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First time here for a while! Just moved a shed load of domains to Cloudflare, and was tidying up my CNAME lists when I spotted this.
Delighted with Cloudflare as a registrar… save only they don’t handle .scot yet
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Just a winter's dog walk...
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November: Scottish Highlands
Sitting outside our local pub. Drinking locally brewed beer. In November.
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Getting wound up with Social Media
Going through some family problems, I have found I get really irritable with some posters.
I’ve deactivated my Twitter and Facebook accounts, and am giving myself a month out to decide what to do next
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Monday tea
Locally caught lobster in our local pub.
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Frozen strawberry vodka - home made. What else to drink in a sunny 25°C Highland garden?
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Sunny Day dog walk; Scottish Highlands
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Still finding it testing how to remember to get posts from WordPress to micro.blog – in facts my microblog
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Sunday BBQ, Scottish Highlands, t-shirt and beer.
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Two hours on the allotment.
Perhaps, time for a beer.
[First use of Quill to update] -
This is a first try at posting a status update on my blog, for microblogging
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Playing with micro.blog as part of my IndieWeb transformation :-)
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How I ReclaiMed my NAS drives
Since I’m sitting in my Highland eyrie, all locked down, I decided I’d do some tidying.
I sorted out my office.
Got rid of yet more shredding and started some tidying up of technology!On my lengthy to-do list was some work on my deceased, much beloved Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v2. Upgraded from a 500G Disk, to a RAID 3Tb volume it had served me well – until a power supply failure knocked it down.
The…
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“The CIA people I talked to are very nervous and careful about what they actually supply to the president of the United States, because they know he is in a position to expose very sensitive materials because of his lack of understanding of the information he gets,” said Goodman, who was division chief and senior analyst at the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs from 1976 to 1986.
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Colonial domination of the future
…The Scottish philosopher was convinced that the institutions of government – such as political representatives and parliamentary debates – would serve to temper our impulsive and selfish desires, and foster society’s long-term interests and welfare.
Today Hume’s view appears little more than wishful thinking, since it is so startlingly clear that our political systems have become a cause of rampant short-termism rather than a cure for it. Many politicians can barely see beyond the next election, and dance to the tune of the latest opinion poll or tweet. Governments typically prefer quick fixes, such as putting more criminals behind bars rather than dealing with the deeper social and economic causes of crime. Nations bicker around international conference tables, focused on their near-term interests, while the planet burns and species disappear.
The 3 problems
…One problem is the electoral cycle, an inherent design flaw of democratic systems that produces short political time horizons. Politicians might offer enticing tax breaks to woo voters at the next electoral contest, while ignoring long-term issues out of which they can make little immediate political capital, such as dealing with ecological breakdown, pension reform or investing in early childhood education. Back in the 1970s, this form of myopic policy-making was dubbed the “political business cycle”.
Add to this the ability of special interest groups – especially corporations – to use the political system to secure near-term benefits for themselves while passing the longer-term costs onto the rest of society. Whether through the funding of electoral campaigns or big-budget lobbying, the corporate hacking of politics is a global phenomenon that pushes long-term policy making off the agenda.
The third and deepest cause of political presentism is that representative democracy systematically ignores the interests of future people. The time has come to face an inconvenient reality: that modern democracy – especially in wealthy countries – has enabled us to colonise the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please. When Britain colonised Australia in the 18th and 19th Century, it drew on the legal doctrine now known as terra nullius – nobody’s land – to justify its conquest and treat the indigenous population as if they didn’t exist or have any claims on the land. Today our attitude is one of tempus nullius. The future is an “empty time”, an unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants. Like the distant realms of empire, it is ours for the taking.
Committee for the Future
A more fundamental point is that there may be ways to reinvent representative democracy to overcome its current bias towards the here and now. In fact, several countries have already embarked on pioneering experiments to empower the citizens of the future. Finland, for instance, has a parliamentary Committee for the Future that scrutinises legislation for its impact on future generations.
[…]
Perhaps the best-known contemporary example is in Wales, which established a Future Generations Commissioner, Sophie Howe, as part of the 2015 Well-being for Future Generations Act. The role of the commissioner is to ensure that public bodies in Wales working in areas ranging from environmental protection to employment schemes, make policy decisions looking at least 30 years into the future.
[…]
Future Design is partly inspired by the Seventh Generation Principle, observed by some Native American peoples, where the impact on the welfare of the seventh generation in the future (around 150 years ahead) is taken into account.
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May had “desperately sought to win sympathy for a Brexit that would not send her population straight back to the Middle Ages”.
‘Sent packing’: European press scathing on Theresa May’s Salzburg summit | Politics | The Guardian
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‘The problem is that there is rather less sub-degree HE in the non-Scottish parts of the UK than in Scotland but most of what there is appears to be recruited through UCAS; meanwhile in Scotland there’s a much larger amount of HE provided in FE colleges, pretty much all at sub-degree level, which is not recruited through UCAS at all…. Indeed, it’s the HE provided in colleges which gives Scotland the edge in overall participation rates.’
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BeyondCorp: How Google Ditched VPNs for Remote Employee Access - The New Stack
With the “BeyondCorp” approach, “You are taking operation problems, and turning them into engineering problems, and then engineer them away,”
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“What Brexit is essentially about is making trade more difficult with our nearest, biggest and richest neighbour.
"That in the end, that is the economics of Brexit.
IFS director Paul Johnson: ‘Brexit is going to be damaging,’ - Business Insider
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We therefore ignore women’s concerns at our peril. Women who were once enthusiastic allies of trans people are now more suspicious. The group with most to lose are trans women like me.
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Wullie Rennie is really pissed off, but apparently he’s in negotiations to appear on the front cover of the bus timetable for the number 17 to Kelty.
https://weegingerdug.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/im-a-labour-ex-leader-get-me-out-of-here/
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Defence, foreign affairs and international development are the ways in which a state formally conducts its relations with other countries.
The ministers in charge of two of them – Priti Patel and Michael Fallon – are gone from the cabinet. Whatever shred of credibility Boris Johnson had as foreign secretary has been stripped away.
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If you voted Tory, you’ve no one to blame but yourself. You voted for this. You voted to deprive your children of the chances you had.
https://weegingerdug.wordpress.com/2017/06/18/welcome-to-tory-britain/
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William Hague’s definition of the Tory party was that it was an autocracy tempered by regicide
William Hague’s definition of the Tory party was that it was an autocracy tempered by regicide
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