#big electrical companies uk

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Fatboy Slim - Praise You 1999

"Praise You" is a song by British big beat musician Fatboy Slim, and was released as the third single from his second studio album, You've Come a Long Way, Baby (1998). It reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and in Iceland, number four in Canada, number six in Ireland, and number 36 in the US. A total of six samples are used in the song. The song features a prominent vocal sample from the opening of "Take Yo' Praise" by Camille Yarbrough, as well as a prominent piano sample from the track "Balance and Rehearsal" from a test album entitled Sessions released by audio electronics company JBL in 1973. That recording session was for "Captain America", sung by Hoyt Axton; a snippet of Axton's vocals humming the "Captain America" melody can be heard in the album version of "Praise You." "Praise You" also features a guitar sample from the opening of "It's a Small World" from the Disneyland Records-released album Mickey Mouse Disco, the theme from the cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, the electric piano riff from "Lucky Man" by Steve Miller Band, and the drum beat from "Running Back To Me" by Tom Fogerty. In a 2021 interview with the website WhoSampled, Yarbrough said that she liked "Praise You" and its use of her vocals, feeling that Cook kept the essence of "Take Yo' Praise".

The accompanying video for "Praise You" was directed by Spike Jonze with Roman Coppola. Jonze starred in the film, under the pseudonym Richard Koufey, along with a fictional dance group: The Torrance Community Dance Group. The video intro described it as "A Torrance Public Film Production". The video was shot guerrilla-style – that is, on location without obtaining permission from the owners of the property – in front of puzzled onlookers outside the Fox Bruin Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles, California. In the video, a heavily disguised Jonze and the dance group, acting as a flash mob, dance to "Praise You", much to the chagrin of a theatre employee who turns off their portable stereo.

The video reportedly cost only US$800 to produce. It won three major awards at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards: Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, and Best Choreography. It was also nominated for, but did not win, Best Dance Video. In 2001, it was voted number one of the 100 best videos of all time, in a poll to mark the 20th anniversary of MTV.

"Praise You" received a total of 80,6% yes votes! Previous Fatboy Slim polls: #12 "Weapon of Choice".

[justforbooks]

Donald Sutherland

Commanding and versatile actor known for his roles in MAS*H, Don’t Look Now and The Hunger Games

Donald Sutherland, who has died aged 88, brought his disturbing and unconventional presence to bear in scores of films after his breakthrough role of Hawkeye Pierce, the army surgeon in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), one of the key American films of its period. It marked Sutherland out as an iconoclastic figure of the 60s generation, but he matured into an actor who made a speciality of portraying taciturn, self-doubting characters. This was best illustrated in his portrayal of the tormented parent of a drowned girl, seeking solace in a wintry Venice, in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), and of the weak, nervous, concerned father of a guilt-ridden teenage boy (Timothy Hutton) in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980).

Although Sutherland appeared in the statutory number of stinkers that are many a film actor’s lot, he was always watchable. His career resembled a man walking a tightrope between undemanding parts in potboilers and those in which he was able to take risks, such as the title role in Federico Fellini’s Casanova (1976).

Curiously, it was Sutherland’s ears that first got him noticed, in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). During the shoot, according to Sutherland, “Clint Walker sticks up his hand and says, ‘Mr Aldrich, as a representative of the Native American people, I don’t think it’s appropriate to do this stupid scene where I have to pretend to be a general.’ Aldrich turns and points to me and says, ‘You with the big ears. You do it’ … It changed my life.” In other words, it led to M*A*S*H and stardom.

Sutherland and his M*A*S*H co-star Elliott Gould tried to get Altman fired from the film because they did not think the director knew what he was doing due to his unorthodox methods. In the early days, Sutherland was known to have confrontations with his directors. “What I was trying to do all the time was to impose my thinking,” he remarked some years later. “Now I contribute. I offer. I don’t put my foot down.”

Sutherland, who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, was a sickly child who battled rheumatic fever, hepatitis and polio. He spent most of his teenage years in Nova Scotia where his father, Frederick, ran a local gas, electricity and bus company; his mother, Dorothy (nee McNichol), was a maths teacher. He attended Bridgewater high school, then graduated from Victoria College, part of the University of Toronto, with a double major in engineering and drama. As a result of a highly praised performance in a college production of James Thurber’s and Elliott Nugent’s The Male Animal, he dropped the idea of becoming an engineer and decided to pursue acting.

With this in mind, he left Canada for the UK in 1957 to study at Lamda (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), where he was considered too tall and ungainly to get anywhere. However, he gained a year’s work as a stage actor with the Perth repertory company, and appeared in TV series such as The Saint and The Avengers. He was Fortinbras in a 1964 BBC production of Hamlet, shot at Elsinore castle and starring Christopher Plummer. He also appeared at the Criterion theatre in the West End in The Gimmick in 1962.

In 1959 he married Lois Hardwick; they divorced in 1966. Then he married the film producer Shirley Douglas, with whom he had twins, Kiefer and Rachel; they divorced in 1971. Kiefer, who grew up to become a celebrated actor, was named after the producer-writer Warren Kiefer, who put Sutherland in an Italian-made Gothic horror film, The Castle of the Living Dead (1964). Christopher Lee played a necrophile count, while Sutherland doubled as a dim-witted police sergeant and, in drag and heavy makeup, as a witch.

In an earlier era, the gawky Sutherland might not have achieved the stardom that followed the anarchic M*A*S*H, but Hollywood at the time was open for stars with unconventional looks, and Sutherland was much in demand for eccentric roles throughout the 70s.

He was impressive as a moviemaker with “director’s block” in Paul Mazursky’s messy but interesting Alex in Wonderland (1970), which contains a prescient dream sequence in which his titular character meets Fellini. In the same year, Sutherland played a Catholic priest and the object of Geneviève Bujold’s erotic gaze in Act of the Heart; he was the appropriately named Sergeant Oddball, an anachronistic hippy tank commander, in the second world war action-comedy Kelly’s Heroes; and he and Gene Wilder were two pairs of twins in 18th-century France in the broad comedy Start the Revolution Without Me.

Sutherland was at his most laconic, sometimes verging on the soporific, in the title role of Alan J Pakula’s Klute (1971), as a voyeuristic ex-policeman investigating the disappearance of a friend and getting deeply involved with a prostitute, played by Jane Fonda.

Sutherland and Fonda were teamed up again as a couple of misfits in the caper comedy Steelyard Blues (1973). It initially had a limited distribution due mainly to their participation together in the anti-Vietnam war troop show FTA (Fuck the Army), which Sutherland co-directed, co-scripted and co-produced.

Sutherland always made his political views known, although they surfaced only occasionally in his films. In among the many mainstream comedies and thrillers was Roeg’s supernatural drama Don’t Look Now, in which Sutherland and Julie Christie are superb as a couple grieving their dead daughter. Despite the dark subject matter, the film was notable for containing “one of the sexiest love scenes in film history”, according to Scott Tobias in the Guardian, the frank depiction of their love-making coming “like a desert flower poking through concrete”. The actor so admired Roeg that he named another son after him, one of his three sons with the French-Canadian actor Francine Racette, whom he married in 1972.

John Schlesinger’s rambling version of The Day of the Locust (1975) saw Sutherland as a sexually repressed character – called Homer Simpson – who tramples a woman to death in an act of uncontrolled rage. Perhaps Bernardo Bertolucci had that in mind when he cast Sutherland in 1900 (Novecento, 1976), in which he is a broadly caricatured fascist thug who shows his sadism by smashing a cat’s head against a post and bashing a young boy’s brains out. “And I turned down Deliverance and Straw Dogs because of the violence!” Sutherland recalled.

In Fellini’s Casanova, the second of his two bizarre Italian excursions in 1976, Sutherland coldly calculates seduction under his heavily made-up features. The performance, as remarkably stylised as it is, still reveals the suffering soul within the sex machine.

In 1978 he appeared in Claude Chabrol’s Blood Relatives, a made-in-Canada murder mystery with Sutherland playing a Montreal cop investigating the murder of a young woman. More commercial was The Eagle Has Landed (1976), with Sutherland, attempting an Irish accent, as an IRA member supporting the Germans during the second world war, and as a chilling Nazi in Eye of the Needle (1981). Meanwhile, he was the hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), who resists the insidious alien menace until the film’s devastating final shot.

In 1981 Sutherland returned to the stage, as Humbert Humbert in a highly anticipated version of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, adapted by Edward Albee. It turned out to be a huge flop, running only 12 performances on Broadway. Both Sutherland and Albee played the blame game. “The second act is flawed,” Sutherland said. “Albee was supposed to have rethought it, but he never did.” Albee told reporters that he had scuttled some of his best scenes because they were “too difficult” for Sutherland because “he hasn’t been on stage for 17 years”.

Continuing his film career, Sutherland played a complex and sadistic British officer in Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985), and in A Dry White Season (1989) he took the role of an Afrikaner schoolteacher beginning to understand the brutal realities of apartheid. In Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), he held the screen with an extended monologue as he spilled the conspiracy beans to Kevin Costner’s district attorney hero Jim Garrison.

After having made contact with young audiences in the 70s with offbeat appearances in gross-out pictures The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), the latter as a pot-smoking professor, he was cast as an unconvincing bearded stranger in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992).

On a more adult level were Six Degrees of Separation (1993), in which he played an unfulfilled art dealer; A Time to Kill (1996), as an alcoholic, disbarred lawyer (alongside Kiefer); Without Limits (1998), as an enthusiastic athletics coach; and Space Cowboys (2000), as an elderly pilot. By this time, he was gradually moving into grey-haired character roles, one of the best being his amiable Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (2005).

The Jane Austen novel was also featured in the television series Great Books (1993-2000), to which Sutherland lent his soothing voice as narrator. Other series in which he shone as quasi baddies were Commander in Chief (2005) – as the sexist Republican speaker of the house opposed to the new president (Geena Davis) – and Dirty Sexy Money (2007-09), in which he played a powerful patriarch of a wealthy family.

Sutherland continued to be active well into his 80s, his long grey hair and beard signifying sagacity, whether as a contract killer in The Mechanic, a Roman hero in The Eagle, a nutty retired poetry professor in Man on the Train (all 2011), or a quirky bounty hunter in the western Dawn Rider (2012), bringing more depth to the characters than they deserved. As President Coriolanus Snow, the autocratic ruler of the dystopian country of Panem in The Hunger Games (2012), Sutherland was discovered by a new generation; he went on to reprise the role in three further films in that franchise, beginning with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013).

He played artists in two art-world thrillers by Italian directors: in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Deception, AKA The Best Offer (2013), he was a would-be painter helping to execute multimillion-dollar scams, while in Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019) he was on the other side of the heist as a reclusive genius targeted by a wealthy and unscrupulous dealer (Mick Jagger).

Aside from James Gray’s science-fiction drama Ad Astra (also 2019), in which he co-starred with Brad Pitt, Sutherland’s best late work was all for television. In Danny Boyle’s mini-series Trust (2018), which covered the same real-life events as Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, he played J Paul Getty, the oil tycoon whose grandson is kidnapped; while in The Undoing (2020), he was the father of a psychologist (Nicole Kidman), reluctantly putting up bail when her husband (Hugh Grant) is arrested for murder.

For the latter role Sutherland was in the running for a Golden Globe, having already received an honorary Oscar in 2017.

He is survived by Francine and his children, Kiefer, Rachel, Rossif, Angus and Roeg, and by four grandchildren.

🔔 Donald McNichol Sutherland, actor; born 17 July 1935; died 20 June 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[theskyexists]

There are many reasons to not go in for nuclear power and some reasons to go in for it after all.

Against:

1. It takes so many damn years to build. We'll be 20 years on and far past our carbon budget. That HUGE (they are insanely expensive) amount of money could have been spent on something more scalable. Nuclear is not scalable. Wind and solar are extremely scalable (and cheaper every day). One reason is that renewable plants (e.g a mill) are small and a repeated construction. Expertise for constructing renewables is widely available, nuclear plant construction expertise is in short supply. Counter (a bit weak): even if it takes ages to build, still, we're not on schedule for non-fossil fuel use anyway, so it will probably unfortunately still be relevant in twenty years.

2. A nuclear plant is a national security risk. One: in times of war. 2: in times of natural disaster. No counter to that except: surely war won't be THAT bad and the failsafes will always be enough.

3. Sourcing the concrete, steel and uranium that goes into such a plant isn't good for the environment. Nor is uranium renewable. Current stocks and use would provide us with 130 years of energy production. Build more plants, that number goes down. Counter: producing any power plant requires mining and transport - coal plants and renewables do too, for example.

4. Nuclear waste is a non-negligible problem. There are (war) incentives NOT to reduce waste. Even when waste is minimised, waste remains. Highly dangerous waste can kill people for longer than any society on earth has ever survived. 500.000 years... So no society can reasonably take responsibility for it. When nuclear waste is stored and then spills (as has happened in Germany) the state must pay billions in taxes to clean it up. Storage is difficult. There are NO permanent storage sites ready in all of Europe. There's about 180 plants now that have ran for decades. No permanent storage. If a company is made responsible for a nuclear plant, they tend to pay out to their shareholders one year and claim not to be able to take care of the waste for fear of bankruptcy the next - or they've already declared bankruptcy. Literally happened here. There are no incentives to deal responsibly with the waste for companies. Germany is projected to have to pay hundreds of billions of euros for permanently storing all the waste they've still got lying around at interim sites. Once again, money which might have been spent on scalable renewable production. 500.000 years... this a storage solution must last for 500.000 years. Ever seen concrete last so long... ?

5. We're seeing nuclear crowd out renewables RIGHT NOW IN REAL TIME in politics in the Netherlands and the UK. The money (and project managemeny time) really cannot be spent twice.

For:

6. Fossil fuels have done way more damage to the environment so far. Nuclear is preferable. In fact, 20% of European electricity and 10% of total energy is provided by nuclear power plants. 180. Plants. All renewables combined provide 17%. No real counter to that: they really do produce a lot of electricity without emitting greenhouse gases! Importantly: they don't need a lot of space. (Nuclear on the whole causes about as many greenhouse gases as wind energy equivalent and even slightly less than solar. Forty times less than coal.)

7. Nuclear is a proven way to produce a LOT of power. Weak counter: this makes it a liability in the electricity grid and incentivises less maintenance to minimise downtime (if no other plants can take over - generally not if they're too big. This makes them unreliable, just like renewables). Counter to that counter: much smaller (scalable) plants are being developed. Counter to that counter: they're experimental. The thorium reactors thay produce shorter lived waste are also experimental. I.e. it will take decades before we can build operational versions. (BUT! there's an ENORMOUS amount of thorium on earth, which is extremely important. Waste is much less problematic and meltdown impossible)

8. Nuclear plants that are not traditional baseload only plants and have load following capabilities can play a role in managing the ups and downs of renewables on the grid. Counter: even when built for this purpose, it's impossible to make enough money to pay for the construction and management and deconstruction and waste management by only running these plants as buffer. This is a problem because companies are asked to construct the plants, not the state. Counter 2: in a hybrid system with renewables the grid operator actually has to PAY OFF (millions) the nuclear plant to stop it producing so much. It's a liability in a hybrid system with renewables.

Final conclusion:

CURRENT nuclear power plant construction does not play well with the transition to renewables because there is no way in this financial system to use its production as a buffer, the state cannot produce the plants because there is a lack of expertise, companies cannot afford to run the plant as buffer and cannot be trusted and ideologically and politically nuclear power is proposed as an alternative to renewables instead of a complement which cuts into the much-needed financial resources necessary for renewable expansion. It is slow to build and badly scalable. We need speed and scalability considering our climate deadline. There is no permanent solution for waste and takes billions of euros to store right now already. Uranium is a scarce and non-renewable resource. Existing plants impede the transition to renewables (there is no need). They form a liability for continued production when it comes to short term production for the grid when needing maintenance and long term liability for energy production when they need to be decommissioned (France is dependent for 3/4ths on many plants that must be decommissioned at the same time). Nonetheless, existing plants are preventing a large amount of carbon emissions. Nuclear can be a useful element to the energy mix, and requires a lot less space than renewables. If innovations in scalable, smaller plants with increasingly better business cases, faster build times and ability to offload production to each other, there may be serious synergy with renewables. Still, these will be useful for 50-100 years until uranium runs out. Problematic, not just because it leaves us with expertise and infrastructure that will have no fuel, but also because we need to transition FAST and it's uncertain in how many years this technology will be operational. Thorium would be a solution to a lot of problems, but that is also decades away from operation. Putting money into research and test reactors is a priority. Decommissioning existing plants early would be stupid even if it would remove their contributions to transition intertia and the as of yet unsolved and increasing waste storage problem.

[dustyspines]

I miss the gang and am obviously obsessed with how you write them, do you have any thoughts or snippets you’d like to share?? <3

many sorrys it took me so long to get to this but because it's you i wanted to put in some extra effort!!! so YES i have snippets and many thoughts so under the cut here i present to you: pinterest board screenshots and gang snippets from my currently unnamed (tentatively titled the dictionary) fic <3

karl. beloved. he's the sweet muggle-born hufflepuff who has an affinity to charms, specifically in the modification/adaptation of charms to make household items more useful. he works in a little trinkets shop in diagon alley where people bring in misbehaving items that need fixing, or to request an adaptation to something they need help with. he charms quills to write in different colours so those with colour-blindness can see. he charms teapots to chime when they reach the boil so those a little more forgetful don't set their houses on fire. he did a year's training the the misuse of muggle artefacts department before taking up the job, and it's the joy of his life <3

outside of work he plays the piano, he loves music and finding funky jumpers in charity shops that are to big but are cosy for all seasons. he loves animals, and his second best subject was magical creatures, but he needs socialisation with people more than he does animals which is why he's so outgoing and friendly and sickeningly loyal to his friends (to a point where he sometimes oversteps but it isn't intentional)

craig. another BELOVED. outspoken but respectful half-blood slytherin with a passion for football that he used to provide tactics for the quidditch team at hogwarts. he's the shortest of the group but is nimble and fast which is why nobody cares, nor does he. he likes coffee in a Proper way, and is very passionate about the brewing of certain kinds (a point of contention with yann who doesn't give af and will use instant coffee powder just to tease him). he works as a speech therapist/mind healer hybrid at st. mungo's, specifically working with kids with traumatic childhoods who need help with their speech before they go to hogwarts. he has a good base knowledge in both magical and muggle medicine practices so is usually the mom friend of the group, but he doesn't mind.

he likes friendship bracelets (because the kids he works with will make him loads of the thread-knot kind) and he forces his friends to go on jogs with him when he thinks they've been inside for too long.

POLLY beloved!!!!! back in school she started a student radio broadcast (thanks to karl's charms skills where he found a way to connect the gramophones/record players in the castle together to work without electricity). she loves music of all eras and is chronic for being a bit of a know-it-all. after school she took up an assistant position in the biggest magical radio broadcasting company and has been hosting the breakfast show for a while now where she plays a mix of muggle and magical music.

she loves rings and mismatching nail polish but the paint is always chipped because she's so hands on with everything. her hair is perpetually braided because she can't be bothered to keep tucking it behind her ears all the time. she has a slight mean streak and knows it but it always comes from a place of care because she just can't stand people who beat around the bush instead of being honest with each other. yann is obsessed with her n they've been living together since they left school but she pretends to be cool about it just so he looks like the crazy one.

yann <3 he wears glasses, he has lovely wavy hair. you'll never catch him dead in a pair of jeans. he's a pureblood from france who went to hogwarts because he'd been living with his grandmother in london since he was a kid and decided staying in the uk would be better in the long run. he works in madam malkin's as a tailor but focuses on male silhouettes, and most of the clothes he wears are made by him. his grandmother taught him everything he knew and he decided he didn't care enough about magic to take up a magical career, hence why he went into tailoring instead.

he has the whole tall and handsome and mysterious thing going on (he's the tallest of the bunch) but it's ironic because he's the most open of them all when you get to know him. super smart but you'd never know because he's very quiet about it. keeps secrets the best because he understand the value in having a person to trust and talk to, but gives the best advice so people don't end up upset. refuses to listen to any criticism of polly because she's always nice to him; doesn't realise it's only him she's always nice to because they're together. has big tunnel vision when it comes to her.

^ that board is just called vibes because it's just capturing the Essence. they start age 20/21 and it goes until they're 24/25, so it's a good four years of their life post-hogwarts.

it's very right where you left me LOL. friends break up friends get married etc. etc.

i haven't written too much that is super Finished, the doc is at 30k-ish words right now. but there are two Gang-centric scenes so here are some lines from those that i really like :)

aaaand that's The Gang. for now. it's fun to know where they're going to end up without really knowing how they get there.

[cringycorruption]

Hello everyone and welcome to my second day of blogging about Palestine

today i wanted to highlight some charities and foundations that you can financially support instead of big companies who are going to fund your money into guns and supplies for the Israel troops

1. Press - House Palestine

Press-house Palestine is a non-for-profit organisation which supports the journalists documenting the lives of people within Gaza. This organisation grants journalists with legal protection so that their experiences and freedom of speech can be presented online. ( they also have a instagram by the name @press_house_palestine ) This link provides articles about ongoing events within the country

2. Doctors Without Borders

i’m sure that there a high chance that you have heard about this one before, but ill mention it anyways since its a good charity. Doctors Without Borders is a organisation dedicated to supplying medical aid to places without proper access to it. what i have linked below is a donation link for their specific Gaza cause, which both implores for a ceasefire and provides Palestinians with medical equipment. you have the option to donate monthly or just one time

3. Islamic Relief Australia

this organisation is one that is located within Australia, but strives to provide food and water to the people. So far they have already given 16000+ people water and over 1 million ready-to-eat meals. They also have other donation links within the site that incudes to help rebuild infrastructure within Gaza and to help rehome palestinians to Australia. NOTE: There are other varients of this organisation within other countries such as the UK

4. Olive Kids

Olive kids is a foundation focused on supporting the children of Gaza. this includes education, medicine and food. This is another Australian-based foundation but that is because i live in australia. if you want to find region specific causes for your location then please google it yourself. Australian causes can be donated to by anyone anyways so you might aswell use this info anyways

5. Action Aid UK

this foundation focuses on providing Palestinians with the services that they do not have anymore, such as power and electricity. They do 90% immediately going towards the people of Gaza and 10% for future emergencies

I also want to stress two things. 1, if you arent in the right financial position to donate then dont, spreading the word does help aswell and 2, im not the excuse for you not to research yourself. all of these groups i found by myself via google, and as long as you have some media literacy, you too can find information. and you should find more than 5 and spread it around, i just wanted to highlight 1 from 5 different sections since i hadnt even heard about most of these until now.

more organisation/fundraisers here:

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

London is a city that has always been deeply uneven, with plenty of cultural treasures to hide the poverty in the Tower Blocks and the underpasses. London is effectively the main of the UK economy, and everything is geared towards it. Hence it retains a degree of economic dynamism that allows a degree of optimism, after all there's always a new restaurant, new exhibition, new flagship store, new play. Sure most workers are dirt poor, living on mashed avocado, and hoping the landlord gets visited by 3 Ghosts at Christmas, but there's the dream of making it in the big city.

Outside the London bubble, large parts of the country are either in despair, or have totally given up. Roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools are crumbling. Police have almost disappeared outside traffic stops. Courts are backlogged, prisons overfilled & well past their designed lifespan. Companies face significant trade barriers with the EU. The water industry is essentially operating on leveraged debt and mostly owned by oversea's pension funds, whilst the infrastructure collapses and raw sewage is being pumped into the rivers/seas. Everyone is underpaid compared to the cost of living, but also compared to many comparable roles in other countries.

In the shires, the more well paid commuter class can still have a nice life, but they are feeling a sharp pinch. Holidays cut. Cars held on to much, much longer than before. Meals out being reduced. Optional extras like music or sports for the kids cancelled. Impulse purchases stopped. All of which sounds like "oh poor Emma can't get her daughter Lucinda piano lessons boo hoo" but think about the economic impact. That is money that would have gone to a piano teacher (usually self employed), to the coffee shop whilst Emma waits, to a music shop for music, perhaps a CD or concert tickets to something Lucinda played at a lesson. Then when Lucinda grows up instead of having a career in arts or entertainment, even at her local bar or church, she doesn't know how to play piano. So society as a whole has lost a musician, and Lucinda as a person flourishes slightly less. The UK arts sector is one of our biggest economic powerhouses, yet it is routinely ignored and hammered by the govt. Art & music are regarded as luxury items, despite contributing £1.6 billion to the annual economy (2021 at 5.6%). That's huge, bigger than the fishing industry which contributes £1.4 billion (2021 at 4%). Yet with rents sky rocketing, and school budgets in utter crisis, arts/music get dropped and creative talent has to switch to more routine jobs to survive. UK Musicians are dropped from EU events following the botched visa system, and international work is increasingly harder for them to get.

Outside the diminishing middle class, the real difficulty and poverty of the UK hits home. People are not sure whether the next rent payment or electricity will quite literally bankrupt them and leave them homeless. Wages are mostly static, with few rises outside a number of key sectors. Some areas have seen wage growth, but that has been concentrated in a small number of jobs (especially finance/management). The population is aging, and the care system is left almost entirely to private companies in a very disjointed, expensive manner. For most people the only credible hope of a financially better life is to inherit or to win the lottery or to commit crime. This is strikingly similar to the pattern seen in many developing world economies.

For example, I have worked in the public sector for 20 years. In that time I have trained, gained professional qualifications, led larger teams, upskilled on IT/project management and become more productive. Since my pay has been capped at a 0.5% rise, it is a real terms wage cut. So I've become more productive yet I'm paid less. Why should I 1) carry on trying to be more productive, & 2) stay in the job? Productivity increases from workers have to be linked to a personal reward, as well as a benefit to an employer or there's no point for the employee. Hence "quiet quitting".

So the UK is in the dire position of poor infrastructure, rampant poverty, and a population that no longer believes hard work or being productive will improve their own lives, only maintain their survival. This is not a recipe for a flourishing economy or nation. The worst thing is that the UK has started to lose hope that things can get better without a magical solution. Without at least some hope, we are doomed.

Saved via reddit from user 'AgeOfVictoriaPodcast' - as an excellent (if depressing!) summary of the UK's economy and society in 2023 / the 2020s / post Brexit

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk is a man comfortable with risky bets. He pledged to send 1 million people to Mars (SpaceX), to fill factories with humanoid workers (Tesla Bot), and to create a network of highways deep underground (the Boring Company). All of these bets are yet to pay off. But six years ago, Musk took a leap of faith that would also affect him personally. He tied his own pay at Tesla to a series of financial targets over the next decade, including boosting the company’s market value from $59 billion to $650 billion. Such targets were decried by commentators at the time as “jaw-dropping” and “his most unlikely goal yet.” And Musk’s wage from the company if he didn’t pull them off? Nothing at all.

The board agreed to the plan in 2018. However, a heavy-metal drummer named Richard Tornetta, who owned just nine Tesla shares, did not. In June of that year, he decided to sue, claiming the pay package was unfair to investors like him. By the time the case reached court in Delaware in 2022, Musk had just one milestone left before the big payout. But the judge agreed with Tornetta in January, voiding what she called an unfathomably large pay package and describing the directors who negotiated it as beholden to Musk.

Musk succeeded in hitting those 12 jaw-dropping targets by the close of 2023, following Tesla’s brief spell as a trillion-dollar company. And now, despite what happened in Delaware, he’s demanding to be paid. At Tesla’s annual meeting on Thursday, shareholders are being asked to vote again on whether Musk should receive what has by now swollen to a nearly $50 billion pay package, the biggest in US corporate history. The $50 billion question for shareholders is: Is Musk worth it?

Posing the question of whether he deserves his pay packet at all marks a significant shift for the relationship between Musk and the electric automaker he has led since 2008. “The resistance shows that there is a ceiling to the influence that a single person has on the company,” says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at the consultancy Gartner. “This is the the first time Tesla shareholders might be willing to say, ‘You can’t have unlimited power.’”

The vote comes at a difficult time for Tesla. For the first time in the company’s history, Tesla is facing intense competition in the electric car market—especially from cheaper Chinese competitors. Meanwhile, some observers have puzzled over Musk’s response and his pivot to robotaxis and artificial intelligence.

“The debate here really is about the future, not the past,” says John Colley, professor of practice in strategy and leadership at the UK’s Warwick Business School. “Tesla has become a mature business, and it’s got all the problems that mature carmakers have now.” Whether a visionary like Musk is the best man to lead a mature business is unclear, he adds.

The pay package is just one in a series of measures that shareholders have already been asked to vote on by proxy, ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Others include whether Tesla’s incorporation should move from Delaware to Texas, whether the company should soften its hardline stance on labor negotiations, and whether the company should preemptively impose a moratorium on using minerals mined from the seabed.

Yet none have been as divisive as Musk’s pay. Deep rifts among investors have been exposed in the lead-up to the vote. Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm has backed the pay package, as has billionaire investor Ron Baron. “Tesla is better with Elon,” Baron wrote in an open letter last week. “Tesla is Elon.” Yet the deal’s opponents include two influential proxy advisory groups, which guide institutional investors on votes, as well as shareholders from the Nordic countries, where Tesla has clashed with workers over labor rights.

Norway’s trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against the pay deal, as will the country’s largest pension fund, KLP. “While we acknowledge that the company has grown significantly and successfully during the performance period, we still note that the total award value remains excessive,” Kiran Aziz, KLP's head of responsible investments, told WIRED, adding the fund will vote in favor of the motion urging Tesla to engage in labor negotiations. “Recent [dispute] between Tesla and the company’s workers in Sweden as well as Tesla’s history of accusations of interference with workers’ rights is of great concern and shows that the company needs to do better work in the area.”

Behind the scenes of the vote, lobbying has been intense. Tesla has paid for ads on Google and X, which is owned by Musk, telling investors to “protect your investment” and support the proposal, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In April, Tesla also launched a website urging shareholders to vote against the Delaware court decision and support the pay package. “The Court’s decision, if implemented, means that Elon would not receive any compensation for the tremendous accomplishments that have generated significant stockholder returns in less than six years,” the website reads.

“This is the most advertising I can remember from any proxy solicitation,” says Robert Anderson, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law. He believes the Musk effect—the CEO’s ability to attract endless publicity—has contributed to this situation. But the pay package and the proposed Texas move are both unprecedented in the business world, he adds. “Either [of] those things by themselves would be pretty significant, even if he were not a public figure.”

The vote will be decided by a mix of institutional investors as well as an unusually large cohort of retail investors, who control around 44 percent of the business. Among shareholders, there are concerns that if Musk does not win his compensation, “his attention might drift to some of his other ventures a little bit more,” says Anderson. Musk managed to juggle multiple ventures for years, but he has been more publicly distracted since acquiring the social media service Twitter and renaming it X. There, his visible turn to right-wing politics has garnered new fans and left some old ones behind.

Whatever happens this week, Tesla and Musk may emerge looking a bit less superhuman. For years, the two have insisted that Tesla is a tech company, with a Silicon Valley–style startup scrappiness. “We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company,” Musk told investors—or voters—in April. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company … fundamentally, it’s just the wrong framework.”

[eaglesnick]

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” –John Maynard Keynes

Last year (September 2023) the Labour Party set out its plans to create Great British Energy:

“…a new publicly-owned clean energy company (which will) save £93 billion for UK households”

And more recently,

“Labour will work with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030.” (Labour: 'Make Britain a clean energy superpower’. 2024)

Bravo! Who doesn’t want, cheaper, cleaner energy production and a move away from reliance upon fossil fuels other than the big oil companies? But did you spot the possible contradiction between the two statements?

In the first statement Great British Energy was to be publicly owned and in the second Labour is going to work with “the private sector”.

How will Labour square the circle of private sector involvement coupled to public ownership? Your guess is as good as mine. Here is what the Financial Times had to say:

“Plans are light on detail. But the party has said it wants to co-invest alongside the private sector…The terms at which it will invest are unclear. (FT: 06/07/24)

What we are not going to get is an entirely state-owned energy company like EDF in France which generated 139.7bn euros  in revenue for the French government in 2023.

So before we get too excited we should remember Britain’s railways are organised within a mishmash of private and public ownership, and have been described as “broken" and “no longer fit for purpose”. Is this going to be the case for Great British Energy?

Even if Great British Energy is 100% publicly owned, and the cost of renewable energy is brought down there is still the small problem of how the price of generated electricity is artificially pegged to the cost of gas. Nowhere have I seen Labour promising to fix this unfair practice.

The UK already produces over 41% of its electricity through renewable sources and private companies buy and trade energy at the market price. This market is different to the energy provider market where you and I buy our energy, which is controlled by OFGEM.

The energy generator market operates on the principle of marginal cost pricing which has nothing to do with competition or the cost of renewable generation.  Marginal cost pricing is where ALL units of electricity are sold at the price of the most expensive unit needed to meet demand at a particular moment in time.

The most expensive units of electricity are gas turbine generated. In other words, cheap renewable energy is sold at the same price as that produced by the most expensive gas plants. Until this artificial pricing structure is replaced by something fairer, the price you and I pay for electricity, whether renewable or not, will remain artificially high.

[stephensmithuk]

The Cardboard Box

This was originally published in 1893. It was however pulled from Memoirs apparently at Doyle's request, originally appearing in just the first US edition and did not reappear until much later in His Last Bow.

Croydon is a large town less than ten miles south of Charing Cross. Historically part of Surrey and a borough in its own right in 1889, it was incorporated in Greater London in 1965.

It would later be home to the UK's sole international airport in the interwar years, which closed in 1959. The terminal building survives and there is a museum on site.

Croydon is today a major transport hub, home to the only tram network in Southern England, which was opened in 2000 using a combination of old railway lines and new street tracks. East Croydon is the main station on the London to Brighton Line, with fast electric trains to Victoria.

It has a theatre - no Shakespeare currently on though, sadly.

Croydon was within the Metropolitan Police District, so Lestrade is within this jurisdiction.

ACD would later run for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, parting company from the Liberal Party because of his opposition to Irish Home Rule.

Wallington is also now in London and was already its own parish at this time.

The temperance movement was pretty big across the Protestant world by this point. Britain never went as far as the US in prohibition though - despite strong support in the Liberal Party, the Conservatives were resolutely opposed and the best they could do was high taxation, along with regulated opening hours that were introduced when the First World War began.

We get Lestrade's first initial - G.

Foolscap is an 8x13-inch sized paper that was commonly used in Europe and the British Commonwealth before A4 took over.

Shadwell is an area in the East End of London, on the river and then part of the docks.

The Albert Dock is probably the Royal Albert Dock. This closed in 1981 and an attempt to turn the area into a business park in 2013 has just resulted in an area that is good for filming zombie movies: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jul/20/empty-promise-the-fantasy-city-within-a-city-that-turned-into-a-ghost-town

[in-death-we-fall]

24 Hour Party People

Things are getting messy on the Stone Sour/Murderdolls UK tour. Welcome inside their world of drunken orgies, comedy pissing and pickled cow’s hearts…

(google docs link)

Photos: Tina Korhonen

If you ever find yourself in the same building as Corey Taylor, the frontman with the most Tourettes-like speech patterns in rock (no mean feat in an arena where swearing is both big and clever), the chances are you’ll hear him long before you see him. A couple of hours after his band Stone Sour’s first UK show with fellow Slipknot-affiliates the Murderdolls, the singer is drunkenly ping-ponging off the walls of a corridor backstage at Nottingham’s Rock City, beaming and gleefully bellowing Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’ at top volume before tumbling into his dressing room for the umpteenth shot of Jack Daniel’s this evening.

The backstage area is teeming with young women who have miraculously acquired passes along the way. More incongruously and to Taylor’s obvious confusion, there are also random semi-naked men flitting about. In the next room, Murderdolls’ Nikki Sixx-coiffed bass player Eric Griffin is entertaining two ladies — one of them, dressed as a sexy nurse, currently occupied with snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. Tonight is clearly going to get messy. If everyone involved in this tour comes out of this thing unscathed, it’ll be a miracle.

“I like the fact that we’re just five fucking guys who stink and love music. I love it, that’s real, fuck that dumb shit.”

    Rewind a few hours, and an infinitely more coherent, if chronically hungover Corey Taylor is fumbling his way into a minibus to join his bandmates on their way to an in-store signing. While, along with guitarist Jim Root, he spends his time worrying America’s parents and poncing around in a mask in Slipknot, it’s quickly obvious that Stone Sour offers the chance to show his often-gurning, surprisingly clumsy human side. The side that has dumped all attempts at being enigmatic for the person whose big ambition in life is to appear in a cartoon (“I can picture Bart Simpson going to a Slipknot concert,” says Jim. “It’d be great, you’d hear, like, a note between bleeps.”), who has been terrified of sharks since his mother took him to see ‘Jaws’ when he was three, who has an obsessive love of British comedy, and revels in tasteless, decidedly un-PC jokes. A random example: “What do you call the worthless skin around a pussy? The rest of the woman.” Classy.

    All of which is good news for the scores of fans who have turned up to meet the band today.

    “There are guys out there who would pick their eyes out with a fucking coathanger and go, ‘Aaargh! They’re for you!’,” grins the singer as one fan thrusts a giant dildo at him to be signed. “But they’re all great. Anyone that listens to us is pretty fucking cool. And little kids are really into it too. You take the time and you fucking talk to them and shit, that’s a fan or (sic) life. Get them young, like the tobacco companies say!”

    Over at the venue, the Murderdolls — all similarly hungover, bar iron-livered frontman Wednesday 13 — emerge from their bus in a flurry of red and black hair and leather to be met by fans bearing gifts of Boris Karloff action figures and teddy bears dressed in bondage gear.

    Perhaps inevitably, because of the way they look, their unashamedly cock-rock outlook, their gang mentality and the way that there’s genuinely no-one like them at the moment, the band have inspired a tribe of similarly-attired devout followers who you can spot a mile off. Many of them are female, which is curious given the off-the-scale testosterone levels that shape the band.

    “We had a group of four girls here bawling their eyes out, really shaking,” says Joey Jordison, struggling to wake up. “I don’t really think it’s too weird. We give them something to believe in, some escapism from maybe some of the hard things in their lives.”

    “It’s insane,” grins Wednesday. “You hang around us for a day you’ll be crying to get away from us.”

    It’s a strange kind of devotion the two bands create. While both are surprisingly approachable some people still go to unnecessary extremes to get their attention.

    “A girl came to an in-store signing with her arms completely slashed up, with every guy in the Murderdolls’ name cut into her arm,” says Joey. “She brought me a cow heart in a formaldehyde jar with my picture in it, and said that that was her heart and it belongs to me. And she gave me a book of a hundred poems that are all about me.’

    Is that not a little disturbing?

    “No, I just think that some of these kids need a little bit more attention. We’re a fun band, we want the kids to have fun, and I don’t want anyone taking their aggressions out on themselves. Life is really not as bad as they think it is. That’s why we come over here, because I know we’re important to these kids. I could easily be at home right now sitting out on my porch drinking a beer and not giving a shit. But I’d rather come over here and tell kids thank you for giving me a reason to live as well.”

    By the time showtime comes around, Stone Sour can be found in their dressing room “spanking the bottle of Jack”, a strange pre-show ritual that seems to achieve little more than earning Corey a new blood blister on his finger.

    One set of anthemic rock and one set of fantastically ludicrous glam-rock stomping later, and it’s time to get the alcohol flowing, bring the prettiest girls backstage, and for certain members of this touring circus to behave very badly indeed…

“Oh Jesus.”

    Corey Taylor is suffering. The last anyone saw of him last night was when he was taken to support band Elviss’ bus for a little drink. Today, he’s paying the price, big time.

    I remember getting onstage,” he says, trying to piece the previous evening together. “I remember doing a great show, coming offstage, drinking about 12 Jack and Cokes being pulled onto Elviss’ bus and them pumping fucking absinthe down my goddamn throat trying to kill me. Fuckers. After that it’s a blur. I remember eating an ignorant amount of fucking lamb steak, just shoving it in my face. It was fucking gross.”

“We go apeshit every night.” -Joey Jordison

    This, apparently, has nothing on what went on in the Murderdolls’ tour bus last night, where one stunned witness hazily recalls someone attempting to use the on-board toilet, only to be met with the sight of a certain lanky member of the Murderdolls inserting “objects” into two girls.

    “We are a fun rock ‘n’ roll party band in every sense of the word,” says a wary Joey Jordison the next day as the band roll in to the Birmingham Academy. “You can draw about every conclusion you ever heard about the traditional rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle from the ‘80s, that’s pretty much us. But I don’t want to make it sound like that’s cool. I don’t endorse it in any way.”

    Joey, Corey, and Jim Root have, of course, seen and done it all before with Slipknot, so it’s fair to say that, bar the heroic alcohol consumption, they may have a certain amount of detachment from the mayhem surrounding them these days.

    “But all that crazy shit happened a long time ago,” Corey insists, grimacing through his hangover. “I don’t really recall! I’d be coming offstage, having a glass of milk and eating cookies.”

    Because the two bands are about such vastly different things — with Stone Sour it’s about bringing things down to the simple elements of their songs and connecting with the audience, while Murderdolls are on a mission to bring the biggest, trashiest, glammiest, most X-rated party to every town they hit — there’s little in the way of rivalry between the camps. The only competition seems to be with putting on the biggest, loudest live show.

    “If anything I think it’s healthy if there is,” Corey concurs. “It just makes you want to give that bit fucking more and go for it. At the end of the day it’s all about the kids, fuck us. It’s all about whether they’re having a good time or not.”

    “There’s always that little competition,” Joey says. “This is our last run before we go back to Slipknot, so I’m not worried about it too much. But we put on the same show pretty much every night anyway. We go that apeshit every night.”

The first thing you’d notice on entering the Murderdolls’ dressing room is the detritus: clothes, make-up scattered everywhere, not to mention drummer Ben ‘The Ghoul’ Graves — the cause of most of last night’s very worst behaviour — stretched out on a sofa and spilling, somewhat unpleasantly, out of his stage costume of a PVC thong while loudly “making room” in his nose. The second thing you notice, half a second later, is that it stinks in here.

    “My clothes smell like a cat litter box,” Wednesday says, wrinkling his nose. “I got my pants out of our wardrobe case, and they’re still soaked from the show because I was sweating, but I swear they smell like piss. I think someone could have pissed on my pants. Our stuff was packed up, so I’m not sure what happened, unless someone is trying to play a trick on me.”

    This, of course, is what happens when you stick a load of men on a bus together for months on end and deny them the rights to proper laundry services.

    “Most bands rely on special lights and effects,” Wednesday continues, as Joey and Corey work on new Slipknot material down the corridor. “But we come to the people in Smellovision. We bring all the senses out. Whenever you come to our show and we haven’t come onstage yet, you can go (sniffs), ‘Oh, something smells like shit! They’re getting ready to go on!’. We’ve got an intro smell instead of an intro tape.”

    Tonight’s show makes Nottingham’s insanity look like a warm-up. It’s so hot in the venue you have to wade through the air, and after Stone Sour incite a mass singalong of ‘Bother’, the Murderdolls trip down the stairs, making last minute checks on their hair, before they explode onto the stage. By the time the encore comes around, Acey has rather gruesomely lost all his clothing from his lower regions, the rest of them are running around the stage as if they’re being chased by killer mosquitoes, and Stone Sour are bellowing their approval from the wings. Nothing here is about angst. It’s all about living larger than most of our lives.

    “Rock stars should look like they’re from outer space or something,” Joey says afterwards, as they pack up their make-up kits. “When I was growing up seeing Alice Cooper and Kiss and shit, when I went to a show I could be like, ‘Okay, that’s the fucking dude in the band’. That’s the way it should be. Even with Slipknot, our image and the show goes with the music. Music and imagery go together, and it just makes it that much more fun for the live show.”

    And while Stone Sour head off to deal loudly with the latest booze-related crisis (their bus driver, who is supposed to be driving them to Scotland in an hour, is passed out drunk, so it’s time to fire him), Joey prepares himself for the long, but no doubt eventful journey ahead.

    “I intend on having a hangover tomorrow,” he says. “The plan for tonight is the same for every night. The reason bands get so fucked up and drink a lot is because all we do is the same thing every day, and it’s the best fucking lifestyle. We have no responsibilities. You’re on this bus, nothing can fucking touch you. You’re meeting cool fucking people all the time. It’s much more fun-orientated and more of a free-spirited vibe with this band than any other band I’ve been in.”

“I liked the ‘Fuck’ song!” The fans’ verdict on the Stone Sour/Murderdolls face-off…

Name: Riannan Davis Age: 19 From: Mid-Wales Well, what did you think?: “Excellent. I love Stone Sour and Murderdolls.” Which band comes out top?: “Stone Sour. I just prefer them and I get bored of Murderdolls after a while. Stone Sour are good over and over again.” Highlight? “Getting promised to go backstage in five minutes!”

Name: Andrew Gordan Age: 14 From: Oxford Well, what did you think?: “It was amazing, really good.” Which band comes out top?: “Murderdolls, definitely. I just prefer that type of music, it’s really good.” Highlight?: “‘White Wedding’ by the Murderdolls. I love the Billy Idol version, and I love the Murderdolls version.”

Name: Natalie Reynolds Age: 15 From: Bristol Well, what did you think?: “I’ve had a fucking amazing time!” Which band comes out top?: “Murderdolls! They rock, because Ghoul’s in the band. He’s so fit! He’s just the drag queen of my dreams.” Highlight?: “Seeing Ghoul in a thong!”

Name: Chaz Boswell Age: 18 From: Wales Well, what did you think?: “It was fantastic tonight.” Which band comes out top?: “Murderdolls, definitely. They’re more fun than Stone Sour, and I prefer their music. My friend lost his shoe.” Highlight?: “Finding the shoe.”

Name: Hayley Lamb Age: 14 From: Lemington What did you think?: “I had a great time.” Which band comes out top?: “Murderdolls. I just love the way they dress and I think their music’s great.” Highlight?: “I liked the ‘Fuck’ song with the umbrella, that was great.”

[master-john-uk]

Once again, the UK Government has let farmers down!

So many of our small farmers are struggling right now. Farm-gate prices for milk have decreased dramatically in recent months, the price of grain crops on the world market have dropped, and UK Gov. have still not implemented quality controls on imported meat. On top of that farms have rising energy, feed and wage costs.

We are fortunate in that both farms are now self-sufficient for electricity... but, I am suffering a personal financial loss.

Should I just put my hands up and surrender? adding it to their empire I bought both the mainly arable farm (2007), and the dairy farm (2018) for all the wrong reasons. Partly from stopping big farming companies (who do not care about their workers], or Dorset County Council buying the sites for future housing development... but, the main reason for buying both farms was to help the previous occupants/owners. (Another reason for purchasing the dairy farm in 2018. is that mother loved cows. Mother passed away in January 2018.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

THIS IS THE LAST DAY FOR MY KICKSTARTER for the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

#20yrsago Out of Blue Six: a lost gem https://memex.craphound.com/2003/08/21/out-of-blue-six-a-lost-gem/

#20yrsago Paramilitary wing of the usability movement https://web.archive.org/web/20030823183246/http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2003/08/19#1061283840

#20yrsago Anal Fissures in a nutshell http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/medical/fissure.html

#20yrsago Beyond Fear: Required reading for Ashcroft’s America https://memex.craphound.com/2003/08/21/beyond-fear-required-reading-for-ashcrofts-america/

#15yrsago UK gov’t loses 4 million citizens’ personal info https://cdn.computerworld.co.nz/article/494185/data_four_million_lost_one_year_uk/

#15yrsago Slim Gaillard’s Vout dictionary: jazz hipster argot from the 30s https://web.archive.org/web/20080913131050/http://www.pocreations.com/vout.html

#15yrsago Are images of the early Mickey Mouse still copyrighted? https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-22-fi-mickey22-story.html

#10yrsago EFF wins big: secret FISA court opinion will be released https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/eff-victory-results-expected-release-secret-court-opinion-finding-nsa-surveillance

#10yrsago UK Serious Crime Agency proposes ban on small cellphones that don’t look like cellphones https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23782136

#10yrsago Swedish seventies neoretrofuturism: the paintings of Simon Stålenhag http://www.simonstalenhag.se/index.html

#10yrsago How British spies exorcise a leak-haunted laptop https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

#10yrsago David Miranda’s lawyers nastygram the UK government https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/aug/20/david-miranda-letter-home-office

#10yrsago EFF and Public Resource fight back against copyrighted, paywalled laws https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-fights-back-against-copyright-lawsuit

#10yrsago Monster and Chips: fun, gross-out chapter books https://memex.craphound.com/2013/08/21/monster-and-chips-fun-gross-out-chapter-books/

#5yrsago European lawmaker writes post warning about dangers of automatic copyright filters, which is taken down by an automatic copyright filter https://www.techdirt.com/2018/08/21/automated-filter-removed-parliament-members-article-warning-about-censorship-automated-filters/

#5yrsago The peculiar hazards of megaprojects https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2424835

#5yrsago The Clown Egg Register: photos of the painstakingly painted eggs that English clowns stake their faces on https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/20/17719884/clown-egg-register-luke-stephenson-helen-champion

#5yrsago How much would universal health care really cost? https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/calculate-costs-medicareforall-properly.html

#5yrsago 22 states jointly petition the Federal Circuit appeals court to reinstate Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20181109180138/https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-files-suit-stop-illegal-rollback-net-neutrality

#5yrsago Amazon’s cloud business leads American companies in shifting its electric cost to taxpayers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-20/amazon-isn-t-paying-its-electric-bills-you-might-be

#5yrsago Touring the haunting ruins of abandoned Second Life university campuses https://splinternews.com/we-took-a-tour-of-the-abandoned-college-campuses-of-sec-1793849944

#5yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s anti-corruption bill bans foreign lobbyists, subjects domestic lobbyists to strong oversight https://theintercept.com/2018/08/21/elizabeth-warren-unveils-radical-anti-corruption-platform/

#5yrsago Verizon to fire department: you’re exceeding your bandwidth while you fight wildfires, so we’re throttling you https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/

#1yrago Workplace surveillance is coming for you: Empricism-washing as a form of wage-theft https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

[trainsinanime]

Sometimes I wish I still used Twitter (until I remember what that place was like), because some news items just deserve immediate "holy shit" commentary. Like this. DB Cargo UK is getting rid of most of its remaining fleet of electric locomotives, and replacing them with diesels with "sustainable" fuels. They call it a bold decision, but they make it clear that this is due to market forces.

This decision will increase carbon dioxide emissions from the British rail sector, at the same time as the British government has given out new licenses for drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. That little country is insistent on making global warming worse, not better.

It is easy to criticise DB Cargo UK for this decision, and I think we should, especially us German tax payers who ultimately own this company. I don't care if this is a good economic decision, it is bad globally.

But at the same time we must also place a lot of blame with the British government. The UK famously has way too little rail electrification. Only a few big mainlines are electrified, and those are so busy with passenger trains that freight often can't use them all that much anyway. New electrification projects either haven't happened at all or have been severely cut back (e.g. the Great Western Mainline which is still not fully electrified), and various conservative governments have said, "biofuel is way cheaper than electrification in the short term, so we should do that" for years now.

Over the past 25 years, literally thousands of new electric locomotives have been built by Bombardier (now Alstom) and Siemens for the European continent. There are entire websites dedicated to listing all of them. And none of those operate in the UK.

The total number of new UK electric freight locomotives in the past 25 years is 10 (with sixty more on order), none of which were run by DB Cargo UK. Compare that to 500 new diesel locomotives (class 66 alone) over the same time frame, many of which are run by DB Cargo UK (Also compare that to 400 new electrics for Austria alone, divided between class 1016, 1116, 1216 and 1293).

The class 90 electrics that DB Cargo UK is getting rid of are from the late 1980s, and at 30 years, they are getting on in age, with more and more maintenance required. Getting rid of them isn't weird, weird is that they're being replaced with diesels instead of electrics. And if the UK government isn't willing to spend the money on the necessary infrastructure, then more diesel locomotives rather than fewer is inevitable.

This is nowhere near the first of these announcements, by the way. Plenty of other British rail companies have gotten rid of some or all of their electrics already. Even DB Cargo UK has sold some of their machines before this. You will find a lot of former British machines in Romania or Hungary, which have the same electrification system, and crucially, enough electrified lines where you can make good use of these machines.

So, yeah. Things in the UK suck. If you live in the UK and can vote there, maybe consider changing things, perhaps.

[northirish]

Anyone who tells you to ‘just get ac’ is a privileged idiot.

When I was 9 I lived in a house without ac and we looked into adding ac to the central air system.

It was 5k (yes, 5000) and that was the lowest quote we got, the hugest quote for it we got was 24k.

Obviously as a working class family, we couldn’t afford this. We tried to install window units and they don’t do much of anything. But even the 3 window units we bought were like 500.

I saw a guy from the UK on twitter get a quote to put AC in his house and it ended up almost being ten thousand pounds and his house wasn't even that big. I just wish people from places where AC and stuff is the norm would realise that it just isn't financially feasible for most folks here in the UK, not only because AC itself is expensive but I dread to think how much electricity those things burn though too, another thing that folks here are already spending way more than they need to, fucking greedy energy companies here are given a blank cheque by those Tory bastards to pretty much scalp people with insanely high prices as well

[lboogie1906]

Le Sony’r Ra, or Sun Ra (May 22, 1914 - May 3, 1993) jazz pianist, bandleader, composer, and cosmic philosopher remains an influential and controversial figure in jazz history. He is remembered for his Astro Black Mythology which incorporated aspects of ancient Egyptian philosophy and science fiction, as well as his contributions to avant-garde jazz and afrofuturism.

He was born as Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham. Composing original music and poetry by age twelve, he played in several bands before receiving a scholarship to Alabama State Agricultural and Mechanical Institute for Negroes, he quit school, claiming to have had a visionary experience in which he traveled to the planet Saturn and was told to stop attending college. He assembled a band for rehearsal purposes only. He went by the name Sonny Blount. He was a conscientious objector and was briefly imprisoned during WWII.

He played piano for various musicians and singers, among them Fletcher Henderson, Gene Ammons, and Billie Holiday. He became interested in outer space and ancient Egyptian mythology, reading voraciously and developing his philosophy that incorporated science fiction, ancient Egypt, and music. He legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra.

After forming the Space Trio with Pat Patrick and Tommy Hunter in 1952, He assembled a larger band that he named the Solar Arkestra. Under his direction, the Arkestra began as a hard-bop big band but was soon incorporating free improvisation and experimenting with primitive electric keyboards. He demanded precision and discipline in his musicians. He and the Arkestra moved to New York City and settled in Philadelphia. He recorded at least 1,000 compositions on over 120 albums, many for his company, El Saturn Research, which he co-founded.

He and the Arkestra embarked on numerous tours, including visits to the West Coast, the UK, Europe, and Egypt. He was appointed as a lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching a course entitled The Black Man in the Cosmos. He and the Arkestra filmed the movie version of the album Space is the Place. He and his Arkestra continued to rehearse and tour throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[scotianostra]

Happy 52nd Birthday to the beautiful Gail Porter born in Edinburgh March 23rd 1971.

Porter attended Portobello High School and was always studious while in school, Gail was even considered a snob because her head was always in the books. With excellent grades and ambition, Gail went on to study media in Film School.

After graduation, Gail was hired as a runner for a Video Production Company, where she was treated like just another number. She was put to work in menial jobs such as making coffee and providing food, to cleaning the office.

After working as coffee maker and office scrubber for 4 years, Gail finally produced her own show reel, which consisted of interviews with random people on the streets of Edinburgh. This eventually led to her work in children’s television,although failing to land a job on Blue Peter she got by presenting cartoons on TV, which led to her Fully Booked a Scottish produced show previously hosted by Zoe Ball and another Edinburgh presenter Grant Stott,

Gail got tired of her career in children’s television, and opted for more a grown-up image. She became an “Electric Circus” presenter on Live and Kicking, a guest host of the television series Melinda’s Big Night In, and host of The Movie Chart Show.

An occasional presenter on Top of the Pops, Gail then moved to the big leagues with her own show, Gail’s Big Nineties, on VH1.

Gail has appeared in men’s magazines like FHM, where posing semi nude she attracted a whole new fan base. Her sexy bad-girl image was further underscored with a nipple piercing and a romance with Keith Flint, of Prodigy.

With her star factor on the rise in the UK, Gail made guest appearances on TFI Friday, All Over the Shop, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and Da Ali G Show, and was a presenter on Kids Passport to the World.

In 2005 Gail started losing her hair and was diagnosed as having alopecia totalis, she took the brave step of not hiding away or wearing wigs and faced up to life without her locks to raise awareness of the condition. She became ambassador for the Little Princess Trust, a charity which provides wigs to children with hair loss. The hair loss did take it's toll though and she has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has insomnia, she was sectioned in 2007 after feeling suicidal, After the death of her mother in 2009 she went through an extreme period of depression which culminated in a spell in rehab two years later after a suicide attempt.

Since then she has run several marathons and spent time helping children's charities, on being bald she says "What's so brave about being bald? I've not fought for my country or found the cure for cancer - I've just gone out without my hat on!"

She also says she want to break down some of the stigma associated with mental illness. In September 2016 she is quoted as saying "‘I’m the happiest I’ve ever been"

Gail rappeared in a BBC documentary Being Gail Porter,in 2020, a warts an all story of her life, in it she says that despite frequent bouts of unhappiness, keeping up the appearance of 'wee smiley Gail' was of utmost importance - though at the time Gail was unaware of the stress it placed on her mind and body. She said:

"Being a TV presenter was my favourite thing in the world, it was the most fun ever. I think there were a lot of deeper issues which came out at certain points. I know there's something not quite right wired in my brain.It doesn't make me a bad person, it doesn't mean you can give me a badge and tell me what it is. I'd rather just be Gail."

Recently Gail has opened up again about her struggles saying;

“I had some very dark days, thinking I was useless, but I got through it by talking to people,” She is supporting the latest phase of Samaritans’ Small Talk Saves Lives campaign. “Be nice, listen to each other, talk to each other.”

“I’d lost my hair, I’d lost my mum, I’d lost my home, I was bankrupt, I was homeless, and I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this can’t get any worse, can it?’,” Gail recalled.

“People can have very dark thoughts, and that’s why we need to talk to each other.”

Gail Porter is helping the Samaritans remind people we all have the potential to be lifesavers by simply striking up a conversation, as part of Samaritans’ Small Talk Saves Lives campaign (samaritans.org).

Gail will lead New York City's Tartan Day Parade on April 15th, the 25th anniversary of the parade.