Interesting Links for 20-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Fitness Influencers Are Using Steroids in Secret

(tags:drugs hormones celebrity OhForFucksSake )

2. Donald Trump should face criminal insurrection charges, Capitol riot panel recommends

(tags:USA crime politics )

3. How the government won but also lost the court case on Rwanda removal policy

(tags:rwanda law UK asylum )

4. EU agrees law to make airlines pay more for producing co2

(tags:co2 airplanes Europe )

5. We need social media that lets you take your stuff and move with it

(tags:socialnetworking Mastodon Twitter )

Comments

[armiphlage]

With respect to 4, you may be interested in the surge in eVTOL offerings for short-range flights.

This morning, the FAA published proposed airworthiness criteria for a new class of vertical takeoff and landing all-electric commercial air taxis.

[dewline]

That might be of interest to a lot of very-rich people who find themselves making regular short-range hops by air, I'd expect, as well as regular air-commuters doing likewise.

[armiphlage]

Target audience is INTRA-city business travelers. One company has already partnered with a major chain of parking garages to use their roof space as eVTOL landing pads. Instead of fighting traffic to get to a meeting or to / from the airport, you'd get a brief (under 10 minute) hop to within Uber distance of your destination.

[dewline]

OY!

[armiphlage]

Also a VERY aggressive build schedule.

[hairyears]

Yes, THIS.

The target market for this already exists in Sao Paolo and other South American cities, where British and American helicopter pilots make a fortune as personal air-chauffeurs and charter pilots and commercial air-taxi pilots for multi-millionaires - not just billionaires.

The complexity and expense of gas turbine engines can *and will* be radically reduced by electrically-powered rotors.

This brings rotary-wing air taxi services into reach of mere millionaires in Latin America - and there are a *lot* of them, they are part of the reason why those countries look 'poor' on the ground - and it makes São Paulo's dual-mode transport system economically viable in other cities with gridlock, no mass transit investment, and a slightly lower millionare density.

[penta]

Helicopters, or tiltrotors?

[armiphlage]

The specific one that the FAA document was created for was a fixed-wing aircraft with twelve electric tiltrotors. Six independent battery packs for propulsion (not including avionics / cabin environmental requirements). Batteries are wing-mounted between the inverters and AC motors they supply, so no long wiring runs or shafts, and so there are six independent propulsion systems. At least for now, flights over populated areas will require a pilot, although their test bed is largely autonomous.

[dewline]

1. Sad and unsurprising, I suppose.

2. Hoping that process picks up a lot more speed, sooner than later, and that it reaches out to affect more of his accomplices. That network has to be disrupted, because it's already looking to lock in people willing to do worse than Trump in a more self-disciplined way.

3. "That paragraph indicates that the government lost on nineteen particular decisions in this case.

Nineteen.

Each of those nineteen decisions was legally flawed: every single one.

The policy may well be lawful – but in not one case was the policy lawfully applied.

And so the the government lost all the individual cases."

Yes, that's an interesting thing to pay further attention to in this context. And they go further than that!

"...the government has legally saved its Rwandan removal policy at the expense of making the lawful implementation of that policy extraordinarily resource-intensive and financially expensive."

Yeah. If it's become less expensive to let those asylum claimants stay in the UK as a consequence of this, I'd call that a win via the side door, and I'd take it.

5. Thank you for this. You've made a valid and clear point here.

[simont]

#5: hmmm. I like most of what they're saying, but it seems a bit disingenuous to finish up by saying "you know, like Mastodon", because that's only solving half of the problem.

If you want to uproot your Mastodon presence and move it to a different instance of the same software, then there's a lot of technical friction that just doesn't happen. Your posts are stored in a data format that another Mastodon instance already knows how to read. Your followers are a list of user ids that are already in a form that's meaningful to every Mastodon instance. The export and import functionality is not very difficult.

A much bigger difficulty would arise if you wanted to migrate from, say, Dreamwidth to Mastodon. What would the Mastodon server do with DW long-form posts? Their long and insightful threaded comment trees? The lists of other DW userids constituting the migrating user's reading and access lists? That's not just a question of "don't wilfully forbid it". That's a question of "first, figure out what it even means, and then write a large amount of extra code to make the best stab at it you can".

Yes, if one Mastodon instance goes bad in some way, perhaps its denizens will be able to migrate their data relatively easily to another instance of the same thing. (At least, presuming they've been taking backups all along, so that by the time the EvilMastodon admin has the bright idea of disabling the export functionality on that instance, it's already too late.) But if Mastodon as a whole becomes unusable, you might be able to take a backup, but figuring out what to do with it is still going to be a major problem.

(I don't know why Mastodon as a whole might become unusable. I just think it seems like a bad plan to bet on that never happening. Nothing else on the Internet lasts forever, after all.)

[andrewducker]

It's true that not all sites will use the same formats. And not even all sites using Fediverse protocols will be entirely compatible.

I'm not sure that I'm worried about Mastodon as a whole becoming unusable, particularly as it's open source and getting attention.

[simont]

Oh yes, I don't mean to suggest that anyone should be worried about it now. But the odds of it still being The Thing People Want To Use in, say, 30 years? Surely low, just on general principles.

[andrewducker]

True. But hopefully either there will be Fediverse alternatives, or someone will write a converter.

[simont]

Yes, there is that: if the Mastodon software permits the data to be exported in some format (that is documented, well specified etc), then it doesn't itself need to contain converters into whatever someone wants to migrate to (that we don't even know what it is yet), because given the exported data, anyone with both the skill and the motivation can write that part.

[danieldwilliam]

would the Mastodon server do with DW long-form posts?

I think that's the killer question isn't it? What does it mean to move from a long-form to a sort-form social media site? Or from a visual one to a literary one?

[channelpenguin]

1. I have the advantage of having hung out with bodybuilders 20 years ago. So I've just assumed this, and not really taken in that most people don't know it. It's the lies that bother me, and that normal people get discouraged or even hurt because of those unrealistic expectations. I've nothing against adults choosing to use PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) to gain a particular physique, especially if it's for their job, but no-one should lie everyone should be properly educated on the very real and often very nasty side effects.

There are many good weights/diet/fitness options for the unassisted, but it does take TIME, effort and dedication - and tuning to your own body. There is no one size fits all. People should appreciate that too.

How the government won but also lost the court case on Rwanda removal policy

[anef]

I had not realised that - it makes me considerably more hopeful!

Losing by winning.

[hairyears]

Point 3...

David Allen Green is an excellent source of information on policy and law, but he is sometimes too polite on policy and government and politics.

There has been a consistent theme in Home Office policy failures, originating with Theresa May, of using the courts, fighting winnable and unwinnable cases in the courts, and going back to the courts, over and over again, and appealing until the Law Lords (now the Supreme Court) runs out of road...

And every time HMG goes to court, the law is clarified.

Which is to say: the ambiguities in law, the gaps in law, the places where the law can be stretched and bent, and powers can be exceeded but we get away with it...

...Become clearly and strictly defined case law where it is very, very clear that the Home Office can't get away with it.

Every time that Mrs May 'won' a case, her Home office and its executive agencies lost more of their ability to be cruel and unjust and abusive in their exercise of authority.

The present-day Home Office is a monster of Mrs May's making, the Rwanda policy builds on her enduring and appalling legacy, and her successors are losing their 'won' and 'lost' cases in the courts, just as badly as Mrs May ever did.

So David Allen Green is correct in pointing out that this a thoroughly pyrrhic victory for the Home Office, and that the policy 'win' is a comprehensive loss of the power they wanted to abuse.

I am pointing out that this is a thoroughly typical victory for the courts and the rule of law, and for the principles of justice.

I am deeply pleased, and reassured as a citizen and resident in a country that has enacted and almost implemented the National Front's 1979 election manifesto, to see this latest success by the courts.

It may well be the greatest success to date: but it's part of a series, an ongoing lesson in law and government which Mrs May and her dismally sociopathic successors are consistently unable to learn.