Just makes starmers buffoonery of stating we will not rejoin in his lifetime, likely to be another 30 years, look daft. Labour was never going to be a trusted choice for ex ukippers choosing who to vote for this time no matter what he said. It’s pointless pandering that will cost him long-term as either we stay out and carry on costing the economy or he rejoins and looks a flipper.

So looking forward to the next five years…

Looking at how Reform and Lib Dems made significant gains in vote share you have to wonder if its still worth Labour chasing after the right wing vote that Reform achieved. I just do not see the where the voters who voted Reform actually believe Starmer on the key issues that Reform campaigned on, immigration, anti “woke”, and Brexit. I cannot see Labour ever gaining the lead on those issues over someone like Farage who will always position himself to the right of whatever Labour or the Tories campaign on. I cant even see Labour being trusted at the voting booth on these right wing issues over a rebuilt Tory party. Its a fools errand to try.

The Lib Dem vote share, as with Reform, boosted by previous Tory voters but Lib Dems campaigned on almost the opposite of Reform (with some tactical, local, NIMBYism) and achieved way more seats on a lower overall percentage vote than Reform. If you are going to pick a direction to go in, wouldn’t it make more sense to move towards the Lib Dems position to shore up in time for the next election?

Labour did worse total percentage of the vote than 2017, its more that the Tories collapsed losing about 20% of their vote that caused this swing in seats. The Tories will rally next time around and a lot of the seats look winnable for them with only a small local swing. The current stance of Labour simply isn’t popular enough to be a vote winner against a rebuilt Tory party.

Sway on ubuntu, as it’s my work machine. I will switch eventually when I replace the PC with a new one

Didn’t she have literally one of the safest seats in the country? Lol

If she loses it’s 100% certainty that she blames the deep state for election fraud. No way she takes her loss with good graces.

At least it’s not on arch 😞

There usually has to be a lever for the far right to use, usually rampant economic inequality. Ardern never really addressed the fucked up housing market in NZ, which was the perfect tax free investment vehicle for those with money. Deny people the right to get their own place and move on with adulthood and you have a pretty big lever that the far right can use to fenagle their corporate sponsored anti environment bullshit with a dash of fascism into power.

I went from 3 to 2, as I went from 2x24@1080p + 1x34@1440p to 2x32@4k. I the jump to 4k with such large screens meant I have a massive more amount of usable screen real estate especially as I do not use any scaling on the screens, although I do marginally increase the font size. I can manage six windows per screen all neatly tiled as long as its not my IDE, that I need a good 2/3rd of the screen to actually be useful for me.

It would be unmanageable if I tried to do this without a proper tiling window manager though, I use Sway. I particularly like how the virtual desktops work on Sway as I have separate virtual desktops per screen, makes them actually useful for me. Typically I have two per screen, IDE/Terminal and Discord/Signal/Music, Multiple Browser windows and Email/Teams/Office.

Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn’t always remotely practical for most pc setups.

I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people’s taste.

What switches does it have? Are they lubed? Are the stabilisers modded? Does it have case foam or other case mods? What type of mount is it? What about the plate? Swing weight and force curve? Linear, clicky or tactile? Silent, oring, ball bearing mod?

There are so many different variables and that’s before you even get to layout changes it’s perfectly possible to build your own keyboard that is perfect or close to it for you.

I have keyboards with different layouts and typing feel that I pick for how I want my typing to feel on any given day. It’s no different from a guitarist having multiple different guitars chasing a different feel and sound.

Not everyone is going to appreciate it and that’s perfectly fine, but there are significant differences with the right changes during a build.

So big vacations we typically plan two to three years in advance and book as soon as the booking opens for the parts of that holiday. Usually means flights about 12 months before, accommodation usually a bit before then. Something like Disney or a sailing holiday we can book two years in advance as an entire package, which in the EU means we ATOL protected, far safer that far out than booking separate. I have terrible anxiety when booking lots of individual components like a backpacking holiday in Japan that had us staying in half a dozen hotels/apartments, hiring a couple of cars, getting internal flights, prebooking tickets to Sumo and Ghibli and so on, but its essential to get the best prices.

We are still paying for a family holiday in a cottage or villa as our kids are still starting their careers. This I book a year in advance, but we plan the locations far in advance of that and scope out where we want to stay.

As we work from home we can work from our van a fair bit. Earlier in the year we did a tour of wales over three weeks while working part time, later this year we are doing a three week tour of Cornwall/Devon/Somerset. We also get away a few long weekends around the bank holidays. As we stay at adult only sites that are very popular and will sell out quickly around the dates we want to go, these are booked as soon as booking opens for them, usually October the year before.

Booking early gets us far better pricing and we get to go where we want, stay where we want. Plus the planning and research is a big part of the enjoyment for us, its also essential if you want to make the most of a planning heavy holiday like Japan or Disney and not pay through the nose to use a quality planning service.

They used it to give away Teams to existing customers then force through price rises later by adding functionality behind additional licenses. They also leveraged Teams to sell a significant amount of conference room equipment that was running Skype Teams. Its likely Microsoft will start to use the embedded Teams usage to push up prices of their core M365 licenses, E3 and E5.

Its also heavily tied into Entra, Exchange, and SharePoint Online as its really three raccoons in a trench coat so its hard to fully use Teams without using those products, which must also be licensed, usually via a E3 or E5.

The timing of it being coincidentally when COVID hit meant everyone wanted a chat and meeting product, so good fortune paid a part as well. Also a lot of organizations wanted off Skype right around this period, so really fortunate timing.

Please tell me she is on course to lose her seat

Pretty sure he pays cash or close to it rather than a traditional leveraged buy out. He normally only buys struggling or collapsed brands he can get cheap like Wiggle.

Ashley wants two main things out of his purchases, the brand name to slap on a web store with any head start it can give into running a business in that sector, and the retail space. Any decent retail space he wants to flip into residential property while stripping any fixtures and fittings of any value, anything else will be gone or rebooted into the lowest common denominator for that area.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

Cost is high due to the high cost to FOM to be on the calendar and a lack of government subsidies, lots of other races get a big hand out. Its rare for this race to do much more than break even. Silverstone relies on the halo effect of the F1 race to improve sales of track days and other events so this is tolerated.

Ticket prices could come down if they could dramatically increase capacity, but that requires a lot more casual fans wanting to go, which requires a British driver directly challenging for the title and the circuit with its surrounding roads/parking being enlarged. Parking is better than the bad old days but its still not suitable for double the current capacity.

Lowering prices for anything other than seat fillers means operating at a loss, they cannot afford to do so for more than a handful of seasons.

Horner would love to sell them a power unit, would be sweet karma

Exactly

While I like the ideas with screens, and fixed buttons even more so, they haven’t gone with them despite the tech being available for a considerable time. I do wonder if its mostly down to how people use them rather than a limitation of the tech itself. Watch how many people nearly swipe or even do scrape exit parking machines, even simple parking meters stop working, people struggle to use the ones inside, then add in weather damage/proofing and vandalism and I would guess thats a big part of it. As its often a closed queue system any problem becomes a major issue almost instantly.

Renault tried leasing the batteries in EV in an effort to lower the initial cost of the car while increasing their tail for future owners. They abandoned it only a few years in as it was a disaster for their used market that got worse the older the car got as nobody wanted the ongoing cost. Only the initial owner saved money, and only if they managed to use PCP finance with a balloon set before Renault realised that the battery leased cars would be worth significantly less.

Renault also did not like that with older cars they would be liable for the battery replacement far sooner than they planned as they (initially) had a higher percentage unusable before they had to do a free replacement vs. a normal battery warranty, made worse as a leased battery has a warranty as long as you are paying the lease.

Renault could repossess the car if you stopped paying the battery lease and refused to buy it out. Its like any car finance that puts a lien or similar on the car, you do not own it till its gone.