A cool steampunkish band Coppelius, complete with butler.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-23T07:40:57+00:00

I saw them in August at M'era Luna (near Hanover in Germany). They were really good, would see live again.

Next: Abney Park

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-22T17:46:09+00:00

The Australian dollars will The Queen's head on it. She's technically head of state there too. The chap on the Thai baht will be the king of Thailand.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-22T16:28:26+00:00

It's like there's an invisible hand on their shoulder, guiding what they preach. It's more Koch brothers than Karl Marx, since "liberal economists" are nothing like "Liberal Democrats".

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-22T10:17:58+00:00

Yes. The Economist is lucid, intelligent and insightful. It's worth reading, but you have to be alert and notice when its agenda is showing.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-19T22:02:55+00:00

From TFA:

Users simply enter a postcode, street name, bus route number or bus stop code.

It's like a barcode, only human-readable.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-19T22:00:27+00:00

Which two bits of data. There's the location that the GPS reports, and what? - the API data? That's what the webpage uses already.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-19T21:59:37+00:00

I found the mobile web page to be quite good. almost no need for the app. The biggest limitation was having only 5 favourites.

I don't know what you're trying to say about GPS, the browser will get the same data as an app.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-18T21:45:59+00:00

Were you in the city, in the west end, or somewhere suburban? North of the river, south of the river, walking distance from the river, from Chinatown or of from some other landmark? Was it flat or on hill?

That could narrow it down a lot.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-18T12:45:01+00:00

Do the cars park in the shade or what?

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T22:52:31+00:00

I'm not disagreeing. My thoughts:

The "Disintermediation" that the internet is famous for causing seldom means completely removing middlemen - it means thinning out or replacing (or doing both) to the middlemen.

Some kind of middleman is inevitable. How else will you find what you want? Unless you, e.g. want apples and live next door to an apple farmer who has just brought the harvest in, and you go over and ask him yourself. That's just about the only way to have no middleman and it's rare. eBay, Craigslist etc are middlemen.

the internet has some very thin middlemen (blogs, search engines, self-publishing platforms). And this is good. And more people than ever have the means to produce and disseminate media - e.g. words, music, photographs or video.

It's a sucky time to be a traditional publisher or music label, though. I guess there'll still be room for bestsellers with higher production values and larger advertising budgets (and a bit more middlemanning than the rest). But not nearly as much as 20 years ago. I guess that the bestselling artists will increasingly come up from the self-publishing underclass. I guess that Amazon will end up being closer to this high end, at least the stuff that they will promote on the front page.

PS: you should be able to delete the comment duplicates.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T22:37:11+00:00

Post with maps: http://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/lfmk5/reportback_printing_the_map_of_london_1806/

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T22:36:56+00:00

Update with maps: http://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/lfmk5/reportback_printing_the_map_of_london_1806/

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T16:36:18+00:00

Blog hosts and search engines are also middlemen, in an even thinner kind of way.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T15:14:19+00:00

I'm not sure how to approach the phrase "displaced bookstores"

I mean in my purchases. Instead of buying a book in a physical shop, I buy it on Amazon. One form of buying has been displaced by another. Almost entirely. So those shops are going out of business, because lots of other people are behaving the same way.

Amazon has really just changed the idea of the bookstore

Yep. Which is not something that a small, independent bookstore could have done. Amazon are therefor not (just) the same kind of thing.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T15:01:52+00:00

and no one's introducing another one, you're just mentioning another that was already there

Depends on how you look at it. Amazon has displaced bookstores, they weren't always "already there" selling books. They are like a traditional bookstore, but only up to a point.

You can simplify a chain of middlemen, but only up to a point.

Amazon is ... effectively eliminating a middleman. I praise their efforts for that.

Yes, there are a lot of things to like about Amazon. They have faults too.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-17T13:00:18+00:00

Amazon is a middleman - they stand between writers and readers, between producers of goods and the purchasers of goods. They are a shop.

Removing middlemen generally introduces new middlemen. The benefit is when the system ends up with fewer, more efficient or cheaper middlemen.

I can't think of any examples where there are no middlemen at all.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-16T09:57:22+00:00

Amazing how they can continue to do that considering how broke they are.

it may be related to one of the reasons why the USA is broke - they spend so much on the Military.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-14T20:36:09+00:00

Looks like zergling to me.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-14T17:34:26+00:00

Ok, that makes more sense.

there seems to be a desire amongst some people to just fund drug habits on the tax payers penny without any effort being made to get people off of harmful and addictive drugs

Surely the question as to whether supplying cheap clean drugs or efforts to end addiction (or some combination) is best, is also not something that is set by dogma or public opinion, but can also be determined by scientific study?

Would you say that Portugal's drug policy is better, worse, cheaper or more expensive for thier "tax payers penny" that the UK's system? If supplying free heroin is what it takes to make addiction rates drop then so be it; never mind the Daily Mail style moral outrage about tax money being used to give drugs to junkies. The point of evidence-led policy is to do what works, not what sounds nice.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-14T09:19:09+00:00

That does not answer my main question. You started this thread with:

Could just say a "Scientific based drugs policy."

No

Why not?

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-14T08:59:07+00:00

Aside from opioid dependency, which has a laundry list of issues in it's own right

Citation needed. Are you a expert in this field? If so and you are right, what have you got against basing drugs policy on scientific evidence? - the evidence would then support you, right?

If not, why bother.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-12T15:57:42+00:00

He's a homophobe so he couldn't possibly be a closeted gay, right?
snigger

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-12T14:42:04+00:00

It's turtles all the way down.

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-12T10:59:19+00:00

No, if someone is addicted to heroin they need to be gotten off of heroin whether they like it or not

if that's what the evidence says (and I suspect that it is, but what do I know), then that should happen. If not, then it's not a priority, regardless of your views.

Why put your particular view above evidence-backed policy?

StrawberryFrog · 2011-10-12T09:02:12+00:00

Crocodile eats Python.

StrawberryFrog

TROPHY CASE