Interesting Links for 19-11-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Shell Is Closing 1,000 Gas Stations To Focus On EV Charging

(tags:oil electricity cars viaDanielDWilliam )

2. Coca-Cola remade its iconic Christmas ad with AI - and it looks as terrible as you'd expect

(tags:advertising christmas ai cocacola )

3. This is how polls should be reported

(tags:polls visualisation )

4. High gas and electricity prices likely to be the new normal

(tags:gas electricity economics )

5. Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted, sparking warnings of possible 'hybrid warfare'

(tags:Finland Germany infrastructure Russia )

6. Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in primary schools

(tags:bullying psychology research school )

7. Only farms worth more than £3m will be taxed

(tags:farming farm tax UK )

Comments

5

[danieldwilliam]

I am of the view that the hybrid war is not possible, it's actual but we haven't realised we are in it yet.

Re: 5

[andrewducker]

I completely agree. We are far too slow to recognise the threat Russia is posing.

We should have mobilised and cut off Russia after Crimea. Instead we told them they could get away with it.

Re: 5

[channelpenguin]

agreed

3

[danieldwilliam]

Very much so. They are a tool for understanding how people currently feel. They have some limitations at this job. They can also be useful for predicting how people will feel and behave in the future but they bring their existing limitations and some others to that job.

People should not be surprised that they have been surprised by an unexpected outcome from using a tool the wrong way.

[autopope]

Wrt. the Baltic cables, this is nothing new in warfare: most of the intercontinental undersea telegraph cables had to be re-layed or repaired after the first world war (and again, after the second) because everybody went on a cable-cutting spree targeting their enemies.

I'll be more worried if Russia starts lobbing ASAT weapons at Starlink or NATO communications satellites in LEO. (Risk of a deliberate Kessler cascade being engineered by Russia, on the threshold of losing their ability to maintain a space industry so no more shits left to give: non-zero.)

[andrewducker]

Just now seems like a *terrible* time to make everyone reliant on a company owned by Vice President Musk...

[channelpenguin]

I think there are ONLY terrible times for that!

[hilarita]

The times for that are terrible and, astonishingly, even more terrible.

And I agree with autopope - we've been doing hybrid warfare for at least a century now. Attacking communication and supply lines (especially supply lines) has been part of warfare for a very long time. It's been interesting that it's relatively quiet on the cyber front at the moment; though maybe Russia aren't saying much, and neither are Ukraine in case Russia gets wise to what they're doing.

Actually, Russia may be holding off on deliberate Kessler cascade because China have a bunch of moon missions on at the moment, and maybe they're not wanting to piss them off that much.

[hilarita]

3. Yes. That does seem to me a much clearer visualisation of how close things really are.
6. Hooray! I am all for a low-cost intervention that improves this, and isn't a way to bully the bully (by staff being heavy-handed, especially towards Black kids) or a way to bully the bullied more ("you must have provoked them! Stand up for yourself (which of course then tends to land the bullied kid in more trouble for retaliation)! Just ignore it...")

[bens_dad]

5. Undersea cables and pipelines.

I recently read something about the German ammunition dumps rusting in the Baltic and wondered whether they could have had anything to do with the gas pipeline breaches a year or two back.

(I am not saying that I don't think the Russians are up to anything, just that there may be other possibilities).

[andrewducker]

There are definitely a bunch of possibilities.

[channelpenguin]

I wonder if undersea cable cutting is at least partly for intimidation. It was specifically lines to Finland, right? And it's going to be very obvious when the repair crews get there if it was sabotage. I wonder that because there are many more ways to sabotage comms than damaging hard to reach cabling, and a lot of them would be far harder to detect. So maybe it's more "you're next Finland" than anything else. (Which could also be a bluff of course to divert attention from some other move)

There are regular controlled explosions carried out in the Baltic (or Die Ostsee, as we call it here). I'm 30 km away and very occasionally we hear them!

[drplokta]

The summary “Only farms worth more than £3m will be taxed” is over-simplified to the point of falsehood. Only farms worth more than £3m will be taxed, provided they were jointly owned by a married couple who are leaving them to their children, they include a house worth at least £350,000, and the estate contained no other assets at all. Which is to say, that supposed £3 million will never apply in practice.

My own solution for this is that inheritance tax should be deferred rather than waived on family homes, family businesses and family farms. You can keep living in the house, running the business or running the farm for as long as you want, but when you do eventually sell it the government gets its share. If it’s inherited again before it’s sold, the government’s share increases.

That fits in well with the change to targeting public sector net financial liabilities instead of net borrowing, because the government’s deferred shares would be financial assets and so would be netted off against debt.

[andrewducker]

The "everything is the farm and it's all being passed on to our children" is exactly the example I keep hearing from the farmers.

[mountainkiss]

This polling article is not arrant nonsense.

[andrewducker]

High praise indeed!

[danieldwilliam]

What do you think is wrong with the polling article?

[mountainkiss]

This one, nothing.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm a little confused now.

[mountainkiss]

I think that’s because you’re misreading what I’ve written.

[danieldwilliam]

Ah, so I am.