Brakenshire

> Yes there is a huge difference with the latter being a 1,000 British colonial-era holdover that's home to the largest tax haven hub in the world.

In what sense is it a colonial-era holdover? Unless you mean Norman colonialism.

You want to turn it down for someone on the pavement, but not for someone crossing a major road at night.

Five years ago there was nothing else, but now there are many options.

We don’t really know anything about Sparta which wasn’t written by outside observers.

I was surprised Mozilla gave up on Servo before realising its potential, particularly for a parallel layout engine, because that could have been a massive advantage on mobile, especially on cheap smartphones which have many cores but each low performance.

There’s also a concept of dating the age of hedgerow by the diversity and randomness of plant species.

This isn't true, you don't have to be a member of the EU to be part of the Horizon programme, which is the EU's science funding mechanism. Membership of Horizon was part of the Brexit deal for the UK, although it seems to be uncertain now as part of the wider disputes.

The UK has actually remained a member of the EU's science funding programme after Brexit as part of the exit deal, although that membership has not been formally ratified yet.

The Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxons a similar lesson!

This is interesting:

> However, Apple is unique in putting emphasis in keeping hardware interfaces compatible across SoC generations – the UART hardware in the M1 dates back to the original iPhone! This means we are in a unique position to be able to try writing drivers that will not only work for the M1, but may work –unchanged– on future chips as well. This is a very exciting opportunity in the ARM64 world. We won’t know until Apple releases the M1X/M2, but if we succeed in making enough drivers forwards-compatible to boot Linux on newer chips, that will make things like booting older distro installers possible on newer hardware. That is something people take for granted on x86, but it’s usually impossible in the embedded world – and we hope we can change that on these machines.

Can the M1 MacBooks be used with Linux?

There's a 15 minute BBC radio programme based around this object here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01ghc4h

Governments want to tax profits rather than revenues. A tax on revenues would kill a lot of high growth businesses.

> Somebody, somewhere made a choice to push the vaccines and not the monoclonal antibodies.

Monoclonal antibodies have been investigated at the same time as vaccines. Companies could have offered low cost production at large scale, but they didn't. What makes you think monoclonal antibodies can be produced and sold for $5-20 per dose like the vaccine?

> I'm unaware of a single study on the safety or efficacy of mixing vaccine types like this.

The Com-Cov study:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3874014

They increased UC for the pandemic, and then reduced it, much like the Furlough scheme, and both of those policies would have been considered centre or centre-left responses if done by a centre or centre-left party.

Can you really see neuroplasticity in an MRI?

One big reason is you're removing the economic incentive to produce good evidence. The herbal remedies industry is a perfect example, there will be valid treatments there but yet the industry is almost entirely medically useless. Some of the treatments might be effective for particular diseases, at particular doses but no one ever knows. These companies have billions in revenue and are vastly profitable but they never look for evidence that treatments work because people buy the remedies anyway, and a company that spent the money to run the trials would be undercut by less scrupulous competition. This is not even a market with asymmetry of knowledge, it's a market where no one knows anything, and the lack of regulation makes sure it continues that way.

I agree, that's well put and I think that could work very well.

I think the key would be having clear centralized standards for how the trials are conducted, or you could have doctors skirting the system and just using it as de-facto prescription, and patients being put at risk for ineffective treatment without producing any valid evidence.

We do have to make drug discovery vastly more efficient, but we want to make it more efficient at making useful drugs available, not just making drugs available. If you decouple availability from effectiveness then drug companies will just market unproven drugs to people who are desperate or who don't know any better. Or even if the drug companies do nothing people will just start taking drugs on the basis of recommendations from Facebook.

Maybe that means building randomized trials into treatment in a much more regular way (like with the Covid RECOVERY trials, where any doctor could enroll patients with a web form, and source the candidate treatment from the local pharmacy), which vastly reduces cost for treatments already on the market with other indications. And perhaps altering the balance of risk for patients with life-threatening or terminal diseases.

For 3 and a half decades.

It’s a joke at the expense of the astrologer. Rome had Augurs with official responsibilities for predicting the future, so maybe these kind of jokes were more subversive at that time.

Although I could imagine a modern joke about an astrologer making grand predictions that are whittled down as the person corrects them.

I’m not sure allotment is the right word, at least in England allotments are much more intended for hobbyist gardening, they’re small, often you’re not even allowed a shed, staying there would be unlikely practically or legally. Isn’t this closer to the Summer Cabin concept in Scandinavia?

Allotments in England are different, more like an open field broken up into 50ft x 50ft squares specifically for hobbyist gardeners, and often you’re not allowed to have any buildings on them at all.

Along the same lines, an issue I was interested in a while back, has anyone written a script in Linux to get the webcam to dynamically crop to faces/people?

Does this work for Linux?

> Before everything started changing in 2020 (Ford is pulling out of the car market in the US except for select models), what models were UK specific?

The Puma is Europe-specific and was launched in 2019.

I don't understand the case you're making, as you say Ford is killing off in the US almost all the vehicles that make up their existing market share in Europe. The point I was trying to make is the company is fundamentally split because of the different nature of the markets. FCA had the same issue.

Many of the smaller Ford cars seem to be designed by the European subsidiary and then either exclusively sold in Europe or later sold in America, for instance the Kuga which is now being sold as the Escape in the USA. Ford obviously aspired to unify across the two markets, but the differences between them are so large it doesn’t seem practical for most of their range. Ford in the USA seems to make most of their money from pickup trucks, with the Mustang brand as a significant extra, and both of those are negligible here. And now there’s enormous pressure from the European efficiency standards, so that Ford is licensing some EVs from VW. I wouldn’t be surprised if the European division was sold off like GM with Opel.

> We have empirical data showing how safe actual level 2 self driving cars are in practice.

Do we? Where does that come from? The data Tesla provides is hopelessly non-representative because it makes the assumption that the safety of any given road is independent of whether a driver chooses to switch on the system there.

If the accounts are subject to ID verification then the abuser can be prosecuted.