bencollier49

Jon Ronson is a very clever man and we don't see enough of him these days. I'll listen to that.

Oh, I don't disagree. That said, some of them stand up to time better than others, in as much as they can contain genuinely novel ideas, by the standard of most modern people.

Other books and authors are just infuriating - the memes they set running weren't necessarily a great thing the first time around, and did a lot of damage to collective human reason. Eliphas Levi immediately springs to mind; there are plenty of others. "Illuminatus!" probably falls into this category, but I don't think that was R.A. Wilson's fault.

Interesting choice of Victorian occult fluffery. The author of the piece does describe it as fantasy, but it's responsible for a whole host of exciting real-world madness in the 20th century and afterwards.

It's important to recognise that until the internet made it much easier for people to discuss ideas and find counterarguments, there were large numbers of people floating around claiming that the contents of these books were not only beyond reproach, but that <insert group invented in the 20th century> was an unbroken descendant of one of the mythical groups invented by Victorian pseudohistorians.

Oh yeah, totally, it was just interesting to see how the term was being used back then and reflect that I've not seen it much recently.

Another case of someone's use of F12 being described as "hacking". Not a great state of affairs.

Hmm, is "Hipster" still a current term?

It feels like hipsters aren't in evidence as much as they used to be before lockdown.

Don't get me started on "crypto" and "cyber".

Yes! SpinVox. What a company.

It's possible that the mechanism is epigenetic, albeit unlikely. The sad truth is that this is probably now present in lots of genomes, and in the absence of eugenics or genome modification to correct the fault, will add to the slow and burgeoning medicalisation of the whole population, as the end of natural selection for baseline health multiplies disorders over time.

Hopefully if they didn't apply Bonferroni correction, the study wouldn't pass peer review.

No, but I am assuming that in their multiplicity and range of interests, they might quickly stumble on a solution in a way which a smaller population of well-trained professionals wouldn't.

Reminds me of Feyerabend's "Against Method".

If they're struggling, they should put a shout out to UK radio hams to help diagnose the problem, they'd get loads of expert help.

YouTube Kids is not safe for kids. Am a parent, stopped allowing that long ago.

Are there any other modern languages where the transliteration is literally "lapsus"? Genuine question.

I mean, doesn't prove anything. If they're smart they'd use the wrong language for their name. Or a double bluff...

Reputation, I suppose. It's a bit like how IRA bomb warnings used to work.

I switched precisely because I found that the DuckDuckGo results were indeed better. This was a third attempt though - the first two times it wasn't quite good enough. It improved, and Google got worse.

Can you elaborate on the Trickle-up Economy point. What do you mean by that? Why is it damaging?

It pays off for those people because eventually they'll run into a non-technical hirer, who'll take 2 months to realise that they've made a mistake. Rinse and repeat.

I don't even understand how that's legal. If you took 100% of your time off as leave, what recourse would they have to fire you? Presumably this only happens in regions with laws that have few legal protections for employees?

Good shout, actually.

The next thing I'd like to see is a rule on maintaining security updates for devices beyond 3-4 years. I'm going to have to give up my perfectly operating 4/5 year old Samsung phone shortly because it'll be falling into the "no support" bracket.

Came to say the same thing. This feels like a weird blast from the past, which given that Covid first appeared in China, seems just odd really.

Yeah, it hung on for ages in banking, didn't it? A lot of law firms still have a drinks trolley which goes around on Friday. Pretty sure banking is still pretty full-on.

I think the 1970s and '80s in the UK were the heyday for this sort of thing. Typically you'd have a couple of pints at lunch time - a lot of offices had bars (rather like coworking spaces today..) and often just stay in the pub. The drinking culture had got larger because of the growth of the middle class - more people moving into office jobs.

By the time I entered the workforce in 1999, this sort of thing was on the wane, although it varied enormously by industry and company. I think the change happened because of the increasing computerisation of jobs (where you could do more damage with the tap of a finger), in addition to women joining the workforce in more senior positions. And probably longer commutes, tougher drink-driving laws, and more formalised HR policies.

A small part of me is nostalgic for it, but it was obviously ridiculously unhealthy. That said, a lot of work was actually done in the pub, and it's possible that people found solutions with their social guard down that they wouldn't have found whilst in the office.

This reminds me of the case of the Amstrad CPC 472.

Amstrad exported the 64K CPC 464 to loads of countries, and it did quite well. But Spain wanted to promote home-grown micros, and in an act of protectionism, applied a special tax to any computer with 64K or less of RAM.

Amstrad MD Alan Sugar directed his engineers to solder a completely non-functional 8K RAM chip to the mainboard, changed the name of the Spanish version to the 472, and skipped the tax.

This has less to do with Brexit, and more to do with trauma from the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury and the earlier Polonium attack. I'm quite surprised that we haven't seen stronger controls on Russians in the UK, especially as we've been busy making ourselves targets for the last week.

Indeed, I guess if you've got a Union Pay card, or whatever it's called.

Missed your chance there, I think.

I've heard that he was quite the party animal as well, something which doesn't quite seem to have been covered by the show (albeit some aspects hinted at tangentially).

Don't want to blacklist or unperson him. I just think he's wrong on that count, and in a particularly mischievious way.