Graham Walker

Why not a cushty job at the TBI?

Even Vaasa, though (even less "north" than Oulu!), was seeing freeze-thaw-freeze cycles while we lived there that made the pavements absolute liabilities.

Someone does tracks across the fields out where we live in Siuntio, but I guess they might be a bit sad if a British novice messes them up. I did pick up hybrid ones that should be able to manage with no tracks, but the issue is more likely to be the operator not the skis...

But still, my nephew was just picking up snow everywhere, it was unbelievable for him that there could be this much snow for so long. Or for both my niece and nephew that you could walk and skate on the sea, that you could take a sauna and roll in the snow outside. So a great experience for them.

My sister and family came in February in time for the cold snap during hiihtoloma. She spent a lot of time asking what gear they should get, preparing etc. And then they didn't bring gloves.

There's also a comparative element. I guess people in the south have experienced winters warming, so "this winter isn't even that good." But frankly, coming from the UK, I am still at the point of "this is great!" Started learning x-country skiing, and got a little better at skating last year.

There's a lot of truth to "there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes." But it is also a flex that falls apart as soon as you speak to anyone from the Nordics, a high percentage of whom say variations on "I hate winter so much" almost unprompted.

Ah but advertising and propaganda only work on other people.

Also the evidence that bailing out the banking system in the form that was chosen was, in fact, the best possible way to achieve the policy objective while maintaining a functional capitalist system. Calling to bail out AI before it even crashes does seem a *bit* like moral hazard.

My "I am not a cormorant" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the shirt.

All the series of Monty Python absolutely need to be sliced up into all bangers, because their hit rate is not fantastic and there is a lot of dross.

Credible case that Con/Ref have been influenced by Russia, similarly that Labour's Israel policy has enabled a humanitarian disaster. Probably the Lib Dems are most coherent for the internationalist democrat voter - but they want 3% GDP on defence and only talk about "continuing" aid for Ukraine

But it is up to voters to make a judgment on whether they think the Greens' incoherent foreign policy is any worse or better than often incoherent Lab, Con, Ref, Lib Dem foreign policies, and then whether *that* is more important in the round than their other policy offers.

The risk is not only that the US ignores Art. 5 though, there are many other risks to membership. The US might invoke Art. 5 itself on a pretext, for example. But I take the point that the Green position currently looks like a compromise between "realist" brainworms and "war crimes are bad".

There's a difficult conversation to be had about the value of NATO membership in the age of Trump, but certainly it's not clear the Greens are having one.

If they win an election, the NATO treaty does by virtue of giving current members veto over new members because they have to sign the Accession Protocols. Erdogan did this to extract concessions from Sweden, for example.

The point is well made in the piece that, even discounting the wildly optimistic narrative surrounding a bubble sector, it is very rare that it is actually a zero.

A large part of the US oil production growth run-up was unprofitable, subsidised by investors and banks, based on a false analogy, ironically, with tech. "These are startups, innovation was just around the corner, keep spending capital until you reach positive cash flow" etc.

During the boom - and even during the oil price decline 2014-16 - frackers borrowed heavily, management incentives were about production growth not profitability. At the end of it you could pick up assets very cheaply, including land inventories.

The parallels drawn here are with mortgage-backed securities, canals, fibre optics etc. but I think a more useful parallel bubble missed is fracking through to around 2016. Fracked wells have the same short lifetime as chips #energysky #greensky

I was hoping to use the ambiguity to get them on board. And they have a lot of experience, they have been involved in the nuclear field since Schrodinger after all.

Surely cats can be convinced to do fission.

Is there a "5x levered short Tolkien reading comprehension" ETF I can buy?

Taking Boromir's description of Gondor at face value, when in that very chapter/scene he lusts after taking the Ring for himself, speaks "proudly" and ignorantly of many things, and is admonished by Gandalf, Elrond, Aragorn, and Bilbo. Reading comprehension is hard!

Indeed. A most Torment Nexus-y name.

That's also...not what happened in LotR. It's taking as read Boromir's description of Gondor which was clearly portrayed as partial and self-aggrandising, one of the things that the Ring could act on in his personality to corrupt him into a lust for power.

The Nordics bury lines quite a lot, especially Norway. But of course, as you say, that depends on the CBA done, fire risk, storm risk etc. Some idea that "we don't want to look like Albania or Vietnam" is not a consideration.

Also, just because the Dutch have buried all theirs doesn't mean much (most?) of the EU doesn't have a lot of visible power lines, even at distribution level.

Saw an ad for the sequel, Si2u, at a bus stop yesterday in Helsinki, just to let you know.

My "only Labour can stop Reform" billboard has a lot of people asking questions already answered by the billboard.