I don’t see the £50m in quite same way as you do; I see it as the “opportunity cost” of the strikes - and it often seems to be the case that the opportunity cost is much higher than what it would cost to negotiate and settle (by extension, it also seems that employers / governments playing hardball with workers is probably based more on ideology than on financial sense).

I believe we share the same sentiment though; these RMT folks are critical to the economy and they should be treated (and compensated) as such.

Not just mosquitos and not just in the long term either; with the colder weather not being as harsh a lot of other critters are either making a comeback, hanging around for longer or not dying out in the colder temperatures - think Blandford flies, horseflies, tick bites…

Project Orbis is about approval (and it seems like a good idea). It isn’t about supply or cost.

Close to home think Gibraltar and Northern Ireland. Further afield - I work with people who regularly travel for tasks that require an on-site presence and who have long term health conditions.

Probably more common than you think.

It’s sad but just leave it be. What’s lost is lost and cannot be easily replaced or replicated. In another millennium or two there’ll be something else there and those of us around today won’t really have any control over that.

Gray. Wheeler. Who next? If these people didn’t have excellent reputations for what they do, it could almost be trolling.

The pure ChatGPT output would probably be garbage. The dataset will be full of all manner of sources (together with their inherent biases) together with spin, untruths and outright parody and it’s not apparent that there is any kind of curation or quality assurance on the dataset (please correct me if I’m wrong).

I don’t think it’s a good tool for extracting factual information from. It does seem to be good at synthesising prose and helping with writing ideas.

I am quite interested in things like this where the output from a “knowledge engine” is paired with something like ChatGPT - but it would be for eg writing a science paper rather than news.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

USE THEM TOGETHER.

USE THEM IN PEACE.

Exactly. The data harvest has had years in the making.

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Yes. Seriously.