dpwm

From the decision on the application for permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court [0]:

> The applicant describes himself as a “journalist in new media”. Whatever that may involve, it is relevant to distinguish his position from that of the mainstream press, which is regulated, and subject to codes of practice and ethics in a way in which those writing as the applicant does are not. To the extent that the submissions for the applicant make comparisons with other press contempts, and the role of mainstream journalists, this is a factor which should be recognised.

[0] https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/docs/default-source/cos-genera...

I can think of a reason why I would take it out: it’s an easter egg – i.e. unnecessary – that has already caused a problem once in a way that was not foreseen.

Of course there may be some that have been using the existing behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is 00:30, but they have so far apparently remained silent.

It would be interesting to let consumers have access to adtech tools. Instead of a subscription, I could set bidding limits on the ads that would have been shown to me.

I appreciate there are commercial reasons why this won’t happen, but it would be interesting. I’d also personally never trust any of the ad brokers to be honest with individuals without an army of lawyers.

The problem with this is that Netflix Originals apparently gets slapped on stuff that Netflix bought post-production or financed as a co-production.

The kind of content that works well for Netflix does not work so well for me. They introduce just enough content that works for me that I don’t cancel the subscription.

I still find it a marvel that despite the majority of content introduced being not for me, I have been able to watch something unseen approximately every night and have given up on so little. In that sense, it is better than TV – even if the impression I get from the new content I scroll past is that it appears to be following all the same trends that made TV less appealing to me.

The most irritating consequence of this content problem for me is that nothing remains in the same place. Is continue watching going to be one, two or even three down button presses tonight? The reward is occasionally something gets suggested that is worth watching that would have been found anyway within a few minutes of searching.

I would imagine what they’re doing makes sense for the majority, but it would be wonderfully nice if there were some kind of alternate "advanced" mode for people who understand the lack of content where all this suggested and popular stuff went away and the search filter improved.

Many legit sellers – big names in all sectors – use the listings merging feature, from kindle books that are almost unreadable to network equipment that has variants with very different qualities. In many cases, Amazon is the seller.

As a customer I find it infuriating, and it feels as though it has been made more difficult over time to read the reviews for just the selected product.

I suspect that many transactions on Amazon simply would not happen if customers were better informed about what they are buying. I have no doubt that this is true across retailers – just think of all the things that have been hyped and sold that end up in garage sales barely used. It's far more common to see crap with five-star reviews than something great with three- or four-star reviews.

The feature kind of makes sense for purely cosmetic changes, like color – but even then it would be useful to have information about the actual variant.

I don't think this is some UI problem. I am quite sure it could be solved very quickly by showing reviews for the selected variant first, and then making it clear that other reviews are for other variants.

There is a way of somewhat mitigating this merging feature: Don't just look at aggregate review scores. Read the lower-end reviews. If the flaws are petty or expected, then that's great. If your variant is the worst of the bunch, you'll find out. But even with all that, it doesn't sort the takeover problem in the article.

Yeah, I confused myself and put an edit in there. I first thought it was just ignoring the Z then giving out a UTC object. Now I realize it was doing what I expected it to: parse correctly and hand out a local time.

[EDIT] Realised this is the behavior I would expect. Parse is doing what I would expect it to, taking into account the given time being UTC. It's then returning an object that's in the local timezone. Still goes to show just how confusing this datetime stuff can be when even the expected behavior looks wrong.

Wait… how is this not a bug according to both Microsoft's own spec[0] and ISO 8601[1]? The Z specifically means this time is in UTC.

The behavior is not at all what I would expect from reading the docs [0]:

> A string that includes time zone information and conforms to ISO 8601. In the following examples, the first string designates Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and the second designates the time in a time zone that's seven hours earlier than UTC:

> "2008-11-01T19:35:00.0000000Z"

> "2008-11-01T19:35:00.0000000-07:00"

[EDIT] I get it now: it's parsing it right, it's just that it's then putting it into a datetime object that's in the local timezone – which is what I would expect. The alternative would be counterintuitive to me.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.datetime....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Coordinated_Universal...

Thank you for posting this.

I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368 episodes, spread over almost seven years.

It appears he started on Bloomsday 2010, and in episode 321, from 2016, he remarked in an introduction that he planned to finish it within ten years from then – which Wikipedia cites as evidence of it being "planned" to run to 2026, whilst completely missing the bit where he’s really talking about an there being an extra episode once a month and jocularly remarks that it is to reduce the weekly podcast from 25 remaining years to ten.

I hadn’t heard of this until today. This is amazing.

Scottish students still have to pay sometimes very high accommodation fees, and this is usually done through a loan.

Example: I studied in Edinburgh from 2008–2012, but was from Wales. I had to pay around £1800 per year tuition fees, but accommodation at its cheapest worked out at £300 per month, without taking into account costs like light and heat.

I have a student loan of about £30k, of which about £9k was tuition fees.

Free tuition would have saved me between a quarter and a third of the cost of going to university.

Now fees are greater than £9k per year, which many believe is absurd. Based on my example, assuming no inflation on living costs, I would have borrowings of £84k without even taking into account interest – all of which I would almost certainly never repay.

Never worked at google, but I use their services and moved country recently.

> The workaround is to use different accounts, each with MOP from different countries. Pretty sure IP doesn't matter.

Maybe it has changed, because this was not my experience: my methods of payments have all remained the same. It appears to be based on IP, because my transition was delayed compared to family members who moved with me because I had VPNed back to the country I had left. I’m pretty sure it was IP based, because the relative delay approximately correlated with how many days I’d used the VPN for.

> I think the practicalities of the unwinding are actually central to the key point of all this: what do we do about it?

I don’t think you can unwind – you can create a more unfair or less unfair society, but even how you measure fair is to be debated in a context where money buys both influence and reach.

It’s not just the class- or race-inequities – it’s the whole ideology: the alternative explanations, the justifications and what look like churches surrounding it.

> Litigating history to try to work out who is benefiting from a historical injustice is almost infinitely complex.

It’s also very backward-focused, and very subject to interpretation. Not to mention it is taking place in a world where the publishers tend to be owned by members of the class that stands to lose the most.

It’s also not just a historical injustice: it is perpetuated and maintained to this day. Some would argue that the maintenance of such statues is offensive. To me, statues have always marked people who were important to the state – and slave traders and colonisers were. A friend once remarked that there was seldom a statue that didn’t deserve all the abuse it got from birds.

> Race and class and other identity categories have extremely fuzzy edges. Everyone will have a bad actor somewhere in their group. Nobody is pure victim or pure oppressor.

Absolutely – in fact they’re largely abstract when you factor in phenomena like albinism and environmental changes for race alone, without even getting into "scientific" racism. Defining class results in substantial reports that have a few interesting observations, but don’t really provide a definite result.

I have almost certainly directly benefited from the imperialism. I don’t think it agrees with my values, but I don’t really see an alternative beyond a sort of tolerated hypocrisy.

I actually consider this the most honest critical reply, even if it runs counter to my values – so I upvoted it.

I don’t believe that the policies were unenlightened, or accidental, or coincidental. I think they were the result of immense effort and cunning, driven by a different set of values that are intrinsic to and still maintained by a certain class today. I believe they originated in the class system as a way to justify the privilege, and I don’t think they ever went away.

The level of ingenuity to pull off what was done, and then to create an ideology and a set of scriptures to justify and entrench it for centuries is absolutely fascinating at both a historical and anthropological level. It’s also a in a context of immense human suffering and loss of life that it cannot be separated from.

I find the woke culture an almost comical clash between the overt and implicit values of globalism and neoliberalism. I view it with a fascination, and it’s not from some position of superiority. I’d like to believe in the ideology, because I think I’d be so much happier, but I’ve always asked too many questions. Again, I consider the possibility I’m intellectually incapable of understanding some fundamental truth. The supremacist angle – not meant as a pejorative – seems the closest I can get to it, but I find that nearly all paths rely on post hoc ergo propter hoc, and it again puts me in a position of being better than others. And yet, fundamentally, do we all not have a sense of superiority: does our own individual survival not come ahead of another’s – outside of kin?

I don’t believe we are qualified to know the impact of imperialism without knowing what the world would have looked like without. From a cybernetic point of view, imperialism appears as though it can only have reduced the variety of the planet, and seems to me a negative – but this is assuming that industrialisation would have happened by another means. Imperialism also arose in multiple forms, leading me to believe it was inevitable, and I suspect other imperialist powers may have seized the opportunities left behind – but this seems a weak justification for what I consider amoral behaviour.

I wonder, however: if the asymmetry were reversed would maintain your position? Were you on the receiving end of might-is-right imperialism, would it still be a position you would hold? Kudos if so, but it’s not for me.

I realise that I was fortunate to be born into an imperialist country, and to be able to be an immigrant in another imperialist country. I drive a car. I can live with that and not agree with the things that ostensibly led to what I benefit from, and put me in the position of privilege to be able to even think about these things.

How do you define prosperity?

GDP seems a flawed metric when discussing plunder: of course country A forcing country B to mine or farm will increase the GDP of country B.

I believe it requires either supremacism, inconsistency or hypocrisy to argue that land ownership at home should be sacrosanct whilst the rest of the world is fair game.

I’m actually not arguing for one thing or another, but I do have a side. I’m fine with overt supremacism or racism, though both run counter to my values.

> Race is a relatively new dimension in this conversation, largely imported from the USA. Conventionally, English society is divided by class, not race.

Absolutely, and the class structure in the UK is very still prevalent and cohesive. I also add that the beneficiaries of the slave trade and imperialism were predominantly one class, with a few crumbs dropped.

In the context of the comment and this article, imperialism and slavery are central. I think you understand why there is a backlash against any kind of redress for slavery, you only have to consider what is at stake: it’s not such a great leap from tackling race inequities to tackling class inequities – and didn’t those ideas get buried already?

I also believe this is true in the US, and why there is similar reaction to race inequities being raised: it’s no coincidence civil the rights movement and socialist movements were interlinked. In the US, the lives of poor white people don’t matter so much, either; that is not to deny that there is not and has not been a substantial race element too.

There is this idea that the US is a classless society, but it still has a class of wage labourers and a class of bourgeois – along with the inevitable class that mediate between the two but are actually the former. It looks remarkably like the UK class system today, with the key difference being the aristocratic remnants in the UK.

> The roots of class are in land ownership. And how far back must we unwind that to achieve equity?

Land ownership, inheritance and distribution are fascinating topics, especially when considering equity on a global scale and how the utility of natural resources has changed.

Land reform in the UK was itself a substantial political theme throughout the 20th century, and we still see elements of it resurface in debates on housing policy and environment, even if the blatant inequities are conveniently ignored.

The entire ideology is so inconsistent that it can only seem like it might work if you wilfully ignore vast swathes of evidence.

Britain’s imperial past and present provide a perfectly adequate explanation for the UK’s relative prosperity. It seems entirely understandable that proponents of the ideology only want some of the history to be remembered.

Otherwise, too many voters might get the idea that the UK is some kind of dishonest, nasty little island nation built on, and still benefiting from, slavery and imperialism. It’s probably a bit harder to remain in power with a program of advancing domestic inequality to the descendants of the beneficiaries of that imperialism.

I don’t think that this is a problem that just the UK has – many industrial imperial powers have the problem of how to contextualise their relative wealth. Once you start asking if it is right for the beneficiaries of those policies to have kept their wealth, solutions like serious wealth redistribution start to get proposed. It’s just that in the UK, there is a tendency for reactionaries to look almost comical to even their deepest opponents.

> That's the UK govt standard for document/data exchange. Short, simple and open. Get the basics right first then tackle the complicated stuff.

Which would be great if they actually followed their guidance.

In reality, the UK Westminster government is one of the worst entities for pushing out spreadsheets that use over-engineered excel-specific validation (often wrong for excel, too) with protection. There is no offer of an ods version, only xlsx.

I read it as anyone – including spammers – who puts link in will get a head request to it from the email provider, thus providing information – even if just that the address is real.

However, the absence of a bounce probably also does that, albeit less reliably.

This article seems rather poor quality and devoid of much content. It reads like an infomercial script. The use of the first- and second-person gives it a real amateur vibe, and at times the tone approaches condescending.

A few example paragraphs:

> Electricity, by contrast, is pretty much everywhere already. Where's your car now? Do you think it might be near an electricity cable? Exactly.

> And you don't need to be Thomas Edison to work that out.

> In fact, free charging is likely to become like free Wi-Fi, a little bribe to lure you into the shop.

There’s an awful lot of companies that use this as their deployment method.

People of requisite cautiousness will vet the shell script – but I suspect most will not.

> Does France require this information for French citizens who no longer live in France, but moved to (for example) the United States 20 years ago?

No, my understanding is only if you actually have income from France – such as rental income. Income is income, and it seems fair.

I believe the US is truly exceptional with FACTA, but it’s probably only because of their current position that they are able to claim global jurisdiction over domestic legislation. If Iran passed such legislation, I doubt any banks would be allowed to comply. FACTA is often cited as a reason for people renouncing US citizenship.

> I believe most EU countries aren't that interested in that information.

France at least appears to be interested, requiring you to explicitly list every foreign place you can stash money on tax returns every year. If you have any kind of French rental income, no matter where you are in the world, I understand you have to declare. There is an EU directive for reciprocal information sharing and I understand it is used.

There are fines and penalties for not declaring a foreign account. The fine is not income or wealth linked, so it seems like it wouldn’t really bother anyone with the sort of wealth to benefit from not declaring; the penalty is having the stashed money treated as income for the year it is discovered, which seems like it could make certain people nervous.

> Note that it has been a nightmare for US people living in EU

It appears to make life much harder in all manner of ways. When I opened my French bank account, the forms placed a heavy emphasis on me not being a US citizen. I asked and was told that it would be much more difficult to open an account.

I would be surprised if Amazon had the same non-negotiable-take-it-or-leave-it terms with Bose as it has with others.

Which raises an obvious asymmetry: Amazon makes no guarantee that it is not offering more favourable terms for bigger suppliers – and although mere speculation, I would be surprised if that didn’t go on, because I seem to remember traditional retailers doing similar things.

I’m not saying this is good or bad, just pointing out that with all retail there has been almost a phase transition once the supplier is a household name, and the dynamics change almost to the point where retailers would offer their products at cost price or even a loss just to make sure that their customers could buy the household name through them.

I think I’ve seen it more directly with Amazon sellers including discount vouchers that only work on their own store.

This is an interesting perspective.

It fits with my understanding of traditional retail as pretty brutal for new entrants, taking more of a cut and putting up a much higher barrier to entry than Amazon.

Ebay may have lower fees, but Amazon is where many people go for convenience.

> That seems like legitimately monopolistic behavior and something that is illegal and should be stopped.

IIRC they do something like it with books through Kindle Direct Publishing: you have to sell on Amazon at the lowest price available anywhere, or else they take a much bigger cut.

It will probably be argued that Amazon isn’t actually a monopoly in these areas, therefore it’s not an abuse of monopoly. I’m only half joking.

As you rightly point out, WordPress has a sweet spot of providing control over content to the customer.

The problem I see is that, in many instances, WP is pushed by dodgy developers running a template for what is a static site. This is easily the case for 90%+ of the small business sites I see. Many are never changed.

WordPress is a much larger attack surface than static hosting. There are fairly obvious ways of automating using WordPress to generate a static site that will be faster and more secure. I believe this is generally referred to as headless WordPress. Why does this not happen more – or do I just not see it when it does?

The old method used to be template matching, and it probably still works well enough for problems like this. There are almost certainly now better approaches possible using Machine Learning.

In my experience, the main challenges with problems like this are dealing with varying lighting, scales, orientation and perspective. These can quickly become of diminishing returns – especially if the solution is provided as an app that provides near-immediate feedback.

Some are not really pre-paid, you have to go online to activate them, or have to order them online, or have few options but to top up by card.

However, I just looked into it some more and it appears you can still buy prepaid cards by cash and buy top-up vouchers with cash.