HeartfulBadger

On the economic side I'm inclined to agree with you that I don't think the EU is a miracle growth cure. However, you could argue that Brexit has helped sink all boats (at least a bit). I think it's easy for people to dismiss the UK's importance to Europe, but just like the US tariffs I suspect it hurts everybody.

Difficult political situation to navigate. If you refuse to publish statistics then it looks bad and fuels this populism mania around government coverups and "woke agenda" blah blah blah. But also, people use stats in very dishonest ways. A bit of damned if you do and damned if you don't, but I guess I'd lean towards putting data into the public domain.

My 2 cents

I don't think it is strange, I think a payment system is a natural monopoly of sorts. The customer experience is generally improved if we all agree on one system. I don't think you'd want a dozen providers connecting your electricity with wires all over the road, and I don't think we want dozens of payment systems with patchwork compatibility.

2-3 systems feels about right, for redundancy if there are technical issues on one, but limiting how many cards we use.

It's a remarkable achievement of our time that we can carry a single piece of plastic almost anywhere in the world and be connected to a vast payment system in any currency, and it's incredibly reliable.

But given it's a natural monopoly, it definitely needs regulation of pricing, and it also needs viable plans if shit hits the fan and international cooperation isn't on the menu anymore.

I've also been trying to use it semi regularly and providing feedback on their search results. I appreciate their post about true keyword searches still being valuable (ie search engines becoming "answer engines").

It does feel worth supporting, but yeah. Some results are rough. Like you look up an official government publication and I can only get the Hindustan times or a weird forum.

It also doesn't seem to want to find PDFs which is very unhelpful when looking for documents.

My issue is that it's a heroic assumption that a society where we go and burn down the centres of our democracy is going to be improvement over today. These things don't happen in a vacuum. I have plenty of things I'd change if I was in charge, but I also look around the world and I think Britain has a lot worth defending.

Bit much mate

I'm wondering what UK based tech companies are critically dependent on American customers? My gut would have said it's better to accept the reciprocal tariffs.

It's ancient, but you can still find some fun playing counter strike Source on Linux. I'm actually a bit sad CS2 reduced the player base.

I like the marmite corn snack from Tesco.

They seem to be inconsistent in saying where the stuff is made. It says designed on the Isle of White, and I found one garment that said Morroco, while another says made in "an environmentally sustainable factory".

True, I wasn't actually too worried about posting (the rules would probably say), but it did seem like most of the posts were EU centric.