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The point I'm making is that (at least as far as the UK is concerned), you can't get away with painting the right as nutters engaged in whipping up fears over nothing when there is rock solid substance that what they (the right) were saying for decades was actually true, i.e. that children were being abused by people predominantly from particular groups, and that this abuse was being deliberately ignored. And what makes the cases in the UK particularly poignant is that it was leftist concerns i.e. political correctness that motivated the cover-ups. If you were a child in the crosshairs, you absolutely did need to be afraid of the left.

If they really can get the cars running at 150 mph regularly these might be competitive for long journeys in Europe. Obviously it will depend in some part on the self-driving technology.

> mass migrations that will be required later this century due to carbon emissions.

...only if we choose not to do something about controlling fertility. But in the end I strongly suspect we'll all be travelling about a lot less. Which is fine with me. Globalism is all about destroying diversity and culture, which is an awful future.

I strongly suspect there are few large settlements worldwide where it's not possible to grow produce either outdoors or in polytunnels to cater for this need. But if it were the case, we (humanity) could either move the settlements or allow an exception for the missing essentials. It would still drastically reduce freighting overall.

> blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects.

Up to a point - but the UK for example deliberately destroyed its own coal industry partly due to concern over carbon, so I would say it's not completely reasonable to give countries a pass for merely responding to fossil fuel usage generally. Nations can and do take the better choice sometimes.

It's the contrast between the incessant virtue signalling from the Canadian government with the wanton destruction of the environment and harm inflicted on indigenous people that is really sickening.

Here's a wild, crazy, dangerous idea for discussion: how about we start curtailing globalism, and encourage people to live less carbon intensive lives by building economies based around what's available nearby?

> cheap things humanity can do to offset carbon emissions

Contraception.

Can't we all just trust Snopes though? /s

Yeah the biomass thing in the UK is an absolute joke - cynical greenwashing. So much of what I hear makes me question whether Oxbridge humanities graduates should be kept far, far away from any decision making involving science:

'James Woodley, an Environmental Biologist and resident of Northampton County, North Carolina, an area severely affected by wood pellet production for Drax’s biomass burning, said: ‘Now that the forests are gone, so is the sense of community. Dust is everywhere, even people are breathing in dust and becoming sick from it. When Enviva [a Drax pellet supplier] moved to our community, and to other poor communities in the Southeastern US, the company promised to bring hope to the hopeless, to reduce poverty, but what they ended up bringing was truckloads of logs, daily, constantly barrelling through.’'

https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2019/drax-protest-pr-2/

Shale oil/tar sands really are a truly disgusting and ongoing environmental catastrophe for which there can be no reasonable explanation in 2020, and about which Canadians should be ashamed. If there were any justice in the world Canada would have sanctions applied to it over this years ago.

I always wondered why the hell I would feel so wrecked at certain times of day. It's a nightmare. Thank god I WFH these days.

It's going to be interesting to see how the defence handle her apparently pretty rapid recovery to good mental health post-Theranos, i.e. new boyfriend, posting smiley selfies etc.

Another GIS-er here. Your comment made me think about the modifiable areal unit problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_problem

The coastline paradox and MAU effectively seem to be of the same class, i.e., change the rules for your measurement and you get different results. This hadn't occurred to me before. I wonder if there's other similar?

It's remarkable how all the woke stuff seemed to go to a different level very soon after Occupy Wall Street.

Yet somehow, magically, there are no environmental impacts from mass migration.

One of the main positive effects for me is not having to attempt to function in an oxygen-deprived office.

Hard times make strong men: and they seriously needed to perform an academic study to prove this? Nice work if you can get the grant money...

And I await the counter-study, i.e. on the detachment from the realities of life of the average urban Cambridge University psychology researcher.

When everything's urgent, nothing's urgent.

Trust me, my communist Welsh coal-mining grandfather would be disgusted by the modern left.

It's funny how attempts at creating utopia always seem to end in horrific bloody violence.

> tribal leaders striving to unite people via voluntary consensus, tolerance and moderation

'Citizen 99234832, we have received reports that suggest you are insufficiently consensual, tolerant and moderate. Please report to camp X101 for voluntary reeducation, or face the consequences.'

> 1. No one working in tech actually wants to solve a problem and move on. The problems are too fun to leave alone once there's an MVP. Enter stage left, all the framework churn. Adoption of graph databases that don't fit the problem. All because the developers are bored and not business aligned.

There's another problem arising out of this for those of us that DO like to solve problems and move on - we're seen as not 'proper' techies if we're not completely obsessed with technology, able to bore for hours, with a github full of projects etc etc...

I like using technology to solve problems. I really don't give a stuff about the intricate subtleties of a versus b technology unless it absolutely matters, because for the vast majority of situations the obvious, pragmatic choice will do the job just fine.

Corryvreckan (Scotland, but still) has one of the fiercest tidal races in the world - the story goes that George Orwell almost drowned in one of the whirlpools.

'Although not, as is sometimes believed, formally classified by the Royal Navy as unnavigable, the nearby Grey Dogs, or Little Corryvreckan, are classified as such.[1] The Admiralty's West Coast of Scotland Pilot guide to inshore waters calls it "very violent and dangerous" and says "no vessel should then attempt this passage without local knowledge". Experienced scuba divers who have explored the waters have described it as "potentially the most dangerous dive in Britain"'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Corryvreckan

The resurgence pool at Porth Yr Ogof (Wales) is another innocuous looking stretch of water in Britain with a sad tally of deaths associated: http://www.ogof.org.uk/porth-yr-ogof.html

'Another sinister danger in this cave is the resurgence pool, where the water leaving the cave is forced through a narrow passage, in doing so it has scoured out a 7 m deep pool with underwater ledges, this coupled with the strong undercurrents created by the flow of the water has made this the most dangerous location in any British cave. In this short section of cave 10 people have drowned all within the sight of daylight, the dangers here should not be underestimated, signs in the cave before the pool warn of the danger and direct you to alternative exits.'

Kind of a patronising comment in itself, as if the poor little snowflakes are so weak that they'll run away from tech after an extremely minor bit of ribbing at their expense.

Correct.

I've come to the conclusion that many of the powerful in the UK view the nation primarily as a means for personal gain of one kind of another, and have no particular attachment to the UK's history, culture, and people, indeed, many of them seem to view the English (in particular) with barely disguised contempt.

> spatial queries being executed on the globe

But it's perfectly possible to create geodesically-correct buffers, for example - such as you might see when calculating ballistic missile range over thousands of kilometres - in a 2D projection, and indeed this has been available for decades. And we have plenty of global models, such as WGS 84: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System

So what exactly are you talking about?

But why, if completely 3D GIS would be so super awesome, do you think that that decent tech stack doesn't exist? The answer is that for the vast majority of applications of GIS, 3D is just an unhelpful distraction.

I don't want to upset you, but I really think you are not speaking from a position of knowledge if you think otherwise (I have a couple of degrees in Geography including one in GIS specifically, plus 15+ years' experience in the field).

It would certainly be interesting as an exam question, for example, to compare 2D and 3D for what it would reveal about each, but in the end it's all about choosing an appropriate model for the task at hand. I'd therefore suggest that pitting 2D against 3D is actively choosing to set up some kind of battle that doesn't actually exist in reality - most of the time there is nothing to be added to an analysis by choosing to store data in 3D, and 2D simplifies all parts of the chain i.e. capture, storage, processing, output etc. I'd strongly reject the idea that but for resistance we'd all be in a wonderland of 3D GIS. People in industry just pick the best tool for the task at hand, and that's almost always 2D.