theinspectorst

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Spock died for our sins according to the scriptures;

And that he was buried, and that he rose again in the third movie according to the scriptures:

And that he was seen of Jim, then of the rest of the bridge crew.

-- 1 Roddenberry 15:3-5

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

Whilst I love this, you do realise that 25 December is the first day of Christmas, not the twelfth? So the Twelve Days of Christmas run from 25 December to 5 January (which is why it's considered bad luck to keep your Christmas tree up after 5 January, aka 'Twelfth Night').

You've started your countdown 12 days too early!

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

Fair enough!

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

Victor Orban is a fascist and he's spent the last 13 years seeking to turn Hungary into a fascist state. He controls the judiciary. He controls the media. He scapegoats Jews, Muslims and refugees for the country's problems. He aligns himself with Putin.

Fascists inherently don't like cross-border cooperation and supranational governance - it runs against all their beliefs about their nation's superiority. So he doesn't like the EU either and blames it for things to his domestic audiences. There is no press freedom in Hungary and so Hungarian voters get bombarded with this nonsense.

The EU needs to recognise that an enemy of European civilisation has been given the keys to the castle. That is a dangerous situation. It is time to invoke Article 7 to recognise that Hungary is acting against the EU's founding values, and remove Hungary's veto.

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

He'd like it to be an empire again...

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

Forcing clearing houses to relocate from London to Paris is part of French industrial policy and it has been going on (unsuccessfully) for half a century.

It's got nothing to do with Brexit - they were trying this long before that happened (and the Single Market be damned - at one point the UK had to take the ECB to court for breaking the Maastricht Treaty over this). And it's got nothing to do with the EU's regulatory reach - market infrastructures in London and Paris are regulated along the same lines under the globally-agreed Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures, and the UK clearing houses already opt-in to direct EU regulation as third-country CCPs post-Brexit anyway.

This is purely about the French state again trying to use the EU as a mechanism to deliver their industrial policy. For French politicians this just has a weird totemic significance.

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

It's worth saying that both major parties are way out of line with the electorate on this - polling of whom shows:

• there were consistent majorities for Remain from about mid-2017 until Brexit happened; and
• there has been a consistent polling plurality for Rejoin pretty much since that point onwards (and sometimes outright polling majorities for Rejoin).

So neither of those parties are currently speaking for a large (and possibly majority) share of the electorate on this issue. When such situations arise, it's rare for the electorate to be the ones who have to change their mind and accord with what the politicians think...

What I expect will happen in the coming years (particularly after Labour go into government next year) is that the Lib Dems will get increasingly bolshy on this issue and probably build towards announcing a Rejoin manifesto in the run up to the 2028/9 general election, and Labour will start bleeding votes to them. That will force Labour to shift its position (in the same way they shifted their position on a People's Vote after the Lib Dems trounced them in Labour strongholds at the 2019 EU elections).

By the end of this decade, Rejoin will be a very mainstream position among British politicians in the way it already is with British voters.

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

The veto existed from a time when the EU was much smaller (in both scope and scale). Having a member state veto today is approaching being as ludicrous as if each US state had a veto on national legislation - it allows small countries with extremist governments (of which there is always likely to be one in office somewhere) to clog up the gears of the entire union.

The European Council's well-established alternative to member state vetoes also still does plenty to respect member state interests - qualified majority voting. QMV means big changes aren't getting passed on a 51%-49% knife edge. QMV puts a two-step lock in place, requiring a) at least 55% of member states that also b) account for at least 65% of the EU's population, to vote in favour.

But this is all moot. Abolishing the member state veto will itself almost certainly be subject to multiple member state vetoes at the Council so this is going nowhere.

theinspectorst, 6 months ago

Agree that's a stupid system, but 60 out of 100 senators can still vote to override it, right?

In the EU, on votes that aren't subject to QMV, 26 out of 27 member states can fervently agree with something but still do nothing about a veto by the 27th state, whose veto can often have nothing to do with the question at hand and be more about domestic political posturing or some other such nonsense.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

Okay, but that's not really what they did with Sela.

Sela wasn't 'Tasha returned' - she had nothing in common with Tasha (in terms of personality or her role in the show) except for being played by the same actress. She clearly wasn't just a backdoor soap opera route for Tasha to return.

Also she was only actually in four episodes (on the first of which the character wasn't identified and Denise Crosby was an uncredited voice only). Sela's brief appearances were so memorable that we tend to forget how minor her role actually was across the span of TNG - Tomalak had a bigger role, for example.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that's an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that's trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that's something that should be applauded.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

The Host - the one where Riker ends up hosting the symbiont.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

JMS has been trying to distil and bottle it unsuccessfully for years. He told an amazing five-year story over B5's first four seasons*, but then each time he goes back to tell more stories in that universe it becomes more and more clear that he can't come up with anything capable of standing next to what he's already done there.

*Context: they crammed the planned s4 and s5 into s4 because they thought they would get cancelled, but then they got unexpectedly renewed so JMS had to write what was effectively an epilogue s5.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

So weird to hear it put like that. I watched the X-Files when it aired (at least when my parents let me) and The Voyage Home (which was released in 1986, not just set then) seemed like a classic old movie to me at the time.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

Capilatlism

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

You're one of today's lucky 10,000!

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

I mean, they're obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook...

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

He didn't steal it. He took it to give to Spock's son, who Kirk took to be raised by Spock's family on the desert world of Vulcan for safekeeping ... High ground!

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

AND MY DAX!

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

Grrr.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

It's widely referred to as that.

Also, Friends didn't invent 'The one with...', they named their episodes like that as a joke because it is common for fans of a show to refer to their favourite episodes along such lines regardless of what the episodes are actually titled.

So use of 'The one with the whales' very likely predates Friends.

theinspectorst, 7 months ago

Why did he take the risk with fake sideburns when he could have just ... grown sideburns?

https://youtu.be/MVFWJ6DxVZc

theinspectorst, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I think for the Lego set it's more that the average casual fan is more likely to recognise the name 'Boba Fett' than the name 'Slave 1'. They're a commercial enterprise and they want to sell these things to a wide audience, and marketing it under a name that was never mentioned on-screen in the movies wouldn't exactly make that easier.

The whole thing is a bit of a storm in a teacup.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live

This shows the live picture but you can scroll down and see the last couple of days.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Great result, but winning back a seat they last held in the 2017-19 parliament (and whose predecessor seats were Labour from 1964 and 1970 respectively until 2015) is not really seismic.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

'If only', said Mr Sunak, 'we could form some sort of union of European countries that could allow us to coordinate and cooperate better on our common challenges. I'm not sure what we could call it...'

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

This is all a big misunderstanding. He's fine with sand; he was saying he doesn't like hands.

That's why he kept letting people chop them off.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Hoekstra held commercial positions at Shell from 2002 to 2004

Literally a guy who worked for Shell for two years, two decades ago, when he was in his 20s.

This is a non-headline. Very poor form by the Guardian.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

My favourite streaming TV service is Ansonmount+.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

I think the problem is that it's difficult to think of this on a country-by-country basis. I'm in the UK. One of my friends works for a hedge fund in London and has an appalling work-life balance, long hours, little opportunity to work-from-home. Another works for a charity based in London while working-from-home in a regional city for all but one day of the month, and works reasonable hours and gets every other Friday off. My own experience is somewhere in the middle. The difference between our individual experiences in the UK will dwarf the differences between the UK and another European country.

I can completely believe that your own relative experiences of Austria and the UK could be very different to what's shown in the diagram because work-life balance is so much more dependent on what line of work you're in, who your employer is, what stage you're at in your career, etc. Except in extreme cases, these things will count for more than national differences.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

'How did it get into space?'

'The Force!'

'That's not how the Force works!'

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

I'd say far less than half based on my experience - I've very rarely seen people putting out a pumpkin or other Halloween decorations in their houses.

The one aspect of Halloween celebrations that I think does exist in the UK is trick-or-treating, which I did do as a kid, but even then it's been probably over a decade since I last had a trick-or-treater knock on my door, though that may be partly a London factor.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

He thought this was a serious account, and loved it.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Never go full Hitler...

I mean, never go part Hitler either. But definitely don't go full Hitler.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Han is the mahn.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Either Ricardo Montalbán or Walter Koenig (I forget which of them used to tell this story) head canons it that Khan had to use the (never seen) Enterprise toilets after Ensign Chekov when he was still a lower decker, and Chekov had used the last of the toilet paper, which is why Khan burnt his face into his memory.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

My recollection from interviews is that Dan Harmon and the cast found Chevy just didn't get the show at all when they were making it. A huge amount of Community's humour is a mix of meta humour and pop culture references. In the same way that Pierce claimed to never understand what Abed was talking about, Chevy didn't understand most of what Community was on about - his frame of reference for what is funny hadn't moved on in decades.

Even though he's famously a dick, when he says he didn't think Community was funny, he might actually be telling the truth - not just being petty.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

It's fascinating how our number systems even evolved. They've done studies with remote Amazon tribespeople where they show them a number of dots and ask them how many there are, and found that their words for what we thought were their numbers 1-5 actually translate to more like 1, 2, 3, '4-ish' and 'many'. Interestingly when they've done the same with very young children then they've got similar results.

Counting is something that only took off when large-scale civilisations (and the need to pay taxes!) took off - before this there was never really a need to be specific when counting a quantity of more than about 4 or 5. Maths developed as an offshoot of language rather than something distinct and so our counting systems suffer from the quirks that come with this.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

The British equivalents are 'youse' or 'you lot'.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

I think partly it's a language thing - politicians (who are supposed to represent us all) keep telling 'hard-working families' that they matter, and keep pretty quiet on the rest of us - regardless of what they're actually doing about it.

But the point the article makes too is that being single is disproportionately expensive already - cooking for one costs more than 50% of cooking for two, splitting a car or the deposit for a mortgage between two is cheaper, etc. So a cost-of-living crisis will affect single people disproportionately too - but there's no political recognition of that fact.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

So pathetic from India - seeking to punish Canada for the fact that the Indian government murdered a Canadian in Canada, and Canada had the temerity to call them out for it.

What an absurd victim complex Modi has.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Harry and Tuvok, their answers contradicting.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

'So long and thanks for all the fish!' is what the dolphins say in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when they leave the Earth and fly off into space, shortly before the Earth's destruction to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

The Purrgil's in Star Wars are also a species of space-faring cetaceans and OP is making a meme linking the two.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Space whales that paid a key plot role in Rebels and now again in Ahsoka? If all you've watched is the Prequel and Sequel movies (not even the OT?!) then there are going to be an awful lot of Star Wars memes you might not get.

theinspectorst, 8 months ago

Space-faring whale-like creatures are an extremely common science-fiction trope.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceWhale