tomo, DaveS,

Mandelson has always mystified me. Time and again you feel this time he really is gone for good. Then back up he pops. On the plus side, his "diplomatic" presence will overshadow Australia's dismal ambassador (former PM Kevin Rudd) who has also blotted his copybook with Trump.

Not sure if this video was posted here before, but it's pertinent and funny.

Re-watched the last part of Mr Bates vs the Post Office (the aftermath, or whatever it was: the real people, not the actors) last night. I don't suppose any of the actual villains have spent time behind bars. Looking around this morning, there was this bland video from the inquiry. Looks like justice will be well and truly buried under *process*.

More promising was this item from the Post Office, which describes a better compensation deal than the stuff that was going on when that documentary was being made. It's still not a good effort though. I'd take a leaf from the 9/11 compensation scheme. Go for generous. Give all the money to the victims; don't squander it on independent panels (aka unaccountable bureaucrats) pretending to make it fair. The fact is that it is utterly impossible to make it fair.

Someone from Trump's team has already described Mandelson as a moron, a sign of things to come. Starmer's lack of political nous is staggering (not that recent predecessors as PM had much, either).

Talking of charity chiefs with huge salaries - that, of course, is where David Miliband ended up after leaving UK politics. One of the new Labour government's earliest actions was to give millions to Miliband's charity, for whatever reason.

tomo,

Mandelson? Pretty dark sense of humour behind that choice. Like your story about the hospitality shown by the Indians. The Americans may not be quite as courteous.

Listened to Josh Szeps interviewing Stephen Fry. Apparently it was shortly after Trump's re-election victory and the interview started with them doing a bit of wallowing in shared grief. Did like it, just a few minutes in, when Szeps suggested that the US President had significant influence on the climate and Fry responded:

If you really believe that the world would last longer with Kamala Harris as President than with Trump I think you're totally misguided.

In the end, my opinions of host and guest were lower than before. Too much snobbery and looking down on the little people. That was easier to take from Fry who has a formidable mind — paraphrasing Churchill (the idiot): Fry is a snobbish man who has much to be snobbish about — less tolerant of it from Szeps.

Was definitely an enjoyable interview, but I'm not sure I'll be able to stand the interviewer for the whole of '25.

On a recurring theme: New York City charities are doing nicely not solving the problems of homeless people. Million dollar salaries and able to virtue signal that you run a charity? Nice work if you can get it (and have conscience atrophy).

One of the resident trolls at Jo Nova's responded to one of my comments with an interesting link: GraphCast, AI-based weather forecasting. Looks like they've done the sort of thing I've been suggesting as a worthwhile use for AI: training on historical weather data and using that to predict upcoming weather. Done right, I think that should well outperform anything equation-based.

Might be our government meteorologists won't rush to it. The last thing they want is for a large and cheap advance in forecasting.

Was unsatisfied with Jo's response on that comment's parent thread. I'm not usually a stickler for semantics, but it really is time that climate got nailed down to a rigorous definition.

tomo,
We're often singing the praises of engineering here, and it's well deserved. Where would we be without it? But engineers are a different story. They definitely run from gooduns to baduns. In the 1980s, Sydney's Water Board was under the influence of the latter (IMO). They just loved big engineering projects, the bigger the budget, the better they were pleased. Perhaps, alongside the various strands of engineer: mechanical, chemical, electrical, civil, ...., we should include the empire building engineer. Might be that the Western Link is from that discipline.

That HVDC stuff does look impressive. The schematics don't look so fancy — just a handful or two of components — but I guess they're pretty chunky, and the cooling system has to visit all parts when gigawatts are moving (hopefully not dissipating too many of them).

.,
I suppose Musk favours Eric Raymond's bazaar over the cathedral. It is a lot noisier, but better than having high priests running the show.

To me, whole Twitter thing is a strange country. An e-pub, where you meet and exchange views with a few mates is easy enough to picture, but with famous people it's more of an e-stadium. What sort of conversation can be held between many thousands of people, each knowing that his view is the most important, and all blethering away at once?

On TIKhistory: I looked through the Stalingrad series, but didn't see where TIK was broken. Looks like it comes to a conclusion too, so maybe he unbroke himself and completed the series.

Rather than start on Stalingrad, I took pot-luck on the clickbaitiest title I spotted: Churchill Was an Idiot. He did a decent job with it, and was magnanimous enough in the comments section to allow that the world was probably better off for Churchill having led (idiocy and all), but I think he's missed the more important point: Churchill's idiocy (or genius) didn't matter. The great men of history are caricatures. The world is far more complicated than the impressionistic painting of history.

The funny thing is that, in the handful of TIKhistory videos I've watched, the primary recurring theme is how planning by the military leader is crushed by the complexities of the real world. I think TIK knew all along that Churchill's capabilities didn't matter very much; it really was just clickbait.

I don't mind having been sucked in. It was enjoyable.