DrBazza

> because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty

Well, the UK has only been asked about Europe twice - once to join and once to leave. Unlike many other European countries that frequently ask their populace as a way of standard governance.

The only other UK referendum in my lifetime was the 'alternative vote'

The UK government (no matter the party) just doesn't seem to like asking the public's opinion, on things. And after 2016, I'd be very surprised to see another referendum on anything, any time soon as the outcome of that was opposite to what the 'establishment' wanted (cue the last decade of squabbling). They will instead use the excuse: 'you gave us the mandate choosing us at the General Election'.

If I add water to a glass of whiskey and dilute it, why don't I get twice as drunk?

I probably did ;)

I said kerfuffle. I didn’t say ‘export’.

I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons.

> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated

Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.

Back in the 90s, my post-doc piracy was photocopying and distribution at every conference, and large mail drops.

It would be nice if billion dollar big tech, in particular those that have R&D donate and form a not-for-profit together with universities that puts this to sleep once and for all. The small irony is that they're paying to submit their own research to another company to make it publicly available.

That's UK politics in general, which I suppose is microcosm of the UK. Everything is now a career. We have many, many, sitting MPs, that have only ever studied topics like politics with the sole aim of becoming a politician. Or never worked in private industry, or even worked in the public sector in parts that aren't necessarily unionized. In the past many MPs had 'life experience' outside of politics.

They are therefore naturally detached from unions, and more worryingly, the every day reality of the electorate.

For some of these MPs, losing their seat at a General Election is the first time in their entire lives they've ever lost a job, unlike the general public that have to put up with routine dismissals, via redundancy, company bankruptcy and so on.

Indeed. I paraphrased this line from wikipedia - "The LTV is usually associated with Marxian economics" perhaps I should have read the next bit ", although it also appears in the theories of earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. "

Perhaps. Though if you strike endlessly, you have no product to sell. So people buy elsewhere and you go out of business. If you disagree, perhaps edit this line in wikipedia:

> These internal issues, which were never satisfactorily solved, combined with serious industrial relations problems with trade unions, the 1973 oil crisis, the three-day week, high inflation and ineffectual management meant that BL became an unmanageable and financially crippled behemoth

(emphasis, mine).

In which country, the USA? In the UK, all Government bodies are unionized.

The reverse is true. Unionization of the UK car industry in the 1970s, more than played its part in the collapse of the UK car industry, for example:

> The company became an infamous example of the industrial turmoil that plagued the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Action by unions frequently crippled BL manufacturing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Leyland#1975%E2%80%931...

'work deserves to be compensated fairly' - are you talking about Marx's 'labour theory of value'? Even though Marx himself criticised it?

The Labour party was founded by unions, so it's no surprise they're still completely beholden to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Labour_Party_(U...

In a jobs market place of wide choice, unionization is unnecessary. The tech job pool spans multiple industries, so if your employer is treating you poorly, leave.

In a jobs market where there are few employers, maybe unionize, because those employers are essentially a monopsony. Hence, in the UK, the NHS, teaching, and public transport, where the employer is the Government, they're heavily unionized.

This is the correct answer. Win2k was probably the most solid and cruft-free release that they did.

Then the enshittification started with Window XP, jelly-mold/curved glass buttons, activation, and .NET everywhere, followed by the disaster that was Vista.

They released Windows 7, and somehow then decided, yet again, to screw things up with Windows 8 because 'mobile'.

It's the UK gov. Rather than do something, it's endless inquiries and 'research'.

Example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Thames_Crossing - the planning application is 360,000 pages and not a single shovel is in the ground. Or HS2. The list goes on. This is a really, really minor example of the same sickness that infests British politics for the last few decades.

More context:

> Elizabeth Louise Kendall (born 11 June 1971)[1] is a British politician who has served as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology > [sic] graduating with first class honours in history in 1993 > [sic] after graduating from Cambridge, worked at the Institute for Public Policy Research (charity)

tl;dr never worked in the private sector, and utterly unqualified to make judgements on technology.

So of course she's the science minister.

This is what UK parliament is full of, ill qualified, political lifers.

What a depressing time to live in the UK.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Kendall

MS has inertia on its side, and its abusive marketing and lock-in strategies of the 90s. Remember when you couldn't buy a PC without Windows from most vendors? Meaning you were paying MS, even if you immediately uninstalled it?

The long term outcome of that is that 90+% of industry still buys Windows PCs. And non-industry: once non-techie people are on an OS (Windows/MacOS), many don't move off it, though Apple's ecosystem has been a good carrot+stick.

One of the more interesting indicators is (even though desktop software is in decline) - the number of apps that are Windows and Mac and maybe linux, and the increasing number of apps that Mac-only or Mac+Linux but do NOT have a Windows download. Something unimaginable in the 90s and 00s.

MS are certainly accelerating adoption of other platforms due to their own mismanagement.

I'm not sure what this obsession is at the moment with 'fat pensions'. Pensions are far from 'fat', and (european) governments have been very dishonest about what will happen state pensions for decades. Governments simply don't have the nerve or honesty to tell the population what's going to happen and get the message across to everyone. And at the same time, youth unemployment is really high. So what do you want, old people to retire 'early' to make way for young people to work, thus requiring a 'fat pension', or do you want them to never retire, and thus not need a 'fat pension'?

Europe's problems can be summed up by Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Which is the next part:

> The older people I talk to show no concern about Europe's economic future, they're always dismissive about the problems Europe faces. They're stuck in the 70's, 80's or 90's it seems.

As an 'older' person in the UK, I've always been 'concerned' about the economic future of the continent, but we've elected increasingly incompetent politicians. When you get older you'll have the same opinions. Politics has gone from being a job trying to manage the country, to being an all expenses paid job with little risk other than re-election, and little responsibility because everything is 'the EU', or a quango (quasi-governmental organization - basically still the Government but not really sackable either).

Consider the UK - ARM was 'ours'. Could you imagine the US allowing it to be sold off to a foreign country? Well, you can guess what ukgov did.

Sabre Engines wanted a tiny amount of Government funding, who said no, so they closed and sold off some incredibly useful tech.

Maggie Thatcher sold off, and perhaps had to sell off, public utilities such as water, with little extra thought as to 'what happens next'. Well, that's 'gets bought out by foreign companies and channels profit abroad instead of reinvesting'.

Then there's the very European union-centric industries that often shoot themselves in the foot and ruin entire industries (UK car manufacturing spent more time on strike in the 1970s than building cars and can you guess what happened).

> If only there wasn't a global power invading countries for oil reserves over the years and causing mass migration and destabilising those places?

Do you think that's the only reason for 'mass migration'?

Consider that in the last 20 years internet access is *globally ubiquitous* because of cheap mobile phones.

That in turn means that people in the poorest parts of Africa that 20 years ago had no idea whatsoever about how 'rich' Europe is in comparison, in 2026 not only can see what they don't have, but can communicate with those than can help them make that journey by land and sea.

War and envy (for want of a better word) are the two reasons.

Channeling your inner Douglas Adams.

The automotive part is interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_flux_motor#Automotive

> Mercedes-Benz subsidiary YASA (Yokeless and Segmented Armature) makes AFMs that have powered various concept (Jaguar C-X75), prototype, and racing vehicles. It was also used in the Koenigsegg Regera, the Ferrari SF90 Stradale and 296GTB, Lamborghini Revuelto, McLaren Artura and the Lola-Drayson.[9] The company is investigating the potential for placing motors inside wheels, given that AFM's low mass does not excessively increase a vehicle's unsprung mass.[10]

> In July 2025, YASA announced a prototype 550 kW (738 hp) 13.1 kg (29 lb) motor, equating to power density of 42 kW/kg, which the company claimed to be the highest ever achieved.[11] By contrast, the state of the art EV motor from Lucid Motors offers a 500 kW, 31.4-kg motor, or 16 kW/kg.[12]

> The first application of these motors will be in the High Performance Mercedes‑AMG GT 4-Touring Coupe.[14]

And is development of batteries (and better magnetics) not just chemical engineering and material science?

Motors might be a 'solved problem' - there might not be much innovation, Maxwell's laws aren't changing any time soon, but there will surely be a lot of incremental improvement - an early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE.

Although the Government (and local Government) can employ 'heads' at market rate. It's just the rank-and-file that have banded salaries.

When you realise that any Government is ultimately a business, it's revenue is mostly tax, and its costs, are like any other business - salaries, then crappy salaries for Government employees makes more sense.

> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.

There's also the (implicit) argument that the (UK) Government is also not having to pay up a (Civil Service) pension scheme, private health (!!), and the consultancy is picking that up, so that's also 'good'.

Before 2004 there used to be a decent number of antipodeans working in finance in London.

After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably.

This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

> „Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“ https://www.gov.pl/web/funds-regional-policy/poland-at-the-f... Update: The comments below this are strange.

The comments are questioning what you wrote, which implies without evidence, that a small amount of EU money relative to Poland's own GDP, in just 6 years, is somehow entirely responsible for Poland's growth.

I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle.

Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.

If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.

Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.

> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.

It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI.

It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit.

This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies.

Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit.

Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.

Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.

And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.

Which are the US made computers? Start by excluding all the ones with Korean LCD panels, and Taiwanese motherboards, and Chinese parts.

If you mean assembled then there are lots of very small European companies that make custom build PCs.

Economies of scale in the US, a single language, and cheap transport, mean that the US companies grow very big internally, very easily. And then go international without much effort. The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.

In 2026, the only country on the entire planet that can likely make their own computer with 100% their parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.