vr46

The company is busy doing other things, but the domain is probably critical to protect lest a nefarious actor buys it and hosts Stuffit-masquerading malware.

Companies hate it when their teams buy new domains as it often commits them to protecting those domains for a very long time just in case.

It's good, but I've shifted over to Keka (https://github.com/aonez/Keka) which is much more modern and versatile (and compresses)

It is, and they do, and I also sympathize having travelled from Romania to Scotland and seen first-hand the differences that Europe has to somehow reconcile, it's a wonder they pass anything at all, even while I would like many of the people running things to be beaten on the soles of their feet repeatedly.

Tension between governing bodies and corporations is normal, signifies health and there's not enough of it.

Apple seems to be having an exceedingly long period of second-album-syndrome after a fifteen-year Imperial Phase©.

© Neil Tennant

His conclusion is somewhat odd, suggesting China writes effective legislation and that is their leverage, as opposed to the real reason which is the size of the market and their authoritarian wont. Which he also alludes to, confusingly.

A cryptic and vengeful fist-shake at the EU Commission, which surely has lower-hanging-fruit to take aim at.

I had some of these before I had access to a computer at school, let alone before getting my own ZX Spectrum, but they were the most exciting thing ever, the promise and possibilities!

They hold up very well, TBH.

Germany must have inspired whoever wrote the Richard Pryor film, 'Moving' when he arrives in Boise to find that the sellers of his new house were not kidding when they said "we're taking everything with us"...

And yes, darkness, there was literally no light whatsoever in either of the bathrooms unless our next-door neighbour helped out with some basic light fittings he had kicking around...

Ourselves and the landlord are dealing with all the issues, bar a complete rewire, and a new bathroom is the next thing on the cards. There isn't enough money in the system to fund the operational costs of housing here. Inflation and regulations have pushed the costs of improvements into the sky - like some new reg coming in saying that ALL new roofs after 202X must have solar panels and gold plating and be made of Vibranium or something, and that means that roofs are simply going to be left to rot.

Yes, well, the kitchen - AND ALL THE LIGHTS IN THE HOUSE - were removed by the previous tenants.

This is so fucking stupid it deserves a dedicated room in the Museum of The Stupid. Kitchens are so fitted to the physical rooms they are in, they are basically part of the house like walls, floors, ceilings and doors.

It's totally mad, isn't it!

Hamburg. The previous tenants left a mess, the landlord put in a new kitchen for us, new fences around the boundary, new back patio tiles. Ventilation is a problem as extractor fans need replacing and I’ve replaced a bunch of electric switches and sockets, but no fun.

Classmates with income only from the job centre are unable to find a place to live, although that’s hardly better anywhere. In London the rents are astronomical and competitive but the cycle of finding, viewing, renting and moving is still running fine. In Hamburg people can’t even find apartments for rent.

The UK has completely abolished fees (I think) for tenants - I am a reluctant landlord - and I completely agree with that, the power asymmetry in finding housing is already bad enough without allowing blank-cheque negotiations.

In my section of Germany, housing is even worse with rent caps and tenant rights, plus a lack of housing. Tenants are hard to move on, so landlords are painfully cautious about getting the right tenants - and there isn't a lot of money to maintain properties either, it seems. Our place has the worst decor and electrics, terrible ventilation and mould. And I think we're at the high end.

Systems geared up for incumbents, like "council houses for life" in London, ought to be sunset, just to get housing moving again. I don't think rent control works well, but I don't think open market rent works either. Anything critical with a limited supply needs to be externally regulated in ways that keep the wheels moving.

This rambling whataboutery is definitely the more tired talking point. BTC really does waste energy and it’s the context for this entire page.

Bring in Australian-style compulsory voting then.

This is such an irritating feature, the Jetbrains Clippy, let's call it Chuckles the AI Assistant.

You can't remove Chuckles after disabling - that was a decision to go against the default setup of plugins - and shows the respect they have for users.

It's like The Cat Came Back - this annoyance is going to run and run.

That’s pretty nuts, I thought those were cruiser tyres specifically with softer sidewalls, whereas sports tourer tyres have those stiff sidewalls for better handling. I think all the K1600s I’ve seen, similar weight, had Metzler Roadtecs or Z8s on (great tyre BTW, always rated a Metzler front tyre, even if they wore out quicker than the Michelin, lovely while they last).

Still, sounds like an interesting characteristic to get used to. Always wanted a go on a really massive cruiser/tourer, but I struggled with my tutor/observer’s Pan European, made me realize that the RT’s design was a lot cleverer than I thought.

Still use it, still rate it, but PGP/GPG doesn’t play as significant a role in much of what I do anymore. We have Signal and 1Password if we need it. I had a little company with two/three others for a few years and we used Keybase chat exclusively instead of Slack or Discord, that was good.

I had to convert that but yes, that is a very heavy bike. I have a 1200RT and yours is 100 kg heavier, goodness knows on what. I know that the Michelin Road 6 comes in GT versions with an extra ply for heavier bikes - maybe that's actually for yours and not mine!

Smoke kills, the things you’re describing are a lot to do with stopping smoke spreading. The UK shares a performance based approach with the Netherlands whereas the German and Italians do things in a prescriptive way. There’s no “EU way”.

So my general observations, for example, on roads:

the lack of speed limits on many highways, or only two lanes on others, which leads to many more lane-changing manouevres between high- and low-speed lanes; or very short-throw entry and exit lanes with extremely sharp curves and abrupt changes of speed; lack of organization and coordination around road-works to provide safe alternatives; the multitude of badly-designed junctions; terrible signage blocking traffic lights and visibility of oncoming traffic; the lack of ice and snow clearance on roads and pavements and cycle lanes; And I say this as someone who rides my bicycle every weekday to get to class. It's been a nightmare and I've just fitted studded tyres which has massively helped. In the UK, these routes would have been cleared.

I mean, both countries are pretty safe on the global scale of things, so we're complaining about things of a high standard to start with, but the figures kind of bear this out:

(ODS file: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65143a89b1bad...)

And the UK (or Great Britain which is just the mainland) had 706 car user deaths in 2021 compared with 1118 in Germany which is quite considerable. Injuries are harder to compare because of the variation in severity and the scale by which they are measured, but a dead body is a dead body. Fatalities means deaths occurring within 30 days of an RTA.

So when you get to Road Deaths, as opposed to car users, Germany jumps to 2562 deaths in 2021 vs 1608 for the UK, and that is 31/million pop vs 24/million pop to normalize things (no normalized figures on the sheet for car users).

Yes, same in the UK, I grew up without seat belts and then in the 1980s, they became a thing - "clunk-click, every trip" - and then only much later, compulsory for rear passengers.

It's step-by-step, building on top of the previous thing, slowly inculating into the population the respect for life and how it's the responsibility of every person, company and government. You belt up, cars add airbags, the government improves roads and traffic management. If all of those things are in place, things get better. In India, it's very much "god will protect me".

My own attitude changes so bizarrely when I'm in India. In Europe it's belt up, put your helmet on, and in India, let's all get into this Autorickshaw and hurtle through traffic. I must be mad.

I was taught by my advanced riding instructor that riding/driving safely was about making sure that everyone inside and outside the vehicle was safe, not just the vehicle occupants. Protection and safety are different concepts in this regard. Everyone has a right to be safe, so "don't ride like a twat" in this case.

Having largely moved out of the UK to Germany, I can see that the UK has a care for human life and safety that is unrivalled so far. (Despite the literal shitshow of the last few years as water companies dump sewage)

The UK has so much good design in all the systems where humans are concerned, from clear signage to walking surfaces, plus checks and balances to provide for redundancy, that you start taking it all for granted.

India on the other hand - I'm of Indian heritage - is a chaotic hellscape where life is cheap. I have an apartment there and recently smooke started pouring out a water pump, somebody mentioned it on the Whatsapp group and eventually someone went to investigate and found it burnt out. You can see so many problems here:

1) Response time slow 2) Problem not treated urgently 3) No electrical cut out 4) No temperature cut out

Basically the sort of thing that you would find sixty years ago in the UK, a malfunctioning device can simply carry on malfunctioning to the extent that it could cause a fire in an entire apartment block. The UK is not immune from this - see Grenfell fire where bad cladding caused many deaths - but we have a full-scale public inquiry and legislation and a lot of very pissed-off people in comparison.

So much of this coverage emphasizes the software. And blames it.

This is not fair - it was very clearly the actions of humans in Post Office Management with support of humans in Fujitsu that committed fraud in order to falsely convict innocent people.

Headline-writing humans and editors should do better.

Hmm, maybe - did you see the PDF reports from swissdevjobs/germantechjobs a few weeks ago?

Zurich, Zug, Bern and Geneva were out there as around double the numbers of anywhere in Germany. I know Switz isn't cheap to live in, but still. Honestly I wish I was still back in London.

And Hamburg has terrible salaries, too, if the €2500/month take home I was offered for a senior engineer role by one of Germany’s biggest companies is anything to go by.

I could also kick him in the balls for playing Purple Rain as the FOURTH song in the tribute show in London, no sense of timing.

But yes, it was mainly his ongoing evil Jiminy Cricket act pushing Prince into more extreme religious views (see Kevin Smith talk about Prince putting fans into groups of believers and non-believers) and tactics that affected his health (painkillers vs surgery).

I only witnessed the tribute abberation in-person so certainly could only convict on the basis of that, perhaps a massive wedgie with an option to upgrade to a kick in the balls if he did indeed have a hand in the downward spiral.

Thanks for links, really need to go listen to that tonight. Took years for Radiohead to play it again after originally getting sick of it, was stunned when I first heard them play it. There’s a band that REALLY understand things.

Prince didn’t understand at ALL, but he experimented a lot, repeatedly launching website projects for albums, creating short-lived memberships, failing to deliver e-commerce orders, and generally impatient with both results and his actual fans when we complained.

Prince was ridiculously fickle and capricious, bringing chaos and disorder everywhere he seemed to go, but, quite frankly, we loved that side of it in a world that was highly organized.

In 2014, our little fan group spent days combing Twitter and the news for intel on the next gig and a couple of thousand of us speculatively queued up in Camden ALL DAY - cold and wet - for a possible gig. Turned out to be two gigs in one evening. Did Prince get on Twitter to tell anyone? No. Did he launch a website? No. He did a random press conference a few days before from Lianne La Havas’s tiny flat.

Did he take Bitcoin? No, it was cash on the door.

So much of what he did from about 1994 on was driven by a slightly paranoid suspicion that he was being ripped off somewhere along the line and only he should control how his work was enjoyed, leading him into weird situations with his fans, other bands and musicians (remember his cover of Radiohead’s Creep), and it only really eased up once he STOPPED trying to work with internet technology and realized his performance skills were his bread and butter.

While I absolutely love and adore his music, I consider him to be a control freak and a terrible communicator outside of the studio who couldn’t handle reality, which is probably what helped kill him in the end, along with some dumb beliefs. I could honestly kick Larry Graham in the balls for that.

For plenty of supporting source material, check out Kevin Smith’s incredible answer to a question about Prince, go look up the Hit & Run tour, and the vast swathes of terrible album covers that helped to bury so much of his later work - that and the fact that you couldn’t buy many of these albums in the shops anyway.

We're only 5 weeks in and people have pretty much gotten to the same level of basic progress, which is far further than Duolingo in 18 months, regardless of homework, no tests - and eventually everyone will have to take a B1 exam anyway. B1 is required by the state, so I expected most people would have a slightly higher level of motivation, but people are of a much wider range of skill than I've previously experienced in a class and some of far less motivation.

All the people who took bonuses while fraudulently prosecuting people ought to be shaken upside-down until the entire bonus has been dislodged from their wallets.

My father was a subpostmaster decades ago and I am gobsmacked at how a public service has been turned into a piggy bank for a rotating cast of licenced bandits.

That everyone in the class demonstrated the same progress showed that Duolingo provided little advantage, which is what I was attempting to say in the quote.

I gave up Duolingo around 18 months before starting the course, which is for complete beginners with zero knowledge.