Someone among Linda Reynolds’ advisors should have had the courage to tell her that persisting with this defamation trial, especially in the wake of the Bruce Lehrmann trial, is really shitty optics.

And the fact that they tried to make it all about alleging that Higgins wanted to bring down the government, while putting Reynolds into the role of the victim, makes it even worse.

I really hope Reynolds fails in this trial.

No country exists in isolation. Why wouldn’t it be fine to discuss events in another country even if you don’t have a direct stake in it?

More recently, probably a wireless handheld controller for my model railway.

Model railway is a hobby for people with lots of time, space, and money. I generally fall short on two of those, although lately there is a bit more disposable income to go around. Last year I was able to splurge on the control setup that I always wanted, which is a stationary controller - basically you sit at a table and control the trains with two rotary controllers and a touchscreen for a number of other things. Looks a bit like this.

But since it’s stationary and my layout is fairly big, sometimes it can be a bit cumbersome to test something that’s five metres away. So I decided to also splurge on the matching wireless handheld controller, an Android-based device with another rotary controller and the ability to control almost all aspects of the stationary device.

Did I need it? Hell no. If I had waited a few more months, a perfectly suitable free smartphone app would have been available that I could have used for the purposes intended. But am I loving it? Fuck yes. Irresponsible to boot, but no regrets, not for one second.

She obviously means for the government to just subside on the existing mining royalties, while also abolishing certain taxes, the act of which will surely help pay for all her lofty fantasies.

Here’s my thing about ‘Ten’.

I love the first half of this album. It’s some of the best music I know in the genre. High energy, catchy, passionate. But somehow, the second half feels to me like the band ran out of ideas and gas. After ‘Jeremy’ it’s all pretty average, low-energy stuff, with the exception of ‘Garden’.

Dream Theater “Awake” (1994). Extraordinary from the first to the last note. 75 minutes of phenomenal prog metal. They’ve made good and great albums before and after, but they never excelled the pure class and artistry displayed on this album.

Bruce Dickinson “The Chemical Wedding”. I never liked Iron Maiden much, but Dickinson’s solo stuff is a different class. Fresh, creative, varied, energetic. Most of his solo albums are well worth the listen, but “Chemical Wedding” stands out for its high variety and creativity.

The funny thing is that most languages in the world call Finland Finland or something adjacent (usually containing the syllable ‘Fin-’), while it’s ‘Suomi’ in Finnish. Only the Baltic states call it something similar to that.

Then we also need to talk about Sodum, Potassum, Magnesum, Plutonum, Uranum, Cadmum, Chromum, Titanum and a bunch more. Why should Aluminum be the outlier?

That’s because in tech, reasonably experienced workers have very high mobility. And a lot of tech companies who tried to mandate RTO have experienced significant brain drain.

Books:

Wool/Shift/Dust by Hugh Howey. A well written, immersive post apocalyptic fiction that has a satisfying conclusion.

The Passage/The Twelve/The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. Pretty much the same as above.

The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. A huge read that spans almost a century (from just prior WW1 to the late 20th century), accompanying the same families from several different countries and embedding them into significant world events of the 20th century. Really well written and enjoyable.

You can disable and even delete an eSIM-profile. Then it’s just a dead chip. If your provider is halfway decent, you can recover a deleted eSIM-profile as well.

When I traveled last year, having eSIM-capability in my phone was extremely convenient. I picked two providers, one as the primary and one as a backup in case there were problems with the first one. No juggling with the SIM-tray and different nano SIMs.

Real estate as an investment, retirement provision or object of speculation is precisely the problem. Every home that gets bought as an investment in an inflated housing market directly contributes to the problem, by cutting people out of the opportunity of ownership and making them dependent on paying rent.