Until the engine warms up, I can’t keep the windscreen from misting up in the winter. Especially if it’s frosted on the outside!

…how do you demist your cars?

Tried to answer, but it got very convoluted, here it is anyway as I typed it out…

Because that’s a less useful metric basically, to change their budget a government can:

• increase existing taxes
• add completely new taxes
• print money (depending on the level of government)

This means that a budget can swing quite a bit in value quite quickly if needed (or if something goes wrong). This means the % could swing quite widely.

GDP on the other hand is effectively the value of the economy, so moves slower and is a better metric to compare different countries with different economies and tax systems (assuming they tell the truth about their GDP…)

Ultimately, if a government needs more money, most of the time it can get it… But whatever they do will have side effects. But those side effects depend on the size of the economy, the bigger the economy (measured by GDP) the more can be done/taken without causing a large effect.

Both of these fail to highlight countries that already have a high tax load though, so in practice a wide range of metrics will be used.

I was more thinking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps

More than 1 million cubic kilometres of lava. Enough gasses to cause a mass extinction event.

Ugh, life took ages to get started. Lazy bacteria!

It’s still a hell of a long time if you consider that the entirety of recorded (ish) history is only a few thousand years long.

Updated comment to remove an order of magnitude.

It’s not X turning into Y when it comes to evolution. There were all kinds of different dinosaurs, that evolved I to all kinds of different niches. Most of those then went extinct due to rocks falling from the sky, or the entirety of India turning into a huge volcano etc.

So it’s not that a T-Rex turned into a chicken, it’s that T-Rexs lived alongside other dinosaurs that developed feathers and filled more niches etc. those that survived eventually became birds. (Have you ever seen an Emu up close?!? No wonder the Australians lost to them 🤣)

Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge. Also, remember this happened over (billions? hundreds of millions) of years.

Other comments about just not noticing feathers are valid too.

That’s the routers business model though

Remember, they are not expecting to win, so this isn’t a policy they are expecting to have to implement, just using it to attract more of the right wing vote they are losing to the Reform UK party.

I would split digital privacy from the foss and Linux discussions. They attract the same people, but are fundamentally different topics.

It also means you could get deeper into the digital privacy topic which is more useful to most people.

For the digital privacy one, ask for a volunteer (or do you!) ahead of time and get them to do GDPR requests for apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc. sanitizer anything they want to hide, but do a demo of what big tech actually knows about them.

Then go though how to prevent that and have a discussion on the pros and cons of that data collection. (Eg I don’t care about Google data tracking as I find the Google location history really useful)

It’s been a while since my politics A level, so I may get some of the terms wrong but hopefully the facts right.

As the UK doesn’t have a formal constitution, it relies on convention and that parliament is effectively all powerful (under the crown) in that if parliament (encompassing both houses in this context) votes for something it can do it. (As it represents the will of the people and has the authority of the crown (less relevant in the modern day))

Parliament can’t therefore lock a decision in such a way that a future parliament can’t change because the future parliament is still all powerful.

In practice though this isn’t entirely the case. You can make a law like you said, and while a future parliament can break it, it would (probably) look bad on them. But what does that do to stop politicians?

A further note on the previous chain - we go have two houses of parliament; the house of commons is the main one with the green benches that most will recognise. It has our elected representatives (MPs) in and (normally) where the PM is selected from.

The house of lords (red benches, appointed members for life) is generally considered the check chamber. It used to be able to block laws entirely, but I believe lost that power semi recently and it can now be overruled by the commons after 2/3 rejections.

Everything is eventually decided by the majority of votes in the house of commons. Even if you put a law in saying that the pm can’t do this without a 80% vote, that law itself could be repealed with a 50% vote.

Theoretically it would only require a 50% vote to remove elections or something crazy. (Although in practice that might not get past the king who technically has the final say)

There is no formal constitution that has more protection like in some countries.

Obviously, check the price before booking. I assume like most things here it can either go up or down as you get closer depending on demand.

I mean, you could fill it with gravy, then it would be a gravity gravy train 😆

There are too many idiots around to assume sarcasm . (Definition of idiot may differ depending on political affinity)

I believe it would be a 45 (actually 42) min journey under gravity power only?

(Assuming frictionless travel in a vacuum…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train

I tend to put 2 - 3 days worth of stuff in the fridge, then freeze the rest (if it’s something reheatable)

I then eat something else from the freezer for the rest of the week so I don’t eat the same thing for a whole week.

Huh, that’s supprisingly generous of them!

I may be guilty of assuming things works the same everywhere

Most insurance policies will require that the insured trip begins in your home country. (Not that you bought it there) There was a news story about this recently.

Can you not extend your initial insurance? I would really recommend having a chat with a person at one of the insurance companies.

Can’t they put a lien on the big, solid, not going anywhere asset the landlord happens to have in the country?

Recently 'World on Fire’s by Dolly Parton… Which was unexpected