Abelian
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abelian.bsky.social
Abelian
@abelian.bsky.social
79 followers 310 following 450 posts
Trying to commute less these days. DMs turned off because of the UK censors.
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"We just want to threaten you with massive fines for running a discussion board about folk music, while a deranged government minister from the other side of the world accuses you of being on the side of some British paedophile you have never heard of. Why are you blocking us?"
"Some"

They aren't even trying to quantify the damage they are causing.
Ofcom letter to Parliamentary committees (Commons SITC and Lords Comms Com) with an update on implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act committees.parliament.uk/publications...

It's not censorship if we can badger them into doing it for us
I've been to Ostia, which is littoral Rome.
You can make a case that environmental groups are calamitous for the environment. But they aren't unmobilised or ineffectual.
Environmental groups have mobilised to restrict housing supply all over the country. They have been key players in killing off HS2 (we will get motorways instead). They have made brownfield development less likely with the Swanscombe campaign. These are all massive successes for the movement.
ca.pa
Somebody please tell the Times.
Danes and Estonians have, broadly speaking, sane and trustworthy government. The UK government is currently discussing withdrawing from the ECHR so that it can control trans people going to the bogs.
Sunday led, but with zero based counting.
Or that they spent at least £365k to avoid building new housing, even though they owned land in the borough and were running the planning department.
Farage didn't have the power to deliver Brexit. He wasn't even an MP at the time. Who actually voted to deliver Brexit by triggering Article 50?
This is the reverse of the truth. Done right, restoring trust in the state could enable digital ID. But that would require the government to be trustworthy, so we'll have to do it back to front.
Not going to happen. The government would pull the plug in an instant if it threatened their precious house price inflation. The best we can do is build decent homes for the population we have, because not building makes things worse.
Me too, which is why I am not a member of the CPRE.
So let's do what they say they want. Build 1.5m quality homes on the 30k brownfield sites in their report. No exceptions. Make it dense. Put in high capacity bus, bike and rail links everywhere. Local amenities to reduce car dependency. Reservoirs and power lines, all the necessaries.

Yes or no?
So said the CPRE last week. When someone actually tries to build on a brownfield site, like the former cement works at Swanscombe, the CPRE do their level best to prevent that too.
Twice, in case I had missed the bit where it came up with workable green ideas for housing the British population (spoiler: I hadn't). The figure for the UK is, per head, among the lowest in Europe - less than 1.5 sq metres per year. We have bigger problems.
All Guardian journalists should be made to live in an undeveloped open field for a few years, until they understand that people on cold rainy islands live in houses for more pressing reasons than making the GDP statistics look good.
So 120 sq km a year on average. In a country with maybe 220,000 square km of undeveloped land, a rising population and a massive shortage of homes.
VAT has been charged on glasses and contact lenses for decades, and the sky hasn't fallen in. The political decision to tax cataracts differently from other vision defects is pretty arbitrary.
Evening in Carmarthenshire
Reposted by Abelian
"this column has described insights from complexity science ranging from the economics of solar panels to how to prevent a housing bubble. All this suggests the problem economics faces isn’t that it is too mathematical, but that the mathematics it has used is needlessly narrow."
@timharford.ft.com
The wrong kind of maths
Why the mathematics used in economics for decades needs a rethink
on.ft.com
It's opening in sections, most of it will be open in October but there's a middle section from Nantgaredig to Llanarthne which is scheduled for January.
The "Tywi Valley Path" Facebook group has a map and updates.
No. There are four miles at the Abergwili end, and two more east of Dryslwyn, but they don't join up and it doesn't run all the way to Ffairfach yet.