GBR48 comments

If we had had social media a hundred years earlier, you can imagine Oppenheimer posting 'With the proper safeguards, atomic bombs can help protect people, deter adversaries, and even prevent future conflict.'

It's true that the French need to sort out their debt, but now - when politically vulnerable - is not the time to do it. And having a widely reviled leader does not help.

In a democracy, you can win an election with the support of a fairly small minority of the electorate, if the majority do not vote. That was how the Brexit referendum was won.

There is a dearth of talent and political skill in Europe's mainstream parties. They have become lazy. Elections are popularity contests. Repeatedly hammer the finances of your citizens and they will stop voting for you. With so many mainstream party supporters and others declining to vote, the extreme parties can pull an outsized chunk of seats in a parliament simply by working the angry, the gullible and the poor with lies, feeding on their prejudice, scapegoating migrants as Jews were in 1930s Germany, and motivating them to vote.

Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop, and Tiny.

Dodgy refereeing in the Liverpool game. van Dijk should have been sent off for having a go at Gordon off the ball and no game ever ends when one side is attacking like that.

I still send and receive Christmas cards.

First footing may be harder nowadays, as it traditionally required a piece of coal.

Door-to-door carol singers are thinner on the ground.

A lot of Christmas stuff was school-centric, so it tends to vanish when you are no longer a kid, and don't have any children or they have grown up. School nativity plays, carol concerts and the like.

The Christmas afternoon TV movie used to be eagerly awaited, as it would only have been in the cinema before.

Christmas 'Eastenders' (sitcom) would have been a feast of yuletide trauma enjoyed by a huge audience. Now we are all just as miserable as the characters would have been in it, and don't need to see it mirrored on the TV.

When your back is against the wall, you do not push through an unpopular budget. You fudge it, stay in power and deal with the financial issues by less obvious means.

Macron's unpopularity is a real problem for his party, but he has always been too arrogant to accept that. Like Trudeau in Canada, he will take his party down with him.

The danger is that Neo-Nazis are going to profit from all of this failure and take control of the EU.

Ironically, if Brexit had not happened, the UK would now be running the EU as the most politically stable and economically powerful country. Instead Boris and his cronies pressed the self-destruct button, trashed the UK economy and undermined the EU.

Yoon attempted a military coup imperilling everything the South Korean people have worked to build since they got rid of their last dictator. He should be in a prison cell, charged with treason, his estate should be forfeit and if he ever leaves prison, he should be banned from holding any office for the rest of his wretched life.

Tribalisation using sanctions and tariffs will kill the global economy. We will all suffer because of politicians playing games.

Aside from the unknown species that would be wiped out, and the vast amount of pollution that would be caused (underwater PM2.5, getting into everything that people eat from the ocean), this would stir up a huge amount of dead and diseased matter, loaded with pathogens. Covid would have nothing on that.

We should learn from the destruction we have wreaked and long term problems we have caused everywhere else and leave the seabed alone. Humanity is like a serial abuser who just enjoys it too much to stop.

At the very least, begin a register of all those involved in this, so when it causes problems, they can all be locked up for it, for the rest of their lives.

It really depends upon how it is done, what is done, the costs and how relaxed or regimented it is. It could be great. Computing, robotics, model rockets, garden club, photography, all the creative stuff that dies for kids when it becomes an examination subject in school. Or it could be like being conscripted into the army. One comment says shaving your head to do sports. Seriously? That's just weird.

They would be fine for five years, ten with a new battery, given the power under the hood. But the irresponsible greed of the tech industry - EoL mandates on OSs and built-in obsolescence - will see them declared e-waste.

At the very least, get a reliable Linux distro on to them and distribute them to anyone on low income.

Yoon appears to have attempted a military coup, dragging SK back to the Dark Ages of dictatorship. That was an unexpected and daft move. SK has developed beyond that sort of thing.

Nationalist economics don't have to make economic sense and don't have to work. They are political. As per Brexit. It is all tribal now.

Nippon Steel politicised the deal with their timing. If they wanted market access they should have just bought shares in it to influence the board.

Maybe Japan buying a shedload more F35s will swing it. Who knows.

Pay the cash to do a degree at a Canadian university. That's three years, or six if you follow it with a PhD. By then you may have a job offer or a Canadian partner.

If you have a family, the state-within-a-state option is your best shot. A Democrat state will insulate you from much of what Trump will/can do. If he wrecks the education system, home tutor.

What politicians promise on the campaign trail and what they actually do are rarely the same.

Yes, it is universal surveillance. But as people don't have a choice, there is not much they can do but accept it. Even if it is insecure, less resilient and may not work very well. There is no point voting for an opposition party, as they want the same level of surveillance over you as your government.

'Old fashioned paper and files' is actually more resilient. Several British hospitals are currently falling back on 'old fashioned paper and files' as their IT systems have been taken down by malware. In going digital we are reducing the resilience of our core infrastructure. That won't end well.

If it is of any benefit to those concerned, all the surveillance in the world doesn't stop governments from being taken down. The Stasi had the best monitoring system on the planet, pre-tech, and the DDR still went the way of telegraphy. Most tech-based state surveillance systems have a single point of failure. One server room goes down, the entire system goes down. Good for revolutions, but a worry for day-to-day resilience.

Sales may well plateau. The gap between a second-hand ICE runabout and any EV is much larger than those numbers suggest, and a large proportion of drivers rely on low-cost, second-hand cars. They really need to lose the excess cost and complexity (analogue dials rather than Star Trek dashboard) and produce a dirt cheap 'Model T' style EV. They need to sort out the issues that have been highlighted. They need to understand the difference between urban and rural usage, that not all homes can have a charger, and that hybrids may be inevitable for a lot longer. And that cheap EVs from anywhere, including China and India, may be a necessity. Other issues include the dangers from batteries in an RTA and extra weight wearing parts out (including road surfaces).

We really needed to be doing well for the green transition to happen, but governments are switching us from a globalised economy to a tribalised one, and that will make almost everyone much poorer, Brexit style. People will not have the capacity to pay extra.

How about stepping into the 21st century and removing the stigma against unmarried mums and their kids. That stigma is the real scandal.

Governments are limited in what they can do, politically and financially. The ICJ telling them they should do stuff does not change that. This could be a tipping point that sees the ICJ downgraded from 'non-binding but influential' to the status of an activist organisation.

Many of these smaller/island nations have happily embraced tourism, built airports, mined their natural resources and turned to internal combustion engines and fossil fuels to drive their own economies as fast as they could. They have not turned their back on this and remained pre-industrial pastoral idylls. They are as guilty as everyone else.

Low-lying islands that are going to vanish should be targeting migration guarantees with nations that are further above sea-level, not cash that their politicians will simply stuff in their own pockets.

Canada's postal service is currently on strike. Courier and postal services in the UK are taking a few days longer (and it is worth buying most stuff early as there are shortages).

Do send a card. In a time of messaging and e-mail, a physical card, written in, with a nice stamp on it, shows you are thinking of someone.

If you don't want to buy someone something they might not want, get them a voucher. Amazon ones are good. Ebay really should get their act together and do some.

For peace of mind and reliability, use special/express delivery and pay the extra. These services are usually prioritised by the post office when everything else slows down, and they have tracking. Internationally, use a courier service rather than the post. It is much easier to use couriers now than it used to be.

BF seems to last for at least two weeks in the UK.

Just be sensible with your cash and shop around. Don't buy for the sake of it and don't lump stuff on credit cards as they have loan shark rates. If you can, save up for stuff and then get it, without paying huge amounts of interest.

My exercise bike expired last week. Getting an unexpected 20% off a replacement was welcome, so I can't complain. Plus it has prevented some of the Christmas stuff from expanding into November.

It's an ID grab, so the Aussie government will known exactly who you are online. Everyone will have to supply ID. All posts traceable. No more #MeToo. Not sure what they will do with tourists. Maybe nobody will be uploading their holiday photos from Australia any more.

It's going to make it easier for bullies to get away with stuff. Most of the evidence for that nowadays comes from social media posts.

It's just another tax. And companies don't pay, we do.

Once a product is sold, the producer has no control over what the customer does with the packaging. Punishing someone for what someone else does is unjust and an abuse of legal process.

In most cases the producer has two options. Either hike prices to cover the extra tax demand, or pull out and stop producing food or medicine or whatever. That will see shortages and higher prices (as we are already seeing with food and medicine). How is that a good idea?

Plastic keeps food and medicines safe. It ensures ordinary people can have mass produced goods at a price they can afford, rather than almost everything being the preserve of the wealthy, buying handmade goods. How is that a scourge?

Most of the plastic out there is historical, from decades when we did not recycle. If governments want to change behaviours, provide recycling options, fine people for littering or pay them when they return the packaging.

If you want to stop the production of plastic because it is produced from fossil derivatives, fund research into viable alternatives that can be produced for less cost at scale. Scientists are good at that - Japanese scientists have just produced plastics that break down in seawater - but they generally need funding to rapidly scale it up. The market would then switch, very quickly. No collateral damage, just a rapid switch to a cheaper, better, greener product. Fund the science.

American sanctions are speeding China towards self-reliance in tech - hardware and software. And the US won't have backdoors in Chinese operating systems. Western tech also offered Chinese dissidents access to the outside world. Politicians don't take much notice of critics, but they should have listened to geeks explaining the unintended consequences here. A massive own goal by the US.

Budding ninjas will have to make do with one of these instead.

https://www.samuraimuseum.jp/shop/product-category/sword/authentic-sword/

The great benefit of computers was their reliability. Aside from programming errors, they did what they were supposed to. 'AI' injects unreliability into these systems. You do not want that when the stakes get high - legal cases or peoples' lives.

Do you want to be a passenger in a plane when a drop of rain on a sensor causes the software to hallucinate a runway at 30,000 feet and decides to land on it? It won't show up in tests, because you cannot reliably test AI.

Given the reliability levels, AI is an experiment, a toy, which is what it says in the small print of everything sold with it, to protect the software companies.

If something matters, don't rely on 'AI'.

As for the Channel Tunnel, it was fine until Brexit, when half the stations were closed and border controls had to be bodged on to it, causing huge delays at peak times. That was down to politicians with ZI: zero intelligence.

Japan may need to sort out dentistry before it gets as bad as in the UK. You are more likely to see an honest politician than an NHS dentist in the UK. Some people have been on waiting lists for more than a decade.

QR codes make scams easy. If one takes you to a website, examine the URL of the website to see if it looks dodgy before typing anything into it.

Reputable traders will refund you via the payment service you used to buy it. This should be automatic. You should not need to type anything in.

Avoid using smartphones to buy stuff, especially expensive stuff. Use a web browser on a PC or Mac instead. And buy through the major sites (Amazon, ebay etc) for an extra layer of protection.

If a deal looks too good to be true, it will be a con.

The other partners need Saudi money. The UK is particularly skint. There are no ethics in the arms trade, so that issue is not relevant.

Surprisingly, this is unlikely to be corporate welfare for Big Pharma.

Basic medicines are in short supply globally.

https://cpe.org.uk/dispensing-and-supply/supply-chain/medicine-shortages/

Nobody is being honest or open about why this should suddenly have started to happen recently. Just vague statements about supply chains. Governments are being as quiet as they can be about it, so may be responsible for it. The UK has been hit hard as it left the EU support system for medicine shortages at Brexit, but it is a global issue.

The drugs include those for Diabetes and ADHD, and some that leave patients at risk if they cannot obtain a regular supply.

Diet and exercise are good, but they will only take you so far. If you have a medical condition, you will need medication.

Transparency would be good on this issue, but I suspect there is some sort of cover up, and it will just continue. Increased global manufacturing is a good thing. Tribalised production just for your own country is a bad thing and will increase shortages around the world, leading to avoidable deaths.

Don't brutalise, maim and kill your own youth in trench warfare as cannon fodder. Target the Russian government and Putin's circle with insurgents. They are responsible for the invasion. Ukraine should have gone after them from Day 1.

Up in mid-December, down on 2nd Jan.