The City of Surrey has been ordered to stop ticketing Uber drivers for operating in the city, following a B.C. Supreme Court judge’s ruling.
Doug McCallum, the mayor of Surrey, was attempting to prevent Uber from operating and had bylaw officers ticket Uber drivers $500 a day. McCallum had taken the side of the cab industry, and said that he would not support the rideshare services.
He has now been forced to give up this month-long fight against the rideshare company. McCallum said that the city is now going to work on developing a level playing field between rideshare services and taxis.
Justice Veronica Jackson ruled that the bylaw officers had been unfairly ticketing the drivers, and that they would face a loss of revenue if they kept getting fined.
Existing tickets that were given to Uber drivers are expected to be resolved shortly, according to a statement from Michael van Hemmen, the head of Uber’s western Canada operations.
Further, the Vancouver Taxi Association lost its legal bid to prevent rideshare services from operating in Vancouver after the judge dismissed the application.
I just want to take a few moments to consider Bryan Alexander's comments about flying to conferences. As most readers know, I have flown to hundreds of academic conferences over the years. So I guess I would be considered a prime offender in this regard.
Except - I don't see myself as an 'offender' per se. Flying to conferences is just one of the things I've done over the years. I've also lived in apartments and houses, I've also bought and eaten food, I've clothed myself, I've driven and taken the train, and even taken the ferry a few times, I've worked in various office buildings.
All of these things have created a climate impact. I've heated my house with gas - in New Brunswick I actually converted from electric to gas. I've mostly cooked with electricity, though these days I usually use the microwave. About ten years ago I finally broke down and bought a car - a Honda Civic - and about two years ago I went with a Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV). I've been pretty low-impact over the years, but the reality is that most of my choices are out of my hands.
My main experience with all of this is that it's really hard to do the right environmental thing. This gets more and more true as you get older. But it's always true. And this, not my flying to conferences, is where the real environmental issue lies. Understand - I would be happy to live a zero-emissions life, and I would pay a considerable price to do this, but it's just not on offer.
Let's take my house. I live in a small but relatively modern house; it's well insulated and my heating and cooling costs are less than half what they were in New Brunswick, where I lived in an older house. And they're in line with what heating and cooling has always cost me, whether living in a house or an apartment. And mostly I've always heated with gas.
One alternative is oil, which is a non-starter. The same with coal. I know a lot of self-proclaimed environmentalists use wood, but that's even worst than coal or oil; we had a neighbour that heated with wood and by himself he polluted our entire neighbourhood. I've always opted for gas, which compared to all of these is much cleaner.
What about electricity? I'm a big fan of electricity, but in New Brunswick they still use coal and oil to produce it. Even here in Ontario, which has a lot of hydro, a lot of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels. We should have the option to use nothing but carbon-free electricity, but governments everywhere I've lived are pushing back against this option, shutting down clean energy alternatives, and promoting oil and gas. So I heat with gas. It's either that or freeze.
Let's also consider food and clothing. Here's I'm thinking not so much about cooking, where the situation is the same as it is for heating and cooling, but about what is available to me to eat and wear. For the most part, when I go into the store, the stuff I buy comes from somewhere else and was transported here. Why are we importing apples and potatoes to Canada? The same with clothing; my grandfather used to manufacture shirts, but the clothes I wear today - including the 'Canada' branded t-shirt I'm wearing right now - are made elsewhere. The shirt - 100% cotton - is from Honduras (which to the best of my knowledge grows no cotton).
Why is my selection of food and clothing so overwhelmingly from other places? It is, of course, because it is cheaper to grow and make somewhere else and ship it here. Question economists about that and they will talk about the high cost of labour in Canada. But why is it so cheap to transport pretty much everything I consume from thousands of miles away? Why do we allow shirts to be sold at all from places where wages are well below poverty level? Free trade is what makes this possible, but the people who live there are trapped there with no income, no services, and no hope. Free trade without freedom of mobility is freedom for the rich and servitude for the poor.
We could also talk about transportation. I lived most of my life without a car. I relied on public transit, I rode my cycle, and I walked. Eventually, in Moncton, I broke down and bought a car, because getting around without one was basically impossible. Public transportation was terrible, and in winter the streets and sidewalks were so bad it was impossible to walk even the short 2km distance from my house to my work.
When I moved to Ontario I chose a place where there I could walk to the train station. But the trains are infrequent and unreliable, they're expensive, and of course they still run on diesel. And public transportation in Ottawa is a mess, as it is in most car-centered communities. So I bought my PHEV, but after several years of trying I have still not been able to convince NRC to provide power stations (all they need to do is contact the same company that provides them to the Museum of Nature, but still they drag their heels).
So that's housing, commodities, and transportation. In all three cases, our society and economy is structurally biased toward the consumption of fossil fuels. Indeed, for the most part, this consumption is subsidized by governments, and supported through public policy and international commerce and trade laws. We're so dependent on fossil fuels we willingly look the other way from the poverty, war and oppression that makes our carbon-supported economy possible.
So - yeah, if I thought it might have an impact on all of that, I might consider not flying. But all that would be accomplished is that I would make my voice harder to hear, the benefits I provide less accessible to people who need them, and in fact would do nothing but lower the cost (by a fraction of a cent) to other people wanting to travel.
I mean - yes I do consider individual action to be important. For example, I recycle. I've been recycling since doing community paper drives in the 1970s. But individual action is drowned by the weight of corporate and government indifference. Which is how my recycled goods end up in a shipping container to be dumped in the Philippines. If the people who care don't fly, it just makes life easier for the people who don't care. As as we have seen recently, our environment can actually be on fire because of climate change, but the governments and corporations responsible are still more or less indifferent.
The problem - and the solution - to the issues of environment and poverty and the rest lie in the hands of those people who have the power to change what we're doing as a society, the one percent who hold most of the world's power and wealth. They benefit from environmental degradation and we pay the price, just as they benefit from oppressive labour laws, the corruption of government officials, and ownership of real and intellectual property.
We need to force a stark choice on them: taxes or pitchforks. That's the message that began to be heard at Davos this year, and one that we must press upon them with more and more insistence. The 8 trillion dollars - almost 10% of the world’s GDP - hidden in tax havens would provide us with renewable energy and the means to rapidly reduce our impact on the climate (with enough left over to increase the living standards of people around the world).
What I do, in my own small way, is to try to redress that imbalance. I work to keep education public, to keep knowledge in the hands of the people, and promote the rights and interests of people who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves at the wrong end of the income spectrum. That's why I have zero interest in working at elite universities teaching rich kids, zero interest in advancing a Fortune 500 company's patent portfolio, and zero interest in profiting from the sale of my writing or my ideas.
I have been fortunate to have been given enough of a salary for a modest life, and I've dedicated myself to making the most of that opportunity to do some good in this world. All my life I've tried to oppose the billionaires who keep telling me we should all earn less and pay more. All my life I've pushed back against the Irvings and the Kochs and the Thomsons and the Murdochs who try to undermine public services, penalize the poor, and extract maximum wealth from an unwilling population, no matter what the cost to the people or the environment.
If that means getting on an airplane to fly halfway around the world, then that's what I am going to do. I'm not going to let billionaires tell me that I should make do with less when it is they, not I, that are both the cause and the solution to climate change, global inequality, and common prosperity, and I am especially not going to let them constrain me at the point when I am most able to put the point to them and to make them pay for their avarice.
Every day on Twitter I see smart people who I respect dumping on one or another of the Democratic candidates.
Sanders for being cozy with left-wing dictators; Warren for being insufficiently socialist; Klobuchar for having prosecuted drug crimes; Buttigieg for taking money from rich people and for his lecturing; Biden for the stains on his record and for being weird; Steyer for being super-rich; Bloomberg for being even richer and for stop-and-frisk; Yang for… something, probably. (I forget).
I have a favorite, and a second and third choice. And so do you, and ours might not match.
Odds are that your favorite is not going to be the nominee. And that nominee, whoever it is, needs to not have been already labeled a garbage candidate by you and by everyone who’s favorite he or she isn’t.
Here’s the thing: we’re fighting to stop the spread of right-wing extremism. It will get so much worse if we reelect the president. It has to be stopped now. No other issue matters, because nothing else can be done without doing this.
Things I Don’t Care About
I don’t care about Medicare for All or beefing up the ACA. I don’t care about free college. I don‘t care about legalizing marijuana. I don’t care about immigration reform. I don’t care about rolling back the corporate tax cuts.
I don‘t care about any of the wonderful liberal and progressive policies our candidates propose — because they’re not going to get through.
(Well, I do care about them, deeply, but the point stands.)
It’s not that it would take 60 Democratic senators — it would take more like 65 or even more, and that’s not going to happen. We can elect the most wonderful progressive person ever and they’ll just beat their head against the wall.
There’s no magic coming. There’s no amount of will-of-the-people that will move Republican senators. All of the policy we talk about is just fantasy.
I also don’t care where the candidates’ money comes from. In fact, I want it to come from everywhere and I want to see enormous fucking rivers of it — because we’re going to need it to beat that corrupt asshole, our current president.
The Only Thing I Care About
Our job is to stop fascism here in America.
And then we can deal with it in the rest of the world.
I have plenty of doubt about what’s the best way. Will we turn out people who don’t usually vote? Maybe. But, the thing is, those people are people who don’t vote. And there’s no guarantee that, if they did, they’d vote our way.
But maybe there is an untapped well who can be energized and inspired?
Or… instead, will we be able to persuade people in the suburbs who normally vote Republican? In this polarized country, can anyone anywhere be persuaded? I don’t know. But maybe?
If you think you know the answer, I’ll tell you you’re full of shit, because you don’t know and I don’t know.
Here’s what I do know, though: we all need to be prepared for one of these candidates becoming the Democratic nominee, and we need to not have half of us hating that person already.
Because none of them are right-wing extremists. They’re all good people who will do their best to get good things done (and fail, but still).
This is the only thing that matters — they would all, every one of them, turn us away sharply and swiftly from the abyss we’re looking at right now. Even the ones who are not your favorite.
Kahoot! is a game-based student response system (SRS). This article is a literature review of studies assessing the use of Kahoot! and whether it supports student learning. The articles compared Kahoot! with traditional learning, with group discussions, and in comparison with other tools. I applaud the authors for not selecting to include papers accessible only behind paywalls. I also like that that the review looked at more than just test results, and included things like classroom dynamics, student anxiety, and student perceptions. That said, as the authors themselves note, papers about Kahoot! specifically tend to be favourable toward Kahoot! "Of the accepted articles, 97% present mainly positive results related to Kahoot! and 8% include challenges and problems." Even so, only about two thirds reported that Kahoot! improved learning.
Ah, corporate ethics, you never fail to disappoint. On the same day I learned that Apple was fined for not telling users that its updates deliberately slowed down older phopnes, I also read that Google creates a unique ID for every instance of Chrome that users install, so it can track their every move. More in Hacker News: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID.
Last year at Slush, the Microsoft for Startups team recorded a bunch of the talks we did in our booth. It’s taken a bit of time, but we’re starting to release them, and I’m really happy that the first to go public is on recruiting diverse teams by Amali de Alwis.
TL;DR: I used metrics to kick-start a year of fasting. In turn, I achieved my lowest weight since high-school, and gained physical benefits I had long since written off as impossible. Last year, I lost 46 pounds. This wasn’t difficult. It only required the right tools and consistent practice. I’ll tell you how I lost […]
We write a lot of JavaScript at Basecamp, but we don’t use it to create “JavaScript applications” in the contemporary sense. All our applications have server-side rendered HTML at their core, then add sprinkles of JavaScript to make them sparkle. [...] It allows us to party with productivity like days of yore. A throwback to when a single programmer could make rapacious progress without getting stuck in layers of indirection or distributed systems. A time before everyone thought the holy grail was to confine their server-side application to producing JSON for a JavaScript-based client application.
Seit gestern benutze ich ein Surface Pro X und ich bin noch in der Honeymoon-Phase. Deshalb sind meine Bemerkungen sicher etwas mit Vorsicht zu lesen.
Ich habe ja sehr viele Reviews vorher gelesen und bin sehr skeptisch daran gegangen. Dieter Bohn schrieb, das sei ein wunderbares Chromebook. Also habe ich mich dem Gerät genauso genähert: Chredge (Edge auf Chromium) installiert und darin dann eine ganze Reihe von Apps erzeugt: Apple Music, Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube. Die laufen jetzt mit eigenen Icons im Startmenü und der Taskbar, sind aber eigentlich alle nur Chredge-Fenster. Und das funktioniert alles auf dem selben Niveau wie beim ThinkPad X1 Yoga.
Zunächst hatte ich noch die Version 79 aus dem Dev Channel, aber schon wenige Stunden später kam für mich genau passend das Stable Release 80 mit Support für ARM64. Glück muss man haben und schön muss man sein.
Ich denke, das ist der Hauptfehler der meisten Reviewer gewesen: Erst mal alles installieren, was man "braucht". Und das beginnt dann bei vielen damit, bei Google das Chrome herunterzuladen, das dann als 32-bit-Anwendung emuliert wird.
64-bit-Programme können derzeit nicht emuliert werden und deshalb bin ich gestern über ein Programm gestolpert, das ich gerne installiert hätte: iA Writer läuft nicht auf dem Surface Pro X, weil es nur eine 64-bit-Version gibt, die für Intel kompiliert ist. Da werde ich sicher noch mehr antreffen.
Ich habe mir zunächst mal keine besonderen Gedanken gemacht, sondern habe einfach munter aus dem Microsoft Store zusammengesucht, was ich brauche: Ruff, Appy Text, NextGen Reader, Netflix, Telegram etc. OneNote und Word waren schon drauf. Ich bin schon beinahe vollständig und das Ding brummt.
Bisher habe ich nur zwei Nickeligkeiten: Die Taste am Surface Slim Pen funktioniert nicht, auch nicht nach entkoppeln und neu verbinden. Und dann habe ich manchmal auf volle Leistung aufgedrehte Lautstärke, wenn das Surface wach wird. Ich denke, beide werden sich noch geben.
Eine gute Überraschung hatte ich. Wenn ich meinen Samsung-Laserdrucker sonst bei Windows hinzufüge, dann muss ich immer erst einen Treiber herunterladen. Diesmal ging das völlig reibungslos und ich fand im Windows Store einen Eintrag Samsung Printer Experience.
Gestern habe ich den Akku nicht mehr leer bekommen. Aktuell sitze ich seit sieben Stunden dran und habe noch 41% im Akku. Das könnte eine Liebesgeschichte werden.
Two blogging connections of old have recently restarted their blogs. First, all of a sudden a feed that had been long dormant in my reader showed (1), meaning a new unread post was available. It turned out to be the return to blogging of Luis Suarez after a 3 year hiatus, who has been in my feed reader since I began working in knowledge management.
Today I came across a posting by Lee Lefever on LinkedIn where he says
I recently decided to resurrect my personal website, leelefever.com, which had languished for years as a static site. The site started as a blog in 2003 and I blogged there until 2007. The good old days!
This time around, I built the site on WordPress … And of course, the new site has a blog and I am dedicated to being a blogger at leelefever.com once again.
Lee is also a longtime blogging friend, back to the BlogWalk days (2004/2005). I followed his blog, his global travel blog with his wife Sachi, and then their company’s blog. Looking forward to reading new postings from him.
Both run their sites on WordPress. So that’s an opportunity to tell them about IndieWeb for WordPress and hopefully convince them to add functionality to their sites like Webmentions.
The last 2 years have seen a small but noticable movement back to blogging. I picked up my own blogging pace late 2017, first motivated by a desire to escape the bottomless pit of Facebook. It’s good to see the ongoing trickle of the return to blogging. And of new blogging voices emerging.
I find there’s a completely new need to explain things to new groups that we’ve thought explained and broadly known. Things like the value of having your own domain and site, but also things like unconference formats, Creative Commons licenses, and how much you can do yourself outside of the silos. Having more of the earlier voices back in the chorus to help do that, and do it in our current context, is great.
Today was the first time I had to be really cross with our little one. With a friend she had used a set of color markers to not just draw on the board intended for it, but everywhere else in her room as well. The door, the walls, the floor, lightswitches, all the furniture such as her bed including the sheets, the lamps and her piggy bank, the Sonos speaker, the toys in her room, and the poster frames on her wall. The door and the wall can’t be cleaned and will need a new coat of paint at some point. The rest luckily could be wiped clean quickly.
I haven’t used Editorial in a while (although I initially wrote a bunch of workflows to aid my writing, I eventually decided to go back to non-scriptable editors), but I am very worried about Pythonista’s future, for two reasons:
The first is that my eldest kid pretty much lives inside it and has coded various apps, many using the bindings to UIView and the like.
He’s even ported bits of Tk across to do UI layouts, and it would be terrible to lose the one programming environment he really likes (Codea is nice too, but there is nothing else that even comes astronomically close in terms of “native”-ish Python development).
The second is that Pythonista is utterly unique in so many regards. It is an unstated masterpiece, and (at least in my view) pushed the envelope of what it is actually possible to do on an iPad beyond anything anyone else (even Apple) has done, so I really it needs to be future-proofed somehow.
I don’t think open sourcing it would be enough - there would have to be a team willing to keep it going, and even though I’d certainly roll up my sleeves and contribute (there are a few libraries I’d like to port over, for instance), Ole Zorn would still have to find a way to get actual income from it.
Apple, in particular, should take note. Swift Playgrounds were cute to begin with, but none of my kids used them after the first couple of weeks because they are too limited to do anything remotely useful, and this pushes forward the notion that the platform itself is, if not borderline hostile to developers, at least fundamentally unsuited for programming in general, even at the most basic levels.
Pedro Marques@MetroManTO
Give me a badge and I’d raise enough money ticketing red light runners, sidewalk parking, failing to stop before tu… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Refreshingly honest of the Telegraph to reveal that they weren't reporting news, or informing their readership but rather waging a war against the EU for 40 years. twitter.com/timothy_stanle…
Brexit would never have happened without the Telegraph. It fell to me, as the Sunday leader writer, to tell the story of the Sunday Telegraph's war against the EU - which goes back decades. I found an editorial calling for a referendum in 1990. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/…
If you’ve ever biked in Toronto, you know that cycling in urban environments can be harrowing.
Part of the problem is the lack of communication between cyclists and motorists. As such, Ford’s European division came up with a unique idea: the emoji jacket. It’s essentially just a jacket but with a series of LEDs on the back that can light up and form symbols.
Cyclists wearing the jacket can use a remote attached to the handlebars of their bike to display various symbols to communicate with drivers. While it works with emoji — smiley faces for happy cyclists and frowny faces for upset bikers — there’s much more to the jacket. It can also display turn signals and a hazard symbol if a cyclist needs to slow down suddenly.
In a video showing off the prototype jacket, linguist Neil Cohn points out that people can process and understand symbols and words in under half a second. Because of that speed, being able to display a large symbol on your back for drivers to respond to could be a great way of avoiding accidents and making city cycling safer.
Unfortunately, as brilliant of an idea as it is, it’s not clear if Ford ever plans to bring it to market. For now, it remains a prototype, albeit a cool one.
If you want a fun, light, but long read on the history of CSS, this is the document for you. My own experience goes back to those days before CSS, so I lived through all the changes described in the article, and it seems pretty accurate to me (and yes, I rember using tables to define headers and footers and left-site menus). It's funny, though - for all the work that has been put into CSS over the years, it feels like such a small advance over the dayt
This article does a great job of explaining how transfer learning is unlocking a new wave of innovation around deep learning. Previously if you wanted to train a model you needed vast amounts if data and thousands of dollars of compute time. Thanks to transfer learning you can now take an existing model (such as GPT2) and train something useful on top of it that's specific to a new domain in just minutes it hours, with only a few hundred or a few thousand new labeled samples.
Swedish company Ericsson is withdrawing from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Similar to LG, Ericsson will be pulling out of the annual conference due to coronavirus related concerns.
Ericsson released the following statement:
After an extensive internal risk assessment, Ericsson has decided to take further precautionary measures by withdrawing from MWC Barcelona 2020, the largest event in the telecom industry.
Ericsson appreciates that GSMA have done everything they can to control the risk. However, as one of the largest exhibitors, Ericsson has thousands of visitors in its hall each day and even if the risk is low, the company cannot guarantee the health and safety of its employees and visitors.
Ericsson will take its demos and the content that it created for the conference to local events called ‘Ericsson Unboxed.’
Earlier this week, the GSMA confirmed that MWC will continue to take place despite the coronavirus outbreak.
“We have spoken to LG and regret not to see them at this year’s MWC20 Barcelona,” a GSMA spokesperson said to Reuters. “As we stated yesterday, we can confirm that there is minimal impact on the event thus far and MWC Barcelona 24-27 February 2020, will proceed as planned,” the spokesperson continued.
Here's how Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) chief executive Roberta Mock opened a recent conference:
"The TaPRA Executive wants you to feel welcome and valued – and not simply regardless of your nationality, gender, body, sex, race, ethnicity, dis/ability, age … but because of these lived experiences. TaPRA aims to facilitate an environment in which a productive balance of researchers at all career stages are able to work together, supporting and learning from each other … [It] is … important that we practise a form of radical acceptance and solidarity – that we make space, that we respect each other and that we look to common goals and aspirations."
I'd say this is a huge step forward, but not far enough. We need to promote, in my view, radical acceptance and solidarity even when we have different goals and aspirations. It's about what we can do for each other, not how we can make people align.
Welcome home, again, Alberto. What a nice write-up. When my (then Honduran) brother in law received his Dutch nationality, we as family attended a similar session with him in his hometown Utrecht. Although it was definitely more formal (with an oath and all that jazz), it was also very festive and relaxed and not just a routine.
Of course it does mean that as a Dutchman I now get to make Belgium jokes about you. But luckily that goes both ways, you get to tell Dutch jokes about me. Brussels is one of those places that prove every time I visit that Europe works.
...our mayor welcoming us to the large, colorful, slightly shady Brussels family (yes, shady, since our cultural heroes are people like these – and proud of it!).
Way to go, my fellow Belgians. No, this country is not perfect. It can be quite dysfunctional. But these things are fixable. What matters most to me, is the ironic, tender humanity you so often manage to infuse in life here. If this is Belgium, I am happy to have chosen to make my home here, and proud to be one of you.
When Microsoft first unveiled the Surface Neo and Duo foldable tablet and smartphone, it was shocking. There were rumours about the devices, of course, but most were too skeptical to believe in a Surface phone.
However, it’s very much real and, despite being slated for launch in late 2020, a Surface Duo was spotted in Canada.
The dual-screen, foldable Android-powered smartphone turned up on the Vancouver SkyTrain. Twitter user Israel Rodriguez (@yzraeu) saw someone using it on the train and snapped a picture.
In the picture, it appears the Duo user is checking an email on the right screen in what seems to be the dark-mode Gmail app (although it could also be Microsoft Outlook).
Hey, not sure if interesting, but I just saw a guy in Vancouver's SkyTrain playing around with Surface Duo. Got photos and videos. pic.twitter.com/TsRQYdD1pz
So this blog about cycling and Toronto started exactly 10 years ago. Just by coincidence, this happens to be my 1001st post.
Here are my stats per year:
You can see that traffic has been gradually tailing off since 2014. This is probably due to social media. In particular, a lot of cycling related discussion has moved to facebook.
Here are the stats by month for the past two years:
There are several long time bike centric blogs based in Toronto that have gone by the wayside over the past decade, notably bikelanediary that called it a day in 2013 after ten years of reporting. Of the blogs that are linked here, the only Toronto based one that has been active recently is Two Wheeled Politics.
I think that I’ll keep this one going for at least a few more years. There’s always something interesting to report on the bike front from TO and further afield.
Brexit day has come and gone. But as has been widely remarked, though apparently not universally understood, nothing really changes in the Transition Period, so there is no radical rupture in daily life.
The big question is whether that also means that nothing really changes in the way that Britain approaches Brexit. For last Friday did mark a rupture in one, crucial, way. Brexit, in the formal sense of Britain leaving the EU has happened, and a new phase has begun.
The issue now is not so much whether remainers accept that (£) – they don’t have much choice anyway - it’s whether Brexiters do. In particular, the issue is whether Brexiters – who now, unequivocally, form the government – are able to shift from campaigning to, indeed, governing.
What would this mean?
Stopping the lies
The first and most important thing that would have to change is for Boris Johnson, his government, and all the Brexiter commentators and advisers to stop lying. If they are serious about Brexit they need to face up to the realities of what it entails and that means telling the truth to themselves and others.
To take an example from this week. Hardly had the celebrations ended than Johnson was reported to be “infuriated” that the EU had “reneged” on its commitments to strike a ‘Canada- style’ free trade deal by now insisting on ‘Level Playing Field’ (LPF) commitments in terms of state aid, workers’ rights, environmental standards and so on. But that this was the EU’s position has been clear for at least a year and, more importantly, was set out in the text of the Political Declaration (paragraph 77) that Johnson himself signed. It’s this kind of constant gaslighting that would need to stop.
There’s more to it than that, though. Suppose that it were true that the EU had hardened its position, or suppose that it does, indeed, harden position in the coming months. In that case: welcome to the real world – there’s no point in having a foot-stamping, ‘it’s not fair’ tantrum. This is what Brexit means. This is what you wanted. The UK is now a third country with respect to the EU, which will pursue what it judges to be its own interests and those of its member states. Britain is no longer a member state, and the EU will, quite properly, have no regard for our interests.
It seems strange to have to remind Brexiters that the EU is not some cuddly, kind uncle, showering largesse upon the world. It is ruthless in pursuit and protection of its own interests. So too will be the US, or Japan, or China, or India, or any other country with which the UK seeks to made trade deals, including ‘cosy’ Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Nor is this confined to matters of trade, and trade itself is linked with other issues. That is evident in the row over Huawei 5G with the US (£) and the report that Spain will have a veto over the application of any UK-EU deal to Gibraltar. The latter caused much pearl-clutching from Brexiters but, again, there is nothing new here. It was the subject of one of the earliest rows in the Brexit process, back in April 2017. And as I wrote at the time, this row contained several lessons for how Brexit would proceed.
These lessons included, again, the need for realism. Just as the UK used Spain’s accession to the EU in 1986 to garner EU support for the UK’s rights over Gibraltar (in that case, to have an open border with Spain), so the converse applies now that the UK is leaving. Another lesson was that the UK needed to drop the idea that only France and Germany mattered in terms of negotiating with the EU. As the pivotal influence that Ireland has had over the last three years should have demonstrated, that simply isn’t true. The EU will negotiate as a bloc, on the basis of a mandate from the Council, and with regard to the (various) interests of all its members.
Getting real
If Brexiters are going to get serious about governing, what also has to end is responding to these and similar things through the victimhood narrative of being punished by the EU or the bullish assertion that it all proves that Britain is right to leave. These are campaigning stances – arguments, if you believe them, for leaving the EU. But Britain has left the EU. The campaign is over. It’s time to get real.
That ‘getting real’ also includes being honest about the economic and political effects of what is being done. A trade deal, of any sort, with the EU is going to do little for services. A minimal trade deal will do relatively little even for goods. If the approach is to be de-alignment then recognize, as Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform explains, that “flexibility does not come for free”.
All reputable economic forecasts show that, whatever the trade deal, we will be somewhat poorer and if there is no trade deal we will be much poorer. There’s no longer any need to try to rubbish those forecasts (or forecasts in general, although in fact, with one notable exception namely that of ‘Economists for Brexit’, these have been fairly accurate). If they turn out to be wrong then they will turn out to be wrong, but admit that, at the moment, that’s the most likely outcome. So plan on that basis.
There are going to be border checks and other formalities between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so stop pretending otherwise. Recognize that in due course that may lead to Irish reunification. Also recognize that Brexit has made the case for another independence referendum in Scotland all but unanswerable, or at all events ensured that calls for it will be increasingly vociferous. It will surely happen eventually. So accept that and, with it, the possibility that Scotland will leave the UK.
Almost all of these things are, in my view, damaging. But that argument is over. Now that they are going to happen what matters is, again, for Brexiters to stop trying to win a campaign argument and start being realistic. If they think they are a price worth paying then so be it, but admit the price and start working out how to go about paying it.
And getting real means dropping all the tired old lines – still being wheeled out by the likes of David Davis - about how Britain’s trade deficit with the EU, and the needs of German car makers, guarantee a great trade deal. They helped win the campaign, but the campaign is over. They were lies but they’re no longer needed. Or, for those who want to insist they are true, they are still redundant as we’ll soon get that great trade deal anyway.
Developing a serious strategy
The second big change that would be needed is also about truthfulness and realism, but on a bigger canvas. I’ve several times argued that Brexit is not just a strategic error but, actually, a strategic absence. Again, that’s linked to its having been a campaign and protest movement. The historian Professor Robert Saunders has provided a more developed version of that argument in a truly superb essay on his blog.
It’s well worth reading in full but, in brief, Saunders argues that Britain joining the EU was a belated strategic response to its changed economic and geo-political situation in the aftermath of the Second World War. It may, he says although he does not agree, have been the wrong response, as Brexiters believe. But that does not mean that the challenges it responded to have gone away.
Moreover, he argues that the British Euroscepticism that ultimately gave rise to Brexit has its roots in a 1990s analysis of the world order which, in 2020, is redundant. Therefore we need, in his words, to get “serious about the choices in front of us” which “will require more imagination, more humility and a more clear-eyed appreciation of the options than anyone has yet offered in Britain’s tortured Brexit debate”.
It is a proposal in line with Sam Lowe’s analysis of post-Brexit trade priorities, referred to earlier, in which he argues that a long-term trade strategy must have a coherent economic or geo-political purpose rather than being a search for “political trophies”, although of course trade strategy is only one aspect of the wider point.
All this I agree with. Developing such a strategy will be difficult and the more so because it needs to be done quickly. It needs a big public conversation which should have preceded the Referendum or, at least, been developed once the result was known. ‘Global Britain’ is not such a strategy but rather, as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee put it in 2018, a slogan in need of substance.
Showing competence
Given the current time pressure and all the operational things that will need to be done – for example in developing new customs procedures – there is probably not the political or administrative bandwidth to achieve it in the next eleven months. But it is important to at least begin, and not just because such a strategy is needed in itself. Rather, along with being truthful and realistic about what Brexit means, doing so would at least send a signal of competence. That would do something to repair the battering Brexit has given to the UK’s image abroad, but it would also be an important domestic signal.
There is much talk of the need to reach out to those who voted for Brexit because they had been ‘left behind’ (though that could and should have been done long ago, without Brexit). But there is also a need to reach out to remainers, and perhaps to a particular group amongst them. Call them ‘the Establishment’ if you must, but like it or not the many business people, professionals, administrators and so on who, as the demographics of the Referendum voting suggest, largely did not want Brexit are going to have to deal with its effects.
In my previous post I argued at length how dangerous it is that we are embarking on a complete change of direction whilst being so internally divided. That would be true even if Brexit was the most wonderful idea there had ever been. Any such policy needs some minimal level of buy-in from those who have to deliver it.
Having failed for three years to provide the consensus-building leadership that might have created that, the government now has a final chance to at least demonstrate that it will approach Brexit in a realistic way, being truthful about its actual effects and challenges. I don’t suggest that this would win over many remainers, but it might at least persuade some that Brexit has moved from unicorn fantasies to a deliverable, if still to them undesirable, project.
Getting out of the echo chamber
A final part of the shift from campaigning to governing would be for government ministers to look beyond the advisors who – I assume – they most closely rely on. Many of them, including Dominic Cummings but not limited to him, have their background in, precisely, the Leave campaign. Relatedly, the whole shady network sometimes known as the Tufton Street mafia is a big part of the problem, because it is from this that so much of the misinformation has flowed. Again, this would be the case even if Brexit were the most wonderful of ideas. It’s always a problem to confine advice to ‘true believers’ as it is a recipe for groupthink and poor decision making.
For Brexiters to recognize this involves dropping the idea – born both of being in campaign mode but also of a victim mentality – that they face a ‘remainer conspiracy’, whose lack of positivity will put a brake on Brexit. Yet if Brexit is supposed to be a realistic project, rather than an act of faith-healing, it requires that ministers get technically competent advice rather than just the soothing balm of being told what they want to hear.
Equally, if the government is really serious about ‘bringing the country back together’ then it would start engaging with people outside of the doctrinaire Brexiter camp. Instead, this week has seen journalists excluded from briefings and business groups not invited to Johnson’s speech on his Brexit ‘plans’. Echo chambers are bad enough on social media, and they’re certainly no basis for effective government.
Will any of this happen?
The short answer, of course, is ‘no’. The very nature of last weekend’s celebrations gives a clue as to why. It showed how, for many who were celebrating, the pleasure comes from triumphing over remainers rather than leaving the EU. That triumph can be endlessly relived, but doing so won’t deliver Brexit. Some, burning EU flags, are more concerned with hatred for the EU than with what Britain outside the EU would be. If Brexit leaders continue to pander to these two sentiments then, as for the last three years, Brexit will continue to be entirely focussed on the campaign, not on governing.
Still others were pro-Brexit but were protesting against Johnson’s Brexit for not being the real thing. That betrayalism, which no doubt Farage and some in the ERG will continue to articulate, means that Johnson is likely to continue to approach Brexit as a tactical party management device rather than as a matter of policy delivery. In any case he is an unlikely person to lead a shift from campaigning, given that it entails both being honest and also giving attention to practical detail and delivery. These things are hardly his most obvious strengths, and were he minded to try he would have started immediately after Brexit day, if not indeed when he became Prime Minister.
Instead, we’ve already seen in this first week we that nothing’s going to change. Apart from the bogus claims about the EU having suddenly invented its LPF requirements, we had the equally bogus idea that the UK could prosper with an ‘Australian-style deal’. In trade terms, since there is no EU-Australia free trade agreement, that just means no trade deal i.e. WTO terms (plus a few bits and pieces). Presumably Johnson’s advisors have suggested his formulation sounds more palatable.
So, still no honesty and, given the devastating effects it would have, still no realism and still no strategy. Johnson’s Brexit speech, according to politics Professor Tim Bale, was “of little substance” and did not have “a whole lot of realism”. Childishly, but in line with government policy (£), he refused to use the word ‘Brexit’. Unsurprisingly, the pound fell by about 1% against both the dollar and the euro as he spoke.
To the victor the spoils
That is one small example of the fact that Brexiters, led by Johnson, will now have to confront reality even if they refuse to be realistic. Slogans and rhetoric won the campaign, but neither they nor ‘true belief’ will make a difference to that reality. Strangely, those on the free-market Right, many of whom are such ardent Brexiters, used to know that ‘you can’t buck the market’.
So whatever kind of deal gets agreed with the EU it will have real consequences on business locations and investments, on growth, on the pound, on prices and on employment. They will happen even if Brexiters deny them, or discount them as ‘remainer negativity’, as if they were still campaigning rather than governing, still trying to win the argument rather than delivering their promises.
Brexiters are no longer, if they ever were, the victims they portray themselves to be. As Nigel Farage said at last week’s celebrations, “the war is over, we have won” (£). To the victor, go the spoils. They are now ‘the elite’ and ‘the Establishment’ but with that power comes responsibility and accountability. Like it or not, they can no longer run away from the consequences, but there’s no sign that they are going to stop trying.
It looks like Apple could be considering switching to AMD processors, or at least giving consumers the option, according to code covered in the macOS Catalina 10.15.4 beta.
As first reported by MacRumors, Twitter user @_rogame shared an image of code found in macOS 10.15.4. Mention of AMD processors first appeared back in November in macOS 10.15.2 beta.
The new code snippet mentions several AMD APUs, including ‘Picasso,’ ‘Raven,’ ‘Renoir’ and ‘Van Gogh.’ To be clear, an APU is AMD’s term for a CPU and GPU integrated on a single chip.
This news adds further fuel to the dubious rumour that circulated a few months ago, citing that Apple has plans to reveal a high-end gaming Mac at WWDC 2020.
As always, it’s important to keep in mind that this is just a few lines of code and could mean nothing. There’s a possibility Apple is just internally testing AMD APU units in its devices and that is why this code appeared in a beta release of macOS Catalina.
Following up the revamped 16-inch MacBook Pro that launched a few months ago, Apple is expected to reveal a new version of its 13-inch MacBook Pro that features its scissor-switch keyboard and improved speakers at some point in the next few months.
Rogers is currently offering two appealing iPhone XS deals.
The first deal gets you the phone for half off, while the second one lets you buy a second one for free. I’ll start by explaining the single phone deal first since it applies to the multi-phone sale.
Save $685 on a 64GB iPhone XS
This deal can be applied online and it nets you a single 64GB iPhone XS for roughly half off. That means the overall cost of the phone over two years will cost you only $600.
Roger’s website says people can buy the phone for $0 down with monthly payments of $24.99 for 24-months.
Getting this plan with Rogers’ 10GB/$75 unlimited plan means your monthly cost is going to be $99 before tax.
BOGO deal
This second deal is only available in stores and it uses all the information stated above.
That means you buy the first iPhone XS and all of the discounts above are applied, but then you can also get another one for free, but they both need to be part of a Rogers Infinite plan.
This isn’t a bad thing though, since the cheapest Infinite plan is Rogers’ best deal. It comes with 10GB of base data that is throttled down to 512KBps if you use more than 10GB. This plan costs $75 per month, but Rogers has another promo that takes $10 off when you add a line to an existing account, which means that the second plan costs $65 per month.
In essence, this is two iPhone XS phones with 10GB of unlimited data each and they cost each user roughly $82 plus tax per month.
Every day, users provide media companies with the type of explicit, accurate, data other businesses covet. Consumers willingly volunteer this data as they register or subscribe in order to unlock more content or build a deeper relationship with their site of choice. And it’s exactly this type of information that, if used right, can push those companies ahead in this new data landscape.
LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) is creating more chances to match online users based on email. Publishers using ATS ask readers to submit their email for free access to content. That email address can potentially be matched to the IdentityLink profile, creating a chance for one-to-one targeting without having cookies, and with clear consent because the email was given to the site. Howe said LiveRamp has 12 SSPs and 30 DSPs buying on ATS or committed to its adoption.
One possible future for post-cookie web advertising is
going to work something like this: if you're signed
in to a site, you're going to get something pretty
close to adtech as usual, except limited to the group
of sites where you're willing to sign in. So if two
publishers can both use a registration wall to get
your email (or SSO that maps to your email, which
is basically the same thing) then the same ads will
"follow" you across both those sites, and you'll see
ads targeted based on loyalty programs you opt into.
This means an increase in market power
for publishers from the conventional
third-party cookie, because crappy and fraudulent
sites will have a hard time getting your email
or SSO. For advertisers, the game of tag, trying
to get ads in front of specific people, continues,
except that the boundaries for the game are brought
in to include only sites that can get people past the
reg wall. LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe explains, in Why
Addressability Will Flourish In A Cookieless World |
AdExchanger.
On sites where you're not signed in,
you're going to get ads for miracle fungus
cures, predatory finance schemes, and other
bottom-feeder stuff—unless you're running a
browser with built-in targeting/atribution (the
stuff being discussed at W3C's advertising business
group)
and leave it turned on. In that case your browser
will do magic JavaScript tricks to give you
reasonable-looking ads from legit companies—but
the site still has an incentive to get you signed in
if possible. (The clickbait of today is a photo and
headline. The clickbait of two years from now will be
a photo, headline, and a killer first two paragraphs
to run above the SSO button.)
Fraud doesn't go away entirely in this scenario,
but the difficulty of fraud schemes does shift,
and tends to make other platforms, such as
streaming media,
into more attractive fraud targets.
Karen Quinn Fung | 馮皓珍 @counti8
Pedro Marques @MetroManTO
redhistorian on Twitter.
redhistorian
on Sunday, February 2nd, 2020 4:01pm
