Yeah so are the people who applied it. Died in a car accident easily preventable by advanced intelligent driving systems.

I'm all for an anti-tracking rant, but the reality is simple cars are the most dangerous. There's a reason it's effectively mandatory to have forward facing range finding systems in all cars in Europe these days along with the computers that are able to process that data.

Uah, that sounds needlessly complex. You have a gearbox? Why not just have a motor spin the wheels directly like a modern Hyundai? Next you're going to tell me your car has an engine with 2000 parts instead of a simple rotating coil sitting withing a couple of magnets.

Err ... no. 6-8% since Brexit isn't some unrealistic booming in the slightest. It's a fraction of a percentage higher than what it currently is year on year, and well within the margin of error for variance between countries on any given year. It's also far smaller than the actual predicted impact Brexit would have.

There's a reason why the UK's economic growth started trailing the rest of the EU right around 2016, and I wouldn't call the EU "booming". The point is that it had a negative impact, reversing those numbers don't make something booming.

See even there you're not even correct in what the rules are, and that's the problem. Most of the discourse is disconnected from reality.

In reality, no banana of any shape was ever "unacceptable" for sale. The ruling was that bananas grown from within the EU (Spain, France and Portugal) needed to apply the same classification and labelling rules and bananas from outside the EU which means the only practical difference is that a straight banana from Spain will have "Class 2" written next to the label in size 4 font, as it sits next to other straight bananas imported from other countries.

Most of what is said about the EU is fucking stupid.

That said some things actually are fucking stupid. There's a lovely collective facepalm right now as Virgin Gin isn't allowed to be called Gin anymore because the regulations governing alcohol say to be called Gin it has to have certain ingredients in it. That kind of thing is stupid. No government is immune from that.

A wind farm under construction and sanctioned by the previous administration has been put on hold by the current one saddling one international company with $6.4bn in debt. The flip-flopping of policies is almost worse than just sticking with bad policies for any investment that is looking to extend for longer than an election cycle.

I've posted this before, but the company I work for has cancelled major investment in construction projects in the USA including not just green energy projects, but traditional energy projects as well. The USA now sits on our projects risk register along side unstable shitholes like Libya. We are now far more comfortable investing in Iraq than the USA. No really, let that sink in. It'll take a decade or more for this opinion to change.

That's horseshit. The reality is Brexit is the same as every political movement to the direction of those who make false promises based on lies. The issue is, most of the time the people pushing those lies are racists themselves.

Half of the population of the UK don't want to kick coloured people out, they want better lives, and are too dumb to realise that what they voted for was a lie. This is the downside of a discourse that is centered around the heart vs the brain.

Heart: Your life sucks, it's all these foreigner's faults, Brexit is the solution that will make your life better.
Brain: Brexit won't make your life better, actually we don't know what it will do, it's uncharted waters.

Those were the two campaigns. Which statement evokes any kind of emotional response from you? The one that says your life will be better with this one neat trick, or the one that says this may be a bad idea?

Absolutely, they may post about it on Facebook while a camera points at their face, why should they care about the TV?

The reality is that most people simply consider it a downgrade. Why fix a camera used only for communication into the living room when you already have one in your hand which is portable.

Did you type this on your phone with the camera pointed at your face? The real reason is, we don't need it. The same reason I don't have a webcam on my home PC despite video calling family members weekly, I don't need it, I already have it in my hand, and I can get up and walk around with that one.

Joking aside, the diagnostic criteria is basically "has some of the known symptoms, ruled out everything else". That's why House didn't like it, he thought there was always a root cause, and it looks like science may have discovered it.

The question now is, how do you undo it? Some of the damage may be permanent, but just getting the auto immune system to stop attacking the rest of the body would make a huge difference to a lot of people, and not just people with Lupus.

I know at least three companies that took the opportunity to move as much of their stock and equipment out of the UK, while EU rules were still in place, and then closed up shop here in the UK. Another ended up opening a new facility in Ireland where they re-tested stuff so it could meet EU requirements, as the new British CA mark is pretty much worthless.

Of course it cost them money, but not as much money as they would have lost by staying. And that's with the UK's newly devalued currency making out exports cheaper.

The UK also had a veto over most of the rules that the EU introduced. I don't think it ever used it. In fact, in almost every case, the UK voted for the proposed rules. It was something like under 2% that it didn't want, mostly because the EU tends to make sure everyone is happy before even having the vote - you know, how adults agree stuff.

There was a lot of misinformation about EU rules. The classic one is the "bendy banana" rule, which governs the acceptable ripeness of bananas sold there. Much hang wringing was done, but actually it was a British rule that had become a de-facto one in the rest of the EU, so they just adopted it from us.

The day after the referendum, some member of the public on TV said she was going to vote remain, but at the last moment remembered the bananas and thought "this has to stop". I think fortunately they didn't give her name, but I do sometimes wonder if she eventually realized and was ashamed of it.

The rest of the world isn't going to forget what Trump did, or the ability of the American people to elect someone like him. It's going to take a long time and a lot of work to rebuild the trust and relationships that existed before, if it is even possible.

The US is seen as politically unstable. Every 4 years there is a good chance that whatever policy was made will be reversed, whatever the priorities were will change.

Recently the French police have started slashing the boats before they set off, on the basis that it's unsafe and they are protecting the occupants.

Really the only way to resolve this issue is to have a proper integrated system to deal with people seeking asylum in Europe, but that would be politically unacceptable in the UK.

Brexit was sold as being protectionist, but it was actually the opposite. We gave up huge amounts of sovereignty.

For example, we used to control both sides of our border with France, but Brexit gave up control of the French side and sure enough the boats started coming. The French are not all that interested in policing our border for us, beyond what they can get out of any deals they made with us.

On rule making too, we are now pretty much obliged to accept whatever the EU does, because we are too small to make big demands of our own. Every time we diverge from what the EU does, it damages our economy even more. Farming is a good example. Brexit was supposed to help our farmers, but it's shafted them with extra red tape and costs when they want to export. Some naive fantasists thought we would become self sufficient and eat British grown food, but it's not really to our tastes and many can't afford the price rises that would come with it.

So don't worry, the next protectionist will argue that Brexit wasn't done right and their version will somehow not be a total disaster.

True. I wonder how bad that would be. How much stuff would get kicked up with enough delta V to enter a long duration orbit

Ah yes, for loans. But really that data should have been kept separate, and deleted as soon as no longer needed. If this happened to anyone in a GDPR country, that will be a factor because there is an obligation to do that kind of thing as a matter of course.