You write as if you have confabulated yourself into being Europe's official spokesperson. This is all a bit high-handed.
I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
> I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
The Brexit shitshow took years to resolve from the Brexit vote to the actual Brexit event and absolutely hogged attention all over the EU apparatus. We could have used the energy we had to expend on that crap (including trying to prevent a restart of the Ireland-related violence) to instead make the EU itself better, react to the multitude of crises happening during the time, or furthen the EU integration. But no, we had the constant noise of Brexit all the time.
> Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
Which is even worse from EU perspective. PMs/Presidents changing every 4-ish years, okay, that's pretty standard. But it's hard to negotiate anything, knowing that your negotiation partner can get booted at any time.
Well, the only thing the Trump admin did that really hurt us was the tariff trade war and the Iran war. The rest sucked for those affected, but had little consequence for Europe, and so the prevailing attitude here is "we can't do anything anyway, why should it matter for us"...
The strong affinity between autism and intelligence seems strongest in technical fields, and engineering and computer science in particular. Autism does not seem to be over-represented to anywhere near the same degree in many other domains that are full of intelligent people.
Is this just from your direct experience or do you have data to back that up? Are you talking about credentialed engineering like mechanical or civil engineering or just software developers?
There's plenty of data on the clustering of high-functioning autistic workers in engineering and computer science, and the massively disproportionate share of autistic children with fathers and grandfathers in those fields. I work across technical and non-technical academic fields and the difference is quite obvious. It also follows naturally from some of the common presentations of autism, e.g., the high co-occurrence of dyslexia.
It's true that all else being equal new power demand lowers the fixed cost per unit of marginal energy generated. But if the data centre requires new grid and storage capacity to handle its load and those fixed costs are charged to the entire electricity consumer base, there is a trade-off.
Also, all else is not equal because the UK is already grasping towards a stretch target of a >95% low-carbon power system by 2030 which has over-loaded supply chains, sacrificed generation cost to speed, and created a queue to connect to the grid that outpaces the annual rate of connections by over an order of magnitude. Adding huge blocks of new incremental demand to the system is quite a challenge, in this context.
Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.
> Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.
I'm not being black and white like that. Some books "are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out" others should be treated with more care.
For an extreme example: if somehow you come to possess the Book of Kells, don't go scribbling your brain farts all over it. You're a modern person who can easily buy paper or a notebook to hold such things.
Growing up, I couldn’t afford new books for school all the time. Ended up thrifting a lot of them. Annotations were like a mixed bag of candy. Sometimes they were your favorite flavor and sometimes they would give you brain aneurysms. Unfortunately that experience makes me treat books as precious objects.
Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.
One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.
I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.
I find critiques of palm oil accurate, but it begs the question - what is your preferred source of saturated dietary fat? You can do all sorts of things with vegetable oils from seeds/legumes, but you need saturated triglycerides for high melting point products like chocolate or to maximize the stability of deep-frying.
Maybe we could go back to artificially hydrogenated oils, but actually give a damn about food safety this time and work out an industrial process to separate trans fats?
This is the main reason I don't frequently eat chocolate anymore. Dark chocolate is both the tastiest and lowest-sugar chocolate, but its cacao-intensity increases your intake of metals.
If I recall correctly, however, the origin of the cacao makes some difference. Cacao from West Africa and Asia has a lot less lead and cadmium than from South America. Still, I think little chocolate, wherever it's from, is metal-free.
Related: I completely avoid any broth or stock made from chicken bones because it has way too much lead for me.
I claim to be able to feel the effects of the lead in the hours after I eat a meal containing chicken stock. I don't doubt your report about lead in chocolate, but I didn't feel the characteristic signs of my getting too much lead the last time I ate chocolate.
I use the app screenzen. It rations distracting apps and retrains you to use your phone as a functional device again. I now only use my phone for messaging, emails, maps and spotify, but can still access Chrome when I need. A perfect balance.
It's reasoned conjecture on an internet message board. Yes, it is over-stated. But if one treats quality of diet as one variable among many in cognitive capacity, which is the only sane approach, then trying to match the diet of a population to trendlines in society-wide cognitive performance is not going to tell you anything.
I don't think so. The energy market CFD concept strikes me as just another example of the over-financialisation of almost everything. Like the kind of solution you get from 2A gun aficionados when a particularly horrible event crops up (the answer is always more guns). In this case, more financialisation.
As a long-standing Guardian reader, I couldn't disagree more. It might be financially solvent, but the business model of the paper under the leadership of Katherine Viner has shifted to high throughput, low quality content vying for clicks in the attention economy. They have gone all-in on volume.
Compare that to the Financial Times, which has a low throughput of very high quality content, enabled by a discerning and high paying subscriber base. I read the Guardian for the lifestyle / cooking sections these days, but the FT is an incomparably better and more serious publication, whatever your politics (mine are the diametric opposite of the financial class).
Yeah, me too. I'm definitely more on the side of the Guardian politics wise, but the FT is SO MUCH BETTER.
To be fair though, the FT is both really expensive, sells market data for a large price, and has a tier of subscription that can only be bought by organisations (they didn't even show me a price).
The Guardian has been going downhill massively over the last few years. I think the point at which I lost faith in them was when they trumpeted that 50% of carbon emissions were caused by 10 companies (i.e. the oil majors).
They approach environmental reporting like a campaign organisation, it's just not serious. Politically, I will never forgive the Guardian for the mendacious editorial campaign they waged against the Corbyn project. In general, the Guardian leads with cultural issues geared towards the liberal professional managerial class, which only compounds the logic and superficiality of its clickbait business model. It is incredibly hard to learn anything by reading the Guardian. This quote from the nymag piece is telling: “The reason I think that it works for us is we cover so much breaking news and it drives a lot of traffic, and we have the scale to make it work,” Reed said. “Even if we only monetize one percent, it’s still a lot.”
I agree as well: the Grauniad's UK political reporting is often shameful at the way it covers internal Labour Party warring with anonymous "internal party sources" that often toe the center-right line, and what are often briefed pre-speech announcements for centrist Labour up-and-comers that read like press releases. (Let alone how they'll breathlessly report anything remotely related to "gender confusion" regardless or not of its actual impact.) Sure, the "quality" UK press is often in hock with one party or another, but it still rankles.
Betsy Reed runs the American side with a lot more quality and a lot less political baggage, which is to her credit. I do think that her tenure at The Intercept, and and in particular The Intercept's inadvertent leak of Reality Winner's identity the feds, has made her more thoughtful.
I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
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