Labour's New Country - Broken Bathroom - Assassination, riots, and resignation - July 2024
On election night itself my bathroom flooded, thanks Starmer.
So I’ve been designing a new bathroom, doing the improv show, and watching the social order collapse into assassinations and riots.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse.
Improv Show
Did the end-of-course improv show at the Hoopla thing at the Miller in London.
They had a cider festival going on and I was in the post-interval group, so I wasn’t even allowed to drink any until we were finished. 😠 It’s not at all like being in the band, where we wouldn’t go on stage till the start of the third pint. 😆
Someone who had never been on stage might think that the looks on the faces of all the audience may make you nervous, but in fact you can’t really even see any of them coz the stage lights are in your eyes. Front two rows, max. Some lights on phones beyond that maybe.
On top of that, I was mostly stage right with a long-hair fringe which is also on my right. The audience were mostly hidden behind my hair in the dark and my attention upon co-performers.
As usual though, I still find my self-assessment of performance is that I do worse in front an audience.
The more aware I am that the audience exists, the less attention I have on the task at hand maybe?
That attention spent on awareness of the audience’s existence certainly feels like it leaves less brain-power for forming memories.
I usually find being on stage a hazy recollection, mostly of my mistakes. And it turns out my recall of events is fairly poor even when not two-pints-in!
I think I was pretty superfluous and maybe a bit blocking in the first game, funny mostly by incongruous references to toes and fingernails in the second, and lost but coping well with enacting a movie I never really watched in the third.
And that’s all you get really, in a team of 14 doing two 45 minute halves.
That is the thing which makes Improv actually pretty easy. You don’t have to be individually clever or smart or funny coz the collective is stronger than the components.
Another more advance course starting in a month or two.
Flooded Loo
There I was, about to go to bed on Election night, when: Oh fuck, my flat is flooding.
Pipe from mains to bath is leaking like mad. Stock-cock entirely ceased up. The estate emergency number reckons maybe 4 hours. Oh.
Eventually, full of cramp and horror, I succeeded in turning off the flow of new water. I could barely type, my fingers were so sore.
But at least it wasn’t getting any wetter.
For a few days there was no water in my taps, and my bathroom was soaked, and I was aching and sweaty and faced a massive repair bill.
I’ve known where my stop-cock is since I moved in.
I’ve known it’s very inaccessible since the kitchen was redesigned.
I’ve known it’s basically ceased up and that might become a problem for a couple of years.
Hammering on the plumbers wrench, wrapped through a tiny hole onto the stop-tap, while lying on my back inside a kitchen cupboard, frankly risked simply breaking the tap and making the entire problem even worse.
I did at least oil it first. Not with WD40 though. With olive oil.
Had no wd40.
The culprit:
This is the little bit of infrastructure that failed and sprayed hot water all over the bathroom.
Here’s what I think happened.
When I turn on the shower I turn on the hot-tap to max, wait for it to warm up, and then pull back the pressure until it goes throb-throb-throb. Then back up a tiny notch before maxing out the cold.
I never really understood where the throb-throb-throb sputtering comes from. I considered phoning into James O Brien’s mystery hour to ask many times as I stood in that shower. But now I bet it’s that flexy-cable that feeds the hot-tap, squeezing or bending or compressing or something.
Stress-stress-stressing every time I turn on the shower so that I can use the ritual I’ve designed to ensure it’s the proper temperature before I step in.
Until it weakens enough to break, just as the rest of the UK infrastructure breaks as Starmer takes over to get the blame.
It goes easier trying to detach it when you twist the spanner the right way. I can never figure out which way to turn even when I’m not trying to decide when upside down tangled between the bath and toilet.
Turns out there exists a pipe quite like this only smaller and that’s the type I bought to replace it first time. 🙄
One of the jobs this plumber will hopefully do is move that stop-cock to somewhere accessible with a tap that isn’t 50 years old and dying. And maybe fit a dishwasher?
Never had a dishwasher.
Assuming moving a stop-cock is even possible? I hear they can do things like freeze the pipe before the tap on purpose and then operate on the pipe before unfreezing it?
Or just turn off the water to the whole estate.
Anyway. New bathroom incoming.
Bathroom Plans
I arranged three meetings to quote the work.
One that went okay, then a second one which I thought seemed to understand the problems a bit better. He pointed out that the ex-hot-water-tank-cupboard being dismantled would probably involve asbestos-containment hazmat-suited operations.
So minus-points on guy number one for not pointing that out.
Third guy messed me around a bit with arranging times, then never showed up on the agreed one.
I usually am looking for cheap coz I don’t care much, but here I much prefer someone who understands the complexities of dealing with the freeholder, and that I’m not looking for a patch-up job, I’m looking to secure the thing for the next 40 years.
The chosen builder started asking me what I wanted.
🤷 I dunno.
Doesn’t really matter.
But nobody else can decide so I have to have opinions about it.
They had me look at some lists of things.
I made a 3d model to illustrate what they might all look like and there’s photos in this thread with a description of the choices.
I loved the black and yellow design I started with, but toned it down to grey and red in the end coz the black and yellow was just a bit too stark.
In theory they fit that towards the end of August, probably it’ll be in the middle of happening next newsletter.
Election Night
Until the flood, I enjoyed staying up late watching tories lose their jobs.
The fantasy result prediction was:
- Landslide victory for Labour
Yep.
- PM loses his seat
Nope.
- Hunt loses his seat
Nope.
- Truss loses her seat
Yep.
- Braverman loses her seat
Nope.
- Corbyn wins
Yep.
- Craig Murray Wins
Nope.
- Farage loses
Nope.
- Workers party get just one or max two
Not even that.
- Greens win 10 seats
Nearly half way.
Not as bad as it could have been.
Usually, because the small city constituencies tend to report first, being easier to count, all the early results tend to come out as Labour seats.
Then everyone goes to bed, and they count all the big rural conservative seats, and then you tend to wake up to conservative smug and yet more austerity.
This is the reason why Brits like to try and stay up. It feels like the longer you stay up for, the longer Labour keeps winning, and then as soon as you go to bed the Capital takes over and buys the result while you sleep.
Sunak accepted defeat almost pointedly gracefully. This is how you have a stable country, America, you accept when you lose.
Was pleased to see Rhys-Mogg ejected, and four green elected, and for Labour to win I suppose.
In my seat Labour keep it. The green candidate I voted for came in second with 17% of the vote.
Yay, I helped the greens keep a deposit. About the best that can be hoped for with my useless vote.
With ten million votes Labour get 412 MPs. - 25,000 votes per MP
With two million votes Greens get 4 MPs - 500,000 votes per MP
With four million votes Reform get 4 MP - 1,000,000 votes per MP.
Is it even really winning under rules like this?
Labour didn’t really win so much as the conservative vote has collapsed. Most of it has gone to the fascist racist party but that’s allowed the center-left Labour to take a *lot* of seats.
They have to fucking fix it now.
It’s on you Labour.
Make it better for people, start to repair the world and the infrastructure. Stop blaming scape-goats.
We are really in trouble if you don’t, in a way the leadership show little sign of recognizing.
USPol
Good grief America has been busy!
They tried to assassinate Trump.
Doesn’t seem to be that much consensus in the preexisting literature on whether an assassination attempt affects a political candidate’s chances. Very hard to run any randomized controlled studies of course and nobody knows what happened in the control country where nobody got shot.
I don’t really think it’ll make much difference to his election chances, but then I already figured he was gonna win when they were scolding and arresting genocide-protestors, before it even became obvious Biden has pudding for brains now.
One thing that does increase in frequency is all the talking heads saying “There is no place for violence”, even the ones who have been doing terrible violence to refugees and foreigners and minorities for years.
Real guns on film sound like pathetic little clicks rather than the powerful bass booms in the movies.That image of his raised fist with his face with blood splatters from his newly bullet-pierced ear is an instant classic though. Defiance.
His supporters will love that.
If that image does win the election it’s notable that the American flag is upside down.
Seems like the security are only halfheartedly trying to cover his body. Can’t decide if they’d really take a bullet for this dude or not.
I liked how Farage reacted all like, “You know a very similar thing happened to me once when someone threw a milkshake at me that time” 😆
And the cops saying they have no idea what the motivation can be. Can’t think of any reason at all someone would want to shoot him. It’s most mysterious.
The media all suddenly abhors political violence of course.
~
“We must never use political violence”, the boarder guard said, “now shut up and get on with pushing these refugees back into the sea”.
~
“oh no, political violence is just wrong” says the policeman, “so stop thinking and help me mace these protestors”
~
“Political violence? Oh no, we should never use political violence” says the bailiff as he sets is dogs on the squatters, “Political violence is a step too far.”
~
“My subjects should never use political violence” says the king. “It’s morally wrong, now leave me alone to write my bill giving more of the people’s health systems to private capital”
~
“Political assassination is very bad when other people do it” says the drone-salesman, “now are you going to buy these flying murderbots or not?”
~
Then Biden quits, and chooses to do so via a text-image post on twitter.
The future is here I guess.
I don’t really know anything about the other people than Harris they mention as potentials. I assume they are all terrible for one reason or another but hopefully a better chance of beating Trump I guess.
Maybe really to beat a reality TV star you need a reality TV star?
But if they can’t get a reality TV star Harris will do.
I lolled when he said “there is no place in America for political violence or any violence ever period” referring to the assassination attempt.
🤣
Well, okay, good job he’s out of the race, he’s clearly utterly lost the plot.
America is founded in violence, and rules through violence, and spends more money on violence than everyone else put together. If there’s a more violent police force in the world than the American police force, that other force also should be disbanded.
The new Harris campaign is doing very well, Trumps election chances may not have been changed much by being shot in the ear but running against a younger smarter blacker woman is turning out to be harder for him.
She makes him look weird.
New Government
Labours first month! They’ve been mostly on holidays while the summer riots have been on but have made some initial moves.
I don’t really understand how Labour can remove a ban on on-shore wind farms without any bills or parliament sessions. I guess it must have never been a proper ban in the first place. Seems an unarguably good easy win.
James Timpson seems like he’s been doing genuinely good things on prisoner rehabilitation for ages and making him head of prisons is maybe a good move too.
Or would be, if, you know, he was an MP. Dunno about this practice where they’re just picking people who aren’t elected and making them lords so they can do government minister jobs though. And the others they’ve done that for do very much seem like jobs for the old boys network rather than picking an expert.
If you wanna run a government department now there’s no need to run an election campaign or stand to represent some constituency.
Just make an application through the old boys network, if the plan is good they can ennoble you and you get get on with the work by the end of the weekend.
They’re making moves towards building some houses, but refusing to let the government own or control the process insisting private enterprise will do it all if they just let them build on the farms.
They have continued to insist they will bully migrants too.
So, mixed bag. No real sign of a mask being ripped off and the real government stepping forward.
Climate Protestors Vs Race Rioters
The things happening in “justice” aren’t really yet the fault of the new government, but the fault of the old.
Five years in jail for a climate protest when the jails are literally so full that they are early-releasing murderers and robbers. It is not justice, it is state oppression.
“Crossed the line from protestor to fanatic” says the judge, who has crossed the line from judge in to fanatic.
Contrast the five years in jail they get for a zoom call discussing a protest to the treatment of the nazi fascists on the streets this week:
I remember when the country used to riot over /actual/ injustices, like cops murdering suspects or government imposing regressive taxes.
These days they just riot over made up stuff: lies about the religion or the country-of-birth of a murderer, say. Or the colour of someone’s skin.
It used to be that rioters would pick corporate representations of state power to riot against: High street chains or police stations. Classic things.
These days they just go pick on the poorest most isolated desperate and lonely people in the country and try and break their windows and set fire to their hovels, or they attack religious institutions through their buildings.
Really the quality of rioting in this country has dropped this week faster than the stock-market. And immigration is not to blame. It’s not the immigrants being awful at rioting!
The 2024 riots are just terrible politically destructive riots, aimed to increase injustice rather then attack it.
And the policing! The cops used to kettle rioters and try and prevent them damaging the symbols of the corporate state, but these days they just stand about watching and shrugging their shoulders. They only have the budget for arresting and jailing climate protestors, not race rioters.
Over all, most pathetic terrible riots of my life. One star, would not recommend.
Crowdstrike
The world’s corporate Windows network broke.
I’ve often thought that the anti-virus-software was as likely to damage my machine as the viruses are. Some of the companies are very sketchy indeed and have deep contacts with security services.
Are those things really secure? I don’t really trust ’em.
What do CrowdStrike do? Sounds like they are some kinda sketchy anti-virus/info-sec company. no doubt with very deep contacts in the security agencies.
So I wouldn’t run their code if I could help it anyway.
Many IT managers are forced to use Windows though, sometimes even very old versions of Windows. Poor bastards.
Plus they have to prove to an agency that their org is taking steps to secure their systems, like, for example, contracting one of these infosec companies with that revolving door to the security agencies.
Anyway. Good luck to everyone trying to fix what happens when that backfires and everything breaks at once.
The way they ship the virus-scanners on new machines and then have them nag for a subscription after a year with scary messages about your computer being insecure is one of the darkest patterns in software.
The machine manufacturers taking bribes from sketchy agency-connected software companies to install scanning software on their machine that then dark-pattern nags them for needless money every month, when Window’s own security is mostly better than the anti-virus companies these days.
Whole industry is a mess.
(Not saying Crowdstrike do that, dunno, probably not, they sound more like corporate contracts then OEM deals at a guess)
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
Had to do a Tarot show on the shooting:
Someone failed to shoot the American presidential candidate Donald Trump so Adam does a five minute tarot reading to investigate and finds that the shooter was an idealistic fantasist trying to save democracy but was thwarted by misalignment and law enforcement.
Links
Linkbot is back!
The linkbot is restored, follow it for all the hot links, summarized here. The RSS feed continues as normal.
Video
Sabine describing the physics of portal. Which is to say made-up physics that isn’t real.
Animated 30 minute summary of her book, which I am very very slowly reading. Nice summary of why our money sucks.
• - Smarter Every Day - The Flagellar
Smarter Every Day’s done a video on the flagellar motor in bacterium talking about how it’s structure is investigated and known and the models we have built of it. Pretty cool nano microscopes.
• - Doctor Who Panel at Comic Con
Three stars from DoctorWho on stage at comicCon They’re all so sweet.
• - Capitan Disillusion, Beckham’s Kick
Captain Disillusion’s latest in which David Beckham is shown to be a liar.
AI Business
• - Sequoia, Game Theory of AI Capital Expenditure
On the AI arms race and misspent capital expenditure:
The arms race between Microsoft, Amazon and Google is thus game theoretic. Every time Microsoft escalates, Amazon is motivated to escalate to keep up. And vice versa. We are now in a cycle of competitive escalation between three of the biggest companies in the history of the world, collectively worth more than $7T.
At each cycle of the escalation, there is an easy justification—we have plenty of money to afford this. With more commitment comes more confidence, and this kloop becomes self-reinforcing. Supply constraints turbocharge this dynamic: If you don’t acquire land, power and labor now, someone else will.
Politics
Another Angry Voice on the political satiation:
Keir Starmer is just as committed to maintaining the rotten status quo as Rishi Sunak, even after 14 years of economic stagnation, failing public services, soaring rates of poverty and inequality, and egregious profiteering by privatisation parasites.
Medialens cover paper by a BBC Correspondent on the bias within the BBC over Israel:
Claims and testimony that encourage the most extreme portrayals of Israel’s enemies are allowed to be repeated without challenge – regardless of whether or not they’re backed by evidence. Claims and testimony that raise the possibility of Israeli disinformation around the events of October 7 are ignored – despite the evidence
• - Sherwood news - the bots that are scamming twitter.
Since Twitter has a revenue-share for popular accounts, you can set up a bot army to make one of your robots popular enough to get paid.
If it can earn enough to pay the AI-prompt-completion fees and the validation checkmark fee, then they make profit.
Advertisers are paying Twitter for robots to talk to each other and nobody even sees the adverts.
Payments for social media seems perverse to me.
It distorts the conversation, even before it also flooded it with bot-spam. People do all kinds of karma-whoring even when the karma is just points on a website not things you can buy food with.
Guess Nostr will have similar issues if they ever get enough users zapping with lightning to make any actual money.
Great technical stuff on the ways you can analytically spot bots too.
Around the Fediverse
So the big corporations are all battening down the hatches. The walled gardens are becoming citadels, with training data forbidden from crossing the citadel walls.
Reddit have done a google-exclusive, Facebook have always had their walls as a feature even as they hate “friends only” posts really, Twitter closed down API access earlier in the year. You can’t even view a user’s timeline without a login now.
This means that the AI bots from each corporation in the future will be trained only on the data from it’s own users.
But the Fediverse hasn’t got any money to train robots so we’ll just have to continue simply talking to each other.
Some highlights this month:
UKPol
@LydiaConwell@exile.social noted:
Our lives are governed by the credulous. People actually voted for Starmer’s Labour party, people are actually elated that red Tories have replaced the blue Tories.
How many of those voters thought about Gaza when they voted? Do they ever think about Gaza? The genocide is regularly downplayed by our media and politicians.
Some people probably aren’t interested, barely pay attention, but know it’s not such a big thing because otherwise they would be making more of a thing about it.
Science
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz has news on nearby stars!
Cool news about Omega Centauri!
First, what 𝘪𝘴 Omega Centauri?
It’s the largest of roughly 200 globular clusters that roam the outskirts of our galaxy.
It packs 10 million stars much older than the Sun into a ball 150 light-years in diameter.
We think it was a small galaxy in its own right that got captured by ours and stripped of its outer layers.
The news is that Omega Centauri seems to have a black hole in its center, just like many galaxies. But this black hole is just 8,000 times the mass of our Sun!….
Threads
@nileane@nileane.fr was talking about Facebook’s fediverse-extension, Threads:
LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads https://www.macstories.net/stories/lgbt-and-marginalized-voices-are-not-welcome-on-threads/ Here’s a story that I wish I didn’t have to write. But it’s high time that we make this a central point anytime, anywhere Threads is pictured as a decent alternative to Twitter and Mastodon. It is only that if you’re a straight, white male.
Crowdstrike
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social had a thread on their investigations into Crowdstrike’s problems:
Crowdstrike published a faulty update. Causes Windows to bluescreen. Driver is C-00000291*.sys. Will cause worldwide outages. Thread follows, I suspect. 🧵
And @ianb@well.com look at how the sites handle it:
Summary of how social media is performing over the CrowdStrike BSOD:
Bluesky: Crickets, because not enough people are on
Mastodon: Deep tech analysis from people currently doing front line support
Twitter: Fake screenshots from Cryptobros
Threads: Three day old content Facebook: Look at my cat!
Just Stop State Oppression Of Protest
I’ve just been sentenced to 5 years in prison.
The longest ever for nonviolent action.
The ‘crime’?
Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction…
Anarchy
@AnarchoNinaWrites@jorts.horse ranted:
It’s all made up. It’s literally all made up. The nations are made up, the rules are made up, the money is made up, the debts are made up, the laws are made up, the enforcement mechanisms are made up, the class power arrangements are made up, the prisons and murderpigs are made up.That’s not to say they aren’t real, but they exist because of CHOICES made by people who are NOT YOU. Our society could make OTHER choices, but it doesn’t, consistently, for hundreds of years.
Fedi
@jerry@infosec.exchange had a long post about preventing racsism:
I’ve been participating in the fediverse for about 8.5 years now, and have run infosec.exchange as well as a growing number of other fediverse services for about 7.5 of those years. While I am generally not the target of harassment, as an instance administrator and moderator, I’ve had to deal with a very, very large amount of it. Most commonly that harassment is racism, but to be honest we get the full spectrum of bigotry here in different proportions at different times…..
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