Good sir, this is clearly a desperate cry for help... This "national centre for gaming disorders" seems desperate for people to learn that they... erm... exist.

More Americans seem to be aware of Milton Keynes than people who have heard about this place, probably because Britain's most unremarkable town has more functions.

Fun fact: there are over 140 roundabouts in Milton Keynes, giving you ample opportunity to turn around and get the hell out of Milton Keynes.

The irony of that I sense will be lost on you.

Crocodile Dundee were American films. The stories were American, the language used was American (they're called prawns, only Seppo's call them "shrimp" and no-one in Oz BBQs them), even Paul Hogan had left Australia (albeit for the UK). This is exactly the kind of thing that these kinds of legislation are meant to stymie.

If you'd like to watch a few Australian films, I'd recommend "The Castle" as a light hearted drama, "Chopper" as a more gritty comedy based on Melbourne gangland figure Mark Brandon "Chopper" Reid (both films feature Eric Bana) and "Bad Eggs", Australia tends to do comedy well. Although I suspect a cultural references will go straight over the heads of many.

As a former Australian, the culture is being subsumed by the worst parts of American culture.

Long gone are the days of the knockabout larrikin culture of my youth (we're only talking 20 odd years ago too) which has been replaced with American style selfishness and ignorance, a grab, snatch and take followed with "I got mine, fuck you". If you aren't old enough to have 20 houses, there's nothing left for you to grab, snatch or take either. The old "laid back" Australian image is just a myth these days, "She'll be right" has been replaced with "I'm alright Jack".

As for this particular move, the old system is dying, by that I mean broadcast TV and it was broadcast TV that used to pay for all the local production. This is again Americanism creeping in with a little help from the British, TV is little more than cheap reality TV any more. If it isn't American style reality, they'll steal things from the British (Strictly Come Dancing, Bake Off, Love Island (which was only named such because Chlamydia Peninsula was already trademarked)). There is little in the way of local drama and local comedy produced these days. I'd hazard a guess that is the kind of thing this move is trying to stymie.

I've long since moved away and found something in the UK I realised Australia lost, it could still laugh at itself, it wasn't taking itself too seriously and sadly that seems to be dying out in the UK now.

I largely agree, however one minor point of order is that banks rarely make interest off people who don't repay their debts. So someone who is at risk of defaulting is going to cost, hence organisations that give easy credit to anyone like Klarna are in dire straights. Whoda thunk you'd lose money by lending it to people who wouldn't pay it back.

What they want are people using credit (preferably exclusively) but paying it off every month, hence people who have credit cards but don't use them are often called "deadbeats".

I'm just glad I don't live in a country that judges me on a credit score. It seems pretty Orwellian to me. Lenders have to make their own decisions when someone applies for credit which means the lender must accept the risks (the likes of Experian have tried to set up credit score like systems here and failed as no one would buy them).

Yet.

They're not going full Stazi on white people, yet.

It'll happen, first they'll say it's just the "Lib'rals" and the ignorant sleepwalkers will just keep watching Fox News and swallowing their State Approved bullshit... however it'll start applying to them too and by that point, it'll be too late as "no one was left to speak out for them".

People who support the mechanism of a police state, especially out of bigotry, rarely seem to understand that the same mechanisms will be turned against them in due course. Well, not until it's too late.

At least they still managed to break my Taylor guitar.

Spain doesn't really benefit from DST because it's highest latitude is still so low that there isn't a huge difference in the hours of daylight between summer and winter.

The UK has an 8 hour difference between midsummer and midwinter. Yes, July has 8 more hours of sunshine than December. If you stuck with permanent summer time, the sun wouldn't rise until 8:30 and would still be dark by 5 in midwinter. If you stuck with permanent GMT, in midsummer the sun would be up around 03:30. Without DST, a whole bunch of seasonal issues (in particular S.A.D.) will get a whole lot worse.

Most clocks adjust themselves these days, so there isn't even that excuse any more.

I think that Too Big To Fail has become Too Big To Fail.

The whole point of a free market economy is to foster competition, if one entity becomes so large or controlling over a market segment that it can cause a serious disruption then the free market has failed, so that entity needs to be heavily regulated, nationalised or broken up.

That being said, I don't think any AI company is too big to fail... I suspect their failure will be too small to notice except by people who have foolishly invested huge sums of money in white elephants.

This... and the idea of local services is derided as a plot to what... make things more local? See the hullabaloo over 15 minute cities.

Pretty much.

I only log on every few days to make sure I haven't got a message telling me someone has died. Once a few of my older relatives shuffle off, I'm probably not going to log on at all. there's no point trying to sort through the crap content and even FB Purity is struggling to contain it all these days.

They're going to struggle to find a country that will let them brazenly ignore environmental laws and US environmental laws were lax for a 3rd world country to begin with.

Besides we all know the whole "I'll just move unless you give me money" is an empty threat as it costs huge amounts of money to move something as portable, replaceable and useless as a corporate headquarters, let alone an operation that does something that requires skilled personnel, has a logistics chain, et al. When a car company moves its manufacturing out of a country, its not really moving the production as much as killing off that model and losing a lot of the sales.

The problem is, with so few corporations controlling the media, in particular the US media you have given a small, very self interested group a monopoly on the truth already.

Most governments are positively benign in comparison.

There was an old Soviet joke, an American and Russian meet in Alexanderplatz (in Berlin for the uninitiated, used to be on the Soviet side of the wall), the American says "you know all your news is propaganda", the Russian replies "We do, you know that all your news is propaganda". The American looks enraged so the Russian says "the difference is we do not believe our propaganda".

That is pretty much the strategy.

Release a substandard product and force everyone to use it.

They've already achieved the former, cant see how they're going to achieve the latter as they had to use strong arm and monopolist practices to ensure that all other email clients were incompatible/unusable to make Office the de facto choice.

The XBox was supposed to "kill" gaming PCs every 2 years since it's release in the early 00s and yet PC gaming is the strongest and most profitable sector precisely because it isn't controlled from the top down.

The Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy didn't work on PC gaming because PC gamers refused to embrace MS.

Thats why the laws are "anit-consumer", you're a consumer, consume, mindlessly, DO NOT QUESTION.

What you're talking about is a customer, something that is definitely not wanted by today's business (and the governments that are merging with it).

And it looks like HMD is retiring the brand too.

The HMD Nokias were good phones (I'm still using an X30), but it seems the brand is cursed when it comes to smart phones no matter how good the product offering is.