notabothonest

> I mean that is obviously overly dramatic posturing nonsense.

No it is not, not in the least. I wouldn't be so dismissive of someone when you clearly don't know the subject area (geopolitics).

There are geopolitical reasons for what Putin is doing in Ukraine. I recommend listing to "Peter Zeihan" on the subject, for starters. He's covered the war very well.

The underlying goal is to push the Russian "frontier" up to defensible geographical choke points before Russia's demographic decline makes it impossible to do so. This doesn't stop at Ukraine. The push would take all of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova, a north eastern chunk of Romania, and an eastern chunk of Poland up to the Vistula. Finland would also have to continue to be neutral, or would have to be taken as well. This is why the Russians have reacted badly to the suggestion that Finland is joining NATO. The gas restriction to Germany was a Russian attempt to push the country out of the NATO alliance, which would have made any NATO response difficult once Russia started on NATO states in the Baltic.

Putin has also made it clear that what he can't achieve with conventional military force, he is willing to attempt with tactical nuclear weapons. Taken together, the clear and stated desire to annex NATO nations (see Putin's recent speech on the Baltics historically belonging to Russia, and Ukraine "not being a real country"), the willingness to use nuclear weapons, and the fact that he is very clearly acting with the above aims in mind, should have you concerned.

The fact that the Russian army has been beaten back in Ukraine should not lull us into a false sense of security. They have plenty more manpower reserves they can draw on, and the Russians have a history of starting wars in somewhat of a shambles, before reforming and producing an army that is more of a stream roller.

> They were denied jobs and housing, the latter basically denying them a vote (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote).

They were not "denied the vote". Read your own link. "However, unlike the situation in Great Britain, non-ratepayers did not have a vote in local government elections." - if you did not pay rates, you couldn't vote in local elections, but could still vote for Parliament.

Furthermore, from your link:

> the Parliament of Northern Ireland voted to update the voting rules for elections to the Northern Ireland House of Commons, which were implemented for the 1969 Northern Ireland general election, and for local government elections, which was done by the Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1969, passed on 25 November 1969.

So, the IRA campaign began after the voting situation was equalised, for rate payers and non rate payers alike, in 1969. And when the Stormont Parliament was abolished in 1972, the MPs for NI were elected using UK wide rules, which again, did not "basically deny them the vote".

Thus, the IRA campaign was not about civil rights. It was about forcibly pushing NI into the Republic of Ireland, against the wishes of the majority of the population.

> in a single event 745 People were injured (154 with gunshot wounds) and a 9 year old was killed.

And which "event" was this, because given the nonsense in the rest of your post, I'm betting that this didn't happen.

I agree we should invest in both.

The issue comes when people think that renewables are a panacea, and we should start building renewables capacity where it doesn't even make sense. For example; wind power is great in and around the North Sea, but makes little sense in central and eastern Europe. Solar power is great in Spain, Portugal and Italy, but the ROI is very poor anywhere north of the Alps.

> Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage.

On what basis do you make this assertion?

Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never see any inclusion of the cost of new transmission lines from any new renewables site.

The Germans have invested billions upon billions in becoming wholly renewable, with miles of new grid infrastructure (but next to no energy storage) and they are still at the mercy of Russian gas supplies... and dependant upon French nuclear power.

It's time to face reality and start investing in fission again, at least until fusion becomes a viable alternative.

Agreed. According to the article, if I didn't write a factory class with the knowledge that it was described in the GoF book, then I'm cargo culting, regardless of whether I understand its value as a creational pattern or not. If I also wrote that class using TDD and have never read Kent Beck or Bob C. Martin, then I'm also cargo culting.

Good luck! Now is the time to do it, and get it put into your contract. You have additional leverage as employers are panicked by stories of workers resigning en masse if not granted additional working from home time.

Don't fall for the "you can do more work because you're not commuting" line - if commuting is considered work time, then you deserve to be remunerated for that time, and they owe you back pay for each day you commuted in the past.

Well, this is an ultra-cynical take on the article. It's also a little myopic in the sense that it assumes increased work flexibility must somehow have a high associated cost, such as loss of insurance, or lack of job stability. That just isn't the case.

Although I don't believe that we're about to enter some form of work/life balance utopia, just from my own circle of friends, big changes are inbound.

Firstly, many of us, including me, have for years been told that working from home more than a day a week was an impossibility, and that we should be grateful for that 1 day at all. Although frequently WFH days came with caveats, such as no Mon/Fri WFH, and there was the ever present threat of it being taken away.

Then, along comes the pandemic, and 'lo and behold, I've been working home for over a year without any issue. So have the bulk of the people I know, especially those in the technology sector. All of a sudden the dozens of arguments I have had with clients and employers over the years have all landed firmly on what I have been saying all along; we don't need to be in work every day, hell, we don't even need to be in work every week.

The cat is out of the bag now, and there isn't going to be putting it back in. A lot of the last year has been positive for many, including me. I've seen more of my own daughter in the past year than I've seen in the previous 7 years combined, and I've come to appreciate how important that has been to both of us. I'm not about to let that go without a fight.

It depends. It was not something that happened at a fixed rate. There were periods steady rise between 1 and 2.5m per century... but then you had events like the sudden flooding of the Black Sea area from the Med, or the Tsunami which finished off Doggerland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Disappearance - both of these events would have had human victims, and survivors, and must have been absolutely terrifying.

It's not necessarily a binary thing. You can have gradual sea level rise punctuated with rapid inundation events.

This is exactly what happened in the British Isles when low lying Doggerland (between modern England and Denmark) was wiped out by a wave which was likely caused by an underwater landslide; that wave was in turn caused by the melting ice at the end of the ice age, which was otherwise causing gradual sea level increase.