I’d forgotten that. Haven’t brought petrol or diesel for about 6 years.

It is narrow. BBC’s key point are:

• Donald Trump removes the 25% tariff on UK steel and aluminium, and immediately cuts the rate on most car exports from 27.5% to 10%

• The lower car rate applies to the first 100,000 vehicles exported from the UK to the US each year - 101,000 were exported last year

• In return, the UK government says it’s removing the tariff on ethanol for US goods, and agrees “reciprocal market access on beef”

So we get to sell them steel, aluminium, cars, and beef. They get to sell us ethanol and beef.

I think we got the better end of that unless ethanol is massive in some way I’m not aware of. Having a larger market for British steel is at least joined up thinking given the recent issues with the Scunthorpe works.

Of all the animals products to take from the US, I think beef is probably one of the higher quality ones, although I may be wrong. I’d worry about our cattle farmers competing… But maybe more selling opportunities is more valuable. Americans do eat a lot of it.

Network transparency

Yes, it was a big shift relative to what they’re used to, but the fact that even then the LDP is still the largest party must have been soul crushing for some.

If you’re only doing university for a piece of paper, you done gone screwed up.

University is to learn how academia works so that you can continue your development independently afterwards. You become capable of researching topics, reading the papers and solving a problem you’ve never faced before.

Nobody ever tells you this, but your first degree is more about developing you than developing your knowledge. If you just askGPT the whole time you’re cheating yourself.

Well… Communism.

Communism as Engels described it is the abolition of private property. Everything is free to all. However the result is a society with no form or structure.

If you want a loaf of bread you go to a baker, right?

• Since you own nothing, you cannot trade for the loaf.
• Therefore bread must be free and the baker must give the bread to you and everyone else in the community.
• The baker feels he’s getting a raw deal. It’s a lot of work and he has little time for himself.
• Tomorrow he decides he’s had enough of baking. He becomes a sculptor reusing his ovens as a kiln.
• The community, bereft of bread and starving, rises up against the former baker forcing them to bake the bread community needs.
• Now we have forced labour.

And that’s just bread. What about the people that do all the jobs we don’t want to do? Collect rubbish, maintain sewers, or mine minerals?

Communism leads to one of three outcomes IMHO:

1. All are equal but because no one can rely on the community for anything everyone must be self-sufficient. Human society regresses back to hunter gathering.
2. People are forced into working roles they don’t want to do to support the broader community. Some people decide those roles (Ruling class). Some people enforce those roles (Enforcing class). Everyone else is subject to those roles (Working Class). An authoritarian totalitarian state.
3. You give people doing vital jobs needed by the community some kind of recompense. If it’s someTHING you give them, well that’s now private property and you’ll get a trading system soon after. If it’s power or privilege, you’ve invented a class system.

So to answer your question…anything that looks like communism because I don’t see how it doesn’t end in disaster. …and I’m fine with Socialism. I think the ideal is a socialist/capitalist balance.

They overlap. Js is a shit technology for the blind.

Dynamic sites that move / hide / unhide components as you do things are unhelpful and confusing. A screen reader will tell you what’s under the cursor right now. If that changes, you don’t get notified that you’re now pointing at something else.

Static sites are better for accessibility too.

When you’ve got the Pope mobile in your sights, you’d hope that might make you question whether you’re on the side of righteousness.

Just as the economy is battling serious headwinds, Mr Xi’s campaign to drive out corruption and enforce loyalty in the top ranks of the Communist Party is generating turbulence.

Hmmm… Drive out bad corruption and enforce good corruption. Right?

That strike on the arsenal outside Moscow the other week has tee’d all this May 9th anxiety beautifully, and Zenensky is riding the wave like a pro.

They don’t even need to hit it at this point. In fact the cost of trying and failing might be too high Vs just leaving the impression that they could have done it but chose not to.

I always thought the was a global shift coming although in my mind it was going to be to do with the end of the oil / gas era.

I thought that as countries moved away from fossil fuels, power would shift away from the US, Russia, and Arab states. As renewables replaced oil, energy generation would become far more diverse and distributed. Each country would be able to utilise their own resources (Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Hydro) and so not have the external dependencies they currently do if they’re not an oil producing nation. They would all gain stability through self reliance for critical needs.

I think we’ve already seen this in part with the EU disconnecting itself from Russian gas due to the invasion of Ukraine. Russia didn’t have the power it thought it did over Europe because there were alternatives. The EU was able to minimise gas usage and get what it needed elsewhere.

Part of me wonders if Russia kick-started a strong independent EU and now Trump is giving it another boost with the trade war. China is trying to step into a “vacant role” which the countries are just freeing themselves from. They don’t want another sugar-daddy that keeps the lights on.

Japan being a democracy is somewhat debatable. The LDP is so entrenched that the people really have very little say in what happens. All discussion is within the party. The party is the ruling class.

Left wing governments can be authoritarian too. It’s a concept that spans the left-right divide. You can be a authoritarian centrist if you’re prepared to enforce adherence to your values. It’s just that you probably don’t need to be.

In my option it’s the extremes that need to be authoritarian because nobody would put up with their shit unless they were forced to.

The Japanese government is very static. Since 1955 the LDP has ruled almost continually (Lost 1 out of 23 elections) and has very rarely even lost it’s overall majority.

At the last election there was a big movement for change, and even then the LDP still won, although without a majority. It’s not surprising that people would feel disillusioned with democracy.

Might need a third one in there.

So there’s no objective truth? Only opinion?

Education allows you to reason about what you’re being told and filter out a lot of the bad stuff. It’s not perfect, but it helps you spot egregious “facts” and label the speaker appropriately as untrustworthy.

I think with a lot of these chips geared at AI there’s so much variation in how performance is measured you can say things like it beats an H100 inferencing on a specific INT4 model and that might be true. However, it might only hold for that narrow case.

So press releases aren’t worth much to me. Show me benchmarks.

Tally-whacker, schlong, weiner, meat and two veg, purple headed womb ferret.

None of what I wrote was about passing judgement.

I agree that once you do you lose your objective foundation. However saying that something has never happened before, or it’s being justified under emergency powers, or that something is a factually incorrect statement is not opinion.