davelauchlan.bsky.social
Cats, music, planes, weather, science fiction. Programmer Archeologist by profession.
My opinions are my opinions. They are no better or worse than anyone else's.
Staffordshire by birth. Reading inhabitant since the early nineties.
1,806 posts
391 followers
519 following
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I personally think it had a rocky start, it seemed a bit too just straight translated Scandi rather being something of itself. But it got better and better. The more I saw of Akram, and of the Rose/James mentee/mentor relationship, the more I enjoyed it. Very much looking forward to seeing more.
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Fifteen years of austerity means that they are mostly funding social care and stretching the budgets for everything else such as roads and waste disposal as far as possible. There's a service there but only if you squint.
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With a plot description like that, it could almost have been a candidate for the Venture SF collection of 1960s pulp.
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You can ship it over here, but doesn't mean much of it will be sold. Rather like Teslas and Hershey bars.
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I'd forgotten about Colin, lounging in the empty seat next to Kumiko on the JAL shuttle, the seat being empty that was the sign of her father's power.
Colin was way cooler than this!
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He's off to the Palisades!
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Oh, this is reminding me of that one episode of Mike Duncan's excellent History of Rome where he covered the Council of Nicaea and I very nearly lost the will to live!
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Just tell us which one.
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There's no such thing as too many books, just not enough shelf space.
Try to think of them as decorative insulation.
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As does anyone who has ever had to look after an elderly or infirm parent.
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I have to say I found offense with pretty much every line of that article.
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Special Branch budget and all pension, NHS and state pension costs? Stick it on the defence budget.
Border force or whatever they are called these days? Defence budget.
Move the Met Office and all weather research back into the defence budget.
Any contribution to ESA? Defence.
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already included. But you could throw in a chunk of their overall education costs too. I reckon any cunning politician could come up with oodles of ways of adding to that 5% without actually spending close to that in real money.
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Ah, but you can fiddle that. There's the obvious stuff, like spending on wages and kit. Service personnel pensions are probably already included. But are the state pensions of anyone who has ever served? Or their NHS costs? Service personnel's children get a pupil premium, that's probably
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Is the section on fishing called the Coddleian?
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the late night dashes up the M40 as he'd gone missing or been rushed to hospital, I always felt I was on my back foot, reacting but not close enough to anticipate what might happen next. It's what you have to do, but you can't ignore the impacts on your own family life and it tests your resilience
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over the shop. I think "selective availability" was switched off in the late 90s and the satnav industry was born. I didn't get a satnav till 2008. Quite amazing how ubiquitous they've become, mostly through apps on our smartphones.
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I'm remembering the bit in Use of Weapons where Zakalwe complains about the maps always being upside down.
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Oh gosh, yes I would not like to do that today. Both of our sons live in London and we've had the odd fraught journey when Google maps crashed or the car sat nav doesn't have the latest road changes. Always happens when we have to do a new route when one of the boys has moved house!
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They'd be amazed to discover that I used to navigate across London by the dual tactics of aiming the car in roughly the right direction and stealing glances at an A-Z. All this and changing gear!
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I got a tracker for my cat. I can't control where he goes but at least I know where he is and where he's been.
(This was prompted because he went missing for a day and limped home with a broken pelvis and flystrike. Once he'd recovered I got him a tracker for my sanity more than anything else)
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I'm not proposing putting older people in combat / front line/ military roles. You want a properly trained properly paid properly staffed full time armed service for that.
But there's areas where we are lacking where it would be useful to have contingency in case of force majeure.
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A national service forced on young people is bonkers.
However I do think there is an appetite for a properly funded voluntary civic service corps (with pay otherwise it's just going to be those that can afford it that do it). Just look at how people wanted to help during Covid!
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If they bought in a form of voluntary modern "Dad's Army"/Observer Corp hybrid focussed on bringing in us older folks (40-50+), I think it would be lapped up. Train us on civil defence, drone maintenance, logistics etc. And yes, have a properly rewarded professional army/navy/airforce.
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My brother is a historian, specialising in the Okhrana and Cheka . There was a short period after the end of the Cold War where Russia opened some archives to historians. He talked about finding interrogation documents complete with blood stains.
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Yes and as well as the tech changing all the time, the processes and tools move too. And of course, a lot of the knack is being able to understand the business/organisation so you can get the requirements right. The coding (in whatever language) is often the simplest bit.
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Thinks back wistfully to the halcyon days where the training courses were classroom based with instructors and proper exercises. Something else that went the way of the dodo in the early noughties. Now it's all "online learning platforms" and "student-driven". Bah!
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If, when I'd started at secondary school, they'd focussed on educating me for the workplace, they'd have been training me to be a coal miner. That was the major employer in my home town in 1981! I earn my living writing code for the backends of mobile phone networks, tech which didn't exist then!
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Included the best use of the opening bars of a David Bowie track ever!
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Until Labour start getting serious about making a case for increasing taxes, Starmer is just bloviating about fixing anything.
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What is this thing you call "rain"?
(Joking aside, after the deluges of late winter, in my bit of the UK it's been the driest spring and early summer that I can remember)
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Continuing the theme of being there to promote the interests of mediocre white people.
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Just realised that I have seen the original Danish version. Don't remember any of it.
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We are halfway through. I'm enjoying it. It's nonsense but entertaining nonsense nonetheless. It definitely feels like it should have been filmed in Denmark rather than Scotland.
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I haven't got to the end yet. There's still time for a final showdown at the lighthouse!
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I think one of them must have been reading one of the Europe books.
The main characters seem to be able to get from Edinburgh to the west coast where all the islands are really quickly. I think they might be ducking in and out of the Community to save on travel time.
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It's the Alan Dale rule for the 2020s!
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I love the way they've just taken the Danish script and not bothered changing the character names. Also, the playing loose and fast with geography. If you are going to have places with islands within driving distance of HQ, at least set it in Glasgow not Edinburgh!