London. Conservative? Hahaha. Yikes. Those are words so diametrically opposed in substance that I refuse to put them in the same sentence.

No. This is purely the result of the "progressive" globalist set importing so many third worlders that native English are a -20 point minority in their own capitol, police being directed to turn a blind eye to any number of criminal transgressions if the perpetrators fall on the right side of the paper bag test, while simultaneously going after native English for things such as going to church during the Covid lockdowns while ignoring the politicians throwing extravagant bashes, going after comedians, politicians, and regular citizens for posting unapproved narratives and very mildly spicy language on the internet, prosecutors turning away cases such as the former while voraciously persecuting the later.
London in particular, and the UK as a whole is seemingly the result of someone asking "what is a sensible, rational approach to successful governance of a population?" and then doing the exact opposite.

What kind of traffic cones do you have that require a CS degree to place? Are they self deploying? Operate on a mesh network? Inquiring minds want to know!

Old cars certainly can't hold a candle to new cars in the spying department. Practically all of them have remote data connections now, so every aspect of your life can be monitored and monetized by global data brokers. At least my old car won't rat me out to my insurance company if I'm a little happy on the accelerator, or if I occasionally use my brakes to their full ability.

You don't think policies like VAT on private school fees and pushing up business taxes instead of personal ones play well with the typical Labour voter?

They're cratering in the polls anyway for a host of other reasons, and I suspect Starmer is already toast anyway for a host of other reasons (though it's significantly harder in practice for Labour to replace a leader they're not happy with than it is for the Tories), but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that some of these policies are being chosen because of their political alignment.

They appear to be playing heavily on the politics of envy. Look at some of their education policies, for example, or the way they treat small businesses and the people who run them. They don't seem to want to pull up the less fortunate if they can be busy pulling down the more fortunate. It's not a good look if you actually want a successful economy, but it plays well to their base.

I agree with you that they seem to be all over the place in policy generally, and after trying to give them a fair chance in the early months, I now have a fairly low opinion of them (with the odd exception in Cabinet who does actually appear to be at least recognising the real problems and trying to do something about them, which I can respect even while thinking little of their party politicians and government as a whole).

You're right about the investment culture as well, but presumably if we're talking about entrepreneurs who have already been successful and are looking to move elsewhere, that's of limited relevance unless they're planning to start at least one more business after they arrive, so in this particular debate, I doubt that is such a major issue.

While we're hardly Russia, our democratic and stabilisation credentials are looking more shaky than ever as well. Our electoral system produces results very far from proportional. One of our two traditional main political parties is now essentially irrelevant. The other, which currently holds power, is breaking all the wrong records and is widely expected to suffer severe losses at the next election already, barely a year into their term. Waiting in the wings (and currently leading by a very wide margin in the polls) is the nascent far right populist party that has become the default protest vote. It looks scarily like that party might actually be pulling so far ahead (whether thanks to their own merits or, like the present incumbents before the last election, because the government of the day is so unpopular) that even with the usual reversion towards traditional voting patterns when a real election happens, they might still win. And the prospects of what happens next in that timeline are truly terrifying, particularly for anyone who isn't a white British citizen from birth.

That feature has been baked into mobile operating systems for quite a while now; If you're just listening to something, it's automagically accounted for; I forget what Bluetooth spec that was introduced with. Video frames are buffered a bit behind the audio and it all syncs up so you don't feel like you're watching a kungfu movie dubbed in English. Where it is a problem is actual interactive programs. Games, music making programs etc. where user inputs regularly need to by synced to the sound. No way around it.

As a Brit, I was surprised to see the UK as a destination of choice.

The current Labour government here often seems to be criticised for being ideological and not pragmatic. In particular, they seem to prefer policies that tax "the rich" and businesses in one way or another, yet not large, relatively wealthy groups like pensioners or the homeowners who have lucked out and now live in a million-plus property that most younger people will never be able to afford.

There's also quite a lot of red tape for businesses here, maybe not compared to some of our neighbours in Europe, but certainly compared to places like the US and probably parts of Asia too.

Obviously some of this is politics and maybe the policies are not so surprising coming from a party that in theory represents the working class. However, it is surprising that entrepreneurs would be attracted to a culture like this at a time when we expect to have this government for another four years still.

The US military mandated all sorts of vaccinations without informed consent, and with often with dubious reasoning, readiness be damned. Basically you're the governments Guinea pig, you'll take the shot and that's that.

For example, the use of the anthrax vaccine was halted when it made a whole bunch of those young able bodied men late to go to war back in 2004. There were all manner of congressional hearings about it; then they modified its use guidelines to include only soldiers likely to encounter it (basically nobody outside of bioterror units), scaled back the dose, and also reduced the number of doses.

It's like there are at least two layers of funny money accounting going on here.

First, you have the strange way that people equate market cap with value. There's no guarantee that holding shares with a current market value of $X will eventually return $X or more in dividend payments plus maybe some eventual disposal of assets, and these are usually the only tangible values involved. A market cap based on ludicrously high P/E ratio will be high, but trading those shares is like trading Bitcoin: it starts to look more like a Ponzi scheme than a genuine value-based investment.

Second, even the market cap is mostly theoretical here, because any shares held can't be freely traded on an open market. The asset is almost completely illiquid other than occasional anomalies like the secondary sale we're talking about. The first IPO of an AI unicorn could be the pin that bursts the bubble.

It's the difference between being one of the AI unicorns that doesn't actually make any real profit yet and is largely funded based on hype and hope, and being a supplier like Nvidia that is actually being paid real money (funded by all the AI investment) and has a P/E ratio that is high but not off-the-charts stupid.

I wonder why that is. Wouldn't be related to the fact that one is able to go into the store, rip them off for less than a grand and walk away scot-free, and then do it again next Thursday, tomorrow and every day which ends with a Y?

That's kind of the point: these policies, like almost every other so-called liberal policy, have enriched and protected the criminal at the expense of everyone else. Even if the harm was limited only to inconvenience of having to find a Walgreens employee to fetch a product behind plexiglass (it very definitely isn't), then not only have these policies enabled criminals to rob a corporation blind, they have robbed society at large of something even more important but less tangible. Trust.

Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Disney surely still has trademark on all variants of Mickey and key characters of their old animations. Using those characters in a commercial context could be construed as linking Disney and that commercial enterprise, when there is no such affiliation. They will NEVER approve of it.

Because it's out of copyright, one could freely broadcast the animations, include them in an anthology of old animations, play them on a projector for the neighborhood, etc. That does not mean you can adopt Mickey as your company logo.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.