Panto_Villan

Had a quiet morning at work so put the new episode of Andor on. Quieter than last week, but I’d still like Disney to inject this show directly into my veins.

This is one of the new anti-personnel HIMARS warheads that the Ukrainians are using (containing thousands of tiny tungsten balls, like a giant hand grenade). I almost feel sorry for the Russians; I would NOT like to be near one of those when it went off.

I think we’re unlikely to see F16s any time soon given the US won’t provide long range ATACAMS missiles for the MLRS they’ve given Ukraine. Apparently the current air defence tech the Ukrainians have (including the modern Western stuff sent recently) doesn’t really work against ballistic missiles. Problem is a single Patriot battery costs a billion dollars, and Ukraine is a big country. So let’s hope regime change in Iran does happen.

Sorry to hear that!

To be fair you’ve fixated on toilets yourself. I said “safe spaces for women” in my original post. Toilets are the least important of them. Do you think different if we’re talking about rape shelters? Why would vulnerable children need protecting but not vulnerable women? It’s also not fair to say asking trans people to go through some kind of one-off process to verify they are trans is implying they are untrustworthy and dangerous. Does medically checking people when disability benefits are granted imply all disabled people are fraudsters? Of course not, but it’s still necessary to weed the fraudsters out.

If someone was applying for something specifically reserved for gay or lesbian people or black people (e.g. a bursary or scholarship), then yeah I'd expect some verification process in place. If you just allow anyone to self-identify as part of those groups without any external verification then it's pretty clearly not going to work.

Presumably if a man walked into a female toilet wearing a wig and a dress, in most cases there will be more women in there than he can control at once and at least one will go and complain to whoever owns the establishment and the bloke will be thrown out and potentially arrested because he's not actually allowed to be there. But if the man is legally entitled to be there because he's declared himself a woman and no further process is required, nobody can object to his presence (in fact, logically the woman who ran off to ask him to be thrown out is being transphobic and could be reported to the police for a hate crime). But that's a bad argument anyway, because using that logic we shouldn't bother vetting teachers for previous sexual convictions because they could just snatch children outside school hours so we shouldn't even bother trying to make it harder for them.

Regarding point b), do you think Norton regards being chased off Twitter by an angry mob as "accountability" then?

It doesn't really surprise me it's ended up here. Rowling's experience of trans people and their activists is just an endless torrent of abuse, whereas the people that are willing to support her are going to have negative views of trans people. It's an echo chamber that's just going to make her views increasingly extreme over time. To echo the point I made in the racism thread a week or two ago, I think it's important for activists to accept that the rest of society is entitled to a say in these matters too. For instance, some trans activists are pushing for both gender self-identification and for trans women to be allowed access to all female safe spaces. Having both obviously presents a problem because a male sexual predator can self-identify as a woman and access these spaces. To be clear this isn't claiming trans people are sexual predators, it's just saying that their proposals create a loophole other people may exploit - and that all groups have some obligation to society to accept inconvenience in order to protect other parts of society (think teachers and their criminal checks, anyone going through airport security, etc). I think it's a bit of a shame that the debate around transgenderism is so poisonous that anyone who isn't fully behind trans rights has to deal with so much hate they inevitably end up going off the deep end. Trans activists clearly need to stand up for their own rights, but society does need moderate, sensible voices to stand up for the other groups affected by these changes too.

Apologies, yes. It went up to £2,500 at the start of this month instead of £3,500, didn't it? Looks like what I was reading actually said that the guarantee was expected to become cost free imminently because of the huge decline in wholesale costs. Yeah, you're right about the standing charges going up a lot. But while the costs for bailing out all the energy companies are passed onto the surviving ones that that will factor into the rises, apparently companies just get to choose what standing charge they want to charge people and this sits outside the standard cap. So it varies heavily from provider to provider.

Not sure where you're getting this info from? The current predictions are that the price cap will cost the government nothing this winter because wholesale prices have fallen far enough that household prices are never going to reach the cap.

You must have been quite unlucky to not be eligible for any of the covid help for ltd businesses, as they threw a lot of money around. It was mostly the recently self-employed that got left out. Anyone with a fixed premises that paid business rates got help, for example. And everyone was entitled to use the furlough scheme, right? Furlough helped an awful lot to cushion the blow for my business. Also as a business owner you always have the option to just pay yourself entirely through salary and then you pay income tax just like everyone else does. This just brings your tax rate closer into line with everyone else's. I'd prefer it if corproration tax remained at 20% because it'd benefit me personally but if a tax needs to go up, corporation tax is one of the best candidates.

It’ll be interesting to see what the OBR say when they cost it out. It’s a pretty punchy rise, although not to the point of being unfair. Like you I’m guessing it’ll raise quite a bit of revenue.

Looks like they didn’t even need to use much CG for the landscapes - seems like they filmed the Cruachan Dam, which is actually a really cool looking piece of architecture. Looks like all they had to do was CG a big gate in the front! Yeah it feels obvious now you mention it. Wonder if he lives in the UK or something?Pretty much everyone else in the show except Diego Luna and Skaarsgard is British.

It gets talked about in the Star Wars thread but I’m going to put a general recommendation for Andor from Disney+ in here. It’s really well done, worth watching for anyone with a passing interest in sci-fi. It’s much more of a character driven drama than any of the other Star Wars show to date (although the action is good too). I’m probably enjoying it more than The Expanse, which I did like too.

Yeah, filmed in Scotland. I think most of the show is done in the UK at one of the big studios near London. Probably no coincidence there’s so many British accents in the show.

Yeah, it’s fantastic. Waiting a week for every new episode is painful. Episode 6 was so good. So many good actors and interesting characters, and tension is done so well. Yeah, it is. But episode 4-6 are a big step up from 1-3 imo, they start to focus on the wider beginnings of the rebellion and the empire. I think it’s brilliant.

In all seriousness her economic plan was basically that unfunded tax cuts would unleash those moments of magic within all of us (generally not how you achieve productivity growth). There was a funny article on the BBC today about Kwarteng saying how his recent time as energy secretary had opened his eyes to the value of state intervention, and turned him away from the path of being a hardcore free-marketeer. Christ knows what would have happened if we’d got the full-fat version of his economic plan.

Well, not really. The increased efficiency is a definite benefit to society. Same with better education or healthcare. The point of politics is to determine how those benefits are spread. If that population votes to give all the benefits to one person and let the others starve to death, that’s a problem with politics rather than a problem with increased efficiency.

You can grow on a finite planet through productivity growth. You invent a combine harvester so harvesting wheat takes 1 man instead of 100. Then 99 people are free to do other things to improve society, and food gets cheaper for everyone, etc. Simplified example but “growth = bad” is equally simplistic. Making work more productive is always a worthwhile goal imo.

Because the Belarus army is significantly shitter than the Russian army, and the Russians couldn’t take Kyiv even with a degree of surprise on their side. Now the Ukrainians have better gear than before, have a lot more battlefield experience, and are presumably pretty heavily dug in around there in a way they weren’t previously. It’d be a great way for Belarus to lose its army. And if they didn’t fancy joining in the initial attack I don’t see why they’d fancy their chances any more now. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

I binged all five episodes of Andor today, and I think it's the best Star Wars content since the original three films. It's fantastic. Some really interesting characters in there, particularly on the Empire side, and it's great how much time everything has to breathe. I did enjoy the first season of Mando but honestly this just felt like proper grown-up TV in a way that the other things they've done up to now hasn't. That said, I'm going to watch ep6 when it comes out this week and then stop until the end of the season. The director said the story was cut up into four 3-episode arcs and it's really obvious when binging it. I think having to wait three weeks to watch an entire arc unfold would be quite frustrating for me, so I'll just come back and watch it all at once. It's interesting because I was reading the other day that they originally didn't want to hire the writer they used for the show because they didn't really like his ideas, but there wasn't anyone better available so they just had to go with it - so it kinda sounds like Disney might have made this by accident. Hopefully it does really well and makes them reconsider their direction a bit.

This is the often quoted reason for it, yes - the power imbalance. It’s true to some extent, but gets used as a free pass too often imo. A black person saying all white people are scum is a racist, just as a white person saying all black people are scum is too. This is how it works in other parts of our life. Let’s take the example of a rich footballer and someone who works in Tesco, and imagine what happens if each robs the other. There’d be far more of an outcry if a footballer was found robbing the houses of poor people than the other way round (the motivation is less understandable), but there’d be no debate that both cases were still criminal actions and were wrong. Anyone who claims racism follows special rules because of (insert name of postmodernist theory here) is just trying to advance their political agenda or personal interests under the guise of false morality, imo.

I think that’s the least likely explanation personally. I’m actually coming around to to the truck bomb idea now. Bomb on the train doesn’t make sense to me. Train bridge isn’t that badly damaged, and nor is the train. I don’t see how that would have brought down the road bridge either. Two or three ATACAMS missiles would be the easiest way to do this, except only one side of the road bridge is totally collapsed. And the Ukrainians would probably target the rail bridge rather than the road bridge given it’s more important for logistics. And they’d probably finish the job shortly if they had the capability to do so. I didn’t really think the Ukrainians went in for suicide bombings, but a truck bomb would explain why only half the road collapsed. Apparently the fuel train was parked at a signal so it could just have been hit by flying debris - it didn’t look too badly damaged, just on fire.

How would a truck bomb simultaneously take out the train on a separate bridge? Missiles seem more likely to me.