gghhzzgghhzz

I can't find the term 'substantial' in the linked source. So I think maybe you are editorialising.

Here is the actual text from 4.7.

> We have investigated the allegation that Cambridge Analytica provided data analytics services to Leave.EU. Our focus has been on the use of personal data and whether Leave.EU breached the DPA98. We served Information Notices on Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica to gather evidence as part of our investigation.

> Information placed in the public domain by some of those subject to investigation suggested a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU, and both sides have acknowledged there was an initial exploration of how to work together during the Referendum campaign. Brittany Kaiser, Director of Program Development at Cambridge Analytica, appeared at a Leave.EU news conference in 2015. Statements by representatives of Leave.EU made in 2016 also indicated that Cambridge Analytica had worked for them. Senior Cambridge Analytica staff also claimed they worked with Leave.EU.

> In response to Information Notices served on them, both parties have stated that only preliminary discussions took place, and the relationship did not move forward when Leave.EU failed to attain the designation as the official Leave campaign. In evidence provided to the ICO, Leave.EU stated that four meetings took place:

> 23 October 2015 representatives of Leave EU met with CA staff, this was a basic introductory meeting to express interest in potentially working together

> 18 November 2015 CA appeared at a press conference with Leave.eu

> 20 November 2015 CA went to Leave.EU’s Bristol offices and pitched their product.

> 8 January 2016 representatives of Leave.EU met CA in London, and CA presented a proposal for future work together.

The ICO report does not specify that any work was carried out, or what exactly that work was.

Also worth noting that the pdf in interim report The related findings of the final report after 3 year investigation are summerised here

https://cy.ico.org.uk/media2/migrated/2618383/20201002_ico-o...

> From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK - beyond some initial enquiries made by SCL/CA in relation to UKIP data in the early stages of the referendum process. This strand of work does not appear to have then been taken forward by SCL/CA.

We had the same issue with Brexit

It was in CA's interest to have people believe they had some sort of magic algorithm.

And it was on the losing side's interest to believe that they would have won the vote if not interference by magic.

The Information Commissioner Office carried out an extensive investigation and concluded that CA were not involved at all with either of the two leave supporting organisations.

But this fact is simply ignored and undefined campaign by CA still used as the simple excuse for why they lost.

A large ICO investigation concluded that they were not involved in Brexit at all.

I think people wanted to believe there was some external hand at work, and it suited CA to pretend they were more capable than they were.

Cummings spoke about using normal Facebook ad segmentation to target some demographics.

> If you support Ukraine you cannot support Iran, and this is Ukraine's stance as well

The three countries that have been attacked, including civilian infrastructure, are Ukraine, Lebanon and Iran

Surely that has to be the default position. They all have a right to defend themselves and a valid claim for reparations.

The one I can't get over is that when Netanyahu was speaking at the UN, he claimed they have hacked mobile phones in Gaza to force broadcast the speech.

Yet months of co-ordination and training between various disconnected groups / gangs / militias, was completely undetectable.

indeed. One of the only positive things Obama did internationally.

The regime may be horrific, but the only route out was through supporting and encoraging change and opening up and progressive forces.

It's a country with 90 million people, and many groups and external influences. Could end up like Iraq.

and it's Europe that will experince the political chaos as result of pressure from refugees, not the US.

An independent Scotland or Wales would have pretty much the same trading relationship with the EU, as England has.

At least for several decades after independence

The level of integration of everything, including trade and supply chains and finance etc, is so big as to be almost total.

In addition, I'm pretty sure that EU would not welcome another hard border with England, it's already waisted far too much time and effort on the issue in Ireland. I'm sure it doesn't want to have to go through that again.

The problem with this argument is that it is very simplistic.

And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.

We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.

Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place. Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.

> The group's stated aim is to stop the UK or any UK companies giving Israel any military support. They target companies who they think supply Israel. They break in and smash them, and as you've hopefully just seen with your own eyes, they are not afraid to attack people with sledgehammers. They use violence to achieve their political aim. They are terrorists and belong in prison.

Yet none of them are being prosecuted under the terrorism act, or on any charge related to terrorism.

"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers"

Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?

I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.

Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.

It's not terrorism.

If it wanted nuclear weapons, it would just buy some from Pakistan.

Their actions do not follow the conclusion you state.

What is clear now though to any Iranian is that they should get nuclear weapons asap. Diplomacy is just a tool used by the west to string you along while they get ready to bomb you

GP is missing one very relevant example of Libya. Gaddafi was persuaded by the west to abandon his nuclear programme, and 8 years later he was dead in a ditch.

I have yet to see good argument as to why the reactors on nuclear subs are "proof" of the viability of domestic commercial electrical reactors. They have different commercial viability, enriched fuel and safety requirements. Plus I don't think the primary use of reactors on subs is to generate electricity.

Not dismissing SMR for commercial use, but don't see how military subs / ships are relevant

It's in a residential area. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy. The whole area is heavily militarized, there are bases everywhere, citizens are automaticlaly enrolled into the IDF - every Israeli citizen in a certain age group can be considered a legitimate millitary target if you follow your logic.

The arguments you are using for attacking Palestinian infastructure and people are more than applicable to Israeli infastructure and population.

In international law people have the right to resist occupation through millitary means. In a small area under occupation then there is no means to create a millitary setup that matches what the 'good guys' consider to be legitimate.

If you want to be consistent then allow Palestinians to have a millitary, air space, airports, ports, navy, jets, nuclear weapons etc. And then you can fight them on equal terms.

> protected installations (such as residential areas or even hospitals) lose their protection if they are being abused by a warring party for military operations

You should maybe research where key millitary apparatus of the Israeli state is located. The headquarters of the IDF for example.

I admit there's something that doesn't add up.

I listened to him being asked a question on UK / US trade and his answer was very generic - something something Amazon.

To be a forex trader, you would live and breathe detail on stuff like this. To be in the top 1% of forex traders you would be far beyond that.

yes he isn't in that position now, but I expected some novel insight that you could only get from a specialist, not something that anyone could come up with.

This isn't the only example.

I don't disagree with most of what he is saying, and I'm very happy for him that he has managed to break through in a small way to get his message out.

but still something iffy.

debt goes down in real terms

but "tax on savers ie the rich"

rich normally are rich enough to protect their savings from inflation. e.g. by putting it in an effective monopoly - land or housing (housing is a monopoly if you also are rich enough to have some influence on what / where houses are built / not built)

> but there's a factor of cant pay the creditors and you just stop

in the UK case then £895 of the debt is owned directly by the bank of England. So in the case of about 1/3rd of the debt the 'creditor' is your own central bank.

The government can of course pay interest on gilts by simply issuing more gilts. It's one of the advantages of running a country, intergeneration debt.

> The total tax burden is probably over 100%

Compared to what? income? capital gains? GDP?

total tax in UK through all taxes is 36.1% of GDP.

Taxes are not high in historical terms. USA for example had much higher tax rates (90% top income tax band) while it was arguably undergoing its phase of highest development.

Roads (and everything) get worse if governments do not invest in roads, or they invest in roads, but have outsourced to multiple layers of contractors who end up extracting a lot of the investment in profit and squeezing of labour costs and not in quality of road building.

> Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy.

A country cannot go bankrupt. After the war the debt to gdp ratio was 250%, and from that position the government nationalised 20% of industry, built houses, create the NHS and welfare state and developed a nuclear programme.

> corporate tax rate of 25%

on profit yes, but if you are big enough you declare as little profit as possible.

> personal income tax of 45%

that's the highest band there is, payable only on income over £125,140

> sales tax of 20% Yikes.

well it's a tax on added value on every step thorough the retail chain, collectable by the end retailer. It's zero rate on food and child clothes and some other things.

Taxes are indeed on the wrong places in many cases: e.g. dividend tax on unearned income should be equalised with income tax, income tax thresholds should be increased in line with inflation / wages and not frozen as they currently are. but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here.

Everything that provides any service or assistance to normal life has been sold off and rented back to us at enormous cost, often with many of extra financial scalping included in the systems we are forced to rely on. And a percentage of the extracted wealth is used to push political and public narrative to incentivise the selling off more.

Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.

And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.

A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.

We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.

Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.

I could go on.

The EU itself imposed a limit of deficit spending to 3% GDP

The Eurozone included economies as diverse as Greece, Spain, Lithuania and Germany

These are some of the self-contradictions I'm referring to.

And the basic issue is that you cannot have a single monetary policy and impose half a fiscal policy, without political unification. And IMO that will never be squared.

I suppose the new glaring contradiction is that environmental policy and net zero policy has primacy (rightly in my view), but now so does making bombs.

as a standards body, yes some of the output is high. I think it serves a useful function.

on the macro level though I can't see it myself.

EU area had everything going for it in terms of being able to make drastic progressive shifts forward in multiple areas. but instead since 2008 its been doing little but dealing with the contradictions of its own self-imposed constraints. be that debt crisis, energy policy, fortress border policy, emigration issues, Brexit and endless political dramas over reactionary political movements. It's now fixated with re-armament, something that threatens to produce yet another lost decade.

Meanwhile, China and other parts of Asia have taken these same 20 years to create entire new sectors and lead the world in them.

"The history tells us that the only condition for lasting peace with Russia is either strong and decisive resistance or military alliance membership"

20th century history unfortunately tells us the answer is containment, not direct engagement.

From handing over Poland and eastern europe to Stalin in 1945, or refusing to protect Hungary in 1956 or interfere explicitly in the soviet sphere of influence, in exchange for them not interfering explicitly in western sphere of influence.

It's not a nice lesson, but that was how we achieved some form of peace for decades.

"EU and the Arab League"

EU does not classify Hezbollah as a terror organisation, only its military wing.

We had a similar political issue in the UK. Boris Johnson was a polarising figure, yet many people had to admit that what he and his active transport advisor Andrew Gilligan promised to do for cycling and active transport infrastructure and livable neighbourhoods was game changing.

Unfortunately it never completed, because when he went then so did the good work, the funding, and now it's back to being a culture war 'war on drivers' issue.

That's a far far bigger endevour than my efforts.. but I do love walking from a city to the airport, dragging my carry-on if necessary.

The last part can be a bit stressful, as airport terminals are not always made for pedestrian access. But it's very satisfying to feel like you have 'escaped' a city under your own steam as it kind of falls apart and back together.

I've used it as a stand in workflow/case management tool in dev and production apps a few times. e.g. when presented with a lot of detailed requirements on case management from product managers, and knowing at an early stage they are far too detailed to stand up to the reality of being used in the business, I've argued for simply creating a new project in an existing well-speced Jira instance with minimal workflow, taking that live as a prototype and modifying the workflow later, possibly with the goal of getting better specs for replacing it with something custom-built.

As a development tool for stories / tasks and bug tracking I don't enjoy it.

As someone who considers themselves on the left, i have broadly the same view.

I also don't have a hard view on gun control, because if the state authorities are militarised then it's hard to argue that civil society can't be. The solution for this of course is to demilitarise the police.

Putting aside your implied definition of Leftists here. The Palestinian point is broadly enlightening, but maybe not in the way you intended. Armed struggle for the purpose of self determination should be materially supported in Ukraine, but not in Palestine. This is the glowing contradiction, and I'm not sure real leftists are the most guilty party here.

The treatment of Assange defies belief, and the hypocrisy is off the scale. The defense from many people who would nominally be appalled by this, seems to rest on the poor character of Assange, so he gets written off. The poor character point may or may not be correct, but is completely irrelevant, and if it relates to civil or criminal offences then it has never been allowed to be tested.