[Youngian]

Not that I'm aware of the Greens bothering with nature very much in their utterances these days.

They used to support depopulation as well, which is very handy if you're against bulldozing over communities.

Its been noted that pine martens are bad at catching red squirrels but do gobble up grey ones. The reds are making a comeback in Kielder Forest since pine martens were introduced.

[Boiler]

Can I have a pine marten in my back garden, please?

[The Weeping Angel]

The Guardian seems to have forgotten that the Greens don't do nature anymore.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Government Can't Win, Part 94.

Every other day we're told the Government needs to be ambitious and bold and all the rest of it. So here's a white paper criticized for... having too much in it or something.Or not having enough in it, maybe.

The Guardian view on schools: Send reforms aside, the government’s white paper lacks focus
Editorial
Plans to resurrect the children’s services decimated by austerity are appealing. But schools also need attention

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... acks-focus

[Bones McCoy]

The Guardian seems to have forgotten that the Greens don't do nature anymore.

Lost Species?
Can we get Velociraptors, up that Tufton Street?

[The Weeping Angel]

Accused!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... MP=bsky_gu

Keir Starmer has been accused of trying to mimic Donald Trump’s social media output after posting a TikTok video about the crisis in the Middle East overlaid with the prime minister’s voice and the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing.

The video opens with footage showing Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters flying over his head before cutting to British military jets in action and a drone being destroyed, as Starmer’s voice states the position he has taken on the conflict.

“Our number one priority is protecting our people,” says Starmer, overlaid with the sound of electric guitars played by Dire Straits.

Starmer refused to join the US and Israeli strikes on Iran but has since authorised “defensive” action.

Al Pinkerton, a Liberal Democrat MP, said the choice of song when the military was “crying out” for the government’s defence spending plan seemed “particularly cloth-eared”.

“Trump’s illegal war in the Middle East is not a movie for promotion despite what [the president’s] press channels may imply,” he added, referring to social media posts by the White House that celebrated the bombing of Iran with a montage of clips from Hollywood films and television shows.

“Downing Street seems unable to avoid being sucked into the orbit of Trump’s deranged confusion of blockbuster with international conflict.”

The Green party said the TikTok clip “has echoes of videos coming out of the White House glorifying war”.

Asked if the prime minister approved the music used on his social media posts, his spokesperson told reporters: “I’m not going to get into internal processes but you have his words on his commitment to defence spending.”

Starmer told the Munich Security Conference last month that the UK was “going to have to spend more, faster” when it came to defence, after promising last year to spend 2.5% of national economic output on core defence by April 2027.

TikTok has increasingly become a social media platform of choice for the prime minister, whose output has been previously praised as “borderline competent”.

[Andy McDandy]

Who is this Jack Hughes and can he please fuck off?

[Malcolm Armsteen]

'Accused' by one no-mark Lob Dem MP who no-one (or at least me) has ever heard of...

Thin gruel, even by the weasel-mouthed* Guardian's standards.


*A mixed metaphor created when a mealy-mouthed 'journo' spouts weasel words.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah, this is pathetic stuff.

“Mimicking Donald Trump” is the new “outreforming Reform”. ie they aren’t.

The country is “crying out” for credible tax plans from Al Pinkerton’s party to fund Defence. Or it would be if they were relevant. “Money For Nothing” isn’t a bad summary of the current Lib Dem approach to tax receipts.

[Tubby Isaacs]

In fairness, Donald Trump is the only politician ever to make videos using… music and his own voice. So you can see where the confusion of Starmer and Trump from.

Now they mention it, Starmer channels Donald Trump by using a microphone and having a larynx. Very sinister.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I find it hard to know what to think about AI datacenters. Anyone know much about them?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... s-warnings

Lincolnshire council approves AI datacentre despite emissions warnings
Campaigners say campus near Scunthorpe could generate emissions close to those from all UK domestic flights

This is what the council say about emissions.

Council documents estimate the proposed datacentre’s “peak annual scope 2 emissions”, or indirect greenhouse gases from generating electricity, will reach about 1m tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2033-34. All of the UK’s domestic flights total 1.2m tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

I don't get this. Aren't greenhouse gases very low if they can generate electricity from clean power? That's 8 years into the future, with clean power intended to be 95% by 2030. The issue as I understand it with aviation isn't that the emissions are high so much as there's no easy way to carry on with aviation and get them down. That wouldn't apply here, one wouldn't think.

My first impression- this probably won't happen anyway, but it doesn't seem to be spectacularly stupid on climate grounds. And anyone got any better ideas for Scunthorpe? It's also actually 15 datacentres.

[Youngian]

Data centres are very heat intensive which gave this firm a clever idea now being trialed, house servers in private homes to provide free hot water
https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-data-ce ... es-a-catch

Music industry YouTuber Rick Beato asks if data centres will be needed when home computing can host people's AI needs. Not a tech insider but an observation based on technological path that music recording has taken.

[Tubby Isaacs]

That's an interesting angle. It would be more energy intensive to have lots of dispersed AI though, wouldn't it?

[Bones McCoy]

That's an interesting angle. It would be more energy intensive to have lots of dispersed AI though, wouldn't it?

Yes a lot more energy to run a distributed cloud.
You also require a lot more over-capacity in a distributed cloud.

I'll provide an example of the latter (a deliberate worst case).

You run lots of different computer tasks, let's say 100, which require 2 processors each.
You can expect to handle this with 65 locations hosting 4 processors.

But there's a switch in task mix.
Now one task requires 20 processors for 2 hours.

In the distributed cloud, that task is capped at four processors, takes 10 hours to complete - customer loses patience and finds a new supplier.
If that cloud was all in one chunk, you could dynamically assign 20 processors and nobody would complain.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Thank you.

At some level, I think that I did actually mean something like that.