Interesting Links for 04-11-2019

[andrewducker]

When passenger boats could dock at Lothian Road in Edinburgh's city centre

(tags:canal Edinburgh history )

Virgin Media to charge electric vehicles with its broadband infrastructure

(tags:Virgin electricity cars )

Tackling drug use: MPs say that it should be treated as a health issue

(tags:health drugs uk law )

DNS Wars (a good history of how the Domain Name System came to be, and where it's going)

(tags:dns Technology history privacy )

We're probably never going to be able to do a great trade deal with the USA

(tags:USA trade Europe UK )

Assholes: A Probing Examination

(tags:behaviour jobs )

Comments

[simont]

I had a confusing misreading of the Virgin Media headline, because when I saw "Virgin Media to charge", it was totally obvious to me that it was going to mean "charging" in the sense of money. But it didn't!

I suppose this is going to be a linguistic problem in general with electric vehicles, but somehow, in the context of Virgin Media in particular, the wrong reading was exceptionally salient...

[calimac]

On the same lines, it was totally obvious to me that the last item was going to be a medical essay on proctology.

[simont]

Yes – so obvious that I didn't even click through the link!

[redbird]

It sounds like the same people who think that Parliament has no voice in a Brexit deal, think that an agreement between the PM and the US president goes into force the day it's announced, which just isn't how it works. Trump has made a lot of "no, we're changing that" since he moved into the White House, but some of that is just 2 a.m. freeform Twitter ranting, and much of the rest is DOA as soon as it gets to Congress, or put on hold indefinitely six hours after someone reads the Tweet and files a lawsuit.

Even with a saner president (admittedly a low bar), and one who works better with Congress, treaties are often signed and never ratified--for example, the U.S. signed the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, but hasn't ratified it. Wikipedia (bless it) has a nice long list of treaties unsigned or unratified by the United States, going back to 1930. "Signed but not ratified" includes the Comprehensive [nuclear] Test Ban Treaty, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and lower-profile things, such as an anti-counterfeiting treaty. A nice press conference between Johnson and Trump at the White House would be meaningless.

[calimac]

Somehow, given the miserable US back history you're describing here, the phrase "between Johnson and Trump" makes me imagine a meeting between Trump and Lyndon Johnson.