I think their origial plan was to try and ensure that Daniel Korski, the CCHQ preferred candidate, would get selected by putting him up against insane choices like Susan Hall. Unfortunately Korski had to exit because of sexual assault allegations (name a more iconic duo than Tory politicians and criminal sleaze) leaving only the insane candidates.

This sort of situation has become a bit of a classic Tory tale with the amount of times similar things have happened since 2019.

Macquarie - famous for fucking over Thames Water by creating a deliberately complex company structure so they could load it up with debt in order to pay out dividends.

Inverse of the classic:

Wouldn't this be pretty bang-on expected for less premium groceries where profit margins are much thinner?

For example, a food product retailing at £2 where £1.80 covers farming costs and operational costs, inflation of 10% will increase those costs to £1.98, to keep a 20p profit, the retailer would increase the price to £2.18 (9% increase). A more premium food product that retails for £3.50 where the farming costs are only slightly higher might have a £2 cost for the retailer with a much higher markup of £1.50. To keep that same profit after 10% cost inflation (to £2.20), the price would rise to £3.70 (5.7% increase).

I never thought of it before but your comment just made me realise this would be a great backdoor way to get the PR ball rolling. Make the lord's elected with a full PR system. Maybe with half the seats going up for election every 7 years or something.

The two potential roads seem somewhat equivalent to me:

1. Threads federation is blocked by the main Mastodon instances. A huge user base of non-techies starts using Threads and it dwarfs the rest of the fediverse acting as a singular centralised platform. The fediverse continues to be a techie/ideological anti-corporate community as it is now with a relatively small community in the grand scheme of things.
2. Threads federated with some of the big Mastodon instances. Fediverse instances outside of Threads get a large amount of growth as people see the extra content available in this larger federated environment. Growth of Threads still outpaces all other fediverse instances combined. Meta then carries out some form of EEE tactics and some large chunk of the userbase of the non-Threads instances switch to Threads. The techie/anti-corporate community continues to use fediverse instances without any interaction with Threads.

Both scenarios end in a large centralised platform run by Meta and a small community that want to avoid a corporate platform.

I think it's also wise to separate the effect of large corporate instances in the fediverse between effects on Mastodon (where users follow users) vs Lemmy/Kbin (where users follow communities). In the case of Mastodon, the effects of EEE tactics will be strong due to a more powerful network effect because it's important that a particular person is on the same platform as you (i.e. this is a similar situation to XMPP and gchat). In contrast, you just need some people to participate in a Lemmy/Kbin community to make it worth joining, but it doesn't matter exactly who, meaning that membership can be small and sparse but the community still has a meaningful existence (i.e like niche forums).

BNC connector, such a satisfying screw and click into place mechanism.

Apart from the fact it didn't work, I thought his tension task was great and the commitment to continue the stunts was top comedy.

Saw the first clip in the video and couldn't handle watching any more. I'm all for allowing people the autonomy to take their own sensible risks and avoid over safety-fying things, but some people are ridiculous (and selfish in this context). If you're going to go over a level crossing when the barriers are closed, at least have the respect to run across, knowing that you're doing something risky, rather than casually stroll through the danger zone!

Oils is interesting.

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/03/faq.html

Loved the thumb war task. It felt very much like a classic task from the earlier seasons.

* tory moment *

The article states that 70% of those occupying social housing have their rent payed for by housing benefit. The article also mentions that housing benefit comes from central government.

So the effect of this is a transfer of more money from central government to councils and housing associations. As well as an increase in the incomes of councils and HAs from those 30% that are well-off enough to no longer receive housing benefit but are still living in social housing.

Not to say I fully agree with the author's viewpoint, but this article is a good, non-sensational, explanation of the current Thames Water situation. Worth a read if you're interested in what's actually going on.

See if you have a local pottery near you that could make a new lid to fit.

Mr Robot, you missed an important sentence:

Abolishing the non-dom tax regime would raise an estimated £3.6bn a year.

They're really descending into the pits of weird fringe politics - like the sort of stuff you'd see from pre-Farage UKIP.

It also seems to be the opposite strategy to Johnson, who was essentially the bullshitting yes man that wanted great, wonderful, positive things for everyone but with no plan on how to achieve it. Instead of grand visions of new (unfeasable) infrastructure projects based on (non existent) future technology that the government will help develop, and impressive sounding targets (with no execution plan) to "make Britain world beating", we now have policies seeking to actively block and slow development of anything new. Johnson was popular because he was promising progress and great things to everyone. Sunak is now attempting to do the polar opposite of what Johnson used to achieve electoral success, presumably because he's aiming for the opposite of electoral success???

Britons, for instance, think they live in a country where only 37 per cent of people would give 1 per cent of their income to the climate fight, but the study indicates the real figure is 48 per cent.

"48% Vs 52%” Oh god it's the cursed numbers again!

Weirdest set of things in the prize task for quite a while, I loved it.

Bill Stickers is innocent!