jajag

I didn't say that the British government had no scope of action, but that it was limited compare to what a modern government could do. That this was further compounded by the attitudes and beliefs of members of the government of the time there's no doubt. But to be explicit about this, I believe that had there been an independent Irish state at the time, it would have continued to export food because not to do so would have been to risk economic collapse and would have outraged its merchant class.

A more accurate portrayal of the situation is to say that Ireland of the time was a state whose economy depended on the export of premium food products - cattle, dairy & grain - whilst the majority of the population were subsistence tenant farmers who grew that produce in order to pay for their farm tenancies, whilst growing a side crop of potatoes in order to sustain themselves. When the potato blight occurred, they were still expected to pay their farm rents using the produce they produced despite this leaving them without a food crop for their own sustenance. Despite what's believed from the common narrative, most of the landlords, middlemen and exporters facilitating the trade and export of food from Ireland at this time were Irish, and many were Catholics; and they were operating within an economic system were these actions made sense. As they would have seen it, stopping the export of food stuffs would have caused economic collapse.

In a modern state with well developed central government, the state would have been able to step in and take appropriate actions. But governments of the 1840s simply didn't have the scope of action available to a modern government, or the necessary vision of their role to accompany that. The result was a tragedy of truly enormous proportions, and which certainly more could have been done to avoid; but to suggest that it was simply due to 'systematic oppression' is to greatly simplify the divisions that existed within Irish society at the time, or the motivations of those involved.

I recently re-read The Name of the Rose, and tried using Google Translate to translate some of the Latin quotes that appear throughout the text. It was close to useless, which surprised me as most (it not all) of the quotes are from well-known and widely translated texts.

I'm only half way through the paper, but it's a very interesting read. One thing I don't get though; I'd have thought that the dative case would be very useful, if not essential, to humans living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but the paper seems to suggest that the necessary neural machinery to support the grammatical case only came into existence 70k years ago. What am I misunderstanding here?

> Have any of their “predictions” aged well?

No, but only in the sense that they've tended to be too conservative and to understate the degree and pace of change.

And just to be clear, the paper linked to is a review of weather station data which finds that extreme heat & humidity conditions are occurring sooner and more frequently than models predicted.

Possibly "grandstanding".

> This might be a good time when a representative democracy, composed of people who are willing to listen to experts and make the hard, unpopular, decisions, would be the best choice.

So basically, you want a return to some form of Aristocracy?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...

Because it's The Register, it's their house style.

I thought this was an excellent article, particularly the point about how and (possibly) why the CDC advised against the use of face masks to limit spread of infection during a pandemic. There seems to have been other failings of expert advice in the early days of the pandemic (e.g. see the UK government's apparent change of strategy early on) and they do to me look like failures in academic reasoning, rather than failures of political decision making. Will be interesting to read the findings of the inevitable inquiries after the dust has settled.

Not wishing to downplay the subject, but the surveillance state is not a recent development in the UK. Tony Geraghty [1] was writing about this over 20 years ago. Back then, it was about how techniques developed for use in Northern Ireland during the troubles were beginning to be applied across the UK as a whole. This involved things such as the mass-interception of communications, or automatic scanning of car number plates on a massive scale with the aim of tracking all car journeys within the country. Recent developments are unfortunately just a continuation of a trend started a long time ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Geraghty

Absolutely; it's Amazon that are making the accusations here.

Possibly referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#Bacillus_cereus

There is a study here of virus stability on dry surfaces: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

To put those case figures in context; the median age of the population as a whole in Germany is 47, and for Italy it's 45. [1]

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-age/

There's a flight to cash taking place. I guess no-one knows what to do, so the priority is to stay liquid.

Can anyone here say to what degree EU state aid & competition law is going to help or hinder governments over the next few weeks, as they try to shore up rapidly collapsing national economies?

The issue is the high percentage of patients that require intensive care, with up to 5% needing respiratory support. This can very easily overwhelm local health systems, and cause a knock-on effect to health support to the rest of the community. The best defence governments have right now is to try and slowdown the progression of the disease, and quarantining entire regions has already been shown in China to be an effective way of doing that.

Back in 2000, I was working for a small dotcom startup and I remember we came into work one day to discover that our production servers were all running at a crawl & unable to serve traffic. Turned out that one of the devs had installed seti@home on all our servers (this was before devops was a thing) and it was hogging 90%+ of the cpu. I think he'd installed seti on every machine in the office that he could get access to, even other people's workstations. He was utterly obsessed with the thing.

But the problem is that the bias often isn't understood by the readership - a lot of people consider the Guardian, NY Times and similar to be sources of unbiased, objective truth, despite the impossibility of that being the case. And those newspapers own branding only tries to encourage that view.

There's a discussion on this Twitter thread about why it could become a problem: https://twitter.com/SuperMugatu/status/1229229188273627136

Are you able to sketch out the reasons for your confidence?

[Edit: Just realized you wrote the comment I was replying to - so OK I see what you're saying]

Widespread crop failure and fisheries collapse due to extreme weather and acidic oceans could be just around the corner. I can't say that with complete certainty (and I really hope it doesn't happen), but I can't dismiss it with any confidence either.

It grows well in Britain, and it's very good in shepherds pie.

That's a highly cynical view. On the one hand, Nissan are reportedly considering ramping up production in the UK [1]; on the other, the UK government no doubt realises that there is considerable economical potential in green energy.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/03/nissan-eu-u...

Central banks are creating inflation, problem is it's in all the wrong places - e.g. asset inflation - instead of a rising CPI. (There is a bit of a debate taking place in central banking circles at the moment about whether CPI is an adequately measure, and whether it should better reflect things like rent increases; FT's Alphaville blog has had a number of interesting articles on the topic over the past week).

Don't forget the quarter billion a day the US has been spending on the war in Afghanistan...

Will be interesting to see what economic impact the Coronavirus outbreak has.

Yeah I'm struggling with that bit also; shouldn't information content be defined as the difference between a storage device with all bits set to the same 0 or 1 value, vs. a device with all bits set to purely random values? And can you isolate a measure of information content from the system that generates that information?

Are you saying what the US has been involved in for the past 70 years isn't a racket? This man called it first, and he knew what he was talking about.