"Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant,"

So... no... AI didn't win a case.

He's also going to have to pay that money back, have all his assets seized to do so (proceeds of crime), and then the tax man is going to be asking "Hey, you earned £2m, right? Where's the tax on that?"

Now that he's been jailed, they have years to unpick it all, file additional charges, seize everything he owned, even take any "gifts" that he gave to friends and family, and build a case for tax fraud to jail him further.

Used to walk the dog rather late at night, and several times I saw a local cop driving very slowly down the street with his lights off past his ex-wife's house. This is nothing new.

I think it's correct either way. They should be embarrassed of the people they abused.

If you're spending $250,000 for a joyride, you should do some risk analysis of your own.
Home made submarines are mostly unnecessarily complicated ways of drowning as should be scrutinized with a jaundiced eye.

China is a famously closed ecosystem. Li Keqiang -- a CPP provincial secretary -- candidly said in 2007 that CCP numbers are "man-made and therefore unreliable". on. People interested in measuring China's economy use proxies, which has become an academic cottage industry. In 2020, China famously cut its population by 200 million (!!!) people.

Anyone who takes Chinese numbers at face value is foolish, because the CCP doesn't do that themselves.

Almost all GM cars are built in China. GM basically gave all their technology away for the privilege of doing this. My guess is that these new Chinese cars will be reliable.

The CCPs model is "State Capitalism", which is a far cry from free markets. It's really a variant of socialism; however, that term is overloaded, so we use the term "State Capitalism" for the variant of socialism where the government has the "commanding heights".

The West does massive of amount of government funded R&D. Eg., the NIH, and the NSF.

Precisely. The CCP has relied on widespread financial repression of its citizens to build an impressive industrial base. The key question is this: if Chinese citizens do not exchange exports for imports, then what is the point? It is economically incoherent. China will accrue a massive amount of foreign currency, and then what? Bathe in it while it deflates away?

Economic imbalances have a funny way of correcting themselves eventually. When this happens, China will discover that foreigners can moderate their appetites or find alternatives. The same cannot be said for factories and their workers.

Excellent analysis from economics professor Patrick Boyle.

Mos sensible post I've seen in this thread. Are you sure you're on the right web site? :-)

With over 15,000 residents per square kilometer in the center of the city you wouldn't want ANY drones overhead where if they lose power, lose contact with the controller, hit something, etc. there's a high likelihood of personal injury. Now with the introduction of robot air taxis into he mix there would be even higher risk. In that sort of situation requiring permits and flight plans makes absolute sense.

What is happening in Russia right now is what you get if you allow unrestricted drone activity. Of course the Chinese authorities don't want that to happen.

We haven't seen a president in the US who could be considered anything less than 'conservative' since Carter in 1980, everyone since then is either conservative, hyper-conservative, or wing-nut loony conservative. In civilized areas of the world the Democratic Party would be considered moderate-right.

You need to read The Secret Barrister novels, written by a real criminal-law barrister.

The UK courts are an absolute mess of chaos, that's not the lawyer's or the judges fault.

You would think that with a former-lawyer as the prime minister now it would get sorted, but they've made only token changes to an absolutely nonsensical court-appointment system that operates largely on constant fire-fighting and ill-preparedness and throwing lawyers to the wolves making them run from case to case with little to no preparation or warning.

It's continued because "that's how it's always been done" but the court system outgrew the capacity decades ago.