The second comment recounting a apparently total recall like memory of being a ten year old boy in 1977 is fascinating. Not least because of the detail about purchasing a white loaf and butter for two pounds British. That's today's money costs. A loaf of bread in 77 cost you thruppence or 4 new pennies if your regional banks had caught up with decimalization recoinage and everyone rounds up on these occasions see the Teuro when the standard 3DM loaf of bread suddenly cost you 3 Euro the next day. Rgds jm2
Several comments have mentioned that culling cats in response to covid didn't happen but I had reason to walk the streets of London in the relevant years and I have only just begun seeing mostly very young domestic cats around the town in recent months. Like pretty much everything Boris Johnson claimed he has said, I have a very strong suspicion the culling of domestic cats did happen in London England. That, or COVID-22 is lethal to all living things. I'm going with both those statements being true on the evidence I've seen.
Edit : red: " covid lethal to all living things " the insect population of the city of London vanished towards the end of the official pandemic measures. Maybe the job was considered done because only this January the most lethal covid variant was culling infants and young children in Japan killing in under two weeks through multiple organ failure and the day after NKK broke the story Rishi Sunak the prime minister of the UK ordered air routes to and from Japan to be fully opened up from lockdown rules completely without any review.
I have memory of the definition of a stray dog being one unaccompanied by its owner, at least in the UK, in the legislation that introduced dog licenses.
That requirement for a licence but not the actual legislation was withdrawn meaning that definition of a stray I just gave will be the law if I recall correctly.
After the passing of a amendment to remove the mandatory dog licence then began this present era of human killing violent and uncontrollable breeds that kills innocents in the UK on a daily basis.
I want to see this definition enforced to control professional untrained and incapable in any case dog walkers who parade with entirely patently pack behaviour animated hounds around our streets and parks.
Besides fouling our byways and recreation grounds on a industrial scale concomitant with the damage to human health that entails, this is unlawful menacing of the public and private unlicensed enterprise founded on the breach of the law and hence must be eradicated.
To my horror I'm recently seeing pirate dog walkers inside the old City of London aka the square mile our beautiful and peaceful financial district where you will stay for weeks without ever seeing a law enforcement officer because we don't need them to intervene in anything because civilian life carries on peacefully regardless just as I well remember it always did almost everywhere just a few decades ago.
> female cats can become pregnant at 4-6 months old already, and they have on average 16 kittens a year in multiple litters).
This totally was not true in my living memory of fifty years.
Edit : like this is totally news to me which frightens me knowing that could really mean that we've passed a irreparable inflection point in a number of the most stabilized metabolic endocrine and hormonal management systems that have taken the entirety of history to develop into sustainable life.
Is systemic oestrogen poisoning to blame?
Or has there been effective speciation as a consequence already, which might demand humane euthanasia?
"Estrogens occurring in the environment can negatively affect the organisms, such as animals, through phenomena such as feminization, dysregulation of natural processes related to reproduction[...]
Edit :
IF what you are saying is true then de facto there's been speciation because there's no way for prior variants of this animal to co exist socially or biologically in any compatible lifespan and neither could the cats I thought existed exist in any shared habitat for reasons of disease and competition. The only possible conclusion is that the very design for life on the planet earth is already proven to be being erased before our very eyes.
Another, more reasonable hypothesis, is that you were wrong about your preconceptions of cat reproduction. The time to reach sexual maturity seems to be pretty well established, and the number of kittens of course will vary depending on conditions but it's not rare to be in those cases of female cats having multiple litters in a single year. Cat pregnancies last two months approximately, so it's not unreasonable at all.
>Can't you see how bad it for Kenya - or anywhere - for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges?
OR is it because this phenomenon is proof that the ability to write winning college degree level essays and dissertations and the accumulation of a industrial scale workforce of talent able to create such works over multiple sophisticated subject areas and subjects, has no benefits for a actual economy and can only persist as a activity if supported by a highly distorted systematic foreign reward arbitrage?
The publications you cite were studied not long before the dot bomb of 00/01 and found to comprise over 50 percent by word count copies and rework of Reuters, and Associated Press wires. I founded a agency early in the 90s which began with a specialism in corporate information systems public relations and I still haven't gotten over the first time we read our release for a client printed verbatim in a national daily.
I can't vouch for other generations, but the agency world I grew up in was occupied by a genuinely terrific cohort of individuals who had always wanted to be journalists and authors, but the mainstream media was locked up with heirs and scions and favourite nephews of families more frequently who first made a successful career in the 50s when social mobility was last a thing, and so the readability if not always examined quality of the typical press release was written to a very high standard, This poses the question of whether there was a improvement in the values of mainstream reporting on specialist subjects, because despite relying on the agencies to spoon feed them copy, news and general media were getting that copy from writers who were immediately adjacent to the sources and who were by virtue of being suppressed from pursuing "real" journalism careers, bent on proving their worth. I grew up reading media of the previous generation and felt that everyone lost something special by the middle of the 1980s. I also think that what I just related kept the standard of computing reporting from crashing. I am not certain my impression be it as it may be based on my professional dedication to and reliance on the insights I could discover at the time. But I am in any doubt that computing journalism crashed in the beginning of the new century and whatever happened to the blogging movement of computing journalism is something more complicated than I can surmise reliably right now. I remember too clearly visiting my local news stand for the latest copy of Byte (I felt able to take a private stand supporting the retail distribution in those years and was ahead of myself wanting to avoid my reading being analysed? When I found that I had bought my last copy of Byte the previous month. To even think of a substitute for the range of coverage as Byte you'd need to begin with Microprocessor Report and end up spending several thousand bucks for not even getting close. What you're doing as well, when you trade up or down the coverage breadth versus density spectrum of individual titles, is very important to think about in depth that I've never seen captured in surveys or circulation audits or even any attempt at so doing. The obvious question about how well you can balance breadth and depth and frequency of reporting rapidly differentiates into very non linear equations that only rarely don't lose their propensity for being possible for any outside observer to understand, because of filters of demographics, physical distance distribution costs that distributors like COMAG realized offer up margins when gamed (back pressure on publishers selling prices that can have a significant dollar cost in geography dependent advertising revenues) and the lumpiness of circulation versus "reach" which is basically how many people read any given copy, which gets skewed by density such as in Silicon Valley and is inextricably connected with big ticket display advertising deals. My business is reversing public information for traders to ascertain better bargain prices for their advertising buying., although I spend a lot more time recently working with music production which originally was a offshoot of making spots for clients who hadn't time for working up the necessary relationship with a purely creative shop.
Given the competing needs of the balances above are all well solved if you can pick and choose your publishing schedule in other words invest more time ceteris psribus and your results improve in journalism often exponentially, trauma triage of scandal reporting is a decidedly less clear method of analysis. Compare with The Financial Times breaking a corporate scandal at their own behest and to their timetable and recognising that when you break big news you put your reputation on the line, and the problems with the original question of whether or not the media are any good at handling stories of major scandals let alone the FTX madness which is still moving faster than the incredulity of the majority of readers and editors both alike, and you have received where I am going to retire for the night with a good malt whisky. Not least because the questions that are being raised are precisely the ones that I wanted to know why nobody was raising them four decades ago and some before my time I'm sure as well.
The most vexing secondary effect lockup to Azure comes when you need Microsoft licensing that Microsoft discounts on Azure and offers palliative adjustments to smaller resellers of cloudy systems together with Microsoft licence agreements, which I could almost ignore using up my quota of enterprise licensing cynicism, except for the fact that margin extraction from competing cloudy resellers can't be ohbo for a probable effect on the level of hardware instances purchased for Microsoft customers who I believe are getting depressed specs as a consequence of this squeeze. Which inevitably has a compounding effect on platform renewal schedules and planned performance purchase points that can only push the package customers get downwards.
I have been suspicious that whilst I am not convinced that the impact is so directly causal simply because of the relative small scale of independent clouds selling Microsoft contracts, nevertheless it could easily be this preferential self dealing the motor for slower upgrade cycles at lower budget defined configurations leading to increasing compression of the options available for Microsoft capacity and anecdotally I've found it increasingly difficult to find equivalent instances outside of Azure which if it isn't a anti competitive practice is most certainly a very harsh environment for resellers which has real effect on customer independence and I will surmise that Microsoft probably sees its position in ten years as being a much bigger and more attractive single source by default like Oracle. If being much more attractive than Oracle is attractive to you I would like to hear how. At least for Oracle, now that installs are nearly only hard mission critical F500 budget full metal jacket affairs, I can rationalise the Oracle position because Oracle at size is going to run on Oracle hardware. But the thought that Microsoft is lurching down the same tortuous path only redeemed by the fact that it's almost impossible for competition to follow after you, and taking the whole intensity of x86 competition off the table and with that a huge part of the value proposition Redmond ought to be nurturing far better than this in terms of passing on the difference between economy of scale plus advantage of platform innovation competition and that sum less some reasonable vig, simply is abhorrent not least because having a dominant swing volume customer gain insensitivity to innovation benefits is tremendously bad for the industry ecosystem entirely. This won't have to carry on for long before I will conclude that Microsoft is going to be a ARM vertical within the next ten years.
Thank you for your report. I have to represent scaled graphs also online via browsers and had been curious about the implementation of scaling through APIs and ultimately browser based drivers. My concern is that the human brain is very much better at comprehending spatial dithering, critical for e.g. price trend extrapolation, than the open literature gives credit. Vital research by CSERIAC at Wright Patterson was declassified to sell the post SDI COTS reboot, but heavily reclassified after 9/11. This has been to the great detriment of the human computer interaction research community which really didn't survive into this century.
I think you know what APIs are, CSERIAC is the Crew System Ergonomics Information Analysis Center, SDI is the Strategic Defence Initiative, and COTS means Commercial Off The Shelf, as in literally buying equipment from regular commercial vendors rather than doing the whole massive DoD contract thing.
About acronyms, I remember a company that won a bid for a company I worked with. Part of the reason they won is that their proposal was very clear, and one of the stated reason was the lack of acronyms.
To this day, I try to avoid using acronyms as much as possible. I also remember an argument at another company, someone was complaining of problems on the "VMS", the other was calling bullshit. It took a few minuted before they realized they were talking about two different things with the same acronym. There are only 17576 3-letter acronyms, if 200 of these are used, the chance of a collision is about 2/3 (see: birthday paradox), and that's assuming a uniform distribution, in reality, it is worse. Misunderstandings are inevitable.
It’s even worse tham that. Many letters can easily be confused for different letters, hence the reason for phonetic alphabets. I had one company who had an external system known as OAS, and some manager who maybe should have known about OAS, but had never worked with it decided to create an acronym OIS. Luckily the two systems were rarely talked about in the same context, but it still took me lots of mental effort to know which of the 2 systems various individuals were talking about in meetings when either were mentioned.
