The Remain campaigners lied repeatedly, aggressively and in a coordinated way, far more so than the Leave campaign did. It was partly the sight of the relentless lying that caused me to study the arguments for Leave more closely and eventually conclude Leave was right. They are still right.

Here are a few lies told by the government alone in the course of the Remain campaign, let alone other campaigners:

If you vote Leave we (Osbourne and Cameron) will punish you by passing a massive 'emergency tax'. Literally, vote wrong and we'll take all your money. A big deal for pensioners and poorer people who were more inclined to vote out. But no emergency tax happened.

This lie wouldn't have been credible without another lie - that Cameron would stay on if he lost the vote. Cameron insisted he wouldn't resign and therefore that Osbourne and his emergency tax were guaranteed. He was lying the whole time - he resigned hours after losing.

The tax lie was itself justified by another lie - the supposedly guaranteed recession that voting leave would trigger, due to the "uncertainty" created by the two year negotiation period. The Treasury knew they were lying, that's why they refused to show its models or how it measured "uncertainty". We know this was a lie because two years after the vote the economy is booming. There was no "uncertainty hit" at all.

The recession lie was supported by yet another lie - the supposed cast iron consensus amongst economists that Brexit = Insta-Recession. No such consensus existed: before the vote economists like Patrick Minford were highlighting how absurd the claims where and immediately after the vote, the Bank of England's chief economist stated that the reputation of economics was in tatters. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman stated the idea of an uncertainty triggered employment bloodbath was "motivated reasoning" and Mervyn King (former head of the BoE) said the government had been talking nonsense.

Notice a pattern here - the Remain campaign built a tower of lies that all supported each other and which have all been disproven in the years since. I'm not even getting into all the other stupid claims they made and are still making today. Just the basics were enough to seriously tilt things in their favour.

Finally, your own post is itself a lie. The Leave campaigners haven't "admitted they'd been lying all along".

We should distrust it completely, as the paper gives no examples of any of the tweets or accounts they classified as being "bots". None whatsoever. Lots and lots of stats about their model and many implausible claims of it being perfect, but nothing that could be used to actually verify their claims.

Indeed their claims are completely implausible. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and they provide none.

Look at Churchill's speeches or FDR's fireside chats. Now look at Donald Trump's twitter stream

Please. Any historian will tell you that Churchill and Trump had quite some things in common. Your perception is merely coloured by the emphasis of historical retellings, which focus you on very specific parts of Churchill's life and views and ignore all the rest. Trump is in the here and now so you see it all.

Churchill was an incorrigible racist who lost the very first election after the Allied victory, largely because he was seen as an incapable peacetime leader who was obsessed by Empire. He wasn't a popular pick even when he became Prime Minister, due to the perception of incompetence.

If Churchill had a Twitter stream today it'd whip up the mob of the always-offended far faster than anything Trump has done. Here are some Churchill quotes. Imagine them in the Twitter stream of a 21st century politician using contemporary English, who never won a war, and see if it changes anything:

"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

"It is, thank heaven, difficult if not impossible for the modern European to fully appreciate the force which fanaticism exercises among an ignorant, warlike and Oriental population"

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril."

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." (sounds a lot like "WINNING" doesn't it)

"In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed."

"It may be said, therefore, that the military opinion of the world is opposed to those people who cry 'Democratize the army!' and it must be remembered that an army is not a field upon which persons with Utopian ideas may exercise their political theories, but a weapon for the defence of the State." (don't think he'd like women in the army)

"I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it."

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum."

Churchill is rightly remembered as a great man - in war, you need someone who enjoys war and is good at it to defend a nation and only a great man could have beaten Hitler. But let's not pretend he was some sort of ultra-intellectual anti Trump. Put Churchill quotes on Twitter under a pseudonym and he'd be banned within hours.

No, News Corp has been doing this for years. The reason is Murdoch thinks Google and Google News specifically is killing the news industry, and that the iPad will save it (or at least he thought that a few years ago). It's pure inter-corporate warfare being played out through manipulation of public opinion. The WSJ in particular are experts at it.

Software development can be a high skilled job but entry level skills can be obtained in months, which is not coincidentally, how much training time seems to be involved with learning to be a long haul truck driver in the USA (I see quotes of about two months of full time study for the formal exam around the internet so maybe call that three months when employer training time is included). Three months of full time study isn't going to make you a well paid programmer but that's plenty of time to learn basic web development skills, and another two or three after that with a good course will get someone writing basic CRUD business web apps if they want to. Of course, it's the start of the journey, but now think how many clueless developers you've encountered who are earning good money.

Can the software development world absorb millions of new developers? Sure, it has done in the past, think dotcom boom. Trucking won't disappear over night, nor will taxi drivers, if only because of limited capacity to upgrade vehicle fleets even assuming the technology becomes perfect (which it isn't), and not all drivers will become software developers.

Can you give some specific examples?

Well, Ataturk tried to forcibly reform Turkey into a western style country through a dictatorship. He was always in favour of democracy ... in the future, knowing full well that he hadn't built any real support amongst the people for his plan but betting that over time the culture would change. Seems like he lost that bet.

EU law was written by the EU. Article 50 is a mess, there was an interview with the guy who wrote it where he said he didn't bother doing it properly because he thought it'd never be used.

There is no diminished negotiating power, it's the opposite.

Java via OpenJDK has been GPL+linking exception for years. So I guess by 'more free' you mean a slightly different open source license.

The only comparable platform to Java is .NET and if your goal is to avoid money hungry patent/copyright-abusing companies, switching from Java (which has been open source for years) to .NET (partly open source for, what, one year?) is not really a great trade.

And no, dynamically typed languages are not replacements, nor are C/C++. To be a Java competitor you need to match its feature set, which is very hard given how large it is. And you need to be both garbage collected/statically typed. Only Go is even in the right general area, but Go is where Java was around 1998, so that's not really compelling.

The rather boring reality is that Java is safe unless you're an unusually rich corporation who is making something kinda-but-not-really Java. That does not describe most users.

Apple's outlandish profit margins were largely possible because the US carrier subsidisation model, which is now ending. A huge market wasn't really exposed to the true cost of the hardware. Android's market share over iOS has been massive in most markets around the world where phones were not heavily subsidised, and now the US is coming into line with international norms it seems like Apple will either bleed marketshare or have to lower its margins significantly.

Apple cannot buy Google or Facebook, and they have a poor track record of poaching staff from both companies. They have money but they don't exactly lavish it on their staff. So if they can't hire the AI expertise and they can't buy it....

You seem to be skipping over a fairly important detail in that heartwarming story - Apple nearly DID die, in the 1990s, and its turnaround was so incredible it's been studied in microscopic detail by business types the world over. Steve Jobs has movies made about him, this is such a rare and unlikely feat.

Blowing off any criticism or concern about Apple's direction on the grounds that "they didn't die last time" seems to overlook the fact that Jobs is dead and what he did is insanely hard to replicate.

I suspect you're overlooking a more likely possibility on the grounds that you wouldn't like it - maybe he decided to turn on Tor because he eventually realised he didn't agree with how it was being used or run. A guy with his skills could clearly get well paid work in other fields, after all.