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IOLO

icanlivewithmyself

my best friend from high school recently retired after spending his whole career working for Rupert Murdoch in Australia. he dedicated all his working life to the single most odious and destructive man who has lived. A man who has arguably caused more pain and suffering than anyone else ever born (Stalin, Mao, Khan ?).

The guy who introduced me and my wife became the Comms Director for the UK PM who literally partied as I could not hold the hand of my dying mother. He knew her. She admired him.

Perhaps I have been unlucky in the friends that I made. And should I measure friendships with morality ?

As I get nearer to my death I think I should.

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IOLO

headinthesand

We are surrounded by Albanians and Kosovans who somehow get asylum from a perfetctly decent European country.

No one can be in any doubt that they do it for profit .

Albanians control the UK drugs trade and are the biggeest curse on our society.

The UK should not allow any more of these dealers in and should prevent dual nationality to prevent the wahabism that the Pakistanis foist upon us.

Time for pragmatism and reality,

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IOLO

streamingshit

I did my first online streaming project in 1996 and after an evening of trying to watch what TV has become, it’s time for an audit.

Before I do a deep dive, do understand that I understand this technology and even helped invent much of it. where we have got to is dreadful.

Let’s start with the big picture. we’ve gone from a single EPG (electronic programme guide) to a disparate smorgasbord of content scattered across tens if not hundreds of ’apps’ and interfaces. And, in most cases, each costs. Your £30 cable bill has become a £100 plus broadband and services bill.

Of course, ’discovery’ or finding stuff is another issue. There are some ’meta’ services, including, in the UK, traditional broadcasters like Comcast’s Sky, JustWatch, hardware companies like Roku and search engines.

But when you get down to individual services things get even more problematic.

Netflix provides a good technical service, but discovery and user experience is rotten. For example, Netflix does not recognise that you have watched content until you get to episode level, so you can keep on starting stuff you’ve watched over and again. their forthcoming clampdown on using your account at more than one property, if badly handled, will be a problem for people who travel a lot and take their video stick with them. But Netflix’ biggest issue is their content – they seem to produce ten times more Spanish and five times more Korean productions than anything in the UK.

Prime Video has dreadful technical problems – connection times are prehistoric and very often the audio is out of sync. Mixing paid for and bundled content is also confusing. And paying for your video via a delivery service is just weird.

Apple TV+ finally seems to have some content, but its UI is heavy and slow.

Disney+ is onto a winner as a child pacification service, but beyond that its appeal is poor.

The BBC’s iPlayer is excellent but requires endless clicks to get to content – ‘do you have a licence?’ ’are you over 18?’ ’agree to cookies’ ’which profile?’. You get none of that on your TV.

BT Sport is good but slow and inconsistent in its catchup, seems to have lost its start from start function. There is no pickup. It also has ads on a paid service.

Now TV is just dreadful. Catchup is non existent or glacial. It is a paid service riddled with ads. The costs are astronomic. The UI is awful.

ITV Hub has bad pickup, live isn’t available on platforms such as LG TVs, no start from start but the worst issue is the dreadful quality of the streaming.

YouTube has more and more good content (such as cricket) and is being used by minor broadcasters such as S4C (for cost saving and distribution). but it is a cluttered mess using search in place of an UI.

Channel 4 seems not to have invested in its streaming for a decade. Endless ads, endless looping ads, dreadful pickup, no live, no start from start, poor image quality. They really need to start from scratch.

Five has a generally very good service.

Premier TV is a real curate’s egg. all their live coverage is immediately available, but there are no apps. you either use Sky or have to depend on Chromecast. The company has recently been acquired by Viaplay who are renowned for their bad tech, so things are not likely to improve.

UKTV’s app is great.

Britbox is my only faultless service. it does what it does wonderfully well.

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IOLO

datarape

Let’s face it, you are a victim. not a subject or user or anything else. you are a victim. of data rape.

You data has been taken and used without your permission. And there is nothing you can do about it.

The EU came up with its stupid and ignorant GDPR regulations and it made things worse. Those endless popups that have wasted millions of hours of peoples’ lives for no benefit.

So can we please move things forward. An individual owns their data. they should hold this in a virtual container and only allow access with full permission that can be rescinded at any time.

Online data should be owned by an individual not by corporations.

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IOLO

sorryseemstobethehardestword

Why can no one admit they were wrong any more ? And say they’re sorry ?

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IOLO

intothemetaverse!

Err, no. the metaverse is a conceit like the interweb or all those cliches that went before.

It has a substance – of course we now live our lives between the virtual and the actual. this was a conceit similar to the change when retail went from deskfront to self-select.

Sure, there are million applications, from servicing a submarine or nuclear power station to Roblox.

But making this a ’thing’ is just stupid. And a bit desperate.

People will increasingly wear VR headsets for training, interaction and pleasure, but not for long sessions. otherwise they will be ill.

AR and hybrid devices are massively problematic over privacy issues.

The metaverse is a thing. It even has some crossover properties, but in reality it is just a marketing ploy.

A CEO whose last big idea has come to the end of its life looking for the next big thing.

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IOLO

reimaginedhistory

There are great dangers in trying to even out history, or just re-imagining history to suit audiences or mores.

My two most hated TV shows of all times are the risible Bridgerton and the even more risible Tudors.

Let me explain.

Bridgerton re-imagines Austen’s England as a world where people of all colours wafted around in a way that they wouldn’t even do in the 21st century. It is highly patronising in so many respects. Historically, morally and culturally. Kids watching this will presume that black people had equivalence in that era. How about telling it as it was ? Whitewashing at its worst.

The Tudors took the fat old king and made him a handsome young man forever. Henry VIII was one of the most risible people who ever strode the earth and to lionise him with lies is just pathetic.

So, can we please return to the Game of Thrones and fiction that is actually closer to reality than the pathetic histograms patronising TV execs and fawning critics want to foist upon us.

Or can we have a series with white slaves taken from Europe to Africa (that, at least, is historically accurate) ? Indeed, there have been so few programme about the slave trade (Roots perhaps being the only antiquated exception) that you wonder why redoing Austen is more important than showing the horrors of the slave trade ? Oh, yes, it’s more palatable.

Wishing a narrative to correct historical wrongs is just morally and intellectually incorrect. Righting moral wrongs today is what we need to do.

Not weaving fantasies.

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IOLO

disinflationism

So, because Thatcher and her bonkers economic advisor, Alan Walters, decided that inflation was a bad thing, UK economic policy ever since has been based on this thesis.

Ask a Japanese and they will tell you that some inflation is a good thing. It’s a sign of a growing and expanding economy.

It’s not inflation that Tories object. It’s wage inflation. Yes, all you Tory voters, they don’t want you to have a wag raise.

And that’s what’s come to pass. Hardly any worker in the UK has received a significant wage rise in thirty years.

The vast resource of EU workers helped with this, of course.

Let’s segue into another economic driver. The pound has collapsed, so exports are cheap (and imports are expensive). This should help British business if they are net exporters. So they can afford to pass on savings and increased margins to their workers.

But the reality is that the economic models of the past are just broken or lies. Monetarism was a mad economic theory that devalued public utility and values individual capitalism and rapaciousness.

Thatcher sold off all the assets – the oil, the gas and the nationalised industries and left us without energy security, whilst perusing a war in the South Atlantic.

Now we have a mini me Thatcher taking over from a wannabe failed Churchillian. What did we do to deserve this ?

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IOLO

howlocanyougo

Well, we seem to be awaiting a few tens of thousands of the ’chosen ones’ (or Tory party members) to decide our future PM.

This is madness. How can a small cabal decide on the leader of a democratic country ?

Given the idiots that have filled this position in the near past you’d hope for a mannequin or standing stone, but no, we have Liz Truss. The girls most unlikely to succeed.

How does the nastiest turd float to the top ? She is stupid, arrogant and nasty and is one of the only life forms in the UK that will actually make her idiotic imbecilic predecessor look good.

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IOLO

primitivism

File:Homo floresiensis cave.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The world is becoming primitive again. Our advances in thinking and learning and understanding are collapsing.

There is little doubt that some corners of our learning (the standard model for physics, or many political models) are hugely flawed.

But all over the world, in so many contexts, we are returning to beliefs that have been proven bad, divisive or just wrong.

The main problem is Faith. That is the belief in something that cannot be proven.

If you believe in something that cannot be proven, you can believe in anything. This is the essence of cults such as religions and social media platforms.

This is not revisionism or countenance. This is the belief in polemic ideas.

You can spend a lifetime studying the cruelty of nature from the haven of ‘civilisation’ and ‘humanity’. Yet humans, by their sheer dominance and inability to realise that their massive over-production have broken the imbalance of our earth.

Once more we are tribal and filial beyond any rationality.

Animals need no excuse to tear each other apart. Humans need football, or ethnicity or any other made up pretext.

I will, from now on, label these people – those who believe in the ludicrous concept of Faith or the pretext of political belief, as primitivists. They need to be left behind. Or we can shortly count the cost.