Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.
Stephen Maturin switches from opium to coca leaves about halfway through the Master and Commander series (around 1800). Ensuring a steady supply of the leaves becomes a recurring theme as is his sharing of their wonders with the various scientific personalities he comes across.
There was at least one study during the pandemic that showed efficacy of these things. The problem for studies is knowing exactly how much they're used. I've used the Boots version in the UK for a long time on the basis that there's half decent evidence that it's effective and the only real side effect is on my wallet. It would be great to see a challenge study of these things but I'm going to keep using them regardless.
It might well be neoliberal dogma but the rose that got walked through London last week by the Watermen is a reminder that it is also true.
People should complain much more about doctors’ guilds. There are limits on how many doctors can be trained in the US and the U.K. largely as a result of lobbying by doctors’ guilds. They’re called professional associations these days but let’s not pretend they confine themselves to enforcing professional standards.
It's amusing that they actually use the word guild. If the medieval guilds had their way London would still only have one bridge. The irony here is that creatives have an advantage that workers in every other industry lack. Humans value and will continue to value artisinally produced goods. Creatives will always have that in a way that 18th Century weavers and spinners did not. That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.
Will the rise of AI reduce opportunities for creatives? Almost certainly, but unlike essentially all other industries, it won't be wiped out by the rise of automation because humans won't stop liking things that are created by humans. As in music, there will be a shift to performance where customers / clients are engaged in the creative process. In many ways, it will be a return to something like the golden age of portraiture as people pay for engagement.
There are huge opportunities for creatives in the age of AI to create new art forms, created in new ways for new kinds of consumer. Creatives can choose to engage with that or to throw sabots. As London's liverymen show, guilds cannot stop the tide, the opportunity is to become something new that floats on the rising waters.
There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”.
Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.
It's the real disease of the EU. There's no problem of failed policy that shouldn't be addressed by deepening the policy and making it harder to back track. The only possible response to problems of complexity is to make the complexity more intractable.
Reading the comments, it seems that absolutely no one is happy about this. It is either a lie, insufficient or a pointless response to a non-problem.
But it’s a clear achievement. An achievement with lots of nuance. And one that runs counter to many strongly held and arguably ideological positions on all sides of the political spectrum.
Reading responses to it here and on Twitter has been rather depressing.
Ah. A simpler time when people were still able to access the operating system internals of products they bought and alter their function without first having to jump through hoops that risked bricking the product they bought.
There’s an irony that the products we buy now which are so thoroughly locked down have learned all the lessons of Windows NT both in terms of product marketing and the security improvements which protect the product companies even more than their users.
I remember playing Unreal for 3 days solid while working an IT service desk in the late '90s. Compaq Deskpro in software mode later upgraded to a Matrox G200 which upended my world. Working Christmas and New Year was a bonus as far as I was concerned. Dodged the family drama and got in plenty of gaming. Also tidied the office...
You pass a law giving a class of inspector the right to enter premises where building works appear to be progressing. You strictly limit what they are permitted to observe and record and require recording of reasonable suspicion. Refusal to grant entry is itself an offence.
Approaches like this would work but are also a huge can of worms.
I often observe that PPE compliance in the U.K. is dramatically better than it is on the continent where I live. In part I think that’s a result of the concentration of the building contractor business and the (relatively) strong enforcement of workplace regulation at sites of large construction projects.
You’d be shocked in the U.K. if you saw someone scaffolding a building without a helmet. In the EU, you’re shocked if they are wearing one.