Interesting Links for 20-09-2019

[andrewducker]

UK cannot meet EU deadline for Brexit plan and needs another year, government says

(tags:UK Europe incompetence OhForFucksSake )

Reviewing Tolkien

(tags:Tolkien movies review )

Outcry as Saga travel firm advertises cruise 'exclusively for Brits'

(tags:travel UK racism OhForFucksSake )

Green light for £314m overhaul of Edinburgh centre

(tags:transport city Edinburgh )

How a Nazi-punching satire led to the first union drive at a well-known tech company—and, workers say, the firing of two organizers in eight days.

(tags:Nazis Kickstarter unions OhForFucksSake )

Asylum seeker denied cancer treatment by Home Office dies

(tags:cancer death OhForFucksSake migration asylum )

Global dimming isn't worth taking into consideration

(tags:globalwarming pollution )

I may have to make one of these!

(tags:food wtf eggs )

New windfarms in the UK don't need subsidies

(tags:subsidies windpower uk electricity environment )

Sertraline: Antidepressant works by reducing anxiety symptoms

(tags:antidepressants anxiety psychology )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

Good times on the offshore wind costs.

That implies that the situation would be similar in North America. Although North America has steeper coastal shelves.

[jack]

Reviewing Tolkien

How did scribbling a children's story on a back of an exam paper and then slowly intertwining it with a growing mythos get rejected biopic-wise?

UK cannot meet EU deadline for Brexit plan and needs another year, government says

Oh god. "Hi, can I have an extension please, my suppurating incompetence fucked over my entire country."

Oh god. If only someone had told him that in advance<fatal sarcasm>

Oh god. He's still on that? He's already funted his majority, can't he kick DUP to the kerb and suck up an Irish sea border backstop or a whole-UK backstop? Can parliament come back and vote for SOMETHING?

[jack]

Ah, the "keep burning fossil fuels" solution to climate change turned out to have been a bit overstated?

[ninetydegrees]

"Sertraline: Antidepressant works by reducing anxiety symptoms"

Great article, thanks. As someone with both anxiety and depression, I feel like they are two sides of the same coin, work similarly and feed each other. The psychiatrist who started me on antidepressants said I had depression but that the real issue was anxiety. This has been illuminating.

[cmcmck]

When you think about it Saga is a pretty strange concept from the get go in assuming that over fifties would only ever want to meet other over fifties.

My f-list on here has people from in their teens to people in their eighties and that's pretty much how I like it in the real world too. :o)

Come to that, 'adults only' sounds pretty tedious as well.

[calimac]

I can't seriously disagree with anything Rilstone writes about the Tolkien bio-pic - I've said some of it myself, though not nearly as well - though I have some quibbles. 1) Even without the private papers, there are already some newer and more insightful Tolkien biographies out there, the best being John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War. (There's also a lot of useless trash, so be cautious.) 2) While we can't know if G.B. Smith would have become a great poet, we do have his surviving poetry and it's very promising from a man so young. Much better than anything Tolkien had written by the same time, even though Tolkien was two years older. 3) PS on carrying childhood jokes and nicknames into adulthood: this is why E.R. Eddison incongruously called his imaginary peoples Demons and Witches. 4) Elrond came into the mythology long after Earendel, and that he's Elrond's father is not that important to his very striking personal story. 5) The real problem with using The Hobbit as the film's punchline is that, for all its increasing depth, it's too light a story to carry the weight of everything the film's Tolkien says he'll put in the tale.

Global dimming: It's said that when the US shut down airline flights for several days after 9/11, temperatures in major cities went up. Fewer pollutants blocking sunlight. Let's hear it for pollutants?

[rangifer]

The plea for more time was made after Emmanuel Macron and the Finnish presidency of the EU issued an ultimatum in Paris on Wednesday, giving Boris Johnson until the end of September to table workable proposals – or “it’s over”.

It bears noting that the Finnish PM considers the September deadline merely "indicative", for whatever that's worth. Helsinki's motive for having gone ahead with the whole declaration to begin with appears a little murky but looks to be basically process-oriented: They're stuck with the presidency and that means they'd like to ensure enough time for a proper judicial review of any UK proposals, and for whatever baffling reason thought that this was a good way to communicate that.