The whole point of capitalism is competition driving efficiency

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit. Competition is the fig leaf with which capitalists hide their (lack of) shame, and there is not an owner among them who would not gladly see the end of their competitors. Monopolies are great for profits.

It's not just that - it's definitely part of the story but not the whole.

GDPR puts a lot of responsibility on agencies to protect data, and one of those responsibilities relates to location of data. It has to be in a jurisdiction with proper protections and MS and Google have by and large been responsive by putting EU etc. datacentres in and locating EU etc. data within them. Everyone is aware that the US parent is subject to US legislation which typically overreaches national boundaries but the commercial terms provide a fig leaf that allowed agencies to pretend the data was protected.

The issue is that it is no longer possible to pretend that data or assets are safe with US companies, and the US can no longer be trusted as an ally or as a nation that respects the rule of law.

now the trust has gone, the business will not come back. This is true for all manner of critical industries, defence and intelligence included.

When this guy is gone, and I don't assume the US can get rid of him at the end of 2028, the voters are perfectly capable of voting in somebody like him or worse. Legislators and judiciary are demonstrably not using their powers to check the executive's excess. Why would anyone outside the US assume that this won't happen again?

Have you been kicked in the head by a horse? The Church of England never managed that over 500 years with the full coercive power of the state, and you think the nonsense about Islam in the UK is in any way realistic?

The news programme was called "The Day Today".

The American correspondent Barbara Wintergreen reports on the execution of serial killer Chapman Baxter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It is a spoof, as karmawarrior has already mentioned :).

But you *just* elected Trump for the *second* time. Exactly what evidence are you judging that on?

The copper in my unwanted goods has a market value, and we're being asked to part with them... for nothing?

Let's see what the purchase price of scrap is before you ask me to make the effort to recycle them... OR come and take them from me.

Why is there no commercial activity here?

With respect to the post office scandal, the issue is partly that the rules of the court mandate that a computer should be trusted unless there is a reason to distrust it, and partly because Fujitsu, The Post Office Ltd and their lawyers engaged in a criminal conspiracy to conceal and destroy any evidence that the computer system was highly suspect, to charge individuals with theft and false accounting when they reasonably believed them to be not guilty of the charges, and to prevent any defence lawyer from discovering how many other people were being charged with false accounting and theft by the Post Office.

I mean, to be fair to the court rule, it's terrible but it's not the main reason for the scandal. The main reason is conduct which could be described highly unethical at best, knowingly criminal at worst. I would like to see the innocent vindicated and changes to the system that allowed it to happen. Justice for the perpetrators is probably beyond hope, but there will always be some people to carry the can.

*MANY* years ago, the ISP I worked for received a threatening letter from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, threatening consequences for our hosting of pornography. We didn't worry too much about it but our upstream contract terms forbade it so we investigated it. It was an online lingerie store that one of our customers hosted... It's not easy to define porn across borders.

The vehicle is the risk to the other road users. The driver is responsible for mitigating that risk.

This true, but that is not the same thing as stealing a car.

really, this doesn't seem right. Not one biologist of any kind collaborated on this? Philosophers and planetary scientists?

It seems to me this is purely descriptive, and doesn't really reflect what evolution is.

Is it a natural law that simple structures combine into complex structures, when that begs the question can complex structures combine to create simple ones?

I think about the meaning of those words and wonder how a philosopher put their name to this.

But then, I only read the abstract...

Not disputing your ethnicity figures, but that's a big change in numbers and I'd like to know where they come from and whether the 1990s "white" definition was the same as the 2021 "white" definition.

What's the source(s) of the 93.8%->81% figure?

Ta.

I am thoroughly ashamed of the title of this post.

If the telescope can detect where life may be, these are the planets we must steer clear of. Our arrival in *any* form is very unlikely to benefit the life of that planet, more likely that we will harm it in ways we cannot predict.

I mean, the ways are unpredictable. The harm is predictable. We must avoid them. Totally. To the point where any encroachment into the solar system is forbidden.

The UK didn't vote narrowly for Brexit. England & Wales had a narrow majority for leaving the EU. Scotland & NI had a pronounced majority for remaining but numerically it was outweighed by the population of England.

Many of the problems in the UK are down to the massive disparity in electorate sizes in the constituent countries and the inability of the English electorate to recognise that they remain in a political, customs and currency union called the United Kingdom. It would be funny if they didn't keep voting for politicians with such hateful policies.

I really like this idea.

However, I see a flaw that should be addressed.

This generates poor outcomes for members of the board who are in disporoportionately large characteristic groups which maintain their homogeneity. This assumes that the group is likely to be the dominant subgroup (let's just go with straight white men for now) and outgroups are at structural disadvantage.

In boards which have already bucked the trend of the dominant group (a largely femail board, or one that is predominantly a non-white ethnic group) would be incentivised to make their boards more diverse (not a bad thing in itself, but the rule is meant to address the dominance of another subgroup which is the typical issue)

In addition to this, any minority on the board would be incentivised to keep their anomaly status if they received the balance of the redistributed pay. There should instead be a win-win outcome for individuals

But there is a really good idea in there.