ploika

That's also done.

"Funded by the Arts Council" is a phrase commonly seen on posters for all sorts of artistic endeavours. "Funding Opportunities" is front and centre on their website too:

https://www.artscouncil.ie/home/

Several of those groups have much stronger lobbies in Ireland than artists do, I would argue.

Live music and theatres in particular have been almost totally shut down here since March 2020. I'm struggling to think of any other sector that has been so badly hit during the pandemic.

Ireland is similarly keen to keep schools open.

Children from age 5 upwards are being vaccinated as of today, and the main focus in school buildings is on getting adequate ventilation and HEPA filters into classrooms. Contact tracing in schools has been not been a priority, for better or for worse.

The will is there, and there's money available to spend, but the implementation has been a bit less than stellar.

I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science but can already write half-decent Python and maybe some SQL, JavaScript or Matlab/Julia/R".

People who are fine with control flow, git, unit tests etc, but who would be lost if you start talking about things like state machines or depth-first search.

I'm largely talking about myself here, but I've worked with dozens of colleagues in several different jobs who would also match this description.

> We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

I generally agree with much of this blog post but the phrase "Western society" annoys me no end and is a bad fit here.

Pension funds.

The company you work for will give X% of your salary each month to Willis Towers Watson or whoever, who invest huge sums of money on behalf of people like you.

Then you move jobs or the start-up fails or whatever, but your old money is still with Towers Watson, hopefully earning a decent return. You contribute to a pension in your new job too.

When it comes to retiring, you cash in your contributions from the pension fund (possibly having done some amalgamating and tidying up from the various jobs you've had) for some class of annuity and possibly a lump sum. All going well, it should be enough to live on in retirement.

If you're working and aren't contributing to a pension, I would strongly recommend it.

Some parts of the world will definitely lock down again in 2022. I'm in Ireland and fully expecting a hard lockdown in January.

I want to believe that the pandemic will move some health systems away from almost just-in-time lean resourcing towards having more unused capacity to soak up shocks without being overwhelmed. I predict a single step in that direction for 2022.

Loads of things. Twenty years ago was only 2001.

Bikes, some items of clothing, furniture, DIY/garden tools, pretty much every kitchen utensil and gadget could be handed down after that period of time if it's high quality. A lot of electrical stuff like radios and TVs are still useful after 20 years.

A version of that for cars is common enough actually. Several countries and US states have road worthiness tests that include minimum (maximum?) emissions standards that must be met. The car I drive will probably ultimately fail on emissions as standards rise over the next few years.

I fully did not intend for it to happen, but using Strava has made me exercise more, and put more effort into improving my performance rather than just going through the motions.

This was especially true during Ireland's very long lockdowns this year, when training in groups was against the rules for long periods of time.

American gun violence is on a different scale to most of the rest of Western society. I don't think it's a particularly useful comparison.

I'm based in Dublin city, currently trying to buy a home somewhere that lets me live as car-free an existence as possible.

I'm avoiding reclaimed land and low-lying areas (of which there is a lot in the city), because they're probably going to flood more regularly, and getting flooded is awful.

I'm not going to move to the countryside because (for my lifestyle at least) living in a fairly dense urban area is much more environmentally friendly than buying a one-off house in the countryside, driving everywhere, and getting stuff (water, electricity, online shopping etc) delivered relatively long distances out to me.

I don't have the time, energy, expertise or inclination to grow my own food on my own land, so it's much more efficient to let farmers do the farming, and just walk or cycle to the grocers and supermarkets to pick up what I need. Irish agriculture could be a lot greener as an industry, but that's a topic for another day.

Same goes for mains water versus finding patch of land with my own well in it. Economies of scale exist, and the environment will benefit from my using them.

That's the function of the Comptroller and Auditor General where I live. I'd be surprised if there was no equivalent in the USA.

It wasn't a Soviet but the 1913 Dublin Lockout probably deserves a mention too. It was a bitter dispute that involved about 15,000 workers and lasted around 5 months. It's arguably the most significant industrial dispute in Irish history, and many of the speakers mentioned in the poster in the article would have taken part in it.

It might largely depend on whether you live somewhere with proportional representation or not. Full-on revolution at the ballot box is rare in liberal democracies, sure, but single-issue candidates get elected pretty commonly and often have outsized influence if they're needed for a coalition government.

Delta, in a word.

It's important to note that while outbreaks are definitely happening, hospitalisations and deaths are way down compared to previous waves.

That's too simplistic. It's very hard to keep minority languages alive, even if you really desperately want to, when you're immersed in a majority language.

The Irish language is in danger even in the Gaeltacht areas where native Irish speakers live, because English is everywhere. Tech is almost exclusively English, most jobs are English-only, most media is in English (not to mention ads on YouTube), most news and politics happens in English (the primary sources at least), all the packaging on everything you buy is in English, it's much easier to find a solicitor who speaks English-legalese than Irish-dlítheanga, your kids pick up English from TV and life.

Before you know it, you and many of your acquaintances are a bit rusty, and conversations happen in English more and more. The language declines, and it's not what you wanted.

I'm not saying all of anything is anything else. Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree.

The notion of "anti-Irish racism" in the UK or USA, or "anti-Polish racism" in Ireland, is widely accepted enough for me to believe that the definition I'm used to isn't unreasonable.

> Canadians and Australians are beneath Americans. We "know" this in our heart of hearts.

Your definition of "racism" is far too narrow if that doesn't count as a racist statement to you.

The one not at war obviously. Being in Europe didn't save Bosnia from being a pretty awful place to be in the 90s.

The wreck is actually on Inis Oírr, the smallest island.

Over the past few years it's kind of collapsed in on itself. It's not much more than a vaguely boat-shaped pile of rust these days.

High-speed rail can absolutely compete with short-haul flights between (some) European cities.

There is no main partisan divide like there is in the US or UK. We don't have a two party system.

The last election was basically a three way tie, with a significant vote share split across another handful of small parties and independents. It's way more complex than just FG v SF.

That's what I'm saying. I don't think they were sitting on it until McEntee left either.

Ireland isn't part of the Five Eyes though.

I don't really think Helen McEntee's maternity leave is relevant either because she's in the same party as Heather Humphreys, and they are in a three-party coalition government. There's no main partisan divide like there is in the US or UK.

The Limerick gangs were more or less dealt with about a decade ago. It's the likes of the Kinahans, and possibly some of the various dissident republican groups, who are much more of a target for this bill.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, Ireland is not part of the UK.

Presumably not, because "the key is broken" is not the same as "I refuse to hand over the keys". This law, rightly or wrongly, is concerned with the latter concept.

I'm kind of sad that the term "data mining" has fallen out of favour, because large datasets (as with mines) tend to contain a lot of worthless dirt that just has to be sifted through.

10 million rows of data is still pretty big, all the same. You can get away with invoking the Central Limit Theorem after about 30 observations, for instance (with all the usual assumptions and caveats). Sometimes all you're getting for the extra effort is a tighter confidence interval around something that could be pretty well estimated with a couple of hundred rows of data.

I think you're talking about different things.

Yosemite could be breathtaking, but not interesting (because it feels very foreign) the way that a huge high school football game or a typical American diner might be interesting to non-American eyes.

(In case it's not obvious, I've never been to the USA)