m-i-l

Note that the article uses "middle class" and "middle income" interchangeably, but in some countries class is not directly related to income. So when it says "that the middle …

I wonder if they have data going back to the 1800s to actually back this up. In the 1970s, for example, the country faced day-long blackouts[0] due to industrial action by coal miners (I think limited…

Not mentioned in the article - apparently Gillette had a hand in suppressing stainless steel razor blades: "Gillette, which held a patent on stainless blades, presumably knew that any gain for th…

Point taken. Although the original point is that it might happen more than you might think with traditional letting agencies, if you aggregated all of the individual cases over all of the 10s of 1000s…

There is a Small Claims Court in England, with a maximum claim of £10K. I got as far as issuing a Letter Before Action to the tenant's London-based guarantor (the tenant himself hadn't left …

Not defending Airbnb's behaviour, but this sort of thing happens outside of Airbnb too. I had some tenants (sons of a well known rock star) cause around £10K worth of damage to my flat in Shoredi…

With progressive taxation, those who can't afford to use London taxis will be paying zero or a negligible contribution towards this. And all those who breathe, irrespective of whether they are ta…

I had my sash windows refurbished a few years back, adding double glazing and draft proofing. They said the frames were the original wood from around 150 years ago, although they said the glass was fr…

The article mentions at least one of them can't read or write. Would be an interesting challenge to build a knowledge sharing platform in that case.

Don't have space for it, couldn't get it up the stairs, and got distracted reading the linked article "How to view 'The Wizard of Oz' with 'Dark Side of the Moon'...…

According to the BBC article "Ketchup debate: To chill or not to chill..." [0] from a few days ago, the NHS advice states eggs are "best stored in the fridge as they will be kept at a c…

Funnily enough, I was just thinking the exact opposite this morning - how little design thought must go into some things. It was in relation to the poor user experience I'd just had from the toil…

More on the "big lie" propaganda technique at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie .…

If the map is correct, it looks like it could be bypassed by entering through Jordan or Kuwait. I wonder if the designers know about the Maginot Line [0] (extensive and costly fortifications on the Ge…

What I'm curious about is when he said things like "I'll pay you, you know, $50,000, $100,000, whatever. Whatever you want, all right?", was it just hot air, or did he actually fol…

According to the article, Hayes was "chief informant, who in return would receive leniency and, more importantly, an agreement that he would be dealt with in the UK. To secure this arrangement Ha…

In the UK we have https://fullfact.org , an independent fact checking charity. It isn't quite the same thing, e.g. is more of a service than software, but is open source friendly, e.g…

And to quote Tracy Alloway, also Bloomberg: "you can replace the term 'distributed ledgers' with 'shared Excel sheets' in about 90 percent of talk about blockchain and finance…

I get this too. They are slightly more regular and monochromatic geometric shapes than your example. I suspect the shapes may vary according to the loudness and suddenness of the noise, e.g. something…

Also available at http://www.deeplearningbook.org/ .

Agree that its very unlikely for currently closed big datasets (e.g. those that give Google and Facebook their competitive advantage) to be opened for this. But if existing shared but siloed datasets …

>Capitalism has already been around forever :) Much of Europe, for example, was feudalist until around the mid 17th century. To put it simply, the king owned all the land, and those who lived on it…

Very interesting. A couple of thoughts: 1. How about automating harvesting? The article suggests that there is a fairly sizeable unskilled workforce, potentially involved in harvesting, packing etc. I…

Pretty much everyone I've talked to who knows about AI (including a former Penrose student who was a classmate on my postgrad AI degree) strongly refute the claims in The Emperor's New Mind.…

There's also the court case at the moment where the Prime Minister is trying to use the royal prerogative to trigger Article 50 (for Brexit) without an explicit act of parliament to authorise it:…