timellis-smith

I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were really fantastic devices

Colour me a bit cynical but we use plastic massively in healthcare and food industries precisely because it is non toxic.

Given the massive prevalence of plastic on just about all our food, if it was really such a threat I would expect life expectancies to have dropped.

Personally I regard this all as fear mongering.

I seem to remember I was on the FBI watch list for subscribing to Linux Journal back in the day.

Strange, I live in the North of England and that has hardly been my experience of late. Most trains have been at least 1 or 2 minutes late.

For me this is also a major failure of poor competition policy.

If Google's smart home system were an independent company, it would love or die by its ability to do its job. But Nest can just piggy back on Google's brand power.

Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB...

I'll let you draw your own conclusions

From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail

Fracking for all it's bad press has been immensely helpful in reducing greenhouse emissions.

If it weren't for natural gas we would still have massive coal fired power plants.

If you look at UK emissions which have been declining steadily since the 1990s, this has been in no small part due to the move to natural gas.

While it would be great to move to carbon neutral immediately, we can't do that without driving up energy prices massively and causing widespread poverty and disruption, so there is definitely room for some middle ground compromises.

As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.

That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more expensive energy source as well.

Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects many 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.

Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.

Apologies if I misunderstood your post.

If I understand you correctly now, then we are in agreement.

Because it is important.

The more egalitarian countries show more differentiation across career choices than less egalitarian ones. I.e. men show a greater prefence for thing based careers and women show a greater prefence for people based careers.

If you've ever watched kids playing you'll realise how self evident it is, from a very early age before kids are remotely aware of cultural norms.

This flies in the face of all predictions that roles of sex are purely cultural.

Yes, but it gets harder the more the odds get stacked against you.

The school system and university system is increasingly run by females for females.

Critical theories designed to dismantle the 'patriachy' both attack males and put in place gender quotas and limits to men.

Males are told that their very essence of being is toxic.

I really don't envy boys growing up these days and an very glad I have a daughter.

Very true, and we are mostly formed by our genetics, and it really helps to keep that in mind.

But as parents that doesn't stop us from overly attributing everything bad that our kids do to our own bad parenting.

>> You must believe deep down in your core that ordering a human being to do something is a sign you must introspect about your failure as a manager, and commit to fixing the problem.

>This also just seems like new-age guilt injected into the work place. Don't be a micro manager always in people's faces for no reason but if you're telling yourself you're a failure because _as a manager_ you told someone to do something, I'm not sure how you last more than 2 days on the job.

I don't know. As a parent it's something I do all the time. My aim is very much to lead my kid and I absolutely hate being authoritarian. So whenever I do find myself being so, I try to introspect (not very successfully for the most part) and find a better solution.

Or really worrying.

I wonder what this is doing to economic productivity.

I'm a principal engineer in a consultancy and can fully associate with this viewpoint.

The org wide work but not org wide alignment rings very true and it occupies much of my free work time trying to solve.

WordPerfect 6 for Dos was my favourite word processor. Vim keybindings would make WP pretty incredible.

The IMF are notoriously bearish on the UK economy. As the article notes the IMF have already upgraded their outlook for the UK economy once.

I agree with you on this. And yes, rising living standards will hopefully make people care more about their environment.

I also agree with you on the individual level with increasingly larger cars etc..

You do know that global land use for agriculture has peaked and certainly in the UK energy usage peaked in 2005.

All this while the world is greening.

Most of the developed world too has declining birth rates.

So I would hardly call it an ever expanding consumption.

How much of the global greening is occurring naturally due to increased co2?

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

It may be that energy prices are ultimately the limiting factor in the advancement of ai.

As an allegory.

I've on occasion been in very cold water (cutting ropes from propellors of boats and stand-up paddle boarding).

While my core body temperature is still below normal, I've found myself incapable of going back into the cold water, like my body physically refuses.

The mind works to protect itself, and perhaps that's what its doing with regards to work - trying to protect you from further damaging yourself due to burn-out.

I remember reading Malcom Gladwell describing how the time of year that you were born affected the chances of you ending up as a professional sportsmen.

Yet schools never seem to take into account the different development rates of girls vs boys which massively advantages girls. Then combine it with a majority of female teachers who understand how girls learn much better; and further combine it with the relative decline of play and sports and the school becomes a very hostile place for boys very quickly.

When the boy leaves the school and goes into the workplace and is confronted by all sorts of women in tech organisation but not men in tech (or the like) they immediately are made to feel that there is less space in the workplace for them.

I would honestly hate to be a boy growing up today and am very glad I have a daughter rather than a son.

See the Employment equity act, BEE, BBBEE in South Africa

cyncism or skepticism?

Or perhaps its just because Borris had just been elected with a majority to do so and the promise to get it done.

Not exciting at that point would arguably have been far more cynical.