NeedMoreTea

I assume because nearly all the works of man are aiming to control and suppress nature. Instead of the natural untidy beauty of an ancient forest, or wild meadow, with random animal and human tracks through it, we pave, concrete and "neaten". Everything tends to a boring concreted monoculture, with straight lines and walls or fences everywhere, such that even parks are a poor second to the natural world -- though if I ever find myself in a city they are a blessed relief even knowing they are the ersatz second best.

It is almost unheard of to work with nature, to produce sustainable, sympathetic houses and cities that are a part of the natural world. The nearest we get is an occasional designer rendering of a sustainable city of the future... A future just about everyone fights hard to ensure never arrives, and we get the sad, brutal ugliness of the city.

We could have both. Without much difficulty.

The web is far too large, and far too commercial -- adtech have forced commerce into fucking everything, and fucking ruined it. Without ads, a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use wouldn't go away, they'd reduce to a more sustainable number of companies and products. The remaining products and services would have to work harder to be better to compete and attract custom. Your new startup might have to offer a genuine improvement or innovation to get traction...

As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes.

A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.

Very true, they're all winging it. It all seems to be coming from the evil genius Cummings who tells everyone from Johnson down what to think.

It's too disturbing to contemplate what the state of the establishment, civil service, judiciary and all the other checks and balances will be at the end of five years.

In comparison to being in the single market, yes it is. At moment of EU exit we lose ALL trade arrangements as all we currently have are under the auspices of the EU. That would, for a couple of years until treaties were getting signed, put us in a worse position than every WTO member and observer.

In the first instance NO countries trade solely on WTO default terms. None. Every country has better than WTO arrangements with someone, even North Korea who aren't even in the WTO. Perhaps their local neighbours and major trade partners, even if they don't necessarily have a deal with the EU (or China or USA).

On WTO terms we'd need to negotiate tariff agreements with the WTO on potentially hundreds of categories of products which is going to take at least as long as an EU-UK treaty. As frequently reported, goods and services to and from the EU will be subject to import duties. For any of the numerous industries where that may happen multiple times, e.g. car manufacture, the effect would be disastrous.

Second we'll lose all trade agreements with other nations that we have had as a result of being within the EU, e.g. with Canada, the US, South Korea, etc, etc. So we'll have no improved relationship with anyone at all. It remains to be seen if claims of interim arrangements are anything other than empty rhetoric, so we still potentially face that cliff edge in Dec 2020.

Third we'd lose the unrestricted single market right to provide services (including financial) across the EU without discrimination and fall back to only WTO terms. That's likely to completely change viability of numerous successful UK businesses. Including some of the largest.

No, he 100% expected a comfortable remain win. He called the non-binding referendum because it was a major manifesto promise. It was a manifesto promise solely as an attempt to shut up the awkward squad -- the extreme Brexit wing of the Tory party, and put them back on the fringe for another decade or so. Then expected another hung parliament and probable coalition, not a majority.

There are plenty of major Tory figures on record confirming this.

With a little luck they can now do so, and require participation by any potential new trade partners. :)

"as effectively as" is not the same as "will result in".

We aren't being given even the prospect of a trading relationship like Canada, Switzerland or Norway as they would require flexibility on one or other of the UK's immovable points. That's been clearly shown for years now, ever since Michel Barnier put out his very simple slide showing the trading relationship options.

Both the USA and Australia already have trade deals with the EU. The UK does not, and will not for probably years. International negotiation isn't a simple weekend thing like the Tory party keep trying to persuade the ever-gullible UK electorate.

So that's potentially years with nothing. WTO rules. Effectively self-sanctioning to a position far worse than now, and placing a severe cap on potential. Businesses with sense, or heavy EU dependency will leave, in droves. I would expect Toyota and possibly BMW to be probable early exits.

We could, I suppose, get a miracle of a fast agreement, but 26 nations have power of veto, and GB's negotiating team has not shown anything resembling flexibility or any apparent clue how negotiating works.

Prove it, or cite something credible. Business stance on the EU and Brexit has optimism at an all time low.

GDPR is, I hope, safe. Various politicians have said it's staying -- YMMV in how much score to place in that. It's reasonable, clear and ICO is one of the better regulators. It certainly doesn't make it harder to do business in the UK. Leaving the EU does that, as effectively as being on the receiving end of international sanctions.

I don't think this lot actually care about the trading and regulatory relationship with Europe, at all. I can't figure out what is supposed to fill the place occupied by the EU. Which makes for an interesting decade, particularly if you have a business trading within the EU.

Which don't have everyone running on diplomatic plates, or actual diplomats.

For a diplomatic cover, usually something for missions in unfriendly and hostile states, (shades of Cold War le Carré here) it would be for staff at the embassy -- which is in London. So the airbase would have to be considered a branch or part of the London embassy under the Vienna Convention. Yet Menwith Hill and Croughton etc are supposedly RAF bases militarily shared under NATO deals.

Hence all the controversy currently coming out of the woodwork, and numerous articles quoting QCs and ministers disputing the validity at all, or considering it abuse of Vienna, including the exploration piece I linked above. IANAL. :)

Both the Foreign Office and the US State Department appeared to accept that she no longer had diplomatic immunity, and she wasn't a registered diplomat anyway -- she was the Intelligence officer's wife. Or at least that's what the Foreign Secretary was claiming at the tail end of last year. The surprise is either of them getting immunity for an airbase intelligence role outside London in the first place. I've seen several reports questioning whether the immunity was valid at all.

But having returned to the USA there is no longer any immunity. A crime is still there to be investigated and prosecuted, an extradition could proceed.

Additionally US-UK extradition agreements both under Thatcher and later under Blair have been notable for their imbalance, but that seems rather academic here.

A balanced discussion of the issues underlying: https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/sacoolas-affair-diplomatic-im...

Oh sure, I've no doubt there were individuals and some businesses quite badly affected, but look back at the overall growth, national and regional statistics and the periods with strikes or lock-outs are simply undetectable if not highlighted for you. Sales and growth figures weren't noticeably harmed. No doubt if you were new to an area, didn't yet have a local or just weren't a pub goer, you might have had more trouble than most.

The article also notes the steady stream of people going down to the local department store and other larger shops once a week, to cash their wages, or a wages cheque to pay their factory workers. Pubs were accumulating cashed cheques from regulars and some making smaller loans.

The real surprise for me is how smoothly they coped, and how little fall out there seemed to be when banks reopened. Though of course there were some of the millions of cheques doing the rounds that did bounce. I've seen far less about knock on effects after reopening like that, but it's usually described in a way that makes it seem "far less than you would expect".

UK govt should be refusing all US extradition requests, and suspending all trials until it is accepted Sacoolas be extradited to the UK.

Ireland famously survived a six month lock out by nearly every bank in the seventies, with no harm to the economy.

Pubs were local guides to credit worthiness, larger shops cashed cheques so businesses could pay staff (an era when many were still paid in cash), so cash could go round the system again, and cheques were countersigned and passed on dozens and dozens of times -- effectively becoming variable size bank notes.

It's a fascinating story, and quite remarkable how little effect no banking had.

I want policing via consent. A police force that through diligent investigation comes to suspect someone of a crime and then acts on it. Let scene of crime DNA assist in showing a relation, or that the suspect may be male etc.

Yet a DNA database to trawl is the wrong answer. DNA is not a 100% unique match, it might not even be unique among everyone alive right now. It can degrade, techniques for amplifying very small samples are highly delicate and easily corrupted. DNA evidence at trial achieves that same undeserved halo effect as polygraph as the non-mathematical public and jurors don't understand any percentage confidences. It is far, far more influential than it deserves to be, even though unlike polygraph it has a real factual basis.

It should be one of multiple sources of evidence sought at trial, and should be barred from being sole grounds to convict.

A DNA and fingerprint database of convicted felons, accessible only to police and ports seems a reasonable compromise. A database of the innocent and not yet proven guilty? Fuck right off.

It's probably the only possible successor to that surprisingly standard looking Merlin powered Phantom II someone did a few years ago.

Which goes to show you're far better off filtering at source while pollutants are at very high concentrations. Far better than trying to remove it when it's down to a few tens of µg / m⁻³.

A damn sight more efficient, and no doubt far cheaper too.

Which rather shows up filtering buses as a lovely bit of greenwashing to avoid mentioning lack of adequate UK regulation. Regulation requiring all polluters filter PM10 and PM2.5 at source -- chimney or tailpipe -- wouldn't be as much of a story, but would actually achieve something worthwhile.

> It's an invented problem created for a drug that didn't work out in the 80s

Discovered and written about before WW1, decades before a drug not working out in the 1980s. How very peculiar.

There are multiple studies, brain scans and what have you showing the treatment is not placebo effect.

The fascinating thing is the same applied for female voices in the same era in the UK too. I had always thought it was some artefact of the awful posh received pronunciation everyone was expected to adopt going through school. If you listen to pre-war newsreels or movies you'll get the same shrill female tones.

Hearing Australian from then is similar, though sounds much like UK RP, with a more gentle hint of "Strine" than you'd expect today.

Yet anyone who's been around long enough will have probably dropped pitch over the years. Listen to any wartime or pre war famous women speaking and hear them twenty or thirty years later, e.g. the Queen, Vera Lynn, not only has the stuck up constricted accent gone, but the pitch has dropped markedly too.

Rather irrelevant considering the increasing chance of dying if you're hit. That's nothing to do with phone or pedestrian signals which can only affect the chance of being hit.

Speaking as a car driver, in nearly all of those situations a car driver would be deservedly held responsible, as you're expected to be able to stop short of unexpected hazards. In built up areas that's going to include pedestrians. Drive slower.

Note that Candy are/were a European conglomerate with multiple brands, including Hoover, Baumetic, Kelvinator and probably a dozen more. I know they had a few Scandinavian brands, and I think they also have Servis.

Wouldn't surprise me if others in that list of seven are holding multiple sub-brands too, and a full tree-walk produces a huge list of brands.

Which is presumably why they are never used for major through routes, so don't cause severe daily congestion. Though I would like to see far more streets, even some with appreciable traffic, converted to downrank cars.

Surprisingly they also have a history channel, with the real stories behind many of their songs.

Probably the bravest man, for the longest time, I have ever read about of any period in history. If ever a life deserved a major movie...

He did so much for Poland, yet was ultimately shot in the back of the head by a communist Pole, after the show trial in 1948, and after months of torture. He'd been trying to gather information of Soviet bloc atrocities.

The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather, published last year is well worth a read.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Volunteer-Mission-Underground-Ausch...

Edit: You can also get the reports themselves, with little extra translated to English. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Auschwitz-Volunteer-Beyond-Bravery/...

What population collapse? World population is still rising. US population is still rising.

Fewer humans would be a good thing for just about all the global human created problems. Far fewer humans would give a chance of sustainable numbers, sustainable industry and agriculture, remove the need to destroy habitats etc.

Aren't those ideas the underlying premise of shared streets (woonerfs)? Basically remove as many signs, markings and kerbs as possible so there's no segregation, and usually break up vision lines. The driver uncertainty stops traffic being the dominant user.

Result lower accidents, much lower speeds, and above all safer cyclists, pedestrians and any kids playing.

> Reliability, speed, accessibility, ease of use, more secure defaults... Enough?

Very glib, but not helpful nor accurate. Reliability of a web service? Speed faster than local network or local VPN tunnel? Convenience appears to be the top and bottom of it from other replies.

> assumption that they "are gathering data [...] and selling it" is beyond baseless

Not at all. US freedom of information goes far beyond everyone else's and leaves the expectation that personal data is collected, shared, sold, misused and abused, and that's been the case since long before the web. Personal data that most places consider private and inappropriate to share, and often have laws for, is frequently easily available in the US.

The web just brought it further into the gutter.

Europe has had freedom of information with constraints on personal data. Data protection has been around since the mid 90s, and prior to that there were other restrictions on certain types of data collection. The discrepancy between the two approaches has been there for probably seventy years, perhaps more, and it's widening not narrowing.

Those national norms set starting point of expectations, and what each nation tends to take as axiomatic. For a typical European, for the reasons mentioned, US privacy provision and expectation starts negative. Certain industries and categories get very antsy about data going, even briefly, to the US as a consequence of that. If it's any consolation I start with the presumption every company is untrustworthy.

Which is why the manufacturers are trying hard to see the 3.5mm jack go the way of the dodo. You might keep on using something for decades, perhaps most of your life!