JoBo

JoBo, 1 month ago

That’s a fantastically efficient way to destroy their business. There’s no way to get honest reviews of employers from employees who know their identities will be exposed whether they consent or not. Doesn’t even matter if the review is after leaving that job, future employers can go nosing too.

Absolute techbro-brane gold.

JoBo, 4 months ago

Refusing to federate with Threads would achieve exactly that outcome. Most people on Threads wouldn’t know the Fediverse existed any more than most people on Google knew XMPP existed.

The Fediverse is struggling to get a large enough userbase to be as useful as the mega-services it replaces. Threads can gift that userbase and make people more aware that the Fediverse exists.

FWIW this is exactly why Threads didn’t join the Fediverse until they’d overcome the legal obstacles to operating in the EU. If they’d federated first they risked losing all their potential EU users to the Fediverse.

The quickest way to lose this game is not to play it and the Google/XMPP example iillustrates why.

JoBo, 1 month ago

Hope that the antifa prisoners get a successful appeal against their excessive sentences out of this.

And that the fash judge is forced to retire immediately, with a review into all their sentencing decisions.

JoBo, 3 months ago

They’re sometimes necessary for disambiguation. I use them all the time because it’s easier than remembering to use them when they’re necessary.

JoBo, 2 months ago

Because it was based on the possibility of her getting citizenship elsewhere. In Begum’s case, she was technically eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship at the time of the ruling, although that is no longer true, and was not true in any meaningful way at the time of the decision.

Every Jewish person is technically eligible for Israeli citizenship. And that could be used to deprive them of British citizenship, with this ruling as precedent.

JoBo, 2 months ago

Maybe you could direct your righteous anger at the people misselling the app, not the people who use it to help them get pregnant or to avoid becoming pregnant in a proto-fascist society that has removed their right to an abortion?

JoBo, 2 months ago

Wordle is a ripoff of Lingo, first broadcast in 1987.

They can take themselves down.

JoBo, 4 months ago

This absolutely was a fraud. The (unfair) contract required postmasters to make good any shortfalls. The hundreds who were prosecuted either refused or ran out of their own money to make up the shortfalls. Many were sacked because they refused to sign the accounts, losing their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names as a result. Thousands more were just quietly putting their own money in, sometimes unfairly suspecting an employee of theft, due to errors the Post Office knew about but refused to admit.

And a primary driver of the scandal was the imperative to make the Post Office profitable so that it could be privatised, with investigators paid partly based on how much money they recovered. New Labour and the Coalition both have much of this blood on their hands.

Gut-wrenchingly awful. The senior people responsible need to lose their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names. I’m not a fan of carceral solutions and Noel Thomas, imprisoned for nine months before his conviction was overturned, says he would not wish it on anyone. He is right. But destitution is something these people visited on hundreds of people for their own financial gain and those gains need to come back to the people they harmed.

This is a useful Computer Weekly summary which links to all its pieces over the years: Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know

JoBo, 3 months ago

No, they don’t have to be rational. It’s counter-intuitive but you can accurately draw a line with an irrational length, even though you can’t ever finish writing that length down.

The simplest example is a right-angled triangle with two side equal to 1. The hypotenuse is of length root 2, also an irrational number but you can still draw it.

JoBo, 3 months ago

This is pretty bog standard human psyche.

Working-class lads and lasses make far more effort to look good when they’re out because no one is going to want them for their pay cheque; wealthy people can afford to look effortlessly casual.

Working-class nightclubs ban trainers and demand shirts with collars; posh nightclubs have no such rules.

Working class lads who earn a decent wedge in areas which still have affordable rents will quite likely be spending more on their car than their rent.

Struggling salesmen go out and buy a new car because projecting success is part of their means to be successful. (No, I do not understand why you wouldn’t look at a rep in a Porsche and think “they’re overcharging, I’ll go elsewhere” but, apparently,this is what they do.)

It’s easy to sneer at the wealthy indulging in these behaviours (and we should, of course, sneer). But there’s nothing strange or startling. They’re just doing it from a much wealthier base with a much stronger safety net because daddy will always be there to pay off the credit card.

JoBo, 4 months ago

The idea gets raised periodically here, especially since the huge drop in turnout starting in 1997.

There’s a Research Briefing on it in the Commons Library.

I haven’t read it but it’s a terrible idea. Just another way for the parties to avoid having to offer anything worth voting for.