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Comment Some perspective (Score 1) 270

23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

Comment Re:Thats like medical doctors (Score 1) 49

Overall, a better approach than the doctor saying "Fentanyl isn't really that bad. You can keep shooting up as long as you have Narcan."

To make the metaphor accurate, instead of Narcan the doctor would be recommending a new novelty drug whose results are untested in the human body, and for which no antidote is known.

Comment There's also a localhost option (Score 3, Interesting) 45

You can turn on a setting in about:config that will add an option to connect to a locally hosted LLM model, typically running in your GPU with something like Ollama, LM Studio or Anything LLM.

I would like that such option was displayed as prominent as those connecting to commercial services, but at least it's there for those in the know.

Comment Re:Morale (Score 0) 68

Wouldn't it be nice if companies treated people well and we didn't need unions?

Companies treated workers well, and Western governments provided a welfare state, because of the menace of the Soviet Union looking as a more attractive option to workers.

Once the Soviet Union imploded ending the Cold War, there were no menace anymore and the ruling class returned to their previous mode of operation, dialling the clock back to the XIX century with it's Dickensian Laissez-faire.

It's only logical that when we go back to the conditions that motivated Socialism, workers bring back the same old techniques of class warfare. Welcome to the New World Order, same as the Old.

Comment Re:Oil and Gas pay for the values and lifestyle (Score 2) 159

It doesn't matter where the wealth comes from; in other countries it comes from the entrepreneurship and hard labor from its workers.
The trick is then to distribute the products of that wealth among all the people, instead of concentrating more than half of it on the hands of a very small privileged class that then gets to decide how it's spent.

Comment Re:Sandwalking Your Way to Wealth (Score 1) 159

This is an interesting perspective. Maybe the "problem" with Norway is more a problem with how the rest of us pick and choose which metrics represent our values. Productivity, work hours, student test scores. Why are these the goals? Why not happiness or contentment, however that might be measured? Or physical or mental health? Crime? It seems to me that productivity, work hours, and test scores are merely means to the real ends of happiness and well-being.

Be careful, you may be up to discover the European way of thinking where "productivity" and "net worth" and "concentrating all the political power in a few lobbies that control the government"* are not synonyms with economic health but rather "safety net" and "well-being" do.

*We tried the last one in the times of the Roman Empire and decided that it's not a good model to live with.

Comment Re:Who decides what is fake? (Score 1) 150

I suspect most here on slashdot would have sided with those "experts" had they lived at the time

And they'd do well, because the Ptolemaic guys were better than anyone else in predicting the movements of planets.

And by keeping with the good work, their successors were able to keep compiling and refining good observations, and ultimately be able to overcome the previous model that have served them well.

The point is not to have "The Absolute Truth" at any one particular point (only religious nutjobs do that), the point is to have a reasonable corpus of observations that get cross-checked with reality so that you do not get blinded by dogma.

Comment Re: Generation ships would never work (Score 1) 21

Not to mention the fanaticism effect of being born and raised all your life with a "purpose larger than you".

There would be a few sceptics that curse their ancestors for condemning them to a life enclosed in a tin can, but my guess is for most of them to live like a small community of religious pilgrim settlers.

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