There is a pervasive idea on the internet that the popular vote is the “real” vote, compared to constituency-based voting. I don’t find that to be a helpful attitude, especially when applied selectively. We live in a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. The House of Commons is a constituent assembly, which is a valid and reasonable form of democratic representation. The election system could be changed to better reflect the popular vote, but the popular vote is not automatically more valid than the constituency-based system. There are pros and cons to both, with constiuency-based voting typically giving somewhat more weight to under-populated areas.

The fact is that the UK voted for Brexit, directly and indirectly, multiple times and in multiple ways using its long-established voting system. There is no way to escape responsibility. Indeed, being a democracy, the citizens of the UK are ALSO responsible for their own voting system.

David Cameron may have gambled on the referendum but he still only had one vote in it. The citizens of the UK as a whole own the results. Also, as I recall, there were two elections after the referendum in which UK citizens doubled-down on Brexit by returning the Conservatives to government with landslide victories.

Also, anti-EU sentiment is one thing and may be common in various EU countries from time to time. However, voting for separation is quite another.

In any case, with such sustained support for the Tories post-referendum, it’s hard to lay the blame for Brexit at anyone’s feet except the UK citizenry itself.

Fair enough. I chose to read it as Nordic rather than Scandinavian given the extent of the map.

Finland. Because they were total bad asses in the Winter War. Finnish ski troopers versus thousands of Soviet tanks in -40 weather? Fuck yeah.

Also, the Finnish sauna is the best sauna.

I want to do the same, but I’m on the fence between Nobara and Bazzite.

Sometimes the manager/foreman/supervisor is just the team member who is willing to be that interface between the frontline workers and senior management. The best middle managers are those who can thread that needle to the satisfaction of both groups.

I agree with you thst managers shouldn’t consider themselves smarter than anyone else. Quite the opposite. Particularly when managing professionals or others with extensive knowledge, I’m a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. That’s where you lead by inspiring the group to come up with ideas and then shaping, coordinating, and supporting those ideas through to a successful outcome.

I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I’ve been to one such event and I was shocked. What’s worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you’d hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can’t tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?

We humans have these things called “boats” that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.

A key piece you forgot to mention is Nordstream 2, which was only completed in 2021. Prior to the war, both Russia and Germany were planning to increase natural gas delivery to Europe, not decrease it, and certainly not to eliminate it by 2025!

I agree that AI is just a tool, and it excels in areas where an algorithmic approach can yield good results. A human still has to give it the goal and the parameters.

What’s fascinating about AI, though, is how far we can push the algorithmic approach in the real world. Fighter pilots will say that a machine can never replace a highly-trained human pilot, and it is true that humans do some things better right now. However, AI opens up new tactics. For example, it is virtually certain that AI-controlled drone swarms will become a favored tactic in many circumstances where we currently use human pilots. We still need a human in the loop to set the goal and the parameters. However, even much of that may become automated and abstracted as humans come to rely on AI for target search and acquisition. The pace of battle will also accelerate and the electronic warfare environment will become more saturated, meaning that we will probably also have to turn over a significant amount of decision-making to semi-autonomous AI that humans do not directly control at all times.

In other words, I think that the line between dumb tool and autonomous machine is very blurry, but the trend is toward more autonomous AI combined with robotics. In the car design example you give, I think that eventually AI will be able to design a better car on its own using an algorithmic approach. Once it can test 4 million hood ornament variations, it can also model body aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and any other trait that we tell it is desirable. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to take those initial parameters and automate the process of optimizing them until it eventually spits out an objectively better design. Yes, a human is in the loop initially to design the experiment and provide parameters, but AI uses the output of each experiment to train itself and automate the design of the next experiment, and the next, ad infinitum. Right now we are in the very early stages of AI, and each AI experiment is discrete. We still have to check its output to make sure it is sensible and combine it with other output or tools to yield useable results. We are the mind guiding our discrete AI tools. But over a few more decades, a slow transition to more autonomy is inevitable.

A few decades ago, if you had asked which tasks an AI would NOT be able to perform well in the future, the answers almost certainly would have been human creative endeavors like writing, painting, and music. And yet, those are the very areas where AI is making incredible progress. Already, AI can draw better, write better, and compose better music than the vast, vast majority of people, and we are just at the beginning of this revolution.

I think it’s because most religions, by their exclusive natures, are divisive and offensive to many. Many current and historical wars have been fought over religion, so some of their outward symbols carry a political message, whether intended or not.

Wearing outward symbols with a political message is banned among civil servants. If you wonder why, ask yourself how you would feel showing up to the welfare office and asking for service from an employee with a gold Trump necklace or a MAGA hat. Or, more prosaically, imagine getting pulled over by a cop for speeding. You are a Muslim wearing a keffiyeh and the officer is a Jew wearing a yarmulka (skull cap). You know that police have discretion to give you a ticket or a warning. He eyes your keffiyeh skeptically, you respond with a look of defiance, and he gives you a ticket. You might suspect that you got a ticket instead of a warning because the cop is a Jew and he saw your apparent support for the Palestinians. Now, of course, all of this could happen without the overt symbology, but the government would rather not open itself up to such obvious accusations.

These laws ban overt religious symbols only. If you want to wear magic Mormon underwear or a small cross or star of David or crescent moon under your shirt, you can. You can even wear Trump-themed butt plug if you want to.

But fuck all of these cults and their symbols.

Exactly. And if your ISP or cellular provider wants, or is forced, to gather information about your internet activities, they can almost certainly find a way. The cheap consumer-grade VPN services most of us use just prevent casual or automated observers from easily detecting your device’s IP address. For most people that just want to torrent casually or use public wifi, it’s enough.

I see this in my day job, too. When I’m in a charitable mood, I chalk it up to pandemic trauma. But more realistically, I think it is a real change in our society’s ability and willingness to compromise and see the world through the eyes of others. People want what they want and they don’t give a fuck who they have to roll over to get what they want. They treat getting what they want as a matter of principle.

The duck-duckling model would probably work okay on the highway, but not so well once you arrive in a town or city. You can’t reliably get ten semis through a set of lights in traffic without getting split up. I guess they could have a depot outside of town where human drivers would meet the ducklings for the final leg of the journey.

I’m sure Finland and Estonia could make landing in St. Petersburg very inconvenient.

The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.

I’ve been paying attention to the Middle East for almost 40 years, punk. What? Iran, like, literally just sent drones into Israel? Oh no, literally what will we do? Like, oh my god, this is so terrible.

You can’t take and hold territory with drones, especially not Iranian drones. Iran is not invading Israel. Grow up and go learn something.

Perhaps I misspoke. I mean to say that the periodic flare-ups with the Palestinians are not that important anymore. They used to be. But nowadays, Israel’s neighbours aren’t invading with tanks and, as I said, the overall trend is towards peace and economic integration with Israel. I agree with you that Israel is important to the US for many good strategic and political reasons.

That’s ridiculous. Government doesn’t move that quickly. They’ve been thinking about how to deal with foreign interference for years. Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Palestine thing isn’t that interesting or important in the grand scheme. At best, the Palestinians, like the Houthis and Hezbollah, are pawns used by Iran to stir up trouble from time to time. This conflict has been going on for 80 years already and the overall trend in the Middle East is toward peace and economic integration with Israel. No one is going to push the Jews into the sea and liberate Palestine for the Palestinians.

I agree with you. The CCP classifies recommendation algorithms in a category similar to defense secrets. It isn’t just Tiktok that can’t be sold to non-Chinese, it is all recommendation algorithms. They know damn well what effect these algorithms have on a population.