...I have never been a cigarette smoker; I am in fact kind of allergic to cigarette smoke. But reading about that "raise the smoking age one year every year" policy makes me want to go buy some cigarettes. Damn.

Same!

(And I'm mildly asthmatic and hate cigarette smoke.)

I really hope they go down in flames.

However, I can't help remembering 1992.

A fairly new Tory Prime Minister faced off against a Labour leader who was working really hard to detoxify the party after previous defeats. Aided by a compliant press, a few Labour mis-steps, and a policy - the Council Tax - that, whether deliberately or not, depressed voter registration and turnout, he scraped a slim majority. (In the office where I worked, five out of seven people weren't even registered to vote, because they were hoping to avoid the 'poll tax').

We had to endure a further five years of sleaze, corruption, and leadership challenges from people on the right of his party, before Labour finally won.

This time round, swap Council Tax for Voter ID, and what else has really changed? Except the compliant press is augmented by a load of bots on social media.

Please, please don't let this be 1992 again.

Banning the sale of cigarettes would be great if it was intended to protect the health of the population (after all, it doesn't ban making your own cigarettes, anybody can still grow their own tobacco, dry it and make some smokes for himself if you're really set on inhaling tobacco smoke). But I somehow don't think the Tories are doing this for the kids, I think they're doing this for the Big Tobacco industry which has invested a lot of money into the "heated tobacco" devices and tobacco cartridges, they probably have higher profit margins.

I‘m not a lawyer by any means, much less a British one, but I would bet serious money that this type of smoking ban is completely, totally, utterly impossible to get past even the most well-meaning court. You do not have different rights for children (or adolescents) and adults, you give different rights to adults based on their age. Surely that cannot work? (I know there are circumstances - e.g. candidacy for public offices - where age limits apply, but in those cases you can argue that a certain life experience/wisdom/whatever is needed. An increasing age limit simply discriminates against adults based solely on date of birth.)

His Dread Majesty is presented as actually liking his pets.

Signs of that in our current horrors are absent.

So, when does the Tzompantli go up?

The New Management distinguishes itself by being reasonably competent

DocMic @ 5: but I would bet serious money that this type of smoking ban is completely, totally, utterly impossible to get past even the most well-meaning court

Not in the UK. Here Parliament is sovereign, so whatever law they pass is the law of the land (with exceptions for the Human Rights Act, but that can be reversed at any time just by passing a law to reverse or amend it). Smoking isn't a human right, so the government can regulate it in any way it sees fit.

I would bet serious money that this type of smoking ban is completely, totally, utterly impossible to get past even the most well-meaning court.

You would lose. There's already a minimum age for buying tobacco products; it's just going to start rising by 12 months once every year.

New Zealand already did it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/04/vaping-and-de-nicotinisation-what-uk-can-learn-from-new-zealands-smoking-crackdown has some remarks about some of the effects, as well as differences in the UK.

Charlie
Your last sentence ... unfortunately - yes.
It's clear that they are going to even-more-comprehensively trash everything, & leave Labour ( Or whoever ) 5 years to try to sweep the mess up, at vast expense, of course.

LAvery
no need for a Tzompantil, after all, they are seriously proposing a return to about 1790, with Transportation across the seas & Prison-ship Hulks, aren't they?

Store 'em in the freezer and save them for the inevitable black market. It works in prisons.

Incidentally, I dislike tobacco too.

I'm now wondering if a historical parallel with the Current Regime is the Protectorate of 1653, with Fundamentalist/Fascist Mammonism replacing Cromwell's beliefs...?

The good news is, English non-conformist wetback refugees coming ashore in North America and Australia now will likely have a higher survival rate than the first wave did.

I've been reading news reports from this Tory conference most days. And the various positions and policies the "leaders" are spouting off about. I think it would be the fodder of much of the news and late night comedy monologues in the US except for one thing.

Our current House of Reps antics in our Congress has it beat hands down. For almost any way you measure crazy.

As to tobacco, well, I bought packs and cartons (10 packs) throughout my teens. For my dad. Who died of lung cancer at the age of 75. Which was 10 to 20 years before most of his lineage. Once I got my drivers license I was available to drive and get him more smokes. A 2-3 pack a day habit he picked up from the free cigs given to GI's as the US tobacco industries contribution to WWII.

Sigh.

I don’t have a problem with the tobacco thing, in fact I rather like the idea. As far as I’m concerned it’s a scoop of ice cream bobbing around in the Tories’ fecal milkshake.

One of those things I really (really!) hate about better writers is their ability to articulate my thoughts better than I can... Stross, Scalzi, Mcmaster-Bujold, Heinlein, Doctorow, et al

John Scalzi just did that to me... again...

"This is the problem with the recent conservative trick of offering things up for a vote without the intention or expectation of winning, and then not having a plan for when you do win. Trump’s 2016 presidential run, the Brexit vote in the UK, this bit of chicanery: They were supposed to be useful bits of messaging, not actual things that were meant to happen. But then they did, and those who offered them for voting was caught flat-footed. We see the mess that Brexit and a Trump presidency have gotten us. This new nonsense is smaller, to be sure, but the dynamic is the same. Modern conservatives can’t govern; they can only signal. That’s the only thing they know how to do any more."

from

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/10/04/the-unlamented-former-speaker/#comments

Unless someone has mentioned it already ...
{ No, they haven't, yet }
The new really nasty thing, now, is the tories not "just" lying, but making utterly fictitious shit up - a trick they have learnt from the US.
"15-minute cites are a recipe for restriction" / "A ban on meat" / claims about "forcing woke policies" etc ...
Straight out of Der Sturmer, or the Daily Mail, only worse.

H @ 14
Very close - Cromwell's ultra-Puritans were really nasty people.

Talking of banning things ....
The proposed age-progressive ban on smoking has ALREADY got the ulta-health fascists talking about banning booze & restricting the sales of alcohol. ......
We all know how well that has always worked out, don't we?
The sheer arrogant Stupidity of these people never ceases to amaze me.

Greg Tingey 18:

[ just to be clear everything written below is loathsome and does not reflect the opinions of the author... he has both a soul and a heart ]

applicable phrases to US politics... you are welcome to bootleg 'em onto UK as you wish...

feckless zeal; increasingly rabid anti-migrant rhetoric; increasingly rabid anti-foreigner rhetoric[1]; industrialized serfdom; fear of science; love for tradition; restricting access to books[2]; pining for the good ol' days; dreaming of restoring slavery-serfdom-censorship-public-whipping; cluelessness in the face of looming climate disasters; denial in the face of multiple, overlapping crisis clusters; blaming victims because they're too weak to protest; OCD-TC-centric[3];

[1] there's a difference between a 'migrant' and a 'foreigner' with Republicans loathing both groups; if you're a woman or POC that's twice as loathsome;

[2] there too many books teaching too much to too many; thus the less people read the better; eventually all books but starting with those books mentioning unloved minorities, which seems to be all of 'em;

[3] newly proposed entry for DSM-7, being a mental illness primarily suffered by multi-billionaires in general and tech-bro's in particular; high ranking arch-conservatives and their enablers; obsessive-compulsive disorder centered upon tax-cutting as the cure all for every single one of society's many, many ills;

That is one part I like. The state shall remove addictive products sold by unscrupulous corporations from the market. It's a bit funny overall that is going to be done by Sunak, but still, I support this.

Actually, prohibition did indeed work out to reduce alcohol consumption in the US. Yes, there was a rebound after some time, but it rebounded to about 60-70% of pre-Prohibition levels. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675.pdf

It would be unbelievable to us nowadays how permanently and utterly sloshed people were in the 19th century.

And restrictions on the sale of alcohol do work, which is why Big Alcohol is spending so much money to oppose them.

from the news category of "YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP"

The name of Liz Truss is being mentioned in the same sentence as the letters "UK PM" and the word "next"

...WTF?

US Congressman Troy Nehls: “This week, when the US House of Representatives reconvenes, my first order of business will be to nominate Donald J Trump for speaker of the US House of Representatives.”

for my friends lucky enough not to be US citizens, please note the person who is Speaker of the House is automatically second-in-succession to the presidency, right after the vice-president... two heart beats away...

...or as a fascist might say: two stopped hearts away

...WTF!?

It would be unbelievable to us nowadays how permanently and utterly sloshed people were in the 19th century.

Yes, but alcohol consumption also dropped in nations that never dabbled in prohibition.

I attribute it in part to hygeine (alcohol kills most pathogens; watered beer is safer to drink than water when there's no real sewer system to segregate source from effluent -- the alternative is tea/coffee and other boiled brews) and also to improving working conditions: at risk of over-simplifying, folks back then drank to numb the pain of 70+ hour work weeks in dire conditions (and because they were less likely to shit themselves to death on beer than water).

Is it intentional that the link to the birdsite in the update is actually a link to Discord that requires a login?

Don't forget "kicking woke ideology out of science" as the official science policy.

https://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/1709207218027934071

I can't help remembering 1997, and thinking wistfully of the New Management - or even Thatcher! What policies Starmer is likely to impose are unclear, but they are vanishingly unlikely to be even as liberal and socialist as Thatcher's.

He likes to think of himself as Blair II, though thank Cthulhu he doesn't have the charisma, and Blair's privatisation / bankrupting of the NHS, police, schools etc. was no accident. Greg Tingey and others will be old enough to remember when largely deregulated hire-purchase was known as the never-never and a major factor in maintaining poverty among the wage slaves - PPP / PFI was obviously just that, on an institutional scale.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/05/tony-blair-urges-expanded-role-for-private-sector-as-nhs-turns-75

People might also like to note that Blair introduced some totally unnecessary offences and started our draconian and Kafkaesque 'anti-terror' laws, despite the fact that we never needed them for the PIRA. I could go on about his other offences, but won't. Will Starmer reverse any of the structural problems in the UK caused by 40 years of extremist monetarism, neo-fascism etc.? Like hell, he will. He isn't likely to even reform our broken electoral system, despite how much Labour would gain.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/02/millions-of-missing-voters-cost-labour-seats-due-to-electoral-boundaries-bias

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/24/keir-starmer-defies-call-for-changes-to-first-past-the-post-voting-system

Yes, if they were, they would ban single-use vapes ASAP and treat all vaping like cigarettes. This rumoured policy is almost certainly one of the ones Sunak is binning:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/11/ban-on-single-use-vapes-in-uk-could-be-imminent

Or, rather, he already has:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/04/health-charities-welcome-sunaks-plan-to-curb-smoking-in-england

To me it seems likely that the billionnaire class decided a few years ago that climate change is real and its effects imminent and bad news. So what to do ? Obviously they can build themselves luxury bunkers etc in various locations around the world, but thats not going to work if the social order collapses. They don't trust democracies to decide/achieve anything ( they didn't get all that wealth by being democratic ), so they want to see authoritarian governments installed in as many countries as possible - note that left/right is irrelevant here. Ideally these will each have a single leader since thats the 'natural order' for these guys. Hence all their work on influencing events via their concierge class (i.e. those in politics, media, etc who do their will for personal advantage).

... note they are not interested in preserving general living conditions, they may even see a collapse in the global population as the "cheapest" solution to climate change. Their aim is to ensure their personal elite status is maintained into the future at any cost (to others).

( hmm, I guess the last week has just been a bit much to internalise )

It should be noted though that Europe is still more prone to drinking than the US, and the top 20 of heavily drinking countries in the world contains 16 European countries and only 4 other (Seychelles, Nigeria, Russia and Gabon).

The UK is 23rd with over 11 litres of pure alcohol per capita per year, the US is 45th, with 9.8.

And yes, of course drugs like alcohol were sold cheaply and used massively to numb the pain of existence, late medieval Poland even required our slaves, sorry, serfs to buy a certain obligatory quantity of vodka from their owners every year.

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

Nope: should be fixed now.

With respect to banning cigarettes, I have always thought that to be a recipe for drug education aimed at people who will never get the message.

To the extent that such a policy were successful, it would lead to gangs killing each other over black-market rights to various sections of your major cities. The violence associated with the cocaine and meth and narcotics trades is about the money, not the effects of those drugs. There would be enough money in a cigarette prohibition black market to drive some fierce violence and serious police corruption.

no need for a Tzompantil, after all, they are seriously proposing a return to about 1790, with Transportation across the seas & Prison-ship Hulks, aren't they?

Are the migrants held on prison-ship hulks meant to starve to death, like French prisoners of war were during the Napoleonic wars? That's a fine English tradition that the current crop of tories should embrace.

Charlie@ 32
"The English only drink water as a Penance" ...
IIRC, Dominic Mancini, Milanese abassador to Edward IV ....

anchrome @ 25 Provided, of course that you can actually DEFINE "woke theology" - which they can't.
Or is that an advantage, because they can simply make shit up?

EC
UNELSS Labour does not get an absolute majority & the Lem-0-Crats have about 50 seats.
THEN we might get PR?

Aardvark Cheeselog
IF ciggies are banned & someone is smoking - it MUST be weed & we know how to treat THEM ... ?

Over Starmer's and the Labour establishment's dead bodies. They would a thousand times have a semi-permanent Conservative government than allow the Liberal Democrats (and others) to have so much influence. I wish that I were joking.

33: "The violence associated with the cocaine and meth and narcotics trades is about the money, not the effects of those drugs"

The experiment with easy access to opioids didn't end well.

Charlie Stross 23:

numbing the pain? plausible

given lack of concern for work place safety pre-OSHA (and UK eqv) just about everyone had minor and oft major injuries accumulate over a life time...

then there's all the unlucky bastards grabbed by pressgangs and/or formal drafts... sent off to war and upon their return... memories oft leading to cold sweats at night and waking nightmares

another aspect of booze: shared experience and few alternative entertainment choices; drinking with your buddies was better than drinking alone; and without radio or teevee, drinking alone was better than sitting alone without distraction;

and don't get me started on winter long depression (AKA seasonal affective disorder)... it hits hard...

combine all the aforementioned, two or more inside one person and yeah... booze

Banning substances that people want is a really bad idea. It always leads in an increase in criminal activity...which then spreads to other areas. What should be done is prohibit the advertising or trademarking of such things. And perhaps also patenting. And strongly enforce "truth in labeling" laws...which should be strengthened anyway.

"Kicking woke ideology out of science" isn't actually a bad idea. Also conservative ideology. Science should be based on repeatable observations carefully specified. Of course, that's probably not what the person saying that meant, but it's still true, and does need to be done. However it's less of a problem than "publish or perish" leading to fake results.

"Kicking woke ideology out of science" isn't actually a bad idea. Also conservative ideology.

This is false both-sides-ism. For decades the US media has promoted the idea that if you present one side of a story then there must be something of merit in the other side. So if you're interviewing vaccine researchers you obviously need to go out and interview an anti-vaxxer "for balance".

"Kicking woke ideology out of science" isn't actually a bad idea. Also conservative ideology. Science should be based on repeatable observations carefully specified. Of course, that's probably not what the person saying that meant, but it's still true, and does need to be done. However it's less of a problem than "publish or perish" leading to fake results.

Ummmmm...

I translate "kicking woke ideology out of science" as "spending more medical research dollars on studying the lifestyle diseases of suburban white men, and defunding research into gender dysphoria, women's health, and diseases that affect the poor and those who suffer from melanin surpluses¹. Also defund epidemiology and public health, because only the Woke care about whether Those People are healthy. They breed like (deleted) anyway." (/sarcasm)

¹Based on the mean melanin levels of a cohort of 200 young men from the University of Maine, measured in February 1954 and corroborated by a similar study of University of Minnesota students in March 1956. (/total BS)

Sarcasm aside, if you believe that things like biomedical research should prioritize either topics that are inappropriately understudied, or topics that help the most people for the least money, then spending research dollars to potentially help women, minorities, the poor across the globe, and on public health, epidemiology, and new and emerging diseases should get top priority. Unfortunately, the problems of well-off white dudes and profit maximizing projects aren't high on this list, hence all the agitprop on Wokism.

You do not have different rights for children (or adolescents) and adults, you give different rights to adults based on their age. Surely that cannot work?

It works over here in Canada, and our law is based on British law.

...given lack of concern for work place safety pre-OSHA (and UK eqv) just about everyone had minor and oft major injuries accumulate over a life time...

Ask an old-timer (up to, say, the 90s) at the UK naval nuclear depot about the drinking culture there, it'll turn your hair white.

drinking with your buddies was better than drinking alone; and without radio or teevee, drinking alone was better than sitting alone without distraction;

I like this reasoning, and it provides something to stack up against the almost overwhelmingly negative social solvent effect I see in media from the early 20th century onward. Maybe people were being hornswoggled into demanding impossible standards of mate perfection or driven to overconsume by depictions of ordinary people living in opulence, but at least they weren't so bored that they drank themselves to death so often.

The Uk isn't the first place to talk about a gradually increasing legal age for ciggies. IIRC New Zealand and Finland have something like that in place.

The difference is that outside of social incentives, there is really little incentive to start smoking. It smells, makes you cough, it kills you and the people around you, and in the beginning it makes you feel sick and/or nauseous. On top of that a significant percentage of people who are of your preferred configuration do not want to kiss you if you smell or taste of ciggies.

The only reason people soldier through all that is because their friends are also starting to smoke, so they want to be a part of that. If that is removed then the appeal of smoking disappears greatly.

Anecdotally, I quit smoking around when it was banned in pubs and restaurants in BC. Forcing all the smokers to remove themselves from the social milieu to go feed their habit made it vastly easier for recovering smokers such as myself to stay 'quit'.

There has been quite a bit of success in just making ciggies unavailable to young people. By the time one reaches adulthood the intense need to 'fit in' that is experienced by people in their early to mid teens has subsided a bit and ciggies largely lose their appeal.

IMO Sunak has managed to imitate a stopped clock in being correct on one thing while otherwise being utterly useless. That said, he isn't likely to accomplish really anything at all until his inevitable defenestration.

Margaret Trauth @ 1:

...I have never been a cigarette smoker; I am in fact kind of allergic to cigarette smoke. But reading about that "raise the smoking age one year every year" policy makes me want to go buy some cigarettes. Damn.

Tobacco was the "gold" that saved the Virginia Colony. The gentlemen adventurers of the Virginia Company didn't come to the new world to found a new nation. They were looking to extract gold from the natives - conquistador wannabees. The east coast natives didn't have gold, but they did have tobacco; especially after John Rolfe introduced several Caribbean strains.

I grew up in the middle of tobacco country. The process for flue curing tobacco was discovered near here ... the song "Tobacco Road" was written by a Durham, NC native.

When I was growing up there, the city leaders were PROUD that 20% of all the cigarettes in the world were manufactured in Durham. A major industry in Durham at the time was tobacco auction barns.

Lucky Strike Tobacco Auctioneer 1953 [YouTube]

You could visit the factories, take a tour and they'd GIVE you a package of cigarettes. If you worked at the factory they'd give you two packs every day. I started smoking when I was 10 years old ... and never bought cigarettes until I was out of high school. Both of my best friend's parents worked for the tobacco companies.

I quit - cold turkey - when I was 21, but sometimes, 50+ years later, I'll get a whiff of second hand smoke & my mouth will start to water. You never get over nicotine addiction. I won't even try to number the friends and family lost to various tobacco related cancers & heart diseases.

So don't fret about the cigarettes. You're well off without them. The Tories seem to be doing the right thing (this once) even if it is for all the wrong reasons.

Charlie Stross @ 41:

"Kicking woke ideology out of science" isn't actually a bad idea. Also conservative ideology."

This is false both-sides-ism. For decades the US media has promoted the idea that if you present one side of a story then there must be something of merit in the other side. So if you're interviewing vaccine researchers you obviously need to go out and interview an anti-vaxxer "for balance".

Still, I go along with the idea that if you're going to kick out "woke ideology" you should also kick out "conservative ideology". Even if one of them IS someone's imaginary fever dream, getting rid of the other is still a good idea.

Just out of curiosity, does the U.K. have "birthright citizenship"?

(Similar to what the U.S. has - anyone BORN in the USA is an American Citizen by right of birth - Jus soli)

Also what is the difference between "citizens" and "subjects"?

Common American myth, that British people are "subjects". This isn't true and hasn't been true for decades, if ever -- we're British citizens. (It says so right here on this passport.)

The UK does not have unqualified birthright citizenship. Per wikipedia:

All persons born in the British Islands before 1 January 1983 were automatically granted citizenship by birth regardless of the nationalities of their parents. Individuals born in those territories since that date only receive citizenship at birth if at least one of their parents is a British citizen or holds settled status.

Blame Thatcherite conservative racism for this.

(British nationality law.)

One of the goals of imagining the "woke agenda" is to move the Overton Window in reaction. So any support for that idea is support for moving in the far right direction.

Another problem with "kick the woke ideology out" is that woke is the imaginary counterpoint to far right ideology. It barely exists as an agenda being pushed by actual people, it's primarily a fever dream used to create a reaction. Like the "tax on meat" being opposed by the UK Conservatives. But as a real political force it's less influential than the nazi's demanding we put refugees in concentration camps (we have "refugee detention centres" in out in the deserts in Australia!).

To put it another way, the agenda here is to make science explicitly political. No-one will be able to say "I have discovered a new species of sand flea" without also having to explain where this discovery sits in the current political conflict. So as soon as you agree that yes, of course, we need to remove the woke nonsense from science it doesn't matter whether you say "and also this MAGA nonsense", you've thrown away any pretence of science as factual or neutral and accepted that it's always primarily political. And that political control of scientific outcomes is not just good, it's necessary.

EC @ 26
Greg Tingey and others will be old enough to remember when largely deregulated hire-purchase was known as the never-never and a major factor in maintaining poverty among the wage slaves - Indeed - There was even a black comedy film made about it - so there!

You can't remove ideology from science. It's done by humans.

What kind science is permissable, for instance, is inherently an ideological decision. Unless you want to permit, and in a real world, fund every bit of science presented to you, then you have ideology in the mix.

Also woke is made up, but whatever.

I see a line between the soviet-style "all science must support the political goals of the state" and the traditional* "science is a hobby for rich men" that morphed into "science is a capitalistic enterprise that drives Progress-with-a-capital-P". Some people want to push us back to the former and they're pretty explicit that they want modern Lysenkoism.

I admit that one of the few justifications I can see for billionaires is as patrons. Patrons of the arts, patrons of the sciences, even just patrons of "build me a giant edifice" (which gave us the cathedrals and monuments that various people are ever so proud of, at the same time as it immiserated multitudes... so in a way, we're committed to immiseration again, the least we can get back is more giant erections that will last down the ages).

But definitely, part of what I'm saying is that I don't like the politics driving current sceience but I dislike even more the direction that politics is heading in. Changing from "a good scientist is one who makes money" to "a good scientist is one who shows that trans people should be killed" offends me.

* European, sure, but also Middle Eastern and Indian. You don't get some bloke sitting round playing with number theory and working out how to use symbols instead of digits while he's spending eveery waking hour carrying bricks for a living.

Nicotine is a wonderful blissful drug. As an ex smoker I have to constantly sublimentally remind myself that taking up the vaping it's not a good idea. If you have never smoked you don't get how incredibly addictive it can be. The fact that it makes you feel good is the secondary addictive element.

Perhaps our genial host with his background in pharmacy can help us here.

By the way I think smoking is a terrible terrible terrible way to do anything.

Charlie Stross @ 50:

Common American myth, that British people are "subjects".

That's why I asked. I'd rather know the "truth" (whatever that might be) than be misinformed by myth.

Moz @ 51:

To put it another way, the agenda here is to make science explicitly political.

I understand that. I'm saying an agenda to make science explicitly NOT political would be a better idea.

And I understand that "woke science" is nonsense ... but whenever some numpty starts spouting off about it should be an opportunity to demand the removal of "conservative science". Tit for tat.

"By the way I think smoking is a terrible terrible terrible way to do anything."

I disagree, in that smoking is a delightful way to do salmon, pork ribs or various other foods.

However, burning anything with the intent of inhaling the smoke it into your lungs is just insane. As an ex-smoker of 27 years, I still occasionally wish it was good for you. Mostly I am glad to be rid of it.

In Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy assassins put nicotine on the edge of the knife.

(Not sure of how historically accurate that part was :) )

It relaxed the victim so much they forgot to breath.

And, of course, all the other chemicals in modern cigarettes are even more hair raising.

Charlie Stross 41: This is false both-sides-ism.

during covid quarantine, there was actually 'journalists' who sought to explain the virus's perspective on humanity and how it would be negatively effected by pharmaceuticals such as aspirin and antibiotics[1]... no really... there were knuckleheads trying to be sympathetic to a deadly, mindless virus... sadly I did not archive those articles... for some reason all of 'em were taken down... might have been the shortage of body bags due to the mounting death toll that finally forced these knuckleheads to pick a side, and they (likely reluctantly) chose humans...

[1] yes, yes, I am aware antibiotics are for bacteria not viruses... just further demonstration of cluelessness amongst those most ignorant of STEM-centric fact-based reality

Scorpion Stare? - but, OF COURSE, our misgovernment are dragging their feet & digging for excuses.

Oh, & more misgovernment lying & evasion How unsurprising

The latest on Chris Grey's excellent Brexit blog, Brexit has driven the Tory party mad. Strongly recommended.

But there is no "conservative science". The whole point is that it is a rejection of the concept of what science is about and what it's for. Turning an evidence-based, experimental, epistemically sound lens on things that conservatives care about is extremely unwelcome by conservatives, just as unwelcome as turning it on things they don't like, which they call woke.

From a quick read through the comments here, it does seem that smokers and ex-smokers are more supportive of banning smoking than non-smokers. Personally I feel that if I hadn't been able to easily buy tobacco at 16, and hadn't been surrounded by people smoking in pubs, I probably wouldn't still be smoking now. And while vapes are a lot less bad for you than ciggies, I still think they should be lumped into the same/similar category of law.

while vapes are a lot less bad for you than ciggies, I still think they should be lumped into the same/similar category of law.

Vapes have the problem that they're e-waste as well as toxic waste. In Australia where only single-use vapes are allowed (IIRC) they've become noticeable litter. Sure, they're bigger than cigarette butts, but they're more problematic to the same extent. Apparently they like to set rubbish compactors and landfills on fire, which butts don't tend to do.

From a public health perspective it's just another way we're pumping weird shit into our bodies and who the fuck knows what that's going to do. I mean, we can guess...

The problem with bans is that it becomes just another thing for customs to try to deal with, and the complexity is all in opening up every single vape and running the liquid through a chemical analysis to find out what exactly it is. This is also something that concerns some vape users... is that "passive" chemical really passive, and is it really the claimed chemical at all? Has the country famous for gutter oil and melamine flavoured milk powder reformed so completely that even illegally imported vapes comply with the rules?

It's a messy and rather pointless distinction. At least at one stage, a 'citizen' had a right of residence and a 'subject' didn't; whether it is still the case could be checked if you know any people with the latter type of passport. Until at least 1975, my status on the passport was "British subject: citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies".

Uncle Stinky
The tory party went mad in about 2015 - just before the disastrous referendum ... they have "simply" been heading towards Upminster Carriage sidings, ever since. { Hint: Barking, Upney, Becontree, Dagenham Heathway, Dagenham East, Elm Park, Hornchurch, Upminster Bridge - complete with giant swastika, Upminster. } It only requires the "right away" to head off into the dead-end sidings!

Damian
Exactly - one only has to replace "woke" science with "Jewish" science to see exactly where this is heading ...

Actually, that's true of what "woke science" should REALLY refer to! While it has never been called that, it was and is a thing, and is disparaged and ignored by all real scientists. But the fact that there is some nonsense from that direction does NOT justify claiming that it has taken over even sociology (as Thatcher etc. have said, though it is demonstrably false), let alone damning the real psychomedical research and practice that is called "woke" by the bigots.

No, the madness dates from about 1985 when the fanatics started to dominate and they stopped trying to rule for the good of the country, and replaced it by pursuing an agenda to rebuild the country in terms of their beliefs irrespective of whether they would do any good or were even realistic.

Old Labour was subject to that, but it was kept under control by its pragmatists and the Conservatives, until Blair turned it into a Tory Lite party whose objective was power at all costs. The Labour membership is perhaps the last remaining 'one nation' force left in the UK, but is irrelevant, as shown by the way that Starmer publicly ignores them.

I'm not sure if UK libel laws will let you but you could always quote verbatim instead of parody , r/nottheonion style

As someone who has stage-4 non-smoking lung cancer, I laughed bitterly at the smoking ban - a problem that is largely solving itself (~14% of the UK population now smokes and it is continuing on a downwards trend). The fact the Torys want to do this while wailing and gnashing their teeth about ULEZ is hilarious. There is increasing evidence that exposure to high levels of pollution (especially PM2.5 particulate matter which ULEZ attempts to address) is a key driver in causing the mutations which lead to lung cancer (see the TRACERx research done my Prof. Charles Swanton with the Francis Crick Institute and UCL). The Torys as usual busy trying to solve yesterdays problems and ignoring todays... sigh.

(Not sure of how historically accurate that part was :) )

It's very accurate: nicotine is a cholinergic neurotoxin in overdose (that's why the tobacco plant produces it -- it kills insects).

I am pretty sure that:

a. The Tories will now proceed to poison the well by selling off all the land purchased for HS2, allowing developers and speculators to bank it against a future revival.

b. Starmer will refuse to commit to a review of HS2 before the election victory he's hoping for.

c. If victorious, the Tories won't revive HS2, they'll just cut high speed running on the network so they can cram more commuter trains on the lines.

d. If victorious, Labour will end up holding a public enquiry, kicking the can down the road until reviving HS2 is horrifically expensive and too late to avoid a crisis.

e. The enquiry will finally determine that something like HS2 is essential. At which point a future government will commit to building a new high-speed line that nevertheless shares some existing track (to save money) thereby not achieving the primary objective of moving high speed trains onto dedicated track and out of the way of stopping services.

f. A future Tory government will then ask itself, "hmm, why should proles be permitted inter-city travel anyway?" and annouce a revival of coal-mining and steam-locomotive building as a shot in the arm for British manufacturing industry. The steam locos will of course be imported second hand from India (who will have finished replacing them with high speed trains and be planning a maglev network by that time).

Does this sound about right?

I would be surprised if you could get even 60mg transferred from the edge of the knife, let alone what the lethal dose really is - especially if the victim were a regular smoker!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880486/

I first noticed the anomalous data when investigating how dangerous home-made nicotine insecticides really are, because I thought there would have been more deaths given its claimed toxicity and how widespread such recipes are.

Damian _ AND others
"ULEZ" is a sham & a distraction.
Apparently, the real reason for Labour losing Uxbridge was local tory bigotry & prejudice & dog-whistling aginst the "Lab" candidate - who is "gay".

Charlie @ 73
a: Already in the works
b: Correct - why should he put a hostage to tory smears & even more lies/ Blody nuisance, but ...
c: If that - most of theor post-cancellation" promises" of all of TWO DAYS AGO are being rowed back from or denied or otherwise evade d: Unfortunately true e: Not necessarily - "Aufbaustrecke" can work very well - IF you let the professional engineers do the job.
f: Sarcasm, but it's not too far out. { I THINK that the only steam-locos the Indians now use are all on special heritage services. )

There is a brilliant American song humorist, Tom Lehrer, who made such amazing songs as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, the Masochism Tango, and The Vatican Rag. His day job was as a university maths prof.

He stopped doing new songs and music when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. He said something to the effect of 'How can I out-parody that?' However, I can't source that so it may be apocryphal.

75 f) Not so sure about India, but one of South Africa's last steam locomotives has been repatriated to Glasgow, and is on display in the Riverside Museum (Museum of Transport).

I think you are correct that the plutocrats are trying to build escape mechanisms for themselves from climate change.

But it turns out that plutocrats are not particularly bright: if anyone doubted that there is a very public ongoing demonstration of it going on right now.

And, unsurprisingly, being rather dim, they haven't understood what is going to happen. Because climate change is not in fact going to be the thing that kills us, directly. Two really obvious consequences of uncontrolled climate change are going to be serious resource shortages and significant chunks of the planet becoming effectively uninhabitable as wet-bulb temperatures start to regularly exceed what is survivable.

So what happens? First of all resource shortages cause a rapidly worsening series of resource wars (I think we're already seeing the start of this). And secondly, well, given the choice between moving and dying, you move: there will be forced migration on a vast scale. And that's going to drive a lot of nasty racism in people and a lot of increasingly authoritarian, explicitly racist regimes (look at the UK, for instance).

And if the plutocrats really are trying to install authoritarian regimes, which is plausible, then that's just another sign they're none-too-bright. Because authoritarian regimes are not famously good at getting on with other authoritarian regimes, especially when they're competing for resources and trying to stop each other from dispatching lots of unwanted brown people over their borders.

This leads to one place: nuclear war, sometime between 2050-2070 I guess. And even plutocrats, in their luxury bunkers, are not going to be surviving that for long. (And no, they're also not going to be surviving on Mars: that's just an idiot fantasy.)

There is one way for people to survive this, which is to cooperate and deal with climate change. We've chosen not to do that, and the plutocrats, with their limited understanding, are probably making it worse.

=+=+=+=

Charlie Stross 73:

bing! bing! bing!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/05/sunaks-spiteful-sale-of-land-intended-for-hs2-dashes-hopes-of-revival

only thing you've overlooked is "Marshall Plan 2.0" (circa 2060) into which Germany-France-Canada-India-China will all contribute eqv US$50B to rebuild rotting infrastructure British Isles to prevent swarms of ill-fed, disease riddled refugees from the UK from sneaking out on moonless nights... with kind-hearted EU/BRICS doctors volunteering to treat all those refugees...

...of course, they'll have much in way of expertise in dealing grunting, ill-mannered thugs having previously volunteered in deepest, darkest most ignorant USA which by 2035 will be reduced to Squid Games-esque flesh peddling due to millions involuntarily relocated as seacoasts are hammered into shattered glass

not that I'm embittered about my nation's future, nope

=+=+=+=

there being so many flaws in modern society, who has time to list 'em all? but this leaped off my e-reader... from "Slow Living" by E. M. Foner (2022)

context: set in 24th century; "Flower" is an AI; twenty thousand years old; operating a starship which includes humans as its crew;

“...but it was the beginning of the end of humanity’s patience with deferred gratification, a fundamental character trait for the advancement of sentients,” Flower explained. “Over the course of two hundred years of easy credit, your people lost the ability to make hard choices about the allocation of finite resources. Borrowing from future generations to solve today’s problems was presented as a virtue rather than a vice...”

=+=+=+=

The problem is that science doesn't have any "woke ideology". That's a label slapped across it from conservatives who simply don't like what the evidence tells them, because it doesn't fit with their pre-digested viewpoints.

The specific current case is othering anyone who's not a cisgender heterosexual. Science has done a lot of work on gender identity, and we have a statistics on who abuses children. (Mainly men, mainly family members or close family friends.) So when the person responsible for hands-on government in the UK is literally calling all trans* people child abusers and saying they're the main threat to children, the alternative view isn't called "woke ideology", it's called "evidence".

And here in the red state of Arizona, USA, former newscaster Kari Lake (R) has announced that she is running for the US Senate after losing the election for governor in 2020 and then spending two years suing the state of Arizona for "election fraud."

Think it's been linked here before, but in case anyone missed it, Tom Lehrer has made all his music available for free download - https://tomlehrersongs.com/albums/

Wish my ears still worked properly.

Charlie, I have a thought.
1. The US is vastly larger than the UK, with correspondingly more money available.
2. The Power ruling the US has his agents spend money in the UK to try to undermine His Dread Magesty

Or is that too close to current reality?

Damian @ 63:

But there is no "conservative science". The whole point is that it is a rejection of the concept of what science is about and what it's for. Turning an evidence-based, experimental, epistemically sound lens on things that conservatives care about is extremely unwelcome by conservatives, just as unwelcome as turning it on things they don't like, which they call woke.

That's the point. Give 'em a taste of their own medicine (or a "wiff of the grape" - whichever will be more effective).

paws
Obviously built by "NBL", probably at Hyde Park, as Atlas closed early - might have come from the old Dübs plant on the South side (Polmadie), but unlikely.

I think it was under FDR that safe water started really being available in the US. That would cut alcohol usage as well.

phuzz @ 64:

From a quick read through the comments here, it does seem that smokers and ex-smokers are more supportive of banning smoking than non-smokers. Personally I feel that if I hadn't been able to easily buy tobacco at 16, and hadn't been surrounded by people smoking in pubs, I probably wouldn't still be smoking now. And while vapes are a lot less bad for you than ciggies, I still think they should be lumped into the same/similar category of law.

I don't think an outright ban is called for, but I do support bans on smoking indoors or inside of closed public conveyances. And I think "No smoking within 50' of the door" should be stringently enforced.

Otherwise outdoors I can move away from you and I'll thank you not to follow with your foul odor.

With all the talk of smoking, it's been years, but I am starting to strongly feel like I should go out on the patio, smoke my churchwarden (with pipe tobacco), and start rereading the Hobbit/LotR.

JHamann @ 81:

And here in the red state of Arizona, USA, former newscaster Kari Lake (R) has announced that she is running for the US Senate after losing the election for governor in 2020 and then spending two years suing the state of Arizona for "election fraud."

What are the chances she'll be able to beat all the other right-wingnutz in the primary and get the nomination?

Also what is the difference between "citizens" and "subjects"?

Things have been complicated pretty much since the start of what would (later) be recognised as the British Empire. Which is to say, around about the 12th century when the Normans started conquering Ireland.

Things started getting really complicated with the Act of Union 1707, when Britain actually came into being as a political entity (rather than two independent countries of England and Scotland) - if you're interested in the full horrendous mess, Wikipedia is, as usual, a not-terrible place to start.

Prior to the British Nationality Act 1948, every citizen of the British Empire (except for the then Irish Free State), was a British Subject.

Canada started the ball rolling 1946 by enacting their own law (Canadian Citizenship Act 1946) defining who was Canadian. The BNA1948 arose as a response, recognising that the Dominions had the competence to define their own citizenship, and if one of them was doing it, then there needed to be an overarching framework in which this happened.

All (former) British Subjects would either become a citizen of their respective Dominion (e.g. Canada, South Africa, Australia etc), and in addition gain the status of CUKC (citizen of the UK and Colonies).

Post independence, India and Pakistan both enacted slightly odd citizenship laws. Not every British SUbject resident in either country fully gained either Indian or Pakistani citizenship. This will become relevant later

The Ireland Act 1949 (recognising that Ireland was leaving the Commonwealth, but there was substantial interest in maintaining the free travel status established in 1922) added a few complications, mostly about allowing Irish citizens of British descent to apply for and hold CUKC status, without prejudice w.r.t their Irish citizenship.

As Dominions became independent, CUKC status was adjusted. IIRC the exact technicalities around this was part of the cause of the Windrush scandal (i.e. people who had emigrated from former colonies to Britain but who, for one reason or another, technically lost citizenship rights in Britain on independence of their original colonies).

The next stage occurred with the British Nationality Act 1983. The CUKC status was abolished, replaced with 3 new categories of citizenship. Note that it did not abolish the status of British Subject - but since (nearly) every British Subject also held CUKC status, Nearly Everyone(tm) became citizens (1).

Except for a minor subset of people who lived in India and Pakistan in 1948 (of whom there were about 33000 in 2014), who never became CUKCs, and therefore never became British Citizens, remaining forever British Subjects.

(1) Note that the distinction between "subject" and "citizen" is almost entirely semantic, and mostly only comes up when either French or American folks want to poke fun at the British. The actual rights and responsibilities accorded to the status of "subject" vs "citizen" are, at least throughout the last century, indistinguishable.

Or is that too close to current reality?

The USA isn't "vastly larger" than the UK; ignore the map for a moment and look at human geography -- the UK has 68 million people, close to double the population of Canada and more than a fifth that of the US. It also has a pretty large economy, even after a decade of self-inflicted malaise.

Finally, the meddling you suggest is the exact mirror-image of the plot of book 9, The Labyrinth Index.

So yeah, there's going to be meddling -- but it's a two-way street.

(More fundamentally I don't know what the post-Labyrinth Index state of US governance looks like in the Laundry universe. Possibly a civil war is in progress -- it looked like it was going that way at the end of the book.)

By "vastly larger", I meant a lot more millionaires, billionaires, extreme wrong wing and "evangelical", with control of billion and trillion-dollar multinationals, who can/are shipping money to the UK, as well as other autocrats around the world.

Does it really make sense to keep the pension age where it is?

Back when Social Security was set up in the United States, a large share of people didn't live to 65, and those who did were commonly in poor condition and not fit to work. Post-65 lifespans tended to be short, so payments continued for only a few years. Now, well, I'm in my seventies, and when I hear of someone dying in their sixties I think "How sadly young!" Of course I could die before the year is out, but the actuarial odds are that I have a decade or more before me. So that's a lot more people receiving payouts for a lot longer, while at the same time they are much less incapable of working, and indeed many retirees come back into the work force. Social Security is both less urgently needed and more costly. How much of a burden should be put on people in their twenties and thirties to support my generation?

I agree that an abrupt increase by ten years would be harsh and painful for many people. But if I could set policy I would say that the minimum age for Social Security would go up one year in every even-numbered year. Maybe that would give us a softer landing when redistribution to the old ceases to be fiscally viable.

So, you actually don't think anyone should live to get the taxes they paid into US social security?

I, on the other hand, think that the top tax bracket should be at least 80%, and ALL INCOME, including interest, dividends, and capital gains, should be part of that. And then everyone gets BMI.

And btw, I'm not 75 yet, and living on social security, so you want me to have to go back to work, like someone will hire me at this age.

British subject until 1948, after that we were "Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies" until 1983, and "British Citizen" since then.

I can't help thinking that telling the youngsters you plan to make sure they can only retire a year or two before they keel over is unlikely to get the response you are hoping for.

And isn't working 40-45 years enough? The idea that the only way we can run a society is to work until we drop to make sure some oligarchs can buy a bigger yacht, is outdated. We live once and 50% of it is working to keep a roof over our heads. How is that reasonable?

As an aside, as someone who lost a parent, a sibling and 3 grandparents before they reached retirement age I'm all in favour of retiring earlier - I hope I manage to reach it and buck the family trend.

Richard Gadsden @ 95:

British subject until 1948, after that we were "Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies" until 1983, and "British Citizen" since then.

... so not actually wrong, just my outdated information needed to be refreshed.

Whitroth: You don't seem to have read my proposal carefully. What I said was that with each two years that passed, the age of eligibility would be raised one year. So suppose, for example, that you became eligible this year, at sixty-two (the minimum age, I believe). Two years from now, the minimum age would go up to sixty-three. But in the meantime you would have aged to sixty-four. No one who had started receiving social security would be made ineligible retroactively; the arithmetic makes it impossible.

I'd also note that raising the age at which people BECOME eligible would not affect their REMAINING eligible. But even if it did, the numerical relationships would make this an academic point.

Personally, I held off on starting social security till I was sixty-nine; it would have been seventy, but we needed the added income to make moving from California to Kansas affordable (living in California having ceased to be affordable for us). But I would prefer to see that stream of income last out my life. The increasing ratio of retirees to workers makes that increasingly hard to sustain. Slowing the growth of the former population, and the outflow of the latter, would be beneficial—and would be less catastrophic than a single abrupt 10-year increase, which I think is politically impossible.

The general problem is that it's a group of people who've been famously generaous to themselves while pulling up a lot of ladders, once again pulling up a ladder.

There's also important questions about whether it's still acceptable to so explicitly favour the already favoured. Average age at death varies a great deal within age cohorts, and the variation is not random. So while it's nice that women in aggregate get more pension years, it's unpleasant that black people get less, and decided unpleasant that poor people also get less. Especially if someone is both black and poor... do they get a tax break because they're unlikely to live as long?

This is the context where the various "lifetime benefit limits" proposals actually make some sense. Someone who got the various child-raising payments, then state-supported tertiary education, then state-subsidised housing and so on, finds out that they've done their chips on benefits and there's no pension. Sucks to be a boomer just this once, sorry. But for the same reason as there's been a travelling wave of life stage specific subsidies, we can't do that... the voting bloc we call "boomers" won't vote for it.

(More fundamentally I don't know what the post-Labyrinth Index state of US governance looks like in the Laundry universe. Possibly a civil war is in progress -- it looked like it was going that way at the end of the book.)

Some modest suggestions. The first was to model it on Colombia's La Violencia and the subsequent Colombian Civil War, with the events of the Labyrinth Index kicking it off.

The problem with that, I realized, is that it makes the tin hat/black helicopter/anti-government western wackos into the good guys. At that point, you've got an issue with your audience, because in our real world, a bunch of these people are full-blown Qnuts and MAGAts. I'm not sure how much fun it will be for us to cheer them on, even as an aside to a UK-based story.

So my second thought was to riff off the Syrian Civil War and Hong Kong uprisings. Perhaps make the American Opposition a bunch of superheroes on the fast track to k-syndrome, and a bunch of nerds and hackers trying to learn the computational demonology that, erm, someone taught them. So heroes as smart munitions, while the huddled masses paint homemade wards on umbrellas, try to hack power grids into summoning grids, cook up vampire repellent based on garlic and scorpion-finding flashlights, that sort of thing. The opposition should be badly organized and likely doomed, at least at first. Where it goes? Up to you.

And I'm sure His Nibs and the other monsters would be good at covering the tracks of whoever tried to teach American civilians computational demonology, OSS style.

JHamann 81:

here's five dollars... she's yours and you keep her there where she can do less harm to me and the other 49 states

What are the chances [Kari Lake will] be able to beat all the other right-wingnutz in the primary and get the nomination?

I'll bite, albeit from a distance of 4,000 miles away and having only very briefly lived in the USA.

As things stand she should be a almost a dead certainty to take the primary. Just consider the electorate voting in that primary: rank-and-file Republicans.

Unless there's something very special about Arizona, or things are changing far more rapidly and positively in MAGA-land, they'll be bound to select Lake -- or someone even more loopy. I dread to ask, but is there anyone more loopy in AR Republican circles?

Unless there's something very special about Arizona, or things are changing far more rapidly and positively in MAGA-land, they'll be bound to select Lake -- or someone even more loopy. I dread to ask, but is there anyone more loopy in AR Republican circles?

Well...

The current senator is Kyrsten Sinema, who left the democratic party to be an independent, possibly because she's one of the most conservative democrats in DC. She hasn't announced whether she's running for re-election.

Ruben Gallego, a democratic congressman from Arizona, IS running a high profile race to unseat Sinema. I'm not in Arizona, but I've been getting a bunch of emails and texts from the Gallego campaign to donate.

So we've got Lake, who has no political experience, except for losing the AZ governor's race in 2020 and badly losing a couple of frivolous lawsuits, running against Sinema (in politics since 2005, $10 million in campaign war chest) and Gallego (in politics since 2011, $3 million in campaign war chest).

My uninformed guess is that Lake is running to raise money through campaign funds. Once she loses, the money will somehow find its way to pay off her legal and other debts. She might be in more trouble if she wins.

The Arizona legislature is batshit right now, but I suspect that, if Sinema runs, she'll win. She can get stuff done and piss of democratic elites. Why not?

Charlie Stross initial entry:

"...All I can think of right now is that the New Management, which started as a ghastly satire on the UK's government of 2016, now looks impossibly utopian..."

uhm, this scale fails to include... "soft bubbling sounds of human flesh slow stewing in sunlight" (circa 2040)

and yet higher up the scale... "snap, crackle, pop of fat dripping off long pork roasting because almost everyone being too poor to afford direly necessary HVAC upgrades" (circa 2060)

then last and topmost... "scrapping of bulldozers used to heap up last night's dead" (circa 2080)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2023/oct/07/whats-worse-than-gobsmackingly-bananas-you-really-dont-want-to-know

You seem to have missed the defining traits of British oligarchs and billionaires -- they use the UK as a tax haven and try to keep a low profile. (Many of them head for the USA because the overall economy is larger so they can steal more money there, but we have plenty of quiet, low-key billionaires right here, starting with the King and working down from there.)

Evangelicals are another matter. No constitutional tax break for churches in the UK -- indeed, there's an established-in-law Church of England with its own privileges (representation in parliament). Which is a different flavour of abomination.

Whitroth: You don't seem to have read my proposal carefully. What I said was that with each two years that passed, the age of eligibility would be raised one year.

The Tories did that in the UK and pension age is now 67.

And at their party conference last week, one of their ministers stood up and proposed raising it to 75 as a cost-cutting measure.

Note that there's no guarantee there'll still be a job for you -- most employers aren't keen on employing folks whose bodies are falling apart from hard use and who have multiple morbidities.

Be careful what you wish for.

H
$10 million in campaign war chest
THIS is what is seroiusly WRONG with US politics.
The unlimited spending on elections - it's quite simply not allowed in sensible countries - though, of course there are ways around this, but, even so,
IF we had the US' insane rules, the tories would have gone full-on fascist { As opposed to fascism-lite } at least 20 years ago ...

Charlie @ 106
There is ALSO the problem, that quite a few "older" people wouldn't mind working past 65/67 again, if only part-time { More money }
BUT this means working, again, for British/USA mismanagement ... errr ... I think I'll stay poor, thank you very much

I dread to ask, but is there anyone more loopy in AR Republican circles?

I would just like to note that if Doctor Who was real, the Daleks could conquer the USA without firing a shot -- all they'd have to do is run in the Republican primaries and be themselves in front of the voters.

As info for them there furriners... The raising of the state pension age in the UK to 67 didn't happen for everyone. Those almost at 65 kept that age, another group with a few more years to go (which includes me) can start claiming at 66 and everyone else has to wait until 67.

It's all vicious and toxic, but if they do your point c, giving up high speed running but keeping the capacity, then they accidentally do good. The buried justification for HS2 is that by moving passenger capacity to the new line we gain freight capacity on the on the old lines. We need that if we are to reduce HGV miles, and we (I think) save significant carbon by reducing HGV miles.

This was mentioned in media a few years back by a consultant on HS2, but not picked up. I know the consultant. He's not a fool and I don't think he's a shill.

This election is going to be tragic for English society. Not because the outgoing tories are going to trash what's left and Labour are going to abandon their principles, although both these things will happen. What I fear is that if they go full armbands-and-battle-standards fascist then a lot of unthinking English people will go for it in the short term. Two years later they'll realise what they've done and what they've asked for and then how are they going to live with themselves? It's like waking up after a drunken party and realising you've done irreparable damage to your personal and family life.

I don't want to live in a nation of emotionally-maimed people, even if it was their own fault.

I specify English people as Scots generally have more sense and Northern Ireland has somewhat separate politics. I don't know how it would play in Wales.

giving up high speed running but keeping the capacity, then they accidentally do good

Except it means if I want to visit London I pretty much have to fly.

It's currently 4h30m by train, which is just barely tolerable. Flying with a checked bag is 1h30m airborne, plus 2h for getting to the airport and checking in and 1h for getting from the airport into London, making it 4h30m with a whole lot less leg room and more interruptions. The fastest I've ever traveled between London and Edinburgh was 3h15m, hand-luggage only via London City airport (which is on the DLR at the London end and on the tram in Edinburgh).

But if they cut high speed running the EDI-LON train ride will stretch considerably. Currently the York-London stretch of the ECML has no stops and covers the 175-odd miles in 1h30m, flat out at close to 125mph almost all the way, and there are long stretches of high speed running in North Yorkshire and once you get north of Berwick as well: indeed, the 400 mile journey averages 90mph including several station stops. I suspect a 100mph speed limit would add over an hour to the journey. At which point flying is hands-down faster.

Remember, the UK is long and thin and anyone who doesn't live within a 250-300 mile radius of Central London gets the shitty end of the stick in this scenario. So expect a whole lot more flying!

Hrm, comparison with Brisbane to Melbourne. 2:20 in the air versus a couple of days by train. Still you'd need to make commercial flights unviable for some reason before rail became even a bit competitive.

Overall?

There was no such thing as good government.

Just ever worsening shades of badness. With 'might makes right' it was the biggest idiot with the biggest muscles. When kings ruled it was by way of intimidation thanks to having the most swords in the hands of men willing to obey their liegelord in which heads to lop off in which sequence. Whereas in democracy, it was those people with the thickest wallets get the most votes.

Watching the UK, its a bit Monty Python with refined Eton snobbery and various hereditary oligarchs turning in silly season proposals for Westminster's policy gnomes to muck about.

Here in the USA, a mix of Stephen King horrors in Washington and mad dogs in Congress and tech bro's who are somewhat hereditary wealthy who clawed their way into becoming oligarchs by way of monopoly 'n mayhem.

Stirring the political pot (and heaping more fuel on its fire) as it comes to a boil are fracking-obsessed Big Oil companies funding their enablers in virtually every legislature, at the sacrifice of society's survivablity. For years, climate denial has been a rather lucrative profession for those amoral enough to fixate upon personal benefit and indifferent to the misery of future generations. With ultra-conservatives on all continents doubling down on 'tradition' and restoring social order as far as they reach. If it were feasible they'd rollback to the 1950s but they would prefer the 1850s.

Insurance companies are: (1) raising premiums (2) tightening down with limitations upon payouts (3) shortening the list of what a homeowner can claim post-destruction and (4) exiting entire niches (Florida in general and seashore luxury homes in particular).

All these various categories of fools-knaves-oligarchs-enablers-monopolists, shrugging off the fallout of fascistic politics in addition to ignoring the climate, all of 'em secure in the knowledge they and their children will have resources enough to shelter in place. Maybe not New Zealand but there's plenty of places in the outlying suburbs and those less developed mountain valleys. But only if thy can keep out the hungry hordes and climate refugees.

Me? I'm buying shares in manufacturers of barbed wire.

Lots 'n lots of protective barriers gonna be needed. And then there's all that refugee warehousing as saltwater seeps into foundations and electrical ducts and subways and so forth 'n so on.

You're an inch or 2 shorter than my 4'22", yes? I find the best "affordable" seats on plane or train are the ones described as "airline style seats" in BR second (sorry "standard") class because they have that little bit more legroom, particularly than airline "veal crate class".

Someone mentioned the other day that Sydney's "metro" rail system endpoints are too far apart to fit inside the Netherlands. So if the Dutch had an internal high speed rail system it would be short enough that we could tuck it inside Sydney!

It's roughly 1000km from Melbun to Sydney, and another 1000km to Brisvegas. Which means 3 hours per leg assuming very few stops, at least with current off the shelf technology. Playing silly buggers with dead straight lines and very extremely ultra fast trains could get it to 2.5-ish hours. You'd need hyperloop to be competitive with airplanes, barring significant fuckery with the planes.

CHarlie
EXCEPOT - for less than 1000km+ - I am FUCKED if I will fly, because of the utterly insane "security" theatre & paranoia
The whole rigmarole really gives me the pip.

You'd need hyperloop to be competitive with airplanes, barring significant fuckery with the planes.

TransRapid demonstrated 400+ km/h maglevs over a decade ago — fast enough to compete with medium-haul airliners. And if your electricity source is renewable, much greener too.

And if the plutocrats really are trying to install authoritarian regimes, which is plausible, then that's just another sign they're none-too-bright. Because authoritarian regimes are not famously good at getting on with other authoritarian regimes, especially when they're competing for resources and trying to stop each other from dispatching lots of unwanted brown people over their borders.

As an example, observe what happened today in Israel.

Hamas has no possibility of actually winning. All Hamas will accomplish is to kill a few Israelis and a lot of Palestinians. But Palestinians being mad at Israel is what keeps Hamas in power.

Yeah, Transrapid also explored the failure modes of extreme high-speed maglev through corporate negligence with an attached death toll, which is why they went bust. (China bought the tech for cents on the euro, hence the Shanghai Airport Maglev line.)

Thing is, maglev can't operate over existing railway tracks at all, and it probably also needs new procedures more akin to aviation to deal with the safety issues -- not that existing high speed rail doesn't also require different safety infrastructure from traditional rail, but maglev is more so. (It's best approximated to "a Boeing 747, only flying along a railway viaduct at less than ten metres altitude".)

The Australian context is important too. Qantas used to be the safest airline in the world, now it's just one of the profitable ones. It really seems that they decided that they could save money by having more accidents as long as it was still fewer than their cut-price competitors.

Oh, and our current train track maintenance programs have been economised to the point trains run slower now than they did in the 1980's.

Who wants to travel on a maglev run using the management philosophy of Qantas and the funding system of NSW railways?

Transrapid also explored the failure modes of extreme high-speed maglev through corporate negligence with an attached death toll

33 casualties, yes. A failure of procedures rather than technology. How many Boeings crashed, with more casualties, from design flaws, before we decided that maybe grounding them until the problem was identified and fixed was a good idea?

For a crowded country like Britain, maglev is probably a non-starter. But Australia had lots of wide open spaces between its cities, so maglev might make sense there. China is looking at it because the air system is already overloaded and maglev would actually be faster on many routes, with a higher capacity.

What gave me the cold shudders about the Transrapid crash wasn't just the crash itself, but the reason there were no voice or data recorder tapes from the control room afterwards ...

They'd been rewinding and recording over the same tapes every day of operation for something like 20 years, so by the time the crash happened the tapes were junk, the magnetic coatings having been stripped away over thousands of write cycles.

That company was just going through the motions: a classic case of normalization of deviance.

(Recall that there was one Transrapid test track and one Transrapid train running on it, roughly once a day. That's a 100% fatal crash incidence over a 22 year operational life. If Boeing had a total hull loss rate of 1/22 years, nobody would fly on their planes!)

Not arguing that TransRapid didn't have deep operational flaws as a company.

But the maglev technology they developed looks pretty solid. It wasn't the maglev technology that failed, but something more basic.

lots of wide open spaces between its cities

Yes, but also high land prices in the cities, which also sprawl. It's almost certain that the cost of the last 100km of land into the city at each end costs as much as the rest of the land. If we have to tunnel to make it politically palatable that means 10+ years of tunnelling on top of everything else. Think a 50km tunnel, times four.

Australia has systematically dismantled our governments ability to do anything more than pay consultants to employer former politicans and bureaucrats and bumble around hoping that someone else does the work to make something happen. I read a slightly horrified response to a proposal to de-privatise some service that was basically: the entire government capacity in that area is a small team of people who summarise reports for the minister. They can't DO anything, let alone hire 50,000 staff and turn them into an effective government department within a single parliamentary term.

Australia had lots of wide open spaces between its cities, so maglev might make sense there

Yet only the most densely populated places have actually looked at it, for relatively short links. The usual argument against high speed rail here is that we don't have the population to support it. Even though SYD-MEL, SYD-BNE and BNE-MEL are among the busiest air corridors in the world, the populations in between those places are small.

It would make sense for Gold Coast-Brisbane-Sunshine Coast, or Newcastle-Sydney-Woollongong, or indeed the loop around Port Phillip Bay that Melbourne is basically assimilating. I don't think the proposal in Melbourne was even for that, it was more a single straight line out to the Western suburbs.

In terms of wide open spaces, if you really mean flat spaces, there's a bit of myth at work there. In reality there are substantial geographic features between the population centres that have historically been challenging to overcome and remain challenging barriers for large infrastructure projects. The direct route from Melbourne to Sydney, for instance, straddles and crosses the Great Dividing Range in several places, and to avoid that by following the coast to start with goes through densely forested areas with very low populations and traverses a number of not-huge-but-not-trivial river systems. The Sydney to Brisbane route has to traverse large, rugged river valleys (e.g. the Hunter) and all else being equal is about 900km. The Victorian government's quote from Transrapid for $34 million a kilometre was for the relatively flat ground around Melbourne, but that's already over $30 billion, then there's the cost to traverse those river valleys and then stations and trains I guess. And look if I live to see a $100 billion Australian Government transport infrastructure project in my lifetime, that's the one I'd like to see. But I'm not holding my breath :).

Re: 'What kind science is permissable, for instance, is inherently an ideological decision.'

And how much of 'ideology' is applied psych/soc?

My understanding is that psych/soc is a science. Not sure why folks here (who strongly skew STEM) tend to overlook/ignore that. The pols' PR folk sure as hell don't.

I've often wondered what election results would be if candidates were 'blinded'. Yeah - pols typically say that they're running on some policy platform but (as demonstrated by DT) it was the inflated self-confidence and facade of success that got most votes.

Re: Upcoming (2025) UK election

Hope Lord Buckethead runs again - like Doctor Who, he's a different person each re-embodiment.

OOC - anyone notice that the number of candidates skyrockets when the old order is on the verge of losing? As several folks already commented: It costs a lot to run a campaign, so where are these candidates who often get fewer than a thousand votes get their campaign funds? (These candidates are usually not at all wealthy/self-funded.)

My understanding is that psych/soc is a science. Not sure why folks here (who strongly skew STEM) tend to overlook/ignore that.

Dude, there are people here who think geology is a "soft" science. They'll get their freak on for real if you start talking about social and behavioural science as though it's STEM. :)

More seriously anthropology, sociology and political science all seem to end up being grouped in the humanities, while psychology seems to straddle humanities and "natural" science. Heck, in the university I went to for undergrad you could get a BA in psych, or a BSc in psych depending on how you enrolled (your second major presumably being the main underlying deciding factor I guess).

They'd been rewinding and recording over the same tapes every day of operation for something like 20 years,

I normally shy away from technological fixes, but in these days of cheap terabyte storage, I don't see why every train (or airplane) couldn't have a birth-to-death record of the cockpit voice and relevant operating data. At a 1e6 bits per second and 3.15e7 seconds per year, that's 3.15e13 bits per year, 4-ish terabytes. Throw in a bit of data compression and stand-down time, and you could get that at the local Costco pretty cheap and have a complete record.

https://www.costco.com/seagate-one-touch-5tb-portable-hard-drive-with-rescue-data-recovery-services.product.100761181.html

The classic gap between "good enough for home" where no-one really cares whether it works, and a bit of data loss is fine; and commercial world where someone has to stand up in court/legal inquiry and explain exactly why they made the decision and what they expected to happen. "we sort of had a go at collecting the evidence you want, but {meh} it didn't happen".

Saying "we put 300 of them into trains and two years later four of them still work" would make Lord Murdoch very happy indeed. So someone has to decide what an acceptable failure rate is and make sure that whatever is bought meets that. Then they have to go through normal government procurement processes, they can't just grab cash from the office and buy a bunch of them in the alleyway behind the local pub. And so on.

Another way to look at it is that the overhead cost of adding anything is so large that half-arsing it is pointless.

You need a product that at the very least is safe to have in the vehicle. So you need a certificate of safety from a reputable organisation, and and engineer to sign off on the exact mounting system. Otherwise when there is an incident and the thing smacks the driver in the back of the head people are going to get cranky. Even more so when it turns out the crash was caused by thing thing shorting out and killing the power system to the control room. Ooops.

All that hassle means you need to be able to buy that exact thing again, and ditto the mounting hardware. Ideally you'd be able to buy replacements over the life of the vehicle - hard disk enclosures tend to be fashion items, and hard disks themselves typically have a life of ~5 years. No-one wants to go through the whole process again every five years, but even more they don't want to throw away the train/plane after five years because the parts aren't available.

there are people here who think geology is a "soft" science

They've clearly never encountered any geology, then. Most of it is bloody hard — even Mohs 1 will hurt!

And while I'm thinking of geology jokes, let me share this rather fun album by Ian Tamblyn:

https://www.iantamblyn.com/epic-rock

The result of writing 12 songs for as geology conference. Very fun, and singable.

More seriously anthropology, sociology and political science all seem to end up being grouped in the humanities, while psychology seems to straddle humanities and "natural" science. Heck, in the university I went to for undergrad you could get a BA in psych, or a BSc in psych depending on how you enrolled (your second major presumably being the main underlying deciding factor I guess).

Well, if we moved medicine into the humanities where it belonged--it IS about humans after all--then the problem with psychology would go away. We'd have all the fields that study humans in the humanities: sociology, anthropology, economics, medicine, political science, history...all funded by the overhead on biomedical grants.

Of course, languages are now also the purview of large language models and Generative AI, so properly English, Literature, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric should be moved into Computer Science departments, where at least they'll get better funding.

Speaking of which, we could argue that much of engineering belongs in the humanities, too. Engineering is about applying physics to make the world more amenable to human use, after all. It's not hard science at all, only applied science.

Floods and fires... not Cuyahoga River, just Gippsland winning the double on climate disaster week:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/06/bushfires-floods-australia-compound-events-gippsland

It's a classification game, so it's part of the soft sciences :)

But I like the economics approach: "we prefer capitalism, because we have money and therefore we win. Thank you for our Nobel Prize". It's the hardest of hard sciences, because it works in the real world. If the classifiers object they can be defunded.

It's not hard science at all, only applied science.

Is tarring and feathering soft science? I assume that pitchforks and rocks are hard science, but tarring and feathering seems like one of those cultural marker things where it's all about the social impact.

I have long been bemused that cooking is not even science, but chemistry most definitely is. So it's not whether you're mixing baking soda and vinegar, but the social context you do it in, that determines the cultural context vis a vis science or not science.

Well, at UC Berkeley back in the Mesozoic when I was there, you got could get a BA in physics and a BS in engineering, a BA in botany and a BS in forestry. It had to do with which college they were in and how those colleges were accredited. The College of Letters and Science, which housed physics, only gave out BAs. The Engineering and Forestry schools were separate, and awarded BS's. So I've seen the BA/BS thing as arbitrary for awhile.

Aside from teasing humorless types, another underlying joke/issue is that, at least when I was in school, humanities programs were in part funded by overhead from whatever Big Science program was bringing in the most grants. Thus, parking grant suckers like medicine and engineering in the humanities part of academia might conceivably mean more money for the humanities in general. I'm a science-y type, but I would like to see a bit more money go to the humanities even so.

Kardashev 129:

survivability(!)

anything that is intended to document the last minutes prior to a crash has to survive the impact (last millisecond G-forces at least 1,000G could be 10,000G)... bounces as the bits crash 'n crash (repeated de-accelerations by way of billard ball style random collisions until velocity of 0.00 KPH achieved)... the fire (prolonged high heat 500+C possibly 2,000C)... the flame-suppressing foam and/or water... the aftermath (slow cooling wreckage after prolonged heat)... removal (sledgehammering wreckage in frantic search of still living humans and hours before rescue switches mode to recovery by which time the recorder has likely been carried off as souvenir by some 'disaster porn' collector of macabre mementos and LEO has to hunt him down)

that's after being in routine usage for not months but years in conditions of indifference to temperature range, dust motes, humidity, casual kicking of interior walls by bored crew...

best of all? the software to download something so confidential will be proprietary... data stored will be deeply encrypted... whoooopsie... they will in less than a year have misplaced the passwords, the utility apps, the source code for the utility, developer team scattered to the four winds and paperwork shredded...

(how can I rattle off such a prediction of mismanagement so easily? because I've been coding since 1978 and 90+% of the projects I was hired on a coder and/or analyst were led by those least willing to plan for problems and therefore they led us into epic fails and/or lawsuits and/or company-wide collapse and/or some combination... if you ask around, let me know if anyone had it better)

the design of aircraft black boxes is good but is sadly no more near as good as they ought be simply because who wants to waste money on assembling evidence that confirms what the crime was (neglect, design flaw, mis-installed, operator error, regulatory whooooopsie, etc, in various combinations) and that the criminals are the executives of vendors (Boeing, sub-contractors, sub-sub-contractors, etc) and/or owners (airlines, governments, wealthy individuals, etc)...?

English, Literature, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric should be moved into Computer Science departments

Well ever since I started doing data modelling as part of my day job, I found that the business IT world spent decades rediscovering Saussurian linguistics (aka semiotics) and most practitioners still don't understand the concept of representation very well. I used to keep a print of Magritte's Treachery of Images by my desk as a prop to explain it from time to time, but that was essentially a forlorn hope. I guess LLMs are a sort of outcome of computational linguistics, so that was always the link that you're thinking of here. But you're right and I see a lot of value in making CompSci students read Donne and Auden, if for no other reason than to encourage them to become more interesting humans.

As several folks already commented: It costs a lot to run a campaign, so where are these candidates who often get fewer than a thousand votes get their campaign funds?

I assume you're not British?

Election spending is strictly policed in the UK, and capped at a very low level (an entire general election campaign over 10 weeks for all participating parties costs around the £100M mark). There's a deposit if you plan to run for parliament of about £1000 (which you forefeit if you get less than 10% of the vote in your constituency), but in return you also get subsidized leafleting. The biggest parties qualify for slots on TV, which are mandated by law and run on the main networks (think pre-cable). The sort of TV ads you see in the USA are flat out illegal.

Not sure how the Electoral Commission has kept up with social media (probably badly) but targeted advertising spend via Facebook and Twitter caused problems -- and potentially criminal charges -- over the last five years.

Point is, throwing your hat in the ring costs £1000, which is basically whip-around at the pub territory. (They put it up from £50 about 20 years ago, if memory suffices, because it was so cheap that estate agents were registering as candidates to get their business name visible on a ballot 60-70% of the adult population would see: it was cheap advertising. Before that, the £50 fee had stuck since the late Victorian period ...)

I normally shy away from technological fixes, but in these days of cheap terabyte storage, I don't see why every train (or airplane) couldn't have a birth-to-death record of the cockpit voice and relevant operating data.

It could, going forward, but remember airliners have a typical service life of 30 years, and trains can be much older. So their design standards are conservative.

I believe as satellite internet becomes ubiquitous on airliners we'll likely see a move towards online realtime telemetry streaming, stored at the manufacturer or airline's engineering HQ. That way, in event of another MH370 there'll be a record of the flight (rather than the CVR and FDR going missing with 99% of the wreckage).

"I have long been bemused that cooking is not even science, but chemistry most definitely is."

AIUI cooking is just applying heat to things that will be improved thereby, with a few extras added in, and near enough is good enough, but baking is a branch of chemistry, albeit these days only occasionally experimental, and must be conducted accordingly.

JHomes

JHomes 143:

so... sushi...? forensic culinary autopsy?

Moz
Cooking.
Ever come across Harold Magee? - I have a copy - fascinating stuff.

Damian
"Rhetoric"?
Back to Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, then!

Bugger such detail. What horrified me about certain crashes is that not even large passenger airlines were required to broadcast their exact (GPS) location. There was blithering about bandwidth, but one (say, 4Kb) packet a minute would allow for ample data and serious spoofing protection. I don't know if that is now required, because some more influential people made exactly the same remarks. IATA is a bureaucracy, primarily, and a regulation authority secondarily.

Well, sort-of. Courtesy of the Blessed Margaret (*) media and other third-party propaganda on behalf of parties (rather than candidates) is effectively uncontrolled, and I am pretty sure that social media propaganda by those is similar. "It's the Sun wot won it" had a lot of truth in it, and then there was the malicious and false campaign against Corbyn. Even worse, that is not limited to British media, and two foreign governments are also allowed to participate (as they did against Corbyn).

(*) Thatcher for youngsters and foreigners.

Your view of cooking is perhaps rather limited. Even making a white sauce involves as much chemistry as baking (though not as much biology).

I should have said 'other media'. In theory, television is controlled (the BBC and ITV pretty tightly), but we shall see whether GB News is actually controlled at all when the next election starts. It assuredly isn't at present.

EC
GB "News" - it's no such thing, it's a fascism-lite propaganda channel, but ...
Fortunately, they appear to have already overstepped the mark & are getting a lot of flak, including internally.
It remains to be seen if they retreat to being a fascist echo-chamber, turn half-respectable - like the All-Station Stopper, or get stamped on by the regulators.

Problem with GB News is that they're not intended to reach a mass audience, their programming is intended to be consumed by journalists working for other outlets who can then run stories of the form "it was reported on GB News that ... [insert propaganda here]".

It injects right wing talking points into the mainstream media discourse. Which is far more efficient at distributing those views than merely running them on a fringe channel.

maybe time to start crowdsourcing scripts for a semi-lurid, somewhat embittered mockumentary set in 2060s... "The Looting Of Earth" for Netflix...

with the only thing saving humanity is we get invaded by the galactic version of Peace Corps volunteers + Doctors Without Borders (On Starships) + employment agencies looking to hire a hundred million semi-skilled shaved apes to scrub out space station toilets in exchange for cancer cures and anti-ageing treatments and micro-plastic-free foodstuffs...

the Netflix series focuses upon the left behinds and those refusing to accepting alien medications and selling off the contents of museums to aliens for sake of hard currency... but of course the Elgin Marbles are not for sell since the British Museum regards those (looted) Greek antiquities as their babies...

I have long been bemused that cooking is not even science, but chemistry most definitely is. So it's not whether you're mixing baking soda and vinegar, but the social context you do it in, that determines the cultural context vis a vis science or not science.

Cooking is applied chemistry.

There a new series coming to Apple TV+ this week than I'm looking forward to: Lessons in Chemistry.

In the 1950s, a woman's dream of being a scientist is challenged by a society that says women belong only in the domestic sphere. She accepts a job on a TV cooking show and sets out to teach a nation of overlooked housewives way more than recipes.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13911628/

https://tv.apple.com/ca/show/lessons-in-chemistry/umc.cmc.40yycssgxelw4zur8m2ilmvyx?itscg=MC_20000&itsct=atvp_brand_omd&mttn3pid=Google%20AdWords&mttnagencyid=a5e&mttncc=CA&mttnsiteid=143238&mttnsubad=OCA20191065_1-674056223204-c&mttnsubkw=153926232376__Qk7Vu6TJ_&mttnsubplmnt=_adext_

I see a lot of value in making CompSci students read Donne and Auden, if for no other reason than to encourage them to become more interesting humans.

When I took my engineering degree we had to take a single half-class in English literature, and another half-class in another humanity (I chose classical history, IIRC).

All the engineers and business students taking their mandatory cultural Engllish class were lumped into the same sections, away from humanities students. I'm not certain why. Apparently these were not popular classes for English profs to teach, but ours volunteered every year because, as he put it, it was the university's last chance to convince us that literature had value and was worth studying for its own sake rather than because it could be profited from.

He did a good job, but the business students were mostly not interested in anything but getting their credit. If it wasn't worth money it wasn't worth anything. Reaganomics was big at the time, greed was good, and the MBA was king. :-(

I normally shy away from technological fixes, but in these days of cheap terabyte storage, I don't see why every train (or airplane) couldn't have a birth-to-death record of the cockpit voice and relevant operating data.

Making that storage survive extreme events isn't a trivial matter of plugging in a consumer-level hard drive. Vehicular electronics face levels of temperature change and vibration (not to mention power fluctuations) that would toast most consumer (or even enterprise) gear in short order. Plus they have to survive crashes.

More useful would be some form of satellite-linked telemetry, so not only do we know where they are but also the data is captured in real time, so even if a black box can't be recovered we have at least some of the data. Given how much money has been spent on searches over the years, this should be easily affordable, if only on the grounds of giving the searchers a place to start looking for survivors.

Moz @ 130: Saying "we put 300 of them into trains and two years later four of them still work" would make Lord Murdoch very happy indeed.

I was peripherally involved in an attempt circa 2000 to produce a high end video-on-demand system for passenger aircraft. The target specification seemed to be the union of every wish-list of every airline; 200 hours of video, changed once per week during a 30 minute turnaround, available on demand to all 600 seats on an A380, in HD, with a tiny power budget per seat. (Oh, and the seat computers had to withstand having some kid pour orange juice over them). Just the math on storing and uploading that much data showed how bonkers it was back then. An hour of HD video was ~2GB, so you needed to fly a 0.5TB disk farm in the days when a big hard drive might store 30GB.

But to get to the point, what finally killed the whole thing was hard drive failures. In theory the vibration, temperature and pressure changes were all within the specification of the drives they bought. In practice the combination of pushing the envelope on all three was enough to ensure that the disk farms were out of commission a lot of the time. And that meant a lot of bored and irritated passengers.

Granted, vibration doesn't hit solid state disks like it does spinning rust. But its still an issue.

Robert Prior @ 155: More useful would be some form of satellite-linked telemetry, so not only do we know where they are but also the data is captured in real time.

Commercial passenger aircraft already have that. Plus they regularly upload engineering data so that any fixes can be done early before a problem gets big.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_mobile-satellite_service

Not even all (or any?) jumbo jets did in 2014, which was the point I made in #146. Look up MH 370.

Yes, indeed, but that's no excuse for not applying what regulations there are. I doubt that the regulations are strong enough to get them stamped on, or that Ofcom has the spine to do so, or that the government would let it.

EC@158: look up MH 370.

MH 370 had ACARS, and a position report was received. Then someone turned all the transponders off.

Under what circumstances can a pilot turn off safety features? Can black boxes be turned off? Would there be a (legitimate) reason to turn of ACARS?

I would imagine that there would be an off switch for use by maintenance and for when the aircraft is sitting stationary at a terminal. I'd also guess that faulty systems can be switched off.

Apologies, but ...
Re-copied from another thread here ... about the monumental fuck-up at the Israel/Gaza interface:

It came to this outbreak of utterly senseless violence, murder & carnage - entirely & wholly - because of stupidity & arrogance. Many years ago, the Palestinians were offered "Land for Peace" - basically - recognise Israel & you can have the West Bank, complete - because the, ahem, "settlement" { Trans: Land-theft } movement had not got going, or not so as you would notice at that point. They rejected it, utterly, because they were & are stupid & arrogant. Later, most of them came to their senses, but it was probably already too late, because "Benny's" brother was killed at Entebbe - another piece of "Palestinian" stupidity & arrogance. After that, desperate attempts to re-start said peace process, but Israel had started it's long, slow march towards Jewish fascism under said Benny - whose stupidity & arrogance seems to know no bounds ... Now, Israel is quite capable of wiping Gaza right off the map, if any hostages are seriously harmed, thus escalating the cycle of stupidity & arrogance even further.

Historical note. The Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted 1096 - 1291. Though in it's latter stages, it was only a thin coastal strip, not including Jerusalem itself. That is the model the non-Jews are following - does Benny recognise this? I doubt it.

My understanding is that older commercial pilots prefer to be able to manually turn off every circuit in the plane individually. The reason for this is so that, if something starts sparking, they can turn it off before it ignites something. This came up in an article I read years ago about how simple glass cockpits should be. They can, of course, be extremely simple, but the older pilots pushed back for being able exercise manual control when things go wrong.

And, so long as the pilot isn’t the part of the system that’s going haywire, they may have a point.

IFF has an off switch, so that you can turn it off when landing, and turn it on and set a code before crossing the threshold for your take-off run.
In this context, I've worked analysing data from ATC radars, and have used IFF Mode 3A to track aircraft through finals and half-way down the runway before the pilot turned it off.

As already discussed, you also want to be able to turn it off in flight if it starts arcing, or the aircraft loses its alternators...

Greg Tingey 163:

Israeli deaths exceeding 600... hostages taken estimated 100... (who the frack takes hostages!? and expects to be treated as a rational nation?)

already there are calls for the Israelis to stop fighting back and just allow Hamas to continue attacking...

W...? T...? F...?

[ at this point I will red card myself... try to find something snarky and fun to post... maybe how bone dry central North America is and guessing when it do a Canada and fill the skies with ashes and heat... plane crashes...yeah that's better ]

for those who regard Wordle as a mere trifle... try doing 32 of 'em all at once... duotrigordle.com

let's compare tactics, hmmm?

have used IFF Mode 3A to track aircraft through finals and half-way down the runway before the pilot turned it off

Where there are ADS-B receivers within some tens of kilometers of the airport, you can see the airplane landing, taxing and parking.

Now, Israel is quite capable of wiping Gaza right off the map

We have come into times when such things are, alas, not beyond consideration. 2024 could be even more horrible than 2016 or 1939 or other anni horribiles.

who the frack takes hostages!? and expects to be treated as a rational nation?

Israel springs to mind. "there's lots of people in our Bantustans. Be a shame if murderous thugs slaughtered another few thousand of them". Not sure what their demands are other than "no Palestinians on our land", but that's not their problem, it's one for anyone trying to negotiate with them.

The whole situation is entirely under Israel's control. They're the occupying power, what happens is 100% their responsibility. There's a peace treaty, they could choose to follow it. But they don't. They also refuse to allow outside peacekeepers. Note the repeated "Israel chooses" pattern. And as with Taiwan, Palestine is only sort-of a country internationally because other countries fear the consequences of formally recognising it.

It occurred to me that by Israeli logic Australia could send a "colonial mission" to the UK, announce that we're reclaiming our ancestral homeland, and start making rules like "British citizens may not live south of Hadrians Wall, may not vote in UK elections unless they hold Australian citizenship, and cannot own property. Anyone who objects will be imprisoned or if that's not convenient they will be shot. And so on. We'd obviously need US permission and support, but it could be done. Sure, there'd be a period of unhappiness while we worked through the process, but the outcome would be beneficial to everyone - just ask Australian Aborigines how much they've benefitted from our help.

Moz & Kardashev & Howard
Like I said, it's down to Stupidity & Arrogance - on both sides ....

maybe time to start crowdsourcing scripts for a semi-lurid, somewhat embittered mockumentary set in 2060s... "The Looting Of Earth" for Netflix...

https://www.amazon.com/First-Contract-Greg-Costikyan/dp/0312873964

https://www.amazon.com/BuyMort-Opening-Accidental-Warlord-Shopocalypse-ebook/dp/B0BDVJYPQ6

Oh, also:

https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Rent-Yoss-ebook/dp/B00UKEGGMM

The whole situation is entirely under Israel's control. They're the occupying power, what happens is 100% their responsibility. There's a peace treaty, they could choose to follow it. But they don't.

Really?

Last I checked, total destruction of "zionist entity" is the cornerstone not just of Hamas, but of every Palestinian political party. IIRC, there is one party which does not call for it, and gets about 0.1% vote in every election.

You cannot have a peace treaty with people who want you dead.

Like I said, it's down to Stupidity & Arrogance - on both sides

One policy I'm going to try to follow, JUST TO AVOID PISSING OFF CHARLIE, WHO'D HAVE TO MODERATE THE DISCUSSION, is not going down the tinfoil-hatted rabbit hole of how Israel didn't see this coming. The parallels with 9/11 are too effing obvious, both in intelligence failures, and in bait for conspiracy theorists.

Anyway, a few notes:

--US national politics are being impacted by Trump's existential struggles to stay out of jail by becoming an autocrat. Basically, 10-15 Republicans could put an end to this by siding with Congressional Democrats to make Jeffries the next Speaker. But I'll get back to this.

--Israeli politics has been hugely impacted by Netanyahu's existential struggles to stay out of jail and become an autocrat. This war is a huge boom boon for him, because he now gets to play Wartime Leader a la George W Busg.

--Then we've got autocrats in Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia trying to flex and stay in power as petroleum-exporting countries at all costs, as the addicts they depend on struggle to get clean. That's driving the war in Ukraine, possibly Gaza (Hamas is an Iranian client, Israel is a US client), and elsewhere (Yemen).

--And on an older level, we're still dealing with the legacy of the British Empire. If the Suez Canal hadn't been built, the politics of Israel, Syria (client of Russia), and Egypt (client of US) wouldn't matter so much. The Canal was built by the UK to more efficiently loot South Asia for tea, opium, and saltpeter, and has now been adapted by the Gibsonian Street of global capitalism to carry global trade. So long as that trade matters, we're all stuck dealing with the politics of the surrounding countries, of which only Jordan seems to be stable and sane, albeit not terribly democratic.

I could go on, but we're seeing a lot of tragic and stupid trends coming to crisis now. This is the price of leaving the cults of Great Man Capitalism and Petroleum-driven politics. As in American Street Gangs, the saying "blood in, blood out" applies.

Turning to US politics (mostly because I don't know how this is all playing out in the UK Parliament), the Republicans are caught. They officially oppose giving aid to Ukraine, so shutting down Congress is Just Fine. Equally, they rabidly support Netanyahu, and being paralyzed and not being able to shower him with billions in aid is Not Good At All. So now they're caught: is it more important to support Israel, or oppose Ukraine?

This is where it gets interesting. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Minority Leader and potential Speaker (he's nine votes shy, AIUI), is described in Wikipedia as "firmly support[ing] Israel's right to exist as a Jewish democracy. He has been called 'one of the most pro-Israel Democrats in the House'. Jeffries also believes Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism."

While I think it's unlikely, I suspect it's possible that JeFfries' political position, coupled with America's political need to stand with Israel against Hamas, might induce enough Congressional Republicans to join with democrats to make Jeffries speaker and end the current chaos. This wouldn't suddenly make Congressional politics more progressive, because he'd have to compromise enormously to get anything done, but it would disempower the vocal extremists. And it's no great secret that most Republicans hate being in thrall to Trump but are too scared to do anything about him. If some of these invertebrates think the Israeli war gives them cover, they might defect anyway.

Anyway, my sympathies lie with everyone who's been on the receiving end of munitions due to all this shit going down.

Hmm, I actually like the bit north of Hadrian's Wall myself, and not sure the current residents would like to share ;-) I just don't understand a. how Israel got to the running a concentration camp stage and b. why they're sacrosanct and allowed to get away with this. I've been meeting angry Palestinians for well over 20 years and I'm not surprised it's come to a head, I just fear for the outcome.

My understanding is that older commercial pilots prefer to be able to manually turn off every circuit in the plane individually. The reason for this is so that, if something starts sparking, they can turn it off before it ignites something.

AFAIK, neither the black box nor the cockpit voice recorder can be turned off.

If ACARS can be turned off, then it is less useful for accident reconstruction, which was what I was originally suggesting: sending the black box data as telemetry to a satellite system so that in the event of a crash the data wasn't lost.

I'm going to be paranoid and suggest that that system should be separate from any 'internet in the sky' system or entertainment system, because frankly I think flight controls and safety systems shouldn't be connected to anything passengers can get at.

who the frack takes hostages!? and expects to be treated as a rational nation?

Who bombs civilians in neutral countries, puts citizens in concentration camps based on ancestry, supports the use of prisoners for experiments in biological warfare, and expects to be treated as a rational country?

Yet they are…

"The whole situation is entirely under Israel's control. They're the occupying power, what happens is 100% their responsibility."

Not 100%; a goodly chunk of it is down to... Britain and the US, oh what a surprise.

Britain in WW1 wanting to ensure continued US support thought that one good method would be to get influential American Jews fired up about Zionism. "When we dismantle the Ottoman Empire after the war, we'll make sure to give you that particular bit of it".

Then made a total pig's ear of sorting out any kind of decent agreement, and repeatedly refused to recognise that yes France did have their own interests in the Ottoman region and no they weren't just going to be so jolly grateful that they would let us get away with saying one thing and doing another, despite multiple iterations of trying it and getting the big fat NON. Then did basically the same thing with the existing inhabitants of the area during the post-war administrative period. "What the fuck are you doing??" "We're being British! We're promising you the moon on a stick and giving you a little piece of phosphorescent decaying fish in a bottle and we're so wonderful and white we expect you to quite agree it's the same thing really!" "Well it fucking isn't, OK?" And then getting tired of the whole thing and allowing their function to devolve onto some really rather fucking nasty terrorists, the principal figures of whom are considerably more familiar nowadays in the guise of notable figures of the Israeli government.

And then came WW2 and the US and another good 20dB increment in the setting of the fuckup factor knob, and so it went on, complete with presentation to the Anglophone public in a manner which probably has a certain little round pig-faced shit from our late opponents in that war frotting himself in his coffin with glee.

We started it, we made it possible for it to carry on, and we bear a considerable share of the responsibility for the consequences since they wouldn't have come about without our interventions.

Nope. About the only thing that's as simple as "heat makes certain things better" is making hot water, since that technically counts as a simple reversible physical transformation. Even something as basic as heating a boughten sausage roll in the microwave involves chemical transformations, and the molecules you have afterwards are not all just the same ones that went in only hotter.

I hate cooking, but I kind of dig chemistry, and I find it inescapable to view the effects of food preparation procedures in terms of chemical effects.

It still wouldn't be any good, whatever it was, if they didn't bother to test it. Otherwise you just get a new variant of "They'd been rewinding and recording over the same tapes every day of operation for something like 20 years" as reimagined in the terms that apply to the different technology.

"An untested backup is a blank tape". I'm sure it isn't me who made that up.

I would delete the distance limit, me. If it's "plane" or "don't go", then I would be choosing "don't go" even if I didn't have the kind of attitude to air travel that makes me tut at the sight of a vapour trail.

With a train, as long as I arrive on the platform no later than the train itself, everything is fine; and the most onerous thing I have to do is hold a little piece of cardboard up for a few seconds for someone to read it. But if I had to turn up several hours before the train was due purely in order to spend the intervening period being fucked about, I'd not bother with the train either.

Absent hamas, Bibi & his fellow travelers would find it difficult to justify their beastliness. Absent continuous reminders of who the enemy is, most Jews & Muslims would mind their own business and trade halal & kosher recipes. I humbly suggest a "B" ark for people who wish to dominate others, although there's more born every day, finding a "B" ark drifting after nature takes it's course, and hosing it out for re-purposing would be a lesson in the value of empathy remembered for generations.

"But if they cut high speed running the EDI-LON train ride will stretch considerably. Currently the York-London stretch of the ECML has no stops and covers the 175-odd miles in 1h30m, flat out at close to 125mph almost all the way, and there are long stretches of high speed running in North Yorkshire and once you get north of Berwick as well..."

Not really a worry as regards that line. Except right at the end, the term "commuting" as applied to that line pretty much means long distance running at 125mph. Including all the way from York to London. I think people who go from York to London and back every day must be nuts, but nevertheless there seem to be quite a number of them.

"The buried justification for HS2 is that by moving passenger capacity to the new line we gain freight capacity on the on the old lines."

Not so much "buried justification" as "one of the iterations of post-hoc justification". HS2 does not improve the capacity available on the L&B because it doesn't go to any of the stations. You can't take off any of the existing trains between London and Birmingham because they all go to other places in between as well. Even if every single passenger between Euston and New Street was indeed happy to go instead from the back yard of Wormwood Scrubs to a silly and awkward bit of Birmingham that even the Victorians sacked off as soon as they could, you still have to keep the existing EUS-BHM services as they are, in order to provide the same service to all the passengers to/from the stations in between.

There are basically three distinct families of time/distance curves and associated pathing requirements on the L&B: fast main-stations passenger, stopping passenger, and freight. But there are only two sets of tracks to cater for these three. To get more capacity by giving each family its "own" set of tracks, you have to get rid of at least one of the three; the obvious one to move away is freight, but the HS2 idea is to keep freight and get rid of the fast passengers - ie. make every passenger train a stopper, and all the people from places like Milton Keynes and Rugby and Coventry who currently get a fast service just have to suck shit.

HS2 doesn't run on logic. It runs on magic. So apparently it is a valid refutation of this argument to insist that no, no, they're not going to do this, and cite in evidence a set of proposed post-HS2 timetables which in fact show that it exactly is what they're planning to do.

I rather think quite a few other people have reacted to that much as I did, because what I've noticed since the point came up is a gradual alteration of the actual timetable to slowly but surely get more like that anyway, so that when the real post-HS2 timetable does come in they will be able to claim that indeed it didn't really change the service. This method of attempting justification for steamrollered railway proposals is surely kind of stale and manky by now, but it nevertheless seems to remain popular.

If they're going to move one of the families away, it should be the freight. The track standards required to support a freight service are so much less onerous than those required for passenger, and so enormously less onerous than for a passenger service operating at a ridiculous speed purely so France and Germany can't have nicer toys than us any more, that the decision practically makes itself. If you want to run railway trains, shift the freight; if you want to run gravy trains, do HS2.

...Oh, aye, and the corollary: If you want to demonstrate that spending money on railways can bring useful and positive results, shift the freight. If you want to demonstrate that spending money on railways is just chucking fuckloads down the drain to create yet another fuckup, do HS2.

Dave Lester @ 102:

I dread to ask, but is there anyone more loopy in AR Republican circles?

That's what I was asking.

ilya187 171:

heh... old bitter joke about Hollywood there's one creative genius (example: GRRMartin) for every 99 imitative hacks... as soon as something by the creative genius gets the green light then imitative hacks all turn out a poorly written clone-work... westerns... rom-coms... police procedurals...

now its fantasies and/or political-economic-dynastic mega-dramas ("Succession" is Westros with in-door plumbing and lawyers as paper-based warriors carrying their liege-lord's whims)

at the moment I'm a thieving hack... there's a book series by E. M. Foner which I performed eminent domain upon... in less than a hundred words summarized basis for his novels...

I fondly recall reading "First Contract" but the author never followed through on the premise... would have been bitter but fun to watch humanity struggling as a planet of 'lesser savages' in a galactic economic system where capitalism reigned supreme and Earth's wealthiest (inbred dynastic) families did not qualify as worthy any respect... and then there's "Troy" books by John Ringo which also seems to have more legs to run another two at least but no indication of further volumes...

so...?

so we imitate those imitative hacks and crowd-source a Netflix drama about Earth in 2060s...

uhm... protein synthesizers that produce amazing 'vat beef' for US$0.21/kilogram without the ecological damage or animal trauma... of course outlawed everywhere... too many vested interests ("Big Beef" as per ==> https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/) and there will be 'moonshiners' doing it secretly in the backwoods...

also... all sorts of better pharmaceuticals... ditto...

with one of the few things that interest the rest of the galaxy's inhabitants being our sporting events... who use those 'semi-random' games as basis of surprisingly massive gambling...thank you Craig Alanson for wacky-arsed concept of an entire species, Jeraptha, addicted to betting action and in turn falling into utter love with fantasy sport leagues (a concept they'd over looked for centuries but having been invented by humans becomes the 'next big thing')

now imagine 'away games' under the light of other stars and mafia thugs of a dozen species each looking to tweak the outcome of games in their favor to shift the point spread with trillions of monetary units on the line for each game of college football (US)... and minor league football (UK)... and rugby (AUS)...

...etc

Greg Tingey @ 117:

CHarlie
EXCEPOT - for less than 1000km+ - I am FUCKED if I will fly, because of the utterly insane "security" theatre & paranoia
The whole rigmarole really gives me the pip.

I can't really afford to fly anywhere. I have too much baggage (cameras & lenses ...), plus the absurd cost to rent a vehicle once I get to wherever if it's in the U.S. because there is no other way to get around to the places I want to photograph.

It just costs too much.

It costs too much to drive too, but I can more easily spread that cost out (drive now, pay later) than I could flying.

Plus, driving I can more easily change plans on the "fly" if it turns out my destination isn't going to work out.

Kardashev @ 129:

"They'd been rewinding and recording over the same tapes every day of operation for something like 20 years,"

I normally shy away from technological fixes, but in these days of cheap terabyte storage, I don't see why every train (or airplane) couldn't have a birth-to-death record of the cockpit voice and relevant operating data. At a 1e6 bits per second and 3.15e7 seconds per year, that's 3.15e13 bits per year, 4-ish terabytes. Throw in a bit of data compression and stand-down time, and you could get that at the local Costco pretty cheap and have a complete record.

I normally shy away from technological fixes, but in these days of cheap terabyte storage, I don't see why every train (or airplane) couldn't have a birth-to-death record of the cockpit voice and relevant operating data. At a 1e6 bits per second and 3.15e7 seconds per year, that's 3.15e13 bits per year, 4-ish terabytes. Throw in a bit of data compression and stand-down time, and you could get that at the local Costco pretty cheap and have a complete record.

https://www.costco.com/seagate-one-touch-5tb-portable-hard-drive-with-rescue-data-recovery-services.product.100761181.html

Your basic home SSD isn't rugged enough for flight data recorder or Cockpit Voice Recorder use. But I do believe there are now Solid State versions in use.

You really don't need to store the entire history on an on-board device. You just need the data from the LAST trip.

Data should be uploaded at the end of every trip & the on-board device erased to give a clean slate to record the next trip. And the on-board recorders should be tested frequently to ensure the recording medium is still good.

"Stupidity & Arrogance" - re. "Hamas"
Gaza's electricity & water are effectively, unde Israeli control ... and then, Hamas attack Israel & start by murdering teenagers at a Rock Concert.
Very clever .. maybe not?

AS Ilya 187 says, too.
These people are STILL rejecting "Land for Peace" - even though the Israeli's have also fucked that one over, via the revolting "Settlement" movement.

H
WRONG
The Canal was built by the UK - NO, it was not.
Ferdinad de Lesseps was FRENCH, it was a French company, which them mismanaged iself & it's gold-mine so badly, that the Brits were able to buy it up, cheaply, some years later.
This is the price of leaving the cults of Great Man Capitalism and Petroleum-driven politics - Really?
You seem to forget the other main driver of arrogance & idiocy: RELIGION.
Which is rampant around Gaza & in the US Captol, yes?

Damian
Also, & equally unfortunately, true.
Except that the so-called "leaders" of the Palestinians are the ones who got them into this ghastly mess, 30+ years ago.

Tim H has the right of it ....

Pigeon & others
Fastest standard scheduled times KGX - YRK: 1h 49 min - 109 minutes for 188.5 miles = 103.7 mph

So Fabian Everyman is to Rishi Sunak what Congressman Matt Santos was to Barack Obama?

As a foreigner, I have missed most of what was going on, but have been wondering just how the 15 minute city is suddenly the target of some wild conspiracy theory. Wasn't the Tory aesthetic somehow all about nostalgia for the old days, village life, and such? Or was I always just misled?

It reminds me of another recent conspiracy theory trial balloon - the one about vaccines being shedded and infecting the unvaccinated. "It's the vaccines that are transmissible, not the viruses!" vs. "having services within walking distance means no one is allowed to leave their homes in the future" - the kind of mirrorworld thinking that feels like an insane end-of-the world cult in its final phases.

One policy I'm going to try to follow, JUST TO AVOID PISSING OFF CHARLIE, WHO'D HAVE TO MODERATE THE DISCUSSION, is not going down the

Thanks!

Moderation Announcement:

This thread is under a complete ban on discussion of the Israel/Gaza situation from now on, for the next couple of days (at least). It's a flame war magnet.

(I'd just like to note that my sympathy is with the civilians -- on both sides -- who have to put up with this shit, and no sympathy whatsoever for the war leaders.)

The Financial Times defines a Veblen Good: A Veblen good is a luxury item whose price does not follow the usual laws of supply and demand. Usually, the higher the price of a particular good the less people will want it. For luxury goods, such as very expensive wines, watches or cars, however, the item becomes more desirable as it grows more expensive and less desirable should it drop in price.

Whilst researching for my novel -- first draft of 1700 pages still in search of a plot -- I read about the French railroad circa 1850s. Lacking basics of concern for humane treatment, French executives ordered roofs be removed from third-class passenger cars to force any passengers who could afford second-class seats to avoid shivering near-freezing condition. So too, second-class was made a bit too uncomfortable by way of cramped seating, insufficient heating and overbooking to increase an allure of purchasing a more expensive ticket in first-class. These French companies gained a significant benefit from intentionally inflicting almost deathly cruelty upon third-class passengers and considerable disrespect upon those in second-class, whilst lavishing pampering when dealing with highest spenders in first-class. (An economist, Jules Dupuit, summed this up quick pithily: “Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.”)

Problem? In the 21st century more than just one vice president at vendors of critical services we all need -- airlines + cable-teevee + data services + medical insurance providers + etc -- learned the wrong lessons from that. They've gotten to the point of being willing to go to absurd lengths to pamper those biggest spenders along with malice of aforethought looking for ways to punish everyone else for the sin of poverty. (Or leastwise for being non-wealthy.) Less attention, fewer options, and shabbier quality service for anybody who was too cheap to pay high end.

So we have gotten to the point where "Veblen Good" is now becoming the overt 'n loudly bragged about 'privilege' of not getting trapped in cattle class seating on a flight, along with avoiding much of the 'terrorism prevention' via sham security theater of flight check-in, and then there's how significantly less brutal any trip between locations "A" and "B" due to having wealth-stature-luck.

A key aspect of a "Veblen Good" being, a limited availability, alongside elevated pricing in order to convey status. Now consider medical care. There'd always been a higher tier of quality medical service for the wealthy but in response to 'long-covid' there has become known, if you pay enough there are doctors who will actually (really!) examine your condition in depth, listen to your misery and assemble a highly customized set of treatments to get you better.

That will soon be hyper-extended into all manner of medical treatment as the populace average age rises and costs rise and systems overload. Alongside previously unheard of illnesses arise in numbers and complexities. New diseases due to toxic exposure such as micro-bead plastics, with road salt and petro-chemical runoff dribbling into food and drinking water. We should all look forward to ever more cancers previously very rare. Along with neuro-damage never seen before.

Nightmare fuel for those of you sleeping well, not only is there "heavy metal poisoning" due to lead, etc, so too "light metal poisoning". One of those speculations is that prior aluminium becoming commonplace (food wrapping, etc), Parkinson's Disease was a rarity; other degenerating conditions having also becoming frequent.

A study of Parkinson's Disease using 2017 data, economic burden estimated at $51.9 billion. Medical insurance companies are already slow-walking treatments along with outright refusal to accept diagnosis. Soon enough it is going to require lawsuits to force insurance companies to provide minimal standards of care. (Oh, wait.)

So imagine a whole new set of unpleasant novelty in neuro-centric diseases...

Charlie:
I'd just like to note that my sympathy is with the civilians -- on both sides -- who have to put up with this shit, and no sympathy whatsoever for the war leaders
YES.
The Rock-Concert victims & the 2 Million people stuck in Gaza.

Incidentally, what is it about Gaza?
Alexander "the Great" sacked the place, brutally, it was a major shithole in WWI, & all the conflicts in-beteen, such as the Crusades & Boney's expedition - it seems to be a "natural" point for opposing sides to fight over & royally screw the then-inhabitants.

Howard NYC
But ONLY { so far } in the USA ... the rest of the devloped world has civilised medical supply & practice, though { of course } the tories are trying their best to trash ours through deliberate neglect.

So Fabian Everyman is to Rishi Sunak what Congressman Matt Santos was to Barack Obama?

Who TF is Matt Santos?

PS: nope, that's not a "Tory nostalgia" vision. The Tories are about making potloads of money while being racists the same way as the US Republicans are, only they used to be a bit less obvious about it.

prior aluminium becoming commonplace (food wrapping, etc), Parkinson's Disease was a rarity; other degenerating conditions having also becoming frequent

Seems likely to contradict the more recent (post-COVID) analysis that Parkinson's surged in the wake of the 1918-21 flu pandemic, and may be a long-term consequence of COVID19.

There are a bunch of other interesting virus/inflammation/CNS disease links coming to light too, including the apparent causal link between Epstein-Barr Virus and Multiple Sclerosis.

There have been noises off and on about aluminium ever since it came into use for making saucepans, but it's always been pretty inconclusive in those kind of doses, as well as the dose being highly variable with changing tastes in the food itself and in its preparation methods, etc.

However in larger doses it does get obvious, as was shown in a UK episode some years ago where the controls on a water treatment plant went up the creek and it deposited elephant-doctor's quantities of soluble aluminium into the local plumbing.

Camelford, before water supplies were privatised. Whereupon the central government team that 'investigated' claimed that aluminium couldn't cause serious medical problems (bugger the statistics) and therefore the Cornish peasantry didn't deserve any help.

But leaving such obscenities out of it, there is good evidence that aluminium exposure is A factor in neurological diseases, but it's definitely not simple cause and effect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6040147/

Speaking as someone who has Parkinson's, and has sat through a few webinars, here's the common model used by researchers.

It almost certainly has something to do with alpha synuclein plaques killing brain cells that produce dopamine. Alpha synuclein is a really common protein throughout the body (and throughout the animal kingdom AFAIK), so disrupting the protein is bad. Instead they're trying to figure out what causes the plaques and cell death and deal with that. There's a list of causes that keeps growing, including lead, glyphosate (in excess1), and possibly chronic loneliness.

The general disease model researchers currently use is that we're born with a large surplus of cells that produce dopamine. Over time, a fair number of those cells die in most people. When almost all of them are dead, you get PD. The exact cause(s) of cell death are thought to be less important than the consequence. As in role playing games, what kills you is your hit points going to zero, and many things can make that happen. Unlike hit points, it's hard to regain lost brain cells.

Another bit of research suggests that PD patient brains postmortem show that metal concentrations are much higher in the dead cell regions than in non-PD brains. So it's possible that some genetic quirk makes some people more susceptible to environmental contaminants than others, because they concentrate metals (and other chemicals) in one part of their brain. This isn't proven, but having a blood relative who has PD is definitely a risk factor.

Incidentally, what is it about Gaza [and warfare]?

Flat land and the proximity of major powers to the North (Turkey), West (Egypt) and East (Iraq/Iran).

The first recorded battle -- with a description of the action -- was the battle of Kadesh 1275BC between the Egyptians under Ramases II and the Hittites who won. Pharoah also employed spin to cover up the fact he'd been ambushed at the river crossing.

Perhaps worth noting that Megiddo -- supposedly the last battle -- is only about 20 miles from Kadesh.

(These locations are technically near the Syrian/Israel border, and thus not Gaza proper. Nevertheless, think of that entire strip of land as the "Belgium" of the Middle East.)

There have been noises off and on about aluminium ever since it came into use for making saucepans,

Calderos, cast aluminum pots resembling Dutch ovens, have been widely and frequently used in Latin America for many decades, probably more than a century. You'd think any epidemiological signs would have shown up there by now.

Mentioning Parkinson's Disease was due to it being more widely known than Lewy Body Dementia, which is but one of many conditions hammering humanity. Ditto mentioning aluminium rather than praseodymium (which I doubt more than one in a million people ever handled it).

Those horrid effects of lead ("heavy metal poisoning") known for centuries, due to exposure experienced by miners and metal workers.

Whereas a significant number of chemical elements -- scandium, titanium, chromium, rhodium, osmium, et al -- had not been purified and/or concentrated and/or alloyed until recently. These being elements existing in nature in concentrations not parts-per-thousands but parts-per-millions.

We have next to zero clinical data of long term effects of exposure to those. (Since none of us are kin-by-blood of Clark Kent we needn't worry about being exposed to krypton.) A reason for concern, would be projecting forwards there could be new, unhappy discoveries similar to finding out there are long-lived radioactive isotopes. One loathsome example being strontium-90, which replaces calcium in foods and thereby become concentrated in human bones and teeth.

Bad if you're sixty, terrifying if you're six years old.

While there are many nations with a more equitable health care system than the USA's, everyone is at risk of damage from toxin-virus-mold-bacteria. And just about every capitalistic-democratic-liberal nation is experiencing an ageing population like nothing ever seen in humanity's history -- resulting from combo of sanitary regulations, cheap food, vaccinations, etc -- whilst at the same time smacked by falling birth rates.

Result will be by the 2040s (and I will be happy to be wrong) shortages of treatment for ailments. Assuming we have ways of treating those novelty illnesses. Lewy Body Dementia is not only fatal, we cannot slow it down. This places all of us in unpleasant position of prioritizing treatment (first versus last), perhaps rationing treatment (some who get it, other who don't).

So I welcome you to circa 2040, when getting many such critical treatments becomes a mode of "Veblen Good", another mode of bragging rights by the ultra-wealthy who will be paying for priority access to jump to the front, whilst the rest of us line up single file, hoping there's enough remaining and we'll be still be alive when we reach the treatment desk.

Not just in the USA, but every nation. Because the ruling elite need not share.

Change is possible, if those who would be our Gods shit the bed in a way that cannot be explained away. Expletive* shame about the collateral damage though.

*Imagine your own favorites, it was a long shift.

(how can I rattle off such a prediction of mismanagement so easily? because I've been coding since 1978 and 90+% of the projects I was hired on a coder and/or analyst were led by those least willing to plan for problems and therefore they led us into epic fails and/or lawsuits and/or company-wide collapse and/or some combination... if you ask around, let me know if anyone had it better)

I've been on projects (coding since 1976, if you count that vocational class in data processing) that did do better, mostly because the programmers/engineers on the project ignored management (within reason) and did things right. Why? Because they were "long-timers", i.e. not one-and-done contractors. We knew we had to support this stuff for years afterwards (sometimes for decades) and we wanted to do other things. We learned this from experience, and didn't feel like making the same mistakes twice.

However, these days most of the people involved have less than 5 years experience, don't usually stick around past 3 or 4 years, and really don't have to deal with the fallout of bad decisions (this is especially true of upper management). I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happened to Boeing's Starliner.

Aluminium
The actual metal, per se is harmless, because it oxydises so quickly, forming a protective "skin" The problems start when, if you are using Al cooking vessels, & strong(ish) acids-or-alkalis are used in the process - think Rhubarb ( UGH! ) f'rinstance ...
Then Al compunds show up & you ingest them & nasty things happen.
Similarly, Glyphosate - if you must use it, use it sparingly, point the spray directly DOWN at the plant you don't want & don't get in the spray, but idiots ignore these simple rules ...

I read it. And what you're proposing is that my children and grandchildren should NEVER EVER RETIRE, but die in wage slavery.

I can't tell you what I think of that, because a) this is Charlie's blog, and b) legal reason.

I am considering making better torches than the tiki torches around my patio, and something sharper than the manure fork in the shed.

Peronsally, I prefer buying dyamite, to assure that those bunkers they're hunkered down in while the rest of us die make lovely, high-value tombs.

"funded by the overhead on biomedical grants"? I'm sorry, but you must be thinking of the late seventies/early eighties. Ain't there now.

Your post, and one or two others... this is so frutstrating... as I wait for my publisher to get around to making the ARCs of my next novel, Becoming Terran.... (Hint: it is not a dystopian novel.)

And as I keep saying to people, and no one ever hears me, by the later 19th century, passenger service, other than possibly commuter rail, was all a loss leader for the freight side of railroading. Yet the ignorant right-wing keeps wanting it to pay for itself. (Gee, but do airlines pay for airports, and all the facilities around them? Oh, no, that's local city government bonds.)

sigh
No one puts consumer-grade hardware there, mostly since it's intended to fail in under five years (and, speaking for corporate planning, under three).

You buy business-grade. For example, Dell sells towers and laptops with a base three-year warranty, and you can pay to upgrade to 5 year.

Consumer grade? That'd be a one-year warranty.

Santos does not, in fact, exist, even though he has a seat in the US Congress. Every single item of his "resume" is fictional. Oh, and he pled guilty to a financial crime in Brazil, I think it was.

I know of one person whose illness was directly linked to aluminum: my late mother-in-law. Seems before she was (literally) Rosie the Riveter, riveting wings on Spitfires during the Battle of Britten, she was one of those drilling holes in the aluminum wings for the rivets. Masks for dust from the drilling, in 1940?

Charlie, if you'll permit, rather than comment on the Israeli-Palestinian war, I'd like to post this link to an actually considered story. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/hamas-offensive-israel-west-bank-guerrilla-movement-gaza

Paul @ 160:

EC@158: look up MH 370.

MH 370 had ACARS, and a position report was received. Then someone turned all the transponders off.

I don't believe ACARS sent position data, just aircraft performance/maintenance parameters ... although I think it could also be used for voice/text if they'd had a problem that they needed to talk with airline about - without using ATC frequencies.

A secondary ACARS on MH370 (that the pilot didn't know about?) couldn't be turned off & kept pinging the Immarsat satellite every hour and THEY were able to do Doppler analysis on those signals to extract position "arcs".

My childhood neighbor ran into kidney problems, and it was blamed squarely on his plate- and welding work with aluminium.

“One loathsome example being strontium-90, which replaces calcium in foods and thereby become concentrated in human bones and teeth”

Yeah, speaking as someone that was born with Sr90 poisoning, it has effects. Like for example all my milk teeth being removed circa 18 months and that resulting (apparently) in the meningitis infection that (briefly) killed me. Also finger/toe nails that were growing out rather than along, as it were. And blood issues.

Robert Prior @ 161:

Under what circumstances can a pilot turn off safety features? Can black boxes be turned off? Would there be a (legitimate) reason to turn of ACARS?

waldo @ 162:

I would imagine that there would be an off switch for use by maintenance and for when the aircraft is sitting stationary at a terminal. I'd also guess that faulty systems can be switched off.

The "black boxes" can't be turned off AFAIK. There might be a legitimate reason to turn off ACARS ... if it was malfunctioning. But on MH370 there was a secondary system that could not be turned off (in the air) and that was what kept trying to communicate with the satellite.

Transponders can be turned off. That seems to be part of why the USMC "lost" that F-35. Two aircraft in the flight & the other aircraft had its transponder on, so the second aircraft had its transponder off so it wouldn't interfere ... ATC could track the flight by the one transponder ... until the second aircraft had its OOPSIES!.

Still no news from the military about what caused the pilot to be "forced to eject". Until I see a report otherwise, I'm holding out for the auto-eject system malfunctioning. USMC F-35s are the only ones so equipped.

JohnS @ 188:

It costs too much to drive too, but I can more easily spread that cost out (drive now, pay later) than I could flying.

Plus, driving I can more easily change plans on the "fly" if it turns out my destination isn't going to work out.

Another cost of travel I have not had to deal with before now is what happens when a hotel screws up your reservation (wrong dates) and then, to add insult to injury, DOUBLE CHARGES your credit card.

Welding is a whole new bigger can of wigglier worms. If some bad health effect is going to ensue at all anywhere, then welding is usually one of the best ways to pick it up as a very clear signal.

What you say is true for the US, but in Britain it varied a great deal. Some lines/companies barely bothered with anything but freight; others depended almost entirely on passengers and freight was an irrelevance.

Due to changed circumstances since those days, however, your final point is no less valid.

"We have next to zero clinical data of long term effects of exposure to those."

Chromium and osmium, at least, especially osmium, are very nasty shit and make it very very obvious given the slightest chance. Don't know about rhodium specifically, but given its large number of laboratory uses I would not be at all surprised to find it doing a comparable number of nasty things in the body.

Titanium, on the other hand, appears to be almost miraculously biocompatible, and if we don't have a lot of good data from all the people with skeletal implants made of it, I would be very surprised indeed.

Yeah, but see EC's post. I was basically saying the same thing in a less rigorous manner. There are craploads of perturbing factors involved, and if you don't take scrupulous care with your statistics, then at typical food-related concentrations you can end up arguing the toss any way you want.

IIRC people were literally going green, and the government were saying "not our fault". Not just an obscenity, but a truly fucking stupid one too.

Who TF is Matt Santos?

I would have that this bit of US political craziness would have crossed the pond.

He was elected to Congress from an area of Long Island, NY. As an R. Low key election, no one paid much attention but one very small very local paper that was mostly ignored.

Turns out he's been lying and cheating his way through life since his teens or 20s. In Brazil and the US and maybe a few other places. There are multiple conflicting (in big ways) biographies from multiple sources including more than one from him depending on who asked when.

The local R's on Long Island want him to resign, even if it means a D will take his place. They are that embarrassed about him. But the only way to force him out of Congress is if the House holds hearings and ejects him. And McCarthy and friends needed every single vote so they basically run and hide anytime the name "Santos" came up. And in exchange he is a totally reliable vote on R topics.

In so many ways, he's a DT light weight. Likely to be indicted in multiple states for all kinds of small to medium crimes as soon as hie term runs out in January 2025. Maybe sooner. Many for financial fraud.

I love this quote from the Wikipedia article about him. "Santos has made numerous false or dubious claims about his biography, work history, criminal record, financial status, ethnicity, religion, and other matters, both in public and in private."

If it wasn't so depressingly real it would make a great Monty Python / Peter Sellers movie.

Charlie Stross @ 195:

"So Fabian Everyman is to Rishi Sunak what Congressman Matt Santos was to Barack Obama?"

Who TF is Matt Santos?

That's probably a better question than you thought it was. I think he's referring to Congressman George Santos; somehow conflating his name with that of Matt Gaetz.

Santos - if that's really his name - is the one person on earth who may be a bigger liar than Donald J Trumpolini. 🙃

Santos is what would have happened to Trump if he hadn't been born rich. Same grifting, crooked amoral con man, much less money to spend on lawyers to flood the zone with shit any time accountability shows up.

You really don't need to store the entire history on an on-board device. You just need the data from the LAST trip.

Data should be uploaded at the end of every trip & the on-board device erased to give a clean slate to record the next trip. And the on-board recorders should be tested frequently to ensure the recording medium is still good.

You frequently want more than the last trip, because many incident investigations would benefit from hearing about what happened on earlier flights with the same crew.

Unloading the data after every trip would be an advantage, if there was a way to do it quickly and safely (ie. without creating an attack surface for hacking the aircraft). Given how tight margins are, and the apparent prevalence of fraudulent parts from 'trusted' third part suppliers, I would want some really good security folks on the team that designs that gadget. Also, the ramp rats that service an aircraft during turnaround are not nearly as trained as the engineers who deal with malfunctions and upgrades (which include updating software systems).

If I was speccing one out, I'd want storage for at least 48 hours. Rather than wiping when downloaded, I'd have it overwrite the oldest data when it needs more room. Unloading would be a one-way interaction, with no possibility of hacking the device. (This probably precludes using a USB connection or anything like that.)

For examples of poor security, consider the cases where security researchers have hacked cars just by driving by them with the right program running on a laptop.

Security item 1: NO WIFI for the data. And the ground crew don't need to be engineers to "hook up this Cat-6 cable to that plug, and when it turns green, unplug it."

I'd just like to note that my sympathy is with the civilians -- on both sides -- who have to put up with this shit, and no sympathy whatsoever for the war leaders.

I'm reminded of the Goon Show episode where Neddy Seagoon lands in Central America to save Britain's last remaining banana tree and is promptly captured. Apparently the People's Front for the Liberation of Someland, te Popular Front for the Liberation of Someland, the Someland Army and a few other groups are fighting. When Seagoon (sensibly) asks "Which side are you on?", he's told "There are no sides. We're all in this together."

Which to me sums up civilians in a civil war.

(Haven't heard it in decades, so I may have some of the details badly scrambled.)

The first recorded battle -- with a description of the action -- was the battle of Kadesh 1275BC between the Egyptians under Ramases II and the Hittites who won.

There was the Battle of Gan in the 21st century BC, that cemented Qi (and the Xia Dynasty) in power.

David L @ 225: It's George Santos you're referring to.

Matt Santos was a character on The West Wing series in seasons 6 & 7. He succeeded President Bartlet.

Security item 1: NO WIFI for the data. And the ground crew don't need to be engineers to "hook up this Cat-6 cable to that plug, and when it turns green, unplug it."

As long as there's no way for a device with a Cat-6 cable to hack into the black box/CVR system.

I'm reminded of why people need to be careful about using public USB chargers or borrowed USB cables to charge their devices.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/04/why-is-juice-jacking-suddenly-back-in-the-news/

Gaza - except it's not ...
The US "House" has shafted itself into inaction, right?
They specifically can't vote on any, "Money" bills, because the bought traitors in the "R" party won't let Ukraine have any money ...
NOW - all of a sudding - they need to vote money to Israel, because of the problems there .. but they can't, because they have done it to themselves.
AIUI - utter confusion reigns, because if they fix their "No-speaker" problem, then they can vote money to Israel, but at the same time, it's all-too-possible that money will/can be voted for Ukraine.
You broke it - you fix it.

Another factor in PD might be oxidative stress, especially since some quinone metabolites of dopamine might make for quite a lot of free radicals. See 7-hydroxydopamine.

Chronic manganese poisoning might lead to PD, the causal nexus I read about is the body incorporates the manganese in some enzymes that usually use iron. Thing is, manganese works better than iron in those, so you get more of the metabolites mentioned above. It's known to happen in welders, makes me slightly worried because we worked a lot with potassium permanganate back in the days; really good at coloring water, and if you drip some glycerine onto it...

AFAIR monoaminoxidase is not involved in the metabolic pathways alluded to above, but another idea is to use MAO inhibitors to slow disease progreasion by halting production of some other toxic metabolites. The also help in the MPTP model of PD, though that's another story.

As for the glyphosate, hm, hadn't heard about that one, and I'm somewhat sceptical. Rotenone and paraquat are known to cause PD, by a similar mechanism to MPTP. And loperamide might potentially go the road to MPTP-like metabolites, too.

Then there might be viral factors (think "Awakenings"). Whatever, hope you're doing well, personally, I'd go for selegiline and dopamine agonists and stay somewhat clear of L-DOPA, but IANAD.

Goimg back to glyphosate, hard to get this stuff in the EU at this point, but you can get 2,4-D quite easily. Somewhat difficult explaining to people why I'm upset, "Agent Orange", no idea, "Dioxin" nö idea, OK, "Seveso"...

Whatever, sorry for the hiatus, err, death in the family.

On a slightly more upbeat note, I just put in my holiday sheet for 2024, well, basically just the time for Worldcon in Glasgow.

Err, yes, I have this strange idea of making Tentakelkaiser and OGH dance to Grimes' "Flesh without Blood".

Whatever, hope you're doing well, personally, I'd go for selegiline and dopamine agonists and stay somewhat clear of L-DOPA, but IANAD.

Thanks!

I won't touch dopamine agonists, although my neurologist did prescribe one. The problem is that a common side effect is uncontrollable drowsiness/nodding off, and worse, that side effect can last for up to a year after you stop taking them.

Since I'm currently driving several hundred miles per week to help care for another elderly relative, nodding off is not a side effect I'm willing to risk. So...I'll probably add L-Dopa to my regimen next. PD treatment is as much about keeping the side effects tolerable as about controlling the PD. My current take is that idiopathic PD is basically slow death by terminal embarrassment.

=+=+=+=

Pigeon 222:

I've got Titanium implants in my jaw, replacing four lower teeth. Good news? Nothing overt. Bad news? Dental surgeon in 1996 -- others since then -- acknowledge there's never been a years-long detailed study of any subtler damage based on assumption of Titanium as a potential neuro-toxin.

Yes, it seems benign. No, there can never be certainty. Yes, it would be nice if every person with Titanium implants underwent a full autopsy upon death, so the medical industry could learn the most possible. No, there's little interest and zero funding.

Shit-fire, it is still impossible to centralize all medical treatment recordkeeping in a manner permitting data mining for { reasons } where the set of { bullshit excuses } exceeding my patience and Charlie Stross's tolerance of extremely-creative non-recursive cursing.

Can any say 'cancer cluster'?

=+=+=+=

Robert Prior 228:

I admire your optimism, but regretfully point to the multiple points of failure of your approach, as per my post #139 (keyword to search for being "whoooopsie").

=+=+=+=

JohnS 226:

Donald T(he)rump being the horrid result if Skynet crossbred George Santos with Matt Gaetz, surgically extracted any moral traits and doubled down upon animalistic urges. Then tossed that infant backwards in time to a specific hospital maternity ward in Queens NY, circa 1946. (Which would explain so much. If we swap "Skynet" for "Putin".)

=+=+=+=

Greg Tingey 234:

Sidestepping the politics, looking only at the civilian misery in Gaza, what we are getting is a glimpse of the 2040s (or if I were more optimistic the 2050s) as cities flood in the US (or UK or EU).

We'll watch as local governments collapse under excessive fraud, infrastructure fails due to too oft postponed maintenance, nobody able to find the disaster recovery plan because it was last updated in 2015. Whereas the national government seeks to avoid expending resources upon unloved sections of the populace (blacks, Jews, gays, uppity women) due to threats by howling mobs in rural area eager to watch urban populations die on Fox News (or other rightwing media) in real time.

Who are now (09-Oct-2023), sad there's no livefeeds so they cannot watch 'ragheads' in Gaza weep and suffer. (4-Q-Nazi-wannabes.)

By the time those rural mobs realize they need the educated urban residents to develop drought tolerant crops (and heat tolerant electronics and medical treatments) , the clock will have ticked down to zero. No doubt pet food factories will be switching over to mass produce cans of Soylent Green™. Because for sure, plenty of raw material easily at hand, ya know?

=+=+=+=

Since I'm being good and not talking about sieges of ghettos...George Santos!

Looks like the dude Congresscritter managed to persuade the GOP that his family had a fortune that didn't apparently, well, exist, and that they seemingly gave his campaign a half million dollars when they, well, actually do it. Why? Turns out that parts of the Republican money laundering campaign support apparatus have certain funding thresholds, so that the more a candidate raises, the more they'll give them. Santos got boosted over a $250k threshold by his "family's"...boldness. It's unclear that they ever knew about their generosity.

Anyway, his campaign treasurer pled guilty to a federal fraud charge last week over this, so it's going public.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/weve-finally-solved-the-mystery-of-george-santos-mysterious-fortune

Matt Santos was a character on The West Wing series in seasons 6 & 7. He succeeded President Bartlet.

Yes. My bad. This is likely what mickey meant.

But I jumped to the Santos name as apparently did a few others. And a mashup of MATT Gaetz and George SANTOS very much fits into the post topic of just how crazy the politics of the UK and US get are just now.

Trottelreiner 2-4-D REALLY? Euuuwww .....

twenty minutes into the future...

"...flashpoint in the conflict over whether health insurance should have to cover obesity drugs..."

"Her Insurance Refused to Pay for Wegovy, So She Sued"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/business/health-insurance-wegovy-lawsuit-obesity-drugs.html

I would have that this bit of US political craziness would have crossed the pond.

Oh, him.

I thought his name was George Santos, not Matt?

Off topic, but given the subject of con men and given your well documented "love" of Bitcoin I thought I would recommend "Number Go Up" by Zeke Faux.

He was lucky enough to be researching a book about the crypto bubble bin fire and hanging around with Sam Bankman-Fried around the time the wheels fell off.

It's not particularly deep but is bleakly entertaining. Very bleak in parts, and absolutely packed with WTF.

That's a really easy solve. Do what the nuclear industry does. All data dumps are by one way optic fiber. It's just an optic fiber connection where the sending side has no receptors whatsoever. Can't hack it if it can only talk, not listen.

the sending side has no receptors whatsoever

No handshaking protocols, or any other way to ensure the data has been received?

given my urge to doomscroll, I shall instead provide a rather off-the-road thought I ran across last night...

"mastodon dental floss"

just give it a minute... imagine what it would be to have both the necessary tensile strength whilst doing no harm to enamel of a tooth the size of a human skull... just human floss, scaled up...?

now take that to next step in the process... mastodons cannot floss themselves... so... don't you feel sorry for the unlucky trainee assistant zookeeper -- just got hired last week still in training -- who is assigned to floss the world's only mastodon, cloned from whatever bits were found frozen in Siberia...

no pressure, that

Don't need them. The transmitter just repeats itself a lot. That you have a complete record is verified on the recieving end, not the sending one.

And by hashes, of course. It's not difficult to verify you have a complete and correct data dump even without checking it against the original.

Needs a new book, obviously, about the coming recession.

Which one, you ask? I just saw a story via slashdot from the Register on AI, with the line "Use cases yet to be fully articulated"

I've seen this before. It was the dot-com bubble in the late nineties, "we've got this thing, and we'll put stuff on it, and work insane, inhumane hours to do it, and go through VC like a starving pig... and figure out how to monetize it later".

So, crypto capital is going to AI, and AI will collapse, resulting in a recession. See, that's the use case, for huge money to short everything.

So, are you the science fiction writer who invented the torment nexus?

https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/09/also-give-us-billions-so-we-can-invent.html

Since we're not talking about political conflagrations and flame war bait, I'll toss out this one for comments, learned and otherwise:

The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00365-3

whitroth 250:

comes back to a combo of game theory ("zero sum" vs "plus sum" vs "minus sum" tactics) and intel visibility (in chess there's no hidden information vs poker there's not only hidden information also false information) with the added hassles that to short sell something you gotta convince someone to lend you their shares in that stock... which means that they'll ask themselves what do you know they don't... and that could well provoke them into digging deeper and selling out before there's a steep downturn...

whereas options (puts vs calls) is a bit more anonymous and nowadays traded without a man-in-middle as with short sells... but still someone has to be convinced you are wrong and they are right while at the same time watching as you are proactively taking action (engaging in higher levels of risk in a mode of greater uncertainty) so again questions are asked...

much of what looks like short sells prior to any steep downturn could well be institutional investors (pension funds, SWFs, etc) with their own insights and hidden information acting fast before the overall market does and selling out to avoid a loss...

pulling off a short sell is tough... back when I had actual skin in the game (cash I could risk without jeopardizing my food 'n rent) between 1990 and 2005, I only spotted a dozen possibilities (not acted upon) and had opportunity to do it exactly once successfully... and still could only got allocated a few hundred shares by my brokerage house (man-in-middle) because I was nobody and my sudden interest was what later I found out was what triggered that trader into digging deeper and his boss told him to send me a fruit basket after their in-house action was short selling 50,000 shares (whilst only allocating me 500)... which was selfish mindset and weaseling typical of those times...

so where we are?

clever advance workups because "money never sleeps"... giga-bucks looking for a home... zillions of cheap CPUs and thousands of clever math PHDs lured away from JPL (and academia) all modeling out what could happen and what should be done... not just the fail of AGI or the epic fail of SDV (self-driving vehicles) or the obvious con of ride-shares as mishandled by Uber and others...

they were expecting another flaring of the Arab-Israeli mess... did you notice how futures in fossil fuels twitched as did shares in airline sector (airplanes are hungry beasts)?

that was very likely pre-defined transactions of selected commodities and companies and sectors which by way of a single click moved a half of a giga-buck into (and out from) those selections... likely took a PHD three months to model it out, IT nerds a month to code it, traders weeks 'n weeks of screaming at one another to puzzle out what exactly to buy and/or sell in what ratios... all ready to do done in seven seconds by a single click...

...and just as soon as video of those 600 missiles flying from Hamas-held territories toward Israeli civilian targets was confirmed there was that 'single click'... never mind the markets were closed there's always someone assigned as 'overwatch' -- whomever that someone was my bet he spilled his coffee and/or pissed himself as reports from Middle East came flooding in -- for weekends and nights to sit in the office playing video games whilst waiting for red lights to flash on an app monitoring conditions worldwide...

because "money never sleeps"

Thomas Jørgensen 249:

...and as part of heading there's an exact count of bytes to be expected and which mode of checksum is embedded...for those truly paranoid there'd be a checksum on every 50 bytes (rather than every 2000 bytes) and then a list of those checksums in the heading (along with a checksum summarizing the checksums)... maybe two different algorithms in use?

whitroth
Erm, no ( I think )
The coming really bad recession/slump will hit when the Chinese property market finally implodes completely, which is going to be soon - probably within the next 12 months.

Important question.
How long before it's "safe" to make non-flame comments on the outbreak of stupidity & arrogance at the E end of the Mediterranean, again?

I'm glad of the ban TBH. That particular subject can instantly turn any thread or forum into a shitshow at the best of times. I think we can all agree that this is not the best of times.

@whitroth

I get the feeling the writer has met enough grifters for a lifetime and probably needs some time to recover before diving into another bubble.

Me too - same reasons: too much instant fury readily on tap. I'm also feeling quite happy to leave it to Charlie not only because it's his blog, but because I think he's correct about all the aspects that really matter.

»Unloading the [flight recorder] data after every trip would be an advantage,«

This has been proposed many times, starting practically when the first flight recorders were installed, but pilot(s union)s have shot it down every single time.

To a first approximation pilots are (still) quite "alpha-male" and the in-cockpit banter reflects that.

A LOT.

MH370 have changed the dynamics of this, but not materially.

»Unloading the [flight recorder] data after every trip would be an advantage,«

This has been proposed many times, starting practically when the first flight recorders were installed, but pilot(s union)s have shot it down every single time.

I understand there is an "erase" button. And it is routine practice to press it at the end of every flight.

»I understand there is an "erase" button«

Not that I have ever heard about or seen ?

Flight Recorders are very defensively designed, and since such a button or electrical circuit might get activated during a crash, its very existence would defeat the purpose of the flight recorder.

Some airlines have secondary recording equipment installed for "corporate" reasons, maybe those have the erase buttons you have heard about ?

My understanding is there are two recorders, one for voice only, a 2nd system for data only (Not sure if it's only control surface positions & power settings, or if it includes data from powerplants*). I can see the plusses for management access to voice, "Does someone on the flight deck have fetid dingoe's kidneys between their ears?" and the aversion of flight officers to management learning what they find amusing.

• If nothing else, it may answer what the crew were concerned with, immediately before lithobraking. **If anything begins running out of spec, it needs to be kn own.

Greg Tingey 254:

sadly, too much tinder atop too high a stack of bone dry logs, this topic

we all want/need to vent... given how there's no winner in war (any war) only varying degrees of how much you end up losing

but yeah 'red card' on it so we have one small corner of the web where there's the collective delusion of unicorns farting rainbows and the world is going to be saved by episode nine of a ten part mini-series

changing topics to something inane and sanity affirming... anyone got recommendations of free web games that are not reflex-dependent? my brains need exercising and preferably nothing violence-centric...

one of my favorites only generates four new boards per day

https://www.brainzilla.com/logic/logic-equations/

I would recommend "the codex of alchemical engineering" but I had a look and it's flash, and flash is dead. There was a much more polished derivative for the PC called "Opus Magnum", which is excellent but not free or web based.

If you want an evil daily word search then cell tower is a decent diversion: https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/

Did a little Googling on CVR erasure. Turns out there is an erase button. Apparently some airline management have used the voice recordings inappropriately (they are to be used only for accident investigation) for management purposes, and also they have being released to the media.

Of course, data can be recovered (like deleting files off hard drives). (Not a bad analogy, as most flight recorders are solid state these days.)

Apparently it is illegal to release these recordings, which is why the NTSB releases transcripts only.

I can kinda see the point: I always warned new teachers to be aware that admin can listen in to classrooms using the PA system with no indication that it is happening, and that some admin do just that.

https://www.ifalpa.org/publications/library/cvr-erase-function--1579

anyone got recommendations of free web games that are not reflex-dependent? my brains need exercising and preferably nothing violence-centric...

Not web games, but if you want to go old-school I quite like the small card games sold by Buttonshy Games. The print-and-play games are cheap, and they have solo games (and solo variants of multi-player games).

https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/button-shy-games

Board Game Geek also has lots of PnP games, indeed annual contests for them, including solo games. The winners are usually very good and can be quite challenging.

https://boardgamegeek.com

It's not 300, but since we've gone this way... cockpit voice recorders. I have no problem with transcripts, given that I have doubt in negative numbers that the pilots are not discussing the hot babe that got on the plane.

And... based on the Yorkshire-Harrowgate tea that I got last year in Mannington, WV (!), and something I read, we just bought a box of Yorkshire Gold by Taylor tea bags, and I'll try it out either this afternoon or tomorrow. (This is for the tea snobs here, who looked down their noses at my PG Tips, and no comments about Taj Mahal, by Brooke Bond.)

Flight Recorders are very defensively designed, and since such a button or electrical circuit might get activated during a crash,

This kinda sounds like considerations pertaining to the fuzing and firing components of nuclear weapons. AIUI, Sandia Laboratories specializes in such things, so perhaps they might have some helpful suggestions.

Sandia Labs advice is probably unnecessary: FDR and CVR design goes back to the 1950s and is a mature field.

(The "black boxes" -- day-glo orange -- are usually mounted in the tail empennage, because fixed-wing aircraft usually crash nose-first so they benefit from having the longest possible crumple zone. They're fireproof against burning jet fuel for a couple of hours, waterproof against dunking in the ocean, shockproof against the kind of jolt loading encountered in a non-survivable violent crash (hundreds to low thousands of gees), and so on.

The CVR records both the pilots' microphone circuits and open mikes in the cockpit (to capture unusual sounds and flight deck alarms as well as speech). However on many aircraft they record a loop of the most recent 30 minutes, because 99% of the time that's all you need to diagnose an accident. (An airliner at cruising speed and altitude -- Mach 0.85 at 40,000 feet -- is only a couple of minutes away from the ground if everything goes pear-shaped at once.)

The FDR records at a minimum the control inputs and, hopefully, also logs a lot of data about the flight surfaces, engine settings, and so on. Just how much depends on the vintage of the FDR, which in turn depends on the age of the aircraft -- a relatively ancient MD-11 or Boeing 727 freighter (some of the latter are still in service in Africa) will record a hell of a lot less than a 2020s-build Boeing 787 or Airbus 350XWB.

Newer FDRs or CVRs use solid-state storage for recording, which is usually better than the old-school magnetic tape storage, but in particularly violent impacts even ruggedized circuit boards epoxied inside a steel armoured box can be shattered and require specialist reassembly in a lab.

Also, the boxes being in the tail means that there's a long cable run between the flight deck and the recorders. So if what goes wrong involves a bomb or missile strike aft of the flight deck the boxes will give you bupkis.

(Source: too many accident investigation documentaries!)

The wikipedia article has a lot of details. Expanding on some of what you said plus more. The history is a bit interesting.

And it's country dependent. So the regs for certification into the UK may vary a bit from the US from the EU, from Canada, from AUS, etc...

Although I'm betting that most of the boxes in use are designed to meet as many regs as possible so the plane can fly where desired.

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

A thought on pensions--the pension age is being raised by the same people who won't hire anyone over 50. And since health care is capricious in the US, reducing Medicare just means killing the last reliable voting demographic for Republicans a lot sooner. I suggest someone will think harder about this later on, but then again, we are talking about Republicans.

thanks to those posting game URLs... it'll take me a couple hours to chew thru 'em

=========

DEPARTMENT OF YOU LACK IMAGINATION TO DREAM THIS NIGHTMARE

"Alabama public library system mistakenly flags children’s book as ‘sexually explicit’ because author’s last name is Gay"

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/10/11/us/alabama-library-marie-louise-gay-reaj/index.html

Where does your water supply come from? Over here they blend that stuff according to where it's going to be sold so that it agrees with the local water. I'm not sure how well that works over international borders.

...chemistry classes banned from teaching stoichiometry of gaseous reactions...

"Alabama public library system mistakenly flags children’s book as ‘sexually explicit’ because author’s last name is Gay"

When I was in high school we read a bit of this book:

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

I wonder if sending copied to Republicans would get their heads to explode before they read it and realized that the word "gay" has a non-sexual meaning too?

Silly thought, I know. The idea that Republicans would actually read a book…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/11/waiting-list-for-allotments-in-england-almost-doubles-in-12-years

Allotments in England are so popular/in such short supply that the waiting list is bonkers.

Are you seeing much guerilla gardening as a response to that? I assume those of you who both garden and wander about your neighbourhoods will be attuned to the sight of unexpected vegetables.

(wrt 'gay' I would normally make some snide comment about The Scuntorpe Effect but Republicans don't believe in research so how would tey know)

just as once upon a Tipper Gore, all Frank Zappa albums carried an adult lyrics warning, even if they had no lyrics.

If you've been around kids for any length of time no talking is very definiely an adult thing...

I wonder if one reason flight voice recorders only record a 30 minute loop because airline pilots are unionized. Having management going over every word they say in the cockpit. Having sloop is a useful compromise: in the event of a crash, it’s critically necessary. Otherwise, the pilots get to talk in relative freedom.

I can't see how that would be possible. There just isn't any land on which you could grow anything in the first place where you could plant something and expect it to remain undisturbed long enough to get harvestable. The only way you'd be able to start off enough plants to beat the failure rate would be to scatter unfeasibly large quantities of seeds everywhere you went, perhaps; and even then you'd most likely find that they all got outcompeted by wild plants and the most you could expect would be something like one manky cabbage saturated with dog piss.

Also, anyone who lives near enough land to be able to even imagine finding enough potential sites will almost certainly have their own garden anyway and so won't need to.

You do occasionally get people sitting and chatting on the ornamental planters outside a police station while surreptitiously poking cannabis seeds into the soil, but I don't think that really counts.

I wonder if one reason flight voice recorders only record a 30 minute loop because airline pilots are unionized. Having management going over every word they say in the cockpit.

Two hours is pretty standard now for solid-state units.

Management shouldn't be listening. In both Canada and the US the TSB is the only organization that can listen to those recordings.

"The CVR recordings are treated differently than the other factual information obtained in an accident investigation. Due to the highly sensitive nature of the verbal communications inside the cockpit, Congress has required that the Safety Board not release any part of a CVR audio recording. Because of this sensitivity, a high degree of security is provided for the CVR audio and its transcript. The content and timing of release of the written transcript are strictly regulated: under federal law, transcripts of pertinent portions of cockpit voice recordings are released at a Safety Board public hearing on the accident or, if no hearing is held, when a majority of the factual reports are made public."

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/Pages/cvr_fdr.aspx

Interestingly, according to Canadian aviation regulations "No person shall erase any communications that have been recorded by a cockpit voice recorder." CAR 605.34(5)

There just isn't any land on which you could grow anything in the first place where you could plant something and expect it to remain undisturbed long enough to get harvestable.

That's useful to know. I'm just not used to that intensity of land use within cities, or that intensity of citizen policing. I'm guessing it more "fuck you, fuck anything that might be useful" rather than "thistles are fine, silverbeet is not"?

For information only - no comments, please!

Moz
We are trying to allieviate matters by getting some people on-board as allotment "helpers" - who then get a share of the produce.
But, I've been a holder since 2008 & it took me over a year, then ( i.e. I applied in 2007 ) - but what a lot of people don't realise is how much actual hard, physical work is required.
OTOH - IF you do it right, often by trial-&-error, or getting advice, then the results are transformative as regards diet & health.

& @ 280 ...
Again, I have planted Jerusalem Artichoke { * Helianthemum tuberosum* } tubers in LBWF ( #Note ) small ornamental plots - & most of them have come up.
Some are now 2+ metres tall, with pretty small sunflowers on top.

One council area I used to live in had a policy of "herbaceous borders" that were deliberately edible herbs and spices. They also had more than a few fruit trees and berry bushes on council land that were outweighed by the natives but still valued.

Current council not so much. Officially they only plant natives and discourage eating even the obviously edible ones (dianella berries!)

https://www.diegobonetto.com/ and of course Diago the urban forager. Making good food fromm the things that he finds. Underground, overground, foraging free...

Ah, the Scunthorpe Problem rides again. Those who cannot remember the past, etc...

I wonder if one reason flight voice recorders only record a 30 minute loop because airline pilots are unionized.

Do you really think that US airline union politics would play any role in the design of Soviet aircraft? Or Brazilian ones? Hint: aviation is international.

A more likely cause is that you need multi-channel recording and CVRs weren't common until the 1970s -- there was one notorious Trident crash in the UK (British European Airways flight 548) where the exact cause couldn't be determined because there was no CVR at all, just an FDR. That was a British airliner type that first flew in 1962 and entered service in 1964 -- approximately a Boeing 727 competitor. Anyway, CVRs back then ran on a multi-track tape loop that didn't need rewinding, much like an 8-track tape cartridge.

Moz, I'm guessing you've never visited the UK?

British cities are dense. A typical British dwelling has about a third the floor space of its Australian equivalent (as well as being much more expensive) and most of them share a wall with their neighbours -- even in "suburbia" (which an American would call "dense urban").

No, but I also didn't think I was talking about growing veges inside. I kind of assume that Britain has parks and other non-paved land at least in small doses. I watch a bit of canal boating youtube and those seem to show gardenable space. And guerilla gardening has had a wee media moment in the UK, which suggests that the place is not entirely covered with tiny british homes.

We've discussed before that over here plot sizes in "community gardens" tend to be much smaller than a UK allotment, I'm guessing 10m²-20m². But we do have at least some of those.

I am inclined to agree somewhat with this article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2014/oct/22/guerrilla-gardening-uk-failure albeit the author seems to be focussed more on decorative plants rather than people gardening to survive (which I understand annoys your ruling class in at least two ways).

There's this really amusing photograph of T(he)rump. Seated in court, watching his secrets revealed, knowing he failed to hide 'em.

Looks like a deer caught in the headlights, as he's publicly revealed in massive 'n meticulous detailing as an utter fraud.

Epic fail, him.

(And no, it will never alter those hardcoded towards fascism 2.0 but leastwise he'll be convicted enough times to keep him busy in his declining years. Unless he wins the nomination and then general election. And now I'm reminded of why I've been looking for a rainbow-farting unicorn as distraction. Dang.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/10/trump-fraud-trial-property-value-wealth/

»I wonder if one reason flight voice recorders only record a 30 minute loop because airline pilots are unionized.«

Quite the contrary, pilot unions have been pushing for longer recordings.

The 30 minutes limitation comes from the fundamental physics of endless tape design.

(The US Stereo-8 (aka "eight-track") cartridges topped out at 25min tape.)

Ah, the Scunthorpe Problem rides again. Those who cannot remember the past, etc...

I recall a "security program" where you entered the last 4 digits of your credit card number and it then checked emails and posts for those numbers. The number of false positives was astonishing

It's not because we're special* for sure, the size of the market has given the United States outsize influence. The various reactionaries are working, unintentionally, to fix this, since many of the qualities that made us so are considered insults that cannot be borne by someone with money and access. Deeply sorry the British .01% seem to have been persuaded by the artfully crafted stupid.

*Too often, not in a complimentary way.

Perhaps primitive AI is mimicking the character of the organizations specified them.

"Scunthorpe Problem"
Made even worse that, before WWII, there was a direct railway ( GCR then LNER ) service between Scunthorpe & Penistone ...
Nowadays you have to change at Doncaster ...

Tim H
Apologies for the source, but: This resume shows just in how many ways the US authoritarians & fascists are working to overthrow their own republic.

Now, this is interesting - Max Hastings is going to vote "Lab" because the tories are too far right - & loonies!

Presumably the change at Doncaster has prophylactics available ;) ? The band of reactionaries that call themselves "conservative" misunderstand what made the United Kingdom & United States wealthy, mistakenly thinking they can rip out everything that offends them, without breaking the Nations. I agree the "Conservatives" on this side have had a soft spot in their head for the confederacy for a long time, being October, I'm trying to visualize a zombie "Jubilation T. Cornpone"*. Any such reanimated Confederacy would create a power vacuum and opportunity for the current secondary and tertiary powers and the Dollar might drop faster than if it was made of gold. JRRT said it best with the words he crafted for Theoden "Oft evil will doth evil mar". the brighter wealthy may also have a word in...

*I suspect Al Capp's inspiration was Confederate General Sterling Price.

The various reactionaries are working, unintentionally, to fix this, since many of the qualities that made us so are considered insults that cannot be borne by someone with money and access

Tim --

I read your post several times, and still do not understand what you are talking about. Especially in connection to Charlie's post you were replying to. Care to elaborate?

@Greg (and Moz):

Perhaps British cities should look into the concept of edible cities.

Here's more: The Edible City Network

And before you all jump on the point that this could never work in the UK due to its latitude, please note that one of the front runner cities on this list is Oslo (which lies north of the very northernmost tip of Great Britain).

See if I can retrace my steps well enough... OGH can sometimes be hasty with Americans who overlook the fortuitous chances that were taken advantage of over the years, my post, in part, implied that if the reactionaries win, American superiority will soon not be a problem, as the reactionaries will be unable to make their shambling, crudely reanimated Confederate wonderland duplicate everything our accident of history does. BTW, thanks for reading.

Do you really think that US airline union politics would play any role in the design of Soviet aircraft? Or Brazilian ones? Hint: aviation is international.

Yes, aviation is international. So is the pilots’ union, the Air Line Pilots Association, International.

What a mess. I'll be mopping up for another three hours, at this rate.

At 5:00 AM, was awakened by * noise * and to defend myself from a pachydermic invader, I had to shoot an elephant in my pajamas.

How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.

[ doomscrolling has me on verge of screaming ]

»Air Line Pilots Association, International. «

To a first approximation you can safely assume that anything with "International" in its name is something local to USA, possibly including Canada also.

So also in this case.

The commercial world wide airline industry is dominated by Boeing and Airbus. Russia has an industry but it has issues. Talk to that Mexican airline which has a collection of Russian passenger jets with only 10% or so flying at any one time. (BEFORE THE UKRAINE MESS). China is working hard to have a complete home grown industry but it is taking a while. There just a lot of tech they still have to license from Boeing and Airbus. And stealing it will not work as they will be denied certs to fly in much of the world.

And the airlines based in Europe and the US are by far the major buyers of airliners.

Anyway, if you don't want to use things that Boeing and Airbus offer as standard you're going to be going off the standard price chart. And most of the time it is not worth the price or hassle.

That's just life.

Go back to the 70s/80s and try and buy a larger computer that wasn't made by IBM. You could but ....

Cities are dense, sure. But a decent chunk of the population lives in towns which are a bit less so, or has land on the edge of town which is not exactly in use.

When I moved to where I live now, there used to be a gypsy/Traveller family living in a caravan down a track on the edge of town. (Might still be there; I haven't seen them since Covid though, but anyway.) They had a horse or two, but they didn't exactly have a field on hand, so they used to tether the horses to graze on the grass verges along the road out of town.

One day the traffic out of town was bad - and when I got there, I found it was because the horse was stood in the road with an untied rope trailing behind it. Everyone was trying to squeeze round it whilst it grazed the opposite grass verge, and no-one else seemed to have the idea of "move the horse instead". I pulled up, led the horse back to the verge, tied it up properly, and good deed done for the day.

The point is, there's a fair bit of spare ground hanging around, and unless you're actually inconveniencing other people or making it look unattractive, mostly the council don't care enough to do anything about it.

if the reactionaries win, American superiority will soon not be a problem, as the reactionaries will be unable to make their shambling, crudely reanimated Confederate wonderland duplicate everything our accident of history does

I see. You are right, but it is of little comfort to us stuck here. Should this happen, the best (or rather least bad) outcome would be New England seceding. But I would not count on it. And if it does, there would be a war within two generations.

As someone who grew up in far western (it does matter) Kentucky, went through Pittsburgh, Connecticut, and now North Carolina. I see things changing. Maybe. The old farts are trying their best to stay in power. But the demographic reality is that my birth year, 1954, was the peak of our population. And we're declining. In 10 years, give or take, we'll mostly be out of power.

In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia (those all all closest to me) things are changing. And the old farts are trying hard to make it so the younger fools can't change things. Because heaven forbid the people still alive after you die don't want to live your life. Trying real hard are they.

The old farts want things to stay the same but also want new industry and high tech. Which means college grads sticking around and and under 40s moving in. And they just don't seem to think or vote "correctly" in their politics.

The next 10 years are going to be rough. At least near me.

Idaho, well, they seem to be locked in. Tennessee, maybe. Florida is thriving as an old fart mecca so they may be permanently stuck in the past. Texas is looking at more of a 20 years demographic switch. Or maybe 10. It's harder to tell. They keep bringing in younger folks who don't vote correctly.

But the younger folks also tend to vote less. Somewhat. Maybe.

Anyway, buckly up.

And from my watching various comments go by here and then reading the news, the UK seems to be in a similar but different set of changes. Ditto Europe.

But again. The next 10 years will be rough.

he's publicly revealed in massive 'n meticulous detailing as an utter fraud

What I found amusing was the Florida politician who's pushing for his tax assessments to be revisited on the basis that his declared value is so far from the assessed value that clearly the assessment was wrong and should be rectified. :-)

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4240476-florida-democrat-asks-county-to-increase-mar-a-lago-tax/

"...mostly the council don't care enough to do anything about it."

This is often true, or close enough to true. But they still come along with a great big mower every couple of months and scalp the whole lot back regardless.

Those horse guys (they show up round here as well - I always like to see them and know that there still are some) are OK because they can just toddle over to a bit that hasn't been done yet, but vegetables require a bit more permanence.

With bits of spare land within cities, then as well as the obsession with this weird idea that certain species of plants can't possibly be allowed to complete their natural growth cycle for no apparent reason being a more frequent source of disruption than outside, there are at least two species of wanker who could create problems: the more numerous basic orc type who simply love to smash and destroy living things that aren't even in their way, and the less frequently observed outdoors but significantly more venomous jealous cunt type, who if they realise that something is someone else's method of getting something for free, will direct specific and determined effort towards destroying or sabotaging it because being able to not have to pay for something is one of the most evil characteristics ever so whoever's doing it deserves to die.

Our water comes from the Potomac and Patunxet Rivers.

My late wife was annoyed that "gay" had become "male homosexual", with no other usage allowed. She liked "gay", as in "and carefree".

And to travel between PNS and CLH requires two changes.

So that well-known trans-Pennine folk fusion travelling entertainment combo, Penis Tone and the Clit Heroes, usually prefer just to spend their time travelling back and forth on the middle leg entertaining passengers between HUD and MCV. This being also the busiest stretch, they get bigger audiences that way.

I don't know what you did, but I would have turned my car to block the road so that no idiot cut around while I was removing the horse from the roadway, doing their best to kill me and the horse.

Of course, I'd have expected one or more morons to honk at me for blocking the road.

There WAS a phrase in the US that made it into beer commercials and similar for a while.

The Gay 90s. Referring to the 1890s.

Poof. No more.

Aha, that sounds as if, in terms of the stage of river evolution at least, your water supply is fairly similar to mine. Late stage minimal gradient slow alluvial plain rivers which at their more youthful ends have cut through mountain ranges, and have also gone through quite a few other towns upstream, have I got that right?

I'll try and remember to do a quick comparison of the geology and ecology of the basins. I think there's a reasonable chance that if I buy some of that tea locally and send it to you, the blend will suit your water similarly well to how it suits mine. It's usually a pretty dependable choice over here if you are stuck needing to choose from whatever the local corner shops have got.

I didn't know you had that word in US slang. Thought it was a very British one...

A LOT of the US sits on clumps of limestone. But the distribution is very uneven. So we get all kinds of flavors of water depending on the source. Then toss in granite mountains for some.

Then there was the well water at my grandfather's that I really liked as a child. It was very much saturated with iron from decades of rust in the pipes and tank(s) on the farm.

You have my email? If not, you can get me via my website, https://mrw.5-cent.us

Pigeon
Both of us wrong!
From the National Timetables:
Table 27 ... Penistone / Barnsley / Sheffield - trains originating from Huddersfield Table 21 ... Sheffield / Doncaster / Scunthorpe ... Grimsby or Cleethorpes

Have you seen Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection?

Bo Lindbergh 317:

thx...looking... hmmm... whole bunch... huh... cool

• There WAS a phrase in the US that made it into beer commercials and similar for a while…The Gay 90s. Referring to the 1890s….Poof. No more.*

How…..queer….that it went poof.

Apparently in the UK it was the Naughty Nineties.

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

I haven't thought about them for a long time, thanks!

She liked "gay", as in "and carefree".

So do many of my gay friends. Some of them use the word a lot, quite pointedly meaning the happy and carefree version.

One funny one is "you disapprove of the gay lifestyle? That's crazy, who would choose to be careworn and miseable... oh, you poor thing".

The berries or the fruit(y Italian)? Either way you're welcome :)

Guardian has another in the series today: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/oct/12/weve-just-grown-our-own-pumpkin-allotments-wont-feed-the-world-jay-rayner

Reminding us that growing veges at home is generally a hobby rather than a major source of food. I grew up working on farms, although mostly I was paid so I was better off than many of my friends. Farm kids often don't get paid until they're old enough to work legally, and sometimes not even then unless they work for someone else. So my "vege garden" is very light on labour by hobby standards, and I mostly grow stuff like silverbeet and pumpkin that self-seed and self-care (ie, I mow them to keep them where I want them)

Also reminding me that a lot of my work goes into stopping the weeds grown by the neighbours from taking over my place (I discovered oxalis in my lawn yesterday... it's one of those "sit down and microweed one square foot at a time" ones. Sigh). But at least the brief show of rain last night wet the garden even if it didn't put any real water in th tanks.

As encountered in the UK it usually seems to be meaning "happy, carefree" in a healthy innocent childlike pleasures, lambkins gambolling on the lea kind of sense. It isn't really the right sort of word to describe that decade; it does get used that way occasionally, but mostly just because someone is bad at choosing words.

I may be wrong, but it appears to me that all the jokes about the other meaning it acquired later on have now all become so stale and unfunny that nobody even thinks them any more, to the extent that it is just about beginning to be possible to use it in the original sense again without people getting confused. You have to be a good writer addressing an intelligent audience to get away with it, but it isn't so long since only a very bad writer would have thought it possible.

I notice that Blackadder seems to like both "gay" and "queer" in their older meanings, likely for comedic effect.

Lambs gamboling always makes me think of Japanese meat packaging. "so cute, so fluffy, so tasty".

(oddly we mostly get that with eggs here, pictures of 10 hens per hectare in a pretty rural landscape then the fine print says "cage eggs")

to the extent that it is just about beginning to be possible to use it in the original sense again without people getting confused.

Definitely not in the US.

Does "fag" still mean a cigarette in the UK? Don't even go there in the US unless you're ready to defend yourself. Or know your surroundings really well.

I work physical jobs, and have had managers who were suspicious if you didn't look careworn and miserable.

Definitely not in the US.

I suppose Zorro, the Gay Blade is over 40 years old now, but maybe it's more about which USA we're talking about. But sure, it's more in the same usage as Blackadder.

Fag can also mean "servant" or "doing servant work". Fagging apparently used to be a big part of boy's boarding school life.

People also suck fags, because cigarettes are called that. Some really, really like sucking fags. And yes, I've known people to say "just popping down the vathhouse for a fag".

And then there's the contraction of faggot, which I suspect came from the slur but I've heard "the gays" use it to describe firewood too.

When I say "people" I realise I mostly mean my ex-flatmate. Who loved puns and language games as well as men. I fear he may have been a bad influence. Yeah, that's it. I blame him. I never appreciated puns before I lived with him, not me. And I definitely never said anything rude or sexual. Not ever.

KEB (she, her) @ 232:

David L @ 225: It's George Santos you're referring to.

Matt Santos was a character on The West Wing series in seasons 6 & 7. He succeeded President Bartlet.

I wonder if that's where George got his last name from? Still leaves the question where he got the first name from?

Made it to Albuquerque, NM. The eclipse is on Saturday. My second set of hotel reservations were honored.

Won't be able to sort out the problem with how the hotel (different hotel) screwed screwed up the first one until I get back home.

Where Rte 66 crosses Rte 66, the proverbial reason Bugs Bunny keeps making a wrong turn there.

I also watch a lot of aircraft accident investigation documentaries, mostly on YouTube (Mentour Pilot's is my favorite).

I've seen a number of them saying that pilots turn off the aircraft's CVR by pulling a circuit breaker after a landing, when it has been preceded by some sort of flight incident that their company or the FAA will need to investigate. This prevents voice data on the CVR from being overwritten.

I don't know if this can be done with a FDR.

He seems to channel George Costanza in his desire to pretend to be what he is not (i.e. successful).

Hehe. It's been a family joke since I was little to react to the sight of newborn lambs in a field by shouting "Mint sauce!" at them.

"Does "fag" still mean a cigarette in the UK?"

Yes. It's absolutely the standard meaning. It's also probably the most common slang word for a cigarette, so it's the standard "in both directions", as it were.

The insulting meaning is of course known, but its existence generally doesn't cause much confusion; you've nearly always got the cue from the person who's about to use it like that having already given off behavioural signals indicating "I am being a wanker" and/or "I am imitating an American" before they utter the word, so when they do utter it you already know what they're going to mean.

For it to be an actual problem the situation generally has to involve the internet. I once had a review on Amazon repeatedly rejected by the "community standards" automatic censor, and couldn't work out why - there wasn't anything even remotely rude in it, and of course that stupid bot never tells you what part of the review it's objecting to, it just expects you to be able to read its programmer's mind or something. I eventually managed to get the review to go through by inserting d.o.t.s...b.e.t.w.e.e.n...e.v.e.r.y...l.e.t.t.e.r, and then sent a copy to customer services as part of a bug report against their censor. Turned out that what was setting it off was me talking about doing rough calculations on the back of a fag packet. FFS. I pointed out to them that look, I am British, I'm using the .co.uk version of the site, that expression is a bog standard piece of British slang and nobody in Britain is going to think it's rude; your British censor is misconfigured because a British word for a cigarette happens to mean something rude in a foreign language, so fix it: only use that rule in the bot for the language/website domain it actually relates to (ie. en-US/.com), and don't try and redefine my own native language thank you very much. I think it went in one ear and out the other though.

It is of course derived from "faggot" = "bundle of firewood" via the combustion reference.

We also have another meaning, which is about effort and exhaustion. "I'm fagged out" = "I'm exhausted"; "too much of a fag" = "too much of a chore"; or the meaning Moz alluded to, a younger pupil at some shithole school like Eton who is forced to perform trivial menial tasks for an older pupil under threat of violence (with full official support: if the victim tries to complain to the adult authorities, the victim receives additional adult punishment, but the bully receives nothing) - though fortunately that meaning is a bit out of date these days compared to Tom Brown times.

And yet another meaning is a kind of meatball thing, made of coarsely minced meat, bits of onion, a bit of flour or something as a (rather loose and weak) binder, and stuff, in a thick rich meaty gravy; roughly the size of a tennis ball or perhaps a little smaller. I don't know exactly what the technical distinctions of the recipe are, but we have "faggots" and we have "meatballs" and they are unmistakably different when you come to eat them. They are made by a company called "Brains"; they come in a thick aluminium foil dish; you take the lid off, stick the whole thing under the grill for 10 minutes, and serve. I used to get them for dinner all the time when I was little. They are less common these days, but you can still get them and they're still exactly the same as the ones 50 years ago and just as delicious.

British people do not find any of this confusing.

It's a bit like "chips" and "chips" in Oz. If the pub's kitchen is closed, you can ask for a bowl of chips, while if it's closed you can ask for a packet of chips with a bowl. You can say "hot chips" to disambiguate, but it's seldom necessary. Likewise the term "crisps" is well known, if a bit twee, and can likewise be used to disambiguate. You generally don't call anything at all "fries" unless it's an American chain or there's a written menu in front of you which says that, though it's rare to find that outside American chains and where it does appear it is likely to be something like shoestring fries, things that are distinct from chips in the general case anyway.

Pigeon 336:

here in the USA, we park our cars in the driveway, drive our cars on the parkway

we buy jumbo shrimp in supermarkets

and politicians in the Republican Party call themselves 'pro-life' despite 'red states' (I'm looking at you Mississippi) having a 11X death rate for their children from gun-related violence and an absolute refusal to extend government-funded health care to children living poverty, nor will they allow free nutritious meals to be provided in all their elementary schools

language is as much about inverting meaning as it is to convey actual information

»here in the USA,«

The way both language and smile-simulating grimaces are weaponized in USA is truly a thing to behold for us foreigners.

"here in the USA, we park our cars in the driveway, drive our cars on the parkway"

Ha, yes, we do the first one here too, but the second...

When the railways were built it was very common for the stations to be sited for the constructional/operational convenience of the railway, rather than the convenience of the town they were supposed to be for. So you'd get the station not in the town, but a couple of miles outside on the road leading to it, still named for the town but when you got off the train there you'd be wondering where the heck the town actually was.

When the distance got up as far as more like 5 miles, the railway would at least acknowledge the inappropriate combination of site and name by sticking "Road" after the name. So for example we got the station for the town of Bodmin, which is 5 miles away from Bodmin, and they think that distance really is too much to just call the station "Bodmin" anyway, so it is named "Bodmin Road" because it is unarguably on the road that goes to Bodmin.

There were quite a lot of these.

Following the mass closures of the 50s and 60s they began to realise that perhaps they had taken the closure idea a bit too far, and there were now some really quite large groupings of population that had been left without a railway service and really could do with one. So they began to open stations to serve some of these areas. Of course they weren't going to actually build any new track, they just built a station at the easiest possible point alongside track that was already there, so they tended to end up with the same kind of discrepancies between location and name, and they took the same approach to naming them: use the name of the town for the station to indicate that that's where it was supposed to serve, but also tag some other word onto the end of the name to indicate that the station was in fact somewhere else.

It ended up that quite a lot of these stations came into being simply as rebuilds/reopenings of some of the original "something Road" stations that had been closed, for basically the same reasons that the site had been picked originally. All they really changed was to choose a different word to tag on as an indicator that the site was in the middle of nowhere. This time round, they picked "Parkway".

So now we have quite a lot of stations that used to be called "something Road" which went away for a bit and then came back again as "something Parkway". I'd guess that in as far as anyone thinks about it at all, people probably mostly figure that "Parkway" is a word made up to mean "station in the middle of nowhere miles away from the town it's supposed to be for", just as "Road" used to be, because that's the only context anyone ever sees it in.

Actually, it isn't. The first station they reopened in this manner was Stoke Gifford, which is a village about 10 miles north of Bristol on the London-South Wales main line. During the time that the station had been closed, they had built a new motorway that runs close past the site.

Now absolutely everyone invariably refers to motorways by their reference number, because that's what they're called on all the signs. I think this one is the M32. So everyone calls it the M32 and nobody ever thinks of it as anything else.

But in fact motorways often do have actual names in words. I don't know why because no fucker ever uses them at all ever and most people don't know they even exist; they're proper Beware of the Leopard stuff. And the M32 has a name in words: it is "the Bristol Parkway", probably because someone had been to the US on holiday and thought it was a nice-sounding word or something. So they named the reopened station "Bristol Parkway" after the road, and then copied that word to use for all the subsequent middle-of-nowhere stations because the station name usage was the only one any real people had ever encountered.

So, while you may drive on your parkways, we misunderstood your idea and put trains on them instead.

So, while you may drive on your parkways, we misunderstood your idea and put trains on them instead.

This reminded me of something we have here in Finland, loaned from English.

We have obviously personal cars, and they need to be stored somewhere when not driven. This is, to my understanding, called 'parking' in English.

So we have these places which are named like 'Tapiola Park' which are, well, car parks. I'm not a native English speaker, and I understand that there are quite a few varieties of them anyway, so language usage might differ, but for me the mental image from 'Tapiola Park' is more like a relatively open area with grass, trees, bushes and other vegetation and usually some footpaths and benches and stuff like that.

In Finnish, a car park is 'parkkipaikka' and translating is hard, so I kind of understand, though these places don't seem to have any Finnish names, presumably because English-speaking people are so common, Finnish-speaking people are not, and most of the people would like to visit parks anyway when they are visiting. (The ones living here could perhaps learn the useful words in Finnish, too, but I just live here and am a native Finnish speaker so can't really speak about people who have moved here from abroad.)

loaned from English.

I think the correct expression here is borrowed from English. Again, not a native, and this loan/lend/borrow thing is something I never seem to learn properly...

So you'd get the station not in the town, but a couple of miles outside on the road leading to it, still named for the town

Same with airports today, if not more so (airports need lots of wide open flat space to concrete over for runways and aprons and so on, so they're almost always a long way out of town).

But it's worth noting that the big build-out of railways in the UK happened circa 1830-1860. And the definition of "outside the town" that applied back then assumed walking or horse-drawn transport, so an hour outside town would mean 3-5km, which today barely qualifies as middle suburbia. Land was cheaper back then and suburban sprawl really kicked in during the 20th century inter-war period with motorized bus and tram for local transit, so a lot of those previously middle-of-nowhere stations got built around. (Random example: Berwick-upon-Tweed's station is outside the old Roman walls, half a mile to a mile from the city centre. Which today means it's off to one side of the city centre and well within the city as it expanded. Again, Durham: IIRC the station has been engulfed by the university campus. And so on.)

Better than that, it's a loan word, meaning it's been borrowed. I kid you not.

As mentioned before, English doesn't have loan words, it just steals them and now they're proper English words. Like parka, curry and ammonia 😛 (Inuit, Tamil and Egyptian respectively)

A different set / example of Stupidity & Arrogance - any better &/or educated guesses as to what the US "House" is actually going to do, please?

loaned from English.

I think the correct expression here is borrowed from English. Again, not a native, and this loan/lend/borrow thing is something I never seem to learn properly...

in the local (UK English) where I grew up, "lend" and "borrow" were often used the opposite from standard english.

"can you borrow us your rubber"

Better than that, it's a loan word, meaning it's been borrowed. I kid you not.

Yeah, I think that's why I often confuse the words.

Though passing things from one person to another for various reasons seems to often be important for language users, so there're a lot of distinctions there. See for example verbs for giving and receiving in Japanese, where they depend also on your relative status, in ways not all verbs do.

"...for me the mental image from 'Tapiola Park' is more like a relatively open area with grass, trees, bushes and other vegetation and usually some footpaths and benches and stuff like that."

And you have that completely right. That is exactly what I would expect "Tapiola Park" to mean, and exactly what the various places in this town called "something Park" are like.

The places where people leave their cars while they go and do non-car things are called "something Car Park".

(If you were going to be really pedantic, "car-parking site" or similar would be more technically accurate than "car park", but people would think you were weird, and "car park" is what absolutely everyone calls them.)

Yep, loads of those. "Can you lend me a fiver until Friday" vs. "Can I lend a fiver off you while Friday"... both mean the same thing, as do the other two possible combinations. And somehow nobody gets confused. "Learn" being used to mean both "learn" and "teach" is another common one.

Greg,

(1) Put forward Jim Jordan as speaker.

(2) Fail to vote for him.

(3) Try with McHenry/McCarthy and fail to vote for him/them, also.

(4) Scratch head and a(r)s(s)e.

(5) Make like it's 65,000,000BC again.

Don't forget your Dictator's Playbook: "Chaos is Good", because it incentivises a supposed need for a "Strongman Leader".

On a longer term -- should Trump get back into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave -- there will be a show down between the Supremes and the President. The Supremes at that point don't stand a chance.

Actually, I do have one question for our US readership:

What happens if a Congressperson resigns in disgust? Is there an election or does the State Governor make an appointment?

Faggots are traditionally made with offal as their meat component. Checking a box of Brains' faggots from the freezer, those are made with pork liver and pork rind, but a fair bit of wheat flour and the like too

Proper faggots are a pain to find round here (Herts/Cambs borders), though I suspect I could find them if I looked hard enough. Or of course there are butchers online, such as here - good picture of a caul-wrapped faggot or two

Brains faggots are nice enough that I have them in the freezer, but they do seem very different from the non-Brains ones

What happens if a Congressperson resigns in disgust? Is there an election or does the State Governor make an appointment?

If a member of the House of Representatives resigns, there's a special election held to fill their place, i.e. the seat remains empty until the election is conducted.

If a senator resigns, the governor of the state they represent appoints someone to serve the remainder of the term.

So, using current events, if George Santos is removed from the House of Representatives for an growing number of financial misdeeds, there will be a special election to fill his seat. When Diane Feinstein died in office, the governor of California appointed a person to serve the remainder of her term.

there's always a happy surprise to be found on the net... if I read enough posts... a map! a map! with "992 labor actions found in 1561 locations"

thank you, Cory Doctorow

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

Greg Tingey 345:

That article mentions: A third option would be for Republicans to agree with Democrats on a consensus Republican candidate.

What it skips over is not so much a long shot as an earthquaking shake up: A third option would be for Republicans to agree with Democrats on a consensus Democrat candidate.

Not so much unlikely as obliging lots 'n lots of guys in utter denial to acknowledge, that the following is an accurate summary: (a) Republicans as a group are dysfunctional verging upon 'epic fail' (b) as individuals there are Republicans who are either utterly brain dead or having been suborned by Putin are in his thrall (c) the nation needs governance in the short term as well rational policies in the long term (d) being out-numbered the best Republicans can hope for is a negotiated withdrawal from modes of (failed) White Supremacy and Christian Nationalist wet dreams (e) no it's not the clothes that make you look fat its the fat from over-eating unhealthy foods making you look fat.

Nobody will admit to any of items "a" thru "e" -- never mind all of 'em before it gets worse. Much, much worse. So, we here are, watching crazytown; hope piled in one hand, shitting into the other, bleakly knowing which fills up first.

Not just Washington.

There's a barbarian horde literally slaughtering unarmed civilians and the only possible response is stopping 'em from raping-looting-burning-killing but there are those cheering 'em onwards and upwards. And now it's come to our attention Harvard-educated scumbags are supporting them[2]. In response to that act of mis-applied sympathy, American CEOs want to blacklist 'em[2] as a gesture not of support to civilian victims on both sides, but clearly posturing to be seen as having that level of power over employment, nation-wide. (Much as Steve Jobs and other CEOs tried a not-so-secret arrangement[3] preventing valued employees from be hired away for more pay as demonstration they own peasants not employ citizens.)

And then there's the shitstorm of utter disinformation 'n clueless misinformation on Z -- or is it called G this week? -- muddying the mess.

As if this was not bad enough, there's an all too-impossible-to-back-down ultimatum in place, no water until the barbarian horde frees its hostages, which is just not going to happen before unarmed civilians on the other side start dying of thirst.

There's no end to crazytown. In fact, it looks like it's city boundaries are expanding[1].

So now you-all know why I'm looking for something more challenging than idle click games to distract me. That, or finding a discount sourcing of vodka by the case.

=+=+=+=

[1] don't ask about oil contract futures... and you should also avoid reading up on projections of bad harvests this year for Asia... no really... don't

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/10/13/investing/jpmorgan-q3-earnings-dimon-israel-ukraine/index.htm

[2] What a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate who really controls employment in the USA

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/oct/12/harvard-letter-israel-hamas-calls-name-students

[3] Intel CEO Paul Otellini tried to hide and downplay a "global gentleman's agreement" with Google.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-unredacted-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-paul-otellini

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-jan-23-la-fi-tn-no-hire-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-20130123-story.html#:~:text=Emails%20to%20and%20from%20the,recruit%20one%20another's%20top%20talent.

And the Hollywood strike might be back on because management looks to be reversing course. { RUMORS BUT CREDIBLE }

Meanwhile Google is trying to hide the evidence of their crimes as it is revealed in court.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/

What happens if a Congressperson resigns in disgust? Is there an election or does the State Governor make an appointment?

Actually each state is on their own. For both Senators and House members. In most cases the governor can appoint a replacement and/or the state calls a special election. Depending on how soon the next election is, a special election may not happen. The calendar window and other details vary by state.

any better &/or educated guesses as to what the US "House" is actually going to do, please?

Skipping over the impulse to make a joke about Henny Youngman.

Not a clue. There are no outcomes that the betting line puts at 50% or more. Likely few that would even rate at 10%. Unless you talk to people (House members) who are just sloganeering.

A few non crazy R's partnering with D's ... I'd rate as a 10% chance. Maybe. But a D speaker. Wow. Or even an R speaker in that situation would be problematic. For day to day operation of the chamber. It would require a rules re-write. And getting everything in place in secret (which would be required) ahead of time would be hard. And this would be a total political end of career for the R's that take part. Total. Just no ifs, ands, or buts. Think of Liz C.

Oh, and to make that happen MIGHT require McHenry to go along. Otherwise it would have to be a surprise during a session called just to vote for the speaker. And McHenry as the temp guy can basically only do that. Call for a session to elect a speaker. And the R's don't want to call for a vote unless they have what they think is a sure thing to avoid a repeat of January's embarrassing mess.

Think of the board game Diplomacy only with 435 players.

Now back to UK politics. It's more fun to throw rocks at the other guy.

Here in Canada I might go hiking or play a sport in a park, but I leave my car in a parking lot. I have heard the term 'carpark' but only used by people who are not from Canada. An additional term is a 'parkade' for one of those multilevel parking lots, usually with fees.

"Fag" has one meaning here, and it is pejorative. I have noticed some subtlety of usage in that it often does not refer to homosexual men, but it always refers to someone that the speaker does not like. Personally I have not found nor looked for an opportunity to use it in conversation since I acquired a clue around age 18.

Cigarettes are called 'smokes' or 'butts', or just cigarettes.

'borrow' - to receive a loan 'lend' - to provide a loan 'loan' - the terms of an actual transfer of money or goods with expectation of repayment.

Occasionally 'loan' gets mixed with 'lend' but the meanings are very clear. I go to the bank to borrow money, they lend me money by providing me with a loan.

Also in Canada: Chips apply to 'fries' and 'crisps'. Occasionally we use 'fries' for the deep fried or oven roasted version, but we never use 'crisps'.

I have never seen the term 'parkway' used except in the name of a road or street - most likely named by someone not from here.

For real fun we could get into the neverending migration of meanings for various body parts. 'Fanny' means very different things in different parts of the anglosphere.

»A few non crazy R's partnering with D's ... I'd rate as a 10% chance.«

A guy who has studied governing bodies as "mechanisms", told me that competently designed assemblies have a relief valve for gridlock, where a person not elected to the assembly can become the (non-voting) speaker.

As I understand it, the HoR is one of those, and if so, I cannot imagine that option is not being explored right now.

But I agree that the chances of it actually happening are not particular good.

Even just finding somebody who is certifiably "non-partisan" enough is going to be hard.

Where it has been done, the stuckee seems to often come from arts or sciences, rather than law, business or entertainment.

But even having found such a person, convincing them is going to be even harder…

Going back to January, I made the comment here that there are between 10 and 20 Rs who'd rather burn the place down than not get their way. They are now working hard at it.

No matter who the speaker is unless that person goes along with the fire bugs they are going to do their best to wreak havoc. To them cooperation is a very bad thing. (My brother, who is not elected to anything, is on their side. Oy Vey.) And funding expires in a month.

And there are another 100 R's who want to go along with radical remodeling with a bull dozer.

Wheeeee.

Howard NYC
The Grauniad has posted a piece - that strongly suggests that Hamas have actually pushed Israelis "over the edge" ...
Though murdering & raping your way through a Peace Rock Festival will do that, even without beheading babies.

If Hamas murder all the hostages, as I suspect they are stupid & arrogant ( Notice my harping on that? ) enough to do ... I really don't even want to think about Israel's responses.

David L
There are between 10 and 20 Rs who'd rather burn the place down than not get their way. They are now working hard at it. - and other people have FINALLY - started to notice this. About time.

funding ends in a month - and then all US guvmint employees gat no pay ...
How long before the actual US guvmint "Defaults on its debt" ????
Causing a total financial crash - do the R's want this, or are they too Stupid & Arrogant to care?

Mmmm, that picture is making me feel a bit hungry. Wonder if there's a Worcs supplier. Might have a buzz round the town next week and see what I can find.

The "baby beheading" this was apparently a single source, uncorroborated. Sounds a lot like the "Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies out of neonatal incubators to steal them from the hospital" story that did the rounds in 1991/92 in the run-up to the Kuwait war ... the "eye witness" turned out later to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA and hadn't actually been in Kuwait City for the event she claimed to have seen.

(And again, see also "Hun horror" in Belgium in 1914-16, allegations of German soldiers bayoneting babies and nuns. This shit is a standard hot-button and whenever you see/hear it you should assume it's propaganda unless/until you get corroboration.)

I'm afraid things have gotten beyond the stage of hostages now. But I think it's time to drop the subject. Remember I banned it earlier? I'm now going to uphold the ban and shut up about it. I urge you to follow suit.

There are between 10 and 20 Rs who'd rather burn the place down than not get their way. They are now working hard at it. - and other people have FINALLY - started to notice this. About time.

This article suggests that unreasonableness is more-or-less required for the politically ambitious Republican Politician to make a name for themselves.

Unfortunately, the job of Speaker requires flexibility and the ability to compromise.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/12/matt-gaetz-conservative-media-00121095

... any better &/or educated guesses as to what the US "House" is actually going to do, please?

The GOP is truly f**ked on this issue. My hope is that enough of the few remaining moderate Republicans will eventually give up in frustration and vote with Democrats to elect house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House.

Still a long shot, but it seems to me this is more likely than enough Republicans getting their act together to elect a Republican Speaker.

If nobody has been elected by November 17th, the U.S. government will shut down, and this - if it happens - will apply a lot of pressure to House Republicans.

Unfortunately, it will also apply a lot of pressure to House Democrats, and it might only take a handful of them to cave and vote with Republicans to elect a Republican Speaker.

So stock up on popcorn... 😂

(If you were going to be really pedantic, "car-parking site" or similar would be more technically accurate than "car park", but people would think you were weird, and "car park" is what absolutely everyone calls them.)

On the left side of the pond, we usually call them "parking lots".

... and then all US guvmint employees gat no pay

Interestingly, House representatives (and presumably Senators) will continue to get their pay even if the U.S. government shuts down... 🫤

(And again, see also "Hun horror" in Belgium in 1914-16, allegations of German soldiers bayoneting babies and nuns. This shit is a standard hot-button and whenever you see/hear it you should assume it's propaganda unless/until you get corroboration.)

Yeah, sort of like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Sadly, most House Republicans (and virtually all MAGAts would rather eat babies than compromise with Democrats...

Two things: first, in the US, most places I've lived, trucks are not allowed on parkways (that is, semis, and large actual trucks; what we call vans are winked at.

Second, as someone mentioned, yes, parking lots (or parking garages). And there's always on-street parking.

What is this "borrowed"? The Finns went with some Norse, and pillaged it.

The way English does to everyone else...

There is a subset - the "hardliners" - who believe that hostage taking is a legitimate way to get what you want, even though you don't have the votes. (Thanks so much, Newt the Grinch).

At some point - I really do not think this will last until next year's elections, because in that case, the Trump Crime Family will basically be about 20 people in Congress after the elections - the rump remnants of the Greedy Oligarchic Party will deal with the Democrats.

How long before the actual US guvmint "Defaults on its debt" ????

Brief diversion on US Federal Budgets and spending.

Appropriations tell agencies how to and how much to spend. In theory a new set of appropriation bills get passed every year before the previous year runs out. September 30. Which Congress fails to do so there is an old law that says "emergency" activities can keep running and/or paying bills as long as the Treasury has or can borrow money. (There is another entire side conversation on budget, appropriation, and reconciliation legislation that we need to run away from.)

For a while now, September 30 is just a flag in the field that legislation is aimed at. (Think of all the precision of a rugby match mixed with a soccer match.) So we at times "shut down" or pass Continuing Resolutions (CRs). CRs are basically keep going at current levels but usually with footnotes. The footnotes are special cases of I WANT THIS or Ukraine / Israel arms or whatever. CRs have time limits. Current one runs out mid November.

Emergency is not defined. So the CBO head gets to say who has to show up and who gets paid. Which is why the rules change from time to time. It is all about how much pain and/or political advantage the rules aim at who. So you get things like the National Zoo closes to visitors but enough staff has to show up to feed the animals and deal with care.

Now to debt. Treasury has money and borrowing power to get somewhere past the 2024 elections. This was done on purpose remove it from the politics of 2023/2024. So how that wall is handled will depend on who wins the elections next year.