if we leave a lot of comments by that time it might add to shipping costs, but if it's a bunch of hot air it'll make it lighter

Fingers, eyes & toes, crossed then ....

When you were swapping out your home internet for a gee whizz fiber connection (I think) you talked about putting the blog server in your home.

You've changed your mind?

Curious as I'm in year 3 of a 1 year plan to move off a mail server in my house.

This is a move by the hosting company, all their physical servers in one data centre are being moved to another. I've been getting the warning emails but my virtual server with the same company is on physical hardware in yet another location.

I ran out of energy wrestling with BT's billing department (then I got covid).

Might try again once I feel 100% and am back up to it.

Ah yes. Account management with national ISPs. I must waste 1 to 5 hours a month with such for my clients.

I really love the way online chats now have you talk to a bot which for me never even gets close to the answer I need. (They don't tell you up front that it will be a bot so you get to waste 4 or 5 minutes starting the chat then seeing it produces no useful results.)

why am I reminded of WestWorld's tag line, "nothing can ever go wrong"...?

Glad to know the upcoming outage is due to a server move and not something more sinister.

That’s the cover story.

year 3 of a 1 year plan to move off a mail server in my house

I have a bunch of domains with MX records pointing direct into the gaping maw of gmail. This had all worked well with the legacy "free" gmail business tier, but that's now been finally wound up. For the handful of mailboxes involved (all for family members) I can easily just pay the per-user fee for the least-cost ongoing service offering and that's probably the cheapest and simplest thing going forward. But I daydream about considering options, including just how much hassle is involved in running a mail server these days, given it's now more than a decade since the last time I was responsible for one as part of my day job. What's more likely is identifying different providers, comparing all the changes and outcomes and sticking with google anyway, but anyway.

I'm still responsible for mail servers, at work and at home. Work is slightly more aggravating because of the users and their odd devices and demands. (Always needing more disk space!)

The most bizarre and difficult thing to overcome is to realize that some recipients just don't want to take your email. (MIT, I'm looking at you.)

"Work is slightly more aggravating because of the users and their odd devices and demands. (Always needing more disk space!)" - That's easy to explain; they "absolutely must have every e-mail for the last 10 years, even the ones with 10MB of Wurd or Excess attachments, on the mail server".

But I daydream about considering options, including just how much hassle is involved in running a mail server these days, given it's now more than a decade since the last time I was responsible for one as part of my day job. What's more likely is identifying different providers, comparing all the changes and outcomes and sticking with google anyway, but anyway.

If you were in the US I'd "Just Say No". And even not in the US I'd tend to say the same thing. SPAM is off the charts. I block outright based on the source 10 to 30 emails for every one I let through. Maybe more now I haven't analyzed the stats in a year or so. And a non trivial number of SPAM emails still get through. Google periodically ignores email from my server. Just because I'm a fly spec on the Internet.

And in the US at least getting a home BUSINESS account, which is pretty much required to get a static IP, is getting harder and harder. Google Fiber will NOT give you a business account unless your address is zoned for commercial use, having a home office for 30 years be damned.

Some of the pressure went off because I have needed to be able to test some work from home things into a data center for clients. And paying $130 / month for a second business setup is cheaper (in time and hassle) than having to drive to a data center at odd times to push a button if a test doesn't go well.

Microsoft 365 will sell you mailboxes for your personal domain for $6/mo if you need to send from those mailboxes. And the big secret is that inboxes that just accept email are free if you have a business account. Well with 50gig per email inbox limits.

But I feel for you. Like you my home email server is only for family but the hassle of a switch will tie up an entire weekend of my time and I need to coordinate with the 2 pairs of folks no longer living in my house. It gets complicated.

That's easy to explain; they "absolutely must have every e-mail for the last 10 years,

At times, yes. A clients professional standards and by law requires them to keep ALL documentation about a project for 7 years AFTER they end their involvement. Now tack on the 1 to 10 years the project ran (and at times was on hold) and you'll see a 14+ year window.

They switched to paying a flat monthly fee to an email archiving service. Not cheap but the time and internal hassle reduction makes it cost effective.

And yes, if some idiot sent 10 emails in a row, each with a 20 meg PDF attached, by law they must be kept.

Which is one reason we have a specialty software that allows them to drop ship and pick up big files. And most times they use it.

That's easy to explain; they "absolutely must have every e-mail for the last 10 years, even the ones with 10MB of Wurd or Excess attachments, on the mail server".

That would be me, at work. Saving all email is a pretty good self-defense mechanism. Makes it harder for management to gaslight you with a new version of history (including priorities) when you have a copy of all their communications.

I was once inflicted with a manager who objected to Email, and wanted all substantive communications done verbally. You can guess why. The rest of the sordid tale is omitted.

It's also useful domestically. When I need to, I can find out who I bought something from, when, and what it was - usually. As David L says, it's easier to keep the lot than trim down (with the risk of deleting something important). Storage is cheap, nowadays.

wanted all substantive communications done verbally. You can guess why.

Indeed. These days that seems to be done mostly in MS Teams, with recording disabled, but obviously there are ways around that... (test automation tools and especially documentation and video screen capture tools come to mind)

"Just Say No"

Yeah, that's the impression I had last time I looked :) I'll be looking at what MS, Amazon, Google and Apple all offer and probably work out a model that works for me. Tinkering time in Azure/AWS space is probably still professionally useful anyway.

Well, break a record or something.

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE

Comments now disabled until Saturday (for final backup of blog prior to server relocation).

And we're back again. (But I have COVID -- confirmed by test, this time, it's the bad head-cold version -- so I won't be around much for the next few days.)

Sorry to hear, hope you have a steady recovery.

I know the feeling. :-(

I hope that you recover faster than last time.

Well, congrats on the successful server move (with COVID, natch). And get well soon.

My wife and I both got a Covid booster and flu shot last night.

Our feeling like crap will be over in a day or so. I hope yours doesn't last long.

"My wife and I both got a Covid booster and flu shot last night.

Our feeling like crap will be over in a day or so."

Might it be taking both together that produced the bad reaction? I've heard the same thing from other people who did that, but we got our flu and Covid shots/jabs four days apart and had very little reaction to either, just a red spot on the arm and, for my wife, slight soreness after the Covid one.

"Might it be taking both together that produced the bad reaction?" - It could be, based on having achy biceps for about 12 hours after having both together in the same arm last year (other one has an artereo-venous fistula in it, so putting a hypodermic or cannula near it for most purposes gets a "NO"), but I've had that sort of reaction to flu vaccine some years anyway.

Might it be taking both together that produced the bad reaction?

For the last 20 years flu shots have almost always made me feel achy in both bones and muscles the next day. Covid shots the same. And similar with the RSV trial I'm in. (I fairly certain I got the real shot and not the salt water because of this.)

This is the first weekend in 2 months were my wife and I had nothing that MUST be done today or tomorrow. So we went for it expecting this to be a tired achy day. My wife's arms are really bothering her where she got the shot. To me it's just another "ouch".

I've had worse reactions to flu shots (a day or so of achiness and lack of energy) than to any of the four COVID vaccinations so far.

Reactions seem to be extremely idiosyncratic.

Good luck, Charlie.

Seconding that - I hope that you recover quickly, Charlie!

Makes me wonder a bit what it does for the effectiveness to have both together or separately. Does the immune system respond better or worse to being asked to make up countermeasures to two things at the same time? How much difference does it make which two things those are?

Your immune system evolved to cope with multiple antigens. Combination vaccines are as effective as individual doses but there are some combinations which can cause problems.

Best wishes to OGH, and this will also serve as a test message (Firefox on Ubuntu Linux).

Pigeon @ 32:

Makes me wonder a bit what it does for the effectiveness to have both together or separately. Does the immune system respond better or worse to being asked to make up countermeasures to two things at the same time? How much difference does it make which two things those are?

In 2021 the VA Clinic where my doctor is located finally had the shingles vaccine availabe. Timing put the second dose in early October and the doctor told me to delay my flu shot until November. So I presume it makes some difference.

Not sure about getting the NEW booster (with omicron BA.4 and BA.5) right now. I'm right on the 2 month minimum and some "experts" are recommending a longer delay before getting the next booster.

I expect to go ahead and get my flu shot next week & I'll ask about it when I do.

A question for the assemglage I don;t think we have considered before.

This follows on from OGH's recent referral to the deceptively simple question of the minimum size for a self-suustaining colony. I don't remember seeing it discussed.

What level of population loss, in a short space of time (let's say a year), is guaranteed to crash our current civilisation?

Feel better soon, Charlie, and thanks for the migration.

I've gotten both shots several weeks apart, so I'm fine so far.

What level of population loss, in a short space of time (let's say a year), is guaranteed to crash our current civilisation?

The question is much harder than it sounds, and very much depends on the manner of deaths. If it is mostly the very old and the very young, which is how most pandemics go, then I think civilization would go on pretty easily. Whereas if it is something that kills randomly across all age groups, the society will not be nearly as resilient. Not only because larger number of productive adults will be dead, but also because productive adults still alive will be much more demoralized. And of course if it something like nuclear war, which destroys infrastructure as well as people, then survivors will have much more difficult task keeping things together.

Whereas if it is something that kills randomly across all age groups, the society will not be nearly as resilient. Not only because larger number of productive adults will be dead, but also because productive adults still alive will be much more demoralized.

For a data point you could look at the AIDS pandemic in East Africa, where it wiped out a significant portion of the productive adults, which had massive economic, social, and cultural ramifications. One is that old people who expected to be cared for by their children suddenly had to care for their grandchildren instead. Another is that the means for caring for one's family were greatly reduced, because everybody started to spend huge amounts of time at funerals and the rituals around them. Which in turn led to a cultural shift when society collectively agreed to cut short the customary period of mourning from 2-4 weeks to just 3 days, because otherwise it just wouldn't have been manageable for the survivors.

However, I don't know whether any proper research has been done on this. All I personally have are first- and second-hand-accounts of what happened during the 80's and 90's.

Covid? again? OH SHIT... please take care of yourself... chicken soup of course...

= = = =

Could we start by defining terminology and scope and timeline?

"Civilization" comprised of set = { electricity, water, shelter, food, sewage, data, medical, financial, law }

Sadly each of those need to be more precisely defined as what constitutes some bare minimum; consider category "food" composed of non-flexible attributes being set = { 2000 calories per day per adult; requisite vitamins & protein & fiber; available at a price point 99.9% of populace; affordable 365 days per year }

If any of these categories is lost for too long, bye bye "civilization".

My gut hunch?

5% of populace of a nation with those most critical skills all dead (or dying) in just one month. Or 20% of a nation endure sudden loss of electricity for three days which leads to loss of water in cities.

And doing enough of that deep digging is buckets of 'nightmare fuel'.

What level of population loss, in a short space of time (let's say a year), is guaranteed to crash our current civilisation?

To be a bit crude but it seems like it would matter;

It somewhat depends on if the loss is in concentrated in Germany or Somalia. Or evenly spread in both.

On top of the age issues others have mentioned.

And if bodies are being abandoned in the streets are these streets up river of major population centers?

Get better soon, Charlie!

I'm beginning to think that the husboid and I are the only people left who haven't had the plague.

Howard suggests "20% of a nation endure sudden loss of electricity for three days which leads to loss of water in cities." as posessing the potential for catastrophe. I'd point out that we did that one in the UK in October 1987 and the only people who died were the couple of dozen who were hit by falling trees/debris.

We haven't yet, because we have been self-isolating due to chemotherapy, and I am NOT looking forward to getting it.

As an aside, I've had Covid since October 2nd. This is the second time, and while not terrible (I was completely flat-out only for two days), it is definitely worse than the first time. First time I was pretty much asymptomatic.

Our feeling like crap will be over in a day or so. I hope yours doesn't last long.

My feeling like crap lasted almost exactly 24 hours. Went away (mostly) around 3am. I now feel I'm 2 or 3 days out from getting over the flu.

My wife went down harder and is much better this morning but no where near 100%.

Get better soon those who have it just now.

I now need the second shingles shot. And the first one took me down for a day and half. Oh, well.

I'm beginning to think that the husboid and I are the only people left who haven't had the plague.

Add me and my wife. We'll see if either of us caught it at an event we worked maskless yesterday.

Neither my wife or I have had it. But we're still masking in basically all retain store situations. Which is making us more and more outliers.

And I drove to Texas in July 2020 and back to close out our apartment there and bring her back to North Carolina. 2 days each way with a total of 5 nights in hotels. Suite hotels but still.

No flights since then for us.

My daughter caught it on a business trip to Ireland last spring. She isolated severely at home and her husband didn't get it. But we/he thinks he might have had it in February 2020. Or a really bad case of the flu for 2 weeks while in New Zealand. He faints at a blood draw so he has never been tested for anti-bodies.

My son and his SO have not had it. He's occasionally been in his office and some folks there have had it. His SO works in an infusion clinic for transplant and cancer patients. Life has been stressful for her for the last 2 1/2 years.

"Neither my wife or I have had it."

We neither, nor our daughter and two grandkids. She's an elementary school teacher and they're still in school, so they had plenty of opportunity to get exposed. Can't rule out asymptomatic cases for us, as we're less than obsessive about getting tested.

Neither my wife or I have had it. But we're still masking in basically all retain store situations. Which is making us more and more outliers.

Likewise. If I've had it, I've been completely asymptomatic. The only time I've been indoors unmasked since 2020 was my niece's wedding (outdoor wedding, indoor dinner) which was a calculated risk. (Family are medical professionals and taking extensive precautions at work, vaccine/testing mandates were still in force for travel, etc.)

Flew back from BC on the first day the federal government dropped mask mandates for air travel, which was very stressful. I was one of 5 people on a full plane who was wearing a mask. (Noticed that we all were using N95s.)

I do most of my shopping at a chinese grocery, where almost everyone wears a mask. When I have to go to another shop, I go early on a weekday when they aren't busy, and don't loiter.

Various ref Covid symptoms - I know I've had it once, based on having a "cold" and Senior Charge insisting I did a PCR.

We've had it a couple of times, once for sure (tested positive). Long term I have noticed that intense cardio exercise gets much tougher, but I am getting better.

• Intense cardio at the gym, or hiking uphill for a length, or playing ice hockey. Capacity before covid and after were different, but it is slowly improving. I know I am in a rare cohort of >50 person who get that level of exercise with any regularity, so I suspect there has been a broad decrease in overall cardiovascular health after covid.

As for the percentage population loss for a collapse of civilization, I think we are a lot more resilient than some of the assumptions above. We could very well lose large chunks of international 'civilization', but the death rates in places like China, Germany and the Soviet Union during WWII suggest the populations can take quite a thumping before they reach 'irretrievable' levels.

Not, however, something to aspire to in any way.

I actually thought about WWII when I wrote my previous post. It's just that I do not consider Soviet Union circa 1946 "civilized". Even compared to Soviet Union circa 1940.

Also keep in mind that both Germany and USSR had a huge help from outside in the immediate aftermath of WWII: USSR had all the industry it took from Germany as war reparations, Germany had Marshall Plan. China had neither, and remained in misery for generations -- despite having lost much smaller proportion of its population than either USSR or Germany.

I suspect there has been a broad decrease in overall cardiovascular health after covid.

My personal cardiovascular health has gone up since Covid started, but that's thanks to retiring and having time to get more exercise. I do wish I had more hills near me, as a 13 km hike with hills (which I did this morning) is noticeably more draining than a 23 km hike on the flat.

Population-wise, I agree with your suspicion. Covid appears to have much more serious long-term effects than people are generally aware of (especially given how our politicians are 'over it' or equating it to a cold or flu).

My sister and her husband haven't had it. Western UK, medium-sized city.

Thanks for this. I think I may need to clarify my definition a little; the USSR in 1946 is not in collapse, in my terms.

hmmm... scaling...

LCF = localized civilization failure; if 20M people in an urban megaplex or small-ish nation are subjected to too much death-darkness-cold-hunger-thirst for too long

CWCF = continent-wide civilization failure; 300M+ affected; all of NorAm or SouAm or Europe or Asia; obviously Australia is a unique case as both continent and nation;

PWCF = planet-wide civilization failure; 7.75B+ affected;

so feedback from ANTIPOPE posters is no, not a LCF if only 20% of a nation endures sudden loss of electricity for 3 days; we could agree at the high end, 100% of a nation endures sudden loss of electricity for 50 days is a LCF; so where in that range of {20%, 3D} and {100%, 50D} is the sweet spot?

asking for sadistic script writers seeking a plausible scenario for their next Netflix mega-disaster mini-series pitch

FWIW: on TW your account is showing "Charlie Strauss" and also "Charlie Stross"

Ooh, something I know about for once.

UK water supply is designed for things to go wrong and avoid having lots of little bits of infrastructure that rely on electricity. Generally you pump from the treatment plant to service reservoirs, and have them uphill of where you want the water. Let gravity provide the pressure.

Lots of treatment plants are out in the countryside, at the end of a long, single power line. Power cuts are frequent, generators are frequently used.

Also, very few of them run anything approaching 24/7. 8-12 hours a day running the treatment plant would be fairly typical, timed for cheaper electricity.

So whilst I don't know much about the resilience from other important things, running out of drinking water for an entire city is unlikely. A lot more would have to collapse first.

I'll just throw in my two cents, which is worth even less with inflation.

One take is that virgin ground pandemics did not wipe the Americas clean of Indians, although they caused huge human losses across centuries. When you look into potential mass kills (the Little Ice Age in the early seventeenth century being probably the best documented, which says little), human global populations can shrink 30% and the mere existence of such a loss will be argued about here a few centuries later.

So is a 30% decline the floor? Hard to say now. The Little Ice Age hit before the Industrial Revolution got rolling, so there were considerably fewer people, considerably more resources, and substantially fewer ways for people to exploit said resources. Now that we've trapped people inside multiple industrial revolutions, having doctors and nurses not be able to drive in 50 miles to get to work in a hospital may indeed result in a number of deaths. Multiply this by an arbitrarily high number of critical jobs, and...?

My big take on it is that it's less the scale of immediate destruction for all but the biggest problems (nuclear war, asteroid strikes, Yellowstone or Toba doing a full eruption), the problem is less the crisis, and more what people do afterwards. So far as I can tell, Civilizations are at best clunky kludges of ad hoc systems that all fall apart frequently, and they need constant tinkering to function even as well as they do. Perhaps it's better to postulate that civilizations fall apart, not during crises, but when people stop trying to rebuild the resulting messes and the ruins made of their lives.

Sometimes a disaster is too big to rebuild after, of course, but as we see with survivalist and ecofascist rhetoric, there's a contingent that thinks it'll be better to just let it all burn. I'm simply suggesting that civilization crashes when their view becomes the dominant one, whether or not they survive the result of their vision.

Well my AUD 2¢ are worth even less, around 1.2¢ in USD at the current exchange rate, but of course Australia no longer mints any coin smaller than 5¢, which is worth about USD 3¢, so maybe that helps a little.

I would wonder specifically whether there are rates of specific target populations that lead to some sort of cascade effect. So for instance if the disaster is infectious disease, then healthcare workers are at a higher risk. In the current pandemic this has been identified and at least partially addressed via additional precautions, but the possibility exists of an organism able to overwhelm such precautions before they can be ramped up to meet the threat. So a cascade from healthcare is possible, but perhaps because of its visibility it's an area that's especially protected.

But what are some other focal areas that might lead to a cascade? Food production came up in the pandemic because it turned out that the meat processing provides excellent conditions for the virus and that was enough to amplify the risk there. What if all livestock became a potential reservoir for a future pandemic, which led to farming communities worldwide to be the first to be, if not wiped out at least rendered unproductive? In some ways this is likely, because with climate change more of the world will be more susceptible to seasonal arboviruses, like Dengue and Japanese encephalitis as well as malaria and friends. Some of these, like long covid, might not kill people outright, but lead to prolonged periods of inability to do productive work (people talk of debilitating joint pain, chronic-fatigue-like symptoms, inability to concentrate).

Is it possible for civilisation to end due to brain fog?

here in NYC, there's two giga-water pipes (with a 3rd under construction) which are "gravity fed"... so from hundreds of miles north of the city the water flows without fuss to the streets

problem?

from the street level up to apartments it is in need of pumping... there's water pressure from the gravity fed mains but soon fades out

never mind floor #40, most buildings need pumping to get it up to floor #7, etc

in the extreme crisis of an extended multi-day massive blackout, folks would need to walk down to ground level to get water then either drink there -- opportunistically use sewers drains as piss pots -- or foolishly attempt to carry multiple gallons up many, many flights

Silly question, but are you still hosting hardware that you own in someone else's data center? I can't imagine any other reason for a physical move.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just rent a virtual server from the same company? I mean a plain old VPS, not cloud stuff like AWS or anything else that ties you into a provider.

There's really no need to own the hardware in most cases.

I should clarify why the USSR in 1946 is not in collapse.
As briefly as I can put it, it still has agency to change itself.

"One take is that virgin ground pandemics did not wipe the Americas clean of Indians, although they caused huge human losses across centuries"

But the question was about collapse of civilization, not about a "100% kill rate". And those plagues did cause complete civilization collapses in several places in the Americas. That's largely why European take-over of the Americas was so successful.

As far back as the 1620, the pilgrims bribed the Mayflower's captain to take them to Plymouth because they knew that "By God’s visitation, reigned a wonderful plague" there which had wiped out the Wampanoag. They had abducted Tisquantum in 1614, they knew what was there and that they could take over unoccupied fields cleared by villages that had been annihilated by European smallpox. Trying to take over occupied spaces, or carve farms from the actual wilderness, would have been much harder.

Over the 17th century large civilizations like the agriculturalist mound builders of the Mississippi valley just vanished. What was left were fragmented, often warring, smaller groups. Which European settlers and the Americans just rolled over.

Covid
I've had four "jabs" .. I'm masking on crowded trains - had to do it yesterday.
Haven't had a even a mild wheeze, so far.

H
there's a contingent that thinks it'll be better to just let it all burn.
The christians in the period approx 450 CE onwards?
- Not helped by the "plague of Justinian" & the (?) Volcanic eruption (?) of about 620 (?) either ...

In the current pandemic this has been identified and at least partially addressed via additional precautions, but the possibility exists of an organism able to overwhelm such precautions before they can be ramped up to meet the threat.

Or those precautions are ignored for political reasons. Thinking of my niece in NYC operating with one mask a week when Covid was new and most of us were in lockdown, because some politicians decided to use the federal stockpile of PSE as a reward for loyalty…

What level of population loss, in a short space of time (let's say a year), is guaranteed to crash our current civilisation?

Naive unconsidered answer:

Assuming deaths are randomly distributed, we could expect a 5% drop in population to cause a 5% drop in supply and demand of/for all goods, food, energy, etc across the board.

Trouble is, having been through a couple of corporate down-sizings ... people aren't robots. People mourn. After a 10% downsizing, work output flatlined for a whole month (both times). People were depressed and had to work out how to get shit down with fewer hands and brains.

So an X% cut in population results in a >X% drop in output due to unpredictable network externalities.

And there's probably some breakpoint beyond which output suddenly falls off a cliff. If you're running a hospital with ten surgeons that gets hit by a 10% die-off and the sole brain surgeon is the one who loses, then your entire city is going to be SOL for brain surgery for the next few years (or however long it takes to replace them/make alternative arrangements).

We've already had a taste of this with COVID19. Health workers burned out badly during the pandemic and haven't been replaced -- in many cases they're leaving due to stress/moral injury, even where they didn't suffer physical injury directly. So overall capacity has dropped sharply, by more than the proportion who were injured/killed in the pandemic.

Less complex societies fare better, but AIUI it still took England nearly half a century to begin to recover from the Black Death in the late 1340s. And for the past five decades we've been gradually moving to run our complex societies on thinner margins with less redundancy and over-capacity in the pursuit of profit. A crudely managed, less productive economy could probably come through a mass die-off in better shape than a lean, just-in-time, agile economy. Let alone one pared to the bone by profit-taking private equity corps.

I believe this is my second time. Caveat: this time is confirmed by LFT. Last time I couldn't get a positive result -- I had no chest/nose/throat symptoms (although the other symptoms were strongly indicative of COVID).

Anyway, I had the good luck to have had my second booster shot a week before exposure. It's been as bad as a very bad cold, but less bad than influenza. I'm four and a half days into symptoms now and tomorrow I'm going to start testing to see if I've stopped shedding virus particles enough to think about resuming going out.

Extra caveat: it's a vascular disease, it may feel like a bad cold but there could be worse stuff lurking in the undergrowth to ambush me later.

Flew back from BC on the first day the federal government dropped mask mandates for air travel, which was very stressful. I was one of 5 people on a full plane who was wearing a mask. (Noticed that we all were using N95s.)

Huh, that's a wild attitude problem.

Wife and I flew home from Germany the day Germany dropped their mask mandate. The flight was about 95% masked. Hell, people were still masking in pubs before we headed for the airport. The staff were enforcing it voluntarily and the public were complying willingly.

So far as I can tell, Civilizations are at best clunky kludges of ad hoc systems that all fall apart frequently, and they need constant tinkering to function even as well as they do.

Anecdata: a friend travels a lot for business -- or did in the Before Times. He recently resumed travel again, within the USA.

He noted ... issues. Flights cancelled or delayed due to lack of crew. Chaotic airport check-in, departure areas, security, due to people not knowing what they were doing or simply not enough bodies to keep stuff moving.

It persisted at the destination. Taxis/Ubers few and far between. Hotels trying to evade daily room service because they didn't have the cleaning staff. Queues at check-in/check-out because not enough front desk staff. Rooms and fittings and fixtures being run down and tatty, clearly not refreshed at pre-pandemic rates.

Oh, and you can read the news about workplace unionization, inflation, labour shortages, and so on.

My take is that long COVID has taken a hell of a lot of people out of the workplace either temporarily or long term -- far more than the headline death rate suggests. Also, a lot of older workers (50 and up) took early retirement. I heard this particularly from a taxi driver in Edinburgh: the old ones noped right out of the job during the first lockdown and refused to come back (quite rationally: they didn't want to die), and it's hard to recruit, train, and retain new bodies. (Taxis in particular, as opposed to private hires, are highly regulated.)

Anyway, imagine this is happening everywhere. And every business is being hit by staff shortages, illness, early retirement, industrial action. So pretty soon it has knock-on effects throughout the supply chain, sand getting in the gear train of industry.

(Then add a maniac like Putin starting a fucking energy war in the middle of a pandemic: I can't even describe how stupid this is. But let's not go there right now.)

TLDR: early collapse looks a lot like this. Nothing works quite right, there are random delays everywhere, stuff takes too long or simply doen't get done.

If we're lucky, new workers show up eventually and things get back to normal after a few years.

But that's only if we get lucky and find a permanent immunization for this slow-motion black death. (Because if COVID keeps chewing away at our vascular systems and escaping our vaccine-induced immunity for long enough, after a few decades the die-off will hit double digits and then we'll be in serious trouble if we want to maintain a complex society.)

Is it possible for civilisation to end due to brain fog?

Until 2020 that was my original plan for how the Laundry was going to deal with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: spread a viral pandemic to induce enough brain fog to stop the magic getting worse.

(Guess what: I'm not writing that ending any more!)

This server occasionally gets hammered by boingboing, hacker news, or similar (even newspapers on occasion). The usage-based billing for a virtual server looked very unappealing last time I checked.

»TLDR: early collapse looks a lot like this. Nothing works quite right«

I agree, but "nothing works quite right" is a much bigger threat than you make it sound, because it causes an enormous drain on time and resources, which again causes more things to not work quite right etc.

It's one thing for one small part of society to be under temporary stress, usually the rest of society has enough reserves to compensate.

But when a large or important fraction of society is under permanent stress, compensation is not an option, and things descend into workarounds, which, as the name implies, take longer and eats up more resources, which just makes the problem worse.

The bad news is that there is no text-book way out of such a down-ward spiral in a highly connected system.

We cannot just say "screw trains" because we are unable run the as needed, that would instantly bring all car-traffic to a standstill.

And the even worse news is that when things go flakey, everybody think of themselves first, which again makes things run even less efficiently etc.

In war-time, it has sometimes been possible to motivate the population to cooperate, despite everything falling to pieces around them, but that is far from the rule, and very much requires a common enemy everybody can focus on.

In other words: We're very likely screwed.

TLDR: early collapse looks a lot like this. Nothing works quite right, there are random delays everywhere, stuff takes too long or simply doen't get done. If we're lucky, new workers show up eventually and things get back to normal after a few years.

Could be. And don't forget that various people have tried pinning inflation on the cost of paying for all those more-expensive workers, which I think may be partially right.

I'd argue three other possibilities, which are unfortunately non-exclusive, nor exclusive with an early collapse.

What's different about her argument is that she's not talking about nuclear armageddon. Everyone's basically figured out that nukes are best used for coercion and blackmail, not for ending human life on Earth, and furthermore, a heavy metal war against the US is a losing deal. So this war is being fought more successfully on the internet, psychologically, financially, and economically. What you're reading as collapse may be, in part, war damage.

That we're fighting this war old-style mostly in Ukraine, and new style everywhere else, speaks volumes about how industrial society has changed.

The sides of the war are basically petrochemical authoritarians versus democracies, with China sort of on the authoritarian side and India caught in the middle. Putin's the major authoritarian player, and he's apparently been pulling hard to get the super-rich and other oligarchs onto his team. Iran's firmly on his side, as is Belarus. Saudi Arabia seems to be riding with him too.

Meanwhile, the developing world is getting sick of stale pale males fighting for dominance in the North while they suffer and die in the South, but that's where we are. On the good side, they're getting forcibly adapted to this strange new world at a much faster pace than we are, so they may well inherit the Earth when the rest of us fade off into the west.

On the good side, we do need to start caring for the future, big time. Hopefully we can pick up all the very useful pieces we still have and build societies that are less about consuming everything and more about investing in a livable future--or we die trying. Note, this is a world that desperately needs futurists providing the notion that a livable world is possible, despite it all.

Charlie @ 67
Correction: * AIUI it still took EnglandEurope nearly half a century to begin to recover from the Black Death in the late 1340s.* .... So, anyone considered the effect of the Black Death in all of Europe?
Minimum of 20% fatality, ranging up to 35-50% in some communities ....
- See also: Barbara Tuchman "A Distant Mirror"

H
"Belarus" - erm, no, or not IMHO.
All those extra Russian troops in Belarus, threatening ... Ukraine(?) Really(?) - or ensuring that Lukashenko stays "on-side" rather than trying to cut a deal, whereby he's let go in return for effing off out of an untenable situation? ... I wonder.

Linked to this: Efficiency inversely correlates with resilience.

The Accountants have got almost every organisation running on a knife edge of efficiency….

Until 2020 that was my original plan for how the Laundry was going to deal with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: spread a viral pandemic to induce enough brain fog to stop the magic getting worse. (Guess what: I'm not writing that ending any more!)

I'm quite sure you've got it all worked out...

...But it amused me for a few minutes to postulate that bogons are not hypothetical particles that stupid people emit, but rather entities rather like eaters, that make a living keeping things normal by forcing you to pay more attention to mundane tasks and less to anything interesting.

So if you have an invasion of our simulated reality by big, nasty systems, one defense is to rapidly "breed" the surviving bogons, until you have mutant strains that are increasingly resistant to the Great Old Ones. Then you release them into the wild. As with mycorrhizal fungi, which took over the world multiple times by getting their hosts into really cool positive feedback loops, the mutant bogons get into a positive feedback loop by absorbing all simulation resources into reifying normality. This helps stupid people live longer and reproduce more, while starving the Horrors of the resources they need to exist.

Heck, a medium-grade horror might even deliberately breed up bogons, to make it impossible for a titan (one of them mythical ice giant infovores) from getting enough into our reality to crash it.

...Anyway, the idea of Bob Howard, Endangered Bogon Breeder, amused me. I'm weird, what can I say?

Johnny99.2
Ah, you agree with the Duke of Wellington, then about that?
He famously made the same comment about this sort of thing, regarding flexibilty & supposed "efficiency" ...

Low-dose naltrexone is apparently being used effectively as a treatment for long Covid.

Talking about a government "outage" ...
Many peoples are now saying that the Trusstercluck's days are numbered { As long as it's less than 144, thus setting a record as the shortest, um "serving" PM, of course } However, I believe that she shot herself in the foot, due to overweening pride, very early on.
Her card was marked when she had the insufferable arrogance to tell His Majesty { how strange that sounds} that he could not go to COP. I hope the "death" is painful, with the sharks ripping lumps off. Here's to the Trusstercluck setting a record - the shortest PM ever!

Be careful what you wish for ....

I guessed wrong, then. I thought that you were going to use the smoking gun that you have twice left on the mantlepiece.

Until 2020 that was my original plan for how the Laundry was going to deal with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: spread a viral pandemic to induce enough brain fog to stop the magic getting worse.

Given your predictive record, would you consider avoiding calamitous stories set in the near future?

Purely in the interests of preserving civilization, of course. :-)

Given your predictive record, would you consider avoiding calamitous stories set in the near future?

WEEELLL ...

"Season of Skulls" (due out May 2023: I'm expecting to get the page proofs later this week) is set partially in the 2017 of the New Management, but mostly in a warped dream of the 1816 that led to the New Management.

"A Conventional Boy" (no pub date yet, it's not quite finalized for submission -- also unclear if it'll be marketed as a stand-alone novella,a really short novel, or the anchorpiece of a short story collection) is set circa 2008-2010 in the Laundryverse (sdome time between "The Fuller Memorandum" and "The Nightmare Stacks").

If I ever get it finished, "Ghost Engine" is set circa 660,000CE, in another galaxy.

And this is my publication track for the next 2-3 years.

Does that work for you?

In 1980 Evesham got all its water pumped from Bromsgrove (this may still be the case; I haven't worked there since 1981). Local storage was about a day's consumption, if that.

Which allows me to tell the story of how I flooded Ambridge: http://www.davros.org/misc/ambridge.html

It works for me, but dear god, could you write some hope-punk meanwhile!

Talking of things going wrong ... the Ukraine war.
Putin has declared Martial Law & is clamping down even more, Russians are being evacuated from Kherson, even though the "Uk" front does not, presently=, appear to be advancing much ....
Dear Cthulu, is Putin preparing to nuke Kherson & then claim it was "us"?

Charlie @84:

"Ghost Engine" is set circa 660,000CE, in another galaxy.

So FTL works in the universe of GE? Or are the other galaxies the Magellanic Clouds (158kLY and 210kLY away)? We could get to those using NAFAL in that time-frame.

No spoilers needed, though. Looking forward to reading it when it comes out!

The funny thing is I really ought to remember that happening, but I don't. Maybe I was on holiday that week. I'm sure it would have been in the Berrow's.

If I wrote hopepunk now, it wouldn't be out until 2026 or so. By which time it would be obsolete (and it'd block a bunch of other, necessary stuff -- like the final book in the Laundry Files story arc, for example).

It's the alternate fork of the universe described in Palimpsest, where the time gate is used for space colonization.

If I wrote hopepunk now, it wouldn't be out until 2026 or so. By which time it would be obsolete (and it'd block a bunch of other, necessary stuff -- like the final book in the Laundry Files story arc, for example).

At some point, it might be useful to write a hopepunk set ca. 2060 or so, otherwise known as a time long after you're safely dead, and use it primarily as a "what the fuck were they thinking?" critique of whatever happened up to the point you wrote the story. It'd be hopepunk because a) people were still around, doing civilized things, and b) sanity had to have prevailed, in order for a) to happen.

Anyway, finish off the Laundry. Personally, if it's all set in a simulation, I'd suggest going completely meta. Perhaps have the characters break out of the simulation, find out what's going on in the UK now, and negotiate a mutually acceptable simulation to live in rather than dealing with the reality their creator is living through. I mean, dealing with the Tories without access to magic or superhuman cognition? The horror!

Although hopefully, things will get better sometime?

Perhaps even by 660,000 CE?

I was thinking of a fixed price bandwidth limited VPS not of something like AWS with usage based billing. Basically the same thing you have now but running into a VM instead of on a specific physical server.

Something to look at later, when it's time to replace the hardware, I guess.

set circa 660,000CE, in another galaxy.

Thank you, m'lud. Your kindness is appreciated.

https://youtu.be/TPupnpSB8YU?t=293 Even non-comedians are struggling to resist Britain right now. Sabine Hossenfelder "how did Britain find a prime minister even more incompetent than Boris Jonson?".

She's good value but the jokes in her news summaries are pretty weak.

I've had issues with the before, a host cut me off when I got slashdotted even though I had mostly switched to another host + torrents for the bandwidth-intensive downloads by then. Admitted I went from 100MB/mo to 100GB in four days, luckily at the monthly rollover point but I blew the ~1GB data allowance twice and the high bandwidth host began to regret their generous offer. Luckily the exponential decay had kicked in by the time they noticed.

OGH shouldn't have the same issue, ever, because it's just text and people are unlikely to scrape the whole site en masse. But if they did a robots.txt file with "just download this zip file" hosted on cloudflare would be the obvious solution.

"Dear Cthulu, is Putin preparing to nuke Kherson..."

Curiously enough, I've been contemplating the question of the evacuation of Kherson, and that possibility came to mind. But of course Putin knows better to do that, doesn't he?

The Con Party used the same basic method as they used to "elect" Bozo; Have their MPs select 2 candidates from their present MPs, then have the membership select which of those 2 they prefer.

The Con Party used the same basic method as they used to "elect" Bozo; Have their MPs select 2 candidates from their present MPs, then have the membership select which of those 2 they prefer.

I don't think anyone is really asking "what was the method" but more "why does the method produce such poor results".

At some point surely they will look at themselves and say... if we want different results maybe we could trying doing something different. Surely by now even the Con membership have to be feeling the pinch? They can't all have all their wealth outside the country.

Australian academic opines about choosing a Con PM: https://theconversation.com/theres-something-wrong-with-british-politics-its-called-the-conservative-party-192729

The Conservative party is a group of about 180,000 people who tend to be wealthier and older than the average UK citizen. It was this group, more than Truss’s fellow MPs, who chose her as leader of the Conservative Party. It was also this group that endorsed the policies she tried to impose on the country, causing outcry from the populace and the markets.

This method of selecting the leader of the party needs to be changed. The current method was designed when the Conservatives were last in opposition (1997-2010). This means it was unwittingly designed for changes of leader while out of government.

Choosing the leader of the Conservative Party is strictly speaking a matter for the Conservative Party. This is fine when in opposition. When in government, a change of leader means a change of prime minister. This narrow franchise weakens the legitimacy of whoever becomes the new prime minister among the wider UK electorate.

When even the Australians are pointing at you and laughing you know you have a problem. These are the people who popularised "Prime Minister (at time of writing)" to describe the current holder of that position.

Perhaps even by 660,000 CE?

Perhaps, although that seems maybe a bit...hubristic.

Personally, I'd be cool with memories of Earth lasting 2.6 million years or so. So long as most of that time lapse involved the flight of one of Ken Macleod's fabled lightspeeders, flying to the Andromeda Galaxy. And so long as said flight crewed by people I really would rather not exist on planet Earth for awhile. Putin, for example. An all Russian crew would be excellent for that kind of brave exploration, IMHO. Heck, I'm even generous enough to hope their on-board life support would last a few years, and that the ship would be have means for getting people up and down from planetary surfaces at least a few times.

Kardashev @ 98:

Curiously enough, I've been contemplating the question of the evacuation of Kherson, and that possibility came to mind. But of course Putin knows better to do that, doesn't he?

Doesn't look as much like a civilian evacuation to me as it does a hostage taking.

Did you guys know that the Soviet Union made the best bread in history?

People would wait in line for days to get a single piece!

davors: how has your book faired?

fun to read about unplanned consequences of deploying automation... given no loss of life...

101 - I was making the point that the results are demonstrably hilariously poor; the best I can do for an explanation of why it's poor is the GIGO filter (Garbage In Garbage Out).

102 - Well yes; note that when commenting on "Today in Parliament" I've taken to actually timing when the story I'm commenting on was broken.

from CNN: "Truss is meanwhile in serious danger of becoming Britain's shortest-serving leader ever, with some of her own lawmakers calling for her to resign and opinion polling indicating an electoral wipe-out for her Conservative Party."

if only I could find this funny... problem was Trump... two impeachments, one (failed) coup and an uncountable number of felonies have collectively wrecked my sense of humor about loonies in reach of the Big Red Button... just how many times did Trump eye the carrying case with authentication codes between 07JAN21 & 20JAN21? unconfirmed rumors the JCS on their own authority locked out those codes evening of 06JAN21 after a hasty voice vote...

watching as Putin attempts to wriggle out of tightening nooses -- multiple groups each eager with their own knives plus Russia-wide roiling economy -- with him as achieving just-about-unhinged-dictator akin to Hitler in the final months of WW2 but unlike Hitler in reach of another Big Red Button... hopefully nobody loves him enough for a continent-wide murder-suicide pact...

Para 1 - If, in the future, everyone shall hold one of the 4 Great Offices of State for 15 minutes, how long does this give the Iron Weathervane?

Para 3 - I've also found myself wondering "Has 'Mad Vlad Putine' realised that he has committed war crimes? Where, other than Ruzzia itself, can he actually travel to as a result?

Did you guys know that the Soviet Union made the best bread in history?

People would wait in line for days to get a single piece!

Coincidentally, I have been looking at Soviet hardware in the last 48 hours. The results are uneven.

What with the current kerfluffle, Ukrainians are selling lots of Soviet-era crap they've got laying around for western currency; I took advantage of this to expand my slide rule collection - or to funnel money to Ukraine with a thin excuse, as you prefer.

One of them is boxwood and rather questionable, as the slide almost doesn't, with a lot more friction on the wood than is acceptable. (This is a common problem with old wooden rules.) Moreover, and unexpectedly, somehow the spring on the cursor has gone wonky and it wants to sit slightly diagonally on the body; how someone messes up a three centimeter piece of springy metal I'm not sure.

The other, unwrapped just a few hours ago, is fine, although the plastic box is rather light-duty. If we ever get in-person conventions again this one will be a good piece to bring to 'how to use a slide rule' panels.

Yes, I agree that expecting our current woes to be resolved by 660,000 CE does seem a little hubristic :-)

Truss is meanwhile in serious danger of becoming Britain's shortest-serving leader ever

Canada's was Tupper: 68 days.

**BINGO! - a new record .... Now W. t. f ?????

So are we now to start up a betting pool as to whether the next PM can outlast a can of spam?

What do the Tories elect anyway? A necrotic johnson? A greased bog?

"And don't forget that various people have tried pinning inflation on the cost of paying for all those more-expensive workers, which I think may be partially right."

This time not really, labour unit costs are responsible for under 8% of inflation, with the main driver being corporate profits (54%) and nonlabour unit costs (like, say, energy) closely on their heels (38%).

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-122-what-drives-inflation

So, on completely unrelated issue, any bets as to who will lead the Tories now, after the record-breaking shortest Margaret Thatcher cosplay in history? :-)

This time not really, labour unit costs are responsible for under 8% of inflation, with the main driver being corporate profits (54%) and nonlabour unit costs (like, say, energy) closely on their heels (38%).

Thanks for the correction. I didn't take the time to dive deeper when I heard that assertion.

Gerg@113: Congratulations, the (barely) UK has set a new record! Now for the next running of the Upper Class Twits race. Or perhaps the next Tory leadership race should be run in connection with Red Nose Day?

@117 - sorry for the typo, Greg

Which allows me to tell the story of how I flooded Ambridge: http://www.davros.org/misc/ambridge.html

That was hysterical. And a perfect example of "unanticipated side effects".

Have they still got any Lenin heads kicking about or did those all go years ago?

I spy a spammer! /\

• yawn *

just woke up from a restful night's sleep... checking headlines... no new wars (GLAD)... no additional felony charges against Trump (BAD)... confirmation additional war crimes by Putin (MAD) new political record set in UKPM duration (SAD)... #CCSS not being widely regarded with as crisis (DEATH)

PERCEIVED WISDOM: "Boris Johnson appears on verge attempting a stunning political comeback."

PREDICT: rather than become PM again he will haggle for a massive not-quite bribe from Tories to not try for PM; dude would be a fool to stick his head into all those whizzing sawblades as the UK economy tears itself apart due to flawed Tory policies; he'd be better off allowing Labor to take over via an immediate election and let them muck out the government stables of all that political toxic waste; then in five years run for office, after everyone howls at pain-filled (necessary) reforms;

AOL-related spam as well! The 90s called, they want their junk back!

(Nuked and banned, thanks.)

Johnson's out for good.

Firstly, he's earning $150K a pop on the lecture circuit right now. This compares to roughly £160/year (or $180K) salary as UK PM. Oh, and if he got the job back he'd forfeit the £108K/year pension he's getting for being a former PM, at least for the duration.

(So there's no money in it for him -- in fact, lots of negative money.)

And as noted, right now the job is a sack of shit, a poisoned chalice -- nobody sane would take it unless they've got an overdeveloped sense of duty or competence or both.

I think Johnson's out of office for good. At least in the UK. He can petition to get his US citizenship back though (I gather the State Department usually grant it if the petitioner hasn't done anything horrendous and is willing to pay their taxes again), spend a decade or so in the US, which means by the time he was approaching 70 he'd be eligible to run for president ...

I'm not convinced. If he ensures his principle opponents get the poisoned chalice this time, watches them fuck it up and the party self-destruct even further, and then positions himself as the "At least I won an electoral landslide", we might have a Bozo II. He definitely has an overdeveloped sense of competence, and it would bolster his overdeveloped ego to think he was called in to save the Tory part after kicking him out brought it to near-destruction.

I can't see him succeeding this time, no matter how much the Tory membership love him, and attempting it would harm his future chances.

No problem; I just read the text, and hovered on the URL. Incidentally, you're also welcome to delete the motion call post.

Was he born in the US? One of their rules is you must be a native born USian to be eligible for president. With some vagueness for US citizens born to US citizens abroad (John McCain was born in Panama on a US base).

I actually think that if the tories were stupid enough { And they are that stupid } then Charles might actually revolt and refuse & prorogue .... Sorry, Charlie, but a huge number of people are still "in lurve" with the vicious lying con-man that is Boris de Piffle

Was he born in the US? One of their rules is you must be a native born USian to be eligible for president. With some vagueness for US citizens born to US citizens abroad (John McCain was born in Panama on a US base).

Boris Johnson was born in New York City, June 19, 1964. If you want to be creeped out, Donald Trump was born in New York City on June 14, 1946. Coincidences suck sometimes. Perhaps being born in NYC should be a major disqualifier for running for high political office, based on the evidence.* Especially being born in June in NYC.

*But only for the 20th Century. Teddy Roosevelt was born in NYC in 1858.

Re: '... knock-on effects throughout the supply chain'

Yeah - JIT complex supply chains coordinating pieces and apps seamlessly from across the globe into one product/service is a nice idea but might need a rethink.

School aged kids - the youngest are lagging in reading ability and probably other early grade skills while the oldest cohort are experiencing very high levels of psychological stress. Plus some are likely to end up with long term medical issues therefore need more medical resources and social support, etc.

Our current situation may feel like a war to some - but against who(m)/what? With the old-school physical wars you'd know fairly easily when it was over and be allowed to and even encouraged by your gov't and various industries to rebuild your society and your life for the better including greater self-sufficiency. Wages went up a lot after WW2 in the US even as the labor force increased. This is also when non-income-taxable benefits/perks first started being offered by employers, plus the GI Bill for higher education. If anything, all of the post-WW2 social measures that revitalized US society and its economy are being wound back. From here, it looks like the same thing's happening in the UK.

A detailed look at the negotiation process and failures in the Ukraine war. Getting to Negotiations .

That might help some of the 'why don't they negotiate' people understand the story a bit more.

I posted this on an earlier thread, but I thought I'd post it here too as many of you may not be reading it anymore.

Umair Haque has another depressing article today for those of you on the east side of the pond: Why Britain is Collapsing

"These are your choices, if you’re in the mess that Britain made for itself. Borrowing. Austerity. Tax cuts. Big Lies. And Grand Experiments."

He presents good arguments showing why none of these options can succeed. My question is this: why didn't he mention raising taxes? After all, much of Britain's problems (as is also true here in the U.S.) are due to massive income inequality. It seems to me that raising taxes on Britain's millionaires and billionaires would be a much better solution than what's going on right now. What am I missing?

https://eand.co/why-britain-is-collapsing-e5590018e04c

Wages went up a lot after WW2 in the US even as the labor force increased. This is also when non-income-taxable benefits/perks first started being offered by employers...

Actually those non-income-taxable benefits/perks showed up during WWII, when wages in the U.S. were frozen by our government. Employers couldn't attract potential employees by offering higher wages, so they came up with other ways.

. . . CRUNCH <== sound of America's . eyeballs hitting paywall . .

Leszek Karlik @ 115:

"And don't forget that various people have tried pinning inflation on the cost of paying for all those more-expensive workers, which I think may be partially right."

This time not really, labour unit costs are responsible for under 8% of inflation, with the main driver being corporate profits (54%) and nonlabour unit costs (like, say, energy) closely on their heels (38%).

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-122-what-drives-inflation

So, exactly the same as last time, and the time before that and the time before ..., as it has ever been since the invention of corporations.

• sigh *

day drinking is now set to default mode

oh... what a shitstorm... trying not to doomscroll but now I gotta stop link clicking thru stories along a spectrum of bad-worse-terrible-horrifying

UK schools are setting up food banks because too many kids are malnourished

https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/teachers-are-setting-up-food-banks-in-schools-to-help-families-in-the-cost-of-living-crisis/

==> Teachers told the Big Issue schools are acting as the country’s “fourth emergency service”, while experts have warned it reveals the “bleak reality” of poverty rates in the UK.

Q: how long till it gets this bad all across the USA? trick question... it already has been but so carefully low key because parents are humiliated in having to accept food for their kids... just no formal process of food banks officially approved... not yet

. . . CRUNCH <== sound of America's . eyeballs hitting paywall . .

eand.co? No paywall for me...

I use Bypass Paywalls Clean on Firefox. This might explain it...

Rocketpjs @ 128:

Was he born in the US? One of their rules is you must be a native born USian to be eligible for president. With some vagueness for US citizens born to US citizens abroad (John McCain was born in Panama on a US base).

He WAS. New York City IIRC. His parents (or at least his father) were grad-students (again IIRC, Columbia University & economics), so it's not even a question of him being an anchor baby. They were clearly LEGALY here and well documented to boot.

IF he could get his U.S. citizenship back he could meet the "natural born citizen" test to run for President. You can renounce your citizenship and get it back later, but there are certain acts you can perform while your citizenship is renounced that are verboten.

I think having been the Head of Government for a foreign state is going to make it damned difficult for him.

POLITICALLY it's a liability.

IF he had retained his dual citizenship, I don't think there's anything in the Constitution that could bar him from seeking the Presidency.

But, having been Britain's Prime Minister, people would always question his loyalty to the U.S. for having renounced it his citizenship for political gain in another country & then trying to come back to the U.S. & reclaim it after losing his position in that foreign land.

AlanD2
I still ran into a roadblock, trying to read the "NYT" over here ...

But wouldn't the circus be fun to watch?

Nukes are expensive. Blowing up a dam with conventional explosives is much cheaper.

I'm not sure what effect it would have on Bozo the Clown's ability to regain US citizenship, or his eligibility to stand for US Federal Office, but he has committed a UK misdemeanor.

It only matters if he is convicted of it, and most misdemeanors aren't disqualifying from holding office in the US.

I still ran into a roadblock, trying to read the "NYT" over here ...

I have had success in breaking the NYT paywall by hitting refresh and then canceling the refresh almost immediately, before the paywall stuff gets reloaded. Sometimes it takes me several tries, but I almost always get to read the article.

Rocketpjs @ 132:

A detailed look at the negotiation process and failures in the Ukraine war. Getting to Negotiations .

That might help some of the 'why don't they negotiate' people understand the story a bit more.

I doubt it. The only negotiations Putin will accept is abject, unconditional surrender by Ukraine. The 'why don't they negotiate' people won't understand why this is unacceptable to Ukraine.

AlanD2 @ 133:

My question is this: why didn't he mention raising taxes?

Whose taxes would they raise? Whose taxes COULD they raise?

"The money" won't have it and the rest of the country is already impoverished; beggared beyond belief.

I'm reminded of a most apropos phrase I haven't heard in a long time, "You can't get blood from a turnip!"

The only negotiations Putin will accept is abject, unconditional surrender by Ukraine.

Not true. Putin would be happy to negotiate as a way to buy time for his military to recover. Sort of like Donald Trump and all his court cases...

Whose taxes would they raise? Whose taxes COULD they raise?

"The money" won't have it and the rest of the country is already impoverished; beggared beyond belief.

I understand "The money". The U.S. has the same problem. But at some point, raising taxes on the wealthy may be the only alternative to a violent overthrow of the government. :-/

I've found that usually the reader view has the full article, if not all the pictures, even if the regular view shows the paywall.

Trying to read the NYT over here gives you first of all a page containing nothing at all except a call to some third-party geo-thingummy-whatsit server, which is supposed to generate some kind of token which the NYT server wants before it'll give you the actual content. Only the geo-thingummy-whatsit server itself refuses to respond to requests from the UK, so it appears that before trying anything further one has to find a US proxy to go through, and I really can't be arsed.

(Pause to further revile Niggle Farrago for making it necessary to avoid the conventional abbreviation for a United Kingdom Internet Protocol address.)

"It seems to me that raising taxes on Britain's millionaires and billionaires would be a much better solution than what's going on right now."

The people who moan and shriek the loudest about taxes are always the people who have least cause for complaint.

They also have the most influence to deter the raising of taxes, and they have a whole raft of shysterisms, weaselries and how-the-fuck-is-that-even-legal scams available to them for evading the taxes that they should be paying, which are not available to ordinary people.

There is even more tax being evaded by corporate entities pulling the same kind of shit on a larger scale. For example Amazon selling things, in pounds, on the .co.uk website, which are supplied by UK businesses, stored in UK warehouses, and delivered to UK customers, yet somehow they can get away with pretending the whole bloody thing is being done in Luxembourg so they only have to pay a piddling amount of tax on it.

Seems to me that what we need to do is not so much increase the rates of taxes, as simply to put the kybosh on all these ridiculous bloody scams, and actually collect the taxes instead of allowing them to be weaselled out of. Unfortunately this basically involves getting the people who are able to implement such measures to cut their own legs off. And doubtless further difficulties beyond that, since Vetinari had the same problem and even he didn't come up with a solution to it.

The people who moan and shriek the loudest about taxes are always the people who have least cause for complaint.

Australia's 'stage three tax cuts' are currently in the news because they start at about the upper quintile of taxable incomes (~$90,000) and get better the more you earn. Obviously they cost a lot of money, and were legislated by the far right to trap the new centre-right government. Cancel the tax cuts, run a deficit possibly even as bad as the far right did, or cut spending... no easy options.

A politician, on a base salary of $211,250, will get a tax cut of $9,075. A registered nurse on $72,235 will get a tax cut of $681 according to calculations prepared by the Australia Institute. More broadly, a typical middle earner can expect $250 a year, whereas a typical earner in the top fifth can expect $4,230 according to a separate analysis by the parliamentary budget office. The fate of the middle earner will be made worse by the loss of the $1,000+ middle income tax offset

So that nurse gets a tax cut of $681 plus a tax increase of $1000+.

What gets me is all the muppets online arguing that they will be personally affected in a grievously terrible way even though they're not rich. Few are willing to say where "rich" starts, let alone argue that the richest 20% of taxpayers shouldn't be considered rich. But since they're apparently not getting thousands of dollars of tax cuts that they're entitled to they have to be earning at least 200k... they're in the richest 10% or 5%.

Meanwhile we don't have the widespread poverty-unto-death that the UK have chosen, but we still have a lot of poverty. One of the things being cuts is the NDIS = National Disability Insurance Scheme, which despite the name is insurance in the same vein as the NHS.

Reddit is awesome sometimes

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/y9nap3/comment/it6k526/

AlanD2 @ 150:

Whose taxes would they raise? Whose taxes COULD they raise?

"The money" won't have it and the rest of the country is already impoverished; beggared beyond belief.

I understand "The money". The U.S. has the same problem. But at some point, raising taxes on the wealthy may be the only alternative to a violent overthrow of the government. :-/

How would a Tory government go about raising taxes on their own "backers"? Any Tory PM who proposed it would have a shorter tenure than the most recent.

He/she would be ejected so fast it would create a sonic boom.

How would a Tory government go about raising taxes on their own "backers"? Any Tory PM who proposed it would have a shorter tenure than the most recent.

Well, there's always the French 1789 solution... :-/

AlanD2 @ 157:

How would a Tory government go about raising taxes on their own "backers"? Any Tory PM who proposed it would have a shorter tenure than the most recent.

Well, there's always the French 1789 solution... :-/

Might come to that, but I think what's wanted is some way to avoid such. The question is do the Tories have the tools?

I think it's broken beyond repair (at least by the current government) because they are ideologically unable to do what has to be done to rescue the nation.

They can't fix it and they won't relinquish power to someone who might be able to.

Meanwhile, I'm going to attack a piece of stupidity in here, that's {almost} on a par with that of our misgovernment.
EC's idea that losing the Falklands War would have been a good thing.
HELPING a fascist government to go on murdering & torturing its own citizens & encouraging dictators everywhere that they could get away with it, as Putin is trying, right now.
Simply: NO, utterly wrong.
Note: This does NOT equate to support of M H Roberts, at all.

As for raising money, start with the low-hanging fruit. Screw the Oil/Gas petrochemical companies to the deck with what used to be called an: Excess Profits Tax. AND - keep it up, make it permanent!
Next, as suggested above, block up all the stupid loopholes.
And remember that most "gross" wealth is not held personally - it's about control not ownership - which is where life gets tricky, yes?

CLANG APOLOGIES

Please delete present pots # 159 It SHOOULD be in the next thread ....

Glad you enjoyed the story.

The book seems to be doing okay, thanks. I only get statements once a year and it hasn't made its advance yet - good job I didn't do it for the money. Of the two places I really wanted to mention it, I got a great review in one and a two-page spread in the other. So can't complain.

The question that just turned up in my head is what if Musk will just silence Ukrainian tweeterers?

Damian @ 162:

The question that just turned up in my head is what if Musk will just silence Ukrainian tweeterers?

Could he do that? I don't think the current moderators would go along, so he'd have to be banning individual accounts himself & I think he's already got too much on his plate to get into that level of micro-managing.

I could be wrong, but ...