The only note I'd add is that "selection was entirely on how academically competent you were" should be replaced with "selection was entirely on how well coached you'd been to pass exams". There were certainly people there based just on how academically gifted they were. There was also a large cohort there based on how much money had been thrown at tutors and private schools, or who had happened to live near a sixth-form college skilled at getting people into university.

It's not a trivial exercise to design an education system that gets the actual best candidates into university.

I mostly agree, but I have to press the point that I mention to all kids wary about the cost of university in the UK - you don't come out of university with a debt, the government does. What you've agreed to is paying a higher effective rate of tax when you earn above a threshold. The loan doesn't impact your eligibility for other loans, and it gets written off after time. So don't worry about the size of the loan, think about whether you think that paying that higher rate of tax is a fair exchange for going to university.

Brexit didn't just make the UK hostile to EU students, the impact followed through to a drop in all international registrations, not just those from the EU. We also lost quite a lot of good staff who didn't want to live outside the EU (there were pension and professional registration impacts).

Going to university somewhere in Europe was a great option for British kids that would have trouble affording university in the UK. Pick the right university and the tuition was free, the teaching was in English, and there was help with living costs. Brexit put a stop to that though.

You're making the mistake of thinking of it as one model. There are multiple different models involved in a climate simulation. Here we have the situation that when a bunch of mostly correct models run end-to-end, the final radiated heat is less than expected due to a cloud component of the simulation not working correctly - doesn't mean the whole set of models is wrong.

The ocean models that you then comment about seem to be accurate and we do have some evidence that the circulation in the Atlantic is weakening.

+4 in Britain would not be nice - large parts of the country would struggle. It would mean a significant increase in CO2 output as the amount of installed AC rapidly increased - typically we don't need it.

Even those who start a PhD with the intention of targeting an academic career afterwards are unlikely to feel the same way about the idea by the time they get their doctorate :)

How the law is sold: Preventing other nations from censoring American truth

What the law is for: Preventing other nations from adding fact checking to reports that Emperor Trump is clothed.

People are making _voting_ decisions based on that, if you want something else to worry about.

Buttons and UI design and components have a cost. Companies making tens of thousands of an item are after savings in the order of pennies per item if they can get them. The number of features is a selling point, but putting more physical buttons onto a device has a cost. So companies want to export some of the UI to a smartphone app where possible. It's much cheaper for them.

It's also cheaper to be able to do an over the air firmware update than to handle the costs of support services during the warranty period.

Not saying any of it is right or perfect, but the current situation isn't inexplicable.

Or downloaded and read the freely-available PDF of the manuals of the specific models that he was interested in before even going to the store? It baffles me that people are happy to spend that much on a purchase just by going to a store and thinking 'That looks pretty, I'll have that one'. Especially for a software engineer!

Regulation does but litigation doesn't. In the UK someone could make a claim that this amounts to age discrimination, as the elderly are less likely to be able to solve the problem via digital channels. As there is a cost being imposed in terms of time and potentially money, depending on how the call is placed, HP may struggle to defend this in court.

It's a matter of 'right end, wrong stick'.

While the example used is incorrect, the principle has very much impacted the NHS. The government has set metrics and targets, and hospital management has of course tried to find ways to meet those targets by gaming the system - just like any other person would. Government needs to find better ways to foster improvement in the big systems that it manages (healthcare, education, etc.).

Nobody is going to leave in protest of a return to the office order if they think they can't easily get another remote job. That means that those who stay are the ones least likely to be able to get another good job. The result is that you just caused your most talented employees to quit.

It's a cheap and easy way - doesn't mean it's a good way. If the CEO is looking to quickly reduce headcount so that they can also leave and get a better job based on how successful they were at doing that, then it's a good way for them (but not so good for the company).

Currently sitting here developing the software for the ground segment of a space mission and visualising the result of algorithm changes on the data using a Mac with those specs - absolutely flies compared to the fully-specced iMac Pro it replaced.

This is true. It's also true that a large segment of the user base of lowest-spec MacBook Airs use their machines so lightly that this will never be a problem in practice during the lifetime of the machine.