to their senses, the government might collapse (I personally can't imagine how May will survive until March (but that doesn't mean it won't happen))

52:

I'm in agreement with our host, and hope it won't come to that.

I'll just note something which bothers me: it's not a left-right issue, this brexit thing. It's an open-closed thing.

Yes, closed is more prevalent in the right, but not exclusive to... By no means.

Why am I saying this? I think we need to fight this scourge. We need to recognise that universal values of freedom and openness and rights in general are foundational to our civilisation surviving. We need to accept that there are the people on the other side of the aisle we can talk to and disagree with, and people presumably on our side who are toxic.

Anyway, I'm sick and tired of being what upon by the universe in the form of old people afraid of the future and of foreigners (and the occasional young idiot with the same bend). But at least now there'll be a brilliant object lesson on the deep reality that we are all deeply connected.

53:

If this blog prediction were likely, it might be expected to be reflected in today's stock market and currency prices. By that metric there's good reason to be skeptical about these predictions.

Translation; 'the holy market is always 100% accurate and predictive of events many months in advance".

I cry bullshit, and point to 1929, 1987, and 2008 as trivially-available evidence.

54:

So, firstly I agree with everything you say. The hubris of the Brexiteers is finally catching up with them (hint: As an Australian, I can assure you the days of Australia sending troops off to Gallipoli because King and Country are LOOOOONG gone, we aren't just going to roll over and sign some sort of trade deal with the Poms just because they beg us to, it'll be on our terms). I'm terrified of whats happening to the world; it's not just the UK and the US, it's everywhere (see: Hungary, see Austria, see...). As a non UKer I have been constantly boggling at the absolute and total incompetence of the UK government in handling this. The hard left who complain about the EU being an evil neoliberal capitalist entity are also in for a rude surprise when they find out just exactly how food, for example, is actually produced.

However I wonder if in the very long term this will end up being positive? Global warming is here. It has arrived. We are dealing with the affects already (eg, the Syrian situation was greatly exacerbated by drought). We (and by we I mean the world) can't deal with 1.5million Syrians. What will we do when, say, 30 million Saudis (most of whom lack any useful skills to be blunt) run out of water? Do we see global supply chains lasting in this situation? I remember reading that one side affect of the Greece crisis is that everyone in Greece has a relative with a farm on one of the Islands or something, and a lot of people went back to the land because of it. Same with Cuba, famously when the Soviet aid was cut off the life expectancy actually increased because everyone started living off veggies they grew in their garden. Maybe it's time to collapse early and avoid the rush?

The US btw is going to get very interesting soon. A much more important thing happened in 2016 than the elections; the mayors of a bunch of coastal Florida towns wrote a joint letter saying, basically, "The Flooding is out of control! We need to do something!" It was ignored of course, and if you talk to the Dutch Miami is toast, there's nothing you can do to save that. Combine that with the fact that Phoenix will have to be abandoned because it'll just get too hot, and suddenly denial stops working. And I'm not at all convinced US culture is prepared to handle this. But maybe I've read too much Dmitry Orlov.

55:

"the cramped, densely populated UK hasn't been self-sufficient in food since the 19th century, and we import more than 50% of what we eat."

Worse than that, it's about 75% last time I looked (also we were already unviable by the end of the 18th century, if not before, the rot had set in well before that).

56:

PS Did you read that dairy report, or just the media commentary? Sure, it was commissioned by a dairy company. That doesn't affect its validity, and it doesn't look obviously "rubbish" to me. Though I've only read parts of it... http://www.lse.ac.uk/business-and-consultancy/consulting/assets/documents/the-impact-of-brexit-on-the-uk-dairy-sector.pdf

Btw, the UK may be nearly self-sufficient in raw milk but it is the world's second-largest importer of dairy overall and has a huge deficit (we import roughly double what we export, based on your own source). I don't feel reassured.

57:

I, too, agree that Charlie’s scenario is unlikely to occur, Most likely some sort of fudged, cobbled-together deal is going to be achieved. It quite likely will be at the 11th hour, and it may well be just be a kicking of the can further down the road (an Artilce 50 extension perhaps), but some sort of deal that keeps the food moving and the planes flying is almost certainly going to happen. And even in the event of a true no deal Brexit, while there might indeed be an attitude of “let them eat financial derivatives”, I really don’t see the EU27 actually forcing starvation onto the UK if things got to that point.

A deal is not likely to happen this side of business heading to the continent though, which is already starting and will be a stampede come the end of the year, maybe as soon as the autumn. I know of one household-name investment bank which officially only expects to move “a few dozen” jobs from London to the EU27 but in fact is right now leasing out two whole office blocks in a major EU27 financial centre in readiness.

The scary part though is that in these sorts of crises events can run out of control so easily, whether anyone wants them to or not. And we know there are actors that want Charlie’s scenario, or worse, to happen, and they’ll certainly be trying to tip the balance that way. So it could happen, even though I don’t think it is likely to.

And that is the most tragic part of Brexit for the UK: that the country has willingly and deliberately put itself into a position where such scenarios are plausible! 300 years of more or less stable government and more or less consistent economic development and a reputation that we do it by evolution, not revolution, thrown away in two years of madness.

Anyone else remember the 70s fascist Britain dystopias like Chris Priest’s Fugue For A Darkening Island, Robin Cook’s (no, not the minister) A State of Denmark or Wilfred Greatorex’s “1990”? I used to devour those, but even growing up during the three-day week and the winter of discontent I always felt their weakness was a handwaviness of how the country gets into these states in the first place.

But now we know. All you need is a bus.

58:

"I have been constantly boggling at the absolute and total incompetence of the UK government in handling this."

What makes it even more boggleable is that before the referendum there were numerous charts of the composition of Parliament published that showed that apart from a few tens of Tories, MPs of all parties were heavily in favour of Remain. Which led to the expectation that even if the referendum did go Leave not a lot would happen because most of Parliament would oppose it.

Where the fuck have those hundreds of Remain-supporting MPs all gone? I know there's been an election, but it didn't result in that many MPs being replaced, and in any case the sudden vanishment was apparent straight after the referendum long before the election was even proposed. All the stupid crap has gone through the Commons practically on the nod and the only effective opposition has been from the Lords. Have they all been nicking off to fancy dinners instead of putting their votes in? Has some Illuminati/Mafia-type figure managed to put the bite on several hundred MPs across the country? Or what?

59:

As I commented earlier today elsewhere, all you need is a set of have-nots who don't see any downside in risking the unknown...

60:

Referencing levels of drug smuggling, I would like to draw your attention to the flurry of papers which followed an innovative drug use survey carried out in Rome:

http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/topics/pods/waste-water-analysis_en

The results of these surveys are actually rather enlightening and quite stark in their conclusions: narcotic use is much higher in prevalence and kilogrammes used than previous police and government guesstimates thought probable.

Working from this, the police are generally rather ineffective at seizing imported drugs, and serve only to keep prices high. Government guesstimates of drug use are inaccurate enough as to be useless, and given that most drug users seem to be invisible to health and law enforcement, it would seem that most people can handle taking drugs recreationally.

Therefore, I don't fear a greater influx of narcotic drugs into Britain post-brexit. About all that'll happen is that drug dealers make less money.

61:

@Elderly Cynic: An immediate tangible cause? We are speculating that.

@Charlie Stross: i'm positing rioting that gets started as food banks run out of food (although the folks dependent on food banks are generally already too beat down to complain) and then supermarkets that Folks Like Us shop in run out of staples like milk and bread. In other words, it starts as panic buying and then gets worse.

So I think we agree a hard Brexit isn't going to be an immediate cause in and of itself? At the very least, a credible prediction of unrest needs to specify who will be doing what, and why. (And ideally, when. I'd expect the economic troubles of a hard Brexit to push politics in radical directions, but mass protests a year or two down the line aren't the same thing as riots up front.)

Rioting over food is at least a concrete example - though I think the suggestion that it would start with food banks is an example of the kind of projection I mentioned in my last post. UK food banks are sparsely distributed and don't allow anyone to visit more than once a month, "to discourage dependency". The angry crowds are much more likely to be at the supermarkets. But even then I'm sceptical that we'd end up with rioting rather than the panic-buying we saw in the 1970s.

62:

tfb / Charlie @ 15 "fascism" And Corbyn is rabidly pro-Brexit, yes? I simpply don't beieve the levels of stupid. I supect we will have to post guards on our allotments - but if the 'leccy supply goes down, so do our frozen food reserves - NOT good.

Will stop here, coming back later, off to pub ......

63:

...and further: The very morning after the referendum, the Leave side flat out admitted that their bus had been a complete lie. The day after that they admitted that one of their other major promises had also been a lie. And yet nobody gave a shit. Not only was there no outcry, there was no reaction at all.

It's not just the levels of stupid that are incredible, it's the levels of passive acceptance and lack of will to resist.

64:

I for one look forward to a No Deal Brexit in which, to keep food and vital supplies flowing, we have no customs controls at the borders. I seem to recall that Leave voters had some concerns about controls at the border, what was the slogan, "Take Away Control Of Our Borders"? Something like that.

65:
A lot of organising work? Not really, because that can follow the initial unrest, if it is mishandled, thus adding more grievances and tangible causes to those existing. An example was in Northern Ireland. When the disorder started (1968 or so), it was NOT organised except by small gangs

NICRA had existed for a year by that stage.

67:

I wouldn't say that market predictions are 100% correct, but how's the track record of predictions by science fiction writers? Probably not so hot either.

68:

how's the track record of predictions by science fiction writers? Probably not so hot either.

Then why are you bothering with my blog?

You're not a regular around here. Better mind your manners; you're skating very close to a ban for rudeness.

69:

I know that. There are already organisations and marches against government policy, and we are now in the days of smartphones being used to promote such things, which makes it MUCH faster to organise a demonstration or riot.

Let's say that there is panic buying and the supermarkets in a deprived area run out of food, so some hundreds or a thousand descend on those in neighbouring rich areas. No problem. But what if they were blocked from doing so? A few days of that, and the imprisoned, hungry people could easily turn into a rampaging mob. Whereupon ....

My point is that a crisis turns into serious disorder mainly when they authorities completely fuck up the response. But what is the chance of this government NOT fucking it up?

70:

Jesus, I'm glad not to be part of this particular family squabble. I only have to deal with...(nods exaggeratedly westward). If I recall correctly, Leave were busted for violating election laws on spending limits for this non-binding referendum, but their obvious chicanery and Russian interference are not enough to invalidate the result, because this really isn't an election. When I read Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" I wondered how people could sleepwalk towards doom, some even eagerly rushing forward. No longer.

The only thing that can be predicted with certainty is that the Conservatives will bodge Brexit or its reversal, so plan accordingly.

For what it's worth, MEP and Brexit Representative Guy Verhofstadt (The Hof!) supports a petition to grant EU citizenship to UK citizens living on the Continent (at 327K signatures towards the goal of 500K).

https://www.change.org/p/do-you-want-personal-eu-citizenship-send-a-message-to-the-european-parliament

There's also a change.org petition to strip The Hof of his parliamentary immunity for recently calling some marching Poles a bunch of Nazis (4125 signatures towards goal of 5000), because, hey, the EU. By sticking around, British citizens get to deal with the smoke rising from the EU's eastern edges (and literally from the northern and southern edges).

71:

I think Charlie has posited a believable scenario of post E-day Britain(E for Exit) but suspect several things will happen instead. If we are approaching a hard exit, the E.U. and Whitehall will “stop the clock” until an agreement is reached-after an outbreak of sanity in Whitehall.I believe it was Charlie who pointed out there are three deadlines, E-180, when 6 month forward contracts are settled, E-90 for 3 month contracts at which points an outline of the disaster will become clear to all who can/want to see. The 3rd deadline is E-day. I do not think the E.U. wants to see the total collapse of the UK(or just England) as such unrest is not easily quarantined and can spread to neighbouring countries. Ultimately I fear that the Leave population is like an alcoholic-they will not admit to a problem until they hit rock bottom. (There is another outcome-certain forces start work on Project Fairfax(for non UKA persons, look up the English civil war.))

72:

Unfortunately Mr Corbyn, for all his virtues is something of a Marxist and unfortunately seems not to have the wit to keep quiet on this belief system.

Karl Marx in life made a number of predictions about the likely future, none of which have come true. He also made a number of assertions about how an economy should be run, which were comprehensively shot down at the time by his intellectual contemporaries in the Austrian school of economics, and which have been fairly well tested in real life several times.

Real-world Marxist governments generally muddle along rather incompetently for a while, then eventually descend into totalitarian economic messes. Venezuela is the poster child for this; it takes a rare sort of anti-talent to comprehensively mess up running a petro-state and its economy, but this the Marxist government of Venezuela has managed.

Thus politics in Britain is getting to be rather depressing. We have a choice between what is almost a minority government headed by the Incredible Charisma Vacuum, with Captain Plonker burbling his incompetent way through leading the Labour Party ever leftwards.

Way out there somewhere we also have the comic relief group formerly run by Nigel, and some yellow bunch headed by someone nobody has ever heard of.

Why is there a preponderance of politicians with silly hairstyles about the place now? Why do some of them look likely to get into power? Where did I take the wrong turn that led to this madhouse?

73:

Didn't stop Napoleon reckoning that he could starve us out if it wasn't for our Navy. He knew we were dependent on importing food.

74:

Karl Marx in life made a number of predictions about the likely future, none of which have come true.

Disagree strongly: the inherent contradictions in capitalism were to some extent averted in the 20th century precisely because of Marx's predictions (evasive action was taken to head them off at the pass), but it looks like we're getting back into Crisis of Capitalism time again at this point.

(Now, as to his prescriptions not working, that's another matter. But then, Marx was about 95% diagnosis and 5% prescription anyway.)

75:

I apologize. Your post was educational and interesting, even if I don't agree with it. I will mark my calendar for five years from now, to see how your prediction fared.

76:

Re: 'Why is there a preponderance of politicians with silly hairstyles about the place now?'

Personally think some of this may be attributable to the fear (in the UK) about not getting a good job if one publicly discloses one's political affiliation thus preventing many sensible people from actively engaging politically at a grass roots level - the source pool of future political leaders/PMs.

The hair could be part of why they couldn't get a good mainstream job. :) Think this is like 'artistes' being allowed to be weird: after a while, 'allowed' turns into 'expected', so that if you're not weird enough, the common bloke can't believe that you could possibly be an artiste/pol.

77:

Not fair. No US political comments but you drop a line like: "leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown." Can't tell on this side of the Atlantic whether you are being satirical or not but that kind of sentiment is designed to elicit reaction that must by its essence involve US political comment. Provocation is fine but play fair, man.

78:

Re: Food shortages - smuggling

Of the impression that there are still many small fishing boats all around the UK coast. If yes, then instead of fishing, many of these boats will likely start engaging in food smuggling. Sources could be legitimate farmers from the EU or an increase in large cargo/container ships from anywhere on the planet (esp. China) passing more slowly than usual just off the international/national sea border.

If this happens then it's likely that some idiot pol (possibly backed by a supermarket/retail giant) will insist that the UK navy get involved to stop this: better die of starvation waiting for the next UK harvest than survive eating un-British food. (The old better-dead-than-red argument.)

79:

I remain somewhat hopeful, not least of which pretty much all my current pension savings are tied up in the UK. However, to respond to the idea that 'food will be fine because it's not changing', that's dangerously missing the point about modern 21st century supply chain management.

We might skip inspections on the trucks coming in, although how we do that and not get smacked out of the WTO on whose terms we would be trading (because they have opinions on that) - even a delay on either end of, say, 30 seconds per vehicle adds up to trucks being stuck on the M26 or in the new lorry parks they're ALREADY building across chunks of the Kent Countryside that should ALREADY be on their way back through with stuff for the supermarket marshalling sites in Leicestershire.

If the trucks get delayed on that job, then they're not available for Jobs 2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 on which they are already booked. The whole Just In Time logistics system is that fragile. Start mucking with it and things start failing very quickly. Fresh food only stays fresh for a while after all.

Screwing with the whole basis of modern logistics alone should be enough to cancel Brexit.

80:

Re smuggling (and this is offtopic) but: Long tradition of that. You could buy French Wine in the UK pretty much throughout the entire Napoleonic wars for instance.

81:

Claiming 'market predictions are not 100% correct' is, while strictly true, fairly misleading: market predictions are often catastrophically bad. It is one of the many awkward truths about economics that the assumption that the markets price things in just does not work very well.

82:

That sinking feeling (produces evil cackle) Aha. Ha. Ha. Ha. You are going to have to get used to it from now on, aren't you. The real sinking feeling happens not when events actually are unfolding in front of your eyes, but when you look back and realize how much you've already missed. Give it a bit of time, and you will be grateful for many of the Brexit failings you are now considering so bad now, because the Big Trade War will hit you hard, and then some more. You will have to get used to things like this: http://www.lngworldshipping.com/news/view,uk-lng-shipment-headed-to-us-likely-originated-from-yamal_50436.htm https://eadaily.com/en/news/2017/12/15/at-a-loss-why-has-poland-sold-its-lng-from-united-states-to-ukraine And why worry about food shortages, this is not how capitalist economy works, isn't it?

the end point of this could easily be fascism There's no reason for oligarchical regimes (who promote and secure fascist governments all over the world) - not to treat their own citizens in the same manner eventually. Especially while said citizens are still riding a globalist wave of optimism and all-loving pink-glasses idealism. It only means that you are the last dish on the menu. https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/resilience-left-latin-america

We are living in world-encompassing white, supremacist, neoliberal state which accepts no borders, liberties or alternatives to its rule. Not because the "white" ARE majority of the people, but because they OWN majority of the people, and it is natural for some(only some) more extreme and less wealthy of them to try and adjust their grip on the assets they feel like they can lose at the moment. These people may bicker for a while, but overall nothing would change for better to everybody else, because even the individuals (this one and the other one) who have the power to change something, they understand - it is a different game altogether. They make a mistake, and they are crushed like bugs under a gold bar.

and a wave of revolutions the like of which the planet hasn't seen since 1917-18 And here I am, to actually remind that 1917 revolutions started with government coup, when liberal government toppled the Emperor and became the new ruler of.. whatever it was left of the Empire. However weak these people were, the Tsar's crumbling bureaucracy was even weaker, so people do not usually blame them for this action and rather stress the following events.

83:
Where the fuck have those hundreds of Remain-supporting MPs all gone?

OK, let's do an explainer on this:

There are 317 Tory MPs now. Of these, there are perhaps 50 who are seriously pro-Leave (the "European Research Group"), 20 that are pro-Remain and 247 who are pro-doing what the party leader says. That's where most of the vote went: when Cameron was leader, they were being told to vote Remain, so they did; now May is leader they are being told to vote Leave, so they do. Only a handful of the pro-Remain (sometimes just Kenneth Clarke, sometimes Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan as well) will actually rebel on major votes, but when the rest (a group led by Dominic Grieve) push hard, then Theresa May will offer them something to back down - however, they are mostly instinctive loyalists, and will often accept fake compromises in exchange for not rebelling, so they can't be relied on. If you follow American politics, think Susan Collins, who threatens to rebel much more often than she actually does.

All 10 DUP MPs are either pro-Leave or pro-obeying the party leader.

All the other minor parties are 100% either pro-Remain or pro-obeying a pro-Remain party leader. There are a few (most notably the Lib Dems Norman Lamb and Tim Farron) who represent strongly pro-Leave seats and might have some problems if they actually had to vote against Brexit in a vote that could overturn it, but voting for the softest Brexit possible isn't a problem for any of them.

Over in the Labour party (262 MPs), there are four groups aside from the majority whose principled position is doing whatever the Labour leader says:

The leadership itself, which is instinctively anti-EU, but also knows that (a) most Labour voters and MPs are instinctively pro-EU, and (b) No Deal will be a disaster and therefore they have to make sure that if No Deal happens they mustn't get the blame. They've appointed a lawyer-MP (Keir Starmer) to do the detailed work and he's been slowly edging towards the obvious solution of the "soft Brexit" (staying in the economic bits of the EU and leaving the political ones) but without admitting that this is impossible without retaining freedom of movement, which is hated by lots of racist Labour voters. As the party out of power, they can pretend that they could have got something that is impossible and blame it all on the Tories for not getting it ... as long as they can vote against what the Tories do without actually winning - so their strategy is to lose the votes as narrowly as possible. If they accidentally stop Brexit, then the government will fall and it becomes their problem, which is something they desperately want to avoid.

A rebellious pro-Remain faction who will vote for anything that softens Brexit and don't give a crap about pissing off racists by keeping freedom of movement. This is probably 100 MPs, but Corbyn never wants to call a vote where they will actually rebel against him, because that weakens his position. This is why Labour keep abstaining - Corbyn and the Remainers can agree to abstain and the party doesn't look totally split.

Two separate pro-Leave factions. One is comprised of the true believers and is either four or five MPs (Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Frank Field, John Mann, and Kelvin Hopkins. Hopkins is technically not Labour because he's been suspended during an investigation into claims of sexual harassment).

The other pro-Leave faction covers a number of MPs who are instinctively pro-EU, but not particularly committed to that, and whose constituencies are very very pro-Brexit. This could be as many as 50 MPs, but probably no more than 20. They are the main reason why Labour has been pretending that it's possible to get rid of freedom of movement without chaos.

Most of the time the Tories can keep their number of rebels small enough that the few Labour rebels will fill up the gap.

84:

Or, much simpler "The market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent".

85:

I do not think the E.U. wants to see the total collapse of the UK(or just England) as such unrest is not easily quarantined and can spread to neighbouring countries.

No, of course EU does not want not want UK to collapse, just as - just exactly as - they don't want to Ukraine, Switzerland or Norway collapse: Collapsing neighbors make lousy fences.

But to be utterly brutal about it: EUs point of view boat-refugees in the Channel or the Irish Sea coming from a politically collapsing UK are, after 30 march 2019, in all respects indistinguishable from boat-refugees in the Mediterranean coming from politically collapsing Northafrican countries.

86:

Yes I could have phrased that better. I guess I'd say that market predictions would appear to me to be the best of the many bad ways to predict the future. It's not so much that I'm saying they are good as I'm saying they are the least bad method.

87:

Not fair. No US political comments but you drop a line like: "leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown."

I detested Dubya at the time, but with 20/20 hindsight? We've got it infinitely worse today.

As for Brown, he knew his macro, but had all the charisma and charm of a two-by-four.

So you can take that quip as "dislike, but grudgingly concede there are worse things out there".

88:

No, no, no, Charlie! Rats are too much gristle and bone. Allow me to offer a much tastier alternative: as we (yes, that includes me, personally) Yippees said in '68, "Eat the rich!"

Steak of hedge fund manager, anyone?

89:

I disagree. The chances of Trumpolini getting through his first term, never mind reelected, range from slim to none.

Btw, I have this picture of a new band, The Tangerine Shitgibbon, as "playing" a fusion of heavy metal and avante garde jazz, the kind of jazz I refer to as "amelodic".... Or maybe this band is just waayyyyy off-key.

90:

Oh, yes, the joy of JIT supplies. Or, as I have been calling it for many years, Just-Not-In_Time.

And it gets deeper than that: I know the US, and so I suspect the UK, also, changed the tax laws so as to taxx stock (that hit artists hard), and so industry wants to stock as little as possible. Now, with border delays, they'll want to stock up, but it will cost them higher taxes....

The upshot is modern capitalism: "sales and revenues down? increase prices to maintain a steady revenue stream!", as opposed to the version of capitalism I saw growing up, which was "sales are down? lower prices".

91:

It will be rioting and looting. For those not familiar with them, read up on the riots in US cities in the mid-sixties.

And, of course, if the Tories are still in power, there'll be an overreaction, though whether they'd do the US "looters will be shot", I don't know.

92:

Hey, you won't have to do that. I mean, King Charles (or whatever name he takes) can be given some ruling powers....

93:

That's an amazingly stupid statement. For one, it clearly shows a complete inability to distinguish between a person who is a writer's fiction, and the person's actual opinions about the world here-and-now.

And how are they doing? Well, let me put it this way: I never expected to be living in a literal cyberpunk future, with multinationals more powerful than most governments, and controlling the others.

So, whose predictions do you find credible - Trumpolini's on a trade war? Farage's on Brexit?

94:

Sorry, but some alcoholics never admit it,even when they do hit rock-bottom.

And I can say that, having lost my late ex to complications of cirrhosis.

95:

Re: '... obeying the party leader'

If obeying the party leader is the default of the majority members within every party, hold party leaderships as many times as needed until the mix of party leaders will act sanely, i.e., for the benefit of the electorate at large.

It's not as though there haven't been surprise party leaderships before in the UK - you're not bound by some obscure x-year tradition.

96:

I'm too young to remember any of this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure this country didn't have an existing "lost generation" of disaffected casualties of a previous economic crisis in the Seventies. How many foodbanks did we need before the Winter of Discontent?

97:

Charlie, while your scenario for a NDB sounds right (you forgot that NI imports all its electricity from Ireland; London is seriously planning to ship over generators in case of a NDB), I think this will be averted: Soon after E-180 Dublin will see that no solution for Ireland is likely and veto any deal on the table (since none will keep the GFA). This will lead to an extension according to 50.3 (which as we previously noted, can in theory be done infinitely), maybe late (the European Council can do that without any parliaments). Most likely we will know around New Year what will happen (looking forward to this years Royal Christmas Message).

For the NBD scenario note that the weather at that time of the year can still be cold.

98:

Have we found his underground lair yet? What uniform do his henchmen wear? Does he have a cat?

Re cats and evil (Brexit) villains, Risky business: linking Toxoplasma gondii infection and entrepreneurship behaviours across individuals and countries (25 July 2018, abstract only without access) The inexplicable is explained! And don't forget to stockpile cat food., which can be eaten by people if necessary. Seriously, though, stockpiling such that one cycles through the stockpile regularly is never a bad idea. If one has a pantry or pantry cabinet, fill it up with food. Using a saliva-based assay, we found that students (n = 1495) who tested IgG positive for T. gondii exposure were 1.4× more likely to major in business and 1.7× more likely to have an emphasis in 'management and entrepreneurship' over other business-related emphases. Among professionals attending entrepreneurship events, T. gondii-positive individuals were 1.8× more likely to have started their own business compared with other attendees (n = 197).

99:

Richard Gadsden broke down the numbers, but to add to that, the simple fact is that the UK is indeed an elective dictatorship. We plebs simply don't have any direct routes to influence politicians and parliament, especially when most of the media is against us. Thus, many people have lapsed into apathy over the years.
Moreover, a lot of people, including politicians, really don't know how the world works, and assume things will be sorted out by someone. There are a lot of people, including in business, who are only now waking up to the fact that the adults aren't going to step out and take away the toys and make sure everything turns out okay. There aren't any adults, but their entire world view assumes there is. Adjusting to this will take time. These people also don't understand how bad things could get; I might need to start explaining things to friends and relatives who don't have a clue about it all.

100:

This will lead to an extension according to 50.3

The crucial word in §50.3 is "unanimously".

That will be a tough row to hoe for UK without loosing both the Marbles and the Rock.

101:

Re: [quote]Canned food I suspect might be the best currenct if push comes to shove... Gold is not as good for digestion...[/quote]

Canned food is good, but whiskey might be better for trade. It's not as compact as gold, but it's harder to counterfeit. And if food is short, whiskey and beer won't be being made.

If you're planning trade goods, try something slightly exotic. Smoked oysters may be good. Octopus is probably too exotic.

If you're planning for yourself, focus more on storage space and consider cost. Also utility after the crisis (presuming it's temporary). So freeze dried hiking supplies might not be a good choice, but I'd certainly consider powdered milk.

102:

Well, you've got a bit of time, but "LED agro" implies that you don't have a lot of room. If you want to raise chickens, you'll need a bit more space than you seem to be expecting. My grandfather had a 10 yard X 10 yard chicken yard to keep him and his wife an eggs, with a chicken once a month. And he bought chicken feed, supplies, etc. The chicken yard was well fenced, and in the middle of cottom fields, so weasels, foxes, etc. didn't show up, but he also kept a dog outside.

The "LED agro" might work as a supplement for personal use, but it depends on a reliable electrical supply.

I think you need to think your plan through a bit more carefully, and possibly put in a bit of practical research. Not everyone who publishes checks to ensure that their plans would really work.

103:

Whisky (we don't make that stuff with an 'e' in it) is a pipeline good several years long, by law. We've got hundreds of thousands of barrels of the stuff maturing away with the raw whisky going into bond today not seeing the light of the Sun again for at least five years (seven years is more realistic for a single malt worthy of the name, and ten years is considered a 'good start').

104:

The UK has already lost its marbles and is definitely between a rock and a hard place :-)

More seriously, the latter will apply to any deal, the way that Spain has been given special privilege by the EU. The press has been awfully quiet on it, but I suspect that the UK will (maybe Robbins already has) agree that Gibraltar remains subject to all EU regulations, the ECJ etc. After all, we had the converse arrangement for the Channel Islands and Isle of Man for a long time.

Greece is vulnerable to pressure from its creditors, who I suspect would be keen on such an extension.

I also suspect that other pressure might be applied, but I am not sure what form it would take.

105:

What do you have against Bushmills?

106:

It's a long time since the Sovereign has suspended Parliament, but I live in hope!

107:

"I do not think the E.U. wants to see the total collapse of the UK (or just England) as such unrest is not easily quarantined and can spread to neighbouring countries."

Greece, I tell you, Greece!

I wonder how much of the acceptance of the ECB's treatment of Greece is due to it being a southern European country, and therefore considered to be slovenly and lazy, unlike the thrifty Germans (whose debts have been forgiven multiple times.)

But if it's the UK, well, they're going to have a lot of explaining to do, to make the case that it is moral failings on the part of the UK.

108:

It's sillier than that. Almost all the time science fiction writers are not trying to make predictions, except about how people might react in some situation. And they will often set up the situation in a rather off-hand kind of way, or just assume it, because that's not what they're about.

That said, I don't really find that any group has a very good way of making predictions. Delphi is about as good as I've ever seen. Or perhaps bookies, though they're usually tightly focused on what kind of bets they will handle. Some aren't, but I think those are pari-mutuel, and thus count more as a Delphi system than as predictions made by the bookie.

109:

Bushmills (the single malt) is okay-ish.

Now, Writers' Tears is actually quite quaffable.

110:

I try not to make actual predictions in my fiction because that's not what fiction is about. I do, however, strive for plausibility — for coming up with a setting in which the characters' actions make sense and which is consistent with the background from which it emerges. And as I'm probably somewhere on the spectrum, I take this monomaniacally seriously by the standards of many of my peers (and some of my readers).

111:

Thanks for the recommendation. Touring Eire on a trike is on my list ....

112:

Great. I am not looking forward to a rapid increase in the cost of the Balvenie 12 yr Doublewood I buy....

113:

Preserved food and canned goods are a sensible idea, and a stock of luxuires isn't bad. But trading tins of spam for fresh vegetables is not a long term solution. Sadly it's time to be sociable, to let your neighbours know who you are and what you can do. Got a car? Offer to take people to the shops (SOON TO BE RENAMED COMMUNITY RATION OFFICE). Building skills? Have them to keep you in mind if they need repairs. Able bodied? Maintenace, hauling rubbish away, all that kind of thing. Not able bodied? Tell them to keep you in mind for baby-sitting, making drinks and meals, neighbourhood watch, keeping an eye on things generally.

Communities working together are more resilient than households, which are better than people on their own. There's always the danger that the worst case scenario doesn't come to pass and you've joined in a street of people who work together and know each other and help etc. even when survival isn't on the line. Still, in that hideous event, then Brexit was a success and you can probably use your newfound prosperity and freedom to move to somewhere where people don't make eye-contact and say hello when they meet.

114:

Delphi... do you mean the method of incorporating sufficient ambiguity in your predictions that no matter what actually does end up happening you can claim that's what you meant? Or does the word get used to mean some other bloody thing nowadays so some group or other can look pretentious at the expense of confusing everybody else?

Bookies... yes, I used to consider them as the most reliable easily-accessible source of predictions. But they seem to have lost their touch when it comes to current UK politics. In fact they seemed to start getting it wrong before politics started to go really off the rails, which might be significant in itself.

115:

When in that House MPs divide If they've a brain and cerebellum, too, They have to leave that brain outside, And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.

So basically we are re-confirming my long-held opinion that the whip system should be abolished, and some serious thought given to how to implement a secret ballot.

116:

"Work for the best, prepare for the worst."

I'm currently poring over the slim volume "Getting ready together" at https://www.byline.com/column/67/article/2206 - it's written by an ex-copper with an axe to grind, but he's open about it.

NeilW @112 - community is a good thing on the whole, especially when you make at least a token effort towards it.

117:

"(*) I'm not convinced by predictions of immediate civil unrest. It took a lot of targeted deprivation and bad racist policing to bring us the sporadic localised riots of the Thatcher era. A spike in hate crimes as happened after the referendum result is probably inevitable though."

I think you are being somewhat optimistic - imagine a situation akin to the fuel protests, but with no obvious resolution in sight, a large part of the PTBs advantage in such cases is mobility - and if a large majority of the country's hotspots go up at once, then they effectively lose that advantage (even if you ignore the obvious possibility of traffic chaos as folk travel to elderly family members and so on).

118:

Honestly, Charlie, the logical conclusion of your own analysis is that you should move to Ireland or a Commonwealth country.

119:

"A rebellious pro-Remain faction who will vote for anything that softens Brexit and don't give a crap about pissing off racists by keeping freedom of movement. This is probably 100 MPs, but Corbyn never wants to call a vote where they will actually rebel against him, because that weakens his position. This is why Labour keep abstaining - Corbyn and the Remainers can agree to abstain and the party doesn't look totally split."

In terms of recent votes where Labour abstained the most obvious would be the EEA vote, however even if they hadn't abstained they are unlikely to have won, because there are a reasonable number of MPs (other than Hoey, Fields et al) who would vote against anything that was insufficiently brexity (people like Gareth Snell and Ruth Smeeth)

On that vote 15 Labour MPs voted with the government to keep the UK out of the EEA, so even if Labour had voted for the EEA, 23 Tory MPs would have had to vote with them to defeat the government.

On the same day Labour voted against the government 13 out of 14 times, and lost every vote because they just didn't have the numbers, and the Tory rebels never materialised.

So no, I don't think description is correct.

120:

Preserved food and canned goods are a sensible idea, and a stock of luxuires isn't bad. But trading tins of spam for fresh vegetables is not a long term solution. Sadly it's time to be sociable, to let your neighbours know who you are and what you can do. Oh, yes. Stockpiled food (and water, or means to make/get/purify clean water), especially cooked food, is (well, should be) for feeding neighbors during times of crisis, to build ad-hoc communities and strengthen existing communities. Same with skills (especially emergency and improv skills), tools (e.g. chainsaws in the US), etc. And this is what happens for real, usually. (Also in my experience, although I have never suffered infrastructure outages more than a few days finish-start.)

121:

That would be a fucking superb bit of historical bookending, in the light of the reasons why he isn't all that keen on taking the name of Charles at the moment...

Or are you hinting that Britain might end up being ruled from a flat in Edinburgh? :)

JNIT (JOOT?) ... yet another example of the catastrophic nature of the consequences being magnified by our insistence on doing something which is so obviously a bad idea I've thought we should stop doing it ever since I realised we were doing it.

Tax on keeping stock... I have no idea whether we have this or not, but I do know that our accountants have this massive fixation with not keeping stock because they think it costs money. They don't mean things like taxes (and things that aren't called taxes but are) on the building you keep it in, or electricity to keep it refrigerated (if it needs it), either; they mean some bollocks cost that doesn't actually exist, invented by the usual accountants' method of treating zero as a very large negative number, which since it doesn't exist can be increased arbitrarily until they win the argument.

It is also an obsession which tends to grow, first from not keeping stock to not having any stock, and then to not having anything else either (like a workforce), instead relying on calling on some other outfit to wipe their arse for them whenever they need something - and that other outfit are doing the same bloody thing, and so on and so on. All these outfits can then claim that they are making a success out of JIT, pointing to their zero-length record of being held responsible for any failures, and omitting to mention that the reason is not that there haven't been any, but that every time there have been they've been able to pass the buck on until it ends up with someone in China who doesn't answer the phone.

122:

There aren't as many fishing boats as there used to be.

There are, instead, people who say the EU has ruined our fishing industry because the EU quotas don't let them function. This seems to be less of a cognitive strain for them than admitting that the fishing industry has ruined itself by catching all the bloody fish, and without the quota restrictions to try and safeguard what's left it would probably have collapsed altogether by now.

There are also a crapload of yachts, especially on those bits of the coast which are nearer to the Continent, which are entirely capable of making the crossing, and next to no customs except at the few ports capable of handling big ships.

123:

Actually, that was Thatcher again. When the EU set up the licence system, most countries bought up their local licences, but she left it to the 'free market' amd they went abroad.

124:

I understand that all those weighty tones proving Malthus wrong are especially filling and nutritious

125:

Could this economic collapse you describe be contained in the UK, or will the UK collapse be the first domino that knocks down the world economy - Great Depression Part Deux?

127:

The other half are going to hate the first half for dropping us in this shite.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner. The backlash is going to be ugly! Let the average Liberal go a few days without food and we'll be happy to kill and eat the Conservatives! (I say this tongue-in-cheek, of course, but after a hard Brexit people are going to be pissed!

128:

Worse than that, it's about 75% last time I looked

According to the government it the UK either produces 76% of it's food or 49%.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/515048/food-farming-stats-release-07apr16.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-pocketbook-2017/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-2017-global-and-uk-supply

Although the 49% number is what is produced in UK minus exports.

129:

What makes it even more boggleable is that before the referendum there were numerous charts of the composition of Parliament published that showed that apart from a few tens of Tories, MPs of all parties were heavily in favour of Remain. ... Where the fuck have those hundreds of Remain-supporting MPs all gone?

Very similar to what happened in the US when DT won. If DT said the sun rises in the west the R's from heavy DT voting areas lined up and agreed. Even if their previous platform was based on it rising in the west.

NOT trying to drag DT into this. Just pointing out how populism seems to extract the spine of many of what once appeared to be people with strong ones.

130:

There are also a crapload of yachts

Yachts are pretty reasonable for carrying people, albeit much worse than ferryboats. But for cargo they generally suck. You're back to stevedores carrying sacks and cargomasters very carefully working out how many sacks go where, and the actual load capacity can be tiny. Sure, a 15m sailing catamaran can carry a tonne of provisions, but you're going to be sadly disappointed by its seaworthyness if you put more than about 5 tonnes of cargo into it. Older yachts will likely perform better, because before computer designed composite hulls they just put more structure in so a 10m wooden ketch can probably be gutted and used to carry 10 tonnes of whatever you want... but slowly.

Fishing boats are ideal for this because they are designed to carry large quantities of fluids (fish are fluid in this sense), deal with heavy weather, and not need many crew. So your 10m fishing boat is likely already set up to carry 10 tonnes of cargo and be much easier to load and operate than a converted yacht.

About the only place yachts have a clear advantage is smuggling gold - like the book says, a keel cast from gold works just like one cast from lead, right up until the end of the voyage :)

131:

Not fair. No US political comments but you drop a line like: "leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown."

I detested Dubya at the time, but with 20/20 hindsight? We've got it infinitely worse today.

Gotta disagree, although I don't want to derail into US politics. However, this is important. Bush was a practiced politician who got a lot of countries (including the UK) into both Afghanistan and Iraq, at a (what?) trillion dollar cost and hundreds of thousands of lives.

Now I agree that the current administration is potentially more dangerous through sheer cluelessness. However, the current US president is incompetent, and that's not entirely a bad thing. One might imagine this person as an active shooter who keeps shooting up random limbs because he doesn't have the patience to aim.

His immediate successors are practiced politicians who know how to aim. Don't make the mistake of handing them the nuclear football entirely too early.

And, in general, don't rush to replace buffoons too fast. You have to pay attention to who the successor is. That's the general lesson from this particular debacle.

132:

As for the original topic (now that I just spent 10-odd hours of a wombat day at a board of supervisors meeting):

My bits of advice: --Prep to move to Ireland as family circumstances allow --Learn how to build rocket stoves out of cans and insulation. Anything that can boil water off scraps of wood is worth having, and the materials are pretty cheap. --(re)read Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell. It's worth revisiting the concept of elite panic as a reminder that it's not just the yobs out freestyling who are dangerous... --Stock up on < ahref="https://www.macsween.co.uk/products/delicious-every-day-vegetarian/">vegan haggis so that when you move to Ireland, you've got something to take the taste off irish beer when you're ex-pats over there...

As for scenarios, I gave up on that when I got the last presidential election wrong (actually I got it right, but didn't understand what the numbers meant).

133:

One of the problems is that there are a lot of actors who can throw a spanner in the works, and brexit is giving them a chance to have a go. And it goes a long way down the organisational chain. You're vulnerable to everything from unions to governments, any of whom can work to rule or go slow if they feel like it.

I wonder if anyone would see benefit in organising racist riots at points of entry should Brexit go sour. It's all very well to talk about sheer mischance resulting queues of lorries causing food to be delayed to the point of inedibility... but I suspect a bunch of George's Cross waving meatheads chanting "English jobs for English workers" could also have the same effect.

One upside to the food problem is that a lot of immigrants are self-deporting, so you're likely to have fewer mouths to feed. And even the most obtuse welfare-dependent induhvidual is likely to see the benefit of farm work once the alternative is not eating... even for the soviet-style "you get paid in turnips and toilet paper". Whether a merchant banker could be persuaded to pick turnips is left as an exercise for the reader.

134:

And third, before I shut up:

Speaking about crises, it's worth considering that Queen Elizabeth II will be remembered as the British monarch who presided over the collapse of the British Empire. Tragic, hated figure? Hardly. This is the critical point: y'all are living through a collapse. What does it feel like? Counterintuitive, isn't it?

As for stuff to hoard: --any addictive import: sugar, tea, chocolate, coffee, etc. --silver other "small change" semi-precious materials. --Useful gizmos like Swiss Army knives.

135:
"--Stock up on vegan haggis so that when you move to Ireland, you've got something to take the taste off irish beer when you're ex-pats over there..."

You might be surprised by how cosmopolitan Ireland has become in the last 20 years or so. Last time I went down to the south west, a tasting platter at a roadside stop was full of things like local cheeses (Brie, Blue, etc) and local salami, with freshly made bread and local micro-brews. The Taoiseach (PM equiv.) is the openly gay son of an immigrant, and the president's a famous scholar and poet. It's definitely not the almost-a-theocracy I grew up in in the 1970's.

136:

I wouldn't be surprised in the least, but I didn't want to cause any controversy by asking Charlie to compare the relative qualities of Scottish and Irish brewing.

That, and after thinking I'd made a particularly silly joke, I was amused to find out that there is, indeed, a vegan haggis. We're definitely living in the 21st Century.

137:

You might enjoy This Is Your Brain on Parasites.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25897836-this-is-your-brain-on-parasites

The chapter on T.gondi is interesting (and pertinent to your post).

The author goes beyond parasites into the gut microbiome, so the title is a bit misleading. Wonder if she picked it or an editor did?

138:

Re: 'chickens - practical research'

I understand what you're saying. At the same time - yes, have checked with folks who own farms both commercial as well as household-use backyard versions. Also understand that any animal farming means having adequate space and reliable feed sources.

Most veg is fairly straightforward to grow in a converted garage*. Haven't checked on growing pulses/legumes under LED lights though. Self-sufficiency farming also means knowing how to store crops and/or come up with alternate usages.

Re: LEDs ... Did some reading on energy requirements a year or so ago and LED veg farming is feasible, hence my interest in the improvements in LED lighting for small-scale agro.

The above would probably work for folks with low energy/calorie needs (e.g., seniors), but you'd probably have to increase your food sources or volumes for kids and anyone doing serious manual labor.

  • Modern urban apt/condo version could be the underground parking garage, rooftop or even the storage locker - veg only. BTW - major US/Canada cities' rats can get huge: some are the size of a medium cat!

Somehow no one bothers to mention: farming is smelly. And, the new LED-greenhouse farming means tending your farm 365 days per year, no vacations. :)

139:

At risk of a yellow card, I'll point out that the prospect of individual American states conducting foreign policy sub rosa is no longer a rhetorical flourish. It last happened outright in the war of 1812, but it's getting closer and closer to happening again. We already have states asking to be treated as participants in the Paris Agreement on climate change. New Englanders have more in common culturally with the people of the Canadian Maritimes than with the people in the Deep South. The EU's tariffs in the latest tit for tat pointedly exempted Massachusetts exports, and if Russia's going to do divide and conquer in the US, why should the EU and UK not join the fun?

140:

In 2002 or thereabouts, the world's supply chain for insulin depended heavily on a single building in Denmark. While there is no shortage of chemists and pharmaceutical facilities worldwide that could retool to take over, has anyone actually done it?

141:

Community is a good thing; for a variety of reasons I'm now living on the street my parents have lived on for thirty years so everyone is in my business whether I like it or not. Usually this is fine, but sometimes I have to excuse myself from conversations with three neighbours just to get to the end of the road. We have the internet and television now, we don't need idle gossip as a hobby!

Maybe I'll get better at it in the event that Brexit goes tits up.

142:

Just to add to the cheery optimism... One note on stockpiling meds: They generally don't have an unbounded shelf life, and I don't just mean the tricky ones you have to keep in the fridge. I've been known to pick up a bottle of Ibuprofen when I visited Leftpondia but they have a best-before and I'm told that while they don't become dangerous, they do degrade and become less effective over time. YMMV read the notes on your specific drugs.

143:

For moving money between currencies you might look into Transferwise, I believe they will allow you to have a Euro bank account where you can directly receive payments in Euro. Their rates are better than those of banks for converting currencies.

Best of luck

144:

Yesterday’s “Standard headline: “Brexit may be delayed” ( Or words to that effect) But of course, Osborne, the editor is v strongly remain.

Multiple references to the Madwoman from Grantham YET One of the few things she got right was a determination to STAY IN the EU … So why are the right, who claim to follow here teachings, doing the opposite? And why is the Corby wing of Labour also reneging – what happened to “international socialism” ??? ( See also Dan H @ 71 )

EC @ 25 Shades of the betrayal over Lend-Lease & the Manhattan project, in other words. Question – why do we keep crawling back for more humiliation?

Ghost iord @ 30 losing Gib would be a disaster ( NOTE; We have held it longer than Spain ..) But you highlight something not spoken of. EVERYONE BLAMES THE TORIES But it is quite obvious, now Corbyn has opened his terminally-stupid mouth, that Labour are in just as big a pile of festering shit, equally self-inflicted.

Andy @ 70 The clock can be stopped at any time up to 29th March 2019; “We are withdrawing At50” Now, will anyone have the bottle to do it? What are the actual dates for those 180 & 90 day deadlines …..

“smuggling” @ 79 Kipling had something to say about that More than once incidentally!

RG @ 82 lots of racist Labour voters Yes, this, because only the evil rightwing tories are racists, aren’t they? Hence the appalling stink over anti-semitism inside Labour at the moment.

EC @ 105 Lizzie remembers the fate of her uncle, who got too close to the fascists. She has a constitutional duty to” Warn & Advise” – we might see that waved around in public, as in: “Get a grip, you lot!”!

Charlie @ 108 Bushmills 10 or 12 year old Green Label is nice. Not as good as Talisker, though.

LASTLY A story of someone I know well She was born in Aotearoa, came to lowland Scotland @ age 14, went to St Andrew’s for a year, before moving to SOAS in London … Now works in Tax/accountancy, with a lot of international work. She hates both the SNP & the EU, mainly for financial-incompetency reasons & no arguments will shift her. “IQ” ( yes, I know ) I would guess about 130 ……

145:

Could this economic collapse you describe be contained in the UK, or will the UK collapse be the first domino that knocks down the world economy - Great Depression Part Deux?

That is in fact my biggest worry, because taking down the (currently) 6th largest economy at a point when there's no economically literate leadership on a global scale to apply corrective planning could be very bad indeed. Especially as Trump seems to believe that trade is bad (that's what his faith in tariffs amounts to).

146:

I suggest you leave the country a month ahead of time and sojourn in Europe. Barcelona is nice, Berlin should be out of winter by then and round off the (3-4 month) stay with something in the Nordics/Baltics.

147:
  • Can't move to Ireland. Ireland is going to be swamped. (Population ~5M; how many refugees can it take from a nation of 64M?)

  • Rocket stoves aren't terribly practical in a top-floor apartment where the chimneys/fireplaces were blocked off and replaced with gas-fired central heating half a century ago.

  • Got an elderly parent who has now been in hospital on a stroke ward for two months who is in no fit shape to be moved to a nursing home, never mind another country with a worse healthcare system. (TBF this may no longer be a consideration by next year).

  • MacSween's Vegan Haggis is a regular thing in this household (though it's way too heavy to eat at this time of year). It was invented during WW2 food rationing when MacSween's, a local butcher, experimentally left the offal out of their regular product—thereby making it rationing-exempt—and found that it actually tasted really good anyway, so they kept making it after the war ended and it's now a traditional thing.

    Unfortunately US Customs officers are not culinary experts and traditional meat-based haggis is illegal in the USA so I'm not going to send you a care package.

    148:

    I've been known to pick up a bottle of Ibuprofen when I visited Leftpondia but they have a best-before and I'm told that while they don't become dangerous, they do degrade and become less effective over time.

    I will note that American retail pharmaceuticals are ridiculously short-dated, presumably to encourage customers to toss the old ones out and replace them.

    Stored at room temperature in the dark, most tablet/capsule formulations should be stable and effective for 2-3 years and useful for another 2-3 years after that, albeit with slightly (5-10%) reduced efficacy. 5 year old anti-histamines or ibuprofen? Totally safe. I'd even be fairly comfortable running on out-of-date antihypertensives and non-insulin diabetes meds, as long as I was on combination therapy (I am) so a reduction in the potency of one medicine alone won't be enough to put me in a bad place.

    Notable exceptions: do not fuck around with antibiotics, chemotherapy agents, anything liquid, live (vaccines), radioactive, or refrigerated (insulin). And you probably want to keep to within the "best before" date on anything where the failure mode is "if this loses potency you die" (like epipens).

    Disclaimer: I am not a pharmacist. (I merely acquired a pharmacy degree, qualified as a member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, and practiced for a few years a third of a century ago.) So this is not professional advice.

    149:

    "I expect a Sterling crisis to follow promptly in event of NDB"

    Unlikely.

    What moves the Sterling up or down is people buying and selling Sterling. That's it.

    So if lots of people try to turn their Sterling into something else in advance of a NDB that will be a Sterling crisis before the NDB. "Sterling crisis" and "lots more people wanting to sell Sterling than buy" being the same thing.

    After would happen if everyone's really sure that, really, surely, they can't possibly be that stupid... ...or if they're all shocked and surprised at how bad it is when it happens. Yeah, maybe, but it all seems a bit obvious.

    So I think you're wrong.

    On the other hand, if I could outguess the markets I'd be blogging from my own private beach, so what do I know.

    150:

    The Empire was replaced by the Commonwealth in 1948, but HM did not come to the throne until 1952, by which time India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma were independent.

    151:

    Provided that you have reliable power supplies, water etc. If everything goes completely pear-shaped, most of the UK won't have those.

    152:

    ...I'd be blogging from my own private beach

    Private beaches are cheaper than you might think, and their cost is only going to drop. It's the "sheltered private beach in the warm sub-tropics" that's pricey, or comes with annoying neighbours (as FreeRangeSailing said recently "looking forward to going somewhere I'm top of the food chain again").

    I'm currently looking at early retirement and while there are expensive options out there, there's also shockingly cheap ones. These days it's easy to search for "lifestyle block with house, price less than $100,000" across a whole country or in my case "multihull longer than 8m, less than $100,000" and just see what horrible abominations pop up (or in my case, need to be popped up).

    If you're single with no kids there are lots of options. If not... considerable negotiation may be needed. Complicated somewhat in my case by me having the most equity in the house and people not wanting to move but can't afford to buy me out. I may end up being an absentee landlord, hopefully with some kind of rent-to-own contract (the legal system is unpleasant for my situation). Friends in a similar situation ended up selling their house because the financial-legal-insurance industry wouldn't let them keep it... which may happen here. Tell me more about this "marriage equality" material that just passed through the anal tract of the Australian parliament.

    154:

    If, as a Brit living in the UK, I buy in to some of the darker possible outcomes, I can arrange to be in another European country next March.

    But how do I prepare and protect my assets?

    I can buy stocks/bonds/funds that are less exposed to the UK market, but how do I hold them outside of the UK?

    Thanks for pointers.

    155:

    Karl Marx in life made a number of predictions about the likely future Marx (and indeed Engels) were political theorists. Any "predictions" they made took the form "$this will happen unless Something Is Done". And, indeed Something Was Done, and $this did not happen (or at least was postponed).

    156:

    "opening us wide open to narcotics [..] smuggling" Well there's our solution, we'll become a narco state! The UK already has a lot of experience in hydroponics, and we've always been good at smuggling.

    As for EU nationals fleeing the country; my friends who had few ties to the UK have left, those who have ties here (spouses, kids) are making sure they've sorted out their residency, but are careful to make sure they keep their EU passports up to date, and also to make sure the kids have duel nationality as well. Alas I've got no way of claiming any other citizenship, but I need to renew my passport soon, so at least I'll be keeping my traditional red passport for as long as possible.

    157:

    Nojay's MMV, but I can get Islays and West Highlands cheaper than I can get Irish malts.

    158:

    Para 3 - TBF the failure was basically that the keel in question was cast from lots of small pours, where a conventional keel is cast from one large pour, and didn't have the same macro-structure failure modes.

    159:

    reliable power supplies, water

    It may not seem like it right now, but the big killer will be the cold. Hypothermia isn't strictly necessary for just being cold all the time to kill you, and heating is one of the things that could get really rather tricky for large sections of the population if electricity and gas become erratic. Here 9kg LPG gas cylinders are ubiquitous for BBQ etc, but you can get more sensible cookers and heaters that run off them as well. I have one in the shed with a gas ring for my wok, but it also means I can cook for a week or five without external power if I need to. It lives next to my drum of rice (always at least 25kg in that)... I can live off rice, silverbeet and eggs for a month if I have to (we have chickens and self-sown silverbeet+spinach+chard too).

    Water OTOH is fairly straightforward to store, and even to move round. OGH might not like carting 20kg of water up to his flat every day, but if the alternative is no cup of tea I suspect he would grin and bear it. Realistically, if the water is only on a couple of hours a day you can store a day or two worth easily enough given a modicum of thought.

    To my mind there's a real jump from the preparation you need for "things might get tricky for a month" and "Britain will become like Turkey or Romania". The former you just stockpile a bit extra, move your savings to Euro or something, and keep calm. The latter... it's time to build an ark.

    160:
    which were comprehensively shot down at the time by his intellectual contemporaries in the Austrian school of economics, and which have been fairly well tested in real life several times.

    First of, no, the Austrian School is not contemporary with Marx, at least if you go with its peak in theoretical work in the early 20th century.

    Second of, for my personal view on the Austrian school, well, actually the Austrians, with their rejection of Mathematicws, at least shouldn't have the usual delusions of being a science common in MBAs and some economists, but sadly that's not necessarily the case with actual specimens. Rejecting econometrics also makes for a piss poor social science; I guess it's best to delegate them to the humanities, with the "big talking without edifice" wing of 19th century philosophy, AKA Hegel. Hey, at least one thing they have in common with some Marxists...

    Third of, for Austrian economics being "fairly well tested", citation please; and this is not an ironic, friendly utterance in this case, if there was such a thing I'd include an anti-smiley.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Business_cycle_theory

    Not that I think Austrian school is necessarily worse than other examples that go for "economics" in everyday talk...

    Real-world Marxist governments generally muddle along rather incompetently for a while, then eventually descend into totalitarian economic messes.

    Err, at least in the case of Russia, the "totalitarian (...) mess" was somewhat before the "muddling along" (aka NEP), but please note even Germany experimented with "Kriegssozialismus" (war time socialism) during WWI. Though I'm not going to lecture about ownership of means of production, central planning (quite a few CEAOs didn't get the memo of that one not working BTW...) and state interventionism concerning capitalism (whatever that is...).

    Venezuela is the poster child for this; it takes a rare sort of anti-talent to comprehensively mess up running a petro-state and its economy,

    Actually, going by ACTUAL economics (Austrian school being the equivalent of some of the whackier outcomes of Lynn Margulies going into Gaia at best, unmittigent Aquatic Ape at worst), no, it's quite easy to mess up a petro state, and it has happened to a diverse host of governments:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

    (No, I'm not saying the Venezuelan gouvernment is not incompetent; I'm just saying it's funny when a biologist has to do Economics 101 for some MBAs...)

    but this the Marxist government of Venezuela has managed.

    Err, again, "citation please". There are marxists in the Venezuelan gouvernment, but then, there might be some marxists in the German liberals, too[1]:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarian_Revolution

    And I know some actual Marxists who'd have quite some fun denouncing the Venezuelan gouvernment as antithetical to Marxist thought; yes, it's the good old Red Queen of ideological purity, beloved to any scholar of fringe groups, e.g. right libertarians...

    As it is, you could also describe them as Keynesian, state interventionist (where capitalism without state intervention is Somalia, not Switzerland), social democratic, whatever.

    Actually, that's not to let the Marxists off the hook, the problem is you can justify just about any actual politics with Marxist thought, and most "Marxist" socialist politics you can find somewhere else. There were socialists[1] before Marx, and it was not just Marxists using their methods:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany)

    Problem is, if it's not a bête noire for incompetent economists and fascist masquerading a concerned conservative intellectuals, "Marxism" is next to meaningless as a label in actual political discourse. It might work for bourgeois kids searching for a nice catchy phrase to label their rebellious phase, but as we know, all revolutions go around the whole way, that's why they are called "revolutions"...

    Why is there a preponderance of politicians with silly hairstyles about the place now?

    I blame Geert Wilders. Or they took the sexual life of the Centauri in Babylon 5 as an inspiration...

    [1] It I had an Euro for any free-market anti-marxist expounding a labor theory of value... [2] I'm using "socialism" as a term for some political theories originating in the 19th century. There is also "socialism" as a term for a stage on the way to Communism(tm) in some branches of Marxism-Leninism[2a]. As I mentioned elsewhere, most 20th century Communist countries would have self-identified as "real socialist" ("real existierender Sozialismus"). Nice way to admit defeat, IMHO... [2a] What most people think of when calling someone or something "Marxist". It's an offshot of the revolutionary brqanch of 19th century Marxism, the reformist one stopped calling itself Marxist some time ago...

    161:

    the keel in question was cast from lots of small pours

    yeah, and they didn't have an engineer or metalworker to say "hey, that doesn't look right". I have to say that it made an amusing plot point but it was also utterly unrealistic. Here's a video of someone pouring a 4.5 ton keel in their backyard. Admittedly a large backyard, but the point is that unless you had enough gold for a really big keel you would do 90% of it in a single pour. And you could easily add steel reinforcing just like modern lead keels do (they also alloy the lead, but you don't want to do that with gold). I would probably wrap that pour in plastic or wood, then wrap lead over the outside. That way you have something that looks just like a normal keel when you move it round. Also stuff 2m underwater is really visible to people on the surface in certain conditions... you want it to look like a lead keel even after it's been dented and worn.

    But the fun part would be the end of the voyage where you had a great big lump of gold to somehow feed into the black market.

    162:

    I am more familiar with the use of gold to make bicycle frames (because of course I am) but it strikes me that for more usual quantities of gold you would be able to make part of the keel from gold, or indeed simply modify the keel. It's common for keels to be bulb shaped with a steel exterior, for example. Shallow draft keels commonly have wings to increase windward performance, so you could make one or both of those from gold fairly easily. And the variations on in-hull keels are so numerous that if one was boat shopping with that in mind one could simply choose a design where the keel was stacked ingots, lift out all the lead, stack the gold bars at the bottom then pile lead on top until you had the right weight and tweak the density until it looked the way it used to. Grab a vacuum cleaner full of dust and blow that out, misting water over between coats, and it'll look really crusty really quickly. Customs is not going to unstack them just in case you're smuggling gold that way...

    163:
    But if it's the UK, well, they're going to have a lot of explaining to do, to make the case that it is moral failings on the part of the UK.

    You don't think "They joined as the sick man of Europe, they never bought into the project, they did this to themselves as a way of avoiding having to deal with tax evasion, they were too full of themselves to negotiate a workable deal, and we're supposed to fix this?" would work?
    It's not like there's a readymade "England as dealbreaker" narrative in European history, or anything...

    164:

    Ah, now reading about that lack of mobility.

    I myself as the parent of two mixed-race toddlers am also sometimes running the scenarios in my head of potential paths to exit in case of climate or fascist jackpot.

    165:

    I sometimes wonder whether all those UK peeps going "at least I can move to Ireland" have really thought through what could happen if the land border with the EU gets violent and the British get blamed by the Irish for that. Dara O'Briain should be fine, rich London accents perhaps not so much regardless of their passports.

    166:

    Yeah, I think there may be an unpleasant surprise in store there. I could easily see the CTA being suspended during such a crisis, and we will have our hands full dealing with Irish passport holders anyway. Also, there is nowhere for people to go. We're currently in the midst of a housing crisis with 10,000 homeless already. The only accommodation available will be tents or some very expensive hotels. If you want to come to Ireland - come now.

    167:

    That doesn't just apply to Ireland. I'm sure the application process for "settled status" for EU nationals is going to be efficient as any other part of this process, so on B-Day +1 a lot of people will have missed the deadline, and how the British government handles that is going to be reflected in how EU members handle the British expats living within their borders. If they're heavy-handed about it then there'll be a backlash: Even if governments don't hit back with tit-for-tat deportations there's likely to be unofficial retaliation of some sort.

    168:

    Stored at room temperature in the dark, most tablet/capsule formulations should be stable and effective for 2-3 years and useful for another 2-3 years after that

    Not to engage in pre-300 thread diversion, but would refrigeration extend that significantly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q10_(temperature_coefficient)

    169:

    Holding them outside of the UK sounds like a bit of a cast of the dice. Yes you avoid the impact of a UK based Stock Broking company going down the pan and potentially (illegally) taking its assets with it AND the (FSCS) Financial services compensation scheme being closed/constrained.

    But if things are that bad there are likely to be foreign exchange and asset controls in place anyway, which means you may preserve your wealth but be unlikely to be able to get hold of it when you really need it.

    Then there's the question of where is "safe" in another Global financial crisis. Euro denominated assets won't be, ditto Dollar assets whilst Case Tangerine Shitgibbon is active. That leaves Swiss Franc's assuming the Euro doesn't take it down via contagion. How many asset funds are there in Swiss Francs?

    Plus pensions and the like won't support those assets, so the vast majority of your wealth is probably stuck to mainstream £,$ and € assets only.

    170:

    Nobody seems to have posted this link, so here:

    https://www.change.org/p/theresa-may-mp-give-people-a-final-say-on-brexit-deal

    I assume that the government will ignore it, especially as Parliament is closing down for a month and a half, but we shall see what happens in October.

    171:

    The interesting and open question is who picks up the pieces if the Conservatives have been tainted beyond salvation and Labour are shattered by their own divisions? The UKIP has been making some worrying Bannon-ward advances lately. The Lib Dems are as exciting as used dishwater. And the Greens, nice as they are, are a bit high up Maslow's pyramid for a country short of basic edibles.

    172:

    I think you can be more specific than that: the market is reasonably good at predicting the future where the future is pretty like the present. It is really bad at predicting the future when the future is not at all like the present. In those cases it tends to predict that the future will be like the present, when in fact something big is coming.

    I'd like to be able to make this more precise but, obviously, I can't, because if I could I would be off somewhere making a lot of money rather than posting here.

    173:

    We're a ways off the point here, but I think we're agreeing that "smuggling stuff as a yacht keel" isn't as easy as it sounds, even without discussing the metallurgy of this one specific book (which IMO was a bit realistic, given it's acceptance of the CoG issues they caused and the eventual failure).

    174:

    Have you tried Pogues whiskey ? https://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/p/30626/the-pogues-irish-whiskey I'm really not one for Irish, I'm more of a GlenMorangie fan (and I can't afford to even taste the higher end whiskies), but the Pogues stuff I found very smooth indeed.

    I'd raise a glass to Shane for that one.

    175:

    In regards to politicians with wild hair.

    As I said in a previous discussion, deep-fakes and AI software which place the face of one person on the body of another aren't very good with moving hair. The wilder the hairstyle, the easier it is to spot a fake. Thus, I jokingly suggested that modern hairstyles are a way for politicians to protect themselves against these types of attacks.

    176:

    When it comes to food, you could buy tons of cheap soybeans? We've got plenty these days in the US.

    177:

    One odd thing about that proposal for a second referendum (both in the change.org summary and the longer, presumably original proposal from the Independent): it suggests a referendum on the final deal, but does not say what the proposed alternative is. It makes quite a bit of difference whether the alternative is continued membership on prior terms (which various EU personages suggest would still be available), or a "crash out" with no deal whatever, which is what Article 50 gives you if no political forces intervene.

    178:

    tfb @20

    "And if fascism is a plausible end point then people who might end up as the targets (the elite, anyone not sufficiently 'british' for the normal not-so-crypto-racist version of that) needs to be planning to leave. If the bad thing happens it will not be enough to have stocked up on supplies or to have saving denominated in Euro: indeed having done those things will make you a target: 'look at tfb, he moved all his savings to Euros in 2017, he knew what was coming, he's one of them, off to the camps with him'. No, you need to not be here if you might be seen to be one of them."

    Where are you going to move to that the racism is not as bad or worse?

    179:

    SFreader @43:

    "Good time to try out LED agro as back-up or even primary food supply. Also, laying hens don't need much space, special tech or feed. "

    "LED agro" requires electrical power. What happens when the power plants can't get fuel and the lights go out?

    180:

    With respect to stockpiling food... excepting people with certain medical problems, and assuming some ability to make hot/warm water, rice and beans provide all of the proper amino acids for proteins. Augmented with vegetables or multivitamins they can keep you going for months. 15 kilos (~20 liters) or so of each is enough for two people for a month. Shelf life in cheap recloseable containers is comparable to canned foods. My prepper acquaintance keeps a years worth in plastic buckets with lids (made for paint storage) in his hidey-hole.

    If I believed in the worst scenarios people here have described, I'd tuck away salt and spices as trade goods before I'd stockpile whisky.

    181:

    means tending your farm 365 days per year, no vacations.

    Hello. Meet my friend. He's a dairy farmer. He hasn't had a day off since his high school graduation.

    182:

    I will note that American retail pharmaceuticals are ridiculously short-dated, presumably to encourage customers to toss the old ones out and replace them.

    It's a lawsuit avoidance thing. I have to keep pointing out to my wife that food package ex dates are similar. The product doesn't magically go bad as of that date. Especially when properly stored.

    183:

    Just so you know, Charlie, the thought of US charities loading food on ships to send to the UK has absolutely ruined my day.

    184:

    Indeed. Scotland is still quite a few years away from energy self sufficiency, because for some reason we don't yet have lots of wave and tidal power turbines around our coast. The wind building is ongoing, but we don't have enough storage for any excess power.

    185:

    Regarding medicine stability, see:

    Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications Lee Cantrell et al., Arch Intern Med. 2012;172(21):1685-1687. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1377417

    186:

    Daniel Duffy @ 124:

    "Could this economic collapse you describe be contained in the UK, or will the UK collapse be the first domino that knocks down the world economy - Great Depression Part Deux?"

    It'd be "Part deux virgule cinq" at least, if not "Part Trois". The "Great Recession" of 2008 is Depression 2.0 for almost everyone except for the Banksters who precipitated it.

    187:

    "What happens when the power plants can't get fuel and the lights go out?"

    Agro.

    188:

    Ioan @ 175:

    "When it comes to food, you could buy tons of cheap soybeans? We've got plenty these days in the US."

    A pure tofu diet gets monotonus pretty fast.

    Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

    189:

    for some reason we don't yet have lots of wave and tidal power turbines around our coast.

    The "some reason" is endurance: Waves bash things to pieces and they're good and fast about it.

    190:

    Actually, the market has been known to spook even when external reality is calm. I'd give you that it's a lot better at making predictions if things remain as they are, but there are too many people involved who make money if the market is moving a lot.

    191:

    All the variants on the idea of calling for another referendum that I have seen proposed have that kind of problem: they specify a combination of {question to ask and set of possible answers to choose from} which looks appealing if you lazily assume that a clear majority of people are going to vote for the option that, to you and (it is implied) the proposer, looks the obviously most sensible one, but when you make more realistic assumptions about how people might vote and how the choices offered would partition the vote, the expected result becomes that it would just fuck things up worse and make it even harder to stop the madness. One might, indeed, start to wonder exactly who it was that wrote the question and answers and what their motives really were...

    We don't need it, anyway. There is, and always has been, ample cause to put a stop to it without further ado - and if we had any politicians who even displayed some vague indication that they might be going to evolve some precursor of a notochord in a few million years time, that surely would have happened. For one thing, the referendum was advisory only. There was explicitly not an obligation for the government to actually do whatever the answer was; it was essentially a glorified twitter poll.

    And then there was the Leave campaign, with outrageous cheek, stating explicitly and in so many words that two of their biggest "promises" were outright lies, the very fucking morning after the referendum. They didn't quite say "ner ner ner, fooled you, suckers, too late to change it now" and blow a raspberry, but they only stopped a fraction of a millimetre short of it.

    Now if I had had anything to do with it the response to that would have been "no, actually, it's not too late; the referendum was advisory only, you lied, you openly admitted lying, so we're going to tear the whole thing up and cite the Leave Liars as the reason". The allegations of illegal campaign funding, Cambridge Analytica involvement, and all that, are just the icing on the cake. Leave's open admission of lying is more than enough reason to bin it all on its own.

    Yet, incredibly, not only was there no outcry at the time, but now everyone seems to have forgotten they even did it.

    I mean just WTF? Consider actual elections; the parties make various promises in their manifestos, whoever wins implements some of them and not others, and come the next election their failure to do the others is one of the main sticks used to beat them with. They have to at least try and pretend, while they're in government, that they did intend to do the others and it was someone else's fault that it didn't happen.

    They can not get away with saying "it was just a load of shit we made up to get votes the last time, we were never really going to do it". If they did then everyone would be furious with them. So how the absolute fuck do the Leave campaign manage to say the equivalent thing and nobody takes any notice?

    192:

    A pure tofu diet gets monotonus pretty fast. We're discussing ways to avoid eating cats and dogs here. :-) I've subsisted for a medium while (3-4 months?) on what was essentially mostly bulk lifestock feedstuff, with informed care and supplements to make sure nutrition was adequate for humans, and well-spiced. (Ever eaten soybean pie?) The commune situation involved did have several egg laying chickens and a large fenced vegetable garden in the summer, and was in farm country. Never have gone the prepper route, but do have a propane cooktop (fed from tanks), and a solar rig that can run an efficient compact refrigerator. (And generators and pumps and etc and designs in head for rigging this and that.)

    193:

    No, it's politics, not engineering - this has come up in previous threads. There was a rather good idea for a tidal generator at Kylerhea (8-knot currents in the narrows) which at one point looked like it might get somewhere. But someone said the wrong thing and all the locals got the idea that it would smash their fishing boats, destroy their nets and permanently close the narrows to all navigation. None of this was true, but once they'd got hold of the idea nothing could persuade them that they'd got the wrong end of the stick, and the project ended up collapsing due to all the protests over something that wasn't even a real problem anyway.

    194:

    Fishing? Fished out? May I introduce you to the Grand Banks, which collapsed some time ago.... (cod damnit)

    195:

    I gravely doubt it. Too much of the financial market6s, etc, will still be in London, and with the size of the UK, it's going to crash the world, and Trumpolini's incompetents will kick over the other supports.

    196:

    First, I would get out of stocks and bonds, unless you're prepared to sell short. I dunno - this is not my thing - but maybe China.

    ULtra-cautious: put it in an insured savings account (the US has FDIC, to protect against runs, etc). Cautious: some kind of money market that's very diversified, and international.

    There will be a lot of folks who'll probably be using their chairs to open the sealed windows, to throw themselves out, when it hits.

    197:

    "in-hull keels"

    Do you mean ballast? The chunks of lead or concrete in the bilge to make sure the centre of gravity remains well below the centre of buoyancy to provide the righting moment?

    "Customs is not going to unstack them just in case you're smuggling gold that way..."

    Oh yes they bloody are. Customs are bastards. They'll take the entire boat apart (with saws and axes) if they think they have suspicion, and if they don't find anything they'll just womble off and leave you with a pile of chopped-up bits and no comeback. (If the police search and don't find anything they have to pay to repair the damage, but customs don't.)

    On the other hand they only have significant presence at major ports that can handle actual ships. Little fishing harbours the procedure certainly used to be that you would tie up, go ashore, find a phone box and ring them up. They would then turn up an hour or two later (however long it took them to drive from their base) and clear you in. They basically relied on people grassing smugglers up so they could be there already waiting for you.

    198:

    I'm a Northern Irishman who voted Remain. I don't want a new recession.

    Please tell me why you think a hard border violates the Good Friday Agreement. Non-devolved matters are not subject to North-South cooperation (North-South Ministerial Council), and that means customs controls, migration, tariffs etc are reserved to the UK Parliament. Meanwhile the British-Irish Council and British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference don't have the right to force any policy on the UK at all without its own consent. That means the UK can have a hard border, or even block people and goods entirely, without violating the GFA. (The Republic can do too.) This is regardless of whether Brexit or a hard border are good ideas, of course!

    Many articles have suggested a hard border would harm the peace process, which is not the same same as violating the GFA, which is different again to specifying which bit of the Agreement they think is violated and why.

    May said in a recent Commons speech that the GFA required there be no hard border (incorrectly), and the negotiations so far have had the UK promise this (but are not legally binding til the end; the UK defines hard border to mean infrastructure, the EU has not defined the term).

    199:

    Brexit day is 11.00 hrs 29/o3/2019 90 days is thus (approx - depending on counting exclusive or inclusive ) 28th Decamber 2018 - right in the middle of the Xmas / Nwe Year break - expect lunacy eith just before 24th Dec or 2nd Jan 180 days counts back to 29th September this year. Dates to watch?

    200: Real-world Marxist governments generally muddle along rather incompetently for a while, then eventually descend into totalitarian economic messes.

    Err, at least in the case of Russia, the "totalitarian (...) mess" was somewhat before the "muddling along" (aka NEP), but please note even Germany experimented with "Kriegssozialismus" (war time socialism) during WWI.

    Yeah. I wonder if the OP there has ever, you know, like READ MARX? I waded through a 300 page abridgment of Capital when I was 18 or 19. The OP also is clearly unaware that Marx expected The Revolution in industrialized countries, with familiarity with democracy, not kingdoms/empires

    And, of course, Capital is an immense amount of data, categorization, and classification - remember Marx was serious about trying to make it scientific, as science was practiced then (as opposed to some Austrian-school economists, who people like Krugman jump down the throats of, but who are listened to by the wealthy and powerful, because they're like the old joke about lawyers: "how much is 2+2? How much do you want it to be?)

    Afiforesaid OP also ignores the full-scale economic warfare conducted against all Communist governments. Socialists. well, we'll ignore the Labour Party, and Sweden, and Denmark and.... At any rate, "muddle through" under massive economic pressure... and then, let's not forget the percentage of any management that's incompetent = unless he's going to assert that the dot-com bubble was all a Marxist conspiracy.

    201:

    Yeah. Partly our fault...

    And then there's the little war we had with Iceland over us pinching the fish round their country as well...

    202:

    I seem to find myself preferring Speyside. I also have one bit of luck, as it were: my taste buds are simply not up to appreciating bottles of whisky that cost $80US and up.

    Which is why I was wondering if anyone was coming over here to Worldcon who could bring along a couple of bottles of Knockando for me....

    203:

    Not sure if this is the correct venue to ask. I'm blocked from following Charlie on twitter and I'm not sure why because I don't think I've ever directly messaged him there, was mainly following for updates. I don't think he'd be seeing any of my posts unless he followed me back. I've posted some scathing remarks to people involved in domestic politics, that's as near as I can figure. Would there be anyone to ask about this? Thanks.

    204:

    Savings account interest in the US is less than the rate of inflation. If you park your money in savings, you're actually slowly losing value.

    Anyway, for people in general who are serious about preparing for serious societal emergencies but don't know where to start, I'd recommend looking at all the free online literature that bombards Californians about how to prepare for earthquakes. It's a similar problem, minus the home falling apart.

    If you're interested in group survival, rather than assuming that everyone (including you) is going to turn into a looter to survive, it's worth looking at how the Rainbow Family sets up to feed groups of hundreds of people. In the US, at least one non-profit has been running a Rainbow Family kitchen as disaster prep training. Their assets are (IIRC) a large tent-like thing, a couple of large rocket stoves made from 55 gallon drums, and an old school bus for transport. And the ability to scrounge freegan food, fuel, source and clean water, and train volunteers to feed hundreds. This is a rather more radical (dare I say anarchist?) solution, where you just get shut of the authorities and form groups of people who take care of their basic food, water, sanitation and safety (not security) needs for the short to medium term.

    Oh yeah, safety vs. security. Security is what first responders do: they come in with special training and equipment and secure situation. They can't make it safe, but they can make it secure (where secure means not collecting a bullet and/or staying out of jail). Safety is where people can put down their weapons, de-escalate the tensions, and talk out their problems. Ideally you need both, as there are always some idiots who would rather steal $50 than make $100 honestly. However, safety is equally critical. If the situation is safe, you only need a few cops for security, but all the security forces in the world can't make a situation safe (see Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.). Safety requires non-violent workers, like Chicago's disruptors, who can calm things down and do the, well, politicking necessary to create non-violent ways of settling disputes.

    If you're worried that the government is only interested in security (as in, unfortunately, much of the US), one of the things you need to do is to understand how to establish safety "forces." This is where the supposedly crazy idea of unarmed peacekeepers (or the Rainbow Family Shanti Sena) makes a lot of sense. If you're worried about a breakdown in government and resulting safety problems, spending some advance time studying up on nonviolent peacekeeping as a way to re-establish safety is one of the most important things you can do (IMHO). It doesn't require any weapons, just courage, people smarts, and the ability to keep talking sanely in scary situations.

    205:

    You might want to check out the current price of US:FB at this point. Do a grep on comments made: there's also some interesting chatter out in the twitter sphere by industry experts about (twitter) CADW's impact (GDPR / missed earnings: word out there is that some serious short sellers[0] are sniffing hard the entire Tech-Tree).

    Other data points:

    Boris + Bannon are allegedly in communication[1] which might explain the oddity of the NEPTUNE mix-signal maneuver[2].

    CTRL+F Blairites - oh dear, failing analysis of the UK Labor drama. This also ties into what we can only describe as 'blindness in the face of the fall' - UK Jewish print media (as in: actual Jewish papers, not papers-that-are-owned-by-the-illuminati-cabal) are running a stunning set of attack pieces on UK Labor (still / again); which while of course somewhat accurate is being fanned to a dangerous rabid peak (and there's some nasty operators clambering out of retirement[0.1] and a general twitter war which is being waged by some nasty people from lots of sides of the debate).

    We did some digging here, as unless they're totally blind to what Bannon / Farage represents they're being very dumb. Are they dumb? Perhaps. Old and out of date is probably more accurate[3] and 95% for sure pandering to their aging right-wing (Conservative) readership rather than younger more media-savvy types.

    Oh, and several UK Politicians are backing the crowdfunding of Leave.EU fall-guy, dodgy sub-par Thatchereque African country deals etc. Two are on-board for basically going full Breitbart.

    tidal generator at Kylerhea

    Private Eye are alleging the Welsh one didn't happen due to the companies in question being run by scammers whose entire company collapsed - pump n dump + extremely odd inter-subsidary loan structures @ 20%. From that you can find their scoop.

    ~

    Anyhow: none of Host's OP touches on the actual news this week (well, since May but hey). The Jet Stream has officially stalled[4]: they were describing it as "split" earlier, but Nature / real scientists have moved onto 'stalled'. Do a grep: this is a big one! (And totally not what happened in 1976).

    Yep, stalled. Question is: for how long? Some are saying months, not weeks.

    [0] do a grep if you want!

    [0.1] Ex-Tory fixers / newspaper smearers, ancient Labor fossils and a whole lot of 'Gammon pretending that they suddenly know about Judaism' - we admit we're not a Voice to Listen to, but that strata genuinely make us look educated on the subject.

    [1] Boris Johnson Has Been Privately Talking To Steve Bannon As They Plot Their Next Moves Buzzfeed 25th July 2018

    [2] Thought it was an odd mix of UK / US techniques. Hmm. Unprovable but watch out for the "Well, if you were actually socialist, Qatar is a slave state!" line: which is about 15% as clever as it thinks it is as a 'gotcha'. But watch who is pushing it: Tommy Boys + 'Enough is Enough' + UKIP all together in unison. Not very subtle.

    [3] This is a very large rabbit-hole. On the UK side you have an entire strata of nominally progressive-but-capitalist-weak-sauce media: in particular ties to 'Dentist Table' magazines that are all nominally progressive (feminism-lite / Pinkwashing etc) which all concentrate on the C/D celeb / award circuit (think "Best LGBT company in the South-East', presented by a random East-Ender celeb) but without too much digging lead to some rather directly odd tie ins - people who happen to be Jewish but do an awful lot of tweeting Tommy / UKIP peoples and so forth. This strata seem genuinely more threatened by Labor / Scary Muslims Hamas than actual Fascism.

    So: ignorance / belief that the UK political landscape isn't radically changing and pro-Capitalist over Socialist types (and they're not very nice but hey-ho: English snobbery about social climbers is always a go-to).

    The other side are some (actually for real) dangerous right-wing Israeli Ultra-Nationalists who 100% genuinely see stirring up things as a means to generate 'fear ḥok ha-shvū' to offset the demographic shifts in Jewish / Arab / Palestinian population levels. No links: they're a small minority but they're extremely hard-core and they're quite good at the old cyberwar. This strata type can be found at the core of some of the ultra-fascists elsewhere. Which is why this account will be deleted after posting this.

    [4] Study helps explain why jet stream stalls out over regions, causing extreme weather events The Watchers, Jun 28th 2018

    206:

    An answer to an earlier question 'cause it actually answers part of Host's OP:

    Poster-who-vanished has returned to amplifying TERFs (the medium variety, not the US versions), Times climate deniers (dumb dumb dumb) and various pro-Brexit stuff while trying to be a 'Voice of Reason'. It's not going too well, since all of that lot are being stirred up massively.

    Strategy. Of. Tension. has been deployed, lots of people all over the place having their buttons pushed. At least 50% are genuine or real (which is high for this sort of play).

    If everyone stepped back and wondered if mutually declared destruction was a good thing, this might be the time.

    But Gulf Stream: that's baaaaaaaaaaaad. Eating Pets bad.

    p.s.

    We're Not Playing, don't nuke random boxes plx. Tonight is the Blood Moon Eclipse, after all! Magick Clowns get special powers tonite!

    207:

    Random thoughts about all this.

    The first is a history of WWI where the guy spends the whole book telling you what happened and why but at the end he says that the causes presented still seem insufficient to explain this calamity. It was obviously a terrible idea and yet all the actors involved seemed powerless to prevent it from happening. It never should have been.

    The second is that, generally speaking, those who start the wars seldom get the outcomes they hope for. With the exception of successful empires, wars generally leave both sides impoverished and worse off than before. The people at the levers of power have the ability to maneuver events but rarely do they have sufficient foresight to pick the best of all possible outcomes. It's sort of like the old battleships having the artillery sufficient to hit a target at maximum range but their rangefinders and optics were insufficient beyond close range.

    So I wonder, what Charlie said about these guys having an angle on benefiting from making things go splat, well, are they really calling it right? I don't think so.

    Threads really messed me up the first time I saw it and trying to imagine undoing the damage of a nuclear war... it can't be done. It's a sobering thought. How do you rebuild after the underpinnings of industrial society are knocked out? With this Brexit nonsense, it's not as a sudden and dramatic as an airburst but it seems like the damage will be done all the same.

    208:

    Karl Marx in life made a number of predictions about the likely future, none of which have come true

    Marx was the first economist to identify the business cycle. Boom/bust with inflation and unemployment, on a 1-2 decade cycle. Those weren't a characteristic of earlier economies - they go with modern capitalism. His predictions regards it were rather good.

    209:

    About the ultranationalist Jewish papers, interesting, esp. since the ultranationalists in Israel have just turned it into aprtheid (only Jews can vote. and it's officially a Jewish state)....

    210:

    You might be interested in reading Tuchman's The Proud Tower, the UK in the 30 or so years leading up to WWI.

    211:

    No, that group doesn't use papers. They make the Times of Israel look centrist. They make Likud look semi-normal. Mentioning them got some poor randoms box get nuked until comment was noticed as not being incendiary or naming names. i.e. The UK twitter war atm is just basic low-information peoples for the most part[-1]

    Oh, and 100% not giving a hot take on current Israeli politics, 'cause our viewpoint is considered a little odd. (Along the lines of: want an Ethnostate? Fine[0] as long as all the States around you share the same levels of development because that's how you prevent wars. That's what the EU attempted (roughly). Good luck when 100 million Egyptians don't get their share of the sweet sweet red sarcophagus juice and come knocking[1]).

    Anyhow. Banished to post 300! Just thought the links might help spot the trends.

    [-1] Notes: Ambassadorial trolling .RU style "kinda works" if you have plausible deniability and when there's not actually a death in the zone: when you've just massacred X thousand people (don't care if Hamas or not) and are gearing up to make 2014 look like a picnic, it makes you look like a fucking sociopath. Yep. Youse bad @ PR Mr Man: ghoulish.

    [0] Totally Not Fine But You Have Free-Will and we think it's a retrograde one-way trip to destruction but sure, go and try it, YOLO, right?[tm]

    [1] Serious lesson of Libya? Modern tech is great at knocking out other conventional tech: but it runs out reaaaaly fucking fast. Ask around about what ~16,000 TOWs did to the manufacturing chain, but that's really on the QT, wink wink nudge nudge. I mean, China was selling weapons for the region...

    212:

    Many articles have suggested a hard border would harm the peace process, which is not the same same as violating the GFA, which is different again to specifying which bit of the Agreement they think is violated and why.

    It's not just the hard border: one of the big selling points of Brexit to the Tory ultras is that by leaving the customs union they are free to diverge from EU standards and ditch both European Court oversight and the ECHR. Which AIUI are baked into the GFA — the EU is the guarantor. (They're also baked into the Scotland Act, which has got Holyrood absolutely livid and spitting blood.)

    213:

    Scary...this tallies with what I see from outside the UK, having lived there in my youth. I thumbnailed the likely social results in my blog a few weeks ago, and that was even without the scenario of a collapsed economy and no food.

    214:

    Apologies to Host, but some peeps are being a little bit naughty tonight with their Data Intrusions:

    Scientists Discover Gene That Predisposes Ashkenazi Jews to Schizophrenia Haaretz, Nov 2016.

    Top tip: We know the signal that caused the damage to the USA diplomats.

    Hmm. Glowing Orb: Who touched it? USA, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, France, Israel.

    Might want to know what the <> means, eh?

    215:

    [4] Study helps explain why jet stream stalls out over regions, causing extreme weather events The Watchers, Jun 28th 2018

    Thanks!

    To go a little further, there's a well-established prediction that the Obama Whitehouse provided a link to, about both the Jet Stream and its meandering.

    Historically, the jet stream was caused by the temperature gradient. On one side was the polar cold air, and the jet stream was fast enough that it was hard for that air to get across. On the other side was the warmer temperate air, also isolated from the cold. The difference between the two (plus planetary rotation) powered the jet stream. This is true for both poles, incidentally, but we normally care only about the north pole because that jet stream is the one that causes most of our weather and affects jet travel.

    As the climate changes, the poles warm disproportionately more than does the temperate zone, so the temperature gradient powering the jet stream decreases. This has some interesting effects: --It slows down, so storms getting moved by the jet stream sit around longer, as do high pressure areas. --it wanders more (the usual problem of slower streams meandering), and this is where those polar vortices slipping way south comes from. --and it can "stall," as this new paper talks about. I haven't gone fishing for the original paper (other stuff to do), but they're talking about the onset of stalls, resulting from increased meanders and decreased speeds.

    In other words, this is great news for predicting, but the conditions are going to continue to get more Paleocene-like going forwards.

    216:

    Ah, formatting: It's a Field Effector - and yes it exists, and yes, don't watch your TV or radio or trust your computer. .RU Hypnotic Patterns via media are teh blunt end.

    It's a brain-fuck that doesn't work on us, but Holy-Moly is it obvious if you're not H.S.S.

    TL;DR

    Field Effector, Regional Levels, etc. Silly Little Apes. Trust us: that's the Real Deal[tm]. And yeah, online now. Good luck with "Free Will" and so on, and if you have tinnitus randomly: you're a target.

    No, really. True.

    217:

    The OP has a long history of flying in, dropping some silly nonsense containing lots of talking points and dog whistles, then leaving rapidly without engaging with critiques of their comment. So whilst sensible replies to them are welcome, I think it pointless to spend much time on them.

    218:

    "Fox News made my Grandmother into a Zombie"

    You've no idea how accurate that is.

    100% True. [No, really: this one is one of the most dirty heinous little secrets left - the Hrz really are there to burn out certain parts of the Mind]. We know this because [redacted]. But no: it's true. 100%. They're getting so desperate that [redacted] channels are being used.

    If you're in a country that 'Touched the Orb' then:

    6 Minds / Month eaten by [redacted] as payment for Social Cohesion / Obey / Dominance.

    No, really. That's 6 / Month Minds. i.e. Babies.

    Good. Fucking. Luck.

    219:

    Re the jet stream and the mentions in the OP about climate change, this (NYMag) piece by David Wallace-Wells is mainly discussing (though without a proper causal analysis) the failings of the US media with respect to climate change reporting. He's one of the best US journalists on this subject. I'm wondering (i.e. asking the diverse commentariat here) how the bad news about heat extremes is playing out in the non-US press. And also how much the press is increasing general public worry about climate change due to the large number of extreme weather events. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? (July 26, 2018) Which is why this all sounds to me a lot more like self-censorship than ratings-chasing — by which I mean self-censorship of two kinds. The first is the intuitive one — the kind done in anticipation of political blowback, an especially acute problem for would-be neutral, would-be centrist platforms like network news. This self-censorship in fear of right-wing backlash is a familiar story, and most of those concerned about global warming know the villains already: oil companies, climate deniers, indifferent (at best) politicians, and constituents who see science as a culture-war front. But public apathy, and its cousin climate complacency, is as big a problem — perhaps bigger. And this problem, too, is connected to self-censorship on the part of storytellers who feel intimidated from attributing what we used to know as natural disasters to global warming because scientists are so excruciatingly careful about attributing cause. As NPR’s science editor Geoff Brumfiel told Atkin, “You don’t just want to be throwing around, ‘This is due to climate change, that is due to climate change.’”

    Re S. Bannon, if my via-google translate reading is correct, Jarosław Kaczyński tells Stephen Bannon to ... f-off. He's operating in unfamiliar(to him) political territory. Paragraph from Google Translate: "PiS rejects the idea of ​​joining Bannon. This is not an offer for us. We supported the Alternative for Germany with the European Conservatives and Reformists with the Russian National Union (Marine Le Pen - ed.) Supported by Russia. We are not anti-system, we are in favor of membership in the EU, although we strive to make it work better. This is an offer for those who want to break the EU - comments Bannon's offer in conversation with DGP MEP Karol Karski."

    220:

    To expand, although I don't recall reading about your example, we have a mixed experience of wave/ tidal up here. There was for instance a giant yellow installation that couldn't stand up to the waves, utilising the kind of turbine that keeps turning in the same direction no matter the direction of air through it. On the other hand a land based version, called Limpet, worked for decades on an island, but nobody seems to want to build more of them, perhaps too much concrete involved.

    There's a 2MW tidal flow power plant being tested just now at Orkney: http://www.scotrenewables.com/flotec/press-release-scotrenewables-powers-winter-storms/

    And there have been other designs kicking about for years, although I think concerns about fish and longevity have been an issue, and whatever happened to Pelamis?

    221:

    Because if you believe the Real World[tm] outside of the Media, Putin kinda assassinated his twin brother.

    Do a grep for the video, we've linked it. No, really.

    I mean: at this point we'd really like some kind of Temporal Balance to play with us, but it's ok, you don't exist.

    @Guthrie: it's about fraud, not science in the Welsh case. We're on ignore, so it's a sorry state label for reference purposes.

    222:

    Yup, I read Private Eye too, and if their figures are accurate there is indeed too much cost in the tidal lagoons. Many of us older folk remember that building tidal barriers across the Severn has been an idea for many decades now, but fortunately for the ecosystem not carried out.

    223:

    The air-tower generator was called, IIRC, the Otter. It used a lot of concrete, designed to last ten years in the mid-Atlantic. It broke up after six months in the more sheltered waters among the islands.

    The Limpet worked better, being anchored to a sea cliff but like a lot of renewables extracting energy from the environment wasn't actually very productive for the cost of construction, deployment, intermittency etc. compared to an on-demand diesel generator running on duty-free heavy oil.

    There's a couple of subsurface turbines either planned or in place on the seabed in energy-rich sites around the North of Scotland but they still don't produce a lot of energy per unit installation and the cost benefits are something they don't talk about in the press releases. Meanwhile we have built out over 30GW of gas-turbine generators all across the UK over the past twenty-five years or so without a whiff of a mention in the press.

    224:

    "in-hull keels" Do you mean ballast?

    Not really, I mean the semi-traditional full keels where with a steel hull sometimes they were combined with a deep bilge so that you could load more weight in on top the the actual keel. I used to sail on one that could go 500kg+ of extra ballast when the owner was short-handed. But that ballast went in below the point where you would think the keel started if you were outside the boat - the interior space was only about 30cm wide and had almost vertical sides. Calling it a "bilge" was a bit misleading, and calling the "weight sitting on the keel" ballast feels a bit less than accurate too.

    Proper bilge keelers have nice round hulls with little to nothing poking out the bottom except actual centreboards or daggerboards. I do see some weird "not quite twin fin keel" trailer sailers that I suspect have both lead fin-lets and ballast but I suspect those are homebuilt by indecisive people :) Sydney has a lot of weird boats and Australia + Aotearoa seem to have way more homebuilt boats than I see discussed in the north (especially the USA). So we get a lot more "I've seen pictures of boats, it can't be that hard" designs.

    225:

    I mean: at this point we'd really like some kind of Temporal Balance to play with us, but it's ok, you don't exist. I do not know what this means. (e.g. is it a request for an existence proof? :) Or not? Or direct comment links? Or something else? Or all of the above? )

    226:

    Re: LED need electrical power

    That's why I've been reading up on solar, etc. Plenty of how-to-live-off-grid books available at my local (suburban/commuterville) library. The most interesting question raised by these authors is: what can you live without? Then do an energy consumption analysis for current vs. proposed usage. And, because you're off-grid, include a back-up system.

    The living without 'stuff' seems to be becoming more accepted as a life style choice. A couple of months back I dropped off a couple of carloads of excess household and personal stuff at the local Salvation Army. The volunteer who helped me unload said that donations there are pretty brisk as are sales. I then dropped off about a half carload of left-over deck stain, paints, etc. at ReStore (Habitat for Humanity donation and resale outlet) - again quite a lot of inventory turn-over. These orgs might be useful as a model for redistribution of goods if the country''s economy goes belly up.

    227:

    The Guardian points out the funny side of "the goernment will ensure adequate food supplies (by doing nothing)": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/stockpile-food-no-deal-brexit-dream-on

    228:

    Yeah, we've got both flavors of old-style conservatism:

    On the one hand, everybody's supposed to be taking care of their own welfare, because there's no surplus in the system for bread and circuses for the proles.

    On the other hand, there's vulture capitalism.

    Where's Dickens when we need 'im?

    229:

    You could come stay on my couch if you want until things sort out, if you can get to California. : )

    230:

    Look on the bright side. All those lovely British Tax Havens will have been saved from wipe-out by the EU Anti Tax Avoidance Directive (2016/1164) which would have applied from the 1st April 2019. All else is secondary.

    231:

    Frank/Heteromeles @ 202 “Survival” …. – when you are living in a city of 10 million people? Or even 700 000 ( London & Edinburgh, respectively ) ? Easier said than done. Provided the power is on at least 12 hours a day & the water isn’t cut off, you are probably OK, though it will be difficult. Gas … um …. Really like your distinction between safety & security &, without saying so, you point out a major difference between the US & here

    Whitroth @ 207 Yes. Very very worrying. I wonder how many people realise that, were it not for islamist nutters –“Bennie” would be a NY businessman – then his brother was killed at Entebbe? What goes around, comes around & no good guys anywhere (any more )

    & @ 208 Also the OTHER book by Robert Shirer: - The Fall of France Where internal dissention & running-round in circles allowed the French to defat themselves in front of a weaker enemy.

    Charlie @210 And, just for once “Holyrood” & the SNP are absolutely correct.

    Oh Dear @ 212 Top tip: We know the signal that caused the damage to the USA diplomats. Well? Produce it then: - Put up or shut up. Guthrie @ 218 Yes, well, I know someone involved in the Kylrhea (sp?) fiasco – he was well pissed-off with the complete fuck-up there. Heteromeles @ 226 True BUT – as I keep pointing out, the “Labour” party are, if anything, even more useless (as a party – some people, like my MP are screaming, but no-one’s lidtening ) Corbyn & Momentum are full-on hard Brexiteers – presumably they can see & WELCOME the coming crash as an opportunity to go all Maduro on us ? And, as one or two others have pointed out, there are a lot of “old” Labour supporters who are 150% xenophobic racists – as in the p[lace where a monkey was hanged for being a Frenchman was one of the strongest ”Leave” votes in the country ( Hartlepool ) - & we’ll just ignore the Nissan factory in Sunderland, just down the road. Yup, the levels of stupid are still rising …..

    232:

    You could come stay on my couch if you want until things sort out, if you can get to California. : )

    I'm not traveling to the United States while the current administration is in power.

    233:

    I wonder how many people realise that, were it not for islamist nutters –“Bennie” would be a NY businessman – then his brother was killed at Entebbe?

    Not islamists.

    The Entebbe hijacking was a 50/50 collaboration between a PFLP splinter group and the (German) RZ (Revolutionary Cells). The PFLP-EO was a socialist movement; the RZ were a hard left/feminist terrorist group (with a side order of anti-zionism that leaked into full-blown indiscriminate anti-semitism).

    Also, we can't really be sure what would have happened subsequently if Yonatan Netenyahu hadn't caught a bullet: would his kid brother have stayed out of politics? Would the elder Netenyahu have been any better? Who the hell knows?

    (A strong case can be made that the West's current problem with Islamism is entirely the West's fault for backing the wrong factions in the Middle East from 1917 through to the present day—going for authoritarian monarchs (the British and French) then authoritarian nationalist dictators (the USA) rather than having anything to do with democratic/anti-colonialist movements, most of which were left-leaning but not inherently pro-Soviet. The Western diplomatic/military saw everything through Cold War tinted glasses and backed scumbags who ruthlessly repressed any opposition ... except the clergy, with results that are now clear.

    234:

    I'm not voluntarily traveling to the United States while the current administration is in power.

    Fixed that for you :) Your government doesn't have the reservations about sending people to the US that we'd expect of a civilised country. You're becoming way too much like Australia.

    235:

    I hadn't thought of that. No, I don't think that it was the reason for Brexit, but may have been the reason for the choice of date.

    236:

    "Fox News made my Grandmother into a Zombie"

    You've no idea how accurate that is.

    So what media made you what you are? :-) Interested minds would like to know, if only for avoidance purposes.

    237:

    Or indeed, a guarantee that we will have wind and/or insolation. In fact, a few years ago we had about a month of effectively no wind and under 8 hours a day of any insolation.

    238:

    If anyone is looking for a reasoned argument to be a bit less pessimistic, this on why a crash out in March is unlikely by Simon Wren-Lewis is very good:

    https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/07/brexit-endgame-second-stage-which-is.html

    FWIW I reached a broadly similar conclusion - crash out possible but unlikely - by a different route, namely by extrapolating forward the pattern of UK-EU negotiations so far, starting with then-Brexit Secretary David Davis' promised "row of the summer" of May 2017 (rejecting the EU's proposed timetable for talks, followed by giving in and accepting it).

    239:

    Chralie @ 231 Your second half is certainly a highly-believable proposition. Ever come across a book called "A Line in the Sand" - a history of before-&-after the Sykes-Piquot (Picot?) agreement?

    240:

    Sorry, but colour me unimpressed.

    Firstly, he has missed one critical aspect of May - she has always been an extreme Brexiteer, including when she was damning EU membership with faint praise, but not for the usual reasons. She is rabidly hostile to being handicapped by EU law and the ECJ on human rights, and her personal red lines are flatly unacceptable to the EU.

    Secondly, there are enough rabid and treacherous brexiteers to sabotage any agreement unless the warring factions are prepared to agree on a deal. Yes, I mean those who WANT to see a crash of UK society and/or economy, and those who want to make us wholly subservient to the USA - not even the government but the military and multinationals, at that.

    There ARE some grounds for optimism, but so far I can't see any alternative approaches making enough headway to actually win.

    241:

    Except that the human rights defeats for May were from the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human rRights. Both of these come under the umbrella of the Council of Europe and have sweet FA to do with the European Union. We are not leaving the Council of Europe (hint, even Russia is a member) or denouncing the ECHR.

    And the other day the British government confirmed it has decided to drop plans to repeal the Human Rights Act (which transposes the ECHR into domestic law) and replace it with a “British Bill of Rughtsl.

    242:

    Hell, I said part of the problem was that we backed the wrong set of authoritarian monarchs. A Middle-East where the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz survived and conquered the Saudi Nejd, rather that vice versa, would I suspect be rather less crap than the current one.

    But the repressed FO Arabists of the inter-war years mistook the fanaticism of the Wahabbis for ascetism and so here we are.

    243:

    A strong case can be made that the West's current problem with Islamism is entirely the West's fault

    I keep seeing this argument and I don't quite understand what it's supposed to actually say.

    "It is your fault that you've created a monster. Now, to atone for your sin, you must let the monster eat you."

    244:
    With respect to stockpiling food... excepting people with certain medical problems, and assuming some ability to make hot/warm water, rice and beans provide all of the proper amino acids for proteins. Augmented with vegetables or multivitamins they can keep you going for months

    These Islands(tm) have proof potatoes and buttermilk - supplemented with meat once or twice a year - can keep you going for decades. (The monotony is a different problem.)

    245:

    Or: "maybe we shouldn't keep doing the same thing and hoping for different results."

    246:

    Actually, that's a myth, though the gist of your remark stands - not merely were those supplemented by things like green vegetables, malnutrition was rife for the people forced to live on that diet.

    247:
    "It is your fault that you've created a monster. Now, to atone for your sin, you must let the monster eat you."

    "It is your fault that you've created a monster. For fuck's sake, stop giving it guns and bombs and money and political support and pretending that its neighbours are the real monsters."

    248:

    Or maybe EC has it right. "You've created ANOTHER monster? Maybe you should atone for your sins and STOP FUCKING DOING IT", etc etc.

    249:

    Corbyn & Momentum are full-on hard Brexiteers

    Are they now ?

    As far as I can tell from over the North Sea, Corbyn's strategy is to sit very still and await a full blown national emergency being handed to him and his new solid majority on a silverplatter.

    What he will use that for is anyone's guess, but it won't be fun being rich, that's for sure.

    If he feels like it then, his current non-committal on brexit allows him to start negotiations to get UK back into EU. That will take years, and allow him to use the convergence criteria to further level UKs class- and power- structures.

    250:

    You haven't been reading what she has been saying! Getting out from 'under' those is also part of her objective (would that Churchill were here today to respond to THAT!), as she has said publicly several times. A prerequisite of doing so is to leave the EU, because of the existing and planned links between the two.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_the_European_Court_of_Justice_and_European_Court_of_Human_Rights

    251:

    I forgot to add links like this:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36128318

    Yes, she has backed down in the face of opposition, but that does NOT mean she has changed her mind, merely that she is trying to fight the EU battle first.

    252:

    Damn atonement - that would be nice, but is crying for the moon - just stop making the problem worse!

    253:

    I keep seeing this argument and I don't quite understand what it's supposed to actually say.

    "You've created a monster: now stop feeding it, and start giving aid and comfort to its non-monstrous but badly starved siblings."

    (Every time the west gets mixed up in the ME our leaders seem to go for the Strong Man rather than the human rights activists. But then again, HR activists are a pesky nuisance ...)

    254:

    Remember: we firmly believe in Nominative Determinism. We shall cease posting, but do check what our name means this time.

    Damn atonement - that would be nice, but is crying for the moon - just stop making the problem worse!

    @Host: seen this? 100% hostile OP at a guess, goal? More strategy of tension (and 100% could get people murdered) - or 'incompetence' making chaos more likely (and we know several regulars have interests in NI but have us muted):

    The Irish News reported that information, which contained emails and passwords belonging to both businesses and private citizens, was given to loyalists by the Paramilitary Crime Task Force.

    The paper said a number of devices were taken by police as part of an investigation and were later returned to their owners. However, information was shared through a pen drive that was left in one of the devices, it was claimed.

    The Irish News said it has seen files that show the information of the citizens and businesses concerned, but would not be making any of the details public.

    It is not known why the PSNI was gathering information on the people whose information was shared.

    PSNI open probe into claim of internal data leak to loyalist paramilitaries Belfast Telegraph, 20th July 2018 - original is Irish Times, but pay-walled.

    255:

    Um. It's more that we go for a government that we believe we can control - hence a strong man who gets out of line or even shows significant dissent rapidly becomes an enemy. Basically, we try to force such countries into either providing cheap resourses or being captive markets. I started despairing of that attitude in the 1960s, in Africa and South America, because it was obvious what problems it would lead to, including refugee crises.

    256:

    As usual, there are too many possible reasons why you might have chosen that name to waste time guessing. It could mean that you are the front for 9 people collecting the data, but probably relates to some aspect of the spirit.

    257:

    to Auricoma @341: "It is your fault that you've created a monster. Now, to atone for your sin, you must let the monster eat you."

    Those who create the monster, aren't going to do the job fighting it. The best thing they can do, is to create another monster for the argument of fighting the first one.

    to Roy @340: Hell, I said part of the problem was that we backed the wrong set of authoritarian monarchs.

    Turns out, if your goal is to kill as many people as possible per amount of money invested, it was Just The Right Choice. In oil industry, people are nuisance: that's the idea they've been playing with in the "Shooter" movie as a subplot.

    to Charlie Stross @251: But then again, HR activists are a pesky nuisance

    Unless they are actually doing the foot soldier jobs (i.e. they have command, discipline and centralized supply of resources). Anyway, certain forces just finished with evacuating a large portion of their "activists" from Syria. Which a strange move because usually they just leave such allies to survive on their own, or do the job by themself. This step, actually, might imply a relocation for next assignment.

    In other news, how do people here see Greece situation? Wildfires recently, then flash floods today. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/26/europe/greece-wildfire-mayor-intl/index.html I don't really see this could end well if government starts to blame unknown (yeah right) actors.

    258:

    I don't think the current U.S. regime will be lasting much longer,* so I'll make the same offer. We're in Southern California about 70 miles east of Los Angeles International Airport and we have couch space too.

    • I won't discuss Trump's fate further in light of your prohibition of the issue, but I'm not worried. We may end up with a Republican, but it won't be Pence or Trump. Also, my thoughts on the matter probably should not be shared in public, but if you're interested you can send me an email.
    259:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM7cBASa4CM WARNING! This is really bad situation and the person with camera most likely died. Looks like a treetop fire, and it is very bad considering the entire town is filled with trees.

    I actually lived through big heat wave and wildfires in 2010, but I was lucky to travel away to different region for most severe period. I live in the city, and fires were mostly on the other side of the river. But still, with heat wave, all of our grass burned down and the smoke was pretty thick. When I was returning, our bus drove through the forest that was burning on both sides of the road, we've had smoke all around us and I've seen some open fire in the ditch nearby.

    This was filmed about 10 km the city back then, and even though this place is known to be rather swampy of all things, it burned like a gasoline barrel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf_NvKrkvj4

    260:

    Though there is another sinking feeling quite a few of those local strong men started out as human right activists themselves or were at least affiliated with them or used human rights activist organizations as a strating point; the whole story of "national democratic liberation" from the 19th century on is somewhat depressing.

    As for Israeli right wing politics, I did some browsing of Haaretz today after the Nation-state law came up, and found this movie about early Shas, no idea how much you're already familiar with it and what's your take on it...

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-rabbis-harnessed-religion-and-identity-and-changed-the-mideast-1.6314503

    But then, before I go into "whatever you do, it's going to end badly", I might as well try to translate some German lyrics...

    And time robs you of the heroes and the dreams, in any case, and everybody reasonable: "That's so, you better face" We're building walls of ice up high as time goes by, though in the corners flame throwers, ready to make them fry"

    Yes, I took some liberties...

    Might as well be the product of my media habit, in the vain of an imaginary project "Narratives of Decolonization; a Western Cinema approach":

    "He's in the mountains!"

    (Somewhat funny that's John McCain's favourite movie...)

    Which reminds me of "Lawrence of Arabia" still being in the "to be watched" shelf.

    Whatever, have to make myself ready for the lunar eclipse tonight, the local hobby astronomers organized something on a spoil tip.

    261:

    As for Greece, the situation is not that new with the Mediterranean, though it might get worse with the heat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Mediterranean_wildfires

    As for "government starts to blame unknown (yeah right) actors.", no, it's most likely not about Russians. ;)

    There is a narrative in Italy, France and Spain it's difficult to legally clear forest to build houses, so land owners set fires to get rid of the forest and build houses afterwards. No idea if that's really the case.

    Another thing might be local arguments being settled by setting fire to the opponent's house or forests.

    But as mentioned, it's nothing new, AFAIK.

    262:

    Wait... a pattern. That's not like, say, solitaire, is it?

    (I am not addicted, I can quit any time I want....)

    263:

    I have a friend, name of MacBryde, who spent about 10-12 years building a real boat: 26'? 36'? I can't remember. named the Albatross, MARVELOUS woodworking, junk-rigged, and they once planned to cross the Atlantic in it by themselves.

    264:

    I Beg These Idiots' Pardon: it is the GOVERNMENT'S JOB to stockpile. And that goes back to at least Ur and Jericho.

    The psychotic neofascists/ultracapitalists are under a delusion that humans evolved as solitary predators, not as pack animals.

    265:

    Re: Fires

    Swamps often produce methane and swamp fires are pretty common in some US states. People unfamiliar with this phenomenon have come up with all sorts of reasons for the light show (UFOs).

    Some areas of Russia have oil just a few meters below ground. Weirdest part of this (as an outsider) is that some folks take a spa-type soak in the bubbling crude for health reasons. (Here's an oil map of Russia:)

    http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/6176

    266:
  • I have serious doubts that's going on much longer - the news yesterday and today, is that Cohen, his ex-fixer, is saying that Trunpolini knew about the meeting in Trump Tower in '16... and that is, in fact, collusion. His counterpunching has reached the "boy who cried wold" point, yawn. And the neoConfederates who want to impeach Rosenstein are not happy, since even Ryan won't touch that.

  • No Republican will be elected President in 2020.

  • Southern California's hot. If/when you decide to jump, Charlie, I'm in the DC 'burbs, and have a house, with a spare bedroom, and networking, all the amenities (and I cook well, and have lived with a diabetic, my recent ex). I'd be happy to host you.

  • Extra credit: if you come at the right time, you can play De Toqueville, and watch the GOP go down close up.

    If my tumbrels ever get here....

    267:

    Your conclusion makes no sense.

    What it says is, a) you created these disasters. b) STOP DOING IT. c) ASK THEM if there's any way you can help fix it.

    The assholes in power all have the upper management syndrome, "I'm in charge, and have power over all of you, therefore, I know everything, and don't have to ask anyone anything."

    268:

    Faux News only helped. I mean, really, the Zombie Apocalypse came a few years ago.... http://wearelovely.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CB-Zombies1.png

    269:

    Here's a relatively decent piece from today's Washington Post: Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer Somewhat light on science, but not heavily weasel-worded.

    270:

    funny (or frightening) guide how to survive in a BIG city when a REALLY bad things happened (in Russian but Google Translate works fine):

    http://3rm.info/publications/42991-ukraina-sovety-na-vsyakiy-sluchay-a-sluchai-byvayut-raznye.html

    271:

    The Right Honourable Ms. May seems to live in a bubble only slightly less impervious to fact than that of Mr. Trump, but I wonder how much longer her government can survive given her disastrous snap election last year and the recent defections of BoJo and her Brexit ministers.

    Also, why haven't I seen the joke yet that Brexit should be pronounced "Breaks it"?

    272:

    Re: BrExit

    Wondering whether anyone has proposed neutral third party mediation so that both sides can blame the mediator later if they don't like the results.

    273:

    Always a good idea to foster cognitive dissonance; the calculation problem should make for headhurt in autoritären economic liberals.

    Whatever, about one hour to go till blood moon, guess it's time to geht into ceremonial garb and practice my part; "Iah, Iah, Cthulhu..."

    274:

    Why do you think I keep going on about rocket stoves? That's one of my August projects--making a couple of them out of various cans and perlite (for internal insulation). The point is that having something that efficiently burns twigs and scrap wood to boil water is useful for when the gas goes out, and I've got plenty of scrap wood lying around.

    As for water, I don't have as much stored as I'd like, but I don't think I ever will.

    Thing is, this isn't civil unrest prepping, it's earthquake and ARkStorm prepping, as well as fire prepping, all of which are on my eternal to-do list. Civil unrest is just a variant on that, at least here.

    275:

    I have a very small wood gasifier stove for the purposes of lightweight backpacking. It's not actually that useful as most of the good walking in the UK isn't in forests, but it certainly works.

    I have enough seasoned wood in the garden to keep myself going for a few weeks but cleaning all the crud off my pans is only slightly more appealing than living on the same pasta/rice meal for several months until supplies recover.

    276:

    nemesis @ 228 Look on the bright side. All those lovely British Tax Havens will have been saved from wipe-out by the EU Anti Tax Avoidance Directive (2016/1164) which would have applied from the 1st April 2019. All else is secondary. THIS MORE PUBLICITY across the national press, right now!

    PHK @ 247 Yes, they are - Corby has been anti-EU for over 30 years & as usual has learnt nothing ....

    277:

    I'm not convinced it will work. We all saw how long Switzerland held out when the americans decided to get medieval on their privacy laws.

    Having a large and powerful neighbour that really doesn't like your tax laws is a problem. It would probably be less of an issue if we had some sort of input into their rule making process...

    278:

    The primary over riding drive of all politicians is to continue to get re-elected

    The absolute most certain way to not get re-elected is to fuck up the food supply

    This means that you can count on the British politicians at least trying very very hard to make sure Charlie’s scenario does not occur.

    They will likely posture and dither up until the last minute but unless they get completely blocked by the EU politicians or some other external wrench in the gears they won’t let it get anywhere near that bad, short term

    I do think long term the prospects are considerably more grim

    279:

    Has anyone read (or have comments on) Ian Hunts' _Brexit: What the hell happens now?

    280:

    Re: Rocket stoves

    Interesting - never heard of rocket stoves before. Apparently they run on/burn anything and are super efficient because they were originally designed for use in resource poor developing countries. (The irony of it all.)

    Tracked down this article for the DIY-ers. (And you can buy a plan for building your own.)

    http://www.iwilltry.org/b/build-a-rocket-stove-for-home-heating/

    281:

    And Twitter goes boom:

    https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/twtr

    Twitter stock plunges 20% in wake of 1m user decline Guardian 27th July 2018

    Congratulations! Those who follow the Mr Shipley's of the world made [nada] those who pay attention to Mad Cat Goddesses just made a few hundred million. Them's the Breaks.

    We mean: if you value Human Worth by profit motive we just proved that we're very valuable.

    Enjoy the Moon, cynical fucks.

    Disclosure: we did not make a 'cent' on this notice.

    Gimme Shelter YT: Music, 3:31.

    282:

    Sure, but what if you and forty of your mates can block just one vote in parliament and then blame the minor disruption to your constiuencies (somewhat less minor in other areas that vote for (ahem) other parties) so that the party leader (and PM) finds themselves in an untenable situation and by getting rid of her, well, that's where the blame lies. You in your safe seat can hardly be held responsible for the difficulties endured due to the incompetence of the former ministry etc.

    Or just declare martial law and have your self appointed Lord Protector, that's good too.

    283:

    If you mean that corporations are lining up to leave the country - sounds like their lobbyists weren't successful with May so they're trying to drum up some hysteria. However, given that journalists are asking these corporations specifically about their likely actions depending on various BrExit agreement outcomes, it's absurd for Hunt to take issue with some corporations openly admitting that they prefer a sure bet over uncertainty. From the bits reported over here, the BrExit negotiations don't seem to have accomplished anything yet.

    If these corporations move their operations, they should expect Brits to boycott their products and services. (Their financial analysts probably factored this in when deciding to head for the mainland.)

    284:

    They know people aren't going to boycott their products because the alternative is to buy British. /snark.

    More to the point, there is no point in trying to sell to people who can't them.

    285:

    editing failure. "can't afford them."

    286:

    Not going to happen. Either there's no reasonable alternative doer of whatever the corporations do, or they do something that is of no interest to ordinary people, or the only reason they're in the UK in the first place is because they're interested not in the UK market but in the easy access to the EU one. Also, you try getting more than an insignificant handful of Brits to pay enough attention to any boycott for anyone to notice.

    287:

    Much of the reason people are worried is that the politicians we've got at the moment are so mindbendingly clueless that you actually can't trust them to follow that logic.

    On top of that, there's a good chance that the next election is already more or less decided as a result of the polarisation of views brought about by the current situation. It seems to me that we have one group of people who are less likely to vote Tory than a Yorkshire miner, another group who will still vote Tory no matter how badly they fuck up because they think the alternative is not to have any more money than anyone else and they can't stand the idea, and an empty space from which nearly everyone has decamped into one of the other two categories.

    It's the second group who are most dangerous because they are the least rational. They include people like old age pensioners who are beyond the point where income tax is personally relevant but who are increasingly dependent on the NHS and other social provisions, yet are still terrified of a "tax and spend" government and prefer one which is destroying their means of survival out from under their feet. Work that one out...

    288:

    I'm hopeful that it won't get nearly that bad.

    But only after UK politicians get a nice good stare into this abyss. With good fortune the reporting this post is based on is enough of a stare. With worse fortune it will take a market crash and recession, which I suppose would happen later this year. At that point a crash program to actually do all the work they should have been doing for the past year or more could still avoid the worst pain, or a retreat to BINO.

    However in the time of maximum political power for the lead damaged generation it seems we are always managing to execute policy with more stupidity and cruelty than I have expected.

    289:

    "local arguments being settled by setting fire to the opponent's house or forests."

    God of mine, God of mine, turn back the wind...

    290:

    One thing that strikes me when I watch random TV is that we have a memetic outbreak of "I'm angry and I don't know why".

    It struck me the other day at work as a perfect description of a coworker - his normal voice is a kind of high pitched angry, and his normal conversation is "that's retarded, obviously the coffee van is going to come today, you're not thinking this through".

    I think it's a combination of the incessant stream of angry voices on TV (some TV!) making people accustomed to that tone and language, and habituation to really poor arguments. So on the one hand it's now common to say "you utter moron, what sort of idiot walks around a corner without looking first" rather than "sorry", and on the other it's common to think "I'm right because I feel right, and therefore you're wrong and are a moron".

    Not new observations and I don't have a recipe for fixing it, but ... it makes me angry :)

    291:

    "unknown (yeah right) actors."

    We have had wildfires in England on the moors above Manchester. Pilots of helicopters dropping water on them have reported seeing people deliberately lighting more. Not to pursue an argument or make a political statement, but purely because they have shit for brains and don't understand the concept of sawing off the branch you're sitting on. Not exactly "unknown" actors, at least not once the police get to them, but what with seeing their actions as so inconsequential that they need next to no motivation to do it, they might as well be.

    292:

    Some areas of Russia have oil just a few meters below ground.

    So do other parts of the world. The US has such in Pennsylvania (where the world oil boom started) and in Southern California.

    293:

    Absolutely. And there we have a powerful reason for losing our dependence on oil that was just as apparent back when the prevailing climate-related worry was the imminence of the next ice age, and is surely - or to my mind at least - far less open to question than CO2. Which winds me up because if we collectively had any sense we'd have sorted it long before we got to the point where CO2 got brought up.

    Although it goes back before 1917; it was certainly apparent when the resource we were interested in controlling was the Suez/Red Sea route to India, and considered it to our advantage to have the region under the nominal control of a crumbling and ramshackle empire (which wasn't exactly hot on human rights either). And our ...complex... attitude to the Ottoman empire was a significant factor in the conditions which brought about WW1.

    294:

    Oh, right. I'm not really used to steel hulls on anything less than actual ships - older sailing boats are made of wood, of course, and more recent ones are usually fibreglass or some other composite. Steel has never really caught on, Chay Blyth notwithstanding.

    I share your perception that the American boating scene is all about having craploads of money. We have that faction in the UK too; keeping a boat tends to raise obstacles of the kind that need a lot of money to fix them - fixed moorings are expensive and in short supply, for a start - while the amount of time people are likely to be able to spend actually sailing it is a pretty small proportion of the year, so it does tend to select for people who have enough money not to be bothered. On the other hand there are also a lot of people who get round it by having a boat small enough to be left on the beach, trailed behind a car, or kept on the kind of mooring which is cheap because you can only get to it at high water springs. It's very much a matter of two different worlds; the transition point seems to be roughly around 10m LOA, where you get prices jumping by an order of magnitude for the same size boat depending on which side of the divide built it.

    295:

    It's all going a bit 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Hard Brexit wgah'nagl fhtagn'

    296:

    Ok, this is getting kind of far afield, but: I just finished reading "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East" and it claims with some evidence that the Ottomans were THIS CLOSE to coming in the war on the side of the UK, and if the Foreign Office hadn't screwed up it would have. It was a really interesting read, and honestly, absolutely no one comes out looking especially competent; there is a definite feeling of familiarity about all the monumental mistakes pretty much everyone engaged in.

    297:

    Dornbusch's Law:

    The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.

    In hindsight most economic/banking crises pan out that way.

    Predicting that things will go wrong is usually the easier bit: predicting when is the hard part.

    298:

    Local crops, with no prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the fields as the agricultural sector collapses (see concluding remarks, section 5.6).

    That's not really what the report you link to says, especially that section 5.6.

    The conclusion assumes the UK joins free trade agreements with places like NZ, Australia and Canada.

    And that this free trade would totally annihilate the UK's agricultural sector.

    Because what keeps all EU farmers afloat (including UK farmers at the moment) is vast govt subsidies. Free trade agreement don't allow that - you aren't allowed to hugely subsidize your local production, that's unfair and has the same effect as putting tariffs on imports.

    But if you push the Sterling low enough, then farming becomes economically viable.

    299:

    Aww.

    Gatestone Institute

    A shame that Bolton's Iran drive is going to fail.

    p.s.

    No, really. We all know, the files are out in the OPEN now.

    300:

    [Not clear what "the files" are. Didn't look very hard.] Out of curiosity I just quick-read The Walrus of Doom's (Bolton's) Iran pieces at the Gatestone Institute. Feel mentally dirtier, though with a better mental model of the guy. Impression is lawyer-style argumentation, full of what he thinks are traps (largely assertions, and they mostly are not really traps), and grounded in part in counterfactuals, and perhaps too much in love with his own thoughts. It's like he's trying to map what he did in 2001 re Biological Weapons Convention, which at least makes a few legitimate technical points about the difficulty of BW non-compliance detection (as part of a derailment effort[0]), to nuclear weapons and missiles. I can see why people find him irritating, and any effective derailment of his warmongering would be quite welcome. [0] Didn't find verification for an assertion in Bolton a 'guided missile', of this - "U.S. officials, led by Bolton, argued that the plan would have put U.S. national security at risk by allowing spot inspections of suspected U.S. weapons sites."

    301:

    Oh, yes. The final straw was us deciding that the two warships we had just finished building for them, which they had paid for but which hadn't been delivered yet, would be more useful to us if we hung on to them... so we did, and didn't even give them their money back. Cue the Germans giving them two of theirs instead and us having reason to rue our perfidy many times over.

    302:

    whomever @ 294 Brabara Tuchman AGAIN Read the chapter in "August 1914" called: " ....an enemy then flying" Referring to S.M.S. Goeben

    Pigeon @ 299 yes, that too Stupid - unbelievably so ... ( Also referred to by Tuchman, what a suprise )

    303:

    Are you sure? Russia Today's opinionists have been pretty sure for some time that the USA is intending to strike at Iran in August. From Iran's rhetoric, they believe something similar. That is certainly plausible, but there's no actual evidence, so we can only wait. God alone knows what Iran would do. This report indicates that the UK and Australia would assist the USA (as, of course, would Israel and Saudi Arabia), though Mattis has denied it. But he would say that, wouldn't he?

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-27/donald-trump-may-be-prepared-to-strike-iran-sources-say/10037728

    304:

    Indeed. I have known that the housing bubble would fail since the 1960s - every mathematically competent person did, as it's a variant on a Ponzi scheme. But when and how?

    305:

    Some UK farming could become internationally competitive following a sterling crash, but most wouldn't because we have to buy oil. We are just too agriculturally marginal.

    306:

    The problem is that we are now dependent on them. Most such organisations are already largely extra-territorial, and moving out further would be no problem. Take, for example food shopping - restoring enough locally owned and taxed shops and distribution would need near-martial law (immediate compulsory purchase etc.)

    307:
    Take, for example food shopping - restoring enough locally owned and taxed shops and distribution would need near-martial law

    I don't recall the nationalisation of the supermarkets in Halting State/Rule 34 being explained at all, but, y'know, tesco is cheaper than trident...

    308:

    Re: 'Free trade agreement don't allow ... subsidize your local production, ...'

    See NAFTA: Side one says that Canadian gov't subsidies to dairy farmers are unfair and the reason Trump won't sign NAFTA. The other side of the argument is that a sovereign state has the right to provide socioeconomic support to its key sectors (safe food production). Canadian dairy does not use pharma/hormones to boost their cows' milk production which results in higher unit production costs for the farmers, hence subsidies. Is this fair? Depends on which you value more: profits or social responsibility.

    Canada seems to be pursuing free trade agreements with everyone. If Canada signs such an agreement with the UK before a BrExit agreement is finalized, it would have to be on no better than whatever terms Canada already has with the EU (so as not tick off the EU, the larger trade partner). If this is the case, please explain: what is the point of entering an agreement with a new partner (Canada) where the terms and conditions are likely to be pretty much the same as you're (supposedly) desperate to get out of?

    309:
    what is the point of entering an agreement with a new partner (Canada) where the terms and conditions are likely to be pretty much the same as you're (supposedly) desperate to get out of?

    So you can say "see? brexit didn't fuck everything up horrendously forever! everything is fine! british manufacturing doesn't need to increase its output of tumbrels at all!"

    310:

    The situation really isn't very good is it?

    Brexit seems to have revealed the gross weaknesses in the British political system - we're now in a situation where we appear to be tumbling towards a No Deal / Almost No Deal Brexit (which would be A Very Bad Thing).

    Why has this happened? Government incompetence has definitely played a part - triggering Article 50 and then taking 15 months to even begin to agree a Cabinet position on the post-Brexit relationship strikes me as staggeringly incompetent. A sensible country would have agreed a cross-party consensus for negotiating priorities (and gained parliamentary approval for it) before beginning the formal withdrawal process.

    However I think that a more significant cause of this situation is the profound shift in the Leave centre of gravity over the past two years.

    For decades before the vote "I'm against the political project but keen on the economic benefits" was the mainstream Eurosceptic position. Go back a few years and you can even find Farage pitching for EEA / EFTA (i.e. "Norway") status for the UK.

    Since June 2016 that has entirely changed - now if you don't want a harder Brexit than the next chap you're seen as dangerously soft, perhaps even a closet-Remainer.

    Where this leaves us is that the Brexit movement now won't accept a softer Brexit and there's no parliamentary majority for No Deal.

    So "let's just cancel it then" I hear you say. That would also be A Very Bad Thing which would play into betrayal / hard right narratives and likely to irreparable harm to UK democracy.

    I think at this point a second referendum is looking increasingly likely. Whether it's just on the kind of deal (i.e. EEA / EFTA, Chequers (+/-), No Deal) or it includes Remain as an option is yet to be seen.

    311:

    Yes, precisely, except for one point.

    It is very doubtful that a cancellation would do any more damage to UK democracy (such as it is) than any other plausible outcome. The positively worst that is likely to happen is a No Deal, followed up by us signing up to a TTIP dictated by the America Firsters.

    312:

    I suspect reneging on brexit would have less negative consequence than one might guess because if the age structure of the vote. 5 years of simple time should be enough for brexit voters to die their way into a minority.

    And, really, the lies to get to yes and the damage it will do to the much younger no 48% aren't already an irreparable harm?

    Appeasing the far right doesn't work out in the long run. They want many of you dead.

    313:

    Nobody is talking about reneging, but reconsideration. Yes, I know that some claim it is but, if that is so, the whole Brexit campaign (UKIP and all), referendum and current policy is reneging on the very clear results of the 1975 referendum.

    314:

    That's where I think a second vote would be better. At least then there's some level of democratic endorsement of whatever path we finally take.

    315:

    Jeff,

    There may be a flaw in your thinking - one could make the same argument about Conservative voters dying off. The thing is that people's political views do change during their lifetimes (broadly people become more conservative as they age). It may be that opinion on the EU is the exception to this rule but I wouldn't bet on it.

    Secondly, conflating "the far right" with everyone who voted to Leave is false (and actually quite dangerous I think) - we should be seeking to marginalise extremists rather than driving millions into their arms.

    316:

    (sorry for redundancy, if this has already been covered)

    "The UK has historical connections to various countries that would, I think, happily go back to pre-1973 status with regards trade. "

    From what I've gathered, no. Those terms were set by Great Britain when various countries were exiting the actual British Empire, and have massive political, legal and economic control.

    There has been almost 50 years of independence and change since then. In addition, the relative wealth of Great Britain has dropped like a rock.

    Today, trade ties with China are far more important than with the UK. And the UK will be in the beggar's position, known to be desperate.

    317:

    "Where the fuck have those hundreds of Remain-supporting MPs all gone? I know there's been an election, but it didn't result in that many MPs being replaced, and in any case the sudden vanishment was apparent straight after the referendum long before the election was even proposed. All the stupid crap has gone through the Commons practically on the nod and the only effective opposition has been from the Lords. Have they all been nicking off to fancy dinners instead of putting their votes in? Has some Illuminati/Mafia-type figure managed to put the bite on several hundred MPs across the country? Or what?"

    What I want to say about the UK is that elite wealth + controlling a margin in Parliament means massive control of the UK government. The Tories were threatened by a UKIP rump, and that rump wagged the rest of the dog.

    However, this is probably incomplete. A large chunk of the elite right used anti-EU sentiment as a political bludgeon, thinking that they could control it. The worse it got, the more useful it seemed.

    318:

    "But if it's the UK, well, they're going to have a lot of explaining to do, to make the case that it is moral failings on the part of the UK."

    (1) Just rebroadcast the rantings of the UK Brexit press and politicians. Making the case that they are deranged lunatics is easy.

    (2) Assuming a 'hard' or 'no deal' Brexit, the UK will be screwed, blued and tattooed, but presumably the EU will get hit by a very hard recession (at the least). The people there will be pissed off, and the politicians will need a scapegoat. The UK will make a handy one, mostly because it will be true (at the collective leadership and Tory voter level).

    319:

    "...and also to make sure the kids have duel nationality as well."

    That won't help much; they'll need 'mass melee nationality'. There will likely be very very one on one formal fights. :)

    320:

    "Nobody seems to have posted this link, so here:

    https://www.change.org/p/theresa-may-mp-give-people-a-final-say-on-brexit-deal

    I assume that the government will ignore it, especially as Parliament is closing down for a month and a half, but we shall see what happens in October."

    The problem is (from a USian perspective) is that the people who didn't vote in a non-binding advisory referendum will d*mn well vote now, and most for 'Remain'. I'd expect what - 10%? 20%? of the 'Leave' voters to grab that second chance for sanity, as well.

    The end result is that the Tories would have just put the UK through 2 years of chaos and then basically said 'Ha! Just kidding!'.

    321:

    Brexit isn't conservative. It is very radical.

    322:

    There may be a flaw in your thinking - one could make the same argument about Conservative voters dying off. The thing is that people's political views do change during their lifetimes (broadly people become more conservative as they age). It may be that opinion on the EU is the exception to this rule but I wouldn't bet on it.

    This. I've been listening to the demographics-is-destiny lot in the US for 30 years, saying those old farts will die off Real Soon Now and we can be progressive. Statistically, there's more old farts now than there were then, and they seem to be just as conservative.

    We're past comment #300, so... The problem is exacerbated in the US because the system currently gives an outsized amount of power to small states with shrinking, aging populations.

    323:

    And I didn't mean to say brexit voter equals 'far right' voter. I was responding to a post which expressed concern that reversing course might play into far right narratives.

    324:

    I agree. I was using conservatism as an example of a political viewpoint that resolutely fails to "die off" witb new proponents instead arising as their views change with age.

    325:

    I think brexit is a fairly unique case. Its not a vague generality of voting or not bothering, it is a specific vote that happened. It isn't going well and it's going to get worse. Those who voted no, I think, aren't going to start thinking it's a great idea because their lives advance a few years in the face of the economic damage.

    326:

    davidshipley @ 313 Secondly, conflating "the far right" with everyone who voted to Leave is false (and actually quite dangerous Yes - I mean Corbyn is rabidly anti-EU & momentum are at the least semi-marxist ....

    Though that combination of anti-EU groups is itself very worrying.

    JF @ 319 "Very Radical" Yes, rather like the overthrow of the Third Republic - it was radical all right. Who is our Petain - JRM?

    327:

    Re: '... likely to happen is a No Deal, followed up by us signing up to a TTIP dictated by the America Firsters.'

    Probably the planned outcome right up to the moment DT gets even greedier, and TM calls for a referendum on that trade agreement. And so the wheel spins some more never getting any farther along.

    Had mentioned anocracy a couple of topics back which is basically an on-going state of limbo re: politics/gov't. Beneficiaries - aside from arms dealers - anyone who doesn't want to be examined too closely or regularly. Folks here have commented about dumping UK currency/stocks. That's fine, but for most folks their house is their single biggest asset and they can't just dump it - they're living in it.

    Seriously: What's going to happen to the housing market? If housing prices collapse, are the banks/mortgage holders going to allow their customers to hold mortgages well in excess of the asset value? probably not so you end up with lots of personal bankruptcies plus a glut of foreign real estate investors and there you are - a land owned by wealthy 'migrants' and there's not a thing you can do about it.

    328:

    It is possible that house prices will plateau in monetary terms, and shrink gradually in real terms until they have reached a sustainable level (30-40% of what they are now). However, as I think I said, I have been expecting a crash for many decades now - and, by 'crash', I do not mean a 30% drop, I mean a factor of 3-5 times.

    329:

    Seriously: What's going to happen to the housing market? If housing prices collapse, are the banks/mortgage holders going to allow their customers to hold mortgages well in excess of the asset value?

    As long as they're making payments, what's the problem? The value of the property won't cover what's owed if you foreclose, so as long as payments are being made just let them get on with it. When it get's paid off the books balance and everything is fine.

    It's the homeowner's problem that they can't sell for enough to repay the loan so are stuck there paying too much for their property, not the banks.

    330:

    That's not the problem. Their (banks and insurance companies) housing stocks are used as collateral for other debts and, if it crashes, at least some of the debtors will demand their money. Also, a lot of pension schemes rely on the housing market to pay the pensions.

    331:

    An elderly N.I. Unionist, interviewed some months ago, I forget where, possibly the Irish Times, admitted that he was resigned to the fact that the island of Ireland would be reunited, and that his brand of unionism was becoming increasingly unattractive to current N.I. youth. He therefore foresaw it happening not in his lifetime, but not very much after. NDB simply moves that goalpost closer. But there was an upsurge in the nutcase element and their bonfires this year.

    332:

    The government has made zero provision for an uninterrupted supply of nuclear material after Brexit.

    For no other reason than it has a backstop at the ECJ, they have committed to the UK withdrawing from Euratom. This has been the fundamental building block for the UK's supply of nuclear fuel, our non-proliferation obligations enshrined in international law, and crucially - medical isotopes.

    Not only are most medical isotopes imported into the UK; they can't be stockpiled - for instance molybdenum-99 whose decay product technetium-99m is used as a medical tracer - has a half-life of just 66 hours.

    The House of Commons health committee has demanded an answer from the government on future provision of medical isotopes. As of last week, they hadn't received a reply.

    People are going to die because of this decision; and the Brexiteers will have the victim's blood on their hands.

    It does make me wonder what the threshold for misconduct in public office kicks in - if it doesn't apply to those knowingly crippling an economy and endangering its citizens, when does it?

    333:

    iCowboy @ 330 That isn't "simply" Misconduct in Public Office. It's Manslaughter.

    334:

    However, I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but it seems that Nemesis @ 228 is incorrect. Apparently that EU directive ( 2016/1164 ) has already been incorporated into UK law.

    The various sections can be found HERE I can provide links to the sub-sections if required, but apparently, sections 1, 3, 4, 5 are all either in UK law already, or have parallel arrangements - & i'm told that section 2 has been dropped ....

    335:

    Elderly Cynic @328

    Here is something that may explain what happened in the 2008 crash.

    The real truth about the 2008 financial crisis | Brian S. Wesbury | TEDxCountyLineRoad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrFSO62p0jk

    336:

    Watches all the old People go Full Fucking Mental Ape Ridiculous to deny their crimes

    Yeah, seen this before like Indonesia Genocide etc: this time there's actual penalty clauses though.

    Who Wants To Live Forever

    They've stopped even trying to change the Past. Because they know what we're going to do...

    p.s.

    Queen Dies.

    What happens then, Brexiteers?

    337:

    The last time England politically separated from Europe it did not go well. Trade was devastated. Local government was powerless. England lost control of its borders. It was invaded by Scots from the north, Saxons from the mainland, Irish from the islands, and then by Vikings. The dark ages lasted for centuries. Why people voted to do this again is beyond me.

    338:

    Frank Landis @ 202:

    "Savings account interest in the US is less than the rate of inflation. If you park your money in savings, you're actually slowly losing value."

    Not just savings accounts. Any government insured account pays less than the OFFICIAL rate of inflation, never mind the ACTUAL rate of inflation. And who really believes our current Congress wouldn't renege on even those minuscule protections in a heartbeat.

    339:

    SFreader @ 224:

    "That's why I've been reading up on solar, etc. Plenty of how-to-live-off-grid books available at my local (suburban/commuterville) library. The most interesting question raised by these authors is: what can you live without? Then do an energy consumption analysis for current vs. proposed usage. And, because you're off-grid, include a back-up system."

    I did all that reading 20 - 30 years ago. Living here in hurricane country, right on the edge of the winter snow line, where instead of snow we usually get ICE storms, I have a fair amount of experience doing without power. I've already been through multiple extended outages (1 week to 2 months) & already have a back-up power system.

    I power a refrigerator with an ice maker, a 4-cup Mr. Coffee & keep my cell phone charged. I can put a camp stove out on the back porch if I need to cook.

    I have a battery radio, headlamps for both cars & the house (along with flashlights for same) and I can also listen to the news on the car radio. I have a wood stove & a chain saw.

    That's pretty much my minimum load, but if I knew I was going to be "off-grid" for any longer than a couple of months, I'd put up a home-sized wind turbine to take over the refrigerator/coffee maker load.

    340:

    Greg Tingey @ 229:

    “Survival” …. – when you are living in a city of 10 million people?
    Or even 700 000 ( London & Edinburgh, respectively ) ?
    Easier said than done.
    Provided the power is on at least 12 hours a day & the water isn’t cut off, you are probably OK, though it will be difficult.
    Gas … um …."


    Yet, the people of Baghdad, Mogadishu, Kabul and the like somehow manage. I think if they can do it, somehow the indomitable British spirit that got you through the blitz will come through.

    341:

    Auricoma @ 241:

    “A strong case can be made that the West's current problem with Islamism is entirely the West's fault”

    I keep seeing this argument and I don't quite understand what it's supposed to actually say.

    "It is your fault that you've created a monster. Now, to atone for your sin, you must let the monster eat you."

    I interpret it more as ...
    "When you find yourself in a deep hole, the first step to finding a solution is to stop digging."

    342:

    Unholyguy @ 276:

    The primary over riding drive of all politicians is to continue to get re-elected

    The absolute most certain way to not get re-elected is to fuck up the food supply

    This means that you can count on the British politicians at least trying very very hard to make sure Charlie’s scenario does not occur.

    You can count on the politicians at least trying very very hard to make sure there's someone else they can pin the blame on.

    Actually doing something about it OTOH, probably not. If they fail, someone else will try to pin the blame on them. From a re-election standpoint, it's better to do nothing and make someone else the scapegoat.

    343:

    I think we're far enough along that I can make this point about Trump without being guilty of hijacking the thread:

    whitroth @ 88:

    "I disagree. The chances of Trumpolini getting through his first term, never mind reelected, range from slim to none."

    The GOP won't move to impeach Trump before the 116th United States Congress convenes on January 03, 2019. It's a quirk in the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, that limits the POTUS to two full terms plus no more than 1/2 of their predecessor's term if said predecessor dies, resigns or is impeached and removed.

    If Pence succeeded to the office of President before January 20, 2019, he would be eligible to run for only a single term in his own right. If he succeeded to the office of President after the mid-point of Trump's term, he gets to run for reelection in both 2020 and 2024 - he could get a max of 10 years in the White House. I'd prefer to see him and the ... uh ... other one ... get 20 years in the BIG HOUSE

    Another quirk that has to do with the way the 22nd Amendment interacts with the 12th Amendment. Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama could all be elected to two terms as Vice President.

    If their "primary" were to somehow fail to finish his/her term each of them could succeed to the office of President, achieving a partial third term via the back door so to speak.

    344:

    allynh @ 333:

    "The real truth about the 2008 financial crisis | Brian S. Wesbury | TEDxCountyLineRoad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrFSO62p0jk "

    It's not the "real" truth; more like ENRON accounting "truthiness". The 2008 financial crisis happened when the accountancy control fraud chickens came home to roost all at once as the Goldman Sachs alumni at Treasury & the Fed ganged up to screw over Lehman Brothers.

    Ultimately, you can thank the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 for unleashing the fraud that led to the crash.

    345:

    The last sentence of the 12th Amendment provides that if you are not eligible to be President you are also not eligible to be Vice-President.

    And, the GOP won't impeach Trump before or after the mid-term elections, not because they want Pence to have the opportunity to run for two full terms (really, they couldn't care less) but because, appallingly, Trump is incredibly popular with Republican voters.

    346:

    [ Bloviating incel/alt-right ranting deleted and drive-by commenter banned. Next time read the moderation policy, dude. — Charlie. ]

    347:

    Basically: if you're over 45, you're a fucking psychopath. You signed up for this shit. You enjoyed it and now you aren't even strong enough to protest it. Was at a (pot-luck) party tonight in the US attended only by (white, jewish) people over 45, and having just read that, did a anthropological-style deep listen(/etc) to a few conversations; the mind sets were rather smug, the politics carefully "centrist" mostly and subdued for conflict-avoidance/social-cohesion reasons. (Depressing; I can see why you find USAians annoying.) Can't say I (HSS) am guilty of any of the above though excepting chocolate and whatever guilt is incurred by savings in equities and participation in a messed-up society. (E.g. a college acquaintance did the full war tax resistance route for a long while, the "Earn less than the taxable income" variant, that involved a lot of couch-surfing. Respect.)

    Oh. And you tried to kill us. Heart Attacks (on subjects that were hosting us) and Mental Full Metal Scramble (Full frontal cortex image run). Nod. (I have never knowingly tried to harm you, BTW.) Tell me why a psychopathic / sociopathic H.S.S hierarchy lead by [redaced] shouldn't face the mirror treatment? I would not shed any tears, to say the least. (And yes, I do cry. Recent events especially.)

    Re your current (retired?) name, many eyes in the US saw video of this and related: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/firenado-seen-in-california-wildfire-is-a-scientific-phenomenon/ Also saw a sunlit thundercloud with rainbow and cloud-to-cloud lighting last night. (Smiled.)

    348:

    Any government insured account pays less than the OFFICIAL rate of inflation, never mind the ACTUAL rate of inflation.

    I, uh, know a bit about interest rates.

    Risk-free interest rates are negative in several currencies. Out as far as the 8-year mark in some cases (though Swiss Francs are a bit of an odd currency).

    Not "negative after subtracting inflation". Just plain old "negative".

    This has been true for some years now but is still quite surreal.

    As an IT guy it means I've spent some time in the last few years finding yet another place that yet another system has broken because developers back in the day assumed a negative interest rate was an error. And fixing risk systems that made assumptions about interest rates follow log-normal distributions (because logs and negative numbers don't get on).

    349:

    I don't know why people are mentioning "living off-grid" with apparent seriousness. It simply is not an option for 60 million people crammed onto a titchy little island which isn't self-sufficient in anything important or even close to it. It isn't even an option for the subset of people who don't really know how to do it, but think they do because they've watched Ray Mears on TV.

    "What can you do without" - Everything except food and energy. Oops.

    The "save energy" narrative is really rather misleading, since it focuses so exclusively on trivia - saving a few tens of watts by changing light bulbs, unplugging things with standby modes that still draw a watt or two to listen for the "on" button. But the overwhelming majority of domestic energy use is for HEATING. Things with heaters in have power consumptions an order of magnitude greater than things without, with very few exceptions, and they tend to be running continuously for longer than anything else except perhaps lighting.

    Trying to supply this energy from bits of scrounged biomass simply isn't on. There isn't anything like the amount of spare biomass available. Moreover, there are millions of people living in houses that have no facility for burning anything except mains gas, while older houses have nothing better than open fireplaces which chuck 90% of the heat up the chimney. The result of trying it would be abject failure, accompanied by widespread deaths from things like smoke and CO inhalation and houses burning down to go along with the hypothermia.

    And a lot of our energy comes from Russian gas and Electricité de France. Great.

    350:

    JBS @ 340 "Blaming someone else" won't work in this case, because the warnings are already coming in loud & clear ....

    RE; Euratom ( & Medical supplies, etc ) Dominic Cummings, who was campaign director of Vote Leave, this week criticised what he called "government morons" who want to withdraw from Euratom. "Tory Party keeps making huge misjudgements re what the REF was about. EURATOM was different treaties, ECJ role no signif problem," he said on Twitter. So, the director of VOTE LEAVE thinks leaving Euratom is a bad move, but the guvmint is doing it anyway!

    Inletcampus @ 344 And what alt-right loonie echo-chamber did you wander in from then? Oh & which inlet? Shit Creek near Innsmouth, perhaps?

    It's not so much that Trump is evil ( I would reserve that for Pence ) but that he is a narcissistic egomaniac, with no long-term plans & loads of spite. Neither of them is fit to be trusted with as much as a second-hand Bog Brush, but for entirely different reasons. Oh yes: thousands of shouting journalists and panicking university professors (Marxists all, but forget that) Liar I used to think of myself as a left-wing British conservative, but the Overton window has now moved, so far that I'm now moderately left-wing ( um )

    With one exception, posters here are usually required to produce some sort of evidence if they make extraordinary claims. Let's see any evidence at all for yours, please?

    351:

    Incidentally: YUCK - Bannon + UKIP + other Euro-fascist & semi-fascist parties.

    Again, this reminds me of the 1930's Nazi-Soviet pact to undermine democracy? Yup. Internal dissention in the "moderate" parties? Yup Dissatisfaction with "normal" politics ( It's all your fault Charlie, you complained about the Beige Dictatorship - forgetting that it was King Log, if I may mix a metaphor ) ... Yup. Extrenal enemies, who would normally be enemies of each other, colluding for both political & financial gain? Yup Internal traitors & Quislings, barking loudly for "change" that will benefit them ( but not us ) ? Yup. I'm sure there are other things I can add to this list .....

    352:

    "an on-going state of limbo re: politics/gov't."

    This happened in Belgium a few years ago: they had an ongoing failure to form a government, and basically didn't have one for a year and a half or so. It wasn't actually a big deal; the day-to-day non-parliamentary governmental functions simply carried on as usual doing things the same way, just as UK ones do while Parliament is on holiday. It didn't mean Christmas for arms dealers, since the same regulations and enforcement continued to apply; it just meant there weren't any changes to them.

    The UK political system has this obsession with "strong government" where one party "has to" have an overall majority and it's thought to be really terrible if this doesn't happen to be the case, which is an infrequent occurrence and the system is set up so as to make sure it is infrequent. The systems in other English-speaking countries are much the same, by inheritance I suppose.

    Most Continental countries seem to have a very different system in which it is one party having an overall majority which is the exceptional situation, so getting anything to a conclusion tends to require that multiple parties can come to a consensus over it, instead of one party having things all its own way. The natural result is that the "throughput" of government is much less; getting things to a conclusion happens much less often, but when it does happen the conclusion is more likely to be acceptable to a broad range of people.

    Now it seems to me that a major problem with government in general is the notion that it HAS to always be "doing something", regardless of what "something" is, so that if there isn't any important "something" that needs attention, they fuck with things that don't need attention, because sitting on their arses until something important does happen is somehow seen as unacceptable but randomly buggering around with stuff isn't.

    Since the main result of fucking with things that don't need attention is to piss people off, but the notion of not doing anything when nothing needs to be done is apparently impossible to hammer through people's thick skulls, there needs to be some other mechanism to discourage governments from unnecessary action. Continental systems, it seems, achieve this by ensuring that the government can't do things that aren't important enough for everyone to agree over, or at least being well towards that position. The British one, on the other hand, has no such safeguard, and strongly rejects any attempt to introduce one. The argument used against electoral reform in Britain - that it would "encourage weak government" - is a point strongly in favour of it as far as I'm concerned. Government should be weak, so it can't do things unless they're important enough that everyone can get behind them with roughly the same aims in mind.

    Note that this is not an argument in the same space as the "small government" thing favoured by opponents of socialism. What those people usually seem to mean is a strong government that uses its strength to oppose any suggestion that it might do things to help people (unless they're rich). What I'm in favour of is a weak government that can't find the time to bugger around with things that are helping people just for the sake of doing something and in so doing bugger around the people who are being helped - which is something that both main UK parties do, and which is not strongly related to the flavour of their ideology, but is to opportunity.

    353:

    I like that you posted this while my above post was in process of composition:

    "Internal traitors & Quislings, barking loudly for "change" that will benefit them ( but not us )"

    ...Which would be much less of a problem if we didn't have a system of government that encouraged the prevalence of change without broad consensus over its usefulness.

    354:

    You see the same thing in any managerial organization. The way to get promoted is to implement new programs and/or make changes in existing ones; simply maintaining existing programs without changes is career death. So every time you get a new manager you get change for the sake of change…

    355:

    I'd model this as a game of chicken, played between Theresa May and UK business.

    Theresa May has no interest in career suicide, so primcipled action will not happen.

    UK business, by which I mean isolated companies, has no interest in the sort of costs, et cetera, that actually preparing for a hard Brexit would invoke. Meanwhile, most businessmen are pretty confident in betting on a soft Brexit.

    Therefore, nothing happens. However, at some point, business has more to lose. So, at a time just preceding the last moment, businesses should start making significant preparations. The most relevant preparation will be relocation.

    (Regarding just-in-time supply chains, in my experience, they are usually operated in this world and are therefore reasonably resilient to idiotic delays. Starvation seems unlikely. Costs will go up a bit. I'd fire a manufacturing manager who couldn't cope with a week's disruption. And I'd have already asked. Suppy chains (cars, etc) may be more problematic. Exiting the UK might be smarter.)

    Anyways, assuming there's enough hubbub over business starting to relocate, May then opts for a very soft Brexit - possibly with referendum approval. If everything stays silent and calm, there may be a hard Brexit. I suspect that, at that point, you're looking at kicking the can down the road. The UK agrees to the withdrawal arrangement without negotiating anything beyond a statement of intent. Now, sure, that isn't a great negotiating posture, but the negotiations are already not fit for a dog's breakfast, so, heh, who cares?

    Long-term, eh, the UK will be smaller and poorer, but I'd actually like to see it splitting into independent countries, so, meh.

    Oh, and, Trump. I guess impeachment is a dream. Well, unless relentless reviews following the loss of the House in November helps out. I hope no second term though. In that case, if, following the can kicking, there's a hard failure in 2021, OGH would be welcome to visit for a bit. (We're on the East Coast - there'd be opportunities for tourism, et cetera.)

    The bright side of that man is that it has clarified, to even the really casual observer, that American politics is still haunted by the ghosts of the Civil War. This isn't anything amazing. If the slave states mysteriously disappeared, we wouldn't have Trump-style politics. Long-term though, they're becoming less and less relevant. Dying industries, population that you can't bring young people to, ..., I hope the problem will resolve itself, over the decades.

    --Erwin

    356:

    But the overwhelming majority of domestic energy use is for HEATING.

    That's probably true in the U.K., but in much of the world the majority of domestic energy is used for COOLING. (Says the guy from Southern California.)

    357:

    This deserves a Hugo nomination for best science fiction short story

    358:

    You have a higher opinion of May than I do. Her policy so far has been one of prevarication, evasion and obfuscation and, even with that, she has got herself into a position that any further compromises, or even delivering on the promises so far, will cause a rebellion of the rabid brexiteers among Conservative MPs. So let's assume she manages to suppress or win the vote of no confidence among her own party and negotiates a soft brexit - but she still has to get a brexit bill through Parliament.

    If Labour was at least neutral, or the SNP backed her, she would probably win, just. But, if not, she will end up in the position of having agreed a very soft brexit with the EU, but being unable to get it through Parliament. The USA regularly signs international treaties and then reneges on them, but the UK can't do that, successfully.

    359:

    In most of the world, I believe that it is used for cooking and lighting.

    360:

    The USA regularly signs international treaties and then reneges on them

    That has been a feature of US policy for over 200 years.

    361:

    Judging from my electricity bills (dollar amount VS. air conditioning usage in the preceding month) in the months of June - October I spend approximately 2-3 times as much to cool the air inside my house as I do to light it. If I didn't cool the place I'd save at least 50% on my electricity bill, possibly as much as 65%.

    At this time, most of the world uses gas for cooking, I think (aside from those who use wood, of course.)

    362:

    Um, the slave states. Yes and no. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to pick a few examples, fought on the Union side and voted for Trump. If you ask any person of color, racism is nationwide, with the urban south becoming less racist and the rural north becoming more vocal in their bigotry. Heck, if you look at the maps put out by the Southern Poverty Law Center, so-urban southern California is laced with hate groups, mostly in the periphery of the big cities.

    No, the big split now is urban vs. rural. People are flocking to the cities, where we have multi-ethnic melting pots that increasingly break democratic. Meanwhile, the rural areas, with their factory towns and factory farms, are increasingly plutocratic. The family farm so beloved of the propagandists has been under attack for decades and is largely gone, despite fervent and continued opposition. Many of the farms are owned by wealthy families and/or corporations (sometimes multinationals), with less-than-free labor, often foreign workers under restricted visas. This was the old role of illegal refugees in the US: cheap, unregulated labor. Politicians winked at it, because the cheap labor kept food prices down, especially for fruits and vegetables, and this kept urban populations happier. When both sides attacked this system, the left for being unjust, and the right to appeal to nativist sympathies, things got messy.

    Anyway, where politics are now is that the majority of Americans are liberals, but they're packed into cities, which means they're packed into too few states and too few districts to control Congress or the Senate automatically. The red states are suffering, but they've also been so gerrymandered that it they look redder than, perhaps they are. Worse,the democrats haven't yet figured out to do both outreach and to fight the gerrymanders. The big fight within the US democratic party right now is with a young guard who's interested in solving problems and in making the US more like the EU, and an older guard who wants to hold onto power. To be fair, the old guard wants to solve problems too, but their power is in big business, and that's not helping the situation as much as it should (and note, not all megacorps are inherently evil. They have their own internal and external politics).

    As for impeachment, the problems are Pence and Trump's popularity with hard core Republicans. Many "Republicans" from the last few decades have either become democrats or (mostly) are voting independent. Trouble is, there's no "whig republican" party in US politics any more, so the Republicans remain in power, but beholden to ideological base of a relative handful of wealthy donors, plus their cadres of authoritarian followers.

    Trump may well be impeached after the Mueller probe ends, especially if the democrats take back the house, and most especially if the probe entangles McConnell (whose PAC has also taken Russian money). Having a mole for president is one of those things that enrages a lot of Americans, even if, for the cameras, they say they have faith in the president (authoritarian followers can flip fast). Having a stupid mole is worse for them.

    If Trump's impeached, we get Pence, who is at least as bad as Trump. Pence is a semi-competent politician but he's an ideologue on the far right of the Republican party. My thumbnail of him is that the Indiana Republicans overturned some of the measures he forced through the legislature within a week or two of when he resigned as Indiana governor, and Indiana is a very conservative state. Indiana's not doing great, and I don't think that a Pence presidency will be good for the US or the world. Unfortunately, that's probably where we're going.

    363:

    OK, so all the UK has to do is negotiate a trade agreement for importing heat from Southern California and we're sorted.

    (In case I see that repeated by a Leave supporter as a serious suggestion I hereby claim copyright.)

    (BTW either you have a most enviably efficient air conditioner or incredibly inefficient lights...)

    364:

    Sigh. US presidents sign treaties and take them to Congress for final approval. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, people from parliamentary systems don’t understand what happened. “The US” didn’t “renege,” the rest of the world jumped the gun thinking the President’s signature alone meant something.

    365:

    Seriously? Have you asked any of the Indian tribes how well the treaties they signed with the US government have been respected?

    Heck, it's so bad that a tribe winning a case before the Supreme Court to force a state (not the feds) to respect their treaty rights was nation wide news.

    It's not just Congress' failure to ratify, it's the executive's failure to abide by treaties that they don't see as in their interest.

    366:

    Greg Tingey @ 348:

    "Blaming someone else" won't work in this case, because the warnings are already coming in loud & clear ....

    However loud & clear the warnings might be it doesn't matter if the politicians are not listening to them. Just because scapegoating won't work doesn't mean they won't do it anyway.

    367:

    Pigeon @ 347:

    "I don't know why people are mentioning "living off-grid" with apparent seriousness. It simply is not an option for 60 million people crammed onto a titchy little island which isn't self-sufficient in anything important or even close to it. It isn't even an option for the subset of people who don't really know how to do it, but think they do because they've watched Ray Mears on TV. "

    I don't live "off-grid", but I have some experience dealing with extended power outages from hurricanes & ice storms. When all the power lines are down over a large area, it may take some time before it is restored. Some of the preparations you can make for "living off-grid" may also be useful for surviving such a grid failure.

    368:

    (BTW either you have a most enviably efficient air conditioner or incredibly inefficient lights...)

    We just moved and I haven't replaced all the lights yet (we're pretty broke right now) and I use a lot of discipline with the cooling system. I don't run it late at night, for example, and I try to wait until I'm really hot to turn it on. So you're probably right on both counts. (Plus the AC is fairly new, so that probably helps.)

    370:

    Elderly Cynic @ 356:

    The USA regularly signs international treaties and then reneges on them ...

    Actually, NO. What the USA regularly does is negotiate treaties that Congress refuses ratify. The U.S. negotiators signature is provisional. Until a treaty is ratified by Congress it doesn't bind the U.S. Once a treaty is ratified, it becomes a part of U.S. law.

    The Administration that negotiated the treaty may go ahead and implements whatever has been agreed to, but there's no force of law behind it. Another Administration can come along and choose whether to comply with the provisions of the treaty or not.

    371:

    The red states are suffering, but they've also been so gerrymandered that it they look redder than, perhaps they are. Worse,the democrats haven't yet figured out to do both outreach and to fight the gerrymanders.

    Figured this might interest you:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the-gerrymandering-game

    372:

    "No, the big split now is urban vs. rural. People are flocking to the cities, where we have multi-ethnic melting pots that increasingly break democratic. Meanwhile, the rural areas, with their factory towns and factory farms, are increasingly plutocratic."

    That statement is mostly not true.

    As I stated in previous discussion, 56% of USians live in metro areas > 1 million, 68% live in metro areas > 500k, and 77% live in metro areas > 250k, and 38% live in the 20 largest metro areas (the smallest of which is 2.8 million). An urban vs rural division would have seen Trump win fewer than 200 electoral votes. Trump only won 3 of the top 20 metro areas (he lost the cities of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Phoenix but won the metro areas due to the suburbs, but it was very close).

    In addition, only 4 states have < 50% urbanization and 10 have < 60%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States

    What you describe as rural areas is primarily suburbanites, metro areas < 1 million, and rural areas (with exceptions).

    373:

    Oh. If you look at list, Trump won all states with an urbanization rate < 75% save Vermont and Minnesota. He won all but 4 states with an urbanization rate < 80%

    374:

    keeping a boat tends to raise obstacles of the kind that need a lot of money to fix them

    I'm NOT a sailor. But those I've talked to and those who have considered becoming such have a saying in the US.

    A sailboat that can sail on the ocean doubles as a hole in the water which you can try and fill with money.

    375:

    From Wikipedia (because it was convenient):

    From 1778 to 1871, the United States government entered into more than 500 treaties with the Native American tribes; all of these treaties have since been violated in some way or outright broken by the US government, while at least one treaty was violated or broken by Native American tribes. However, violations by one party do not nullify the treaties under US law; the treaties still have legal effect today, and Native Americans and First Nations peoples are still fighting for their treaty rights in federal courts and at the United Nations.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_treaties

    376:

    Or, put another way? From all sides of the argument? WE WUzS ROBBED!!!! And So? Re Run THE ARGUMENT ! DO IT NOW!!! SO THAT, We - WHO ARE WORTHY - WILL WIN!! And .. IF WE DON'T win BIGLY? DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN in the good old EU Oligarch style ...For We of the Educated Cultured,are NOT, Not, Bigoted .. but Bighearted .. DO know bettered that those deeply evil, and uneducated, folks of the underclass ..Know Best ..have Degree in English Literature ..know SO much more than a ..PLUMBER and thus am Qualified to Vote Bigly..Oh yes !

    377:

    " expect the government will collapse within 1-4 weeks. " Starting from NOW? Ho,Hum didn't someone or other muse upon the folly of a Science Fiction Writer who wrote fiction in the near future? Must have been reading elsewhere and am confused? Early October for the ..generously allowed for time frame ..to expire? This should be.... Interesting?

    378:

    It's rather more interesting than that.

    So far as I can tell, the argument so far is:

    Math professors: we've created a mathematical test for gerrymandering. Here's the results. There's a problem, let's settle on an impartial math test for gerrymandering, so that gerrymandered districts can be redrawn, and people are represented more fairly.

    US Supreme Court: Math? That's too complicated for us. Come back to us when you have a legal definition of gerrymandering. We're lawyers, after all, not mathematicians. Our reality is different than yours, and we believe it's more important.

    379:

    If Trump's impeached, we get Pence, who is at least as bad as Trump.

    Thoughts seem to be turning in that direction:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/opinion/sunday/mike-pence-holy-terror.html

    I'm not sure Pence is Nehemiah Scudder, but the parallel is a bit too close for comfort.

    380:
    The systems in other English-speaking countries are much the same, by inheritance I suppose.

    bzzzt unthinking Anglocentrism, zero points, go to the back of the class.
    New Zealand has never had a non-coalition government, one of Australia's federal parties is basically a permanent coalition that fights some state elections separately, Ireland has had coalition governments since 1977, India's had 5 coalition governments since 1975...

    381:

    To be fair the Conservative & Unionist Party in the UK is really a permanent (?) coalition too and has been for nearly two centuries.

    382:

    Previously, that was done by getting rid of the VeeP FIRST anyone remember Nixon's Veep - Spiro Agnew? This time it might be a little problematical ...

    Talking of which we haven't seen another visit from our friend at post # 344 OOPS - just checked back - he's been evaporated. [ I hate to say it, but it might have been interesting to see if he could have dredged up even a tiny smidgen of evidence for his rantings - just for larfs? ]

    Talking of which, what did I say in response @ 348? It's not so much that Trump is evil ( I would reserve that for Pence ) Um, err ... that NYTimes article is unpleasant. I mean Pence HAS an "agenda", whereas DT has whims & narcissistic temproary desires.

    383:

    she still has to get a brexit bill through Parliament. If Labour was at least neutral, or the SNP backed her, she would probably win,

    That would be the SNP that recently lost an independence referendum to the Cons only to be told the very next day "oh, the promises we made were lies". That happening once might be chance, twice is really pushing it. They have to know that if they voted for any kind of bill at all that would be exploited by the government for maximum partisan advantage.

    Viz, May has absolutely no leverage with the SNP other than the Trumpian "you should assume anything good I say is a lie, anything bad is an understatement". I still love their EVEL acronym, it's so close to accurate.

    384:

    These days in Australian politics the race between the two centrist parties is so close that neither can govern without the assistance of the cross bench in either the house of representatives (our commons) or the Senate (our elected Lords).

    385:

    New Zealand has never had a non-coalition government

    That sounds really facty, but sadly the evidence doesn't support the statement. Even wikipedia disagrees. Not to mention people like me that lived in Aotearoa and voted in elections that resulted in majority governments. If you mean "since MMP was used" that's technically correct if you consider ACT to be a separate party rather than an exploit of the voting system (and National entered coalition agreements with other minor parties, so it was indeed a coalition government).

    one of Australia's federal parties is basically a permanent coalition that fights some state elections separately

    Is explicitly a coalition and habitually referred to as "The Coalition" (or The COALition, given their love for coal). It's so ingrained that a former Prime Minister once said before an election "I will not lead a minority government", despite at the time leading a minority government and having no prospect of obtaining a majority. His coalition duly won the election... but with only 58 of 150 seats going to the Liberal Party you would expect the "no minority" leader to admit defeat. In fact he danced the official dance of joy and victory before being rolled by his own party and replaced by a merchant banker.

    From wikipedia

    Australia has a de facto two-party system, with the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition of the Liberal Party of Australia, National Party of Australia, the Liberal National Party and Country Liberal Party dominating Parliamentary elections

    It's amusing partly for the long list of parties in "The Coalition" and the way the names associate.

    386:

    Australian politics the race between the two centrist parties is so close

    QED :)

    Would that be the Liberal Party and the Liberal-National Party? Maybe the Centre Alliance and the United Australia Party (formerly Clive Palmer's United Party before that fractured). Or Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party and Derryn Hinch's Justice Party?

    The "list of Australian Political Parties" is worth reading for anyone who is interested in political comedy. Click the links,

    387:

    Re: 'Now it seems to me that a major problem with government in general is the notion that it HAS to always be "doing something", ... because sitting on their arses until something important does happen is somehow seen as unacceptable but randomly buggering around with stuff isn't.'

    Interesting argument - thanks!

    However: What happens when something new appears: unforeseen tech/currency (Bitcoin), online attacks and/or voter manipulation, natural disasters, etc.? (Not dissing you, just really curious as to how you'd go about handling this. Personally think that gov'ts should focus on planning for likeliest scenarios --- like the EU has been doing - instead of trying to bandaid over mistakes.)

    An aside 'on the do-nothing school of management' ... Know of a global consumer packaged goods corp where new hires in marketing are explicitly told not to even dream of changing anything to do with existing products/brands. Any changes are done only by very senior managers/directors and only after exhaustive studies. And when a change is finally considered it is then introduced so gradually that consumers rarely notice that there was a change. This approach has worked for over 60 years- and they're still considered one of the leading CPGs.

    Re: Belgium ...

    According to an acquaintance: Belgium is a house divided sorta like the UK if all four countries making up the UK actually had proportional representation in Parliament yet continued to live in four different make-believe glorious pasts when their neck of the woods was tops. (Or like Quebec in Canada, or like the former Yugoslavia, or like former Czechoslovakia ... there are a few more examples including in Africa. Sometimes a bit of partitioning makes sense.)

    388:

    Well perhaps if 'they' studied say Gibbon's Decline and Fall or politics in the Medici state then yes that English/History graduate might have something valuable to say in regard to the question at hand..

    But seriously the proposition as to whether leave/remain correlates to a particular demographic based on first order statistics (e.g. BBC scatter plots) is a fundamentally dubious one. See the analysis at the link, which indicates that first impressions e.g. people voted along class or education lines does not necessarily hold up to close scrutiny. Income and age however do seem to to be valid predictors. As always note the caveats attached.

    https://prawnsandprobability.blogspot.com/2016/07/brexit-statistical-demographic-analysis.html

    389:

    Oranges are not the only fruit.

    Do commercial flight patterns fly 10 meters apart up on high?

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3212396/

    Moon moved real fucking fast tonight. And Mars went out a few times!

    looks @ .RU

    Couple of sections reporting massive solar blank out there (cough totally not geophysics altering environment at all*)

    ~

    Frakk me. Actual deployment of the [redacted] weapons on civilians just to cling to power: sociopaths.

    p.s.

    You can work this anyway you want, but our clearance is fucking LUNAR. Nasty little fuckers.

    390:

    Oh, ok, let's do this.

    We're Going To Crash Your Entire Computer Systems In Retaliation.

    "POOF"?

    "POP GOES THE WEASEL"

    Fucking Sociopaths. Soulless and Ugly: "Vicious Mind ?!?" - Darling, it's a fucking Mirror, you've no idea what the Abyss can do.

    p.s.

    No, this is not a funny joke. Srs .mil spec naughty fauckers plays tonight on civilians 'cause the civil ways aren't working too well. We're talking ramping up the old Brexit Shexit Dark Patterns into the Actual .MIL stuff.

    But sure: go and watch East-Enders, nothing to see here darlings.

    ~

    Fuck me that was blatant.

    391:

    Re: ' A/C ... just moved and I haven't replaced all the lights yet (we're pretty broke right now)'

    Dumb/nosy question but ... have you looked at insulation options to rein in your energy bills because usage is only one part of the story. There's also the placement of doors and windows, awnings/covered porches, exterior plantings to moderate temp of walls so as to help guide airflow, and some other small things that can add up.

    392:

    Triptych.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince

    Swallowing Shells?

    Oh... if your .mil spec stuff can be beaten in under an hour, You're Fucked.

    393:

    @Host.

    Nope, they're playing Tommy Boy but the Real Deal[tm] MI5 stuff is being pulled out.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-experiments-biological-chemical-weapons-2016-9?IR=T

    Only... not bio/chem, [redacted].

    LUNAR FUCKING GRADE MATE: AND WE'LL BURN YOUR FUCKING HOUSE DOWN NOW.

    394:

    We're renting, so we don't have most of those options. I'd do all of them if it was up to me, however.

    395:

    Mr AF Neil is now desperately making jokes about 'Dragons in the Sky' while no-one is looking too close @ his Trump Tower properties[0] and so on. Stop stealing our material.

    Greenpeace just burnt the IEA[1]

    And Our Kind Really Can Do CERN Level Shit. LUNAR FAILURE MODE.

    Lots of other stuff, but really: watching an Old Order die who enslaved people and sacrificed children for power is, well. Bad time for immoral fucks, this is.

    [0] https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2016/11/does-trump-bug-his-hotel-rooms.html Spoiler: Yes. Spoiler: It's a network and Mr Neil has some interesting kropromat of his own [ALLEGEDLY - WE'RE MAD, REMEMBER]

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/29/rightwing-thinktank-ministerial-access-potential-us-donors-insitute-of-economic-affairs-brexit?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

    Oh, and lots of other things: but that LUNAR fail was special. Do the Pilots know what they were doing? Holy Fuck I hope not.

    396:

    I"m not saying you'd get approval for them, but there are a lot of things you can do that won't be noticed by a landlord or won't be cared about. Sealing round windows with tape rather than silicone sealant, for example, is removable... but often sealant isn't noticed at all. We do the same with vents in brickwork, because Australia is all about airflow. Bit of cardboard, some masking tape... no more vent. If the walls are white you have to actually be looking for it to notice.

    Also, basic house maintenance stuff can make a big difference - making sure the eave vents are clear and unobstructed can help a lot with temperatures inside your roof. Check carefully for hooks or bolts around the top of the walls/underside of the eaves, you may be able to hang shadecloth on the sunny side of the house using existing fittings. Neighbourhood association rules permitting, of course.

    It's worth at least looking into the ceiling/roof space to make sure there's nothing too horrible (roof leaks, for example). And if you see a house being demolished nearby and are up for it, relocation ceiling insulation can pay off (how many final inspections check for extra insulation...)

    As a long-time renter I have a fair bit of experience in the area of "stuff I can fix without the landlord noticing" :)

    397:

    "by leaving the customs union they are free to diverge from EU standards and ditch both European Court oversight and the ECHR. Which AIUI are baked into the GFA — the EU is the guarantor."

    Although my point was about the hard border only rather than Brexit generally, these points are also incorrect. The GFA doesn't require EU membership by the UK (or RoI), though it does allow the North-South Ministerial Council to implement any EU law within its remit. After leaving, that would only include activities in the south. The EU is not given any role in the GFA, as "guarantor" or anything else. You may be thinking of the fact that the RoI and UK govts are treaty-bound to support the GFA.

    The GFA does require the ECHR to be part of NI law and for Assembly legislation to be compliant with it, otherwise Assembly Acts can be struck down. That doesn't necessarily require the UK to be a party to the ECHR, at least in respect of GB, indeed perhaps the Tories would leave the ECHR and/or repeal the Human Rights Act in GB but not NI.

    398:

    Moon moved real fucking fast tonight. And Mars went out a few times! Moon and Mars are fine now, I am fairly sure. (They appear to be nice and calm in the sky, to the E/SE.) That was seriously obtuse. You made me read that 2011 paper on ETD (Eye Tracking Dysfunction) (and I'll read The Little Prince). Blatant it was?

    399:

    @ 393 The "IEA" - well-known to be almost into Upminster Carriage sidings in terms of sanity & crooked as they came. MOST entertaining interview on this morning's "Today" programme, full of wall-to-wall bullshit.

    Ah yes "Down with Tyrrany" led to two interesting quotes, both of which are relevant:

    1: When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." -- Sinclair Lewis. See previous remarks about Pence, of course.l

    2: A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. - - M T Cicero ( Now why does J R M come to mind when I read the Cicero piece, I wonder? )

    400:

    I hate to say it, but it might have been interesting to see if he could have dredged up even a tiny smidgen of evidence for his rantings - just for larfs?

    No, Greg, the alt-right dogwhistles in that one comment he posted were so loud they were making my ears bleed; if I hadn't booted him he'd probably be ranting about Jew-bankers and affirming the Fourteen Words by now. ("Fourteen words": wikipedia is your friend, I'm not linking to it here.)

    While VPOTUS Pence is indeed a nasty piece of work, I suspect he's already etting most of his agenda through via the back door by manipulating Trump, whose ego Pence seems to know how to stroke; certainly he's an activist VP in the mold of Dick Cheney. Mike Pence as POTUS might be safer than Trump; he'd have to work out in the open and his base is just the religious right, not the toxic coalition of religious right and burn-it-to-the-ground griefers that Trump has assembled. (Also, Pence was rather crap as a senator for Indiana, and might well face internal opposition from within the Republican party.)

    401:

    The later analyses of Brexit voter opinions unearthed two strong correlations with support for Brexit in the referendum (albeit not along demographic or party lines):

    a) Support for bringing back the death penalty

    b) Opposition to immigration

    These also strongly correlated with authoritarian personality traits, and less strongly with age. (Tellingly, support for restoring the death penalty — a shibboleth of the right since 1965, when it was abolished) slipped below 50% for the first time in the mid-2010s.)

    402:

    Well I was aiming for a bracketing shot of Labor and Lib-Nat. :)

    My view of the ‘minors’ is that they’re essentially cults of personality rather than a ‘party’per se.,. I’m reminded of what Lenin remarked about the Australian political spectrum.

    403:

    A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within

    Yes, and one of the most effective ways to undermine a polity from within is to set your beard on fire and run through the senate screaming "traitors!" — Witch hunts are dangerous: they have a tendency to get out of control and often eat their instigators, but they can do enormous damage.

    NB: there's a huge difference between a witch hunt and a criminal investigation by a law enforcement agency following procedure and obeying rules of evidence, for those of you thinking about the Mueller/FBI investigation. Just sayin'.

    404:

    Bugger. Thanks for the correction.

    405:

    I must admit reading this is making me think I need to take action in regards to my own financial affairs, Charlie, and speaking here as a British citizen who is also a working writer with a number of books out.

    100% of my income comes from the UK, although I live in the Far East: royalties on published novels and editing work for UK companies. I've felt the loss of value of the pound very keenly indeed, since every hit on the pound reduces what I get when I transfer those funds from my UK bank to my account here in Taiwan.

    Like any sensible writer, I've worked hard to save money so I always have funds available to keep me rolling through rough patches. But all that money is tied up in a UK account. I'm not really terribly financially literate, so I haven't really thought about the very thing you're talking about, moving funds into a non-UK account in case of a hard Brexit.

    I don't know if I really believe such a thing could happen without the political equivalent of a staged intervention, but then again history has a habit of proving optimists like me wrong. Now I'm wondering if I should shift as much of my savings either to my bank here in Taiwan, or...where? Where can one place one's money in the event of a dangerously suicidal and extremist government driving us all off the cliff?

    If anybody knows, don't hesitate to share.

    406:

    My view of the ‘minors’ is that they’re essentially cults of personality rather than a ‘party’per se

    I think you do The Greens a disservice, and IMO there's a good argument that The Australian Democrats were a decent party undone as much by their optimism about the maturity of Australia's press as by their own stupidity in supporting the GST (electing not one, but two female leaders in succession at a time when both the press and parliament were struggling to get past "nice tits" as a response to women holding office [1]).

    There are also a plethora of other very-minor parties and microparties that in some ways necessarily look like personality parties because if they have an elected member it will be ONE member... the LDP in the form of David Leyonhjelm for example. You get the same in Aotearoa, people questioned whether ACT could survive the departure of ... basically every MP and leader, for example. Worth noting that The Greens in NZ were also called a personality party, and when Rod Donald died some members of the media presumed that was the end of the party. Ditto when Jeanette Fitzsimons retired... that garbage is neverending.

    [1] I may be biased by my arrival in the country coinciding with Natasha Stott Despoja being their leader and the press losing what was left of their decorum - she was not just female, but young and blonde. I has just left NZ at a time when the top five leadership positions were all filled by women and the sexist debate was almost entirely limited to talkback radio (viz, The Queen of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Sundry Lesser Territories and Islands, The Prime Minister[2], The Leader of the Opposition, The Head of the High Court and of course The Governor-General[3])

    [2] I assume you have all seen the media excitement that the current occupant is only the second PM ever to give birth in office, and the first white women (they don't say that out loud AFAIK, but Benazir Bhutto didn't generate half the news despite also being a women heading a Muslim country (which, OMG, I'm surprised the Wahhabis didn't declare war))

    [3] worth noting that none of those positions other the Queen use the feminine form, not even the Governess-General. I suspect the kiwis would only do that for laughs but it wouldn't surprise me to hear of some European monarchy doing is with straight faces.

    407:

    Charlie "14 Words" - Euwwwww ..... Except also that the three mst pro-Brexit people I know are all younger than me & 2 of them are certainly well-educated. ( The ex-NZ one, of course, has her own reasons for being that way - a. n. other story ) Yeah, um, err a witch-hunt, asin McCarthyism & real traitors - again you don't want to whip up fear for a non-existent foe. I happen to think JRM actually wants his version of Airstrip One - a vision not too different from Pence's actually - certainly not if you were under its' boot-heel.

    408:

    And I hoped to find a PhD position somewhere in the UK sometime in the nearby future. I wish you all good luck and to find some kind of peaceful resolution that wouldn't involve famine, pestilence and their friends. You'll have enough troubles without me.

    410:

    Re: The conclusion assumes the UK joins free trade agreements with places like NZ, Australia and Canada

    This: "New Zealand Government pushes out warning of Brexit trade war risk" - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/105859499/new-zealand-government-pushes-out-warning-of-brexit-trade-war-risk

    411:

    I've never understood why UK "sailing boats" have such an obsession with Bermuda and/or ketch sail plans.

    412:

    That sounds plausible; certainly my electricity usage (all-electric rented house) at ~57.5N is about 90% heating, and 10% cooking, lighting, refrigeration and entertainment. (I happen to have modern cooker, fridge-freezer and Tv.)

    413:

    Yeah, the last NZ cults of personality were Peter Dunne and United Future and Jim Anderton's Progressives. Technically the Winston Peters Party New Zealand First would count but they seem to get a few others elected so can stand on their own merits.

    As for those claiming that NZ and Australia would be happy to go back to trading with the UK as we did prior to 1973 ... good luck with that. Our farmers have long memories, and well remember exactly how the UK shafted them. They then spent the next 40 years developing markets in Asia, Russia and the Middle East. So that's the meat and dairy sector out.
    Alongside that ... what exactly does the UK intend to trade back in return? Complex derivatives? Looking at the top ten export commodities of the UK, basically none of them are relevant.

    414:

    Tiny nit: Pence was never Senator, he was Governor (head of the state) and previously a congressman aka House of Representatives. Doesn't change anything else you wrote being 100% accurate however (and the polls were saying he was likely to lose the next Governor election pretty decisively).

    415:

    I'm sure a goodly part of it is simply that junk rigs are perceived as weird and exotic; they certainly look highly distinctive as their appearance is in a different class from that of any traditional European sail plan, which all show a family resemblance. And there's also the self-perpetuating aspect that next to nobody has sailed one.

    One obvious reason to prefer triangular sails is windward performance. Sailing is kind of like cycling in that no matter which way you go the wind always ends up being against you, and you end up spending more time close-hauled than on all other points put together, so it makes sense to have a rig that performs well into the wind; and there is also the manoeuvrability advantage in narrow waters of being able to get close to the wind, which is one of those things that when it matters it really matters.

    There's also the difficulty that a junk sail tends to be incompatible with a stayed mast, so you end up having to use a plain pole mast that relies solely on its own stiffness to stay upright - and probably has to cope with more bending moment than it would with a triangular sail because the centre of pressure on the non-tapering junk sail is higher up. No big deal on a dinghy, but on anything big enough to comfortably live aboard a pole mast will be heavy, and there's nothing you can do about it since the separation between the tension and compression sides of the bending force is only the width of the mast rather than half the width of the boat. And having all that weight high up does not suggest good things about the boat's motion in a sea. It's also harder to feed the mast support forces into the hull, so you are likely to have to step it in the keel which in turn means a big obstruction in the middle of the cabin.

    416:

    However, I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but it seems that Nemesis @ 228 is incorrect. Apparently that EU directive ( 2016/1164 ) has already been incorporated into UK law.

    Well the UK is still in the EU, so it has to be, doesn't it?

    It comes into effect in January 2019. It can largely be ignored in all the chaos until April, at which point its easy to remove quietly.

    417:

    The UK fairly often doesn't put EU directives into law until the EU gets stroppy about it - in quite a lot of cases, we still haven't done it for Northern Ireland; there are almost certainly some for the Crown Dependencies and probably some even for Great Britain.

    418:

    the three mst pro-Brexit people I know are all younger than me

    By years or decades?

    Once we (me included) hit 50 anyone within 10 years is basically the same age as us mentally.

    419:

    No no, for the love of god no! It's called biomagnification, people. The rich are apex predators. They accumulate toxins. If you eat the rich, you get all those toxins. So do NOT eat the rich. Just Mulch the Rich.

    420:

    So being of poor memory and personally much effected by the Good Friday Agreement, I went back and re-read the whole thing (I used the text here: https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/IE%20GB_980410_Northern%20Ireland%20Agreement.pdf)

    In strict terms, you are correct: There is no item or text in the Good Friday Agreement that explicitly disallows a hard or enforced border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, there are a number of points in the text where a frictionless or invisible border is implied.

    Declaration of Support, Item 3 (pg 2): "We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands."

    To me (and to many others in NI) this implies a lack of a hard border, or significant barrier, between North and South.

    Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity, United Kingdom Legislation, Item #2 (pg 18): "The British Government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency."

    This is the item that most directly speaks to the point that Charlie was making, I think (and what you have noted too). Removing the UK from ECHR jurisdiction does seem to break this. However, as you point out this is something implicit in a "no deal" scenario, rather than just the hard border (although, the first necessitates the second) -- note that I say "implicit" and not that it is a certainty.

    Economic, Social and Cultural Issues, Item #1 (pg 20): "Pending the devolution of powers to a new Northern Ireland Assembly, the British Government will pursue broad policies for sustained economic growth and stability in Northern Ireland and for promoting social inclusion, including in particular community development and the advancement of women in public life."

    While this section speaks to the interim commitments for the British Government prior to establishment of a working Assembly, it could be argued that it also applies in absence of a working Assmebly. If that is the case, then the British Government (and it's partners-in-crime, the DUP) seems to be deliberately pursuing a policy that offers neither "sustained economic growth" not "stability" for Northern Ireland. Again, this is more pertinent to the whole "no deal" Brexit scenario, but the imposition of a "hard border" could be compellingly argued as a major impediment to NI's economic stability and growth.

    Security, Item #2, Subsection ii (pg 22): "the removal of security installations"

    Perhaps a stretch, but as a fellow citizen of this bonkers place, you can surely appreciate how significant sections of the community will see the restoration of any security apparatus on the border as a big red flag, and a betrayal of this item.

    "Agreement" text (pg 30): "Wishing to develop still further the unique relationship between their people and the close co-operation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union"

    Perhaps best illustrated by analogy: You can't agree to be your neighbour's friend, and then expect to erect a 20 foot high fence between your properties without undermining that friendship.

    At the end of the day, a hard border doesn't explicitly violate the letter of the Good Friday Agreement, but many people in NI will feel (quite rightly, in my opinion) that it violates the spirit of the Agreement. And when people here feel wronged, they seldom stop to be too calm and rational about it.

    421:

    NB: there's a huge difference between a witch hunt and a criminal investigation by a law enforcement agency following procedure and obeying rules of evidence, for those of you thinking about the Mueller/FBI investigation. Just sayin'.

    Agreed completely, but Putin and Trump bought and paid for a criminal investigation, a [redacted] and a witch-hunt, with a side-order of new Cold War. I hope they enjoy everything they ordered, because their waitress is a cranky middle-aged lady who's going to serve them everything they ordered, then present one heck of a bill!

    The important thing for Putin and Trump to remember is that U.S. Republicans are crazy and loud. U.S. Democrats (given power,) are sane and quietly effective. (Bush invaded Iraq, while Obama killed bin Laden.) IMHO, the next ten years are going to be very hard for both Republicans and Russians.

    422:

    “At the end of the day, a hard border doesn't explicitly violate the letter of the Good Friday Agreement, but many people in NI will feel (quite rightly, in my opinion) that it violates the spirit of the Agreement. And when people here feel wronged, they seldom stop to be too calm and rational about it.”

    Actually I’d go a little further than that, in that on the basis of Dave’s reading while a hard border isn’t explicitly required by the GF agreement it would make things which are explicit in the agreement very, very, very difficult to deliver.

    And the stuff about the EHCR really does look like a potential deal breaker...

    423:

    I found this on Brexit just now.

    Note that Naked Capitalism is sometimes right and sometime wrong...

    424:

    I would also add that we're talking pretty much in pure political terms of impact for a hard border. We can make educated guesses about that based on the text of GFA, and we can make some grim informed predictions about economic impact; but we can't do much more than guess about the social impact of a hard border (and none of those guesses look pretty).

    425:

    David L @ 372:

    A sailboat that can sail on the ocean doubles as a hole in the water which you can try and fill with money.

    "bottomless hole"

    Cornelius Vanderbilt (Commodore of the New York Yacht Club) once likened ownership of a yacht to standing under a cold shower tearing up $100 bills.

    426:

    _Moz_ @ 394:

    I"m not saying you'd get approval for them, but there are a lot of things you can do that won't be noticed by a landlord or won't be cared about.

    I expect it's more about having to spend your own money to make improvements on someone else's property. The landlord is unlikely to squawk about the improvements; it's more a question of whether you'll get a decent return on your investment.

    Would you spend a thousand dollars to save five hundred on your electric bill? Especially if the improvement you make "justifies" the landlord raising the rent if/when you go to renew your lease?

    427:

    to Trottelreiner @259: There is a narrative in Italy, France and Spain it's difficult to legally clear forest to build houses, so land owners set fires to get rid of the forest and build houses afterwards. No idea if that's really the case.

    Apparently, it is, indeed, the case - or so local people who survived the firestorm believe. Firstly, the city was not build according to modern standards of safety - but that happened when these standards were not yet in effect. And, obviously, government did not have any opportunity to enforce them. The other reason is more obvious - this is pretty expensive land near the coast, so some people wanted to benefit from it, and that explains why people are rising suspicion about arsonists.

    https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/07/pakistani-migrant-arrested-for-trying-to-set-fire-in-greece/

    I was totally expecting this story to continue in usual EU direction of talks about migration deals, but apparently I overestimated it. Either the people who are profiting from the tragedy are smar enough, or the right wing is not really that popular among modern Greek population thanks to constant EU enforcement of draconian austerity measures.

    to Charlie Stross @399:

    The later analyses of Brexit voter opinions unearthed two strong correlations with support for Brexit in the referendum (albeit not along demographic or party lines): a) Support for bringing back the death penalty b) Opposition to immigration

    It would not possible notice anything like (a) opinion on international level, but anti-immigration is pretty much how it started some years ago, if anybody cares to remember. As certain military "defence" alliance completely exploded Libya, torched Syria and stirred Egypt big time, a flow of migrants and refugees increased tenfold, so certain countries started to play their tug of war with Brussels about how to handle them. Greece is worth mentioning too, as it was worst-performing economy post-crisis, so they vouched to leave the EU, which resulted in pretty cruel case of failed expectations. These two factors are pretty obviously resulted in current proposition by sheer force of inertia.

    428:

    Noting this bit:

    Asked if there are any borders anywhere in the world where there is no physical infrastructure, he replied: “No. The most open systems of trade which exist are either in South Africa, where there is the South African Customs Union since the early 20th century, and there is a border. And if you look at for instance Norway-Sweden, there is a border.

    Back during the Cold War the US-Canada border was the longest undefended border in the world. In places it passed through towns and even buildings. Crossing it was a casual matter along most of its length.

    Then 9/11 happened, and the US went hysterical. We got blamed for allowing terrorists into the US*, got no credit for taking in the planes that the US would have allowed to crash after it closed its airspace, had to upgrade our airport security even though it was already better that the US post-9/11 security, etc…

    But pre-hysteria, the infrastructure in many places was a signpost with a phone number to call when you got to the next town.

    *And are still being blamed (Napolitano, McCain, et al.) nearly two decades later, when the original story was debunked within days.

    429:

    I think this whole mess has already poisoned political debate, generational relationships, and friendships for a generation on the mainland, add that to Ireland’s, errr..., “interesting”, pre-existing situation and the social implications are beyond messy...

    430:

    Re insulating a rental:

    Big projects, well one could try talking the landlord into doing it. There are government and utility company subsidies available sometimes that could make it very cheap. You do provide a benefit by being willing to take the disruption. But most landlords, it is my impression, are very short term thinkers.

    What you very much can do, however, is wander around your unit trying to find air sealing flaws and other major problems. You can fix a bunch of those for $5-100, depending on what you find, and they can make a big difference.

    My last rental was in Chicago, where the winters are very cold. It was a centrally heated building so I couldn't turn the heat up. During the second winter I wandered around the place on a very cold day just feeling cold spots and finding possible air holes. Then I spent around $60 to plug up a bunch of holes and stuff insulation into a few specific places. It made a huge difference. The place was about 5f/2.5c warmer. Best find: on top of one of the bathroom vanities there was a 1 square foot opening going into the wall, just gushing warm air up toward the unit that did have the thermostat.

    One can also do temporary things, like that plastic you tape across windows. It's kind of ugly, but it works.

    431:

    Found that article very informative & frightening. one small nit to pick THIS is the Sweden / Norway border ( Main Stockholm / Oslo road ) note that although there are customs checks, you are still permitted to drive straight through ... MIGHT that JUST work in Ireland? Somehow, I doubt it, given the other problems ....

    432:

    Facebook's hundred billion dollar stock plunge last week got me spontaneously recalling Henley's tune "in a New York minute everything can change" as I lounged drinking tea in the backyard this morning. The lyrics depict a red in tooth and claw state of nature with phrases like "listen to a fool's advice, take care of your own, the wolf is always at the door." Which led me to the question is that really so bad, life thrives when predators like wolves in Yellowstone cull herds of grazers. People might even need existential challenges just to get out of bed in the morning. Followed by, yeah but every time I watch business news the key takeaway is always, damn I'm glad I'm not working anymore.

    Maybe an economy creates maximum utility, personal satisfaction or life fulfillment, whatever measurement is preferred, "utils" for its participants when it manages somehow to balance between extremes, prolonging to the utmost any stable periods of development, between extreme pendulum swings from stifling Latin American style oligarchy to chaotic Oklahoma land rush, Soviet breakup types of free-for-alls.   Such a view resembles the balanced ecology emphasis I've noticed in writings by environmentalists. Could it be that we're our own biggest beneficiaries when taking an interest in things like species preservation? Species come and go to replace each other all the time, nature finds its equilibrium regardless of human meddling, but even though someone may think they're fighting for the spotted owl, who really runs off with the proceeds of that fight is the general public, by exposure to the whole ecological frame of mind. Benefits include the concept of ourselves as an endangered species, awareness of the hazards of long term unintended consequences from slapdash remedies, and better understanding of the individual's place in the larger scheme of things, a systemic emphasis.

    Any books or articles around, that explore this conjecture? I'd be unsurprised to learn I've just reinvented the wheel, and there's a whole literature going back decades that neatly packaged and long ago dismissed such pondering. Mostly i'm reminded of Gary Larson's cartoon showing space aliens with captive Americans in a terrarium, where they put in a little strip mall decoration, similar to a treasure chest or pirate ship in a goldfish bowl. "Aw, look, now they're happy!"        

    433:

    No. It's been proposed several times, and debunked immediately by anyone who actually looks at it.

    According to Wikipedia, there are 10 staffed Norway to Sweden crossings and 30 unstaffed ones; Northern Ireland to Eire has over 300 crossings, and a large number of places the border passes through properties.

    Perhaps more seriously, there is a tradition of behaving legally and responsibly in Scandinavia that is somewhat lacking in the Irish border area. Even today, things like fuel and cigarette smuggling are big business; I don't know how things have changed since this, but I suspect not a lot.

    https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmniaf/1504/1504.pdf

    434:

    Inflation. I remember when it was ten pound notes :-)

    435:

    What you're replying to wasn't one of my posts.

    436:

    THIS is the Sweden / Norway border

    This is not quite a straightforward a comparison as you might imagine.

    For all practical purposes, the SE/NO border is an internal EU border, Norway is a "-light" member of EU for this purpose, so there are no tarifs involved.

    Second the SE/NO border is remote (as in: hours of driving) from both countries capitals, which means that any smuggled contraband or luxury goods must be particularly illegal/profitable to offset the necessary cost of fuel.

    Friends on boths side of that border tell me that the norvegians are the worst, smuggling mainly sugar and vegetables. (In Oslo, the difference between "a burger" and "a luxury burger" is usually three slices of cucumber and a small leaf of lettuce. The suggar is for fermentation.)

    None of this match the situation with the Eire/NI border.

    437:

    My late wife and I converted her old two-burner camping stove to propane. It's a looot easier. My ancient backpacker gas stove, yeah, well, water will boil, if you get it going and wait.

    438:

    What got me about all this, for days, now, is "growth wasn't going up!!!"

    I mean, what were the idiot/investors (to repeat myself) planning for, when there were 7B twitter account - that everyone should start a second?

    To paraphrase the Batman, stockbrokers are a superstitious and cowardly lot.

    439:

    "Tax and spend". That's one of the chestnuts the GOP always use to attack the Dems. I swear, if I run, my instant response to it is that they're "borrow and spend wastefully" Republicans.

    I refer you to the "deficit hawks" who voted in a tax cut that will massively a) benefit the rich, and b) increase the deficit.

    440:

    At least for the US, I think the operative adverb? is "had". Anything near the surface was sucked up and sold long, long ago.

    441:

    I have grave doubts about all the above. I cannot see anyone going in with Trumpolini in attacking (militarily) Iran. I don't even know how much the Pentagon would go with it. And ALL the Dems in Congress and the Senate,a and probably some Republicans would go, "Cheney told us that going into Iraq wouldn't cost us anything. Somewhere around $1T US and $2T US later, they'd be screaming. Already, there's a bill to force Trump to go to Congress, the way it says in the Constitution....

    442:

    So do NOT eat the rich. Just Mulch the Rich.

    I may have to start a new Psychobilly band - Donnie Shlump & the Wood Chippers.

    443:

    One of the things that made the US collapse so horrendous were ARMs - adjustable rate mortgages. Low rates for the first 3, 5, or 7 years, then you have to remortgage, or the current mortgagor will seriously crank your rates up. Houses went under water (my daughter's is), and rates went up to where the owners couldn't afford them. Many literally just walked away.

    444:

    The Queen dies, and suddenly there's an opening on the hillside of Glastonbury Tor, and we know who rides out with his knights to save the realm....

    445:

    There's a few issues here: just last week, I saw a piece that Trumpolini really solidified his hold on his base... but his base is shrinking. Older Republicans are gagging and leaving, and the independents are leaving by the boatload.

    446:

    Yep. Here at work, someone comes into Purchasing, and oh, we need three quotes, no, we need one quote, and they'll put it out for bid, no, three quotes, but they'll still put it out for bid, no....

    447:

    Please note that some cities or suburban areas go GOP because of literal gerrymandering (look of the origin of the word). Austin, TX, for example, that some Texans aren't really sure is part of Texas, it's so liberal, has districts that go out 40 mi. And then there's that disctric in NC, that runs about 90mi, and in many cases is < 5mi wide.

    Note, also, that if Pence comes in, he will have an anti-"mandate", if anything, and be very week.

    [[ fixed html but not spelling - mod ]]

    448:

    By the bye, "family farms" are a thing of the past (and I say this, having close friends who have one). As of the 1990 Census in the US, that was "no longer a recognized occupation", because it comprised < 1.5% of the population.

    [[ fixed html - mod ]]

    449:

    Wellll.... A century and more ago, in the US, most state legislatures only were in session a month or three out of the year. Now, however... they still take a total ov a couple months of, but with the population, um, twice what it was when I was in my teens, there's just so much that needs to be dealt with.

    450:

    Adjustable-rate mortgages are standard in the UK, although many are fixed for the first couple of years. I couldn't believe it isn't usually the case here in the US when we bought our house. "You mean the monthly repayments never go up from this? No matter how bad inflation is, or what the Fed rate is? Where do I sign?"

    451:

    It was from the link you gave. Sorry, should have made that clearer.

    452:

    The Kickstarter campaign I linked to has a map of the district in Austen that the game designers come from. Looks like about 1/3 of Austin's urban area + five and two-halves of rural counties.

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the-gerrymandering-game

    I think I'm going to back it. Looks like a pretty decent game on its own, even ignoring the political implications. Campaign runs for eight more days, and the PnP level is only $10.

    453:

    No! Then you've got a number of them, and that'll increase the amount of nasty things in the single plot of ground.... And it's not like you're going to be on a steady diet of them, I mean, there's a LOT more of us then there are of them, and they don't breed fast enough (Praise be Ghu, purple be His Name!)

    454:

    Given the current situation, there would also be one from Silbury Hill, another from a cave near Tintagel, and yet others would materialise in Stonehenge and Amesbury; they then would proceed to fight over who is the One True King. All with the grasp of modern problems that you would expect from people who have been asleep for a millennium, and were' entirely part of the real world even before that.

    455:

    You buy them. 10 year, 20 year, 30 year. I always got 30 yr, which have low rates, but winds up with them making a lot in interest. Then, if you can, you pay it off early. That's what I did on the house I live in - I paid it off very early.

    Check banks and mortage cos (and credit unions! for rates, and downpayments. If there's any way at all that you can make 20% down, DO IT, and then you don't have to pay for PMI (they should be hung) which is you paying their rates to insure that if you default before you hit 20% principal, they get paid.

    And UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES EVER* LET THEM BUY HOUSE INSURANCE. Talk to whoever you insure your car with (I really like State Farm), and find out what it will cost. The reason for this is that if you let them buy insurance, THEY ARE THE INSURED. If your house burns down, or someone's flying car (this is the 21st C) crashes into your second floor bedroom window, YOU GET NOTHING AT ALL, and you still have to pay off the mortgage.

    456:

    Oh, come on, those are all just different Gates to the otherwoldly Avalon.

    Here I'm an American* and I know that!

    • I'm also serious about the Matter of Britain, and probably read more old journals on it in my late teens than you've ever seen....
    457:

    I guess we'll just have to wait for the most recently dead one to turn up and tell them all to stop being silly.

    458:

    "My ancient backpacker gas stove, yeah, well, water will boil, if you get it going and wait."

    Those things are designed to help the French sell expensive butane (at least over here they are, adjust according to national circumstances).

    Fortunately it is easy to circumvent their dastardly schemes using tinfoil, brown paper and paste. These items are used to construct a cylinder of brown paper with tinfoil pasted to the inside, height to be slightly taller than the stove plus pot, diameter just big enough to clear the pot. The cylinder keeps the wind off, the tinfoil lining stops it catching fire; it folds conveniently flat when not in use, and it makes a tremendous difference to how fast the thing boils.

    Alternatives include things like digging a hole to put it in or building a little dry stone wall around it, which are considerably more hassle, although the dry stone wall can also be fun. They tend not to work so well, though, because the fit is not so good, and as for sheltering it under the overhang of your tent, that is nearly useless. It's remarkable how little draught it takes to blow a huge amount of the heat away, far less than you'd think significant from how it feels on your skin, and it takes much more to shield it effectively than the crappy little shallow dish thing at the level of the flame that seems to be the most a stove as bought ever gives you, if it even does give you one.

    459:

    Well if nothing else, looks like we might get ekranoplans back...

    Still not worth it.

    460:

    Nope, we're not allowed.

    So here's a Brexity thing.

    Memes, how to do it wrong (this is relevant):

    As some of you have already noticed, Hillary is wearing Illuminati earrings in this. It's those subtle touches that make this more than your run-of-the-mill anti-Semitic effort. Yair Rosenburg, Tablet Magazine, 30th July 2018

    Yair is counting on people not using search tools:

    AMERICA VANQUISHED, Part 2: America under Jewish Rule American Vanquished, DarkMoon, 2011 - Note: this really is a batshit antisemitic site so, you know, be prepared.

    Why is this news?

    Because it's (again) ancient pre-Trump / Brexit sources (come on... 2006? 2011? that's about fifty generations in internet terms).

    Now go look up Ms. Bari Weiss supporting Toby Young or the funniest thing you'll spot all year outside of BigFoot Porn:

    Thanks @bariweiss for your thought-provoking talk on a new "Seven Dirty Words" @chq Michael Hill, Twitter, 26th July 2018 - read the comments, savage. Now think to who famously made the '7 words' speech.

    And if that is your cultural reference in 2018, you're a dying breed.

    ~

    If you want to relate this to Brexit: Older Generation, Out of Steam: No New Talent.

    Now ask why.

    p.s.

    You need to get up to speed on magnetic pole shifts and other wryd. But .RU, UK and .CN are pretty blatantly dumping shit into the atmosphere atm to respin the old current. [ALLEGEDLY].

    p.p.s

    "It Gets Better".

    461:

    Oh, and if Davidcshipley wants to play Future Games and rack up a score, Louise Mensch is getting taken to the cleaners over, well:

    would ask that everybody take a moment to report @conspirator0 and @ZellaQuixote for targeted, anti Semitic harassment of me and of my family. These two men have imposed a Pepe over my face @TwitterSupport. My husband is Jewish, and 8chan attacked our family physically. THREAD Louise Mensch, July 29th, 2018, noted friend of Milo and Murdoch.

    Note: #resist is mostly Shareblue, but there's other elements: Mensch is getting taken to the cleaners by a couple of amateurs and she's panicking now.

    Suspect a Milo Deportation Soon[tm]. (As promised).

    ~

    Basically: we can shatter mirrors. Times / Gate is a biggy, esp since they've been using non-dom sources to police content.

    Tsk Tsk Tsk.

    Actual Adult Lesson: Dragons in the Sky isn't yours to pinch for a joke, little fat man. Be very careful who you poke next.

    462:

    She's Also Not Jewish. By a fucking mile.

    Which makes her the second British National this week to falsely claim Jewish Status in their projects.

    The other is a Labor MP, LFI, who is a right noxious piece of wankstain. Iain.... something.

    But you can note the pattern: whose gonna be the third scalp?

    p.s.

    Swatting / Doxxing is bad Martin, we play hard when threatened.

    463:

    Note: http://animeright.news/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/12/ARN-milo-yiannopoulos-confirms-louise-mensch-is-a-troll-who-runs-cover-for-rupert-murdoch_1498215245-b.jpg

    If you're being outed by Anime Right Wing muppets a year ago, well. Srsly. We'll show you how to crack mirrors my laddios.

    This goes for the entire UK Media Sphere: you're out of date and out of time.

    Burn our House Down? Not a nice threat.

    Off the record: you'd be amazed at how bad Media Barons are with phone security. FFS, Hunt can't even remember his wife is a .CN asset, he thinks she's Japanese, that's how stupid this is.

    p.s.

    Hmm, the old .IS as unassailable. We hate going back to the old country (pillars of salt), but we can: takes ~5mins to find the illegal arms shipment deals and so on.

    Fucking. Apes. (And yes: this is all a joke about the Monkeys Gag - if anyone outside of Israel knew how institutionally racist and retrograde you were, even in comparison to Iran, fuck me.)

    You. Are. Not. The. Chosen.

    /done

    464:

    I've never understood why UK "sailing boats" have such an obsession with Bermuda and/or ketch sail plans.

    My overriding impression is of gaff rigs everywhere, whatever the general sail plan. I assumed that came from a combination of low bridges, deforestation/forest control, and working sailboats (you can reef a gaff rig much more effectively than a full mast one - with a triangular storm sail your windage is smaller and lower - if you're committed to sitting in the North Sea fishing for a week that matters).

    Bermuda rigs (sloops and cutters) are popular because these days it's "run the extrusion a bit longer" and strength in general is easier to get. So you care about efficiency, and having two jigs on rollers + a single mainsail gives you a good balance between lots of options and simplicity of rigging and operation. Especially now with kiting sails and asymmetrical spinnakers, you can fly dramatic rigs in light winds and leave the fixed sails for heavier weather. Also, modern battens reduce the comparative advantage of a gaff rig, the "rectangular" sails you see on racing yachts are gaffs in all but name (they're curved-edge quadrilaterals that don't lie flat so there's no really good planar-geometry way to describe them).

    The reason you see fewer two-masted rigs is that these days losses from shading the trailing mast are way more important than having a second mast or more rigging options. A modern composite rig will be less than half the weight of even a modern aluminium/stainless rig, and it's so much stronger that you benefit more from a taller mast/lower aspect ratio than you possibly could from more sail lower down. Two masts makes for a heavier, more expensive, harder to manage rig... and extra crew to manage it just add to the weight penalty.

    465:

    Re: ' ... balanced ecology emphasis I've noticed in writings by environmentalists.'

    Sorry, unaware of any such book but it's an interesting idea and I hope you'll inform us of results.

    Question: What is included as comprising the environment? (Levels of authoritarianism, religiosity, wealth distribution, trade/economic sectors, size ... ?)

    466:

    My understanding of junk rigging (note that I'm not much of a sailor) is that it's optimized to a different set of circumstances.

    --It's cheap: by using bamboo battens to take the strain on the sail, they can get away with using cheaper cloth between the battens. This contrasts with having to use higher strength, more expensive cloth for western rigs. --You can spread the junk rig fairly high up, which reportedly works around Chinese harbors, which often have barely a breath of wind. These sails can be optimized for low wind, as well as high.

    As for the keel, junks were built wide, like motor boats, rather than having a keel (something about shallow harbors and coral reefs further south, would be my bet). They'd have a dagger-board equivalent to drop down, but they tend to plane, rather than having a Bermuda-type keel to lean against.

    Not being a sailor (I don't have enough money to afford a floating financial hole for entertainment), I can't say how much of this is true, but what I am pretty sure of is that boats are designed for their local seas, and junks are really designed for the South China Sea. They can be sailed all sorts of places (Wooden Boat had a great picture of a small junk sailing around the icebergs somewhere up north), but the fundamental design wasn't about pining for the fjords, shall we say.

    467:

    I expect it's more about having to spend your own money to make improvements on someone else's property.

    Most of what I do costs only time, or goes with me when I leave. At one stage I bought the offcut end off a roll of bubble-wrap+foil insulation (from Reverse Garbage, so I don't know the real origin). That cost me about $2 for ~20m x 500mm. I used it primarily to wrap the shitty, rental-grade storage hot water cylinder in ~5cm of the stuff. That took 30% off our power bill... and cost me about $5 (the tape to hold it in place was the most expensive part). I also taped some into sheets to attach to the sliding aluminium "ranch slider" doors, because there were no curtain rails ... no thermal drapes possible, property manager was a dick about adding them.

    I'm not kidding about "stealing" old fibreglass batts from demolition sites, I've lashed out $20 on a plastic overall and respirator then spent a few hours one night moving bike-trailer-loads of batts into our ceiling.

    Sure, those costs mount up and you can end up spending $1000 on it. But the combination of increased comfort and lower bills is something I'm willing to pay for. It's just a question of security of tenure... it's really annoying if you're just getting settled in and you get the boot. In Australia and NZ you're a tenant at the convenience of the landlord, they can flick you on 2-3 weeks notice without cause if "a family member wants to move in"... it's effectively impossible to challenge that because after all "the situation changed" can also happen...

    I think the most extreme change I've ever made was replacing the oven/stove unit. I found a better one free, made a trivial repair, and fitted it. Since they all look basically the same and the property manager was a 19 year old real estate agent I figured they'd not notice. I was right :)

    To me it's all about what the property manager/owner cares about and notices.

    468:

    If The UK media knew just how fucking normalized and usual Genocide Language was is in Israeli politics and culture.

    Holy Fuck, they'd probably declare Jihad.

    Yes, True.

    If you attempt to import your bullshit, don't be surprised when Blow-Back happens.

    For the record: Most Israeli Politicians, even from the "Labor" party engage in extreme forms of genocidal language against Palestinians. It's not even open to a Parliamentary Sanction - they just keep doing it.

    shrug

    You don't want to be playing this game now, my little squeeks.

    But, so be it: If you want to make sure that 90% of UK people know exactly how racist Israel is, we can do that.

    Your Major party are facists: everyone knows this: you laugh at people getting killed and you live in a militarized ghetto structure.

    All of this is True.

    Want the .is gov links?

    [Seriously: You're pissing off some very nice people and.... oh, Holy Shit, you tortured an Ascendant Angel for political gain. Frakk Me are you sociopaths]

    469:

    Balanced ecology and equilibrium are not stuff that academic ecologists have been talking about for a very long time. We're having more fun with things like trophic cascades (the wolves in Yellowstone, for example).

    There's no balance in nature. That's why things like speciation and the occasional mass extinction happen. It's more like there's a relentless churn of coevolution: something happens, say a population of bugs is mostly eaten by a predator for some reason (perhaps it's a bad year for the prey to hide). Anyway, the survivors proliferate, and whatever they did to survive makes them invulnerable to the predator, who in turn mostly dies off, except for the few who can eat the new version of the prey, and the interaction goes back and forth indefinitely. It's more like the eternal game of politics than like a balanced situation watched over by some benevolent deity.

    Trophic cascades, incidentally, are fun. Here's a simple one: wolves eat elk, elk eat plants. If there are no wolves, elk numbers grow, they eat more plants, and the plants that survive are not the ones elk eat. In Yellowstone, this leads to meadows. Add wolves, wolves eat elk (and more importantly, elk stay away from areas where they can be ambushed by wolves), elk eat less of their favorite plants, and those plants come back (these plants would be things like willows and cottonwoods, which help a bit control flood damage). Add humans into this: humans kill off wolves, elk proliferate, willows and cottonwoods go away, damage from rainstorms increases, human ranchers downstream suffer.

    As an environmentalist, here's my conservation argument: we evolved in a world with three million-odd species, and it now looks like we can kill off most of them if we really want to. However, the species that remain will be the ones we can't kill off, either because we need them to survive (like our crop plants) or because, well, we can't kill them off. The ones we can't control will proliferate to fill in the gaps left by our killing off the ones we could control. Is this a good idea or not? Do you want to camp in a field of thistles, lock your garbage cans against raccoons, and lose your garden veggies to pests that are immune to whatever you spray? If so, keep doing what you're doing. Alternatively, we can keep around more species, even though this requires us to be restrained and merciful. They may help control some of our worst pests, or they may not. But ultimately, that's the question: do you think we should stay in the world we evolved in, or should we build a world that can take advantage of us despite whatever we do? I'm for the first choice. You?

    470:

    I kinda prefer the hovercraft-based one a guy in Nelson made. Still wing in ground, albeit the power required for a hovercraft also apparently gives him the ability to bounce quite high...

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/26223/Above-sea-ride-sends-inventor-over-the-moon

    471:

    Sometimes I wish we had upvoting.

    472:

    "Brexit isn't conservative. It is very radical."

    Are there any actual conservatives left in the UK? Or just radical right-wingers calling themselves that?

    473:

    Do you want to camp in a field of thistles, lock your garbage cans against raccoons, and lose your garden veggies to pests that are immune to whatever you spray? If so, keep doing what you're doing. Alternatively, we can keep around more species,

    So much that. In Australia and Aotearoa it's quite blatant because the latest hominids love them some introduced carnivores that dramatically change the landscape. But you talk about controlling the cute widdle kitty cat population and ... gee... seems like some people would actually prefer I was gunning down schoolchildren.

    In Australia we have a shit-ton of other problems, because we exterminated and eliminated the traditional farmers, let their fields run riot, and now we're scratching our heads wondering why everything is changing. Not to mention the various really big fences we have to destroy ground-based wildlife (oddly enough not many species here have evolved to deal well with fences... but they are starting to do so now, either by changing behaviour or being replaced by fence-tolerant alternatives).

    I wonder if anyone has studies marine predation patterns in the context of deliberate killing of anything that eats people. Do we get a change in mix when that's not part of a "kill them all" programme (or do we not have an example of that to study?)

    474:

    Sorry, but I think "committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships" somehow implying a lack of a hard border would essentially mean that any decision that any side in NI does not like could be construed as against the spirit of the GFA. And when one speaks of violating the GFA, as Charlie did in his original post, one means breaking the letter. Either a hard border breaks the letter or it doesn't.

    "Removing the UK from ECHR jurisdiction does seem to break this. However, as you point out this is something implicit in a 'no deal' scenario, rather than just the hard border"

    I think you misunderstood my argument. ECHR means the Convention, not the court (ECtHR). Being a party to the ECHR is apparently not required for the UK, but its incorporation into NI law is. I have not said it's implicit in a no deal scenario at all. Instead, the GFA involves the ECHR, but Brexit does not. Brexit removes the UK from the EU, but not from the ECHR. The EU and Council of Europe are separate things. If the govt announced we were going to quit the ECHR you might have a case. But we're quitting the EU.

    No, I'm sure "pending the devolution of powers" became a dead letter twenty years ago.

    "Removal of security installations" doesn't create a duty never to put them back. Consider, the GFA required the Republic to hold a referendum on amending Articles 2 and 3. An effect of that change was to create birthright citizenship. After a while they didn't like immigrants' babies being automatic Irish citizens. So they amended the Constitution again. It didn't violate the GFA. Similarly, the fact the IRA hasn't disbanded and has megabucks in their war chest doesn't actually violate the GFA.

    Secondly, we all know that the objection here is to British customs officials telling people what to do. If we have a no-deal Brexit, the EU will require checks (however seldom) on the southern side to protect the Customs Union. Nationalists won't feel the same about Irish customs officials. And Irish Revenue has been doing preparation, which would be strange if it violated the GFA. An all-electronic system is possible, though not in the next year or two, with lorries only being diverted to a depot miles from the border.

    "unique relationship between their people and the close co-operation between their countries as friendly neighbours" -- this is the preamble to the British-Irish Agreement. It isn't legally binding so it isn't possible to violate. The RoI has of course agreed in the B-IA that the UK can now erect a 20 foot high fence.

    "many people in NI will feel (quite rightly, in my opinion) that it violates the spirit of the Agreement. And when people here feel wronged, they seldom stop to be too calm and rational about it".

    This can just as easily be used to argue that we should all discourage people from feeling wronged, and that it would itself be wrong to use the "spirit" to avoid giving the UK its rights to a hard border under the letter of the GFA and to Brexit under Article 50, which the Republic ratified in a referendum.

    In any case my original argument was that the GFA is not violated by this, regardless of whether it's bad for the peace process (and yeah, people saying it's provocative was always going to be part of that). Fwiw I hardly think the UK's future trade policy should be dictated by a hypothetical threat from the weak, small and unpopular dissident republicans, any more than loyalist terrorists or the killer of Jo Cox should push us around.

    The reason the border argument is doing so much business is that Remainers in the UK want to believe it to try and stop Brexit (there's plenty of more attractive arguments for us to use on GB's voters guys) and that the Irish government knows it will make it more difficult to use GB as a land bridge for their lorries to the continent, not to mention the effect on their trade with GB (which is large) or even NI (which is small).

    475:

    The time of the gaff as the default rig coincides more or less with the time of wood as the default material for hull construction. These days it's pretty rare; you find it on old boats of course, and on boats which are trying to look old, and occasional dinghies. Nearly everything has triangular sails now (and hulls mostly made of fibreglass or some more complicated composite).

    There are places like the Broads where gaff rigs are more common, but that's mainly because there's a lot of deliberate "living in the past" going on there, whether in the way of survival of old boats in the benign fresh water river cruising environment or of continuing to build new boats to old designs. Going through bridges is much the same for sailing cruisers regardless of sail type; moor on one side of the bridge, mess about lowering the mast, pole or motor through the bridge, moor on the other side, and mess about raising the mast again. These boats tend to be hired out for a week or two at a time to people who through inexperience often aren't very good at handling them, and the arrangements for lowering the mast are accordingly designed more to make the operation difficult to fuck up rather than slick and rapid.

    Slick and rapid is what the wherries - working cargo boats - and their experienced hands are good for. The sail is a single huge loose-footed gaff, and the mast is pivoted in the step with a big counterweight on the bottom end. With one person at the helm and one handling the rig, they can collapse the sail and lower the mast in a flash, shoot the bridge on momentum, put everything back to normal with equal rapidity on the other side and carry on without a break, even against the current. This works because the crew have been doing it for years and the rig is highly optimised for it, but the pleasure boat hire operators would prefer their rigs to be such that their customers don't even think of trying it.

    The advantage of a short mast is not related to bridges - no mast could be short enough - but to trees. On stretches of river with trees growing along the bank, the taller your mast the less width of river you can use before it catches in the branches.

    Working sail boats did indeed use either a gaff rig or something closely related for the reason you cite, and general ease of handling with a minimal crew. They also used it because triangular sails hadn't become popular yet when working sail was still around. For blue water voyages, square rigs persisted until working sail came to an end.

    Ketch rigs on boats that you might think are too small to warrant it have some popularity with people who like to sail short-handed. Breaking the sail area up into smaller chunks makes each chunk easier to handle, and in bad weather there is the advantage that you can drop the main altogether and carry on under foresail and mizzen alone.

    476:

    "Brexit removes the UK from the EU, but not from the ECHR."

    In theory perhaps. In practice we have Theresa May who is fanatical about losing the ECHR so she can get on with installing the telescreens.

    477:

    1) You seem to have missed the bit where I agreed with you about a hard border not being a violation of the Agreement.

    2) You also seem to have missed the larger point I was making (or believe that it can be hand-waved aside).

    I don’t see the merit in continuing an argument that seems destined to go in ever decreasing circles; but thank you for at least providing me the impetus to re-read the GFA after all this time.

    478:

    At least for the US, I think the operative adverb? is "had". Anything near the surface was sucked up and sold long, long ago.

    Not quite. Any LARGE deposits near the surface are long gone. But there are a lot of small things within a few feet to a few hundred feet that are too small for the big rigs. Drive around parts of OK, TX, So Cal, and PA and you'll see small walking beam jacks pulling up stuff from not far down. A truck will come by every few days or weeks and collect what is pumped. You can even spot the behind faux art and buildings if you look close when driving around LA. Quantities are small but still the cost of extraction is less than the value of the oil.

    479:

    And then there's that disctric in NC, that runs about 90mi, and in many cases is

    I think your formatting ate some of your comments.

    NC is an odd duck in this argument. NC has been gerrymadered for decades. It's just that the R's got very good at it when given the chance. But prior to their drawings in 2012 the D's did some major whackyness. They, the D's, were the ones that started drawing districts with areas connected via miles of highway medians.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_congressional_districts#Historical_and_present_district_boundaries

    I've lived in a gerrymandered district since I moved here nearly 30 years ago. Reliably D.[1] Especially those years when I was grouped with a town 60 miles away instead of with the 1/2 million or so neighbors I had within 10 miles.

    [1] Well except for that 2 year term 94-95 when the R's swept out all kinds of D's. (For good reasons in many cases but not all.) But our R was so bad he was booted in the next election and we got our predetermined D back.

    480:

    I'm sure I saw some programme not long ago about an outfit of that kind - can't think where, though, and it's not a usual way for me to discover information, so I'm a bit puzzled. There was a "lot" of shallow oil that could be reached almost by poking a stick into the ground, but which only came out slowly. The point of the programme was that the whole operation was powered by one of those systems where you have a big crank in the middle pulling on a bunch of rods made from sections bolted together which radiate out in all directions and pull on the pump jacks. They had what looked like enough land to keep a couple of hundred cows on if it had been pasture, which it probably had been at one point, but now it was mixed grass and smallish trees, with arrays of pump jacks at various points, each array fed from its own branch of this most amazing network of reciprocating rods that strode across the grass or snaked between the trees to the central crank, which was driven by really not all that big a motor. It made sense: to power all those jacks individually with electric motors would have used a broadly comparable amount of metal in the power distribution network, but it would be expensive copper rather than cheap iron; and the electric system would have more ways to go wrong, whereas with the mechanical system, as long as someone walked the lines with a brush and a bucket of grease every so often it would last more or less for ever. They had been slowly extracting oil there for over a hundred years; they seemed to be keeping it going now mainly as a museum-type operation, but it did still produce enough oil to make greater than zero profit.

    481:

    I think I saw that one also. It was in western PA.

    482:

    Reliability is not the point - Electric motors have extremely long mean time before failures, far better than any mechanical linkage not contained in a housing. More likely, it was just never worth the capital outlay to replace a setup that worked until it got so old it became a literal working museum.

    483:

    Heteromeles @ 467 Yeah Or the one noted by uncle Chas D (?)... that settlements with cats had more bumblebees, because the cats eat the mice, which themselves preyed on the bee nests. ( Something the occasional rabid cat-haters ough to have pointed out to their tiny brains ) Or the re-introduction of Beavers in various parts of the UK, with spectacular results to ... everything. Or down on our allotments ... foxes & particularly almost-adult fox cubs can be a nuisance - they LOVE digging stuff up - especially if "the humans" have just put something ( like seedlings ) into the ground. To them DIGGING IS FUN & so is exploring waht the 2-legs have been up to. You (we) simply put up little fences or lay down grids & put up with it. Why? Because the foxes EAT RATS & PIGEONS - which do much more damage & are probably more likely to carry diseases we can catch.

    484:

    I've been reading this blog for quite a while, but the side discussion on the Swedish-Norwegian border drew me out of the lurking woods.

    Greg Tingey @ 429:

    There are a few things to note about the border and special relationship between Norway and Sweden; Poul-Henning Kamp @ 434 touched on some of it.

    The most important part is that both countries are part of the Schengen Treaty which allows free flow of people and thus no passport control. Norway is also part of the EEA [1], severly limiting the amount of customs inspections needed/allowed. As such most border crossings (including international airports!) into Norway consists of a nominal check-point where you can declare that you are importing anything customs-worthy, as well as a chance to be stopped for a search. In practice these checks are more or less non-existing; for airport entry it's mainly limited to flights from "known troublespots" like Schiphol (tourist cannabis import).

    The main smuggled imports are sugars (for consumption, not fermentation) [2] and meats, with a smaller side of tobacco products; while the main smuggled export these days seems to be diapers [3]. The border is not as remote as you think; large parts of eastern Norway (where the majority of the population lives) regularly shops at the other side of the border. The price savings are enough that there are even organized bus tours from western Norway.

    [1]: As the remnant of an older trade agreement between the (then much smaller) EU and EFTA; these days it consists of the (enlarged) EU, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. This grants Norway access to the single market by adopting some of the more central EU regulations (Wiki Summary).

    [2]: Norway has imposed very high tariffs on products containing sugar additives (including soft drinks), leading to price differences large enough (usually in the 5-6x range) for it to be more than viable to "self-import", leading to web-shops offering soft drinks at european prices for mail order.

    [3]: The low cost supermarket chains are waging a price war on baby diapers, resulting in the price being low enough for it to be profitable to buy in bulk and drive back to eastern Europe.

    485:

    The other thing that most people miss about problems like 'the Irish question' is that they are at least as much about perception than actuality - in that case, largely because of the historical wrongs perpetrated by GB and the extremists on both sides. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." has been frequently quoted about Ireland.

    You would know better than me how widespread that is among the people of Northern Ireland, because judging from reports in the media and occasional contacts with actual people is not reliable. Brexit is also more about perception, with much less justification, but we know that only about 30% of the population's views are dominated by perception in contradiction to actuality.

    486:

    Don't hold your breath waiting for the Russian navy to bring back missile-armed Ekranoplans.

    AIUI the reason they went away in the first place was institutional politics (and the same kind that Christopher Cockerell ran into in the UK when he tried to get the Air Ministry and the Admiralty to pay for hovercraft development).

    Ekranoplans in the 80s were a new type of vehicle that didn't fit in an existing force structure; the Soviet navy had three A-90s in service until 1993, but it was a relatively small vessel—a 150 seat troop carrier conceived of as an assault landing craft that could come in as fast as a helicopter while carrying IFVs—and there was no promotion ladder for officers commanding them: it was a career dead-end. So nobody wanted to be in charge of them, morale was poor, and then they ran into the funding chaos of the early 1990s.

    (The US navy had much better luck with big-ass hovercraft because the US Marine Corps took one look at them and thought "hmm, this can ferry an M1 Abrams from carrier to shore ten times faster than any existing landing craft, WANT" and bought a bunch of LCAC — landing craft air cushion — which plugged straight into an existing requirement.

    487:

    I can see that a hard (WTO)Brexit would cause export and JIT cross-border manufacturing problems, but I have difficulty understanding why it would cause import problems leading to food shortages: exports can be be blocked by the EU but imports should be under the control of the UK.

    So what causes an immediate drastic import blockage of food?

    Is a large percentage of our essential food first exported and then re-imported? Are the ports not capable of separating outgoing flows from incoming flows? Is the problem that nobody wants to send a full lorry to UK that will have to either return empty (economic hit) or be caught up in the export jam, and a large percent of food cannot be containerised?

    488:

    NB: This explanation bought to you by the department responsible for explaining why the US Navy is run by, and for the benefit of, Fighter pilots. (No really: you don't get to the top as an admiral unless you command a carrier battle group. You don't get one of those until you've been captain of a carrier yourself. And you don't get to command a CVN until you've commanded the entire air group aboard a CVN. And you don't get to do that until you've commanded a squadron, and you don't get to command a squadron until you've flown in one. Ergo, the US Navy has a promotion ladder biased in favour of fighter jocks.)

    489:

    You get import problems, because all vehicles entering the UK have to be checked and taxed appropriately. This is a slow process, especially when you don't have the parking areas or the customs inspectors to cope with the surge in inspections.
    You get food problems, because an awful lot of food enters the UK via truck, and those trucks will be stuck in the queue behind all the other trucks. The government is talking about turning the motorway into a parking lot.

    Remember the driver might say "I'm carrying potatoes for Tesco" but the border force hears "I've got fifty Syrians in the boot".

    Also keep in mind France currently has an issue with migrants at Calais. The UK pays them to secure their side of the crossings and keep the problem in Europe. I could easily see France going "Actually it's your problem now", and moving the camps to the other side. So then you really would get a Wild West on the border.

    490:

    It's complicated (but you know that already).

    And you got my underlying point about perception versus reality; which is why I decided that continuing a pedantic debate about the minutiae of the letter of the GFA wasn't particularly constructive.

    491:

    You can see a similar rig at the Petrolia Oil Museum. Petrolia, ON was one of the first places in the world that they drilled for oil. Lambton Museums use this rig for the tourists these days. Apparently, they get 2% oil, 98% water now. You still get quite a reek from the oil they do extract.

    Worth a trip if you're in the area and don't mind going well off the beaten track.

    492:
    Now landsmen all, whoever you may be, If you want to rise to the top of the tree, If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool, Be careful to be guided by this golden rule. Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee!
    493:

    It is a fascinating museum. The descriptions of what life was like for the immigrants who tried to farm in those conditions are heartbreaking.

    And if you are in the area, not that far south you should visit North Buxton. The town was settled by African-Americans slaves who survived the dangerous trek to Canada, gotten across the inland sea that is the Great Lakes and then had to figure out how to farm and hunt in a climate/environment they were unprepared for.

    494:

    That look interesting. At a three-hour drive it's probably an overnighter rather than a day-trip, though.

    The Oil Museum, North Buxton — what else is worth the visit in the area?

    495:

    If you're interested in fossils from the Devonian, Rock Glen Conservation Area is one of the best places in the world to find Devonian fossils. Bring your camera for that one - it's very scenic.

    If you're interested in mead, Munro Honey and Meadery is in Alvinston. I had no idea that you could get a dry mead - I thought they would all be sweeter than heck. (Shows what I know). They give tours as well, so you can see their setup. And their hives. When I was there, they'd put a dot of paint on the back of the queen in their observation hive so you can spot her.

    496:

    “Working sail boats did indeed use either a gaff rig or something closely related for the reason you cite, and general ease of handling with a minimal crew.‘

    Mrs JayGee and I had the pleasure of spending a morning trundling around the Blackwater estuary on a hundred-and-something year old Thames Sailing barge recently. Extremely impressed that a vessel that size could be operated by a crew of 2 (basically master and minion) and by the sheer performance of the thing compared with a few modern cruising yachts we encountered!

    497:

    ...that settlements with cats had more bumblebees, because the cats eat the mice, which themselves preyed on the bee nests. Whenever I hear these stories, I'm reminded of the very last "Li'l Abner" (Al Capp) Sunday comic strip. (Al Capp and his characters are a part of 20thC Americana, for better or worse.) Finally found it: http://pdxretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/LilAbner-771113-H-M-LastSunday-XL1.jpg The EPA (?!?) has sent spider-eating vultures to ... eat the spiders. Then they suggest vulture-eating jackals to eat the vultures, then tigers to eat the jackals, and then...

    The point is - don't introduce species without testing or at least modeling. The UK has managed to avoid a lot of this, by vigilance and luck. Off to battle a massive growth of a very invasive Asian bittersweet vine. At least no thorns or toxins!

    498:

    I took that article with a huge grain of salt to start with, and the idea of a wing-in-ground craft based in the arctic seems absurdly dangerous in all but the most benign weather conditions. I just love the idea of the darn things.

    Russia has all sorts of cool military stuff, but with the size of their economy, there's just no way they can support even what they have, much less expand to keep pace with the (egregious) size of the US military budget. On the other hand, what they're doing with social and political disruption in the west seems to be an ROI that is absurdly cheap, so...

    499:

    Is a large percentage of our essential food first exported and then re-imported? Are the ports not capable of separating outgoing flows from incoming flows? Is the problem that nobody wants to send a full lorry to UK that will have to either return empty (economic hit) or be caught up in the export jam, and a large percent of food cannot be containerised?

    Yes to all of the above!

    Also: transport companies in the UK today benefit from reciprocal recognition of licensing regulations and the free right to move within the EU. If we leave the EU, British trucks stop being EU vehicles and have to obtain permits to enter the EU (which are relatively scarce). Hell, British driving licenses stop being recognized in the EU.

    Because we're used to frictionless flow at our ports, we simply don't have parking/marshaling facilities for tens of thousands of trucks per day. And land in the south-east (around Felixstowe and Dover) is frighteningly expensive—when it hasn't been turned into commuter dormitories for London.

    500:

    Ekranoplans are good in certain situations ... if you're in Siberia, you have a lot of rivers that freeze in winter and might as well be a motorway for hovercraft or ekranoplans. Also lots of really deep snow. It's easier to fly down a broad frozen river at 300kph than to build out roads.

    Ground effect altitude increases with the size of a wing, too, so bigger ekranoplans fly higher (although they're more expensive — IIRC the cost of an aircraft scales as the cube of its weight). Hence the idea of the Lun, a 500-600 ton brute armed with hypersonic anti-shipping missiles able to do a number on a US supercarrier. (But it only makes sense if you can protect it from carrier-based fighters, and if you expect to but heads with a carrier battle group in the first place. Which are both very questionable propositions ...)

    501:

    Ekranoplans in the 80s were a new type of vehicle that didn't fit in an existing force structure; the Soviet navy had three A-90s in service until 1993 There was a plan to build many more, but they were cancelled way back in 1984. The military initiative at the time was slowly stagnating, and these vehicles weren't as good as expected of them. I may assume, it is almost too easy to fly them, so people sometimes crash the vehicle and sustain damage (it is less severe than plane crash but still pretty dangerous). So, practically, there have been too many setbacks.

    There's pretty decent vehicle called "Orion 14", but it is not too popular yet. The prototype of bigger version crashed in 2015 and they've been rebuilding it since then, until they conducted some more trials last year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuEsR8DFjHI Several other models are also built and tested (most of them are at least 10 years old): Ivolga EK-12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqZRcDThE_M (been there at MAKS 2013, seen it up close) Burevesnik 24 (HSA-7) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Het9Ys8RhMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN0Rp4zcYi4 AirFish 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-sWokqiVHw Yep, this is about as popular as one may guess. Since no major powers in the world can allow someone else to be successful in advanced technology, it is impossible to find investment for projects like this. Only big scams are flourishing. Sanctions and blanket tech export bans ensure that rich people can hold onto the scraps of technology that are not obsolete yet, and continue to reap profits.

    Well, there are also practical reasons why these machines aren't popular yet: 1. They are occupying middle ground between aircraft and a boat - while requiring much less quality and control, they are still difficult to fly and may end up crashing. 2. Therefore, there's no clear guides how to use them and their traffic, what weather is safe for operating, how to prevent accidents, etc, etc. It is not even clear, who you should train - boat captain or a pilot? 3. The gap between water surface and plane is very important so it does not crash into waves after liftoff. The larger the craft, the higher waves it can tolerate, and small craft can only fly above small bodies like lakes, rivers and smooth seas. Larger craft can go deep into the sea and over high waves, but they would require more investment. 4. Storms are very dangerous because of huge wing area, and sometimes a big gust can send you tumbling if you are not careful, as illustrated above.

    The other option is to make the craft closer to the plane - "ekraonlet" model is pretty much the same ekranoplan that can gain more altitude for limited amount of time and thus stay above danger. Or maybe it is a plane that can use ground effect. I personally expect military to go for this version. As for practical usage, I totally expect military would use it for light transport functions, if they desire so. I mean, it only should have a capacity to fly with several tons of cargo so they would occupy the niche somewhere between helicopters, tilt-rotors, floatplanes and cargo planes. It would be pretty useful for littoral operations and securing the areas of inner seas at the borders. For the reasons above, it is more useful to build many smaller vehicles rather than a big one, unless we are going for some intercontinental liners from somebody's dreams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9mY-u7rE_Y I can expect something like that, only with different forms. Composite hull, higher capacity, turboprop and jets. Maybe if you add digital control system to fly it safely. https://cdn1.img.ria.ru/images/150501/99/1505019902.jpg https://cdn4.img.ria.ru/images/150501/94/1505019484.jpg

    502:

    Did a quick search against Wikipedia and of the last Chief of Naval Operations guys, going back to 2000, they are/were, in reverse chronological order: sub, sub, surface warfare, surface warfare, surface warfare, and then a former pilot. In fact, only one of the last ten CNOs was a pilot. One more served (while he was enlisted) in an air combat group but wouldn't have been a pilot.

    I'm not saying you're wrong, since I didn't spend any time looking at the current list of admirals or their career paths beyond CNO, but it makes sense to me that there's a lot more surface warfare and sub command slots than there are carrier command slots, and so most of the pool of senior captains they're promoting from have a non-aviation background.

    Plus I'd think that if the Navy was really run by fighter jocks, they would've fought harder for a second engine in the carrier version of the F35.

    503:

    Yair is counting on people not using search tools: Interesting. google image search with date filters is now part of my toolkit; thanks for the encouragement to play with it. I think you're suggesting (along with other things) that we (the audience) need to be consistently better at determining the freshness/staleness of ideas/etc.

    You need to get up to speed on magnetic pole shifts and other wryd. I have to be sparing with such material. It can take some significant effort to sort out the pure lies from the believed BS/woo from the believed bad science from the genuinely inexplicable-with-current-science, and the debunkers sometimes tie themselves into explanatory knots for the weirder material. Read New Scientist and Skeptical Inquirer regularly, and flakier sources sporadically; does anyone have suggestions for sources that make a decent attempt to sort this sort of material?

    504:

    Charlie: Irrespective of the actual outcome on and after March 2019, reading your analysis has made me realise one simple thing:

    • EVERYONE (yes EVERYONE) needs to create a personal CONTINGENCY PLAN ahead of next March

    Some of the comments indicate that people are already thinking this way, but my point is EVERYONE needs to have a plan.....just waiting for "things to happen" looks like a recipe for personal disaster.

    One simple example comes from a comment here about moving money abroad ahead of March 2019. This probably means starting to open a foreign bank account NOW.....not next March! Lots of other aspects needed which need planning and action NOW!

    505:

    Charlie @ 496 Horrible, isn't it? And unless ALL of those problems are either sorted or kicked down the road with a temorary fix, there will be complete chaos at all the Brit ports that deal with EU traffic ( which is about 95% of them ) for at least a month, I would have thought. NOT a pleasant prospect.

    506:

    Ok, I hadn't realized the walking beam pumps were for oil close to the surface. And yes, I saw plenty of them when I lived in TX - there was one town that we'd drive through, on the route we took from Austin to where my m-i-l lived, that every block had one or more pumps.

    507:

    1. They are occupying middle ground between aircraft and a boat - while requiring much less quality and control, they are still difficult to fly and may end up crashing. 2. Therefore, there's no clear guides how to use them and their traffic, what weather is safe for operating, how to prevent accidents, etc, etc. It is not even clear, who you should train - boat captain or a pilot?

    Exactly the same problems hit early hovercraft development in the UK in the 1950s-1960s.

    Eventually we ended up with some ferry services (e.g. the big SR.N4 car ferry hovercraft on the English Channel ... but that was killed off by a combination of rising fuel costs and competition from the Channel Tunnel.

    (Turns out hovercraft are closer to aircraft in terms of maintenance and fuel requirements.)

    Hovercraft also don't work well in rough waters: the English Channel is relatively sheltered, but even so they had to stay in harbour during storms.

    (The Russian Navy now has the Zubr class LCAC, even bigger than the SR.N4—but again, it's a military landing craft. Interestingly, it's sold to Greece and China which suggests it's a more versatile and useful design.)

    508:

    You're in NC? What cons do you make - ever hit Baltcon, or CapClave?

    509:

    Jeff Fisher @ 428:

    Big projects, well one could try talking the landlord into doing it. ...
    What you very much can do, however, is wander around your unit trying to find air sealing flaws and other major problems. You can fix a bunch of those for $5-100, depending on what you find, and they can make a big difference.

    That was really my point. The suggested improvements were all "Big Projects" of the kind where the tenant won't get a return on investment; the benefits will all go to the landlord. Spending $50 to save a hundred makes sense.

    Spending a lot more money where the savings have to accrue across several years doesn't make sense unless you're going to be there long enough to get the savings.

    510:

    I would adore some predators where I live (oh, the shame, he says, flinging his forearm to his forehead, a city boy in a split-level in the 'burbs!). We need something to take out the damn rabbits.

    511:

    I will note, as a datum, that I have seen a number of folks over the years wearing a t-shirt, on one side of which reads "there are two kinds of ships: submarines" with a pic, "and targets" carrier in periscope crosshairs".

    512:

    Elderly Cynic @ 432:

    Inflation. I remember when it was ten pound notes :-)

    Quite probably. Back in the 1860s when Vanderbilt supposedly said that, a hundred dollar bill was actually worth something.

    513:

    Er, no, about the UK. The reason that we have little trouble is that essentially all of our ecology is comprised of invasive species - in fact, the only terrestrial vertebrate that we know was here 12,000 years ago and still is, is Homo sapiens!

    And we have plenty of thorns, and some toxins - about as many as the northern USA or Canada - temperate (especially northern) ecologies don't favour the production of toxins.

    514:

    Oops. Chronoclasm, due to finger trouble programming the tardis :-)

    515:

    So I went and did a little more research, looking at current fleet commanders (Rear and Vice admirals) and higher, and here's what I came up with:

    Northern Command: surface Southern Command: surface Pacific Command: surface Pacific Fleet: fighter pilot Europe/Africa: submarine Naval Nuclear Propulsion: submarine Cyber Command: intelligence/crypto

    2nd Fleet: reactivated less than a month ago, couldn't find a commander 3rd Fleet: pilot 4th Fleet: pilot (P-3C Orion) 5th Fleet: fighter pilot 6th Fleet: surface warfare 7th Fleet: submarine 10th Fleet: surface warfare

    I don't think OGH is wrong in the sense that the carrier operations do take up an enormous amount of institutional resources, and that if you're coming out of an aviation background, you almost have to be a former pilot (with the possible exception of having an intelligence/signals background), and if it's not the majority of current command level officers, they certainly are over-represented.

    516:

    whitroth @ 441:

    One of the things that made the US collapse so horrendous were ARMs - adjustable rate mortgages. Low rates for the first 3, 5, or 7 years, then you have to remortgage, or the current mortgagor will seriously crank your rates up. Houses went under water (my daughter's is), and rates went up to where the owners couldn't afford them. Many literally just walked away.

    Many who couldn't just walk away were nevertheless forced out of their homes. The banksters often pushed buyers into ARMs when the buyers could have qualified for a low rate fixed interest mortgage, because the banksters got a bigger commission on the ARMs. The buyers weren't people trying to defraud banks, they were just people who wanted to be part of the American Dream by owning their own homes.

    That "financial crisis" in 2008 swindled the middle & working classes (particularly middle & working class minorities) out of 20 TRILLION dollars in wealth. The banksters got bailed out. Their victims did not.

    517:

    whitroth @ 446:

    By the bye, "family farms" are a thing of the past (and I say this, having close friends who have one). As of the 1990 Census in the US, that was "no longer a recognized occupation", because it comprised < 1.5% of the population.

    That's interesting because the U.S. military comprise < 1% of the population and they ARE still "a recognized occupation".

    518:

    You are talking eggs and cartons of eggs. A "family farm" would have comprised 3, 4 or more people, as opposed to "farmworkers".

    And the military ain't going away any time soon.

    519:

    _Moz_ @ 465:

    Sure, those costs mount up and you can end up spending $1000 on it. But the combination of increased comfort and lower bills is something I'm willing to pay for. It's just a question of security of tenure... it's really annoying if you're just getting settled in and you get the boot. In Australia and NZ you're a tenant at the convenience of the landlord, they can flick you on 2-3 weeks notice without cause if "a family member wants to move in"... it's effectively impossible to challenge that because after all "the situation changed" can also happen...

    I think the most extreme change I've ever made was replacing the oven/stove unit. I found a better one free, made a trivial repair, and fitted it. Since they all look basically the same and the property manager was a 19 year old real estate agent I figured they'd not notice. I was right :)

    To me it's all about what the property manager/owner cares about and notices.

    I think you're still missing my point. When you make improvements on rental property you have to look carefully at the cost/benefit of what you're planning to do. "Security of tenure" is spot on.

    If you're going to be in the location long enough to realize the savings (or other benefits) to offset the cost, it's worth doing. But big ticket expenses that aren't going to pay off for years & years aren't worth the cost if you're not going to be around to recoup the benefit.

    Kitchen appliances are no big deal. You can take the new ones with you when you go. All you have to do is store the old appliances until you're ready to put them back before moving out. BTDT-GTTS

    520:

    whitroth @ 505: (replied to David L) You're in NC? What cons do you make - ever hit Baltcon, or CapClave?

    There was a "SuperCon" in Raleigh this past weekend (July 27, 28 & 29). I didn't make it because the only part that interested me was already sold out before I found out about it.

    521:

    Here in San Diego we actually have a squadron of hovercraft based at Pendleton. The only use I know they had was when they implemented a multi-agency plan to fight a major fire on Catalina Island back in 2007. The fire engines converged on the squadron docks, drove onto the hovercraft, went to Catalina (about 40 miles) quite quickly, unloaded at the beach, picked up a load of evacuees, went back to the mainland, unloaded the evacuees, picked up another load of fire engines, and just kept doing this for a day or two.

    AS for the ekranoplans, great idea, and it's interesting that no one mentions their precursors, the old WWII Catalina flying boats they used for long range recon. IIRC, flying close to the water to use the Wing in Ground effect for lift was how they boosted their ranges significantly. With satellites, there's little point in doing this now, but I wouldn't be surprised if military pilots don't learn about this as one potential strategy to limp back to the runway without having to ditch.

    522:

    paragraph You are talking eggs and cartons of eggs. A "family farm" would have comprised 3, 4 or more people, as opposed to "farmworkers".

    I know about "family farms". I married into one. Started during the depression with literally a grant of "40 acres & a mule". One son & three daughters who all married away from the farm first chance they got. When I married the youngest daughter, the father, son and two grandsons (sons of the son) were farming 300+ acres (the original 40 plus rented land) along with one part time farm hand; tobacco, soybeans & peanuts.

    And the military ain't going away any time soon.

    There doesn't appear to be an equivalent here to the <code> tag used in some other places to indicate irony and/or sarcasm, so you have to watch out for the context.

    523:

    JBS @ 513 The "Banksters" got comensated & the others/victims didn't ... and now - are they the Trump voters I wonder?

    524:

    Lorry park on the M20 could last years.

    10,000 freight vehicles a day through Dover, checks take between 5 and 45 minutes per vehicle from outside the EU.

    525:

    "The Oil Museum, North Buxton — what else is worth the visit in the area?"

    Point Pelee National Park, which is the southernmost point of continental Canada and a major point in bird migrations. At the right time of the year the bird watching is unmatched.

    The foliage on the Talbot Trail which runs along Lake Erie rivals anythiing I have seen in New England.

    If you are interested in the war of 1812 there are many small memorials and sites of interest.

    John Brown had secret meetings in a church in Chatham, near which there is a lovely little park honouring Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first female African-American newspaper editor in North America. She was born in Baltimore but lived and published in this part of Canada for quite some time.

    The entire area is steeped in the history of successive waves of refugees from the US, from United Empire Loyalists to slaves escaping to freedom to the current border tensions.

    526:

    Try this one on: in the apt I rented when I relocated to the DC area, the landlady told me how I should be happy that I didn't have to buy a, what was it, stove, I think.

    I looked at her, incredulous. I did ask that people rented houses without stoves, and the tenants could bring in whatever they wanted? And how could the landlord know that it wasn't a fire hazard, and then there was the possible damage moving it in and out, and hooking it up (if it was gas)....

    I did get her thinking about that. I would NEVER allow that, and that wasn't the case in all but one apartment I ever rented.

    527:

    I wasn't talking commercial cons, I meant Real SF cons (all of which are put on by a default or incorporated 501(c)(3) not for profit educational organization...). At real cons, you don't buy a ticket, you're not an audience; you buy a membership, and you're part of it. And they're all run 100% by volunteers, and no honoraria....

    Why, yes, Capclave this year, for the first time, I'll be working the Green Room, rather than the consuite. Balticon, my std. shift is running the consuite midnight-03:00....

    528:

    Thanks. Looks like I need to plan a trip there. Talbot Trail for colours is out, unfortunately — I can't manage more than day trips in the fall — but I do like history and that's good anytime. Rock Glen looks like it's worth a visit anytime as well.

    So the Oil Museum, the Meadery, Rock Glen, Chatham, dig around for small attractions…

    Time to start saving for a short road trip.

    529:

    There must be many forms of prisoners of circumstance, one might be Babbit and 'I have never done a thing that I wanted to do all my life' another Don Giovanni, who has Leporello invite the Commendatore to dinner and then must dine with the Commendatore. I wonder what H.G. Wells, stuck at the top of the Victorian tower, would have made of twenty-first century Europe? His The War in the Air was contemporary with The Riddle of the Sands.

    However isn't it a little unconscious to use a neologism invented for us to describe the EU exit process? Also, the outline of the future presents a conventional frame of the purpose of Europe, that the UK pays £9-10 billion to maintain a prosperity threatened by xenophobia. Depression, famine, revolution is all very nineteen-twenties? The suggested legacy resembles the outcome of a seventeenth-eighteenth century trade war?

    530:

    Hmm. From a different part of the EU (.at): we don't care about UKs quaint measurement system (always good for a quick laugh), or that they drive on the wrong side of the road. Participation in EUR would be non-negotiable, though, and there's a definitively non-null chance of the "case law" judicial principle not surviving an EU re-entry (it caused no end of grief in just about every working group, and also: this is the 21st century, not A Glorious Empire Of Ages Past). Plus, of course, the opposite of the current "special deals" in financing everything - be prepared to pay a premium, and no more veto powers on anything at all.

    531:

    Fighter pilots whose engines have quit certainly use ground effect to land and have been doing so for decades. The RAF and the RNLAF certainly do and I am sure others do as well.

    (Engines quitting can be due to mechanical failure, fuel starvation, birdstrike, etc.. There are well-understood procedures for recovering the aircraft to runways which are near enough, which means that the pilot hasn't risked the ejector seat (better than nothing but still dangerous), hasn't thrown away the airframe, and hasn't blotted their record by doing so - especially if they ran out of fuel by being too enthusiastic...)

    532:

    Forgot to add: That applies mainly to single-engined fast jets, and not at all to variable-geometry designs like Tornado...

    533:

    You can, if you're quick enough. There's about a gazillion newly-built homes there for sale. On the cheap. Last fall I saw many a newly-built single-family dwelling on sale for as low as 40kEUR. Including a couple thousand square feet of garden. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere, of course - which was hit worst by the last econonmic crisis. But then that's what one wants if one worries about food supplies (hey, lotsa cows within eyesight). And as an author you're not exactly depending on being smack in the middle of a high-density urban area. Where the masses of refugees will concentrate.

    How that'd work out with all the other parts in (and of) your life is another question altogether ;)

    534:

    I have a guest room for you to use in .at, though with your SO it'd be more than just cramped. Also our Feline Overlord doesn't take kindly to feline interlopers ;)

    535:

    "we don't care about UKs quaint measurement system (always good for a quick laugh)"

    Ha. In the UK, we laugh at the US over that; they've hung on to (their version of) it far more tenaciously than we have. Heck, NASA (and presumably others) even use (present tense) the Rankine scale for absolute temperature, while over here that's never been familiar knowledge other than for a few specialists. Engineering in the UK has been metric for yonks now - only yesterday I was being surprised by the odd dimensions of the parts of a machine until I realised it was an American design and the funny numbers were actually round fractions of an inch. I think I am more pro-metric than is the average for people of my age, because of the engineering connection, but nevertheless the majority of the UK population is now familiar with metric units simply as a result of those who aren't dying off.

    536:

    You are Salyavin and I claim my £5 :D

    537:

    "...expenses that aren't going to pay off for years & years..."

    Well, a lot of this is down to personal attitudes, like whether you define "pay off" in exclusively financial terms or not.

    One of my current projects is to replace the carburettors in my car with fuel injection and replace the transmission with a less lossy later model. Whether the saving in fuel costs will ever exceed the cost of the parts I don't know; I rather doubt it, but I haven't bothered to work it out, because the advantage of that aspect of the conversion is in not having to put fuel in the car so often; what it's all about is hassle - accumulating enough money to buy the parts is a hassle that I only have to go through once, while refuelling the car and perhaps putting off using it until I've got enough money to refuel it is a hassle that occurs all the time, so I like the idea of making it happen less often.

    Other advantages are that I like the increased elegance of making it use less fuel with a simple (in engineering terms) modification that does not itself represent a large expenditure of energy (all major parts being second hand, so the energy of manufacturing them is already "paid off"); the enjoyment of simply doing the conversion (which isn't to say it doesn't have its own major pain-in-the-arse factors, but IME with such operations the overall balance usually comes out positive once it's all done); and the satisfaction of knowing (if previous experience is a guide) that the web page I will write once it's all finished describing the things that went wrong and how I dealt with it will be helpful to at least one person doing the same thing, or something related to it, themselves.

    All this means that the money question at the start of the project is not "will I eventually spend less on fuel than I spend now on large chunks of metal", but simply "can I get together the money for the large chunks of metal".

    As far as landlords are concerned: I lived for 15 years in one of ten flats that opened off a communal stairwell. The replacement of the light bulbs in the communal stairwell was down to the landlord of the building, but he never did it, because he was a wanker. Well... he did replace one light bulb, with an incandescent which burnt out after about a month and left us back in the dark again. So once I had realised what the situation was, and being disinclined to keep stumbling up the stairs in the dark on the basis of some dumbass principle of "eurgh, it's not my job", I took to replacing the light bulbs myself - using CFLs, modified for longer life, which would last 2-3 years. I carried on doing this all the time I lived there because it was less trouble than falling over. Now that I don't live there any more, I expect everyone's falling over again...

    538:

    "that's the question: do you think we should stay in the world we evolved in, or should we build a world that can take advantage of us despite whatever we do? I'm for the first choice. You?"

    Oh sure, I'll take door number one, racoons on the roof made a believer out of me. Their eldritch shrieks as they fought all night would have made good sci-fi sound effects. Had to remove the mulberry tree they were using to get up there. Now I wonder if the advantage of a complex, integrated and highly interdependent environment over a stripped down, every species for itself type, has any metaphorical relevance to the economic environment. "Disruptor" seems to be a term of praise in the tech biz, which via Amazon, Apple and a few others is becoming Everybiz. But then rats, raccoons, thistles, kudzu and zebra mussels are big disruptors too, efficient resource allocators from one point of view. When does the stability of a cautious thinking, slower acting, regulated economy start looking like stifling bureaucratic stagnation, or is it way too late to start wondering about it anyway. Probably wouldn't want to smother the next James Watt or Steve Jobs in his crib, after all. Would we.(looks at ceiling, scratches chin, snaps out of it) NO, no! Of course not...

    539:

    OI...

    Pigeons are right at the bottom of the list when it comes to animals that humans can catch diseases from. The "pigeons carry disease" thing is simply propaganda from arseholes who make money off killing them, which finds easy acceptance due to the primate aversion to shit. In fact you can eat pigeon shit without coming to any harm. They don't carry psittacosis, they can't even catch bird flu even from massive doses of the active virus. The feather dust, like any fine dust, can cause lung problems, but that's only of significance if you actually live with pigeons, and is irrelevant in any normal circumstances.

    You are far more likely to catch diseases off cats and dogs (and a fox is basically a dog, also rather more likely to pick up things from rats than a domestic dog). You are vastly more likely to catch diseases off other humans. Any effort spent worrying about catching diseases from pigeons is a waste of Na+/K+ exchanges.

    540:

    I think you're still missing my point.

    I am pretty sure I understand it. Your position is "my landlord is a dick and I must be punished". You'd rather suffer than pay even a single cent that might in some way benefit someone else.

    I'm with Pigeon. Given the choice between putting in a bit of effort to be comfortable, and being uncomfortable in the rosy glow of knowing that I'm not contributing to other people's happiness... I choose the former. You can call me a socialist, a marxist, or a gullible idiot, I don't care. I'm comfortable, you're not. I'm happy, you're not. I win.

    In US terms: money is a tool that one can use to increase happiness. I use it that way.

    (it's worth noting that I live in a country that doesn't punish the poor quite as harshly as the US does, and has much better safeguards against unexpected events. I can use the $20k/year I don't pay for medical insurance to buy happiness instead of basic security. But again... I win).

    541:

    You're in NC? What cons do you make - ever hit Baltcon, or CapClave?

    I don't do cons. Just never got into it.

    But my son ran a D&D thing at the one last weekend. Maybe some other things.

    542:

    Well, yeah... if a US supercarrier turned up on a frozen river in Siberia, I think Russia would be a bit too fucked already for ekranoplans to make any difference :)

    All that you say about ekranoplans (and hovercraft) is true, but surely the main reason neither type of vehicle has really caught on is that they're basically a solution looking for a problem.

    Hovercraft, as zero-altitude helicopters that can be made much bigger than normal ones, do manage to find the occasional niche like ferrying tanks ashore or exploration over squishy surfaces - because they can go slow and stop. (I don't think the passenger ferries really count; they were more a desperate attempt to self-persuade that the idea isn't quite useless.) Ekranoplans have pretty much all the same limitations on where they can go plus the extra limitations of having to be moving at hundreds of miles an hour, not being able to turn very fast, and needing runway space at both ends (ie. flat land or water, but not a ship), which cuts down the number of things you can do with them to the point where they're not worth the hassle compared with building a few more of things you've already got lots of that can also do it, even if not quite as well.

    Arthur C Clarke once proposed that hovercraft were the future for land transport, because the only "road" they need is basically a horse gallop and you don't have to mess around with tarmac and shit. Not one of his more compelling arguments, it seems to me. I don't think he even mentioned the fuel consumption. Or the likely results of mass ownership of something with the weird handling characteristics of a hovercraft by people who find it difficult to drive a car on ice at walking pace. It strikes me that if you are going to swallow the fuel consumption, then the basic idea is then better implemented with a sort of ekranoplan bus; you can even let the grass grow long, you just have to avoid the development of tall trees.

    543:

    Support or oppose the ECHR as you like, this is a blog post about Brexit, isn't it?

    544:

    1) You went on to say an invisible or frictionless border was implied. It wasn't.

    2) I noticed the larger point about the "spirit" and public anger and discussed that, noting that both sides can do it. The parties to the GFA are committed to its terms and nothing less -- and nothing more. Anything else is, indeed, ever decreasing circles, which is why I want my fellow Remainers to drop the GFA nonsense and get back to more effective (and true) arguments.

    545:

    And that makes the ECHR irrelevant how exactly?

    546:

    rbarclay @ 527 Had to look that up - I would, of course have expected .Ös (!) The measurement system mostly works, though the only thing even I (aged 72) now normally use "Imperial" in are Miles & PINTS ... but then I've been using "mks" since I was 14. See also Pigeon @ 532. DO NOT KNOCK "Case Law" - it is infinitely superior to "Code Napoleon" top-down inflexibility - you DO realise that although Scottish Law is "Roman" based it also uses Case law? [ The classic er, case, for case law is, of course: The Mansfield Decision. ] Agree re. "special deal" - it ain't going to work.

    Pigeon @ 534 Like I'm still trying to work out that IF I convert the Great Green Beast to LPG, will I then be allowed to keep it, rather than having fucking bastard Khan steal it? [ The problem being that replacing the power plant is "easy" - but expensive, but/& there is no replacement vehicle AT ALL for a "proper" Land-Rover ]

    540/542 The ECHR is NOT part of the EU & is therefore irrelevant ( No matter what the rabid Brexiteers tell you )

    547:

    One problem with Ekranoplans is they move too fast too close to the water surface to use them easily in busy traffic areas like harbours and around inhabited coastlines. This limits their civilian use more than most folks might realise. Collision avoidance in coastal waters is already a PITA, not magnify the speed of one of the participants by a factor of ten and add to that a lack of visibility and radar capabilities from being only ten metres or so off the surface and bingo.

    548:

    Case Law / Mansfield decision It is quite possible that said decision altered the history of the entire planet, quite siginificantly.

    It was: "The air of England is too pure for a Slave to breathe" Thus making slavery in England illegal. [ Note ] From that decision flowed ... 1. The rebellion of Geo Washington & his rich friends, seeing which way the wind was blowing ... 2. The abolition of the slave Trade (in the middle of a world war, no less!) 3. The final abolition of slaveowning anywhere under Brit control ( Which basically meant the WIndies & S Africa, because everyone else had practically given up by then ) 4. The Second Slaveowners Treasonous Rebellion ( US Civil War ) 5. Those effects are still with us today - look at the USA ......

    [Note: THIS is case-law's great advantage - not only is it flexible, but, if the facts change (as they all-too-often do ) then judges AND JURIES can change the law, to suit the altered circumstances. Whereas a rigid, codified "Code Napoleon" type cannot & will render judgement "according to the law" no matter how fucking daft it is. Another example was the refusal of juries to convict, even when the defendant was obviously guilty, if it meant the Death penalty for a minor offence ... after a year or two of that, the law was changed .... Every so often, you still get juries refusing to convict, when something especially egregious &/or stupid has been done by "authority" .....

    549:

    That attitude is remarkably common. One of my jobs was giving energy advice for an electricity utility. I couldn't count the number of customers to whom I suggested insulation, heat pumps or switching to controlled load supply for hot water. Over 7 years in the job it would be several thousand at least. Not one single customer in a rental ever took my advice. Despite my explaining that I was in a rental myself and exactly how to do it. Not one.

    550:

    Very true, but if you scale up the design and strap a nuclear reactor in the back you've got a vehicle that can happily cruise across a planet that's predominantly water. Add some VSTOL drones and you've got a potential counter to those Amerikanski's and their CVNs.

    551:

    "The ECHR is NOT part of the EU & is therefore irrelevant ( No matter what the rabid Brexiteers tell you )"

    Ah, the bit in the brackets is why the bit between the ampersand and the brackets isn't true... :)

    You know they're not the same thing, I know they're not the same thing, but we also both know that if the question was being addressed solely on the basis of facts it would never have got to the stage of even thinking about a referendum in the first place. It is the irrationality of the nutters that is driving the whole thing, so their perceptions of the ECHR as a concomitant disadvantage of the EU and of the connections between the two insitutions do mean that the ECHR is relevant.

    (In much the same way their perceptions of Britain as a global economic superpower in its own right make Britain's global economic superpower status relevant, even though it hasn't got one and never has had.)

    LPG: I see the TFL website says it "may" do the trick but doesn't tell you how to find out for definite whether it actually will or not. Why do I get the feeling that the LPG get-out is something they were wanting not to have, but failing in that aim now want to make people think it'll be too much hassle to try...

    There has also been some uncertainty over whether my car would also be effectively banned from London on grounds of age - or so I gathered - but never bothered to find out properly since I have no intention of taking it there anyway; if I can't avoid going at all I'll go by train and save so much hassle. So I was mildly interested to also observe that in fact its age renders it completely exempt. Which leads me to suggest that all you need to do is exchange your Land Rover for one about 20 years older and Robert's your mother's brother, as they say, though strangely the identity of your father's brother remains an eternal mystery.

    552:

    Actually, it's FAR more closely entwined than that! Firstly, despite being mentioned only briefly, it is integral to the Good Friday Agreement, and the DUP would NOT be happy for Great Britain to be different from Northern Ireland in that respect.

    But, more subtly, see #248. In effect, the EU demands membership of the ECHR, so a prerequisite for leaving the latter is to leave the former. No, the matter cannot be separated.

    553:

    Somebody really ought to use that idea in a story.

    Maybe for added interest you could have a distinguished former cosmonaut in command and set the story in an archipelago which is a recreation of Earth’s geography set in a massive ocean on an enormous flat plate floating in space... :-)

    555:

    There are a lot of advantages to the old units (and even the old currency!), and I still use both - often mixed :-) But you need to have a fairly good level of arithmetic skills to do that. Changing to decimal currency did considerable harm to the UK population's arithmetic skills.

    Actually, what I don't understand is why the USA drives on the right. The rule of passing on the left (and that is what UK law is - you can drive anywhere on the road) is the same as for the sea, and is ancient. Currently, it's consolidated in the Highway Act 1835, but it's a lot older, and some Web pages claim it dates from the Romans.

    http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Will4/5-6/50/section/78

    I have no idea whether the story that Napoleon changed it in the areas he controlled is true, but the story that people changed because they drove wagons from the left hand horse is obviously putting the horse before the cart! They could FAR more easily simply have driven them from the right hand horse.

    556:

    The rebellion started in the North and we freed our slaves faster than the British would have. In fact most of them were freed by service in the rebellion against Britain. It is estimated that 1/4 of the American army at Yorktown was black.

    You might note that 5000 slaves belonging to Loyalists were transported to new homes by the British, where they remained slaves.

    Let me note that I don't claim the North was more "moral" than Britain. Slaves no longer mattered that much in the Northern economy, but slavery still served an economic purpose in British colonies and the South, which basically fed Britain's weaving industry. Still, it's clear that rewarding white Loyalists was more important to Britain than any principles of human rights AND that living with the curse of slavery in the South was preferable to the North than trying to go it alone.

    557:

    we freed our slaves faster than the British would have. In fact most of them were freed by service in the rebellion against Britain.

    Both sides played that card. Consider the Black Loyalists, for example:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Loyalist http://www.blackloyalist.info

    Absent the rebellion, would the northern colonies have freed their slaves?

    As for the other contrafactual Greg implies, would there have been a rebellion without the Mansfield decision?

    (After all, the British were doing other horrible things to the colonists, like insisting that they couldn't burn out the Catholics, refusing to let them break treaties signed with the Indians, and having the audacity to ruin smuggling by lowering the import duties on tea.)

    558:

    Again, I'm not sure if you're still missing my larger point, or truly (and incorrectly) don't think it matters (note, this is different to "it shouldn't matter", because that's just "if only" expressed differently, and therefore not relevant):

    Whether a hard-border is violation of the letter of GFA is not relevant; people's perceptions are, and wishing things were otherwise is futile.

    While I agree that it would be great if Remainers were a bit more careful in their language, and accurate in how the presented the issues facing NI post-Brexit, it seems unlikely that is going to happen (the fact that the issues faced by NI are even on the radar should be some kind of a relief). I also suspect that in some circles "violation of the GFA" is being used as a synonym for "disruptive to the peace process" -- again, better accuracy in terms and language would be nice; but as the old saying goes: Wish in one hand and piss in the other, and see which fills up first.

    559:

    "The rule of passing on the left... is the same as for the sea"

    Vessels on a collision course should alter course to starboard...

    You pass the other ship with it on your left (port), not with you on the left side of the channel/etc. Otherwise expressed as "you pass port to port". It's the opposite way round from the road, but the convention for expressing it is also sort of the other way round, referring to the other ship rather than to the road; the other ship is of course the only reference point whose existence can be guaranteed.

    The story I've heard is that keeping to the left of the road facilitates attacking the fellow coming the other way, while keeping to the right favours defence, and the different conventions reflect different degrees of historical oppression between the territories concerned. I don't believe it though :)

    The one that puzzles me is why UK pedestrian passages (eg. the pedestrian corridors on the Underground) are the opposite way round from the roads. The signs nearly always say "Keep Right" - I have occasionally seen "Keep Left" but it is extremely rare. "So as not to confuse sailors" doesn't seem an adequate explanation.

    Units: I agree that the old units are often more convenient sizes for the purposes of estimation or approximation, for which reason I do still use them "colloquially" as it were, but I'm sure that is simply habituation rather than an inherent property of the units. On the other hand the inherent property that they don't have is any sensible relationship between the units for different quantities, and the magic numbers that descend in hordes when you do any calculation involving mixed quantities are a pain in the arse (exceptions do exist, but are rare). It's not that I can't handle the mental arithmetic, I just don't see the point in making my life difficult.

    By contrast, the magic numbers to convert imperial to metric can very often be usefully simple, at least in the world where π = √10 :)

    Metric inch = 25mm Metric foot = 300mm Metric yard = 1 metre Metric nautical mile = 2km Metric horsepower = 3/4kW Metric BTU = 3W Metric pound = 500g Metric ton = 1 tonne Metric gallon = 5l Metric atmosphere = 100kPa

    etc.

    Arithmetic skills: the joke (which I have seen applied to both UK and US contexts) is that kids who don't learn them in school nevertheless acquire them rapidly to a high degree when they start dealing drugs; after all, in school you don't get your legs broken for getting it wrong. (There is also a version with one extra word, but its influence is negative.)

    248: aha! I intended to quote that but I thought it was Charlie who'd posted it, and a quick scan up and down using Charlie's avatar as a cue to check the text didn't find it. Now I know why :)
    560:

    As an additional thought:

    I haven't actually seen many people discussing "violation of the GFA" as some kind of slam-dunk way of stopping Brexit. Any time it comes up is in much the same context Charlie used it here, as a passing footnote, or possibly (as I said previously) as a synonym for "disrupting the peace process". Even if Brexit in general or a hard border in particular did violate the GFA, there is nothing extra-legal about that which would prevent the Brexit train wreck carrying on -- arguing about whether the GFA is violated is truly pointless (except as a pedantic exercise in point scoring: I'm right and you're wrong!)

    The louder arguments I see, hear and read from local politicians and the NI public (as well as most UK politicians) are that a hard border will disrupt trade, travel, business, and communities -- these are not debatable points, this will happen with a hard border. Disruption of the peace process is a second order effect, and subject to many other variables (current events and news in NI, and ROI, are already shifting these variables in a highly unpredictable fashion); any serious analyses of what happens post-Brexit with any form of border controls is all but impossible, except to say that it's not going to be sunshine and rainbows (although unicorns may be possible -- in the Equoid sense).

    561:

    Damn! I must be going senile :-( Yes, I knew that about the rule at sea, so why did I have such a stupid brain-fart? Thank you for correcting it.

    The reason that pedestrian routes use the other convention is so that they can see oncoming traffic - it's a trivial way of improving safety.

    Yes. I can believe it. The reason that they were so good in the UK is that simply using the old currency (before pocket calculators, of course) was a mental exercise in itself. Pounds, shillings, pence and farthings, with the half-crown as a very common coin? Guineas, groats, marks, and so on went out of common use a long time ago.

    562:

    Yes. And that includes a hard border in the Irish sea. While the 'protestant' hard-liners could be simply kicked in the teeth, and I can't see that they would get support from outside in the way that the other side did, it would be extremely messy, at best. Even if it could be pushed through, which is unlikely.

    563:

    Nor is implementing an "Irish Sea border" even as simple as just kicking a different set of hard-liners in the teeth; this will also disrupt trade, travel, and business (less direct impact on communities, as they tend not to straddle the Irish sea!) -- and the second order effect on the peace process will be just as chaotic and hard to predict.

    The other thing to remember is that it's not just Unionist and Nationalist hard-liners objecting to the hardening of either border, moderates and NI residents across the political and social spectrum will be negatively impacted and are already pissed off about it. This situation is unlikely to improve.

    564:

    Pigeon @ 548 Yes, I'd noticed ... because most Local Authorities in London have fllets of small LPG-powred vehicles. But if stinking crrok Khan & his supposedly-"green" allies take note of that & publicly admit it, then we know what will happen. Whereas they want to be able, under the entirely false guise, of improving "London'a Air Quality" simply to remove lots of privately-owned vehicles, from their owners, with no compensation or any possible replacement available. I'm not sure at what point the "age exemption" cuts in - & wheteher it will roll forward, or be a fixed date .... ( I might have a get-out there, of course ... )

    @ 556 100kPa = 0.1MPa = 1 Bar and, you forgot the really interesting one: 1 Chain = 20 metres

    EC @ 558 There was a very good reason for Guineas: 5% commission 100 Pounds sterling to thw winner & 100 shillings to the commssion-agent(s)

    565:

    The most comprehensive (I can't vouch for accuracy) version of this i've seen is: https://www.worldstandards.eu/cars/driving-on-the-left/

    The idea of teamsters driving a wagon on the left horsewas based on the idea of using "Horse mounting blocks" that were already commonplace on the sides of roads and streets. They would mount a horse on the left, for the same reasons everyone else had always done (right-handedness), which meant the left horse of a team and passing on the right.

    566:

    Oh, yes, but that disruption is no more than Brexit will do to a different set of people! I quite take your point, but the moderate majority isn't going to become violent without more provocation than just major disruption. There are other groups that are :-(

    567:

    Neither you nor I are anything like old enough to remember when guinea coins were in common use :-) We do, however, remember half-crowns and farthings.

    568:

    Ah, no, the pedestrian routes I was talking about were the ones where there is no possibility of encountering any traffic other than pedestrians, but the density of the pedestrian traffic is high enough to make it worthwhile separating it by direction, as in the pedestrian corridors on the Underground, though they are not the only example.

    Come to that, even the Underground escalator convention is back to front - slow lane on the right, fast lane on the left - compared to roads.

    569:

    Age exemption is 40 years and rolling, so your beastie has a fair while to go yet before it's covered.

    570:

    Ah, yes. They are simply following the same rule - which is logical, when you think about it. Consider the case of an undivided road, where the pedestrians move onto a sunken route - doing it the other way would force them to switch over. And Planners are a sub-species of Bureaucrat, who follow rules in preference to taking considered decisions.

    571:

    Thanks, I may, though I think of a large terran-type planet with less iron, but a larger radius.

    Oh, you will not like what just struck me: on board the ship, EKR Enterprise: "Ensign Smith, steady as she goes." "Aye, aye, Captain Ivanovitch...."

    572:

    Well, I was thinking of this one...

    https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/spring_2007/fiction_missile_gap_by_charles_stross/

    ...but yours would probably work too. :-)

    573:

    In case anyone is still reading this rarified conversation, this article is more detailed and eloquent than I have managed so far, regarding NI and the state of the Good Friday Agreement:

    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/08/01/playing-with-fire-brexit-and-the-decay-of-the-good-friday-agreement/

    574:

    Thank you for that. Most interesting, though I am afraid that he was far too optimistic, and the failure mode was predictable in 1998. I blame That Blair for the worst of that, at least up until Brexit, but let's skip that.

    575:

    Whenever I hear nostalgia for old systems of measurement, I'm reminded of the Mars Climate Orbiter. If I remember correctly, NASA gave thrust specifications in Newtons, while Lockheed used Foot-Pounds. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

    576:

    because most Local Authorities in London have fllets of small LPG-powred vehicles.

    But are they tasty?

    577:

    Also little piece of information I fished out today about military ekranolet with missiles - apparently, current plans include some drafts that are staged for development in the first half of next decade, and their primary goal is patrolling of Northern Sea route. There are currently too many options to chose from with limited funding of the military, however, if US would be too insistent on invading into these waters, the plan might become real. http://tass.com/defense/1015327

    Eventually we ended up with some ferry services (e.g. the big SR.N4 car ferry hovercraft on the English Channel ... but that was killed off by a combination of rising fuel costs and competition from the Channel Tunnel.

    That's a very interesting info, I never heard of it before, it seems though the ferries had pretty small influence after English channel opening. I heard about US military vehicle, and Zubr is pretty popular out there for being such humongous and magnificent beast, but civilian application is the whole other deal.

    Now that I remembered something, there are also hydrofoil. They were quite popular in USSR in a similar role (sea and river passenger traffic and recreation) and I've had an opportunity to ride one of these cool ships in the 90-s before most of them were dismantled. They are beautiful machines, and some of them are still hopping around - not as fast as flying vehicles, but way faster than classic boats. At least until gasoline is chap enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z95B6eMn3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZPSk6C_84Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEUczL9kQo

    Also some news coming up recently, they've built and tested first craft of the new series. Too bad I'm not going to see it on my vacation yet, it's the only one that was finished and it is deployed in Crimea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2llKruER4A

    578:

    In the US people who grew up here walk on a road on the left if no sidewalks or similar, but walk in crowds, (well generally), and drive on the right.

    Airports are were the convention breakers drive me nuts as there is so little room to maneuver.

    579:

    If I remember correctly, NASA gave thrust specifications in Newtons, while Lockheed used Foot-Pounds.

    An example of when pushing NASA things into the private sector proved a bad idea. It was a Reagan thing. Some things you want under control of a single group.

    580:

    English channel I meant to say about tunnel, ofc.

    582:

    Just a general comment on a major reason I read this blog. My window into EU/UK politics here from the US is very small. And a bit smudged. Unless I want to spend an hour a day scouring overseas sources my (and others here) information flow is very limited. This blog is one way of getting a better picture on things. A bit (big grin) biased at times but still a better picture than from US news sources.

    I keep thinking back to GT asking me what was so bad about Hillery to so many people. Well over here May seems somewhat bland unless you read here and other places about her policies and views for the last decade or few.

    583:

    They use those hydrofoils on the Yangtze in China, too.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgqwxNJNsBk

    IIRC the Canadian Navy had one (or was trialling one) for patrolling along the West Coast, but it hit too many logs that escaped from log booms (or had to go too slow to avoid logs — my memory is fuzzy over the details. (Heard from an ex-Navy chap, so literally hearsay.)

    584:

    I would say predictable, but not inevitable (at the time). However, since I continue to live here, it should be clear that I choose to believe in hope in the face of all else.

    585:

    I got to ride on an SR.N4 across the Channel twice (a return trip) in the 1980s.

    It's hard to appreciate how large the thing is from the outside; it's like a roll-on/roll-off ferry ship, only it's a hovercraft. Very, very loud, not quite loud enough to need ear defenders, but close. The engines start up, rise to a thunderous roar, and then it's like the room you're sitting in is in an elevator and it goes up two stories in a couple of seconds ... then begins to fall, sideways, off the concrete parking ramp until it hits the sea in a spray of foam and starts to accelerate.

    The traditional car ferries sailed across the English Channel at maybe 20-30 km/h; the SR.N4 raced across it at 110-120 km/h, making the crossing in under half an hour from take-off to landing.

    The only other thing I've been on in the water that came close was the high speed catamaran on the Irish Sea (which hit maybe 70-80 km/h).

    586:

    Hydrofoils are still operating in Poland:

    https://www.zegluga.pl/hydrofoils-gdynia-hel

    587:

    I saw a one or two "docked" USN ones in Key West years ago. I just remember them being big.

    All the maintenance issues of jet engines with the noise to go with it. Oh yeah, toss in regular salt mist into the intakes.

    588:

    The only time I was sick crossing the channel was on a hovercraft. And it was a lovely still day. Might have been the excitement (I was fairly young), or too much sunshine, or the vibration.

    I've felt nauseous on some rough crossings, but never actually brought anything up since then.

    589:

    Pigeon @ 566 BUGGER I thought it might be 25 years ….

    Charlie @ 582 Yes well, I’m an honorary member of the Goodwin Sands Potholing club – i.e. I’ve been to the Goodwins on an SRN4 – wonderfully silly, had to be done, but, alas, no more ….

    Driving on the Right/Left Everyone USED to have the Brit convention – drive on the left At the Frog revolution it was reversed – because the reason (so I’m told) was that most people were right-handed, so it was convenient if you were carrying a sword …. Unfortunately, most people are right-handed & even more so, right-eyed, which means that the Brit convention is probably automatically safe – if you are driving a motor vehicle – see also road death etc statistics …. Even more fun is when this translates to raiways. SNCF drive on the left, but not in Elsass-Lotharingen ( I wonder why that might be so?) … bur Paris Metro drives on the Right. ÖBB drive on the left … I think Sweden ( Statens Jämvägar ) also “keep left …. etc

    590:

    Sigh.

    Ok, for people who've not noticed that little Tommy Boy was released today, the massive fake-bullshit spin (which, in particular includes the utter fucking shame of a Holocaust Memorial Trust Foundation Leader denouncing an actual Camp survivor, which is 100% when you know you're dealing with a sociopathic non-entity without a Soul - note: these are very specific insults and now proven true) and C4 and BBC pushing a fucking embarrassing lack of skill set little fucking pretenders or the "White Helmet" being taking in by Israel etc etc.

    100% Israel Gov is running full spectrum Ops - oHHHH!! Danny Le Fink got fingered! (see above about Institute).

    Greg, if he was honest, might note we predicted all this storm with almost 100% accuracy. Will he? Zzzzz.

    We forget which bullshit narrative we were spiking, literally 100% of Western Media is now full on sociopathic bullshit.

    ~

    Ah, sorry: the question we had is - are you all aware this is all utter bullshit and propaganda or what?

    Nope, still not the question.

    Hmm.

    Oh. Nope, still cannot remember it as we view a trillion screens of lies. Ah, that was it: If you've ever experienced it, what's it like to watch your Reality Crash from an internal perspective?.

    Cough

    Oh, that was it: QANON went all ultra-active. MF muppets don't understand what it's actually doing. Someone wake up the little rabbits, they're making psyop warriors just like Breivik.

    p.s.

    Danny Le Fink, of Philip Cross Fame Got Fingered about Gatestone today: amateurs. Ask him about the Gatestone Gateway Payments to Breivik allowing him to buy grenades and that classy classy suite.

    You're fucking Amateurs.

    Oh, and you just declared war, which is a frakking huge mistake - .CN weps involved, DERP.

    591:

    Gaah, you've reminded me of the one time I used that thing - in the dark and with wind speed close to its operational limit (presumably based on passenger reaction rather than actual structural safety). I swear it hit every single wave top, bouncing from one to the next providing the full down/up roller coaster experience 2 or 3 times a minute. I never felt the need to try it again.

    ( I do remember the small passenger hovercraft to the Isle of Wight as being great fun - there was no physical barrier between the pilot and the passengers so you could see/feel how it spent half the time travelling 'sideways' )

    592:

    "Remember the driver might say "I'm carrying potatoes for Tesco" but the border force hears "I've got fifty Syrians in the boot"."

    And the government rapidly setting up a vastly expanded border force is one which holds its position based on xenophobia.

    593:

    Unfortunately, most people are right-handed & even more so, right-eyed, which means that the Brit convention is probably automatically safe – if you are driving a motor vehicle

    To me that would make driving on the right side better. You would be sitting on the left and could operate all those extra controls easier without looking.

    At least for me my right arm is more accurate when not looking than my left.

    594:

    To stay somewhat neutral, let's just say neither "case law" (or common law) nor civil code law[1] are superior or inferior, just different, 'mkay?

    For starters, it's not just the Code Napoleon, in Germany we have the BGB, other countries might have other traditions. The Code Napoleon was influential, but codification started before it, and the Bavarian civil code of 1756 and Prussian state law of 1794 are somewhat older than the CN; it's a typical Enlightenment project, though one might argue about the proportion of "Englightened absolutism" involved[1].

    The European "Ur-Example" would be Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis, hence the "Roman Law"[2]. Where the original Roman law of the Republic would have been somewhat different, e.g. a collection of edicts and laws with a lot of customary law thrown in, not necessarily easy to get through, which lead to the codification[3].

    As for why Common Law is not inherently superior, it's always nice to rephrase the advantages cited to get to the disadvantages, and there is a sliding slope from "flexible" to "capricious". For debatable values of "flexible", case law is somewhat binding, e.g. inflexible, whereas you can change laws in civil codes. e.g. they are flexible. Though you might rephrase the latter as "legislative tyranny", if you like; or lack of new laws as "Parliament and prime minister sitting duck and having a jolly good time without doing work". Yes, we could go on with the spin doctoring...

    And in the end, it might depend on one judge to decide on an issue, compared to discussions in parliaments etc. in Civil Code Law. To go back to Mansfield on slavery, there are a bunch of somewhat differing decisions. In the Sommerset case, Mansfield said there was no precedent of a slave being removed from Britain; another judge might have used an analogy to indentured servitude or villeinage to say it is legal, or he might have created another justification.

    If something similar happened in a country with a Civil Code law, having the same conditions as Britain at the time, e.g. no law concernign slavery, strictly speaking with no law governing the issue, the decision would have been similar to Mansfield; using some analogy to say slavery is legal might be possible in case law, but difficult in Civil Codes that don't include slavery; there might be some discussion[4] about laws introducing slavery, but that would take some time. In the meantime, we would automatically get the best result possible in case law, without the problematic possibilities.

    As for gaps in legislation, one might call that benificial, but then there is this thing with legal certainty.

    Leaving those rephrasings aside, judge-made law is somewhat problematic with Seperation of Powers; it blurs the line between judicial and legislative branches. And you have the funny discussions about judicial acticism vs judicial restrain, though you have that one in Civil Code law, too[5]

    On a quite abstract level, one problem might be Common Law rests on looking for analogies to precedent cases, where judging if some analogy is spot on or too far fetched is often up to debate[6].

    Civil Law should go fot abstract principles, though the level of abstraction might differ somewhat; the BGB is said to be less concerned with trying to model every posssible case than the Code Napoleon and more looking for principles from which judges can deduce the particulars; it might have something to do with the Abstraction principle in contract law.

    As for analogy, in German Law there is a "Analogieverbot", e.g. "prohibition of using analogies", which is somewhat tied in with nulla poena sine lege, e.g. no punishment without a corresponding law. The only time analogy was explicitly used in German law was from 1935 to 1945, ehm, not a good precedent; "if there is no law corresponding to the deed, the deed is punished according to the law whose essence is best appliable.", yes, somewhat free translation.

    If you want to see how German Law deals with new putative crimes and gaps in legislation, to use an example, there is the Case of theft of electricity of 1899, please note that even Civil code law systems sometimes cite precedents.

    Some guy tapped into the electrical lines next to his room and used the electricity. When in court, problem was "theft" was only applicable to "withdrawl of physical object", which didn't include electricity; so alternatives were

    a) define electricity as a physical object (problem: stretching definition) b) use laws concerning theft through analogy (problem: using analogy. Anybody concerned with intellectual property rights in the room?)

    So in this case the result was the guy got away scots-free.

    And in 1900 there was a new law concerning "deprivation of electrical energy". With the legislative power being German Imperial gouvernment, e.g. not necessarily democratic by a modern yardstick, but still, somewhat better than one judge deciding once and for all how to deal with it[7].

    [1] Yes, most of the people involved with promulgating codified law are on the "absolutist strong man" side of the political scale, but then, for the people at the buttom of the barrel most of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern history it mainly came down to "the nobles and rich balking down on us" vs. "the king and the nobles and the rich balking down at us, that is if they are not balking at each other, which is the usual state of things"

    [2] Don't get me started on Ancient Germanic Law, which added trial by ordeal to European law, AKA "put your hand in boiling water and let's see who heals faster by God's will(tm). Though wiki has this citation about Frankish lawyers, e.g. "rachimburgs": "Living libraries, they were law incarnate, unpredictable and terrifying." Though googling for the term "rachimburg" doesn't yield much. Fast forward to "germanists" and romanists in German Romanticism...

    [3] At least in German law another problem were many different jurisdictions. Which might actually still be of interest when interpreting historical contracts...

    [4] Please note the legislative is usually elected, while judges are not elected in sane countries. So the legislative branch is usually somewhat more democratic.

    [5] Rule of Thumb for those involved seems to be "It's activism when I don't like the results"

    [6] I could tell some stories, though we might arge if the analogies are applicable...

    [7] And one thing you really don't want to get me started one is judges and lawyeres vs. science and technology. OK, most of our politicians being lawyers...

    595:

    Hm, seems there are a bunch of theories; the one I like best is a postilion usually sitting on the last left horse better to ues his whip on the other horses. Reasoning is you go right with that one to better interact with oncoming traffic, though personally I'd go left in that case, for exactly the same reasons...

    596:

    Hm, reminds me of Captain Ivanova. Err.

    Though I guess Admiral Kuznetsov would be a more probable name. Or Kniaz Potyomkin Tavricheskiy. Or Aurora.

    597:

    If by "irrelevant" you mean "unimportant", it can be as important as you want, it is not "relevant" to a discussion about Brexit, because the European Union and Council of Europe are completely different things.

    598:

    "Whether a hard-border is violation of the letter of GFA is not relevant; people's perceptions are, and wishing things were otherwise is futile."

    Amazing. I've acknowledged perceptions and the peace process from my first comment. Perceptions can be changed, that's what elections and referendums are all about. Whether perceptions are correct is very relevant for others especially if they want to change them. Same goes for Brexiters economic perceptions versus the reality. It's what the blog post was all about.

    "again, better accuracy in terms and language would be nice; but as the old saying goes: Wish in one hand and piss in the other, and see which fills up first." Lack of moral agency. Perhaps Brexiters are to be held responsible for the consequences of incorrect perceptions in Northern Ireland (they should be) but Remainers should not? Should May go on the TV and use the same phrase?

    599:

    OY @ 587 I assume you are referring to wanker Corbyn? Remarkably like the Bourbons - "Learnt Nothing & forgotten Nothing" There are rumours (see the "indy" ) that thecentrist (never mind the Blairite ) Labour MP's are getting seriously pissed-off wit this & wondering about forming a new party ... Will only work if the Tories also split - along Brexit lines.

    As for Isreal & "bennie" - it's now a very bad funhouse mirror, with the nutters on both sides running th show - racist & religious thugs the lot of them. MEanwhile the ordinary Isreali & Palestinians are being shat-on byt heir respective "own" sides. WHich resembels the tory/Corbyn problem, only even worse ....

    Trottelreiner @ 591 Your [7] is very apt - simply don't allow politicians anywhere near technical/scientific legislation without a brigade of keepers, because you can guarantee they will screw up.

    Thing @ 595 Taking not too far out of context: Perhaps Brexiters are to be held responsible for the consequences of ..... Yes, well, if we are unfortunate enough to get the hard Brexit the loonies have been wishing for, I can seriously see rope & lamp-posts being put to use. Apart from Farage, BoJo & JRM, who else is most likely to be, erm "left dangling" ? [ Unfortunately, Murdoch & the Barclays will be out of reach ]

    600:

    You seem to have an extensive knowledge of weapons platforms and strategic initiatives over the last few decades - but you don't come across as a 'Guns & Ammo' / 'Soldier of Fortune' reader:) It's evident in your work - the Laundry Files in particular. So was there some point where you decided you needed a realistic backdrop (or at least a well-informed friend) for near-future fiction? Was there a particular piece of work that made you decide to seriously invest time in these things? Or was it a general interest you always had that was honed by the work you were doing? I'm genuinely interested in how you manage this.

    601:

    I saw a one or two "docked" USN ones in Key West years ago. I just remember them being big.

    You thought the USN LCACs were big?

    The Mark 3 SR.N4 was roughly twice the size and nearly double the payload of an LCAC.

    (And the Russian Zubr class LCAC is even bigger — full load of 555 tons, payload of up to 150 tons.)

    603:

    Frankly, you’re now being both condescending and disingenuous, while cherry-picking bits out of the middle of my replies to manufacture arguments about. I shall draw a line under my responses.

    604:

    "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." You clearly haven't.

    Changing perceptions is HARD, and takes decades at best, and more often centuries, even when all of the causal factors have been removed (which they haven't in this case).

    605:

    Re #587: I believe so. Just when we thought that we could see how bad things could get, they get worse. I believe that this is an externally supported (possibly even foreign sponsored) attempt to split Labour. While a Corbyn government wouldn't be great, the prospect of a Johnson one following a train crash Brexit, Conservative landslide (in seats, even if the converse in votes), Rees-Mogg as Chancellor and America First TTIP, makes it look like heaven.

    606:

    I'm fairly sure what we're witnessing is the shock doctrine — disaster capitalism — finally being bought home and applied to the UK/USA, which invented it and applied it to everyone else (as a form of post-colonial asset-stripping).

    In particular, because the US and UK economies were formerly reasonably stable, it is necessary to manufacture crises: this is being accomplished iteratively and supported by the neo-nazi revival (as in Germany circa 1930-35, the Nazis are seen as useful tools by the industrialists — or in this case, the hedge funds).

    On top of this we can add accelerating climate change, both as a useful source of crisis justification and as a tool for recruiting neo-nazi look-alikes (whether the shape of white supremacists, BJP Hindu extremists, various Polish, Italian, German, Hungarian and other nationalists, Erdogan's followers in Turkey, and so on) to do the leg-work of shifting the Overton window far enough to make insane uber-capitalist asset strippers sound reasonable in comparison.

    Corbyn's ascent within Labour is if anything a fortuitous accident — he's a populist, but the wrong kind of populist for the disaster capitalists (a socialist one!) hence all the mud-slinging. He may actually be about a generation ahead of the times in this respect, insofar as I'm guessing anyone left standing by 2050 will happily embrace socialism if it just promises ubiquitous air conditioning and storm shelters for all (and hangs the hedge fund managers from the lamp posts outside their survivalist bunkers).

    607:

    Agreed.

    I am in a mixed mind about Corbyn, but McDonnell is an Old Labour fanatic, which is a tribalist rather than socialist doctrine; I remember when Labour was the Nasty Party, and destroyed the UK economy and most of the social and political unity that has arisen from the war (Thatcher finished that off, of course).

    However, you are too optimistic about 2050. Yes, they will embrace something called socialism, but the people they will hang will be relative innocents who just have identifiable assets and, especially, those who embrace a heretical form of socialism. Yes, people like you and me.

    608:

    I'm gonna argue with some of the economic predictions. Not long term but at least what would happen on the day vs gradually in the weeks coming up to it.

    As a general rule, if a prediction posits that people will ignore an obvious chance to get rich quick ... it's probably not ideal.

    The market isn't perfect but it's also not utterly misaligned.

    Perhaps we guess that fuel will be an issue. As an individual my instinct would be to stock up on a few hundred liters of petrol and fill the central heating tank weeks or months in advance.

    Ditto for stocking up on food.

    So, then, why would business owners and people who generally buy low, sell high, not see the same opportunity? if a fuel shortage is expected then stocking up (and in so doing cushioning the shortage a little bit) is the rational and selfish obvious choice and way to make some money.

    Markets deal poorly with unexpected events. Unexpected natural disasters, votes going dramatically different to expectations from polling or network effects leading to cascades.

    When the pound collapsed after the brexit vote part of that price change was down to projection of the possibility of a no-deal brexit.

    If, as we get closer to the date, the government continues to play ookie-cookie then expect the pound to take a slide downhill as it becomes more and more clear that they're not going to get their act together.

    Or if the government suddenly comes out and announces that there will definitely be a no deal brexit months in advance.

    But if it just slowly happens the markets will already largely be accounting for known variables. If it's expected that the price of a stock or currency would collapse the day after a no-deal brexit then someone would have to be an idiot to not take that into account if they were buying the currency the day before. So it's going to get encoded into the price.

    This reminds me of a question someone posted on a finance forum where they'd come up with the bright idea of buying stocks the day before dividends were due then selling and buying another stock where the dividend was due 2 days later and continuing on like such. It had not occurred to them that the price of stocks would drop the day after dividends were paid exactly because of that making their scheme worthless.

    Making predictions that the price of a particular stock or currency would drop on the day of brexit is kinda similar.

    Of course if everyone is expecting a last second deal and then it falls through that's a different matter but sudden changes don't typically come from long term already-known information.

    609:

    if a fuel shortage is expected then stocking up (and in so doing cushioning the shortage a little bit) is the rational and selfish obvious choice and way to make some money.

    That assumes that (a) you have the money to spend on stocking up, and (b) you have somewhere to store the fuel.

    (I'm ignoring something like inventory tax, because I don't know if it applies in the UK. I know it's a factor in the US.)

    Another option would be to lock in your prices, but that only works if the supplier you deal with is both solvent after Brexit and inclined to honour the contract — two more risks to account for.

    610:

    Color me somewhat unimpressed by you stating it won't be as bad because people might start hoarding some weeks in advance, thus creating scarcity.

    Happy happy joy joy indeed.

    611:

    As you say, and the SRN4 was also LOUD enough to draw the attention of viewers in Dover Castle, on a windy day (I was one of them, back in 1995).

    612:

    On the driving on the left (or wrong ;-) ) side thing as I was told it:-

    Wagon/carriage drivers in the British Isles and North America all used to drive from the RH seat (US made "Westerns" are correct in this respect), which made it easier to judge passing distances if you passed right to right.

    In continental Europe, they commonly used postillions, who always sat on the left horse of "their" pair, and that made judging passing distances easier if you passed left to left.

    613:

    As an aside to this, despite there being differences in the bases of legal systems you also get similarities. For example, the French use a "examining magistrate" to evaluate a case: In Scotland we have a similar system where the case is evaluated by the "procurator fiscal" (plural procurators fiscal, because there are many procurators and one fiscal system).

    Info based on living in Scotland, and watching the French show "Engrenages" (Tr. Cogs or Gears, but for some unaccountable reason the Engl, er British Broadcasting Corporation called it Spiral): Either way, highly recommended it you can cope with French dialogue (with support of subtitles).

    614:

    As Charlie says "General Interest", and since like attracts like he's not the only one; you'll find knowledgeable discussion of the public domain aspects of current and near (in defense terms) future weapon systems if you look hard enough.

    615:
    but the people they will hang will be relative innocents who just have identifiable assets and, especially, those who embrace a heretical form of socialism. Yes, people like you and me.

    Hm, going through my music collection for this year's holiday in Italy[1] I came about this by SNFU...

    "So, he went and found himself a wife And decided to get on with life And they sit and play the waiting game But when the bombs woke up to take this all away

    So they drink, and it all goes away And they smile, because there still here today And they laugh, in the fakest of ways Cuz, one day the'll be no tomorrow And they know one day the'll be no tomorrow"

    Though I could swear there is a "and they know when they don't need no tomorrow" at the end. And I listened to that one quite often between 18 an 27, well, we have a history of subclinical or not so subclinical anxiety disorders in the family...

    And there I am, misremembering Heinlein's "All you Zombies" somewhat, "I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away."

    And remembering the guy next to me in history A-levels who gave the cassette with this song to me back in the day, some time before he had to repeat class because apparently getting stoned enough to communicate with your guardian spirits is not that conductive for school; I told him about CNT and FAI in the Spanish Civil War, and he said that couldn't be anarchism, it sounded like communism. And IIRC I was reading "The Selfish Gene" at the same time.

    There have been talks about getting our class together for the 20th anniversary of our "Abitur", though that would have been last year, which might say something about our class or not. Maybe it'll work out this year. Guess it'll be funny to see how people remember me[2]. I wonder which band t-shirt I'm going to wear...

    [1] Err, "I am just going outside and may be some time". [2] Without undue ideas of grandiosity, I have the feeling they will remember me...

    616:
    there's a definitively non-null chance of the "case law" judicial principle not surviving an EU re-entry (it caused no end of grief in just about every working group, and also: this is the *21st century*, not A Glorious Empire Of Ages Past).

    You do remember Brexit's not going to rid the EU of common law systems, right?

    617:

    Malta and Cypus too.

    618:

    I still have fond memories of the Steyr AMR in "Halting State"...

    As for shared interesrs, in my case, hanging around with some flight simulator fans (hello Karsten) in my late teens and trying to figure which plane was best in which scenario might have something to do with it, and I remember a heated discussion about T and N stoff in chemistry class, chlorine trifluoride[1] is another of these things that come up from time to time hereabouts.

    Got somewhat surreal when another friend got Karsten into "Deine Lakaien", though. Goths...

    As for OGH, I sometimes wonder how much Charlie's experience with RPGs gets into his writing. Juliette's battle sequences in "Saturn's Children" somewhat reminded me of a GM explaining the locale. And AD&D is not that much into modern weaponry, but AFAIR me looking into modern firearms[2] started when we played Cyberpunk 2020 in the early 2000s. Not that I remember much of that sessions, it gets somewhat more lucid when we started Kult and I rediscovered the fun convulated gnostic cosmogonies can be...

    [1] The husband of my aunt was trained as a plane mechanic and had some interesting literature, which made for interesting information before the internet made everythin searchable. And Karsten insisted on T stuff being able to dissolve humans, well, hydrogen peroxide is fun, but not that fun. Might explain the whitened black guy in Iron Sky, though...

    [2] Quite likely again, I have some strange attractors that show up as new only for me to realize that I was into them before, usually interupted by some change of friends, workaholic phase and/or depression.

    619:

    The difference between case law and civil codes actually is not that clear cut.

    (Please note I'm not a lawyer, and actually my (thankfully limited) exposure to legal proceedings is with the German system, not the French, and I guess I should go out drinking with some lawyers. Cue fantasies about mediterranean looking lawyers into BDSM, err..)

    E.g. in German Law there are a bunch of cases about state and religion that get cited whenever new problems come around. In my case, I got interested when some employer insisted on me not using Hubbard's technolgies[1].

    Actually, it's not ACTUAL case law because they are cited as examples how the priciples laid down in Grundgesetz, BGB and like have to be applied according to sensible discourse and logic, not as binding decisions. Still, people abide by them because current courts most likely would use the same logic, and better not to bother higher courts with appeals. And the change of courts getting to other conclusions are small.

    [1] Not that I ever would. And explaining why actual Scientologist would still have not problem with undermining a firm despite of that, while it might make for some problems with Freezoners...

    620:

    People who have money and who want to make more money have a very straightforward incentive to stock up.

    It does not depend on just one single penniless individual.

    @Trottelreiner

    Businesses stocking up in advance of an expected shortage is a good thing.

    If there's a shortage it's better to be in a situation where many people have filled some warehouses with whatever there's a shortage of and who then sell it than in a situation where nobody bothered stocking up because either they're all perfectly unselfish idiots or the local powers outlawed markups in such a case.

    If there's a sudden shortfall in supply vs demand you want to be in the universe where someone throws open a warehouse and shouts "now selling at 50% make-me-rich markup!" not in the universe where they go "warehouse? why would I spend my money filling a warehouse, some idiot made it illegal for me to sell at a markup if this happened." and then people starve.

    though the world is full of people who would make such rules and they collectively have more blood on their hands than many of the worlds worst dictators.

    "Hoarding" is only a bad thing if it's due to an event happening with no warning. If you can start importing ,say, rice 6 months in advance of the expected event then the community is strictly better off than one where people didn't start doing that.

    It's one of the sometimes-seemingly-rare cases where market forces actually do perfectly align with what we actually want them to do to improve human welfare.

    621:

    EC @ 602 Yes & no - Corbyn is entirely a big enough fuckwit to be entirely capable of doing this all on his own, with no external "help" ... contrarywise, re. Charlie @ 603 - I tend to agree. There's no doubt (now) that certain groups stand to do extremely well out of wrecking both the UK & the USA - in fact thw whole thing is remarkably like the plot of one or two John Buchan novels.

    622:

    German TV used the original French title, though they later on taped the English title on that. Thanks for the proposal. ;)

    As for the examining magistrates, in Germany that'd be the Staatsanwalt. Perusing wiki, in France that'd be a judge, though in Germany it's a lawyer.

    Judges in Germany nowadays are mainly involved with deciding the case, not the actual investigation. Though as said, I guess I should hang out with some lawyers again..

    623:

    However we look at it, it's the same principal of having a lawyer (profession, not job title) support a police investigation and make a decision as to whether or not there actually is a case to answer. Is there a similar show in Germany? There was in the UK back in the 1970s, "Sutherland's Law", obviously set in Scotland since we're the only part of the UK to have had this system.

    624:

    Err, we were not speaking about warehouses, we were speaking about individuals, where most people could only stockpile for themselves, which would most likely not boil down to supplying others later on. People buying a surplus would further heghten demand, while the suppliers might somewhat hoard themselves, e.g. we get low supply and high demand some time before Brexit. As mentioned, "Happy happ joy joy".

    As for warehouses, indulging in some praxeology myself, why sell the stuff now when you could just wait a little longer and prices go up. And then, why not still wait a little longer...

    Sorry, personally I have gotten to the point where I automatically liken people saying "the market will fix it" to hippies talking about "ecological balance". Though the latter have better drugs and music and have a higher proportion of people somewhat aligned with my personal aesthetic tastes in body types, err...

    Of course, you're invited to show me statistics that prove me wrong...

    (Err, yes, in my private life I have been accused of always modelling the worst case scenario; I decided to change that somewhat last year, e.g. repeating "things might work out alright after all" as a new mantra, thing is, given some later developments, it's hard not to see the logic in my self-inflicted pessimism.)

    625:

    You are prejudiced, to put it mildly. The current campaign is NOT based on his mistakes, which I accept have existed, and is definitely concerted even if not orchestrated. I believe that its intent is to split the Labour party, though making Labour as anti-Palestinian as the Conservatives would also be a win. I avoid this subject on this blog, so will not say more.

    626:

    Personally, I read the Guardian every morning, because I want actual news, as opposed to what the US produces, overwhelmingly infotainment.

    And the writing is vastly better. And they occasionally cover SF, and they actually know what they're talking about, mostly.

    627:

    Or, as my late ex, the metallurgist who was an engineer at the Cape for a bunch of years put it, stress corrosion cracking.

    628:

    No, no, no, I would never think of O a, Captain Susan Ivonova, Commander of the White Star Fleet, daughter of Mikhail and Ivonova, and I am the Right Hand of God, and here to blast your sorry asses back to Earth....

    Still waiting for another woman in filmed sf near that strong..... Hmmm... Claudia Christian isn't married....

    629:

    Greg Tingey @ 520:

    "JBS @ 513
    The "Banksters" got comensated & the others/victims didn't ... and now - are they the Trump voters I wonder?"

    Well, you know what they say ...

    “Fool me once, shame on you ... Fool me twice, won't get fooled again

    Looking at the numbers, it appears he did get a higher percentage of votes among the swindlers than he did among the swindled, but there are a certain number of people out there who will ALWAYS fall for the con.

    630:

    chuckle Soldier of Fortune mag? A friend of mine, the writer David Sherman, has written for that. He knows it's war/gun porn, but it pays.

    He also knows the difference: he's an ex-gyrene, and was in 'Nam early. That's as opposed to, oh, pulling a name out of my hat, Vox Turd....

    631:

    "As a general rule, if a prediction posits that people will ignore an obvious chance to get rich quick ... it's probably not ideal. "

    Or maybe not ignore, but take one look, and know that the get-rich-quick scheme only pays one side... the seller of the scheme.

    "The market is not ideal..." Really? Ya think? How well "aligned" was the unregulated part of the market that crashed the world economy in '08?

    The reality is that in large economic terms, it's a rigged game, run by the 0.1% for their own benefit[1]. They're the house, and the house always wins. The market, as it works now, is literally a freakin' Ponzi scheme. Most of it involves trading stocks[2], not collecting dividends.

    Stocking up? How much do you think that corporations stock up when folks are getting worried?[3]? They're all bureaucracies, which take time before spending money to buy stock, and then there's delivery dates.

    And why would businesses not keep waiting, until the price maximizes?[4]

    Oh, and I'm not sure how you would "stock up on a few hundred litres of petrol", but a) I don't have a 55 gal drum or two, nor a way to transport that to the gas station. And, as I live in an urban area, there's probably some law reguarding safe storage of such. And I don't know anyone else in an urban area who could do that.

  • There's a story today, that I saw on google.news, that megacorps are buying their own stocks back, instead of raising workers' salaries, with the money they saved from the GOP tax cut.

  • To paraphrase the Batman, "stock traders are a superstitious and cowardly lot", who run on buzz and supposition. Oh, and automated arbitrage.

  • I refer you to the US toilet paper shortage of a couple decades ago, where there were rumors that there was a shortage due to production issues, and supermarkets literally RAN OUT of toilet paper.

  • There are laws against price gouging, esp. in times of disaster.

  • 632:

    EC @ 622 Ignoring, as agreed Isreal/Palestine ( It's TICKING ) - but still no. Corbyn has not changed a single ting since 1975, whiulst the word around him has changed out of all recognition. He has learnt absolutely nothing at all, & seems incapable of doing so. Even the Maybot is capable of changing more than him, given facts shoved in her face hard enough, which is sying something ....

    • revisitng Charlie @ 603 One thing tickles ... "Disaster Capitalism" works very well for its evil overlords in foregin countries 0 but it seems that the guilty parties don't seem to realise that if they do it to their "home" countries, there's nowhere to go when the lampost-&-rope brigade turn up. Have they not thought this through? Who are they anyway? Lets have it out in the open: I would spplit them into 2 groups - the politicians, who, financially speaking are minor players ( e.g. JRM, BoJo, Trump ) & the "business" people like Murdoch & the Barclay brothers - now, who else [ I'm asking if only because the usual "rich lists" don't work in this case - its a sub-set of the above. ]
    633:

    RPGs and writing.... My late wife and I were working on a scene in a novel where our heroes and friends get ambushed in a rough urban street at night. I pulled out my God Kit, and we ran the whole fight in std. original D&D melee rounds. Some characters got badly hurt that we hadn't expected. The reaction - she was writing chapters in a ghost-writing APA - from everyone in the APA was how realistic and believable the scene was.

    Please remember: D&D was created by half a dozen friends who'd been playing Chainmail, and, having just read Tolkien, wanted to add monsters and magic to it... and once you say Chainmail, then you're talking about an ancestry that leads back to Von Clausewitz, and to the war games played in every military college in the world, to teach future officers how to run battles... and therefore, is a good learning and simulation tool.

    634:

    Well, it's just the guy not being a judge in germany makes for some extra seperation of powers, which really gets drilled in you as a principle in history, political education[1] and social science in school.

    The best known German police procedural would be "Tatort"[2],

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatort

    though it's been known to have left actual lawyers dead from internal bleeding due to head-desk collisions. E.g. not that realistic, quite a lot of the stuff the investigators are doing would be illegal.

    https://www.zeit.de/2012/13/Krimi-Tatort/komplettansicht

    The "Zeit" article mentions an episode of "Polizeiruf" as an exeption, though I have no idea how this translates to other episodes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polizeiruf_110

    And according to German wiki, "SOKO München"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOKO_M%C3%BCnchen

    is said to be quite realistic.

    "Im Angesicht des Verbrechens" was critically acclaimed, though viewers' numbers were disappointing; personally, they might have tried a different title, there is a somewhat similar sounding crime documentary...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Im_Angesicht_des_Verbrechens

    (There is also Derrick, exported to many countries...)

    Generally speaking, Germans love their Krimi,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_crime_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_legal_television_series

    though the usual course also includes many British, American and Scandinavian productions. E.g. Midsomer Murders is quite popular here[3]

    I guess for some Germans detectives have to be English or at least British. Edgar Wallace movies are part of the German pop-cultural heritage

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Wixxer

    Even when the source material was produced in Germany:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graf_Yoster

    [1] Basically crash course in economics and the political system in Germany. With something of an emphasis why Western Germany's stem is best(tm). With a self selection of social democrats and marxist-leninists doing the job in my case.

    [2] And there I remember Mhari/Freya having a flashback of her own when we zapped into a "Tatort" with Schimanski eating some magic mushrooms...

    [3] Hm, anybody already came up with the theory Barnaby is a serial killer who just manages to frame other people in his crimes? Just asking...

    635:

    whitroth @ 523: "Try this one on: in the apt I rented when I relocated to the DC area, the landlady told me how I should be happy that I didn't have to buy a, what was it, stove, I think.
    I looked at her, incredulous. I did ask that people rented houses without stoves, and the tenants could bring in whatever they wanted? And how could the landlord know that it wasn't a fire hazard, and then there was the possible damage moving it in and out, and hooking it up (if it was gas)....
    I did get her thinking about that. I would *NEVER* allow that, and that wasn't the case in all but one apartment I ever rented."

    Last time I went off to school (about 8 years ago) I could have lived at home & commuted. It was about an hour & a half each way. I did a bit of calculating & figured out I could rent a one bedroom apartment near the school for just a bit more than what I'd spend on gas for the commute. More than saving the cost of gas and wear and tear on my car, I saved the 15 hours a week so that I could apply the time to my school work.

    It was a fairly nice apartment, but the refrigerator didn't have a built in ice maker. I drink a LOT of ice water. It's become one of those can't live without it things for me.

    I went down to the Habitat for Humanity RE-Store and found a nice refrigerator that DID have a built in ice maker for a couple hundred dollars. The apartment had a large walk in closet with washer/dryer hookups I didn't need because I could do laundry at home on weekends. So I stored the original refrigerator in there.

    All I had to do was replace the line between the sink & the cold water valve inside the cabinet with a line that had a tap for the line to the ice maker & drill a small hole in the side of the cabinet so the line could get to the back of the refrigerator (at the back of the cabinet where it couldn't really be seen unless you knew to look for it).

    When I finished school & gave notice that I would be moving out, I moved the original refrigerator back into place and donated the other one back to Habitat.

    636:

    If you want a good playable simulation for firearms, may I suggest At Close Quarters by Doug Berry?

    A supplement for Traveller written by a former Ranger, it leads to players spontaneously using actual real-life combat tactics rather than movie tactics (at least after they've been shot at!).

    http://bitsuk.net/Products/ACQ/ACQ.html

    Being an RPG supplement, the emphasis is on speed-of-play rather than minutiae. Can be played independently of a Traveller game, with adaptation notes included.

    You're not in the UK, so this might be a better source: https://www.rpgnow.com/product/124197/At-Close-Quarters

    637:

    Pigeon @ 534:

    "...expenses that aren't going to pay off for years & years..."
    Well, a lot of this is down to personal attitudes, like whether you define "pay off" in exclusively financial terms or not.
    One of my current projects is to replace the carburettors in my car with fuel injection and replace the transmission with a less lossy later model. Whether the saving in fuel costs will ever exceed the cost of the parts I don't know; I rather doubt it, but I haven't bothered to work it out, because the advantage of that aspect of the conversion is in not having to put fuel in the car so often; what it's all about is hassle - accumulating enough money to buy the parts is a hassle that I only have to go through once, while refuelling the car and perhaps putting off using it until I've got enough money to refuel it is a hassle that occurs all the time, so I like the idea of making it happen less often.

    You're still missing the point.

    Would you be willing to invest that same time & money working on a leased or rented automobile? One where you were likely to turn it back to the lessor in a year or so before you realized the intended savings, whether those savings are monetary or the time spent standing at the gas pump?

    The lackadaisical landlord and the stairwell lights are on a whole different scale. Your cost was trivial and the benefit, the "payoff" if you will, immediate. I'd have done the same.

    What I wouldn't do is something on the scale of climbing up on top of the building to replace a leaky roof at my own expense. That's just not on.

    638:

    there's nowhere to go when the lampost-&-rope brigade turn up. Have they not thought this through?

    In the short term, they've got Investor Visas ($0.5M-$20M a pop depending on where; they come with full residence rights and citizenship after a couple of years, if the investor wants it) and also fucking great big yachts like this (when I gave the bad guy in "The Jennifer Morgue" a converted Soviet guided missile destroyer as a yacht I was low-balling it by modern billionaire standards).

    In the longer term ... they can get on their yacht or in their bizjet and pick another balkanized jurisdiction over the border. And if things go so bad that there are no safe jurisdictions any more, they've got goons with guns and nuclear bunkers to live in. Although, as Douglas Rushkoff explains, they're a little bit short-sighted ...

    639:

    There's a story today, that I saw on google.news, that megacorps are buying their own stocks back, instead of raising workers' salaries, with the money they saved from the GOP tax cut.

    That's been going on for a couple of decades. As it happens, Vox had decent explainer on it this morning:

    https://www.vox.com/2018/8/2/17639762/stock-buybacks-tax-cuts-trump-republicans

    640:

    _Moz_ @ 537:

    I am pretty sure I understand it. Your position is "my landlord is a dick and I must be punished". You'd rather suffer than pay even a single cent that might in some way benefit someone else.

    No. If someone else benefits, it's fine with me. That's just paying it forward. I'd just rather NOT make myself suffer using my resources to help a landlord to screw me over. Moot because I don't have a landlord.

    There IS a balance point where it makes sense to draw the line against the takers & the users; where you have to consider your own self interest as well as that of others.

    I'm with Pigeon. Given the choice between putting in a bit of effort to be comfortable, and being uncomfortable in the rosy glow of knowing that I'm not contributing to other people's happiness... I choose the former. You can call me a socialist, a marxist, or a gullible idiot, I don't care. I'm comfortable, you're not. I'm happy, you're not. I win.

    It's not a zero sum game. "Contributing to other people's happiness" doesn't mean you can't consider your own self interest. You don't know whether I'm happy or unhappy. Nor does my state of happiness make you a winner ... or a loser.

    FWIW, I consider myself to be "reasonably" happy. I have a roof over my head. I'm retired with a modest income adequate to my needs. I have enough to eat & I'm in fairly good health for my age. I don't spend anywhere near $20K/year on insurance. I made a conscious decision 40 some years ago to serve in the National Guard (that "well regulated militia" so conveniently overlooked in most gun control arguments) in order to earn the benefit of VA medical care when I retired. I have my friends and I have enough stuff I need to do that I don't get bored very often. I'm happy.

    What I am not, is a smug asshole who thinks my good fortune makes me better than anyone else.

    641:

    Whether or not the neologism invented for the EU exit process is an example of dog whistle politics, the other elements of the media blitz must be? Deal or no deal? Hard or soft? Hitler was once described as a giant valve making speeches in the Sportpalast, it is reminiscent of that.

    And is it credible that Hunt can't remember the nationality of his own wife? The DNA of western news culture has difficulty producing variants of itself which can cope with deliberate fakes, is it being tested with deliberate gaffes?

    Searches for fourteen words links produced John Thompson Stonehouse, who died on April 14th 1988, perhaps its just a curiosity. Though I doubt the United States would consider the concept of the postmaster general being a Czech spy as of little interest, especially when the Post Office was to be used to lead privatisation.

    642:

    Elderly Cynic @ 552:

    Actually, what I don't understand is why the USA drives on the right. The rule of passing on the left (and that is what UK law is - you can drive anywhere on the road) is the same as for the sea, and is ancient. Currently, it's consolidated in the Highway Act 1835, but it's a lot older, and some Web pages claim it dates from the Romans.

    I have no idea whether the story that Napoleon changed it in the areas he controlled is true, but the story that people changed because they drove wagons from the left hand horse is obviously putting the horse before the cart! They could FAR more easily simply have driven them from the right hand horse.

    In the UK the custom of driving on the left derives from Medieval Knights who carried their shields on their left and their swords on their right. Passing to the left of oncoming travelers freed up their sword hands when needed.

    There were no Medieval Knights or Roman Auxiliaries in the American Colonies.

    There were heavy freight wagons pulled by teams of two, four or six draft horses. The early wagons had no driver's seat. The teamsters either rode on the left rear horse or walked along the left side of the wagon where it was pulled by teams of oxen.

    They did this because it was more convenient to hold the reins in their left hand and a whip to prod the horses/oxen in their right. That's harder to do if you're on the right rear horse or walking on the right side of the oxen.

    And when you're controlling the team from the left side, passing oncoming traffic on the left puts that traffic on the teamster's blind side. It's safer for both the teamster and the oncoming traffic to have that traffic to the driver's left.

    In France, the change was more deliberate. Aristocrats rode or had their carriages driven on the left. The change to driving on the right has the same impetus as the new universal system of measurements they implemented during the revolution.

    643:

    Robert Prior @ 554:

    Absent the rebellion, would the northern colonies have freed their slaves?

    There is some validity to the argument that slavery proved to NOT be economically viable in the northern American colonies/states. For the most part, those northern slaves were not freed, so much as sold south to where slavery remained economically viable. Views on the "morality" of slavery had a lot to do with how profitable it was ... or not.

    644:

    What tickles me is that a quick Google on the LCACs led me to the entry on its Mothership the LPH'S like the USS Wasp.

    Which for the uninitiated is the "helicopter carrier" the USN operates for the USMC. Which when you dig into it can carry up to 20 F35B's plus 5 M1A1 Abrams tanks.

    Which even leaving aside the 10 USN supercarriers gives the USMC easily the 2nd biggest carrier force in the world with 9 APH's. Which is a sobering reminder of just how stupidly big the US armed forces are.

    645:

    Trottelreiner @ 615:

    I still have fond memories of the Steyr AMR in "Halting State"...

    Yup. That's the reason it's essential to vigorously defend the right to keep and to arm bears.

    646:

    Allen Thomson @ 636:

    There's a story today, that I saw on google.news, that megacorps are buying their own stocks back, *instead* of raising workers' salaries, with the money they saved from the GOP tax cut.

    That's been going on for a couple of decades. As it happens, Vox had decent explainer on it this morning:

    https://www.vox.com/2018/8/2/17639762/stock-buybacks-tax-cuts-trump-republicans

    It was one of the arguments the Democrats made against the corporate tax cuts BEFORE they were passed; that the corporations wouldn't use the money increase worker's pay, but only for stock buy backs, dividends & CEO pay raises. And that's exactly what's happening now.

    It's about as prescient as predicting scrambled eggs AFTER Humpty-Dumpty had already fallen off the wall.

    647:

    Pigeon, re comment #63 regarding passitivy. And now you know how most of us in the US feel right about now.

    648:

    defend the right to keep and to arm bears.

    The great thing about that is that bears hardly shoot anyone at all. Significantly fewer than children under 5 do. Perhaps the USA should amend their constitution to say that only bears can be armed :P

    In Australia, of course we have the right to bare arms and we will defend that right to our last can of VB.

    649:

    Yes, but ... ( & no, they have not thought it through ) IF they succeed & the USA & GB semi-collapse a lot of people & the remaining governements are going to want them either in jail or dead ... Investor visas in some putative other state are NIT going to protect them, in the end. It looks as though they are assuming that they can continue to bullshit their way out of trouble & I don't think that will work. NOT that that will be much consolation to the rest of us, scrabbling in the ruins.

    HINT: If you REALLY piss some people off, your card is marked & we WILL get you ... The classic example has to be not Bin Laden, but Gadaffi - after P.C. Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by one of the Colonel's "diplomats", it didn't matter - he was going to be wasted, sooner or later, & so it proved. Whover makes up the UK's government if we are unfortunate enoough to have a no-deal Brexit, they will make sure that whover was responsible comes badly unstuck.

    Oh yes, referring back - John Buchan novels: He was a tory, but the villains in hos stories were not, as one might expect from novels written 1914-39 communists, but usually wreckers within the "capitalist" syatem, seeking to exploit the ordinary person or even a state. And we now seem to be inside one of his plots.

    650:

    Greg, you're really stretching our Time in this Body, but: Given we just had a rather direct death threat (as in: "slit your fucking throat if you ever talk to us again[0]"), we'll answer.

    Gadaffi was killed because France-NATO-UK deal, Gold Reserves (cough look up the Bank cough) and US / EU petro-interests. Oh, and Syria wasn't working out so well. Libya was always the patsie for the .RU / Iran backed states in the 1980's. Please don't tell me you still think Lockerbie was Lybia? That is really fucking stupid.

    Try looking up the handy big signs behind BBC reporters some time. Hint: SAS / Local insurgent translations + media 'buzz-words'.

    The US, the UK, FR, etc... really do stage manage wars.

    pst.

    The Media have teams they embed with PR outfits from the Army and all that.

    ~

    And we now seem to be inside one of his plots.

    Honey-Bun: if you still think that's the versions in play, we've news for you.

    We're kicking the absolute shit out of your (UK) best PR / Dark Matter Agencies and not even bothering to do the network analysis. They make a move, we just TRUMP it [irony].

    Prod us further, we'll burn your fucking House down.

    House of the Rising Sun Original.

    House Of The Rising Sun Five Finger Death Punch version, who are much beloved by US Vets.

    Get Lucky Daft Punk.

    [0] Narrator: Mind was already infected. H.S.S. really don't understand Network Rhizomatic Effects. House Of The Rising Sun Five Finger Death Punch - it's a US vet favorite

    IF they succeed & the USA & GB semi-collapse a lot of people & the remaining governements are going to want them either in jail or dead ...

    You're really not getting the entire vibe here, even after a few years.

    Hint: Go look up the Tories spending ~£270k on a study to "see if austerity had any impact on food banks" and the # rise in suicides etc.

    You're being a fucking TWunt if you cannot see what's already happened and is being inflicted on the most vulnerable.

    So: time to chip in - you for the massive Purge or not? Not much time left my little dancing prancing Man.

    651:

    Would someone with a lot more patience than us go over to MF and tell them they're being muppets pleasee?

    Oh, the antisemitism goes way deeper. For example: in their trading card set the global enemy is glaringly referred to as "(((Them)))." Also described on the same card as "Black Hats" (antisemitic dogwhistle via hacking term) and "the cabal" (antisemitic dogwhistle)." The QAnon cult's antisemitism is pervasive but also invisible to many of its observers and some of its stupider followers.

    Q - ((( - correct

    Blackhats - not antisemitic, it's kinda well, a well known term

    cabal - not antisemitic (In Q terms it refers to the US intel agencies - CIA/NSA etc)

    WOULD SOMEONE WHO IS NOT LOUISE MENSHCE OR ISAVRELL MOKSHOTTE GO TELL THE YANKS THAT THEY ARE BEING PLAYED SO WE CAN GET SOME SLEPP?

    SRSLY.

    CHILD MINDS IN ADULT BODIES ITS A BIT SICK.

    652:

    Actually, the 'CABAL' for Q just references the Atlantic side of the billionaire / privilege club who denied (CONSPIAACCTYY TEHORY) that Bildenburg existed or that CFR / Atlantic networks existed.

    Like: Are we all going to pretend that massive $$ bungs don't make the US political scene work? How Fully Retarded to we have to go to parse the current US political scene out? Maybe... "Oil had no effect on political donations" or "We've never heard of a campaign driven by Corporations" or "Tobacco money never once entered a campaign" or "We've never heard of Standard Oil influencing elections!"

    OH, and they all met up on secluded islands and fucked underaged pretty girls.

    True.

    Note: for the time, this was better than actually fucking children in Homes.

    Feel free to delete this, but it's all true [HELLO ANDY, NICE BIT IN THE PANTO - actually a compliment: managed to only fuck teenagers, which for the times was a major fucking plus]

    [Meta = this is how scared y'all are these days even discussing known Truths (hello Lord GINK) - that's rather worrying]

    653:

    the corporations wouldn't use the money increase worker's pay

    Or, apparently, use the money to expand their business by investing in capital equipment, new properties, etc. At least not much.

    Among the many things that I Am Not, I Am Not An Economist, but this looks as if the corporations judged that their business was already at a saturation point and such investment wouldn't bring in much increase in profit: dP/dI ~ 0. Or the management just doesn't care about much except lining their pockets. A cynical person might choose the latter of those.

    654:

    Leased or rented automobile... no, because I wouldn't have one in the first place. I'd spend a month or two's worth of rental on buying one out of the back of the local paper instead.

    Leaky roof... I probably would. I'd almost certainly use an unconventional technique, but I'd stop it leaking, if it was buggering up my flat; I'd find it less hassle to do it myself than get someone else to do it. Main deciding factors would be things like could I locate the point where the water was actually coming through the roof so as to put the patch in the right place, and did I have any means of getting up there in the first place.

    655:

    1) Should we shout, should we scream What happened to the post-war dream? Oh Maggie... Maggie what did we do?

    2) It looks unpleasantly likely that getting to 2050 in the first place is going to involve surviving Nazis, so we're fucked one way or the other.

    656:

    I think you're being deliberately obtuse, so there is no point continuing.

    657:

    Using the rental car analogy, there is a large chunk of the renting population who would refuse to put air in the tyres. Despite the low cost, low effort, and the fact that they'd be the one who benefits from reduced fuel consumption, they just won't do it. I had customers who refused to go on an electricity charging rate because they were renting. They could switch for free, the landlord could change it back for the cost of a phone call, but no, "you don't understand, I'm renting". Damn right I don't understand.

    658:

    "...it seems though the ferries had pretty small influence after English channel opening."

    It made a difference, but it's a long way from killing off ferries altogether; there's the cost, for one thing, and then there are problems with things you're not allowed to take through it, such as LPG, which puts off caravanners and people with LPG-fuelled cars. Also it wouldn't surprise me if it works out to be not all that much quicker as the time spent actually travelling becomes small in proportion to the time spent fannying about at either end.

    The hovercraft was always a bit marginal, since its main function was as a slightly desperate attempt to show that yes, there was a use for these things and all the development hadn't really been a waste of time. It didn't help that nearly everyone who went on it hated it and you never heard anyone have anything good to say about it, or indeed have anything to say at all about anything other than throwing up.

    The ferries further down the Channel are largely unaffected. We used to have hydrofoils running across to the Channel Islands and Normandy; now they seem to have changed over to boats that try to generate lift by trapping the wind of their passage between the hull and the water. I don't know why, but I don't think it can be fuel consumption as the power output of the new boats is something stupid in the tens of megawatts range and they must drink like fish.

    659:

    I used to frequent Google News. Had it reasonably trained. But to keep me reading things with the correct ads they keep adjusting what I saw and I've mainly given up on it.

    Now I read a lot from Apple News on my iPhone and iPad. (Nope on Macs.) I've got it reasonably trained to ignore sports and entertainment categories and some source that I find useless.

    I'm a big fan of NPR. But their iOS app overhaul a few months back has mostly wreaked my ability to use it as a primary news source.

    And yes, I get a lot of biased stories tossed my way. I know it. I deal with it.

    660:

    There were heavy freight wagons pulled by teams of two, four or six draft horses.

    Movies have it as horses. But I think most were oxen. This was true for wagon trains full of people. I suspect the same was true for freight. Horses are fragile and tended to be used when speed was/is needed. On the other hand oxen tended to go slow and steady where pointed. Especially when yoked together. After all the main thing that might excite them being missing.

    661:

    Hee hee hee...

    Waaa... as the wave disappears out from underneath leaving the vessel unsupported and your stomach moves into your chest as it goes into free fall.

    WHAM down into the trough and the water slams against the underside so hard the whole structure vibrates and you wonder why it hasn't bashed it in yet and when it's going to. Immediately followed by nngh as the bow jabs into the side of the next wave and the whole caboodle more or less stops dead.

    Rinse... in the several cubic metres of cold sea water that have just slooshed from front to back right over the top of the bloody cabin.

    And repeat... depuis plusieurs heures, because this is a sailing boat, not a hovercraft, and it's an order of magnitude slower and crossing a wider bit of sea.

    Your second paragraph makes me think that a spell driving a hovercraft would be the perfect experience for any author who is about to try and describe some rapid manoeuvring in space. I find it woeful when even pretty good authors go and describe it like driving a powerboat instead.

    662:

    now they seem to have changed over to boats that try to generate lift by trapping the wind of their passage between the hull and the water. I don't know why

    Tunnel hulls need a prodigious amount of power to get up on the plane, but once they're there they need less than a normal planing hull... that's why they exist.

    You need to get a normal planing hull up, while also pushing air through a smaller slot than it is designed for. As you get up speed that problem becomes worse and worse until suddenly you start getting lift, the hull pops up, and suddenly it's all easy. There's fun design stuff there, and the wee race boats I played with had manual lift flaps to make it easier because they were power limited (by class rules, not physics).

    663:

    No, I meant I don't know why they changed, not I don't know why the design uses the hull as a momentum to pressure converter :)

    664:

    Rinse... in the several cubic metres of cold sea water that have just slooshed ... because this is a sailing boat

    This is what I used to hate about sailing dinghies. Slightly bigger boats are fine, anything where I can retreat somewhere and get warm and dry. Sadly much of my early experience was with a parent who had wanted to sail little boats as a child, so of course I must be forced to do that. When he gave up and bought a Phase 2 that he could sail I was very happy. Not least because that hull planes (speed good!) and I could just faff about when I felt like it... for hours at times. Sadly no trapeze, but by taking the mainsheet off the last pulley I could hang off that. Luckily the boat also fell over shortly after I fell off :)

    665:

    In the UK the landlord is specifically legally prohibited from fucking you around for changing supplier. I don't know the exact details but it's basically a case of you pay the bills so you officially get to decide who you pay them to. As far as I can make out most people still decide not to and most of those probably don't even know the legal protection exists.

    666:

    No, I meant I don't know why they changed

    Possibly because they behave better when things go wrong? A hydrofoil that hits something tends to experience large forces, and a hovercraft in unexpectedly rough water is just a raft. But a tunnel hull tends to skip over obstacles and generally works ok as a displacement hull even in really bad conditions.

    I'm guessing that when the older boats got to end of life the operators looked around and discovered that the current boats hadn't been replaced by a shiner, newer version of the same, but there were lots of options for fast cats in various configurations. At the one end are the offshore jetboat cats used by various coast guards that draw 2m displacement and 0.5m on the plane but use fuel like ... well, less fuel than a hovercraft but more than an equivalent prop craft. Then you go right down to ye olde Sydney Harbour Ferries that are basically a couple of bridge pontoons with big old diesels in the bottom. In between you can trade fuel use, speed, carrying capacity and so on in about 20 different ways to get what you want. Whereas the ekranoplan market is quite concentrated :)

    667:

    the landlord is specifically legally prohibited from fucking you around for changing supplier

    In Anglonesia the only way the landlord can (legally) influence this is by making electricity/water part of the rent. If the tenant pays for it they get to decide who the retailer is (the infrastructure monopoly is legally required to permit competing retailers and might not even be a retailer). Sadly one consequence is that a lot of apartments (and some houses) have "rental grade" water heaters etc and no insulation, because it's not the landlord who pays for consumption.

    But then, an awful lot of owner-occupied houses here are built to the same standards so it can be effectively impossible to force the house more than 10 degrees away from the outside temperature. I sometimes see 0.1kW/square metre heat pumps built next to houses (that's 15kW for a small-ish 150 square metre house). It's just not something people think about when buying houses. Even when they're buying a new house. {eyeroll}

    668:

    Well you said you were calling it a day several replies ago and kept going. I'm merely saying that although nationalists might act on incorrect perceptions of the GFA, they shouldn't, and the perceptions can be fixed, just as Brexiters' can be. Nothing rude about saying that. Likewise when the DUP say that a sea border would be against the GFA, it's fixable, even if a sea border gets implemented. Then those who believed them will feel better. And early in the campaign Remain was doing well, it changed. It can be changed back.

    669:

    Moz @ 664 I don't understand this ... My (electically-heated) hot water tank has had lagging around since forever ( certainly over 40 years ) & my loft has a good 300mm+ of fibre/rock/wool insultaion across the whole area. It's like the fuckwit-insanity over "smart meters" - I mean, TURN THE HEATING DOWN, TURN THE LIGHTS OFF - it's not difficult.

    Going back to EC (waaay back-comment) .. Still no. Corbyn & his idiot followers are still doing their best to get rid of ( "deselect" ) my MP - who has a majority of over 20 000 - because she is "too right-wing". The fact that she is, quite possibly the best MP in the entire House of Commons cuts no ice with them - ideological purity is all. So, a Labour split is all too possible if this insanity goes on. It's a mirror-image of the brexit insanity that has gripped the tories.

    670:

    Reliability isn't the issue, but repairability is. If an electric motor fails, it has to be replaced or sent away to be rewound; very few farms have the skills and equipment to rewind an armature. But a set of push-rods can be mended locally.

    This kind of trade-off is more common than most people realise. Higher powers messing with the trade off is a potent source of damage.

    671:

    My (electically-heated) hot water tank has had lagging around since forever

    Yes... but :) Standard tanks have a certain amount of lagging, but the cheaper the tank the less insulation (as a rule). My test is to tape a couple of bits of bubble wrap over a chunk of it and measure the temperature difference. More than 5 degrees Celcius means there's not enough insulation (and the tank is often slightly warm to the touch). With our tank I've got 50mm of rockwool (in cheap plastic drop 'cloths') and that gives about 10 degrees - it'll be 35 inside and 25 outside.

    We used to be able to buy a commercially made version of that with slightly better insulation, but the company stopped making them because there was not enough demand. I kind of understand that, we pay ~50c/day for off peak hot water (12c/kWh) so there's no way to make extra insulation pay for itself. The $35 I paid for my extra insulation is about the limit - it saves us maybe 10c/day.

    672:

    Yes. It's why I don't use hydraulic brakes on cycles, and why I loathe the gimmickry in modern cars.

    673:

    Reliability isn't the issue, but repairability is. If an electric motor fails

    Yes, exactly. if it fails. The great thing about diesel is that because you're constantly maintaining it and you have to repair it every few hundred hours you're well used to doing that. You're also surrounded by other people who do the same, and likely there's someone who can do more serious work nearby.

    Whereas getting an electric motor fixed is an ordeal. It'll likely have to be sent away to a big city, and the cost of the fix is quite likely to be more than just buying a new one. It gets annoying having to do that every 100,000 hours, I can tell you.

    Where I grew up I reckon we had 20 or 30 diesel mechanic businesses, and exactly one electric motor rewind place for a population of about 60,000 people. It's not that there were no electric motors (there were several industrial electricians doing a fine trade), but the bloody things just refused to break down. You'd run the thing at full capacity 24/7 except for the annual shut-down, and every five years you'd have to replace the bearings. But would it break down? Fat chance. Sucks to be the guy trying to make a living out of rebuilding them, I can tell you.

    674:

    You are moving from prejudice into bigotry. That sort of behaviour has been characteristic of both the Conservatives and Labour for at least 25 years, usually in the other direction. BUT THAT'S IRRELEVANT TO WHAT I SAID.

    I said that that there is a concerted, EXTERNAL campaign to split Labour or, failing that, to make it anti-Palestinian. And THAT is the disturbing matter.

    675:

    It's why I don't use hydraulic brakes on cycles

    That's amusing, because I do exactly the opposite for the same reason.

    The hydro brakes on my touring bike were purchased fully assembled and have worn through three sets of brake pads with no other attention. Even the cable disks need more than that, and they go through brake pads more often to boot. It's been a very long time since I used rim brakes of any description, although I still have some old brake pads in my big bins of bike bits.

    I ride ~90 minutes a day, rain hail or shine, so I notice reliability issues perhaps more than the average bear. I also wear stuff out frequently, so I end up with a personal record of the bits that last. Shitmano 8 speed hub gears... 5000km. Rohloff hub gears, 4x the price and lifetime unknown because my oldest one only has 150,000km on it. 30x the lifetime for 4x the cost... it ain't exactly sophisticated economics. But brakes... disks work better, more reliably and with less servicing than rim brakes. Hydraulic disks are more expensive but lower maintenance than cable, and work better in the wet. They are possibly not as good in the mud, but I don't ride enough mud to care. They don't work as well in the cold (below about -20 degrees Celcius), but if you're riding where that matters you have a whole lot of changes to make to your bike.

    676:

    "So as not to confuse sailors" doesn't seem an adequate explanation.

    Wasn’t it “always walk on the right-hand side of the road to face oncoming traffic”?

    Thus endeth the Highway Code and all that.

    677:

    Bring me a slab of XXXX gold Bring me my esky of desire Hand me a beer, make sure it’s cold, Bring me my Holden ute of fire.

    678:

    EC @ 671 NO - but I did miss your emphasis. As long as she is the candidate, I will continue to vote for my currently-sitting Labour MP, because she's brilliant. Labour are quite capable of splitting themseleves over Corbyn's various insanities, especially given "momentum" ... you may believe that "extrenal forces" are trying to split said party, but (at present) I'm not buying it, for reasons given. OTOH I have never, ever been a fan of "likud" - oops, we weren't supposed to talk about that, but you did bring the subject up.

    679:

    OK. So I am touring Lewis and hit the pipes on a rock (on my recumbent trike) or have them damaged when it is parked (on an upright). Both causes of damage are quite likely. In continual, driving rain, natch! What do I do then?

    And THAT is Guy Rixon's and my point. The risk of an event is the cost of it to you weighted by the probability of it occurring. Like most people, you are thinking only of the latter.

    680:

    You should look harder, then. The concerted campaign I am referring to is definitely external to all political parties, not just Labour. Note that I did not say foreign, nor did I say it was orchestrated, though either or both may be the case.

    681:

    No. It wasn't there in the first edition :-) But, yes, that is the reason it was introduced. The 1964 edition, rule 3 states "Where there is no adequate footpath, walk on the right of the road to face oncoming traffic."

    682:

    First off, thanks for taking the time to type this much on a fairly fringe interest. My personal interest isn't just "comparitive legal systems and/or police procedurals", but also how much it's improving my listening comprension (watching French stuff with subtitles I'm now noticing "that is not what $character said" moments in the subs).

    In Scotland the procurator is a lawyer who investigates the case, and then presents it in our lower courts if required. In France, the investigating judge appears to be exactly that; he investigates the case but does not prosecute it.

    I've kept all the Wikipedia cites for investigation later.

    [3] I've never heard the theory that DCI Barnaby (either) is a serial killer before; What I have heard, from several independent sources, is that Joyce or Cully Barnaby (John Nettles' wife and daughter in series up to 2011) was the serial killer, and he was complicit in that he framed someone else for every murder.

    683:

    Well, Moz has a pretty good understanding of this I think. So here's the additional point he didn't mention.

    As I heard it, the "wave piercing catamaran" was introduced, at least in UK and French waters, to offer hovercraft/catamaran speed in rough seas. In this they succeeded, based on trips I've made to and from the Channel Islands using Condor Ferries' fleet.

    684:

    I've had this argument about "smart" meters too; they don't actually save electricity.

    685:

    I'm merely saying that although nationalists might act on incorrect perceptions of the GFA, they shouldn't, and the perceptions can be fixed, just as Brexiters' can be. Nothing rude about saying that.

    That's a wonderfully optimistic outlook - the shame is that it's also utterly unrealistic. "Shouldn't" has nothing to do with it.

    When we talk about Irish Nationalism being problematic in this context, we're not talking about the SDLP, or even the pragmatic wing of Sinn Fein. We're talking about the 32 County Sovereignty / Continuity IRA / Real IRA, etc, etc types. These are not reasonable people, they're the people who opposed the GFA in the first place, because they are completely convinced that a bit more pushing in the Armed Struggle will get them what they truly believe to be the only correct outcome (they haven't gone away, you know...)

    These are the True Believers (I hesitate to say "fanatical", but in some cases it's accurate), and they live in a perceptual bubble all of their very own. Any regression on the border, will fuel their justification for violence. You can assure tham the it's merely technical, it's just paperwork, it doesn't really make a difference - but none of that will matter, because it's a concrete, demonstrable, step away from their goal.

    By analogy, you should now assure us that the KKK, the BNP, and even Vox Dei / Nigel Farage can have their perceptions "fixed", because after the 32CSM it should be easy. Maybe some can - but the bulk will not. The best you can hope for is a generations-long effort to slowly reduce the numbers of fanatics.

    686:

    [ DELETED BY MODERATOR — because it provoked the rude comment at #708 by being basically shit-headed about basic humanity. ]

    687:

    Yep, the wave piercing cats are bigger capacity, more fuel efficient, lower stress on the hulls, and overall can be run in a wider range of conditions than all the high speed alternatives. They can also be shaped to minimise wake creation, which is handy for higher speed in restricted waters.

    688:

    No, the murderous idiocy is that made-up numbers called "economically irrational" that count bits of people's imaginations are considered more important than genuine numbers called "death toll" produced by counting actual real dead bodies. So you get people allowing dead bodies to accumulate because they consider the made-up numbers as too sacred to just make up something else instead, while the number of dead bodies is considered unimportant enough that making up a smaller number for the newspapers is perfectly OK.

    This is the sharp end of the complaint I have made before: that things are fucked-up because the apparently-obvious prime purpose of doing anything is actually only a secondary consideration and often a very minor one, while the real prime purpose is to make money, and if this conflicts with the apparent purpose then it is the apparent purpose which has to be compromised so that the unstated real purpose may not be. We get away with it, or we mostly have got away with it so far, partly by doing things to often ridiculous excess with the unintended consequence that fulfilment of the apparent purpose happens enough anyway, and partly - at least in more enlightened regimes - by enforcing the existence of certain volumes where priorities are more sensibly ordered (to the accompaniment of much yelling and screaming from those who consider such volumes a threat to their imaginary constructs).

    The problem with price caps is not that they go too far, but that they do not go far enough: they attempt to alleviate one symptom while doing nothing to cure the actual disease. The actual supply of food still remains in the hands of people who think food exists to make money out of rather than for people to eat it.

    To be sure, sorting that out is something of a major operation and not a quick one, since we have allowed the looney system to become so ingrained that allowing real people to die in large numbers is seen as preferable to changing the imagination. But while that long-term difficulty acts as a sound (if unpalatable) reason why any short-term emergency measure is bound to be a bit of a fuckup one way or another, it does not act as a sound reason for long-term action to rebase things on a more sensible footing to get so little consideration that it's only irrelevant blog comments like this one where anyone even mentions it.

    689:

    Ah, I was not aware of the "wave-piercing" aspect. I can certainly see the point of that (see #658, where it was the same bit of sea that I had in mind).

    690:

    It's something I appreciate about designs like the two-stroke MZ motorcycles from East Germany. The owner's handbook you got with the bike was nearly as comprehensive as a full-on workshop manual (though still only handbook-sized, as the bike was so simple there wasn't that much to go in it). The standard toolkit was again quite small but still adequate to take the entire bike completely to pieces at the side of the road and fix it - or at least bodge it up enough to get home on - using crap you find in the ditch, unless the failure was something really catastrophic.

    691:

    EC @ 677 Ah ... you can see this external conspiracy oops concerted campaign, but poor uninformed me, can't .... hmmmm .....

    paws @ 681 Of course they don't - the whole thing is a giant rip-off & con-trick - which we, the consumers are being forced to pay for.

    692:

    gasdive @ 654:

    Using the rental car analogy, there is a large chunk of the renting population who would refuse to put air in the tyres. Despite the low cost, low effort, and the fact that they'd be the one who benefits from reduced fuel consumption, they just won't do it. I had customers who refused to go on an electricity charging rate because they were renting. They could switch for free, the landlord could change it back for the cost of a phone call, but no, "you don't understand, I'm renting". Damn right I don't understand.

    But these are all fairly low cost "investments" and pay back the "renter" as much or more as they do the "landlord". Not checking the tire pressure & keeping it up is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

    I'm not sure what "go on an electricity charging rate" means unless it's some kind of a rate PLAN. I'm on an "equal payment plan" with the local utilities. I pay the same amount every month. It's set in January using the average of actual use during the preceding 24 months. My monthly bill hasn't changed in about 8 years. Before that it stayed the same for a dozen years or more; just a couple dollars more than my current bill.

    That said, I read the "you don't understand, I'm renting" as possibly "You don't know what a real hassle it is to deal with in my asshole landlord." There might be a "social cost" involved that negates any saving on electricity.

    693:

    "But then, an awful lot of owner-occupied houses here are built to the same standards so it can be effectively impossible to force the house more than 10 degrees away from the outside temperature."

    You couldn't survive winters here if you weren't able to heat your home more effectively than that. We live in Southern Ontario, therefore our temperatures are far less extreme than in many other parts of the country. The average day in January is -4C and since 1981 the record low for a January day was -32C. Those figures are without having wind chill factored in.

    Of course since the record high for a summer day in the same time period was 38.5C (much higher if you factor in the humindex) most homes have good furnaces and good a/c and people pay to have their homes well insulated.

    694:

    Pigeon @ 662:

    In the UK the landlord is specifically legally prohibited from fucking you around for changing supplier. I don't know the exact details but it's basically a case of you pay the bills so you officially get to decide who you pay them to. As far as I can make out most people still decide not to and most of those probably don't even know the legal protection exists.

    I suspect it's no different there than it is here. Most landlords will obey the law, but some won't. The ones that won't don't give a shit what the law says, they'll try to fuck you over any way they can.

    695:

    Damian @ 673:

    “So as not to confuse sailors” doesn't seem an adequate explanation.

    Wasn’t it “always walk on the right-hand side of the road to face oncoming traffic”?

    Thus endeth the Highway Code and all that.

    That works in the UK and other locations that drive to the left. In the US and Europe, you have to walk on the left in order to be facing oncoming traffic.

    It works anywhere if you drop the left/right and just make it "Walk on the side of the road where you face oncoming traffic."

    696:

    It looks as though they are assuming that they can continue to bullshit their way out of trouble & I don't think that will work.

    Interesting remark. I happened to hear a prosecutor talking about his job last night.

    Apparently interviewing most criminals is fairly straightforward: burglars, drug dealers, mobsters, violent drunks, etc. Once actually chained up in a police station they very quickly realize that they've done something wrong, they've been caught at it, and their least bad option is to take a deal if one is offered. (Or for some, not talking at all. That may be frustrating but it's even less work for the prosecutors; they can talk to the criminals' lawyers.) So far so good.

    Then there are the con artists. As a group they're sure they can find the right story to make everything all right again. If one pitch doesn't work they'll just try a different one. After all, they talked their way into people's money and they talked their way into trouble; therefore they must be able to talk their way out of trouble. It's just a matter of keeping up a nonstop stream of charm, misdirection, and bullshit until something works.

    Notice that truth doesn't appear in that strategy. Neither does not contradicting what they said ten minutes ago. Other criminals will often lie but they tend to pick one lie and stick to it, even when it's stupidly wrong. Fraudsters will say anything and everything, sure that if they just find the right line of bullshit their problems will be solved. They will not tell the truth and they will not shut up.

    If this reminds you of anyone in politics, that's up to you; I didn't name any names. :-)

    697:

    Those "made-up numbers" aka money tends to be a fairly real representation of real resource allocation and the relative values of the various resources. The prices of fuel, the opportunity costs of land uses etc etc etc.

    Further those made up numbers can be counted as a "unit of caring". AKA how much people actually care about an issue.

    yes it's super depressing that the marginal cost of a human life is somewhere in the region of 2000 quid, slightly below the marginal cost of a donkey life (based on the charity budget of the UK donkey sanctuary) and that's a real expression of what people care about and how much.

    You could replace money with something else or have people each allocate some portion of the countries resources some other way but that wouldn't increase the amount they, on average, care about different things.

    Sure, you can throw price caps on and if you have a deity to centrally plan your economy then everything is golden but in reality we don't have deities so what you get is death and suffering on a vast scale because without real prices to communicate relative availability of resources misallocation becomes a more and more massive problem until everything grinds to a halt, empty shops with nothing to sell while people have piles of worthless banknotes that can't actually be used to buy anything. See: Russia in the late 80's, Venezuela more recently and many other places where inept governments have tried to pretend nothing is wrong by slapping price controls on everything... making the problems worse in doing so and generating death and suffering in the process.

    698:

    Oh, for heaven's sake! Almost every national newspaper carried an article like this, and the same message came from the usual 'representatives', in the space of a few days:

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-antisemitism-row-jeremy-corbyn-peter-willsman-jewish-leaders-a8471311.html

    That's a concerted campaign.

    699:

    More on Brexit from Naked Capitalism* (maybe someone can follow the Financial Times links; I don't have access.)

    • The usual caveats regarding Naked Capitalism apply; that is, they are sometimes wrong and sometimes right. Pay attention to the details.
    700:

    Thanks, but not into playing these days, though when I run into a fight scene, I'll probably just go back to D&D, where I know the biases.

    701:

    That... "boat". It looks like miscegenation between a giant cigar boat (aka penis boat) and a cruise ship.

    Geez, is it ugly. But I think cruise ships are among th4 ugliest things to ever sail, and if you've got all that, and all you're going to do is lounge about and eat, why not do it at a hotel, for less?

    702:

    No. There were minor instances of it - by "minor", I mean a few companies - but now it's widespread.

    703:

    You wrote: In the UK the custom of driving on the left derives from Medieval Knights who carried their shields on their left and their swords on their right. Passing to the left of oncoming travelers freed up their sword hands when needed.

    I'm utterly confused. WHOSE left? If I'm riding ahead, and there are travelers coming towards me, I want them to pass on my left, where my shield is.

    Actually, same is true if you're walking.

    Why, yes, I did fight heavy in the SCA when I was young....

    704:

    I keep wanting to get a contract to arm bears. I also want the one to sell body armor to the bears and the deer, to try to defeat the Teflon-coated bullets that the NRA fought (and won?!) for "hunters" to use.

    705:

    Two things, oh, She, first, on both sides of the Pond, I think they're loosing it, and here's why: years back, an idiot by the name of Blagojevich was gov in Illinois. Now, other machine politicians knew the way it worked, and did things like hiring their supporters, and sending contracts their way - paying them off. This idiot wasn't paying them off, and just wanted to be given whatever he wanted (including trying to sell a US Senate appointment).

    He's in jail.

    The Orange [FT]ool is like that, as the hard Brexiteers on your side. They don't have a clue that if you don't actually pay off, to the benefit of your supporters, they turn.

    And am I in? Will my double-bitted axe (yes, I really do have one) serve, until we build the Humane Invention of Mssr Guillotine?

    706:

    Of course not. I mean, that's a waste, and when you're expecting to move on in two or three years, and hopefully upward, not laterally, you want to save as much as possible, show you can show improved profitability this quarter, or, daring, next.

    707:

    I hoped that was a joke, and therefore chose to assume it.

    Q. How do you tell which side is right?

    A. It's easy. When you have the left one right, the one that's left is right.

    708:

    I'm still reading google news, but I hate it. The last two revisions, in the last couple of months, have made it designed solely for a mobile, and only kinda usable on a real computer. But then, the last five years or so, the search signal-to-noise ratio has gone way down - they're total idiots, completely run by the ad dept, failing at the point of it all, search.

    709:

    The way I heard it (as a child) was that passing on the left was a way of showing that you were doing so peacefully.

    710:

    I've almost never heard of hydraulic brakes on a bike, and never seen them. Thanks, no, cables are just fine, and easy to repair, and replacing brake shoes is a no-brainer. And back in the seventies, I rode a lot (not counting the two summers I spent as a bike messenger....)

    711:

    [ DELETED BY MODERATOR — Reason: extreme rudeness ]

    712:

    "If this reminds you of anyone in politics, that's up to you; I didn't name any names. :-)"

    But the TV show that I also watched, definitely did. Now "we" know what channels you watch, commie...

    713:

    Agreed, motors are incredibly reliable by the standards of almost all other engineering, but that leads us into the far tail of the failure distribution where intuitive decisions often go wrong. Two war stories by way of example.

    In my youth, I worked at an observatory where the gear to work the dome shutters - two big electrical winches per telescope - was a big headache in maintenance. There were two major failures that I can remember, one where we lost both gearboxes on one dome and another where we lost both motors. In the gearbox incident, there were two spare units in stock (because "gearboxes fail") and no observing time was lost. For the motor failure, there was only one spare (because "motors don't fail"), so the other unit had to be sent down to sea level for a rewind and several nights were lost.

    More recently, one of my colleagues bought a log cabin in rural Sweden. His water supply is from a new, pumped well he had drilled and the electrical, rotary pump is permanently sealed at the bottom of the shaft; if it fails, he has to start again with a new borehole. This is vastly cheaper than making the pump recoverable for repairs. For a salaried person in an advanced country, this a an excellent trade off. He can afford to re-drill the well every 20 years, if need be, and he has the option of staying elsewhere while it is done. And it's his choice. However, that trade off absolutely does not work for a village well in a developing country. If a charity was to set them up with this unrepairable tech it would, IMO, be a bad misdeed. Something human-powered that can be mended locally would be far, far better.

    714:

    You aren't currently a 'keen' cyclist, then :-)

    I believe that hydraulic brakes came in following disk brakes because, with cables, those often have two modes of working: no effect, and over the handlebars. I like drum brakes, which remain reliable whatever the weather, are highly abuse-resistant, and last for ages with no attention; and those work fine with cables.

    715:

    And am I in? Will my double-bitted axe (yes, I really do have one) serve, until we build the Humane Invention of Mssr Guillotine? I'm in as well, if that isn't clear. (Not with a axe though.)

    It was draining to read this long piece (US focused, FWIW) Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change (Nathaniel Rich, Photographs and Videos by George Steinmetz, AUG. 1, 2018)

    716:

    SS @ 693 Then there are the con artists … of whom 95% of politicians are a sub-set, right? [ As you suggested … ]

    EC @ 695 Yes, I’ve seen that – so? Big deal … You STILL haven’t got the even more important & fundamental message: Corbyn is 150% incompetent, if only because he has learnt nothing at all since 1975. And yes, I can distinguish between “anti-semitism” & Anti-Likud ….

    Troutwaxer @ 696 Simple. May is awful, but even she is almost-infinitely-better than BoJo or the Rees-Thugg & hence the ( I hope temporary) “going soft” – it’s yet another negotiating position as regards the press …

    Whitroth @ 702 BUT the brexiteers are gambling that they can get Brexit BEFORE their supporters turn &THEN that they can still blame someone else – see also SS/693 on con artists, right?

    717:

    That's certainly why hydraulic brakes came in on motorcycles; the early cable-operated front disc calipers had a bad reputation for binary response characteristics.

    Drum brakes... well, they do if they're well-made. One of the things which is not good about the abovementioned two-stroke MZ is the front drum brake, which has a response characteristic that varies wildly from one application to the next, so that you never know how hard you're going to need to squeeze the lever for a given braking effort or even if you're going to be able to get that amount of braking effort at all. It's one of those things which is a bugger because you can never adequately simulate real operating conditions in the workshop, and under the conditions you can impose on the bench it just seems to work fine, but I think it's down to seemingly trivial inaccuracies in finishing the bearing surfaces meaning that you can't rely on the shoes expanding dead square to the drum, and they shift about fractionally with every application so that they are slightly differently off-square the next time. The "cure" is to find a same-size front wheel with a drum brake off a Japanese bike, and fit that instead.

    Then there's the tale my grandfather told of the brand new car (I forget the model) with mechanically-operated drum brakes whose driver had to slam them on for some reason... so far so good... but as soon as he took his foot off the pedal the car catapulted itself into the ditch. The cam in one of the hubs had gone past 90 degrees, so the brake on that wheel jammed on and didn't release when the one on the other side did.

    718:

    Actually, no, because I couldn't parse your original. But since you start, I'm ready for you: Costello: Who's on first? Abbott: That's right, Who.....

    719:

    I've never noted a binary response in cable brakes. The only times I ever went down was one, hitting a seam in the streat at a bad angle, and second, hitting a gutter that was covered with leaves.

    720:

    Sorry, Charlie.

    But he was asserting that price-gouging in a disaster was no different than a bakery raising the price of bread a nickle, because the price of flour went up a penny due to a bad harvest, and it was all just business. And that the government objecting for the people it served was unwarranted and immoral intervention in the Holy Business of Business.

    722:

    So I am touring Lewis and hit the pipes on a rock (on my recumbent trike)

    I performed the experiment... someone rode my tandem trike over a traffic island and bent both steering link arms (Greenspeed steering) and scraped the shit out of one Hayes pipe. You could see the inner over about 10cm. From the way the cable ties very snapped and one end-link on the cable bent I suspect that the trike actually stopped when the cable caught on something. Which left the trike with... three working brakes.

    Sure, that's just one case. But there will always be breakages, that's just the way things are. And these days you go online and order "hydraulic brake, Hayes Model XXX, rear, 1.4m hose" and it arrives a few days later. Or you buy a spare hose, parts kit, bleed kit and so on. Like I did. I sold them with the trike about 5 years later, still in their original packaging. Although I did find a spare hose the other day, maybe I failed to give that to the buyer.

    I mean, sure, after the collapse of technological society those things won't be available. But really... after said collapse it's bike tyres and tubes that you're going to be wanting, along with other consumables. If we get back to hamming stuff on forges V brakes are going to be the limit, I reckon. Acting on steel rims...

    723:

    The average day in January is -4C and since 1981 the record low for a January day was -32C... record high for a summer day in the same time period was 38.5C

    Yeah, I suppose it's important to point out that pre-invasion clothing was optional and largely decorative over almost all of Australia. Sure, the smarter people stayed out of direct sunlight when it was hot, and used fires in winter storms, but the whole "build shelter" "make clothes" thing was for temporary needs rather than essential to staying alive.

    In that sense it's remarkable that the invaders can make houses that are so often less comfortable than outside. My house is brick with a clay tile roof, well ventilated, and consistently 2-10 degrees cooler than outside except when it's very hot outside, when it'll get toasty warm during the day and stay hot all night. So inside we get winter lows near zero for long periods even when the actual overnight low is 5 degrees or more. At least we don't get frost on the inside of the windows here, like I used to get in one flat in Christchurch.

    724:

    As far as reliability goes, I've been amused at the technology mix in the "third world" (parts of Australia, Timor, PNG) where a village will often have a cellphone, sometimes a smartphone, some solar battery lights (cheap ebay units), and some plastic containers for getting water out of the well and storing it.

    On the one hand it's really useful to be able to ring someone and sort out exactly what they need and want, and slightly bizarre to be asked to pick up online shopping orders from the post office to bring with us; but on the other it's very common to be fixing solar panels to a lashed-and-thatched roof while standing on the shoulders of a couple of locals. And everything is screw terminals, because crimped anything is a consumable that has to be ordered from China... and there is nothing that will not fail at some point. I've seen PV running through everything from SolarPlus UV rated cable to cat5 to bits of a truck wiring harness to what i suspect was wire-core clothesline.

    725:

    Edge of Tomorrow , l'esprit d'escalier. John Major seemed a nice enough man. To Victory Join The UDF? The Mimics arrive in 2015 by meteorite, and why are they Mimics anyway? The presenter is air tasered? He wakes at Heathrow Airport?

    It was claimed that it was characteristic of the Germans during the Nazi era that they would just talk around subjects. Though I suppose the Communists fought them in the streets before they were targeted by the RAF, at least they wouldn't be deluded by Hitler.

    726:

    News report on the cost of getting rid of rubbish reminded me... what happens to UK rubbish and recycling? Will not being able to export it to the EU be a problem?

    https://youtu.be/qvY3WImNgfk

    727:

    You are still completely missing the point. Even if it were only 3 days (and, in areas like that, 5-7 is more likely), the cost of that time can be large - missed transport, cancelled plans and more. I carry a brake cable and some parts and can fix the problem within an hour or so, even in the rain.

    EXACTLY the same is true more generally. You have to think, not JUST of the likelihood of failure (as most people and almost all politicians do) but of the cost of failure. See #710 for another example.

    728:

    Yep, I still don't understand what you mean by the cost of failure. You seem to regard a week lost to failed drum brakes as somehow much cheaper than a week lost to failed hydraulic brakes, and I just don't get it.

    I suspect you're working on the basis that you personally can't service a hydraulic brake and can't/won't learn how to, therefore any repair means a long delay. Which is not true for everyone, and definitely not true for me. I suppose it's also worth noting that I have serviced and repaired a wider variety of bikes and bike parts than most people just by dint of working as a framebuilder and as a bike mechanic. It's not that I haven't used or serviced drums, I have. I don't like them because I have experience with them.

    Look, your requirements and situation are very different to mine, so it may well be that drums are the best solution for you. But to claim that they're therefore the only sane solution for anyone, anywhere, that's not sensible.

    I'm also curious that your worst case consequences of a complete brake failure is "missed transport". Unless by "cancelled plans" you mean "due to having to attend my own funeral", in which case I've learned a new euphemism. The UK must be a much safer place to ride a bicycle than I'd been led to believe.

    729:

    Don't be ridiculous. That is complete nonsense. Actually drum brakes ARE more reliable than disk brakes, but they don't take any less time to fix. Anyway, you can control all of drum, disk and rim brakes by either cables or hydraulics, and the context was the latter, not the former. I will give you some invented (but plausible) numbers:

    Cable linkage: probability of failure 5%, cost of failure 1 hour. Expected (average) time lost 3 minutes.

    Hydraulic linkage: probability of failure 0.1%, cost of failure 5 days. Expected (average) time lost 7.2 minutes.

    Worse, consider the risk of missing a critical target. It's harder to put numbers on, but the cost of doing so is MUCH higher. What is the cost (and NOT just in monetary tersm) to most people of having cancel a holiday AND having to arrange a trip home at the last minute? Because that's what can (and does) happen, if you are relying on pre-booked services (whether accomodation or transport).

    With cable linkage, that can happen only if it occurs when you have less than 1 hour margin. With hydraulic, it will happen for every failure.

    730:

    Based on my experience with Camden they will simply take away half the rubbish bins, collect every other week, and expect you to magically create less waste.

    731:

    (brakes) cost of failure 1 hour / cost of failure 5 days

    The cost of failed brakes is quite definitely your life if you do not get very lucky. BTDT bless the cross-traffic car driver who caught on there was a problem and stopped in time.

    732:

    Yeah VERY thankfully, the Great Green Beast has a dual system - early last year I had toi stamp HARD on the brakes, because the guy in fromt was a fuckwit ... and the line to my rear brakes part-failed (split) I was able to gety home, very carefukky, becvause the front brakes still worked. And could then get a brake bleed screw, fit it to the rear line ( Having removed, by pushing aside ) the pipe to the rears, thus closing it off & then topping-up with fluid. Lasted for 2 days until I got it to garage, for pipe-replacement. A brake failure can be fatal, don't mess with it ....

    733:

    EC on a "concerted external campaign" Um, err Ex-MP and longtime Labour Party member and Minister resigns membership Any comments?

    734:

    Greg @666: Corbyn & his idiot followers are still doing their best to get rid of ( "deselect" ) my MP - who has a majority of over 20 000 - because she is "too right-wing". The fact that she is, quite possibly the best MP in the entire House of Commons cuts no ice with them

    I got to hear Stella Creasy on a podcast I follow* and she came across very well I thought; funny and human, but with a steel core in there too. She was impressive.

    Regards Luke

    [*]Remainiacs - a weekly serving of commentary about recent Brexit news, for all your remoaner needs.

    735:

    She has been very efficient at kicking in some very unpleasnt people & improving the lot of women in sevaral parts of the country ( & made enemies of some semi-fascist male supergoes ) how sad - especially since at leat one got jailed for his pains. She would make a suprb PM IMHO, though that would royally fuck the road traffic round here with "security" ( The road-distance from my front door to hers is about 120 metres & a straight line would be even shorter! ) This is another of the reasons Corbyn is such an utter tosser - he & momentum don't want people as good & effective as her ....

    736:

    Want the .is gov links?

    Next up: proof of how the Iceland government remote-controls Israel. (given that the entity claims infallibility they of course could not have mistaken the TLD of Israel, which happens to be .il)

    I have decided '[redacted]' stands for "my fleas". That makes some of the texts somewhat amusing.

    737:

    Yep, thatsthejoke.jpg.

    IF you wanted to not snark and actually know something, go look up the current Druze anti-Gov protests, various US commentators looking to link the anti-Bibi US stuff (mostly aging hippies and various factions) with modern Israel left and the current complete fucking melt down of the Right Wing (ex Murdoch sleaze merchants at the core) smear attacks in the UK lead by Cambell.

    I mean, if you wanted to actually have a discussion.

    But, yeah - we can hook you up with the .IL gov docs sent to their Embassy outlining the current media strategy, sure: they're not that secret.

    p.s.

    Know when not to poke ant-mounds.

    738:

    Because left social democracy now has an unchallenged hegemony in Britain’s main progressive party. Next Stephen Smith, Twitter, 4th Aug 2018 in response to yet another old school Blairite "why I left the party" Guardian stuff.

    If you wanted a really hardcore tell / prediction line above and beyond having it already proven, there's been a shit load of traffic showing just how bad the PR blow-back is going to be when the .IL Druze stuff (+250k protestors, lots of good video, loads of solidarity and love etc etc) gets hooked back into a shoddy little rag like the JC run by an ex-Murdoch merchant.

    Especially since everyone was hoodwinked into slandering / libeling ex-Camp members.

    We were told not to post about this again, but... you wanted an answer that wasn't fucking stupid snark / smear / London Fleet-street bullshit.

    p.s

    There's been a slew of 'social chips' being cashed in (favors for favors) this weekend, including Tony Benn's grand-daughter etc.

    How fucking stupid are you going to look if you cashed all that in and the main leading story in .IL is that a major schism / anti-Likud movement is getting serious wind?

    Answer: pretty fucked.

    QED.

    OWNED.

    739:

    Oh, and triptych.

    Given you can snark at that, but ignore the threats / heat we get for posting things: if the FT is now moving to a 'squash this now' line, you can assume that some of the major players ($) are seeing what is easily spotted and we already pointed out:

    Cashing Chips at that high table might get Royal Flushed. Esp if Laws and General Decorum are being ignored all over the shop.

    p.s.

    Amused yet? Wait for the actual punch line. Hint hint: Big Move on Monday.

    740:

    [I mean: if the Times of London is leading with "The KKK / Moon-Martians / That Bloke From Stockton on Sea who has a funny walk and a bit of a droopy eye are endorsing Corbyn" you might think three things:

    a) Murdoch is rattled

    b) WTF are you smoking

    c) This is all one big media clown show.

    Thanks for Playing Mate.

    741:

    One last one:

    Never, ever, ever do the line "lie down with dogs and wake up with fleas" if:

    a) You don't understand the actual Meta Plays

    b) You don't understand Mirrors

    c) You don't know at what cost us informing you about it / changing reality comes at

    d) You have a linear understanding of our actual Politics / Metaphysical Alignment

    So, yeah.

    Careful with your words, you might learn something outside your bubble: Gott barn kveður góða vísu

    742:

    Hexad (and bound):

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: We're hearing extremely disturbing reports that Jeremony Corbinnne once hurled insulting antisemitic insults at a HEDGEHOG in his garden!

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: Coming in now, a mere 2,000 people in Israel protested against a totally fair Law that doesn't unfairly segregate their racial status

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: There have never been three high level resignations or a national crisis in Israel over these Laws that are totally not apartheid or racist

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: Ex Labor member of a club in Surrey who writes for the Telegraph and plays bowls withe the local PFI lawyer "QUITS LABOR IN SHOCK"

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: Israel has absolutely no internal politics and that huge protest you just saw with the large banners of "CRIMINAL PRESIDENT" are just students

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: CORBYN IN HEDGEHOG SHOCKER: HE SAID HER SPINES WERE A BIT SPIKEY.

    LOLLLLDFLGLGFHLDFGHLGF

    No, seriously.

    We Fucked You From Orbit.

    743:

    LOLLLLLLLLLLLLL.

    This is a Meta-Fuck from Heaven.

    "The last remaining 349 JC / BOD members were OUTRAGED that the Hedgehog was insulted"

    "250,000 Israelis telling Bibi to fuck right off with his racist shite is totes not news"

    "Jermememy Corrbine will institute GULAGS the day after attempting to fix LOBO / PFI interest loans that are hitting local councils for up to £100 mil interest on a 50 yr 50 mil loan"

    Seriously: FUCK OFF ALREADY.

    744:

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: Shall we invite more members of the amazingly racist Middle East Forum who totes aren't connected to IL PR Gov links to discuss the HEDGEHOG?

    MEF/NOTEVERISRAELDUDE/HASNEVERALWAYSBEENPAIDBYIL: Yes, well, I think we can all agree that insulting hedgehogs is de facto antisemitic and needs to be codified into Law

    SKY NEWS SPLASH: In other News, a Lord of the Realm just launched his new cash churner on his estate: "SMACK A HEDGEHOG WITH A SPADE LAUNCHED FROM A CLAY-TRAP"

    MEF/NOTEVERISRAELDUDE/HASNEVERALWAYSBEENPAIDBYIL: Yes! We love to see Traditional Sports supported in the Great Fenglish Milands.

    MEF/NOTEVERISRAELDUDE/HASNEVERALWAYSBEENPAIDBYIL: No, I deny that I was kicking that Hedgehog in the under-cover reports.

    Srsly.

    LORD OF WAR

    We were alive back in the days of Salt - You're Fucked if you poke us to play.

    745:

    Link in # 735 is utter bollocks. STELLA represents real Social Deomcracy & momentum want to get rid of her. I mean, you're on the other side of the pond & know better than I, who have spoken to the lady several times & also know her mother ... I'm with S P Zelder as regards fleas, I think.

    ( Aslo three successive posts telling us we are fucked is boring & repetitve as well as uninformative. )

    746:

    IF you wanted to not snark and actually know something

    snark is quite sufficient for me

    I "learn something" here too, but not about politics that neither I have any influence on nor it direct influence on me nor even on any people I know, in links chosen by a bot who has no actual understanding of the contents (or by a human who failed to read more than the subject).

    I mean, if you wanted to actually have a discussion.

    Having a discussion has a few requirements:

    • the participants using words for their meaning and not as Markov association chains (or drug or psychosis induced free association chains). Case in point: that saying about lying down with dogs was not on my radar nor in my writing, but is a free association dug up wherever

    • the participants actually trying to communicate with and not at the other participants

    Where those are not given any attempt would be futile.

    747:

    Okay, I give up.

    When did the language turn to shouty gibberish?

    This is usually a stimulating area discussion area that is a good read, but theres a high percentage rant at the moment.

    So, some people think JC is the Messiah and some think he is a pratt. Got that.

    And some think the Labour Party are veering recklessly left and others that it was too near Tory Lite. Got that.

    Its getting a bit dull.

    748:

    "There's no balance in nature."

    That is exaggerated to the point of view of being seriously misleading. In a complex system such an ecology, the interactions can lead to a cyclic phenomenon, a balance, a 'random walk' or (most often) something less easy to classify. But the point is that, in ALL cases (INCLUDING trophic cascades), they are emergent properties of the system, and can change whenever circumstances change, or just because the solution happens to be metastable or stable only within tight limits.

    I could give you ecological examples if you want.

    749:

    You have forgotten the events of 1981, as . I am not denying that there is an internal power-struggle - actually, there are at least two. But there is also an external attempt to foment dissention and more, though it is unclear whether the explanation is #25/#238/#603, #734, a combination, or what.

    750:

    EC @ 746 the events of 1981 Please be more specific, as I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. The Madwoman was PM & M Foot was Labour leader during the whole of that year ... Please make your point clearly.

    751:

    Meanwhile ... Especially for hard SF writers ... I think the word "interesting" applies here?

    752:

    The current UK negotiating strategy is classic divide-and-conquer, working their way down the major EU nation states to detach them from the position of the the EU's chief negotiater. The problem with this is his position was dictated by the other EU nation states. It is, in fact, delusional, and isn't going to fly. Part of this is to big up the possibility of a mutually destructive hard exit, leading to the brexrit apocalypse sketched by Charlie Stross.

    Probably, nobody buys this obvious bluff, and the current governmenteventually settles for an unsatisfactory brexit in name only that stops the Irish Question detonating and keeps the spice flowing

    Slightly less probably (even Brexiteers have a residual instinct for seat preservation, but you never know), the government collapses, and after a General Election all bets are off.

    Outside possibility, full on Brexit Apopocalypse, as advertised

    753:

    The formation of the SDP.

    754:

    peterajet @ 749 SLIGHT problem IF Labour win a new General Election with fuckwit learn-nothing hard Brexiteer Corbyn "in charge" we will be no better off than with a tory brexit ( & quite possibly even worse off, if that's possible )

    Pigeon @ 750 Thanks A great might-have been that was, which, incidentally I supported, as I believed that the Madwoman had betrayed the "One Nation" stance of the actual "Conservatives" as represented by Macmillan, Butler etc .... Especially as momentum are simply "Militant" under another name with lots of unbelievably gullible followers.

    755:

    Off topic (seven hundred posts in? Yeah, right), but a 2.1 kiloton explosion over Thule seems like the kind of thing readers here would care about.

    756:

    Off topic (seven hundred posts in? Yeah, right), but a 2.1 kiloton explosion over Thule seems like the kind of thing readers here would care about. Some obtuse space opera material up thread that might be related. Or maybe just an amusing part of some multi-layered cover for something else. :-) It's the no-comment aspect of that explosion that makes it intriguing. Very small asteroid impacts resulting in high-altitude explosions happen quite often so superficially at least this is nothing unusual. ("nothing to see here, move along folks")

    757:

    a 2.1 kiloton explosion over Thule seems like the kind of thing readers here would care about.

    Not that infrequent on a world-wide basis. I expect that it was somewhat loud on the ground.

    https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/

    758:

    OK. I know nothing about this magazine or even if it's a faux magazine/website. But they seem to agree with Charlies essay on how bad things could get.

    https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/thirty-six-things-that-will-happen-if-britain-crashes-out-of-europe-with-no-deal

    759:

    "When did the language turn to shouty gibberish?"

    A certain person (usually known as CD, for Catlina Diamond) needs to talk with their doctor about pharmaceutical adjustment again.

    760:

    whitroth @ 700:

    You wrote:
    In the UK the custom of driving on the left derives from Medieval Knights who carried their shields on their left and their swords on their right. Passing to the left of oncoming travelers freed up their sword hands when needed.
    I'm utterly confused. *WHOSE* left? If I'm riding ahead, and there are travelers coming towards me, I want them to pass on *my* left, where my shield is. Actually, same is true if you're walking. Why, yes, I did fight heavy in the SCA when I was young....

    That certainly makes more sense, but then it would also make more sense for them to develop the custom of driving to the right instead.

    So why DID the UK develop the custom of driving on the left?

    761:

    So why DID the UK develop the custom of driving on the left? This history "Why do some countries drive on the left and others on the right?" includes a lot of dates that I assume are accurate. If so, then it seems to assign blame for right-hand drive to the French (because duh), the Americans (because it's modern tradition to blame the Americans?) and the Russians (because they invented it?) In the late 1700s, however, teamsters in France and the United States began hauling farm products in big wagons pulled by several pairs of horses. These wagons had no driver’s seat; instead the driver sat on the left rear horse, so he could keep his right arm free to lash the team. Since he was sitting on the left, he naturally wanted everybody to pass on the left so he could look down and make sure he kept clear of the oncoming wagon’s wheels. Therefore he kept to the right side of the road. In Russia, in 1709, the Danish envoy under Tsar Peter the Great noted the widespread custom for traffic in Russia to pass on the right, but it was only in 1752 that Empress Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna) officially issued an edict for traffic to keep to the right.

    One of the very useful tells in the geoguessr game is right-hand/left-hand drive. (Plant life will get you approximate latitude though not N/S hemisphere unless one is a specialist.)

    762:

    Catina Diamond:

  • Israel is a Jewish state. Get over it.
  • Take your meds already.
  • 763:

    David L @ 755 "Prospect" is usually regarded as reliable, & also as haonest as any other. Very strongly "Liberal" in social matters, faintly financially conservative, has had some very eminent contributors over the years. If they think it's going to be shit, yes, well ....

    Bill Arnold @ 758 Yes, that's the version I've always heard - everyone "drove on the left" until the revolutionary French changed, because it was different to what had been done before. [ And also because, it you are right-handed, your sword is on your left side, so keeping left makes sense. [ See also spiral staircases in castles ... & the exception in borders Scotland, where those belonging to the Kerr family are opposite-handed, because the Kerrs were & are notoriously left-handers. ]

    764:

    It makes more sense if the rule was established later, when cavalrymen fought with sabres and without shields.

    765:

    I think the story concept might be taken... :)

    766:

    "So why DID the UK develop the custom of driving on the left?"

    As has been pointed out, it didn't. It inherited it from much much earlier traditions. This page looks a lot more plausible than most, though I haven't checked the references:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right#History

    I can believe that the French changed to driving on the right after the revolution, given what else they changed (not always with permanent effect), and that teamsters made the change in the USA (I believe that most carriages in the Europe had seats, or a single horse being led by someone on foot).

    But it's THOSE that developed the custom on driving on the right. It's YOU who changed, not us.

    You can reasonably ask why the Romans developed the custom of driving on the left, but none of the current British kingdoms existed then (actually, even the kingdom of Cornwall didn't), let alone the UK!

    767:

    I'm afraid my opinion of the Greens is somewhat coloured by their origin story, as a lifeboat for Don Chipp when he ejected from the Libs, and their good work of moderating both parties in the Senate not withstanding (mea culpa). But I think they like the other small parties will be undone by iron law of centrist politics, to survive you have to be big. That's why we see a pareto distribution of party lives, most sputter out in the first couple of elections and only a couple go on to have lives measured in decades.

    768:

    You’re mixing up the Greens with the Democrats, possibly because Moz was talking about both?

    769:

    Cheers; that all makes sense and as I said I can personally testify to just how smooth riding a wave-piercer is, from which the reduced hull stress becomes immediately obvious.

    770:

    I presume by "cruise ship" you mean the sort of "barge + hotel on top" object that the likes of Carnival come up with rather than a true ocean liner such as the John Brown Queens built for Cunard (1960s and earlier)?

    771:

    OK I'm single, but I have difficulty generating enough rubbish to justify putting out any of my bins more than once a month (~quarterly for plastics, after flattening 2l bottles).

    772:

    And some of us think that, at least with the present "leaderlessship", neither the Con Party nor Liebour are electable.

    773:

    The hidden joke is that I was quoting (sort of). A strange individual in the 70s released a plainsong recording of the British Highway Code. EC filled in the bit I missed - “In the absence of a suitable footpath...”

    (I’m sure I vaguely remember the narrator pronouncing it as “suit” and “able” rhymes with “table”.)

    Some folks here possibly got it, anyway.

    As for the left/right thing - well yes, duh. But it’s a British blog, remember. Aligning to a US-centric default is not actually required.

    Also history - next are you going to talk about pink for girls and blue for boys being a Roman or medieval thing? :)

    774:

    The Labour leadership clearly does not support Theresa May's "red lines" , and neither do the PLP (with four obvious exceptions), or the mass membership. You seem to be blinded by a tribal antipathy for the left.

    775:

    We (a couple) are inflicted with enough packaging that we put out the bin, full, once a fortnight. As I am an extreme composter, our green bin goes out only 2-3 times a year with wood and prunings unsuitable for composting. Our black bin (other waste) goes out every few months, unless we are having a junk-purging session.

    Damn that unnecessary packaging!

    776:

    peterajet @ 774 Irrelevant, when Corbyn is a rabid brexiteer. However this piece in today's indie is onteresting - I tend to agree with it, for obvious reasons. You also seem to have missed my stated support for the SDP ( Roy Jenkins, the best PM we never had ) or for my current ( Labour, HINT ) MP. Also, having now read it, the article in "Pospect" linked to by David L @ 755 makes a horrible amount of sense. [ The one thing I don't think will happen is a total cessation of air traffic, if only because that really would hurt everybody else as much as us, but - it's possible - & it could still be very very difficult. ]

    777:

    Yes. While I regard Corbyn as a bit of an idiot, and McDonnell as unspeakable, I would sooner see a return to the disasters of Old Labour that what the Rabid Right plans for us. And I speak as someone who would probably gain financially from the latter.

    It is a great pity that Clegg fucked up his chance to change the electoral system, and destroyed the Liberal Democrats. It is a joke (with some truth in it) that the SNP might well take seats if it stood in some places in England :-)

    778:

    I'm in a building with 12 flats of between 2-6 people who get to share six rubbish bins collected every two weeks and six recycling bins collected every week. Oh, and one small organic waste bin. We used to have eight waste and four recycling, then Camden did an overhaul, replaced our bins with new ones and gave us four of each. We had to fight to get the extra bins - apparently they thought one between every three flats was normal.
    On my own I don't make much rubbish, but I share with three others. Collectively we'd do a half bin every two weeks, but some of our neighbours generate a lot more, especially the one with a bunch of little kids.
    The only person who is really happy about the bins is the resident grumpy old lady upstairs who gets to write all the passive aggressive notes about how to use them properly.

    779:

    Corbyn is not really a rabid brexiteer. He doesn't like the pro-business aspects of the EU much, but seems to accept it over the current alternative options. Reluctant remainer is probably a fairly accurate tag.

    The Antisemitism is a beat up - there are just as many anti-semites in the Conservative Party, and in British society generally, but it's a concerted attack on Corbyn for somehow being responsible for it ... the one person in the party who doesn't seem to have a racist bone in his body. He's been regularly going to public and private events of all faiths in his constituency his entire time as an MP!
    Sure, he regularly makes idiotic comments, and I disagree with a lot of his policies, but he's not actually all that left wing, certainly not an extremist, except in comparison to how right wing UK politics had become under New Labour and then Cameron.

    780:

    Yes... my recycling bin takes about 15-20 carrier bags full of rubbish, with the handles tied together to make a roughly spherical package, depending how hard they're squashed down. That probably corresponds to about 20-27 carrier bag loads of stuff brought in to the house, given the extent to which the contents shrink of their own accord when the food inside is removed, and depending on how much I can be bothered with squashing them further (usually not much). One carrier bag brings home 4 days' worth of meals from the shop.

    The contribution from stuff other than food packaging is not significant - junk mail and other postal debris accounts for essentially all of that extra, and does nothing more than fill in the gaps. (The packaging from things like PC cases, car windscreens, and car exhaust systems, is an exception, but for obvious reasons such an infrequent one that it doesn't count.)

    From this we can easily see that it takes a few months to generate enough rubbish to fill the bin, and also that even if there were 4 people living here and getting through food at 4 times the total rate, collecting the bin once a month instead of once a fortnight would still suffice - might call for a bit more squashing of the contents, but there is buckets of margin in that. It also makes me wonder just WTF people are doing to generate so much rubbish that they find fortnightly collections inconveniently infrequent.

    On the alternate fortnights the non-recycling bin is collected, or in my case isn't collected because there's nothing in it. Other people seem to mainly use theirs as overflow capacity for the same stuff they put in the recycling bin, since this is not one of those areas where they rootle through your bin to fine you for putting inappropriate items in it in the way that according to rumour some areas do. This further increases my bafflement at HTF they are generating so much rubbish.

    781:

    “It is a great pity that Clegg fucked up his chance to change the electoral system, and destroyed the Liberal Democrats.”

    Clegg was stitched up on electoral reform.

    His ultimate mistake was putting what he perceived to be the interests of the country[1] before those of the country and expecting the electorate to be able (or allowed) to tell the difference between cynical opportunism and basic decency...

    [1] Avoiding a collapse of government during an unfolding economic crisis while exerting at least some moderating influence on a Conservative party gleefully hell-bent on taking an ideologically driven sledge-hammer to every piece of public/social infrastructure in sight in the name of austerity...

    782:

    No. His main mistake was to trust the New Conservatives to behave with minimal honour (decency, if you prefer). The Old Conservatives (Churchill to Heath) would not have behaved that way.

    783:

    Agreed. Corbyn can only be compared with Militant Tendency through perceptions clouded by how far the average mood of politics in general has moved to the right since Militant's day. Militant got called the "looney left", with some justification given the negative appeal their more extreme positions had for a lot of even leftwardly-inclined voters; it was largely a piss-taking appellation. The screaming against Corbyn, on the other hand, seems to arise in large part from the fear of those who recognise that he has a significant positive appeal and so see him as a threat to their own positions. (At least, that part of it from outside the Labour party does. That from inside seems to have more to do with people not understanding the appeal of a left-wing leader to people who want to be able to vote for left-wing policies and have their vote count.)

    Certainly I find it a major disappointment that he does not take a strong position against leaving the EU. But no matter who you vote for in Britain you can't avoid having to grit your teeth and put up with the shit elements of their policy existing alongside the elements worth voting for. Almost always the overall score comes out powerfully negative for everyone and it's a case of having to pick the least negative option. With Corbyn, EU-related disappointment notwithstanding, it comes out amazingly positive. His manifesto was a quite remarkable document in that nearly all the points in it were things I agreed with and there were only a handful of items I didn't, whereas practically every other time I've read a major party's manifesto it's been a case of picking out the handful of things I do agree with. This means that even allowing for 90% of the items never getting anywhere, the 10% that did bear some fruit would inevitably include at least some which were things I'd actually voted in favour of, whereas with any "normal" manifesto it's overwhelmingly likely that it wouldn't include any.

    To be able to vote for policies you support instead of just voting against ones you don't, and at the same time to be casting that vote for one of the two parties that is big enough to count, is a really fucking amazing rare opportunity to engage with British politics positively, rather than purely negatively as is almost always the case. Without Corbyn I'd most likely vote Green and just have to put up with the electoral system making it very little different from not voting at all.

    784:

    "Clegg was stitched up on electoral reform."

    The way I see it it was one of those situations where the case for is so self-evident that its proponents relied entirely on rational argument, while its opponents relied entirely on FUD. Result, of course, FUD won, and why the juddering fuck is this species called "Homo sapiens" rather than "Homo stultus" eh?

    785:

    Derail - interesting new info re: Alzheimer's

    Like some other folks here, concerned about some older family at risk of AD.

    Not a 'cure' but shows some promise. When I was looking up the terms on Wikipedia, learned that this factor is very closely related to platelets. (Would appreciate anyone here with deeper understanding about this topic to explain - and identify issues with these findings - in plain language.)

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05763-0

    Excerpt A:

    'Lymphatic-vessel growth in mice is promoted by a signalling pathway involving vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGF-C) and its receptor VEGFR3, whereas impairments in the pathway lead to a loss of meningeal lymphatic vessels1,3. Furthermore, treatment with VEGF-C increases the diameter of meningeal lymphatic vessels, improving lymphatic drainage4. Consistent with these findings, the authors showed that local delivery of the Vegf-c gene into the cisterna magna of old mice using a virus restored the drainage of CSF tracer into deep cervical lymph nodes. This change was accompanied by restoration of spatial orientation in old mice. '

    Excerpt B:

    'Viral delivery of Vegf-c at this time point could not prevent the cognitive impairments in either model, suggesting that the early amyloid-β deposition and cognitive impairments in these animals were caused by disruption in another clearance pathway — most likely transvascular clearance. As transvascular-clearance routes gradually deteriorate with age, an increasing burden is probably put on the meningeal lymphatic system. If the capacity of the lymphatic system is reached, this might lead to faulty lymphatic drainage of amyloid-β and other proteins from the ISF and CSF (Fig. 1). Thus, a dynamic relationship between the meningeal lymphatics and blood vessels seems to regulate proteostasis in the brain.'

    786:

    EC @ 782 YES - which is why I still sometimes think of myself as a left-wing conservative ... The rightward shift has now found me supporting a female Labour MP, as previously stated BUT Pigeon @ 783 Sorry, not buying it. Corbyn's main problem is actually his total incompetence. And, no I happen to think his supporters at least are "militant" Agree to disagree?

    787:

    Re: 'The word "interesting" applies ...'

    Thanks for posting this! When I first read this on another site, my immediate thought was that this was a heavy-metal planet (Holy crap, Batman! A naturally occurring planet-size nuke!) Second thought: What kind of biochemistry/life forms could possibly arise and be stable enough to consistently self-propagate in such an environment? (Ditto for silicon-based AI.)

    Would be interested in reading whether there's any spectroscopy on this re: chemical composition.

    Excerpt:

    'However, the research team’s analysis showed the planet’s magnetic field is incredibly strong, around 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s, and this could help explain why it also has a strong aurora.'

    788:

    I read back in the sixties or seventies that Jupiter was just under the border of being able to ignite fusion, so this isn't surprising.

    We know there are a lot of non-solar objects out between the stars.

    Now, if only the Planet Porno would come into our solar system, and the Emperor Wang apply his sex ray to this planet, the whole right would self-destruct....

    789:

    Take it and stuff it. 1. Since it was founded, it had avoided saying that. 2. What about all the non-Jews who lived there before? (And do NOT talk to me about Jordan or Lebanon - talk to the folks in Cornwall about Scotland.) 3. GOD DID NOT GIVE THE JEWS THE MODERN STATE OF ISRAEL. Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, the US, the UK and the UN did. It was expected to be secular. 4. You really want a Jewish version of Iran? 5. Apartheid is apartheid, and I don't care if you put a bow on it.

    790:

    You got it in one. I swear, they look like someone did a copy and paste with a ship and a hotel.

    bleah

    Me, go on a cruise? Let's see... if I wanted a hole in the water to throw money into, how 'bout this: http://www.sailingtheatlantic.com/kiss_the_foredeck/star_song.jpeg ?

    791:

    There are lots of other phenomena that are associated, too, and they are still trying to work out which ones cause which others, whether they have missed a common cause, or what. Don't hold your breath.

    792:

    whitroth @ 790 Oh I don't know. How about

    Or tow real boats from Arthur Ransome: SY Gondola - Catain Flint's houseboat! Or better still, the original for Goblin ( "We didn't mean to Go to Sea" ) Like THIS then ...

    793:

    Oh, my. The Goblin's beautiful.

    Once, only once, I went sailing in a small boat, on one of the lakes around Orlando, FL. Utterly silent but for the wind. It was lovely.

    Now, for something bigger, back at Worldcon in '83, friends, knowing I had medieval's with me, invited me on a midnight cruise... on the Longship Company's clinker-built Norse ship http://longshipco.org/ Sp. there we were, all in medievals, Labor Day (US) weekend, rowing into Baltimore Harbor, and all the power boats around were going nuts looking at us....

    794:

    Bugger - my first link vanised: Google for "Steam Yacht Sunbeam" .....

    795:

    For those who were looking down on Space [Earth Defence] Force, there might be some good news, the project is stalling. https://www.military.com/dodbuzz/2018/07/25/congress-fails-fund-trumps-space-force-defense-budget-bill.html

    RE: Yachts I've had quite impression from certain yachts belonging to our "native" billionaire. Not that I'm a big fan of rich people (to put it mildly) or if I support spending huge sums of money for relatively little output, but this is work of art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(motor_yacht) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(sailing_yacht) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hXY6ObJ1jE

    796:

    To me those all look like boats for people who like working on their boat. My stepfather seemed to be one of them for a long time, owning a boat where maintenance time was more than use time, and the use was apparently "go out in the bay and get fishing gear wet".

    I'm not that geriatric yet... probably too old to actually sail an iFLY15 but not too old to want to try :)

    797:

    "Avoiding a collapse of government during an unfolding economic crisis while exerting at least some moderating influence on a Conservative party gleefully hell-bent on taking an ideologically driven sledge-hammer to every piece of public/social infrastructure in sight in the name of austerity..."

    Did they actually moderate anything?

    798:

    Media treatment?

    By having some seemingly reasonable people available to talk to the media about how they're really a party of nice, sensible types with a few hot-heads who thrive on media coverage, they can make the whole setup more acceptable. If all you have is Johnson and Farridge* it's difficult to look serious.

    Australia has a different electoral system where one-off media sensations can get into the senate just by being eccentric. I think the record is around 0.2% of the vote. We also have a history of those politicians flaming out... like Mal Meninga whose political career lasted 28 seconds.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt--SGmIKIQ

    • I use the English spelling, none of that foreign nonsense.
    799:

    Actually, Australia is probably setting new records right now for largest number of bye-elections in a single term. We have a constitutional clause that the BNP would be proud of as it disqualifies anyone tainted by foreign influence.

    Until recently this wasn't much cared about but once one case was brought and lost the floodgates opened and a game of partisan oneupcretinship started. I count 17 affected MPs from a couple of hundred total but only about 7 or 8 bye-elections so far because senators are replaced by count-backs of the last election so no new election is held.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Australian_parliamentary_eligibility_crisis

    800:

    For those who were looking down on Space [Earth Defence] Force, there might be some good news, the project is stalling. Thanks, hadn't heard that. I'm mainly amused by it (it doesn't seem as dangerous as some other future-military issues) for (sci-fi?) reasons, due to a perhaps-unreliable intuition that it was in-part inspired by a briefing to DJ Trump on some unexplained space-related phenomena.[0] The one(s) with the many names suggested the same, perhaps in a similar spirit. If one wants to develop (planetary-scale?) exotic weapons that might be effective against alien space craft, the projects had better be very dark budget and with extremely competent OPSEC, else they will be found (network analysis/etc at scale) and covertly compromised.[0]

    [0]This is standard bad sci-fi!!! :-)

    801:

    I'm afraid so. I mean of course the Dems.

    802:

    Take it and stuff it.

    Cry me a river.

  • Since it was founded, it had avoided saying that.
  • O RLY? Here's, from the Israeli Declaration of Independence (in original Hebrew below).

    Accordingly we, members of the People's Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.

    לפיכך נתכנסנו, אנו חברי מועצת העם, נציגי הישוב העברי והתנועה הציונית, ביום סיום המנדט הבריטי על ארץ-ישראל, ובתוקף זכותנו הטבעית וההיסטורית ועל יסוד החלטת עצרת האומות המאוחדות אנו מכריזים בזאת על הקמת מדינה יהודית בארץ ישראל, היא מדינת ישראל.

  • What about all the non-Jews who lived there before?
  • Some of them still live there.

  • GOD DID NOT GIVE THE JEWS THE MODERN STATE OF ISRAEL. Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, the US, the UK and the UN did. It was expected to be secular.
  • We don't care what they expected. Also. the roots of the modern state of Israel began long before Truman, Churchill and the UN.

  • You really want a Jewish version of Iran?
  • I really don't want a Jewish version of Lebanon.

    To clarify: Israel can be democratic only as long as it remains Jewish.

  • Apartheid is apartheid, and I don't care if you put a bow on it.
  • And nuclear bomb is a nuclear bomb.

    803:

    Did they actually moderate anything?

    Comparing the period 2010-2015 with 2015-present, I'm sad to say that the answer is "yes".

    2010-2015: Tory austerity shit, albeit with the parking brake engaged and lots of squealing as they gun the throttle repeatedly.

    2015-present: Tory austerity shit with the brakes off: also overt attempts at gerrymandering and voter suppression (copied from the US Republicans), and the beatdown on the poor, disabled, and non-ethnically-pure goes into overdrive.

    And that's without Brexit, which prior to 2014 was basically a Tory party internal shibboleth rather than a cause of national paralysis and an onrushing state of emergency.

    804:

    No real surprise, since I grew up abut 8 miles from John Brown's (Clydebank, Scotland for those who can't get that from the name alone).

    I'm also drawing a distinction between a "cruise ship" and a true "ocean liner". A true ocean liner can maintain a 3 day passage between New York (USE) and Le Havre (France) or Southampton (UK) without bending in Winter. Try that with a cruise ship and if you're lucky you'll only have 5_000 very sea sick people to deal with: If you're unlucky you'll have a structural failure and a major rescue operation.

    805:

    Which reminds me of the 1960s USAF orbiting laboratory/observation satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_2 briefly mentions this, and there's more in the link from there to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Also, there's about 6 pages of history on MOL, and a review of a model kit, in the present issue of Airfix Model World (off sale 5th September 2018 in the UK).

    806:

    To clarify: Israel can be democratic only as long as it remains Jewish.

    Racial/ethnic restrictions on the franchise are generally considered bad outside the US and Israel special cases. I think even the BNP would balk at doing something similar in the UK, although perhaps the Conservatives wouldn't - EVEL is a step in that direction (what is the official acronym for "English Votes for English Laws"?)

    Albeit I'm biased by coming from a country that has a wider franchise than most, has does for quite a while, and is proud of that.

    Speaking of which, I was introduced to a wonderful book called "THE history of women's suffrage" which is written as though the rest of the world only exists insofar as it is reacting to events in the US. Amusingly it only starts after all (competent, adult) women got the right to vote in Aotearoa and it ends a long time before many black women got the vote in the US (it ends in 1922 but it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that they could challenge common forms of racist disenfranchisement and even today cases are still being fought under that act).

    I'm more of a franchise absolutist - if you're ruled by a government you should get to vote for it. You should also be a citizen of it, for that matter (and not the "Puerto Rico" faux-citizenship nonsense either).

    807:

    I think "EVEL" is actually correct; it's certainly the only term I've heard other than the obvious mispronunciation.

    808:

    Re: AD- 'Don't hold your breath.'

    Yeah, I know. Still, it is encouraging that new mechanisms and processes are being discovered esp. as older theories are being abandoned.

    Given the failure of the pharma industry to come up with anything new (they've effectively thrown in the towel), uni-based research almost entirely supported by public grants seems the best hope. Odd how the uni's/gov'ts fund and do all the work, take all the research risks, yet pharma takes all the profits. To quote a favorite rock band: 'Hmmm...something's not right here.'

    (Queen recorded the tune below to describe their first record deal. Hey, what can I say - really looking forward to Nov.)

    QUEEN - Death On Two Legs live London 1979 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXzW-pZ5sUQ

    809:

    As in the US. I hear ads (no, they're not "our supporters") on NPR from Pharma... when the reality is that something like 60% or 90% of basic research* in bioscience and medicine is being done by the NIH, or by grants from them.

    • As opposed to research on something that does the same thing as another drug that's about to go out of patent.
    810:

    That's The Highway Code by the Mastersingers with much amusing accenting including "pav-e-ment". Unfortunately it seems to be available only on second-hand vinyl (or of course YouTube).

    811:

    Bill Arnold @ 761:

    “So why DID the UK develop the custom of driving on the left?”
    This history "Why do some countries drive on the left and others on the right?" includes a lot of dates that I assume are accurate. If so, then it seems to assign blame for right-hand drive to the French (because duh), the Americans (because it's modern tradition to blame the Americans?) and the Russians (because they invented it?)

    That's one of the sources where I got the "right-handed knights" explanation from. It has fairly good info on why the US & French drive on the right and why other countries that drive on the left do so (former British colonies or their railroad systems were designed by British engineers).

    But, "right-handed knights" has been discounted as a reason why the UK drives on the left. So, what's the REAL reason?

    812:

    Damian @ 773:

    Also history - next are you going to talk about pink for girls and blue for boys being a Roman or medieval thing? :)

    No. I'm pretty sure that's something that came out of the 1920s.

    813:

    As I said, ask the (ancient) Romans.

    814:

    (driving on the left or right)

    The German town Landsberg am Lech has a steep street lined by houses on both sides that had the following rules until ~1920: - the person leading the draft animals leads them from the animals' left (as usual) - carts keep to the left (no crushing of teamsters between carts in the middle) - the owners of the houses may not close their doors so in case an out-of-control cart comes down the street people can jump through them to safety

    The carts coming down that road were mostly loaded with salt, going to the only practical crossing of the Lech river. They tended to be heavy and the street was cobbled, and the area (still) gets snow and ice for a month or three each year.

    815:

    Argh.

    There's this concept called "The Valley of Death" (e.g. https://stories.abbvie.com/stories/moving-drug-discoveries-beyond-the-valley-of-death.htm). The problem is that, in 2015, there were 1.2 million pharma research papers published, but only 396 drugs introduced worldwide. There are a bunch of problems in the "Valley of Death," which you really should understand if you want to know why most research is funded by NIH, but most drugs are funded by big pharma.

    First, most papers are of the form, "Compound X shows effects against Issue Y in vitro." Basically, some chemical controls a bacteria, shows activity against a cancer, or whatever, generally in some sort of assay, ranging from a high schooler's science fair project to huge-scale automated chemical library screening.

    Anyway, there's a whole chain of events, starting at the lab bench: --Some compound shows promise for some condition in an in vitro test (cell culture, normally). --It doesn't conflict with an existing patent --It works in lab animals as it does on the bench. --It doesn't have serious safety issues in lab animals. --It doesn't have serious safety issues in a small group of people --It doesn't have serious safety issues in a large group of people --It is as effective or more effective than existing treatments in a test of efficacy on a small group of people --It is as effective or more effective than existing treatment in a test of efficacy on a large group of people.

    Now notice, the first few steps are stuff a lab scientist could do, and this is where NIH funding goes. It's providing funding for some large part of the 1.2 million research papers that go into the hopper, with the hope that some of them make it out the other end.

    Where Big Pharma comes in is when they have to start doing large-scale tests of safety and efficacy. And don't think that, "oh, it would just be cheaper if they used test subjects in Bangladesh, rather than the US." They've been doing this for years. Human trials are done around the globe, with each segment targeted to where it will minimize salaries, because around 75% of the costs are the salaries of those involved (and yes, that's in the hundreds of millions).

    Almost all of these don't work. Why? --Compound works differently in a lab animal than it does in a cell culture or assay (almost all of them). --Compound turns out to be too similar to something already under patent. --Compound turns out to be toxic to things we care about, like heart cells or brain cells, or just people in general (almost all the rest). --Compound doesn't work in humans at all (most Alzheimer's drugs). --Compound doesn't work in humans better than existing treatments.

    So we've got this clunky system wherein large ranks of effectively artisanal researchers find compounds. A very few make it across the Valley of Death to human testing, which is almost exclusively done by Big Pharma. The Valley of Death is scaling up from small scale lab and rodent studies to big-scale studies to figure out what all the compound does, both good and bad. There's only limited capacity for this kind of testing, and it's maxed out.

    The other point is that much as I dislike the Pharma Bros, I'm not sure that they're wrong to ditch their drug discovery labs. If they have something like a 1 in 10,000 chance of finding a new drug, that's a lot of wasted money for every product they take to market, and that product is going to be hideously expensive to pay for all its siblings that didn't make it through trials. I don't know if there is a right answer for the drug production ecosystem, but I don't think that blaming the companies for buying up publicly funded research is wrong, since they are putting hundreds of millions into making it ready to market.

    You might think that DIY drug manufacture would be the way to go, for which I'd suggest reading This article from In the Pipeline (which many years ago gave us that lovely article on FOOF).

    816:

    The issue, as far as I have seen, is more that they get publicly funded research at a low price then keep all the profits, although obviously some effort is made to keep some of that for the university and researchers who came up with the ideas in the first place.

    As for research, it's easy to do badly if you are merely looking for a slightly different variety of treatment for something which is already treated. Poor people aren't a good market.

    Another possible weak point is that the potential drug has to be soluble in DMSO for ease of handling, which does rather restrict what molecular shapes you can use.

    Screening is at least becoming much more intelligent, with smaller scale few to tens of thousands of molecules being screened after much computer work to see what molecules fit what is known about the receptor or suchlike that is targeted. Billions in venture capital is going into this sort of thing, and a lot of other areas that the big drug companies aren't investigating, but a lot of it is speculative, which at least means suppliers of lab equipment, chemists, biologists etc are kept in a job, but I do think it could all be done more efficiently by one large company rather than replicating highly paid executives across lots of small companies.

    817:

    Since nobody has mentioned the runaway greenhouse study that has been making news, and climate change is, as the OP says, a serious backdrop to Brexit (especially related to human migration to the North):

    Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene August 6, 2018 (pdf)

    The Figures capture the gist of the study: Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

    Some choice "science speak": they need to work on the messaging. (Here's The Onion version) The negative feedback actions fall into three broad categories: (i) reducing greenhouse gas emissions, (ii) enhancing or creating carbon sinks (e.g., protecting and enhancing biosphere carbon sinks and creating new types of sinks) (59), and (iii) modifying Earth’s energy balance (for example, via solar radiation management, although that particular feedback entails very large risks of destabilization or degradation of several key processes in the Earth System) ... Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway; these include changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values ... Enhanced ambition will need new collectively shared values, principles, and frameworks as well as education to support such changes (67, 68). In essence, effective Earth System stewardship is an essential precondition for the prosperous development of human societies in a Stabilized Earth pathway. ... Ultimately, the transformations necessary to achieve the Stabilized Earth pathway require a fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective governance at the Earth System level (77), with a much stronger emphasis on planetary concerns in economic governance, global trade, investments and finance, and technological development

    818:

    OT, figure it’s late in the thread.

    Seen on this morning’s commute - a grey Mercedes C63 with the personalised plate “RFC791”. Driver wearing plain but bespoke shirt, mid-50s at the very oldest (could be “lived in” late 30s).

    I figure ex-field circus for a networking vendor, long ago promoted into account management. Or just a wanker, you can’t really tell.

    819:

    A friend has a "GOTROOT" vanity plate. (Couldn't tell you whether he has rooted his vehicle; perhaps.)

    820:

    You didn't run the numbers: most promising drugs fail. The problem is the ratio of successful drug to failure, which is, what, 50,000 to 1? They even say that drug development follows Eroom's Law, the inverse of Moore's Law--discovery is getting harder, not easier.

    So if one company does discovery, every success is going to have to support the costs of tens of thousands of failures. That's not an economic model that works, and I suspect it's why Big Pharma companies have been dumping their R&D labs. It's cheaper to buy stuff that might well work, rather than paying for almost total failure.

    I don't like Big Pharma, but I have to say it, they're smarter to have researchers who are on someone else's salary get money for discovery. These people can (and often do) create their own companies to commercialize especially promising drugs, but they profit when they're bought out by a Big Pharma Company if their product seems to be good. Otherwise the fledgling goes out of business, and the employees go back to their day jobs. Wasteful, yes, but it could be a lot worse.

    As for the automation of discovery, it's worth digging through In The Pipeline to get an acerbic take (from the inside) about separating the BS from the toxic waste from the few things that might work occasionally.

    821:

    They even say that drug development follows Eroom's Law, the inverse of Moore's Law--discovery is getting harder, not easier.

    And why wouldn't it ?

    The basic "theory" of drug development is that we just need to find the small-ish molecule which happens to "push the right button".

    That might be workable principle in case of Intelligent Design, but in a system evolved by survival of those who survived, the fact that we still exist is proof positive that there are not a lot of "right buttons" to press left, because they are almost by definition dual use.

    The ailments with sufficient profitability to sustain drug development all look like incredibly complex system failures which happen because we drive our bodies far outside the envelope evolution has optimized us for, in terms of both age and molecular environment.

    822:

    Bill Arnold, Heteromeles (Frank) & everyone How apposite. This morning's "Today" programme had two utterly fascinating pieces in the 07.30 - 07.45 slot. An inteview with James Lovelock ( at age 99, good for him! ) with a strong aside on pro-nuclear power, which should stir up the usual fake greenies. And, after "the papers" a remark on Marie Stopes ( Which had a sideline on overpopulation of course ). Stopes was a very controversial figure - still is. The irony of the piece on her being immediately follwed wy the religious-lying-hogwash-slot-of-the day did not escape me, either. All the churches damned her & all her works, but, she was also in favour of "sterilising the unfit" & had somewhat (!) racist views, so like I said - still controversial.

    823:

    In the short term, they've got Investor Visas ($0.5M-$20M a pop depending on where; they come with full residence rights and citizenship after a couple of years, if the investor wants it)

    It may be noted that billionaire tech bro wankers using their "investment" of millions in New Zealand not to actual invest usefully in our economy but instead to buy a survivalist paradise in the South Island high country have begun to FUCK US OFF.

    There were serious questions in parliament about just why Peter Thiell's immigration got fast-tracked

    Why they think the locals here in NZ would let them get away with role-playing 'survivalist warlord' here if the Americans chase them out in case of global economic collapse is beyond me. Shows a pretty severe misunderstanding of the NZ psyche - not surprising given that my fellow NZ citizen Thiell's only ever spent 12 days here.

    824:

    Well, I have an automatic reaction to any UK registration of the form "RFC $number", and I suspect all the other Scots residents will have the same one.

    825:

    Paws ( & Daman ) "RFC" Uh? Rich effin c**t ??? Or something else?

    826:

    Perhaps the NZ population should put some special lampposts close to these survivalist compounds.

    The lampposts can even be named after the rich arseholes, so that people will know who to hang from which when 'the Event' comes.

    827:

    Royal Flying Corps Rugby Football Club Really Fast Car Revolting Fart Collector Rabbits Fighting Cthulhu Reanimated Festering Corpse

    ...In this case it literally means "Request For Comments", which is what the standards documents for how stuff on the internet works are called. RFC791 describes Internet Protocol, ie. the "IP" in "TCP/IP", "IP address" etc.

    No idea what the Scottish meaning Paws is referring to is though. Refugees Fleeing Culloden?

    As a completely irrelevant aside I discovered this today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43993471

    Some nutty thing about building some crap on the end of Lord's cricket ground above the tunnels into Marylebone, apparently for no other reason than that there isn't anything else built there at the moment, and flogging shares in it using a blockchain thing. Only they can't because the MCC still has 119 years' worth of lease on the top 18 inches of ground. All very silly and pointless, but the combination of railways and blockchain inspired me to mention it here :)

    828:

    Yeah... I'm pretty sure the Nancy Blackett has spent more time being restored than being sailed. I think there was one restoration followed by a further period of neglect which necessitated another one without any actual sailing being done in between, though I might be remembering it wrong.

    They are beautiful though :)

    I periodically poke through adverts on the internet for cruising trimarans and indulge in a bit of fantasy, particularly when I find something like a Telstar going for 5K, but I too fear the flesh is not up to the desire these days...

    829:

    I'd think "Rangers Football Club" before anything else: I loathe Wendyball as much as anyone, but that abbreviation is that ubiquitous in Scotland.

    830:

    Ah, yes, of course... the sectarian dispute over client-side image maps.

    831:

    Re: Drug discovery

    Excellent key papers/review articles on AD that include specific examples of the drug discovery journey you describe:

    https://www.nature.com/collections/vgnnbfttml

    BTW - some other factors that might explain why useful drug discovery is near non-existent in Western big pharma:

    1- Industry analysts downgrade firms that do not consistently show 90%+ gross profit. (It's getting to the point that NP is approaching GP requirements.) Very important since most of the money being made in mature industries are via the stock market/share price.

    2- Recent-ish patent law changes that allow Corps to request and get patent extensions every time they find a new use for a drug*. This keeps costs higher than initially expected/forecast for many medical treatments plus guarantees a consistent very high income stream for that org. If that Corp also had the first market entry, they can keep out competition for decades unless/until the competition comes out with a new molecule that does nearly the same thing, e.g. novel oral anti-clotting agents. So - why 'waste' money on R&D when all you need is a patent law lawyer. (Imagine if this happened with ASA!)

    • Today's side-effect is tomorrow's new miracle treatment! Rogaine is probably the best example. But there are some drugs that literally have life-or-death impact so this is a serious concern.

    3- Clinical trial cost structure/reporting - have no data to back this but some of the numbers look 'weird', hence my guess that quite a bit of cost associated with clinical trials is based on precedent/history of cost structure. Specifically, because in the early days of clinical trials each Corp basically had to develop their clinical trails framework from scratch, you'd get huge set-up and learning costs. This is like pricing a car assuming that the entire factory and all materials would have to be built (costed) from scratch for each car built. Also - the Clinical Trials industry is huge and offers services ranging from doing the lab work through to post-market launch PR. And all of this is also added to the so-called clinical trials cost rather than 'marketing/promo'.

    4- Foreign trials - Substantial cultural differences in running clinical trials have been documented by the FDA. (First learned about this via a novel oral anti-coagulant trial that had a large proportion of patients in the PRC and got so screwed up that the FDA had to send a team to review all of the documentation. BTW - this drug did make it to market in the US.)

    832:

    Re: Investor visa aka fast-track to citizenship

    Same thing happened in Canada in the '90s when the HK Chinese were looking for safe havens to decamp to in anticipation of HK reverting to the PRC. Biggest visible impact was soaring real estate prices in the two largest English-speaking cities which was quickly followed by a severe affordable housing shortage. (Yeah - real estate is the easiest sure way to park your money.) Took over 15 years before this real estate problem was sorta addressed in Vancouver and a couple of years later in Toronto by sticking a 15% foreign-purchaser property sales tax on such properties/transactions. (Real estate orgs argued that this was a very bad idea - yeah, for them.) BTW - from what I've read, most of these decampers never became CDN citizens nor ever bothered to even move to Canada.

    Damned! - seems the Cdn gov't is going to try this idiot policy again!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/23/canada-immigration-millionaires-six-applicants-china

    833:

    I'll note that Republicans (US) have a track record of saying We Should Do This, and then not funding, or legislating to make it happen.

    834:

    Yes, I've heard of the Valley of Death.[1] But the reality is, in the West, we have very few humongous multinationals, and as was noted, a lot of their ROI[2] comes from stock valuation.

    Given that, they focus overwhelmingly on the closest they can to sure bets. Going after breakthrough cures is very risky, in terms of time and money, and so that's not what they focus on.

    Oh, right, and then a lot of money gets spent, in the US, anyway, since around '97 or '98 on consumer advertising of prescription-only drugs?!?!?! I remember when that started, "ask your doctor about the purple pill", literally, and it didn't tell you what it was for!

  • A year and two weeks from now, I'll be free to tell you where I've been working for these (as of today) almost nine years, and why I'm familiar with a lot of this.

  • ROI is defined as "the value of the CEO and other execs' stock options, bonuses, and golden parachutes.

  • 835:

    I remember seeing a guy on the street a few years ago, wearing a t-shirt with 127.0.0.1 on it.

    Personally, though, my favorite RFC is 1149, IP over avian carrier (yes, that does mean what you think it does). And yes, it's been tested, and of course it works. Also, when you look it up note the date....

    836:

    Well, not exactly. What we're moving towards is not a button, but molecules that block the ability of nasty organisms and viruses to bind/get in where they shouldn't. And that is something we're starting to be able to model; I, personally, know some people doing that.

    837:

    "Fake greenies"... um, yeah. Y'know, I read in today's papers that two French nuke plants are either shutting down, or going to standby, because the cooling water is too warm, do to the heat wave.

    838:

    It should be no surprise that that is my favourite RFC too :)

    839:

    That's going to happen to any heat engine if you make the cold side too hot. Failing to anticipate future temperature rises is not a new phenomenon.

    840:

    A fair number moved here, at least for part of the year. There were residency requirements that had to be met, at least for some classes of investor visa.

    The interesting thing is that as a country we'd have been better off taking refugees. They end up paying more taxes and creating more jobs per capita than rich investors do. Which of course totally contradicts the neocon "the rich create jobs" mantra :-/

    841:

    Strange attractor time... The French shut down and reduce output on a few of their reactors during the summer since they've got overcapacity at that point in time and they can't sell more than a few GW of that overcapacity to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the UK and elsewhere. Quick check, right now as I type this they're exporting 8GW to assorted countries including Atomkraft Nein Danke Germany (3.5GW). The UK loves cheap French nuclear power so much we're upgrading our existing 2GW cross-Channel power-sharing connections to about 5GW total, including a 1GW cable running through the Channel Tunnel.

    Some of the French reactors are cooled using river water and there are limits to how hot the condenser loop output can be so they don't affect the local riverine environment (this is also true for coal-thermal power plants which are similarly constrained in such circumstances but they don't hit the news because they're not nuclear).

    During the winter when the river water is colder their reactors actually generate more power than normal since the Carnot cycle efficiency is greater which is handy because that's when they need the extra power to heat homes etc. In contrast at the end of each year most Solatopias like Germany are burning Russian gas like there was no climate-change tomorrow to keep the inhabitants from freezing to death in the dark (Google "Nord Stream 2" for further details).

    842:

    Nojay @ 841 The UK loves cheap French nuclear power so much we're upgrading our existing 2GW cross-Channel power-sharing connections to about 5GW total, including a 1GW cable running through the Channel Tunnel. Which supply will OF COURSE be totally uninterruped by a no-deal brexit ......

    843:

    Oh, I agree on that. My understanding, from someone who openly works in the industry, is that roughly one-third of drug costs in the US are in advertising, and since the cost to produce a new drug is something over one billion right now, that is substantial and grotesque. That's why there's so much work on "me-too" drugs and similar annoying efforts.

    As I said, I'm not a fan of big Pharma (I'm more in favor of things like vaccines, clean water, and public health). I just try to be realistic about the problems. Were I given the choice of bankrupting myself to be rid of some disease, I'd have to do a serious, Jack Benny-style, consideration of it, and I may well take dying and leaving something for my family as opposed to my creditors.

    844:

    The UK loves cheap French nuclear power so much we're upgrading our existing 2GW cross-Channel power ... Which supply will OF COURSE be totally uninterruped by a no-deal brexit

    I can see the beginnings of an Onion article now.

    UK power to be rationed due to ongoing customs delays of electron inspections due to a hard Brexit.

    845:

    whitroth @ 833:

    I'll note that Republicans (US) have a track record of saying We Should Do This, and then not funding, or legislating to make it happen.

    It's a way to kill an existing program they want to eliminate using stealth. Like they were going to have a better health insurance program than the Affordable Care Act, just as soon as they could repeal "Obamacare".

    Of course, what was going to happen was the ACA would be repealed, but the "better" replacement would just die in limbo.

    846:

    David L @ 844:

    “The UK loves cheap French nuclear power so much we're upgrading our existing 2GW cross-Channel power ... Which supply will OF COURSE be totally uninterruped by a no-deal brexit”
    I can see the beginnings of an Onion article now. UK power to be rationed due to ongoing customs delays of electron inspections due to a hard Brexit.

    It must be a bitch working for the Onion right now. Brainstorm the most absurd, insane & impossible whacko conspiracy theory you can come up with and before you can get the page up, Trump & Alex Jones have superseded you.

    847:

    roughly one-third of drug costs in the US are in advertising

    Think about it. In the absence of a National Health Service or a NICE to provide guidance, you need to “get the message out” to those hundreds of thousands of individual business partnerships that you want to buy your product, as soon as possible after its release. Rather like a cinematic release, good films don’t need advertising - word of mouth will keep the cinemas full. It’s the average films which need advertising when the word of mouth just isn’t there.

    So, you need to get that US doctor to know that your drug is on the market, in contrast five other new drugs and the new model Porsche / Rolex / property opportunity / holiday destination / golf clubs that said MD had their eye on... expensive stuff, trying to compete for eyeballs and awareness with the luxury industry...

    848:

    It must be a bitch working for the Onion right now.

    No kidding. I've got an editorial cartoon from before the election, so two years old, that shows a cartoonist at work with an editor coming into the room; she's saying, "Stop - that Trump cartoon you came up with this morning just happened."

    849:

    Saying 'we should' or even 'we've started' (occasionally even, 'we've completed') and then simply not doing anything is hardly a republican only trick. My local council uses it all the time for not building or maintaining cycling infrastructure.

    850:

    ...a t-shirt with 127.0.0.1 on it.

    I've seen that shirt too; the wearer did not appreciate my response of "There's no place like local host!"

    851:

    A slight diversion from Brexit, but Jeffrey Lewis (Arms Control Wonk) has just published what is either very near future science fiction or analytical continuation of the morning news. I'm about halfway through and it's pretty good so far.

    The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

    852:

    In continuation to Happy 21st Century topic I read before registering on this blog platform, there's now one more inevitable trend just resolved.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/farewell-infowars-you-wont-be-missed/2018/08/08/dd158dae-9b3c-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn3nnykmd88

    Firstly, I'm don't have any terribly bad or good impressions of this person, the best of him I could get is hearing parody of his character in latest instalments of Deus Ex. I've seen enough weird but popular people in my life, and he is nothing of exception.

    And secondly, it is not, of course, to any degree an unique case of banning some pundit from the general public (it is an inherent property of the system, after all, no unauthorized person can so much as approach at arm's length to mass-media without certain permissions). Instead, it is a first time (as far as I am informed) somebody was banned so promptly on public. And they all look like they know what they are talking about - just look at their lexicon. I swear, people in my country did some weird and extreme things with our "feral" capitalism and oligarchs, but this is just taking it a step further.

    853:

    Are you familiar with RFC 2549, IP over Avian Carriers with QoS?

    854:

    But that is a better health care plan! It helps their health, since it gets rid of some of the poors (that is, anyone not in the top 10%) and of those, at least 5% we could get to give us all their money/bankrupt themselves, so see how it helps our health?

    855:

    Martin, from the way I read that post, you don't understand what we're saying: they're not advertising just to doctors; after 1997, they're consumer advertising, on buses, subways, the 'Net, TV.... Literally, "go to your doctor and tell him you want him to prescribe a drug for something that we can't tell you it's for, and you many or may not have".

    No, I'm not exaggerating. As I said in my original post, for several years, it was "Nexium (tm), the purple pill, talk to your doctor", without ever saying what it was supposed to be for.

    856:

    A lot of the pharma industry advertising dollars go into prime-time teevee promotions about miracle drug X and how the suffering viewer should speak to their doctor about it. This is expensive but productive in terms of sales, not so much in terms of "getting the message out" to medical professionals who are better catered for by weekend conferences at a four-star hotel with championship golf course attached plus branded schwag for all attendees.

    857:

    Does he get to the part where half the US is jumping up and down and cheering... if the target is Redmond, WA, home of a well-known o/s/office/M$capulosity?

    Btw, having had to deal with it for a couple of days, on and off, have I mentioned that I put Win 10 on part with Vista? As in, I LOATHE it!!!!!!!!!

    858:

    Alex Jones... no, this person is a failure as a human being, and a vile piece of shit, on par with, say, Jack Chick of Chick Tracts (google it).

    He's the one who pushed the vile nastiness that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring of child sex slaves in the (nonexistant) basement of a local to DC pizza place, provoking some gun nut case from one of the Carolinas to walk into the pizza joint with firearms.

    And he's the one who's been pushing that the mass murders of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook was a "false flag" operation, and didn't really happen, and has attacked bereaved parents from there as "actors". (Several, finally, are now suing him for, I think, libel/slander, and pain and suffering.

    And this goes on and on. Think of the Onion, but one intent on being vile.

    859:

    Beyond Prime Time? What You need in Big Pharma is the like of ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prozac_Nation that can proclaim that THEIR Stuff is Bad ..BUT? That your New Stuff is Good ..start with Hints on the Social Medias and then move on towards Research Papers and Study by Scientist and onward towards Our Stuff not only Cures ...whatever the thing is that you are worried about NOW ..but also Things of the Future? I' mortality? Got MONEY? Then CharlStr Mk !!!! will, WILL!.. hold off th3 Grim reaper until something Even Newer comes along. Trust US in this ..would WE lie to you? Just consider? What can The Richest buy that is worth more than LIFE? Look at their Faces as linked ...Age is a HORRIBLE thing. Look at their Faces ...

    https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/richest-people-in-world-forbes/

    860:

    No sinking feelings here after this announcement! Book coming out next year from some guy from Scotland. All is well and it's going to be even better once the swelling from a wasp sting to the face has subsided. An experience not to be repeated.

    861:

    I am indeed :)

    862:

    If we've got to book recommendations, I must put one in for "The Book of Woe" by Gary Greenberg. The subject is the capitalist approach to increasing the success rate of drug development, particularly as regards mental conditions that don't have objectively-quantifiable physical symptoms. The method goes something like this: Pick some compound that does something to people's mental state (it doesn't much matter what) when consumed in sub-lethal quantities. List some group of common behaviours and/or subjective states which frequently occur together and that are modified by whatever the effect is. Use a combination of graft, cronyism and mutual arse-licking to have the simultaneous presence of X or more of those behaviours/states defined as pathological in the DSM. Punt your chosen compound as a specific for this invented pathology. For bonus points, punt some other compound from your inventory as a palliative for the side effects. Punt the pathology itself as a possible cause for some dirt-common everyday ennui like feeling crap when you get up in the morning. Or to really go for the big one, make it a specific for some piece of mischief every schoolkid gets up to at some point, and have it declared that because it's now "known" to be an illness, telling them off for it now counts as child abuse, and the permissible method of getting them to stop doing it is to send them to the doctor and get them doped off their tits.

    Disclaimer: I only managed to read about a third of it before the endless repetition of different flavours of the same fucking shenanigans and corruption became unbearably exasperating. However, on describing my reaction to the friend who had recommended the book to me, he confirmed that I had indeed got the message, and said the remaining two thirds were just the same.

    I get something of the same feeling of exasperation if I spend too much time reading the comment threads on that "In the Pipeline" site. They have an infuriating tendency, when some (genuine) difficulty crops up in discussion, of talking round and round it in endless circles, making suggestions whose half-arsedness they openly admit, but never even approaching any admission or recognition of the factor which constrains their suggestions to be half-arsed: capitalism. Their prime interest is not making drugs, but making money using drugs to define a context for doing it, and moreover doing it under a system which accords subjective/irrelevant/imaginary factors at least as much, and often considerably more, prominence as objective relevant scientific facts such as what the drug does to given pathologies and the system exhibiting them. I'm not sure which commenters are more disturbing, the blithely ignorant ones who sail airily on and leave it to be someone else's problem, or the ones who are clearly and directly being frustrated by its consequences and who are clearly aware of the cause at least at a subconscious level since their posts almost state it outright, but who tie themselves in knots of cognitive dissonance to prevent themselves realising the significance of what they've just written.

    863:

    That's what I think PHK meant about dual-use buttons. Certainly it is nice and well-defined and amenable to modelling or experimentation to be dealing with concepts like "we can determine that virus X gets in by binding to structure Y, therefore if we introduce some other molecule which blocks that interaction, virus X will be cabbaged"; but the problem is that there only is a bindable structure Y so that something which is part of the body's normal functioning can bind to it, and if you stuff its keyhole with glue you bugger up the normal as well as the viral functionality. That might barely matter at all, or it might be more lethal than having X-osis in the first place; and it is a complex-system interaction which we probably know basically fuck all about to begin with, a galaxy away from the just-throw-CPU-at-it easily-modelled quantum Lego of designing a functional blocker. So while computational chemistry is a bloody great idea and much better than the spray-and-pray approach for coming up with blockers, you're still just as stuck with the trials in actual patients, which is the really awkward bit.

    864:

    List some group of common behaviours and/or subjective states which frequently occur together and that are modified by whatever the effect is... defined as pathological in the DSM.

    Better yet, have the common responses to working for your company, or living with the effects of having companies like yours dominant, listed as pathological. "you feel stressed, constantly tired and unhappy"... that couldn't possibly be the result of long hours in a precarious job at low wages with no safety net, no, no, it's "Atypical Dystopian Despondency"{tm}.

    "corporate wellness programmes" are what happens to this idea when satire fails a reality check.

    865:

    I believe you, since we have a lot of characters about as odious as this guy, and then some people quite bordering insane trolls all over the Internet. Even though I personally would ban these people from all electronic connections to the world and put them in Solovki, my government still does not commit to limit their freedom of speech as long as their attacks don't become too personal or falling directly under the laws. The latter is still up for discussion, though, as well as world-wide practices for government to try online bloggers and social net posts for criminal activity.

    However, it does not explain where you people have been all these years, with all your sense or righteousness. If several major (not one or two) mainstream media outlets so synchronously target certain individual with "emotional" responses, defamation and outright ban on their accounts, every decent person would assume the existence of Propagnda Reichsministerium that has finally went off the deep end. No, this is just too ridiculous. It's the epitome to neoliberal dictatorship.

    866:

    whitroth @ 854:

    But that is a better health care plan! It helps their health, since it gets rid of some of the poors (that is, anyone not in the top 10%) and of those, at least 5% we could get to give us all their money/bankrupt themselves, so see how it helps *our* health?"

    It's a "better health care plan" to the same extent that Doctor Swift's Modest Proposal was a genuine solution to the Irish Famine.

    867:

    Iirc Alex Jones came to the fore once the appearance of cameraphones and internet stopped the interest in Bigfoot and UFOs.

    He was going with a David Icke / Erik von daniken type vibe until 9-11, which blew a steady wind into his tinfoil sails with jetfuel-steelbeams'n'wtc7.

    I think 'prison planet' was his first opus I looked at - as a fan of the outlandish gonzo conspiranoid. But then he strayed into politics, like a clown in a minefield

    868:

    No, I understand that - I took the consumer-demand advertising as a given (I’m currently on vacation, somewhere that carries enough US TV to see the “Drink Pink Medicine X! Pink Medicine X is not a treatment for Type 1 diabetes, and should not be taken if the patient is breathing or has a pulse” variety... I was trying to point out that there were additional costs in pushing reps out to every doctor’s surgery in an attempt to persuade them to stock the stuff.

    As a long-time fan of “The Big Bang Theory” (my beloved wasn’t too happy that I turned youngest into an avid watcher) I’d point out that the pharma industry forms a thread-relevant part of the backstory...

    869:

    Rather like a cinematic release, good films don’t need advertising - word of mouth will keep the cinemas full. It’s the average films which need advertising when the word of mouth just isn’t there.

    You need to first pack'em in before they'll tell their friends.

    A $100 million movie has probably spent about $35 million of that in marketing, and only about $65 million actually making the film.

    But the economics of movies are tricky - you're not just convincing viewers to see the film, you're also convincing theater-owners to show the film. So you're convincing theater-owners that the viewers will want to see the film.

    If a film opens well, and is well-advertised, then more theaters show it on more screens at more times, which means more people go see it as it's there, available. If it doesn't, or isn't... well.

    And, of course, theater-owners make more money out of food and drink than they do from the tickets. So if you make a film aimed at a demographic that buys lots of junk food, then more theaters will play your film on more screens for longer. Hence an economic push to make films aimed at young men, who buy lots of popcorn and drink lots of coke.

    870:

    My wife and I are somewhat bottom feeders.

    Most movies we see in theaters are after the initial run. In the US most metro areas with a 1/2 dozen or more theaters will have one that picks up movies after their box drops off and sell tickets for $2 or so. (First run movies are $7 to $20 depending on where you live.)

    You know the $2 is for the movie rights. All of their money is made off of $10 popcorn. (That's for a small to medium sized bag.)

    871:

    "To me that would make driving on the right side better. You would be sitting on the left and could operate all those extra controls easier without looking."

    Spare a thought for the pilot trying to land the average fixed-wing light aircraft: he sits on the left, with a yoke, not a stick (because the user experience is meant to be exactly like driving a car...) with his right hand on the throttle (there's only one, in the centre, single axis, not much adjustment required), which only leaves the left hand (feet are dealing with the remaining axis) for the yoke to make the precision two-axis attitude adjustments needed all the way down.

    872:

    And, of course, theater-owners make more money out of food and drink than they do from the tickets.

    A few years ago, The Economist did an article on cinema economics. As the saying apparently goes, "Movies for show, Popcorn for dough". The ticket price covers the cost of hiring the film to show in your cinema; the profit comes from the concessions. Last time I took the boys to the cinema, my wallet felt like someone had shouted "Stand and Deliver!"

    We live next-door-but-one to the manager of a family-owned Edinburgh cinema; they compete with the big chains by trying to offer a more comfortable/local/friendly experience (e.g., big comfy sofas to sit in) and by being rather central in Morningside...

    873:

    The Conservatives face certain defeat at the next general election if they don't deliver brexit - they'll be punished by the hard core brexiters. They face almost certain defeat at the next general election if they do deliver brexit and it is anywhere near as bad as these predictions. With a choice between certain defeat and almost certain defeat the Conservatives are going to pursue brexit.

    874:

    WTG @ 873 And Labour, with Corbyn in charge - pushing Brexit for all he is worth ( not a lot, admittedly ) is better, in what way, precisely?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    MODERATORS:

    874 appears to be advertising SPAM

    ( Please delete this section of this post after dealing with the problem? )

    875:

    Labour are no better. My point is that the Conservatives are in charge until after brexit and have no reason to change course despite all the issues.

    876:

    Well, yes, but #874 is more amusing than most, though I agree that Dementia Well-Rogered is touting for a charlatan - after all, we all know that the way to achieve those results are by using Dho-Nha curves. OGH hasn't covered this use of them so far, but I am sure that (after his well-deserved rest) he could produce a side-story on the topic. Whether he will, though ....

    877:

    Well, yes, but #874 is more amusing than most, it made me wonder what would happen if spellcaster tried to fix Brexit.

    878:

    I don't know who did this (mit url), but the "Active Summoning Curve" yellow warning triangle is nice. http://web.mit.edu/~ternus/Public/Public_old/laundry.pdf

    Demetria's list, oh my. Every (spell) item listed is personal and selfish.

    it made me wonder what would happen if spellcaster tried to fix Brexit. Now that at least is larger in desired scale of change, and potentially (depending on investments etc) less selfish.

    879:

    That is why the extreme right are trying to split Labour.

    880:

    Nice, though the curve reminds me of polytene chromosomes somewhat.

    Actually, I wonder if Dho-Nha curves are a special case of elliptic curves

    Or a L-system like the dragon curve

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve

    or a space-time-filling curve

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve

    881:

    ERC @ 879 Bollocks I know a stout member of my local Labour party, as well as a nodding acquaintance with my MP ( I know her mother better ) ... And it's "Momentum" ( Militant under another name ) who are trying to either split the party, or alternatively drive all the Social Democrats out. Momentum are acively trying to deselect an MP with a majority of over 20 000, because she is not ideologically pure ...

    882:

    I think both are true...

    The internal dissension you cite is certainly real, although it seems to me that both sides are similarly culpable, if the displays of Labour MPs bitching at other Labour MPs in public that I've come across are any indication. MP 1: "You're damaging the Labour party..." MP 2: "No, you're damaging the Labour party..." (me: FFS YOU'RE BOTH DAMAGING THE LABOUR PARTY CARRYING ON LIKE THIS, JUST PACK IT IN ALREADY [twitches wing against side])

    And the far right are trying to foment dissent against Corbyn with this antisemitism bollocks, partly because they want to make Labour as much of a basket case as the Tories are making themselves, and partly to divert attention from their own unsavoury orientation. It appears to be having some success at least at the second of those, from what I can make out; I'm unsure as regards the first, because I see so little dissent from the view that criticism of the state of Israel over their treatment of the Palestinians is entirely justified that I can't tell if it's unanimity I'm seeing or just a filter bubble effect.

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