doingtheiroming

Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.

An oily Stephen Maturin.

I was hoping this was going to be a malicious MCP from the good old days of security tool naming.

"Does this belong in..." seems to be nearly the correct question.

Stephen Maturin switches from opium to coca leaves about halfway through the Master and Commander series (around 1800). Ensuring a steady supply of the leaves becomes a recurring theme as is his sharing of their wonders with the various scientific personalities he comes across.

Surely they could just ask China.

It might well be neoliberal dogma but the rose that got walked through London last week by the Watermen is a reminder that it is also true.

People should complain much more about doctors’ guilds. There are limits on how many doctors can be trained in the US and the U.K. largely as a result of lobbying by doctors’ guilds. They’re called professional associations these days but let’s not pretend they confine themselves to enforcing professional standards.

It's amusing that they actually use the word guild. If the medieval guilds had their way London would still only have one bridge. The irony here is that creatives have an advantage that workers in every other industry lack. Humans value and will continue to value artisinally produced goods. Creatives will always have that in a way that 18th Century weavers and spinners did not. That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.

Will the rise of AI reduce opportunities for creatives? Almost certainly, but unlike essentially all other industries, it won't be wiped out by the rise of automation because humans won't stop liking things that are created by humans. As in music, there will be a shift to performance where customers / clients are engaged in the creative process. In many ways, it will be a return to something like the golden age of portraiture as people pay for engagement.

There are huge opportunities for creatives in the age of AI to create new art forms, created in new ways for new kinds of consumer. Creatives can choose to engage with that or to throw sabots. As London's liverymen show, guilds cannot stop the tide, the opportunity is to become something new that floats on the rising waters.

Yep. Grid integration is great. Engineered markets much less so. Sadly, the incentives for regulators and market participants are well aligned here...

Damn. Came to post the same. You said it better.

It's the real disease of the EU. There's no problem of failed policy that shouldn't be addressed by deepening the policy and making it harder to back track. The only possible response to problems of complexity is to make the complexity more intractable.

Don’t shoot the message.

Reading the comments, it seems that absolutely no one is happy about this. It is either a lie, insufficient or a pointless response to a non-problem.

But it’s a clear achievement. An achievement with lots of nuance. And one that runs counter to many strongly held and arguably ideological positions on all sides of the political spectrum.

Reading responses to it here and on Twitter has been rather depressing.