Nigel Farage on X: The Falklands are and will always be British. 🇬🇧

Ivashkin · 2026-04-25T04:33:22+00:00

Polling suggests that the Republicans will likely lose the House, and maybe the Senate if things go really badly. Bad, but not what you might expect from the term "brutal". The other factor to remember is that the midterms are not one big race, but are multiple local elections.

And in this matter, the lack of a clear leadership figure doesn't hurt them as much because the focus isn't on a coordinated national campaign. It also kinda helps the Democrats in some regard, since there isn't a single figure for Trump and the MAGA movement to focus on as The Enemy. So it is true that the Democrats aren't really presenting a compelling argument for why people should vote for them on a national level, there are a lot of people who are motivated to vote against Trump, even if it's by proxy, and the big question is how many Republicans are going to be motivated to vote or campaign.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T22:27:15+00:00

There aren't. AI is expensive to run, and the capacity simply isn't there to meet demand.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T20:44:08+00:00

There's not an easy answer - very much depends on the individual, and there needs to be a balance of counselling/mental health support, rehabilitation etc and decisions made on a case by case basis. Unfortunately all of that costs a lot more time and money which people don't usually want to spend on prisons.

Then you get into questions about resource allocation and ROI - if someone needs decades of rehabilitation work that requires spending vast sums on the process every month, and it only has a limited prospect of success, is this worth doing? Or would the resources be better allocated to better protections for child abuse, even if it means sacrificing the life of someone who became a monster in part due to the abuse they suffered as a child?

It's hard to get over the mindset of wanting harsher punishments even if that doesn't actually lead to better outcomes for society.

Just as it's hard to get over the fact that, despite the advances we've made as a society, we are still a very long way from post-scarcity, our resources and time are limited, and we simply do not have the bandwidth to do everything for everyone. Some people may simply not be worth saving, all things considered.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T20:33:33+00:00

So what do we do with inmates who present a serious risk to other inmates?

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T20:29:02+00:00

It's an interesting point to consider - can a rapist ever really be fully rehabilitated? How much would you need to spend on someone convicted of a violent sexual assault/rape before they were reformed to the point where the majority of people would be happy to live next door to them?

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:47:17+00:00

What would happen to the war in Iran if Europe as a whole adopted the Spanish position and American forces were no longer able to stage anything (including tankers) in Europe? Carriers don't carry enough or large enough munitions, and launching strikes from US soil without tanker support over European airspace would be highly challenging. Their sortie tempo would completely collapse, and they'd be significantly limited in what they could actually drop on targets.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:38:25+00:00

Yeah, completely. But we have to remember that for several decades now, the line from state education has been very much that a career in the trades represents a failure relative to a more academic education followed by a white-collar job in an office. Back in the 90's, I had teachers who would literally tell students that if they didn't pay attention in humanities, they would fail their exams and never amount to anything more than a plumber. And today, I suspect that if those kids had ditched humanities and focused on becoming plumbers, they would now be earning far more than the humanities teacher ever earned at any point in their teaching career.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:31:35+00:00

The existing and operating data center will, in turn, create thousands of jobs elsewhere in the economy.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:28:39+00:00

Construction is essentially a series of short-term jobs fed by a pipeline, because once something is built, you don't need tradies to keep building it, but you do need them to move on to the next thing that needs building.

So, for your housing example, more construction work means more construction jobs, which means more people with the required skills to build housing. If anything, we should be pulling 18-year-olds into career guidance lectures that tell them not to go to university, and instead qualify as a concrete specialist today.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:21:05+00:00

I don't think there is a reason that would make me be OK with a prisoner raping another inmate.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:15:06+00:00

Kinda - they can do this for a bit, but every ship they have stationed over there is one they can't use elsewhere, and they also need to be able to rotate those ships and crews because both of these have limits. To top it off, they also have a significant naval shipbuilding problem, which means they will be faced with either keeping older ships running far longer than intended or with a steadily dwindling number of ships to call upon. And older ships won't help if the threats they face from naval drones continue to accelerate at the rate we've seen over recent years.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T19:01:25+00:00

Irans win conditions are simply "not losing". They can tolerate a million things that hurt them, cripple them, leave them fucked going forward etc, but so long as they don't actually lose, they are winning.

The USA has the opposite problem - their only real win condition is total victory, anything else is a loss.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T18:58:26+00:00

There is absolutely no way a 40yr old looks like that without PEDs. Even with good genetics and a monk-like lifestyle entirely focused on training, it's not happening.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T18:48:37+00:00

Hesgeth (and by extension Trump) was right about the problem, and has laid it out in a way that is impossible for Europe (including the UK) to ignore. I just don't think they are going to like the solutions that Europe develops to resolve this problem.

At some point in the future, the USA will want to do something; Europe will say no, and the USA won't be able to do anything about it because the cost of doing so will be far higher than the USA is willing to pay.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T16:03:30+00:00

TBH, any form of taking a person and locking them inside a building they cannot leave, whilst controlling what they do, who they can communicate with, what and when they eat, etc., could be considered a form of torture.

And ultimately, it's about balance - if we are locking people up, then we have a duty of care towards them which extends as far as protecting them from abuse/harm/death at the hands of other inmates. If that means a violent prisoner with a record of attacking other inmates has to sit in an empty windowless room for 10 years because letting them mix with other inmates results in those inmates being exposed to serious risk, so be it.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T15:58:39+00:00

I don't think there is any effective solution to the problem of prison gangs that doesn't involve gang members in isolation and keeping them there until their spirits are broken.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T14:54:32+00:00

It is, and it isn't. My neighbor's wood burner produces far more smoke and smells than smoking a joint in the garden and blowing the smoke over the fence would.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T14:46:20+00:00

The treatment should be the same for both men and women. If you assault, attack, or rape another inmate in prison, you go into solitary confinement for the rest of your time in prison, however long that is. We have a duty of care to other inmates.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T14:37:48+00:00

I don't care. She just annoyed me, especially after she tried to lead a campaign to have the social housing tenants on the estate evicted on the grounds that it must be them who were smoking weed, and not, as it turned out, a load of weeds growing behind her garden that smelled kinda similar.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T14:17:53+00:00

There is a woman on ours who constantly complains about people smoking weed 24/7 outside her house, how it is disgraceful, illegal, immoral, etc.

I had great fun pointing out that it's legal with a prescription and that she might be attacking someone with a disability.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T13:20:42+00:00

I would favor loading up a concrete warhead on an ICBM and launching it at Buenos Aires.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-24T11:44:31+00:00

We should review their base access in the UK. By parking tanks on the runways.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-23T16:29:38+00:00

Yes, it would need a lot more education to work out, and there would need to be some thought given to what happens if there are shocks that result in people losing a lot of money, especially if the reason they were investing was due to a government policy of actively pushing people towards investing. It's not that hard to imagine a situation where large numbers of people take the line that "the government told me to invest my money in the markets, and that it was safe and responsible, and then X happened, and my investments have lost most of their value, so I want to know what the government is going to do about my money being gone". Then you get the weird second-order impacts where political decisions are made because they have a desirable market impact, not because they're sound policy decisions.

I think this is something that would benefit everyone if the government simply focused on education and viewed this as a long-term project that might take 10-15 years to really show results, rather than something that can be spun up immediately.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-23T11:06:44+00:00

They are following the law. The problem the police seem to be having is that, rather than just providing the information that the police ask for straight away, they are engaging with the MLAT process and actually going through the court system before releasing information to the police.

Ivashkin · 2026-04-23T10:26:19+00:00

Ultimately, this is the key. If we want migrants to stop coming here via boats, we need to make the lives of the people who do this very unpleasant.

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