Yeah we're thinking of heading to Cornwall, we've always gone to a decent caravan park at the start of September before my son began school, but now we're having to look in the summer holidays and the prices are crazy!
OK, this was a thing that happened. Shutting it down.
Then the centimeters shit 🤣 MAN, I mean fuck lol you can’t blame me okay, every time I’m shopping online especially when I’m buying a fucking bra or something else specific like that,
Okay, don't say some of you, say all of them. Be like it's an undeniable fact. Like, your opinion is absolute truth, and they are completely, totally, completely wrong. Exaggerate it. Extremely. Make it so severe that, like, it'll make them angry enough to click on it to argue.
That's not an Americanism really; people call it Scotch in British English too. It's just that because 99% of the whisky in the UK is Scotch anyway you don't really need to specify. Whereas because most whisky consumed in the US is bourbon, they tend to specify when they mean Scotch.
The same is presumably true in reverse, i.e. Brits using "bourbon" more than Americans because of the need to specify.
Personally I'm not bothered by the whisky/whiskey distinction. Whisky was traditionally Scottish and whiskey Irish, with the Americans going the Irish way and other countries (like Japan) going the Scottish way. But it's a bit of a meme to nitpick at this point; they're indisputably just two spellings of the same thing.
Once you've got your eye in, scotch and bourbon are quite different. Many (although not all) scotch whiskies have peat in their flavour profile (a kind of smoky, salty, earthy flavour which is very distinctive), while bourbons never do. Bourbon is almost always quite a lot sweeter than scotch.
They're also made quite differently. Bourbon is mostly corn, and often has lots of rye and wheat in the mix, whereas scotch is mostly made of barley. Bourbon is always aged in new oak barrels, whereas scotch is mostly aged in second-fill barrels (which might previously have been used for bourbon, wine, sherry, port, cider etc.).
MPs using whatsapp and other encrypted messaging apps is intentional, regardless of the quality of IT infrastructure. They don’t want their records arbitrarily available for inspection (and inspected they should be).
For example boris johnson if i remember correctly “losing his phone in the sea”? so a number of messages became inaccessible
The government's public-facing tech (gov.uk & related systems) is actually pretty world-leading and done in-house for a not extortionate amount, so it may be possible to form teams under the same organisation to develop internal software
That said though, those in government probably want to keep stuff under the table with WhatsApp and so probably would spend billions on contractors owned by their mates only to claim it's too expensive when it's nearly complete and scrap the whole thing, ideally with high cancellation payouts (this was the plan all along to look like they tried to do something while keeping the status quo)
I guess most of us are here because we're fairly IT literate and or inquisitive enough to learn. What you're describing makes sense on a technology level to us but it's missing the key ingredient that going to make it work for the government.... the human ability for incompetence, exacerbated by British hubris, made worse by multinational IT consultancies having a stranglehold on UK government department IT. Ok that's more than one missing ingredient 🤣.
The easiest thing to do would be to mandate MPs use separate phones. One for personal use one for government business. Great. What happens when they don't? You're going to have a large number of MPs that will simply say, "I am elected you are not I will only carry a single phone". What do you do then? Mandate a work profile? Again, "I am a duly elected member of this parliament and I am not going to comply". They'll just swap personal numbers like they do now and continue to use private WhatsApp for government business. It will go on and on like that because they'll just be belligerent for the sake of it. It's the British way. Under those circumstances I simply can't see educating MPs or civil servants on how to use a (let's be honest) niche messaging app. People are inherently lazy and they'll choose the path of least resistance even if that means weakening security and obfuscating government records. MPs don't give a shit. Can you see MPs voting on strict controls for themselves? I can't.
Let's assume for a second that this does have by in from government. Every department has their own long running deals with US IT consultancies that aren't simply going to allow these types of changes that undercut their bottom line. Who do think runs all the various IT systems in the UK government? Its not the Department For Information Computing & Technology (DICT) its several large consultancies (Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, JPMorgan, KPMG, Deloitte, etc etc). They're not going to hold out their arms and welcome an in-house solution that under cuts their bottom line. Just ask GDS!
I'd love for what you're suggesting to become a reality but we have enough difficulties getting public data from local councils in usable formats let alone trying to swing government departments to do anything useful.
BBC have already started testing it and I suspect it's spearheading the eventual move. And it kind of makes sense, in that governments and large corporations are no longer beholden to tech companies for critical communications to its audience.
And it kind of makes sense, in that governments and large corporations are no longer beholden to tech companies for critical communications to its audience.
This is key, especially as there is concern that some state actors have undue influence over certain services (hence all the fuss over TikTok as well as general concern about our reliance on Chinese companies). The idea of network sovereignty keeps coming up. Working with established open source solutions that can be largely implemented in-house is going to be key for governments going forward.
I’m American. I couldn’t come up with trunk so I called it a boot. Thanks to all those episodes of Top Gear I’m sure. Bonus is that my wife and I watch enough Dr. Who so that she knew what I was referring to.
I use loads of americanisms and their spelling for words like color, the way I see it most the world is using English so least we can do is meet them 0 001% of the way on cresting a global odious language
I noticed in Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Gromit cares for a vegetable in his garden that they either call a ‘marrow’ in British English or ‘melon’ in the localized American export of the film.
“How’s that marrow/melon of yours coming on?” -Wallace
Not a movie, but it really traumatized me to the point I still see it today. When I was 5 or 6 I saw some PSA during children's programming to get people to buckle up their children in a car. Some guy was driving, with his daughter in the back. She was showing him how she had learned to play a song on the recorder (the flute). Then he had to brake and I still see the flute rammed down her throat to this day. It was effective, though, as I am known to tell my kids to not run or play with something in their mouth.
It was the kid breaking into the substation to get his frisbee that was stuck in one of the insulators that did it for me. "Jimmmmmyyyy!!!!" while smoke was pouring out of his shoes.
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