exchemist

Thanks. I’ll know their names next time they crop up in news reports.🙂

Who are they?

Mandelson has now also been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. So the apparent unfairness as between the two suspects has been rectified, at least.

Yes he is a bad apple all right. The unwritten contract between the public and the Royal Family is that they should behave is a respectable manner, given that they get funded through the Civil List. He has broken that contract. At the same time, some of his treatment looks to me heavy-handed. For instance I now learn that while Andrew was arrested, presumably on the grounds of reasonable suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office, Mandelson was not. Yet Mandelson was a senior government minister at the time, so unquestionably in Public Office, whereas Andrew had an unpaid role as an informal trade envoy. So Andrew was not a government employee. Was he nevertheless in Public Office? Seems doubtful a charge would stick. One doesn't know what agreement he may have signed in relation to handing of confidential government information, but if he is suspected of breaking such an agreement I would have thought that would be a civil breach of contract and not a criminal matter. Unless it was the Official Secrets Act, I suppose. I wonder what the grounds for arrest were. The police need both reasonable suspicion of a crime and a reason to believe that arrest is necessary. Perhaps the police felt that, unlike Mandy, Andrew would not cooperate in the investigation, so they had to arrest him to get him into a cooperative frame of mind. Still seems a bit odd though.

Since these are all taken from Faecebook I can't see them. But there is at least one real device of this type, as pointed out by @Sensei . That one uses jet engines - and costs $0.8m a pop, so only of interest to broligarchs. Might be entertaining if if Zuckerberg bought one and crashed it, while wearing his creepy AI glasses............ 😁

Hahaha, yet more mad "pothu" shit.😆

Indeed, more about it here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2025/08/21/introducing-the-volonaut-airbike-a-futuristic-ride-built-for-superheroes/

Not when it works as it should. There is no reason to think the police arrest is because of some combined public pressure, regarding the combination of his sexual exploits and his behaviour as a trade envoy, as was being suggested. The Epstein files apparently suggest he may have passed a government document or its some of its contents (about business opportunities in Afghanistan) to Epstein, when perhaps he shouldn’t. That’s it. So he’s been arrested, questioned and released without a charge being brought at this point, while investigation continues.

That isn’t how the law works, though, is it?

I would be quite surprised if this goes anywhere. It is notoriously hard to prove the offence of Misconduct in Public Office. My guess is that on paper he may have done something arguably similar to what Mandy did. But then Mandy was a government minister, who would have signed the Official Secrets Act. And the material he passed to Epstein quite clearly gave him an opportunity to make money on the markets via insider trades. In Prince Andrew's case he probably had a loosely defined mission to grease the wheels of trade and all he passed on to Epstein seems to have been some piece of analysis of business opportunities in Afghanistan (good luck with that, eh?). I suspect the cops did what they did as a piece of due diligence and to avoid any accusation of special treatment for a member of the Royal Family. I expect the Director of Public Prosecutions will in due time find there is no prospect of securing a conviction and the whole thing will be dropped. As for the sex stuff, yes it's very sleazy but I cannot see that he has broken any law of England. This looks to me like a classic media feeding frenzy - always easily set off when the Royal Family is involved. There are even hysterical articles asking whether this could mean the end of Charles as king (why?), or possibly even of the end of the monarchy. What balls. 🙄

I don’t think so for a minute. He’s just had a lifetime of entitlement and is now trying to minimise as much as possible the opprobrium that has finally caught up him. Nor do I think Zuckerberg is on the spectrum. He’s just talking his own book, as these guys always do.

Oh I see, yes sanding would definitely release airborne fibres.

My understanding is that it is the free fibres that are the problem. With mastic, I would imagine they are all stuck down pretty firmly and won't come free and float in the air. But one might wear gloves, I suppose.

I am currently reading "Careless People", by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a New Zealander who used to work at Meta (or Facebook as it was) and left because of disillusionment about its true goals. I have only read a quarter so far but it is already clear that, for all the high-minded talk at the time, the only real goal was more hours on-line, by more eyeballs, and collecting as much monetisable personal data as possible, with little consideration of the consequences. LLMs are fairly clearly a means to turbocharge that effort. As yet, there is almost no body of law or regulation to moderate and balance this drive of the tech corporations with what is in the public interest. The EU is working on it - which is one reason why Vance and the tech bros hate the EU more than China or Russia and desperately yearn for it to fail (Exhibit A being the new US National Security Strategy).

Is this related to Yanis Varoukaface's concept of "technofeudalism"?

It seems to me your experience in academia is very valuable. Like other posters, I feel sure AI has a big contribution to make, but more selectively than its proponents (who have a strong commercial interest) currently claim. The perceived Luddism is really just a natural reaction against something that is being pushed upon us too far and too fast and without any controls. Society is already reeling under the impact of social media, which has only recently arrived and is already causing serious damage to the mental health of our children and even to democracy itself. We have not had time to adapt to it and control it properly, though some countries are getting better laws in place as we speak. Now LLMs come along, on top of this and using the self-same channels that we are slowly trying to get under control. These plainly have the potential to make things far worse for society, especially in terms of the mental health and intellectual development of individuals and on broader social cohesion. The most problematic aspect, as I see it, is that both social media and LLMs are designed to induce dependency. The fight for personal autonomy and against dependency is as old as civilisation itself. You see it in historical concern about alcohol, nicotine and drug abuse, about overindulgence in eating, or sex, and of course about economic and political systems. So pushback against uncontrolled use of LLMs strikes me as a healthy thing. We need time to adjust to its promises and threats.

I have to correct my earlier statement. I have discovered I can actually deactivate the AI feature in my browser - and have done so.

You don't seem to know what demagogy means. The offsetting trick does not invalidate my point. While these corporations may pat themselves on the back for buying up "green" power, that leaves less to go round for everyone else. In other words, because of the net increase in power demand LLMs create, a lot of other users are forced to source power from fossil fuel sources instead of renewable sources. So the climate suffers - because of LLM usage. Yes we know. And it is irrelevant.

Irrelevant.

Is this really true, though? For instance: QUOTE Conventional search engines are the result of decades of optimization. They are designed to process billions of queries every day with incredible efficiency. A typical Google search, for example, is estimated to use between 0.3 and 0.5 watt-hours (Wh) of energy and returns results in milliseconds. These results are drawn from massive, pre-indexed databases of the web, meaning the system doesn’t have to “think” in real time — it simply retrieves the most relevant links based on your keywords. In contrast, LLMs operate on a completely different model. Instead of fetching pre-written content, an LLM processes your query and then generates a custom answer, word by word, using massive neural networks with billions of parameters. This process, known as inference, is computationally expensive and energy-intensive. Depending on the size of the model and the hardware it runs on, a single LLM query may consume between 2 and 5 watt-hours — sometimes even more. In some comparisons, LLM queries have been found to require up to 100 times more energy than a standard search engine query. UNQUOTE From: https://best.baffour.digital/llms-vs-conventional-search-engines-energy-efficiency-requirements-and-use-cases/

And Bach thought the piano would never catch on......... But then, don't you also remember the dotcom bubble? AI will of course have its place, but there is little doubt it is currently being hyped and misapplied. What makes this hype cycle especially dangerous is that it is a product liable to induce dependency (cf. cigarettes) that is being bolted onto the internet and thereby sold to billions of people by the tech capitalists, willy-nilly, without any regulatory guard rails. I even get an AI answer now every time I use my web browser. I get no say in this, even though AI responses are of zero interest to me and in fact I actively do not want them, because of the damage to the climate caused by their outsized power requirements.

Yes I could find no reference to any paper by Fowler to support any of this. Hallucinated by AI and mindlessly copied by bad lazy news organisations perhaps.

Here is a rather nice example of how US states can bypass Trump: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/16/gavin-newsom-a-loser-says-trump-california-green-energy-deal-uk I find it significant the way so many US politicians have decided to become pro-active in building or maintaining bridges to the EU and the UK. The Munich security conference has been an eye-opener. So many Democrats pitched up, from Newsom to AOC. They are sending a message that this aberration squatting in the White House should be seen as just that. I hope they are right and meanwhile it seems to me these contacts with individual states are an excellent stop-gap.

I note the terms "incisive feedback" and "framework". Is this a person, I wonder.

It’s an antifungal I think. I don’t know if it is used intensively enough to pollute watercourses.