sethoflagos

Really? Number of vacancies in the UK, seasonally adjusted, April to June 2007, to April to June 2026 Currently about 50% above what it was prior to the Brexit vote.

Only ever spotted this species the once. The site is now buried under the infrastructure of a freeport. Yellow-billed Turaco: Tauraco macrorhynchus verreauxii

My mother would most definitely have sympathised with you and (more particularly) your wife. She seldom missed a good opportunity to regale the rest of the family with her perspective on the preterm forceps delivery of her eldest and dearest. His perspective on arriving into the world with a hurting, blue, triangular head was not recorded. 🥶 I think it's a little simpler in the UK. The argument could be quite fairly be framed as: "We have a falling birth rate, aging population, unfilled jobs, and barely enough tax income to meet current pension commitments. So what would you rather have: immigration controls and ever rising taxes, or a living pension in retirement? You can't have both. Your choice." As free passage is a likely precondition of UK rejoining the EU, crossing that Rubicon would help recover most of the 6-8% knock to annual GDP caused by Brexit.

Small exception. There was that time in my wife's village that I was only excused the morning church service if I assisted my brother-in-law with preparing the Xmas dinner. Rest of album here if anyone is interested

Thank you. If you ever need advice on how to deal with a deportation notice served on your newly-wed bride a week after you were flown off to assist the MOD in some hell-hole like. say, Iraq, drop me a line. Or flying together for a holiday break to Cyprus - all visas in place - only to be denied entry. Or dealing with an NHS (expletive deleted) who advised a woman of child-bearing age that the only treatment available for uterine fibroids was a hysterectomy... shall I continue? Absolutely, yes! Marx couldn't have put it better, and if I were back amongst my fellow shop floor workers in the West Riding paper mill where I served my apprenticeship, I'd probably adopt a different strategy to the arguments I present here. But we're all well-educated, well-read, highly-skilled critical thinkers, aren't we. So no need for training wheels when we hop on the old bicycle. We can all see straight through the divisive BS, right?

Hardly. You raised 'overcrowding' in response to @swansont 's questioning of why 'white Caucasian' immigration to the UK was being overlooked. Nobody seems to be clear on your reasoning. Perhaps you misunderstood the question.

On the face of it, a very reasonable point to make. Yet I contrast this with the more than a quarter of a century I've lived as a white British man in Nigeria - permitted to do so currently purely on the grounds of having Nigerian born dependents (a wife and daughter). How many times in that considerable period have I been verbally abused because of my skin colour? Or criticised for having no religion; not speaking a word of Hausa; dressing unconventially; eating 'foreign' food (frequently, bacon); playing Pink Floyd or Frank Zappa loudly whenever I felt like it; or some degree of responsibility my ancestors may have had for the the slave trade, or other heinous crimes of the colonial era? In a word: never. Not once. Now compare that with the experiences of my wife (a naturalised British citizen) living in London where she is about to be awarded an upper-class 2nd honours degree in Mental Health Nursing from Kingston University to sit alongside her other upper-class 2nd honours degree in Public Administration from the University of Lagos. The poor girl is nervous taking the night bus home after a long shift caring for the demented population of the Surrey stockbroker belt for fear of racial abuse. An abuse encouraged by the fascist Reform Party; the rancid dregs of a Conservative Party that are now indistinguishable from the fascists; and a largely foreign-funded mass-media promoting their toxic ideas. I don't know about you, but for me this is a very personal matter. There isnow, I believe, no sitting on the fence on this one. You either condemn racism unilaterally wherever it occurs, or you don't. Which is it to be? Anyone? Which at 286 people per square kilometer compares with the 250-266 estimate for Nigeria. Huge difference, eh?

Why? @swansont seems to be making a perfectly valid point.

The family were from Huddersfield! 😂 (where I lived for twenty years) Mind you, it was only a few miles from the site of the Halifax Gibbet on which the Paris Guillotine is said to be modelled. Spent many a fine evening in Gibbet Street - though more for an excellent nearby curry house rather than historical site-seeing.

Because they were on the same side of the real divide. See Harrying of the North

Maths helps see the full picture unbefuddled by the ambiguities of verbal languages. This video popped up in my feed today. A bit popsci, but it presents ideas that have been strongly influential on my belief system pretty well. I say 'belief system' since (as it explains via Gödel) in any consistent logic system, there must always be some objective, necessary truths that are impossible to prove. You just have to accept them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q82eArp0e7s

Matt Goodwin, a racist you promote in your post, stood in the recent Gorton & Denton by-election, finishing a long way behind the victorious Green Party. Time was we just left you lot to the tender care of Albert Pierrepoint, if they'd managed to evade the end of a bayonet (great British tradition). Oh, I do miss the old days.

Yes, I saw that one in my feed this afternoon. Nice little alpine!

mkpụmkpụ TIL that Ụlọ Mkpu is Igbo for termite mounds (or anthills) Also that the IPA symbol for the kp phoneme is [ɓ̥], a voiceless bilabial-velar plosive that does not exist in any European language. Really difficult for a Yorkshireman, especially when you get two in quick succession.

Given the maturity of technologies we now have for chemical analysis back to Archaean times (e.g. Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis–GC–MS and supervised machine learning), it will become increasingly difficult for evidence of such civilisations to stay hidden. The challenge remains that it only takes one measurement to confirm a presence: Haldane's Precambrian rabbits spring to mind. Proof of absence can never be absolute.

I'm fine with your usage of the term 'facts' in both of these posts. However, the implicit/explicit relegation of 'truth' to a mere woolly human construct really doesn't square with my experience of the English language up until I left the UK in the 1990s (which meant I missed most of the Science Wars and New Age post-modernist brain worms that most of the West now seems to be infected with). Are we that unhappy with the traditional absolute meanings of 'TRUE' and 'FALSE' in boolean algebra? Must we replace them with 'fact' and 'fiction'? Consider the definitions of deductive and inductive reasoning: It seems to me that those who deny the validity of an objective, absolute truth must also deny the validity of any form of deductive reasoning (it's woefully absent in most views presented). How many times has it been claimed in the above posts that 'no truth can be 100%' as if inductive reasoning were the only game in town. Quietly (and ironically) oblivious to the FACT that the latter requires its input premises to be TRUE for its conclusions to be CONGRUENT (the 'in all probability' of induction that contrast with the VALID conclusions of deduction). Perhaps I might also point out that all my posts here are based on the premise that I don't inhabit the Matrix. This makes them CONTINGENT (bounded by some scope of application) rather than NECESSARY (unbounded and universal - as in most of pure maths); this doesn't impact their VALIDITY, or magically convert deduction to induction. (I'll teach you to bring Quine into the discussion!) Probably answered this in the preceding rant. Strictly speaking, a "fact" always exists independently of human consciousness, and therefore is never a "human construct". The contents of this thread indicate that for many, "truth" can mean whatever they want it to mean. I prefer to keep it as close to "fact" as possible, but that may be a "spectrum" leak.

Excellent point! Another example maybe: 'Seth made a proposition concerning absolute truths that some believe may not be absolutely true'. Try sitting on the fence with that one!

By comparing them to π. A real number context is clearly implicit. The category error is your own invention.

No, I didn't. I picked selected values from the set of real numbers, two of which happened to be rational for purposes of clarity. Your argument is contrived, null, and void.

I wouldn't argue with any of this.

Ref: Number Line Of course! But I can still call out bad faith arguments where they crop up, can't I? In a practical sense, sometimes - yes. But why use fuzzy logic in cases where absolute logic is readily to hand? An example of an absolutely true statement. Of course there are many different points of view on this. I've stated my position which is orthodox scientific realism. If someone else prefers unscientific antirealism, solipsism, or whatever than so be it. I'm happy to defend my case until the cows come home. targhlIj yIngagh, yIruch!

That's not what I asked. We are not dicynontids. We are cynodontids, so there must have been at least one cynodont taxon that survived the Permo-Triassic extinction event, yes?

No. I'm presenting it as an example of (a pair of) true statement(s) in the context of the number line. Base 10 can be understood by default by any reasonable person. Since at least Immanuel Kant, it has been understood as an a priori truth (ie self-evident to reason alone: not requiring of empirical factual support). So describing it as 'factual' is a misnomer in a strict epistemological sense. It's a truth. And an absolute one at that. See Epistemology for more on that rabbit hole. I think some of the confusion here is that such truths are not immune to wilful misinterpretation. I'm waiting for @TheVat to pop up and say it's actually Klingon for 'my hovercraft is full of eels'. However, that's clearly not the intended context. Insisting in all seriousness that it could be is bad faith I think.

Since Lystrosaurus was a dicynodont, and there is strong evidence that we are descended from a contemporary Permian cynodont lineage, then how can this be? They are not closely related.

Absolutely! Especially to an engineer whose duty is merely to meet the applicable specifications: anything beyond that being a case of gilding the lily - an unprofessional waste of time and money. But note that the example given was not concerned with providing a perfectly accurate value for π - it was concerned with specifying bounds within which we know that value to lie. There's quite a significant difference. Like I can't give you a precise value for the wavelength of green in a rainbow. But I can state with confidence that in every rainbow I've ever seen, the green bit lay between the yellow and the blue. Courtesy. You should try it some time.