cs02rm0

The Saudis announced six megaprojects in 2005. King Abdullah Economic City was the only one that went anywhere. I believe it was supposed to have 2 million people and reached about 7 thousand.

They've kicked people out of the area, killed at least one person, trashed the area with initial construction efforts (I've driven past) and now the inevitable seems to be coming to pass already.

They still have time but they need to do something to diversify from oil in the way Dubai has eventually. Building a new Dubai, with a different legal framework (only rumoured for Neom AFAIK), doesn't seem like the worst idea to me, but starting with an overly ambitious design probably isn't the way to get traction. The Middle East do love a pissing contest though so starting small isn't what they're into.

I found myself writing a book recently, completely left field to my normal technical work. I'm intending on approaching a literary agent but I need it reviewed first and I'm looking for dispassionate, distanced, but informed opinions.

Not sure it'll ever be the same for my kids. Which is a shame, whatever the gains and there are some, I think we've lost something.

But, not having looked at all of them, some of them can also be what were historically our closest understandings of the way things actually worked. In which case I'm not sure it is even a lie through simplification rather than just teaching children the evolution of our own understanding.

I can make my bed to some extent with a very few small, human-resource limited departments conducting surveillance. But we seem to be growing an entire public sector willing to recreate the Stasi and its wider influence. I'm not sure what the fix is, it isn't particularly a new phenomenon and it only ever seems to expand.

It's probably time.

He denies these accusations and they have not been tested in a court of law. Rumble have declined.

Traditional conservative economics don't seem to be on offer in the UK these days.

I think for the last 50 years, possibly excepting one Labour leader, the wider electorate have seen Labour as literally the worst of all alternatives. That's why the Conservatives are consistently voted in.

The problem isn't really either of our two terrible main political parties though, it's the absence of any realistic competition. If there were an obviously better alternative I believe that despite any historical affiliations voters today on all sides would leap to it. We've had that 50 years to find an alternative and there's still nothing palatable waiting in the wings.

Why this is, I think is more debatable. Maybe the answer is PR, maybe we need to pay MPs more in line with historic rates in real terms (and more than some recent software dev grads), maybe it's something else. But it's pretty clear to me that as much as people don't want the Conservatives, they really don't want Labour either.

It's not inherently unethical, that would be a very extreme, purely deontological rather than consequential/utilitarian, position to take.

Perhaps bring your ethical values to those industries you see as problematic. Otherwise, you're leaving those industries to people with different ethical views. (And that seems unethical).

As an inreach mini 2 owner and very, very infrequently a user, I hope so. My iPhone isn't new enough for this (13 mini) and if I get a new phone anytime soon it probably won't be Apple, but it'd be nice to see Garmin adjust their pricing.

> Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc

And now we have Discord, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, Slack, Teams, etc etc

But I suspect it's a relatively tiny, albeit terrible, problem compared to breaking encryption, which isn't just about privacy but about every action over the internet.

I don't see that you can have it both ways; secure encryption and being able to inspect traffic. There's no alternative so it's either using other mechanisms to go after CSE and terrorist material, as currently happens allowing us to know about the scourge, or we may as well revert to everything being on http.

TV sucks these days!

I guess it's open water unlike the Seine, but it did surprise me, I felt like I was sat in quite an industrial area when a couple walked past in swimming costumes and towels.