JetSetWilly

You can always find a line that passes between two points. Why would you even try to find a line that doesn’t pass between two points? What is the difficult part here.

The UK strongly backed Denmark over the greenland situation. I’d be a lot more worried about the EU’s “appeasement” of russia (slow acting germany, hungary etc) than the UK’s carefully navigated and level headed US relations. That’s what will undo the EU.

In Scotland one issue is that the UK electricity market is national (unlike in eg norway). So even if local supply is very high and interconnects are not large enough to export to england - we must pay the higher national rate. As octopus ceo suggested if the UK energy market has regional pricing then electricity in scotland would often be a lot cheaper and in some cases industrial demand would move there. But that would disadvantage the SE of England so will never happen.

Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!

The issue is that quite often the wind doesn’t blow - often for several weeks like last january - and the sun barely shines for much of the year. So renewables mean the country just has to pay for (and subsidise) a whole ton of extra infra but can’t actually retire non-renewable infra because you can’t rely on renewables. This strategy is why UK electricity is so absurdly expensive.

And when presented with this politicians and “green” sorts will handwave about pumped storage or whatever despite that basic back of the envelope calculations will show we can’t build enough of that to store 4 weeks worth of electricity for a whole country.

Restoring a democracy and getting rid of a dictator sounds pretty peace-prize worthy to me. If Kissinger can get it then he’s always got a chance.

Much like “intellectual property”, “international law” is a nonsense term that tells you only that the person who employs it lives in their own bubble, captured by powerful interests of others.

It would be great to run this on a collection of interesting threads over different periods and not just one snapshot. For example, the thread from the day Trump got elected in 2016, the thread from the day of brexit and so on. Those are the times when people make many passionate predictions about how the future will play out, be good to see them retroactively scored.

DEI was mentioned in a footnote, it didn't seem to be the main thrust of the memo. I agree it would have been better to not mention it at all, the decision is perfectly defensible on the basis of all the previous non-footnoted points.

I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.

No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap. You can read the full text of the actual memo (and a reasonable interpretation of it) below, but it appears to me that the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional, inconsistent with all other government communications and even inconsistent letterheads on the very same department's material, and that appearance matters. It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke", but it does seem like the original decision to use Calibri was not based on anything and just about appearing to be woke.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...

The left's change was purely performative. Nobody has demonstrated it had any benefit, nobody attempted to show that it would have a benefit beforehand, and it doesn't appear to have had any benefit in the aftermath. It was a change on the basis of feels. This is how it often goes with the left, change for change's sake with no demonstrated rational basis and you are obviously a bad and morally suspect person if you disagree with whatever they have invented, followed by overblown hysteria if you restore the status quo.

Curiously you left out the broken spine.

Of course the terrorist-excusers like to make out that it was just a bit of paint, what's the issue? It was 7 million pounds of damage (to be paid for out of our defence budget, so that's 7 million quid less to spend on other things) and put some of our key national defence infra out of commission for a period to boot.

But of course, that's ok - we should allow such groups to exist going around attacking people, crippling them and destroying national infrastructure to the tune of millions, its just free speech innit.

No sensible country in the world would allow such groups to exist.

I'm sure you'll also find that lawyers make statements in favour of hopelessly guilty murderers. That's what they are paid to do. Your "freedom of expression" does not include hitting people with sledgehammers and attacking and disabling national defence infrastructure. Of course, we should withdraw from the HRA precisely because it is perverted in this way by lawyers, but those bald statements do not in fact show that hitting people with sledgehammers is legitimate freedom of expression or protest, and it appears that committing such acts is the principle reason for PA to exist.

Yes. They are both groups that only exist to commit violence against people to further their political aims. They may differ in how extreme they are, but the core of it is they are violent and we should have absolute zero tolerance against such groups.

New powers seem perfectly reasonable to me. Of course, it all depends on your idea of “protest”. For the authors of the article groups like Palestine Action assaulting and grievously injuring police officers with sledgehammers, and damaging fighter jets in RAF facilities are merely engaging in legitimate “protest”. They are not, and if an organisation exists only to “protest” by attacking people and our critical national infrastructure, it is completely correct and right that it should ba banned and forbidden.

In the modern era it is far easier for foreign powers to meddle subversively with the country thanks to social media, so obviously new powers are needed to combat this. Hopefully these powers can be used against Palestine Action’s related groups, Extinction Rebellion and all the rest of them who exist only to spread their ideological mania via violence and disruption, not to “protest”.

Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.

They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.

Yes, as someone who regularly interviews candidates in the UK - if I see "foreign university I've never heard of + masters at a british university" then it is a huge negative signal, they are nearly always idiots. My favourite was the person with an MSc in CS from Edinburgh University who couldn't even do fizz-buzz level super-basic coding tasks.

At this point I just try and avoid selecting people for interview who fit this profile at all.

Sounds a bit like the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. In it there’s constant “evolution” between different trading strategies that become more or less efficient over time.

So here, Phase 1 would be a market dominated by EMH believers who passively invest. In phase 2, speculative “noisy” traders start to exploit this landscape to profit. In phase 3 there’s a crisis or period of high volatility. The old complacent EMH strategies suffer losses and become extinct. Then no doubt in phase 4 the market moves to some new equilibrium with new strategies dominant!

So in this AMH theory what you describe is a natural process of evolution.

I have a feeling this migrant didn’t get off a dinghy with all the other engineers and scientists so probably isn’t raising a lot of concern for most. Conflating “immigration is too high” with “anyone who thinks immigration is too high is a racist who thinks they are all freeloaders” doesn’t work anymore, no amount of media propaganda will change that.

And yet those kids from state schools then come out with more firsts than those from independent schools, showing they were not “dumber” at all - they were smarter.

Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!

Your anecdote doesn’t contradict the story - the University of Edinburgh doesn’t appear in the top 20 so apparently their “rankings” don’t think highly of the University of Edinburgh either.

(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)

Fortunately in Britain we have moved far from the values of former labour MP and noted Europhile Sir Oswald Mosley. I would see reform as a fairly traditional conservative party, though I appreciate that there are many that are keen to shift the overton window so far that they can be described as somehow “far right”.

I'd love to switch to helix from emacs - I really like the editing model when I have tried it. However I write a lot of clojure and the lack of a REPL in helix and reliance on using LSP for everything (which just isn't as good as repl integration) is a bit of a blocker. I hope their plugin system and embracing scheme for it means that some kind of REPL capability will be implemented and supported well. I hope that plugin branch is merged soon.

It isn't free but it is less expensive. In fact in Scotland the annual water bill averages to £490 compared to £603 in England. This is despite a lower population density (which means more infra required per person comparatively).

So despite the best efforts of critics, they can't really show that Scottish water is any worse in terms of sewage outflows etc - if anything it is marginally better on that metric, and significantly cheaper to run. And the actual water quality is good, although that has a lot to do with incidental geography. Why would I want it privatised?

I think a national speed limit is a sensible system. In many countries, every random stretch of road has a different speed limit, as though driving speeds have been centrally planned - usually poorly.

Expecting the driver to be an educated and safe driver who is capable of judging the appropriate speed for the road is far superior. This also inculcates a better attitude in the driver - the speed limit is not a target.

Really the article - despite the headline - spends a long time on the literary history of gaelic in scotland, with a short paragraph at the end on the current status. I doubt the author had time to expand to a review of minority language measures globally, and it didn’t seem to be the main point of it anyway.

And, the situation and standing of gaelic in Ireland and Scotland are quite different. In Ireland, gaelic is strongly associated with the primary, and successful ethnonationalist movement. In Scotland, at the end of the day gaelic is a remnant of a foreign invasion, and is also historically associated with catholicism, so is often seen as the “other”. This makes it more difficult to whip up enthusiasm to learn it, even among die hard Scottish nationalists. This whole situation is quite unlike Ireland and even Wales, it would be at best a distraction in the article.

Why? It’s not about ireland - it’s about scotland. Article makes complete sense in a scottish context.

> Penicillin

Invented and developed in the UK.

> Microwave communication

Lion's share of pre-war advances and development were in various European countries.

> Synthetic Rubber

Developed by Fritz hoffman at the Bayer Laboratory in Germany, 1906

Frankly, your comment is a massive self-own.

“The British” did not genetically engineer the potato blight.

Further, in the 19th century state capacity was small and massive modern style relief programmes were not possible. Despite this, Britain managed to spend a large degree of GDP on relief. Proportionately more than it did on covid response recently, for example.

The reason people deny british culpability for “genocide” is that there was no “genocide” and britain did what it was able to do, to an unprecedented degree in fact. If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.

You have it the opposite way round. The UK (for example) never gave a chickenpox vaccine because it reasoned to do so increases the risk of shingles, and shingles is more serious than chickenpox. Also chickenpox is so mild that administering a national vaccination programme is of dubious benefit, the money can be more effectively spent elsewhere.

The JCVI might have recently changed recommendation but whether it is worth the cost/benefit is another matter.