native_samples

They do not have time. Only realistic alternative is nukes (takes many years to build) or an LNG import terminal (started already, takes years to build). All the alternatives to depending on Russian imports require enormously complex construction projects.

Almost certainly they'd searched for that doctor to get directions?

And that's why I said "nobody thinks that", indeed.

Nonetheless, you seem to be fluent. Lots of people around the world speak some English but aren't fluent, don't get dubbing or subtitles into their own language for every film (or do but way late and they don't want to wait), and some of those people could in fact struggle to follow complex dialogue or might misunderstand idioms.

The current situation is not in any way desperate. All claims that a desperate crisis exists are based on the assumption of feedback loops that do not yet show up in any actual data and in fact many temperature datasets e.g. from satellites, weather balloons or the USA's own state of the art surface temperature network show virtually no warming at all for decades. To see warming you have to look at heavily modified composite datasets that are constantly being revised using methodologies so extreme that they literally create entirely new trends where the raw data doesn't contain any.

In an environment with as much epistemic uncertainty as climatology has, it is madness to allow bureaucrats to control anything at all. They are in no way fit to make important decisions on scientific topics.

You originally claimed "Look at Brexit, it has caused economic harm". A direct causal assertion. Now you've switched to "various organizations claim it will cause harm" which is a very different thing.

"you lament that EU commissioners are voted in by party blocs in the EU parliament"

Where did I say that? I said the opposite, right? That in theory they are appointed directly by national governments without EU parliament or Commission involvement (in theory, but apparently not in practice). EU Parliament can only fire the entire Commission at once, it doesn't select Commissioners and never has.

"you say that people vote for parties in the UK (they don't they vote for MPs, regardless of their party affiliation is written on the ballot), and that this is good"

No, because I didn't express any view on whether it's good or not, I described how the system works. Why do you keep putting words in my mouth like that?

"even the Bank of England says that the UK will suffer more than other G7 and EU nations due to the current supply side inflation"

Bank of England, IMF etc said a lot of stuff that turned out to be flat wrong about Brexit in the past. None of these institutions has any credibility. Every single one wanted Brexit not to happen for ideological reasons and created "expert" forecasts on that basis. A former BoE chief even said the entire profession of economics was in crisis, their prediction misses were so bad, and he's right.

At any rate, the more important point is that, again, trying to tease apart inflation due to fighting COVID from inflation due to Brexit is now hopeless. I'm not happy about that. I feel like COVID was a massive distraction and has largely prevented the government capitalizing on Brexit, and it also means we'll never be able to resolve this economic impact debate. The cost of lockdowns, mass testing, travel restrictions etc is so massive that Brexit is a mosquito in comparison.

"Sticking your fingers in your ears so that you don't need to listen to people telling you otherwise doesn't mean a doughnut is a stick of celery"

The people in question aren't neutral bystanders, they very much want certain outcomes (for ideological reasons). Brexit is neither a donut nor celery, it's merely a continuation of the long term trend towards decentralized governance - look at a graph of how many countries exist over time to see this. In such a way it can work out better or worse depending very much on your perspective and values.

Used Jira at the last company. Use YouTrack now. YouTrack is better, hands down. Much faster UI, more keyboardable, better integrated into the IDE, integrating it with CI and mailboxes is easy.

Caveats: new job is small so it's a small instance. JetBrain's own YT instance is pretty fast though, so I guess it can scale well. Also, we don't use the new KB/wiki feature so can't comment on that. It's probably got less features than Confluence. We don't use the scrum features.

Biggest caveat - I speak as a developer. One of the biggest problems with Jira was the culture that surrounds it. Clueless PMs who had never written software in their life kept creating fixed workflows in which you couldn't transition tickets to arbitrary states (for no apparent reason, there seemed to be no benefit to these rules). So we were constantly being slowed down by the need to get the handful of people with Jira access to edit the workflows and add more transitions, which was pure makework, especially as even figuring out who the admins were was remarkably complicated. PMs also had a weird Jira fetish, they were like, if it's not in Jira it doesn't exist. So they forced the project to change from a more normal SW dev project early on to mandating that every commit had a ticket associated, and that ticket had to be scheduled into a sprint etc. It was just rank stupidity. Want to do a quick refactoring, as part of your current task? Roll it all into one giant commit because otherwise you'll need to file a ticket. New place doesn't work like that. YouTrack is used more simply, like a todo list. Git logs are the source of truth.

Latest versions of YouTrack come with a knowledge base and pretty flexible workflows support. I'm curious why YouTrack never seems to be listed as a Jira+Confluence competitor, given the similar target markets.

Yes. Google's first decade was notorious for their terrible products. That's why nobody used anything made by Google before 2016.

Ye gods. What has become of that once great organization when this is the best response you can come up with?

That supports my point, no? The paragraph you cited boils down to "there is an association between being less sick and not getting Alzheimer's (i.e. being less sick" + "there seems to be an association between literally any vaccine regardless of mechanism or target and less Alzheimers". These are not specific biological mechanisms of action, they're just correlations supported by an ultra-vague causal hypothesis of the form "maybe microbes cause Alzheimers". That's not actually a causal biological explanation.

In the UK people vote for parties and not individuals almost all of the time, so the whip system is there to ensure people get what they actually voted for. A good example of where this disastrously failed is just after Brexit where a lot of MPs campaigned on a platform of respecting the vote, then did a 180 degree turn and refused to do so once in power. They all lost the whip and were kicked out of the party but then refused to call by-elections to let the voters re-decide. Eventually, Boris was able to call an election and every single one of those MPs lost their seats.

"Look at Brexit, it has caused economic harm to the UK, and this has caused support for it to drop"

Economic harm?! The impact of Brexit, if any exists at all, is unmeasurable because it's lost in the noise compared to lockdowns and trying to fight COVID.

What we can say for sure is that the people who claimed voting to leave would trigger an immediate recession were wrong. The economy grew in the years after the vote. Actual implementation was largely put on hold just months after leaving due to COVID and little has changed since.

The polls said the same for the British population before the referendum process started. The population changed its mind before the vote.

Actually, you have to be careful with polls. Polling showed a very clear and strong majority of the British population did not like the EU and were basically opposed to it, but a significant chunk of those people were scared of the threatened economic and tax consequences (which were in the end a lie - there was no emergency tax hike and no recession). If they had not been threatened with ruin then the Leave vote would have been much higher.

The EU has demonstrated it is willing to create essentially unlimited amounts of disruption in order to stop countries leaving. It won't play nice, or respect the wishes of the electorate. It will fight them. Inevitably that scares people, it did in the UK too. This does not mean that those people actually like their situation.

Only a small minority of people actually think continent sized governments are a good idea, especially in Europe. Most people think this is self-evidently a bad idea, which is why the EU leaderships are never willing to let people actually have a referendum on the question - the UK being the lone exception, and look at how nastily the various pro-EU minorities in power tried to stop it being implemented!

"Americans manage to do it, after all."

Americans fought a brutal civil war to ensure the federal government would continue to enjoy supremacy over the states. In the modern era, about half of Americans currently think their country is heading for a second civil war, according to opinion polls. In recent days you're seeing elected federal politicians directly state that people should disobey rulings of the Supreme Court and laws of state governments. You've had federal agencies spying on and directly attacking elected presidents, with no consequences.

So it is absolutely not clear that Americans manage to do this, in a timeless/stable sense. They've managed it in the 20th century but for most of that time they had serious external enemies to bind the country together. Historically speaking, very large and powerful governments tend to collapse from internal decay, splintering into small countries. The number of countries rapidly increased in the 20th century as empires fell apart and new countries formed in their wake. Very few/no people regret this process - you don't see many people hankering after the Ottoman Empire or USSR, do you? A lot of the instability in the Middle East is a legacy of this process, for example.

Having once been a heavy user of emacs and then switched to IDEA, I'm not sure emacs actually is more extensible. The IDEA API is enormous and very powerful. Plugins don't seem particularly limited in what they can do.