Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE

Cambridge Liberal Democrat. Techie (retired). One time pilot (lapsed PPL).

Profile picture: street furniture - I take pictures of interesting street furniture when travelling. In this context it *is* appropriate for the street lighting columns to be gold plated.

Web: https://www.brettward.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettwardltd/
Location: Cambridge, England

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Last Notes

2026-07-03 17:15:55 UTC

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I found blue jeans tight and stiff and heavy and uncomfortable as a child and have never worn them as an adult.

2026-07-03 17:07:32 UTC

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I suspect that was very much a 1970s problem.

2026-07-03 16:53:37 UTC

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A one time colleague found that she no longer got shocks off the computer when she stopped wearing nylon knickers.

2026-06-17 13:45:35 UTC

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Mint. Trying to create network shares.
On the Mint box I can't see the Windows shares that are exposed on the network.
On a Windows box I *can* see the drive of the Mint box, and browse around and read files, WITHOUT ENTERING ANY CREDENTIALS!! Which doesn't strike me as a terrible secure default behaviour.

2026-06-17 10:56:07 UTC

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I tried putting Linux on an old PC the other day to see whether "2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop" and couldn't get any sane behaviour out of the networking, so I haven't turned it on for the last few weeks.

2026-06-07 17:29:17 UTC

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That not all "AI" is LLM and not all non-LLM "AI" is evil. Many people here get that, but there are plenty who don't.

2026-06-07 15:52:22 UTC

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You probably use an ML system every time you spend money - every transaction is fraud scored at some point, some multiple times.

2026-05-31 15:19:17 UTC

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That's how all governments (with sovereign currencies) spend money - the money is created as the government spends it.
In order that the amount of money sloshing around doesn't grow fast enough to cause undesired inflation governments also destroy money, by collecting taxes and by selling bonds. Selling bonds is however in part just a favour to the markets who need somewhere to save money - if the government doesn't like the interest rate that the market is offering for bonds then the government can simply choose not to sell any for the time being. This is why shenanigans in the bond market don't actually affect the government's ability to spend.

2026-05-13 15:23:52 UTC

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I don't recall there being any time limit to the commitment when I signed up to #No2ID last time round this Labour police state loop.

2026-05-10 15:05:16 UTC

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Same with Twitter. So my account there still exists but has been abandoned for some years.

2026-05-10 08:51:37 UTC

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The Tories at the next table in the pub the night after the election were moaning about how unfair this was (IIRC they got their usual 0 seats) but shut up when we pointed out to them that they'd had decades of opportunity in government to change the voting system.

2026-05-10 08:39:16 UTC

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At one point we had a 2/3 majority on #Cambridge city council on the votes of around 10% of the electorate. That's how FPTP local elections work (if you're any good at targeting).

2026-05-09 11:11:28 UTC

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I suspect that an over-cautious attitude to increased regulation may be one factor.
Like, you get 400 applications for a basic admin job, and to avoid ending up in court for discrimination HR insist on every single application being properly scored against a matrix, properly replied to, ect ect. Rather than what would make business sense - on a quick flick through, pick out the dozen or so that are worth reading properly and ignore the rest.
IMO HR should do a more pragmatic risk assessment - "there's only a tiny, tiny risk of having to pay out only a couple of grand, so we won't spend several times that on increased process."

2026-05-07 19:59:09 UTC

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Yes, one does rather wonder why people use small boats to cross the channel would they could just walk across the NI border.

2026-05-07 11:04:05 UTC

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This doesn't affect those Brits who have obtained Irish passports as an anti-#brexshit measure. They can continue to enter the UK with their Irish passports, and thus still don't have to pay twice for an inferior product.

2026-05-07 11:01:02 UTC

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British dual nationals (whose other nationality isn't Irish) can't travel into the UK solely on the base of their other nationality passports, as of not-very-long ago.

2026-05-04 20:39:48 UTC

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My most "fun" interaction with gliders ...
I was flying along one day and saw two gliders somewhere off to the left and ahead of me. Knowing what gliders are like - no concept of "straight and level" - I checked back on them a couple of seconds later (after continuing my scan for traffic, instruments etc) to see where they'd got to. To find they were nowhere near where they had been.
Eventually - another couple of seconds later - I saw one of them going maybe 100' directly beneath me, and the other one maybe 100' directly above me. I'm absolutely certain that they had me in sight the whole time and were taking the piss.

2026-05-04 20:31:14 UTC

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I have been for one flight in a glider. The instructor said "you're a power pilot, so I don't have to teach you how to fly, but be aware that you'll find it very sensitive in pitch." So I was very very careful to try to make tiny pitch movements ... and even that managed to send the nose up and down rather violently.

2026-05-04 18:47:58 UTC

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Wow. Very pretty.
(I stick to powered flight myself - "every landing a forced landing", and over terrain like that too!)

2026-05-04 16:48:14 UTC

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Just been trained on the BBC.

2026-05-04 09:21:17 UTC

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Sure - that's a current choice of the current government, which they could change, not a law of nature.

2026-05-04 08:26:57 UTC

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But the government only has to sell bonds if it happens to feel like it, so it can refrain from doing so if it doesn't like the interest rate. What happens to the prices of existing bonds doesn't affect government.

2026-05-01 08:05:29 UTC

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They are. I worked somewhere that had a model trained on the (large, complex) system's documentation. Often it knew the answer (with a link to the source document), sometimes it didn't know the answer in which case it would say so (with links to possibly relevant source documents).

2026-04-30 15:30:04 UTC

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There's visible ripples - you can see the surface. When you really have "glassy water" you can't see the surface from that sort of angle - you just have to fly a descent path so that when you unexpectedly hit the water you've got everything right for a landing.

2026-04-15 22:05:52 UTC

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How do you know what it said? Didn't you skip through it?

2026-04-15 09:26:00 UTC

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I'm mildly surprised that it helped anyone buy a house. The natural assumption is that house prices will simply rise to absorb the entire subsidy - interesting to see that that turned out not to be the case.

2026-04-12 09:51:37 UTC

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How much grid upgrade would that £272m have paid for? - would it have been enough to make a difference, or are we talking many, many billions?

2026-04-11 16:04:00 UTC

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Isn't this deliberate? Don't you actually pay for all this useless garbage?

2026-04-07 22:00:25 UTC

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The USA has been rampaging round the world bombing the shit out of people for no good reason for rather longer than 47 years, hasn't it?

2026-04-05 13:49:51 UTC

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Also what Putin's 17.4m #brexshitters seem to be missing is that this is down to them - without #brexshit we'd have had a say in the regulations.

2026-04-03 12:59:44 UTC

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I once saw a CV which said "University of Hertfordshire" and then in big letters "formally Hatfield Poly".
Very sensible of the applicant. Hatfield Poly had a good reputation for that sort of graduate, but at the time nobody had ever heard of the (recently rebadged) University of Hertfordshire.

2026-04-03 10:52:13 UTC

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"Controlling for university and course choice" *removes* some class bias, doesn't it, as class influences those choices?
There's plenty of outreach work for example to counter the "people like me never go to Oxbridge so I won't even apply" mindset. Which wouldn't exist if it wasn't needed.

2026-03-27 22:01:44 UTC

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At the bottom of a path up an Alaskan mountain (don't remember which one) there was a sign saying, roughly:
"Rescue on this trail is self rescue. If you like, you can sign in in the book in the box - local volunteers check the book once a week or so, if they remember, and might, or might not, come looking for someone who has signed in but not signed out."
#Alaska

2026-03-20 23:29:29 UTC

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There is of course no excuse for burning carbon to run AC anyway.
(1) We've known for thousands of years how to build houses that don't need AC.
(2) In a location where the sun gets hot enough that AC is needed ... then guess what, there's also enough sun to generate the solar electricity needed to run the AC.

2026-03-20 23:19:56 UTC

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And let me guess whether American responds by
(1) burning less carbon, or
(2) turning up the air conditioner.

2026-03-15 19:57:33 UTC

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We're still to the left of Labour though.

2026-03-13 17:18:06 UTC

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My grandma, as a naïve young housewife, not knowing any better, bought half a pound of bay leaves.
Her friends didn't half laugh at her.
Until the war started.
And they spent the next few years sneaking round to apologetically "borrow" a bay leaf.
[Well, that's the family story. I can believe that they were unobtainable in packets in shops, but surely it would only have taken one tree in someone's garden to keep an entire suburb supplied.]

2026-03-12 15:15:20 UTC

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My mother voted Remain in Putin's #brexshit referendum.
"I remember the war," she said. That was enough for her to vote for a peace project, none of the other arguments needed to be considered.

2026-03-11 14:27:17 UTC

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That's a slightly different view of Mullion Island to the one I usually get from above Polurrian (seen in some of the photos here https://www.classic.co.uk/holiday-cottage/desc-4858.html).
#Cornwall

2026-03-09 22:39:55 UTC

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Once Upon A Time I was sitting in a full council meeting when I received a text from my MP.
"Hi Tim, have you got any shovel-ready transport schemes that the Chancellor can announce in next week's budget?"
How not to do infrastructure, I thought.
(Hint: you ain't gonna spend large amounts of money working a scheme up to being shovel-ready if no funding stream to actually build it has yet been identified.)

2026-03-09 19:38:22 UTC

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We did borrow one of those emergency satellite communication widgets last time we went walking in BC mountains.

2026-03-07 23:40:05 UTC

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So, still almost free then.

2026-03-01 11:35:33 UTC

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At least three options:
(1) The same company culture naturally leads to both a female CEO and a smaller pay gap.
(2) A female CEO is more likely to say "sort the pay gap" to the HR director than a male CEO.
(3) The HR director is more likely to take it seriously when told to "sort the pay gap" by a female CEO ("she really means it") than by a male CEO ("he's just paying lip service to today's fad, he'll be on about something else next week").
Which other theories have I missed?

2026-02-28 17:24:50 UTC

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Normal size baked beans tin I assume, 400g. It was specifically Heinz because the purchaser doesn't like the native US alternatives (despite Heinz being AFAIK a US company).

2026-02-28 15:55:13 UTC

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$5 for a tin of Heinz baked beans in the USA I've just been told. (We pay 24p for a local equivalent.)

2026-02-25 14:44:38 UTC

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"prioritising the actually or potentially employable on the waiting lists for treatment over those who are severely disabled or simply retired"
Your former suggestion is a risk, yes - it appears to be something that is currently not done and in my view should *not* be done.
Your latter suggestion is what I would support.
(A lesson in how to write a policy such that it can be interpreted in two completely opposite directions at the same time. A failure to obey one of the very early rules one learns as a politician: "before you open your mouth, think about how your worst enemy might maliciously distort what you're about to say".)

2026-02-25 13:45:07 UTC

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A "getting people back to work" NHS policy could be quite a good idea, assuming that it will include things like:
(1) Reduce waiting times for mental health services from years to days.
(2) Treat conditions earlier, when they make working difficult, rather than waiting until they make daily life impossible.

2026-02-24 08:51:55 UTC

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Are there that many empty seats these days? I remember then 1980s when you could expect to sleep across an entire row of empty seats coming back across the Atlantic, but I haven't seen a plane that wasn't at least nearly full for decades.

2026-02-22 17:06:32 UTC

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I'm left wondering how RWNJ MPs handle their casework ... a lot of which is complex immigration cases. Do they just tell their constituents to fuck off, or waht?

2026-02-22 12:09:11 UTC

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And if one day the Greens win power ...
... they will suddenly realise that FPTP isn't so bad after all, and that in fact voting reform is a long way down their priority list.

2026-02-19 13:26:58 UTC

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Hasn't Birmingham also been in the news on and off for the last several years?

2026-02-15 10:59:22 UTC

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Meanwhile, the current business model of universities, to make a lot of their money from foreign students buying one year taught MAs, is somewhat at odds with the lingering policy of Theresa May's, which is to regard foreign students as "immigrants" rather than "customers".

2026-02-15 10:55:41 UTC

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I was told by an MP at the time the current system was brought in that students were mostly not expected to pay off the debt; and that the scheme was, therefore, essentially a graduate tax; so the main objective of the scheme was to punt the cost of universities thirty years down the line for some future government to worry about.

2026-02-12 08:44:29 UTC

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But is "growth", at least whilst it continues to mean "let's burn more carbon", actually desirable?

2026-02-08 19:31:47 UTC

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He will presumably be replaced by yet another nasty--piece-of-work spin doctor, that appears to be how we run governments in the UK the last few decades.

2026-02-08 12:18:26 UTC

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The only reason I can think of for Labour writing that letter is that they have decided that Reform are going to win and have decided to blame the Greens before the Greens can blame Labour.

2026-02-02 12:19:08 UTC

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I once bought a whole brand new car with an interest free loan, which as far as I could work out was genuine. What I haven't worked out is why the dealer tried so hard to persuade me to take it when I'd already indicated that I was willing to pay cash.

2026-01-30 10:36:39 UTC

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Our local police told me a long time ago that the shift in the balance of crime goes with the economic climate.
In good times violent crime is up and acquisitive crime is down, and in bad times violent crime is down and acquisitive crime is up.
This, they said, is because in good times the "bad people" have money, and spend it on drink, and get drunk and violent, whereas in the bad times they can't afford drink and have to steal to buy food and pay rent.
(I'm sure there's more to it than that, but this sounds like it could be a contributing factor. This is the practical view from the street - I don't know if there's any academic research to back it up.)
(Another thing that goes with economic climate is recycling rates. Recycling is measured by weight, and champagne bottles weight a *lot* more than lager cans.)

2026-01-27 22:03:23 UTC

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FSVO "we".
When I was on a council committee organising HMD events the other victims of the Holocaust, and other genocides (eg Rwanda), *were* given attention. YMMV I guess, depending on where you live.

2026-01-26 13:27:43 UTC

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I don't get this use of the "execution" word.
To me an "execution" is the legal killing of a criminal by a state following whatever relevant due process of law is in place.
That's not what happened here.

2026-01-21 10:03:06 UTC

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That would be a "fact", though, and facts don't matter to gammons - what they vote for is to fuck up other people's lives.

2026-01-19 23:10:12 UTC

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Listed was my thought too. I know where there are some listed cast iron gates which are always left open, and thus similarly useless, because, we're told, if they were continually opened and closed that might risk damage.

2026-01-18 13:32:21 UTC

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But where's the court that will actually DO something? Like imprison Trump for contempt in such a way that he can't immediately pardon himself?

2026-01-18 10:49:09 UTC

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What confuses me is why the people aren't defending themselves. The USA has things like the second amendment, stand your ground, castle doctrine, and more guns than people - why aren't ICE goons getting shot left right and centre?

2026-01-14 10:33:45 UTC

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Maybe there's an underlying feeling of "if these people are rich enough to travel abroad then they don't need benefits"?

2026-01-12 19:50:02 UTC

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Once Upon A Time that would be the inside of the bedroom window. (No car, of course, we weren't that rich.)

2026-01-11 18:49:24 UTC

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All I know about planes is that survey, a few years old now, that 97% of planes have covid on board according to waste water sampling.
My assumption is that the other 3% of flights were short haul flights on which not everybody went to the loo.
So I haven't been on a plane since. OK, so I'd be happy to fly myself with nobody else in the aircraft ... but all my paperwork has expired, and I'd have to spend hours in a tiny cockpit with someone else to get it back.

2026-01-10 09:19:39 UTC

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... as long as they are then being used efficiently. Temporary labour is sometimes (when used properly) a perfectly sensible way of coping with lumpy demand as it beats having experts on the payroll who have nothing to do for a significant part of the time.

2026-01-05 15:29:15 UTC

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Well, we've already taken to defending Wikipedia - it's gone from "it's just written by some random bod on the internet, it must be crap" to "it's written by actual human beings, it's great!"

2026-01-04 12:28:43 UTC

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A Word template from, apparently, 1992.

2026-01-04 12:20:57 UTC

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I downloaded LibreOffice yesterday just to see what it's like. Once Upon A Time all our kids insisted on trying the then free versions of Office, and all after a while said "we need something that actually works, please can we have the real Office?" But that was many years ago, and I see reports that LibreOffice is much better now, so I thought it worth another try.
I opened up my letter template. Which has a "creation date" field in it, obvs, as any letter template would. Unlike when I start to write a new letter with Word, which updates the date to the date at which the new document is created, LibreOffice seemed to leave it fixed at the 1992 date at which the *template* file was created - it seems to me that there's no conceivable universe in which anyone would want that changed behaviour.
Looks like I'll be sticking with Office for now, if such a basic, simple, thing as writing a letter doesn't work - what other annoyances am I going to come across??

2026-01-01 23:41:19 UTC

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How meaningful was the wait time anyway, as a useful[#] indication to an individual patient? Aren't wait times anything from "immediate" to "never", depending on triage?
[#] "Useful" as in, for example, does their companion wait, or do they know to go home to bed and come back in the morning?

2025-12-30 13:04:00 UTC

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I'm not that bothered about reading a #brexshit-supporting paper that I can be bothered with the workarounds. I stopped paying for the dead tree version years ago, and I've now stopped reading the online version.

2025-12-30 09:21:43 UTC

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Johnson did make a start on his election promise of a final solution to the social care funding crisis - by seeding covid into care homes thus reducing demand - but he never finished the job.

2025-12-29 15:27:46 UTC

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It is generally believed that in the USA anybody can sue anybody for anything. Suing a foreign supranational not-government for "unfair not-state competition" seems fairly mild by US standards.
Whether they would win, many years and untold hundreds of millions in legal fees down the track, is a different question. Particularly if Trump adds to the fun, and the lawsuit targets, by applying some random set of sanctions to "Europe" in retaliation for this "attack on US business".

2025-12-29 13:41:42 UTC

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pw;dr
Have Visa, Mastercard, etc, launched their lawsuits yet?

2025-12-29 13:03:52 UTC

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Indeed not. Moving 2,000 kg of hardware in order to achieve the movement of 100kg of person sound to me at least fifteen times as inefficient as a 30kg e-bike.

2025-12-28 16:35:09 UTC

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Well, that's what we've been (partly) living on for the last several decades - my wife is an academic publisher (books not journals).

2025-12-28 14:46:09 UTC

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I think this might be more of a problem at a lower level, as well established and well respected academics can "self publish" and be taken perfectly seriously by those who want to read their stuff.

2025-12-28 13:17:49 UTC

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I'm not sure I entirely get this.
Academics are free to publish whatever they like for free on their own web sites, and make it available to all for free, and many do.
If they choose to take advantage of the added value that they believe that publishers offer they must surely understand that publishers' employees have children to feed and mortgages to pay just like anybody else.

2025-12-23 14:56:17 UTC

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If only the farmers hadn't voted for #brexshit, then they might not be having to whine about their tiny margins.
(Yes-I-know-not-all-farmers-only-most-of-them.)

2025-12-21 20:32:21 UTC

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What should the overturn rate be?
I tried to get officers to give me a target for planning appeal overturns but they wouldn't offer an opinion. I reckoned 25% was about right but I never did get any guidance from anyone who knew better than my gut feel.
60% does sound rather high though for a loss rate for any appeal system.

2025-12-18 21:39:32 UTC

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I was under the impression that governments had performed such an examination more than once, and nothing much changed?

2025-12-08 23:27:10 UTC

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Trouble with that is remembering which false date you gave to which site, for when they use it as a security question.
With Twitter I couldn't be arsed. They demanded my date of birth some years ago now, and I didn't supply it, and I haven't been able to log in since.

2025-12-07 10:37:28 UTC

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Getting anyone to agree to an electoral pact in public seems out of the question at the moment.
But things do happen on the quiet in by-elections. I recall one where there were Labour party members in and out of the Lib Dem campaign HQ, helping successfully to defect the Tory whilst loudly announcing (helping themselves to the cake - there's always cake in a Lib Dem by-election HQ) "I'm not Lib Dem". And one Thursday when there were several Tory seats up for by-election: Labour didn't campaign in some (though they did put up paper candidates) and Lib Dems didn't campaign in the others (though they did put up paper candidates) - the electorate in those constituencies got the message OK and voted the Tories out in all of them.

2025-12-06 11:06:11 UTC

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I think in general (not limited to economics) the process is supposed to be something like
1. get some data
2. use *some* of it to design and build and/or train a model
3. see if the model then predicts the *rest* of your data (if not, start again)
4. see if the model then predicts ongoing real life for a while (if not, start again)
and only if you get this far
5. put the model into use / publish / whatever.
I sort-of get the impression that some people get some of these steps in the wrong order, like moving to step 5 before validation with steps 3 and 4.

2025-12-06 10:54:23 UTC

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My reading so far suggests that there are *lots* of models. People even get Nobel prizes for them!! But I'm getting the impression that none of the models work terribly well on anything other than the data they were trained on, so predictive usefulness is somewhat limited.

2025-12-04 09:41:59 UTC

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As a required exercise at work I asked an AI to generate a web application wrapper round an existing piece of back-end code.
It generated something that looked like it came from 1995 - pure HTML, no styling at all. But it did work, and you could see everything at one on one screen, no scrolling.
So for a laugh I said "make this look like a 2025 web application, not a 1995 one". And it generated lots of CSS and suchlike ...
... and did exactly what it was told. 2025-style, what you saw on the screen was mostly wasted white space. We had to scroll vertically to see all the information, and some individual fields needed to be scrolled horizontally.
My colleagues took one look at this and said "we prefer the 1995 version". So did I, I said, that's the version I'd committed for production use.

2025-11-25 08:51:53 UTC

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If you clobber small private planes you won't get any pilot training[#] so the airlines will run out of pilots ... which may be a deliberate objective?
[#] Many pilots pay for their own training at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds. Double the price and you'll significantly reduce the number of people who can afford it; they'll choose different careers.

2025-11-23 16:02:03 UTC

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I've just checked. There are no buttons that I can see or feel on the front of the telly (I haven't looked at the back, but it's not practical to operate controls there whilst trying to watch the thing anyway).

2025-11-23 11:35:47 UTC

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Hmm. Though there is an obvious counter-example - we have for years now accepted television sets that can't be used if the remote control fails.

2025-11-23 10:22:38 UTC

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Why would anyone ever buy anything like that?
First rule of buying IoT gadgets is that they should fall back to manual controls if all the smart stuff fails.

2025-11-22 11:03:13 UTC

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Wow. Non-zero based axes *and* very different ranges to the two scales, 1.4 vs 1.7, obviously chosen to make the graphs look as though they match. I don't recall there being anything that extreme in How to Lie with Statistics.

2025-11-16 22:34:59 UTC

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Seems to depend on the story.
In their editorial for the 2017 general election they recommended their readers to vote for a party which had "get #brexshit done" as a manifesto commitment. That was the paper, not just some columnist.

2025-11-16 19:51:57 UTC

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(pw;dr - I don't pay money to #brexshit-supporting organisations)
But yes (guessing what the article is about), all that imposing more bureaucratic hassle on landlords does is put the rents up.
Because good landlords comply, and recover the costs from their tenants, there being no other source of money in the landlord-agent-tenant system, but for bad landlords it's just one more, yet another, regulation to ignore and disobey.

2025-11-16 14:03:28 UTC

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I am discovering as I look at my retirement finances that the "focussed social engineering taxes" seem to be designed to ensure that if you're rich enough (which for this purpose probably does include me) you don't really have to pay any taxes on investments.
Which is not what one might have expected "focussed social engineering taxes" to be targeted at.

2025-11-16 13:27:58 UTC

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This is correct, of course. And you'll know this, but for any others reading who don't:
One of the reasons why the tax system is deliberately complicated is to try to ensure that everybody pays at least *some* tax. If there were only one tax ... if you managed to evade that you'd be paying nothing. But if there are 47 taxes, if you manage to evade one you're still paying the other 46.

2025-11-07 11:13:13 UTC

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ITVx is however infinitely cheaper than IPlayer (0p compared to £174.50).

2025-11-07 11:07:49 UTC

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It's a much more general rule of politics:
"If your opposition are responding to your agenda, rather than talking about their own agenda, then that means you've won."

2025-11-07 10:24:56 UTC

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When was the last time I watched any broadcast telly? OK, so a few months ago - I do watch a handful of hours per year. When was the last time I watched ITV? Last time a new series of Grantchester was being broadcast whilst I was coincidentally somewhere with a telly licence, maybe a couple of years ago.