It’s a fundamental mistake that people make so often in politics, is to think that somebody they personally find repulsive or merely bland must be seen the same way by others. It can be a shock to recognise that figures like Boris Johnson and, yes, even Farage, have hordes of fawning admirers who don’t just agree with their policies and methods but also find them witty, charming and even attractive.
Oh dear. Looks like I’m not taking home the party pack.
Semi-seriously I’m wondering though: when did corporate rhetoric shift from “creating value” - which almost makes rapacious capitalism sound benign - to shamelessly “capturing” that value? It’s as if they want to give the Marxists a reason to think they were right all along.
Plenty of Chinese takeaways, and a good few “Indian” establishments (takeaway/delivery only, no restaurant) have operated in the same way, without chains or brand names, for decades, at least all over the UK. Many great quality, many poor, but that was part of the fun of moving to a new area, figuring out the good ones from all the menus that got shoved through the letterbox.
Before that, of course, the fish and chip shop is an ancient institution, though they rarely delivered.
> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale
This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people.
It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.
The Irish Famine was genocide. The potato blight destroyed one crop, but the British state chose to export grain and livestock under armed guard while over a million starved. That is deliberate destruction of a people, not an accident.
This pattern runs deep: Cromwell’s massacres and forced transplantation, the plantation system, the suppression of Irish language and culture, and the burning-out of Catholic families in Belfast are all part of the same logic of demographic control. Each episode targeted the Irish as an ethnic and cultural group for elimination in part, which is exactly what the Genocide Convention defines. Across centuries, British policy toward Ireland was consistently genocidal.
Exactly… back in 1975 Fred Brooks was advising programmers to “plan to throw the first version away” (The Mythical Man-Month) and it’s still true today. Just the tools to build that rapid prototype that have changed. Once it was Ruby on Rails, once it was Visual Basic 6, very often it’s still Excel macros…
Wasn't part of throwing away the first version because of all the knowledge you gain while actually building it? So that you could build it much better the second time, with much better abstractions/design? If you had AI code it the first time, you don't gain that same knowledge.
You still do from operating the software.
You see what problems users have using it, which types of problems they tackle with it.
By the end of running the software for a month you will have typically learned a boat load.
But you and the parent are both ignoring that, in the real world, prototypes constantly (in fact, nearly always) get shipped straight to production and not updated or rewritten, precisely because they solve a pressing problem, and if they solve it well they get real users right away who start bringing up new feature requests and bugs before the prototype can ever be fixed.
This was a constant pattern in software engineering even before LLMs, but LLMs are making it much worse, and I think it's very head-in-the-sand behavior to ignore that. It's akin to going "well, you can't blame the Autopilot because the person should have been fully-attentive ready to react at any millisecond". That's not how humans work, and good engineering is supposed to take real-world human behavior into consideration
In London that’s also mostly true due to the patchwork history of different companies building different lines… however when King’s Cross/St Pancras was redeveloped a few years ago the “official” interchange route between Piccadilly and Victoria lines became much, much longer - minutes of walking compared to seconds. This site doesn’t cover that station, but does link to TfL’s own diagrams via IanVisits, and the reason is clear: at one end the platforms of both lines are almost touching - and I believe that shortcut staircase is still there if you ignore the signs and know where to find it - but the tourist friendly route is much more circuitous, going up to the mainline station and back again. I assume it helps to relieve congestion in an extremely busy station, I remember more than one occasion when they just have to close entry to the platforms during rush hour due to overcrowding.
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: 'I shall never play the Dane.'"
There’s already such a thing as an “SE” business registration, which is a pan-European publicly traded entity [0]. Presumably this is talking about a similar, privately owned structure?
For those on the UK tech scene during the first 1990s dotcom bubble, my favourite misuse of this was in the infamous NTK newsletter [0], where in-person events where listed under the heading “Event Queue: GOTOs considered non-harmful”.
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