Flick 🇬🇧

See, told you you’d know by the follow requests!

While I would in general prefer no vomit, vomit at 7:30 once I am actually out of bed, and with enough notice to get him outside, is a definite improvement.

Unbearably cute to hear a French woman say that she enjoys relaxing by doing “cro-chette”.

Emotional labour is tiresome. Especially when one had to deal with dog vomit (et al) at dawn. But sometimes necessary.

https://spectator.com/article/baby-gabriel-rumi-is-the-latest-victim-of-the-global-surrogacy-business/

On Tuesday, a court in Dallas, Texas will convene to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with heart disease, headed now for surgery.

Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world.

The global surrogacy business surges on, valued at almost $40 billion, heading for $300 billion by 2030; an accelerating factory belt of babies commissioned, grown, sold. No one who profits from it wants to pause the gravy train or look too hard for harm. But the case of baby Gabriel-Rumi makes the cost of surrogacy – all surrogacy – painfully clear.

https://spectator.com/article/bonds-identity-crisis-mirrors-britains/

Sometimes I wake up in the night disturbed by dreams of James Bond. Surely, you might say, that’s the point of him; a man of such raw sex appeal that he can break the somnial boundary of women all over the world. But these aren’t sexy dreams about Bond’s past; they’re nightmarish visions of his future – Bond in the modern British public sector.

Picture it, 007 walks in for his briefing with M. The process is not the quick-witted sparring of classic Bond but a long PowerPoint presentation complete with a quiz at the end to show he’s been listening. Miss Moneypenny doesn’t ‘feel comfortable’ booking Bond flights because of the carbon output, so he finds himself on a rail replacement bus service. It transpires that his mission, the highest use of the British deep state’s most dangerous asset, is to eliminate someone suspected of misgendering the employee of a Citizens Advice Bureau in Broadstairs.

https://spectator.com/article/the-great-whataboutery-delusion/

If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that these badlands are policed mainly with insults and innuendos. And so you learn one morning, to your surprise, that you are an apologist for some repulsive regime which you strongly dislike. If you have been especially daring, you may be a ‘war crimes denier’ as well. Or you are charged with ‘whataboutery’, a word its users think will magically erase your case. Or, in many ways best of all, you are a conspiracy theorist.

There is a myth that this phrase was invented by the CIA to try to discredit protestors against the Vietnam war, but the expression is far older than that. Even so, like all these dismissive epithets, it is remarkably effective – especially among the great electronic mobs of antisocial media.

https://spectator.com/article/middle-england-is-finally-waking-up-to-the-migrant-crisis/

So I have some sympathy with those who are pleased to hear that Burnham thinks non-working-class areas of the country should take their own unfair share of illegals, particularly when you read the details. For instance there is the idea of housing 1,250 ‘male asylum seekers’ right beside Piddington in Oxfordshire. The village has a lovely church and village hall. The 2011 census recorded a population of 370. A similar brainiac has decided that the village of Barnham in Suffolk should have a right going-over. Barnham has a population of 600, a charming bell tower and a nearby landscape garden designed by Capability Brown. It too is scheduled to welcome 1,250 ‘asylum seekers’.

It is not for me to make predictions. But I suspect that the illegal migrants housed in these parts of rural England will not appreciate the subtleties of church architecture or landscaped gardens. Problems are likely to arise. I say no more.

https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/if-this-is-true-the-hyperscalers

In my regular research (behind a paywall), I have been saying for a while that I think the future of AI is not large language models (LLM), but small language models (SLM) run on local desktop computers or even mobile phones. In May, a team from Stanford University published research that compared these SLMs with the performance of LLMs run in data centres. If their results are true, then we will hardly need any data centres in the future, and the hyperscalers are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments. […]

This already means that one can replace data centres and their expensive cutting-edge semiconductor infrastructure in four out of five use cases. The research report estimates that the addressable market in the US for SLMs has grown to about $10tn or one-third of the entire US GDP of $30tn. There isn’t much left for LLMs to thrive in, and every year, their advantage over SLMs is shrinking.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/asian-communities-told-wash-rice-37574542

Asian and Muslim communities have been told to wash their rice and feet less in a bizarre water-saving bid by the UK's water regulator.

A whopping £270,000 of billpayers' money funded the scheme that used a famous chef to teach southeast Asians how to wash rice with less water.

People from the Muslim community have also been encouraged to use only a litre of water when performing “wudu” – washing the body – before prayer.

So, can anyone in the UK use some metacam and/or onsior?

Just spoken to the vet. He’s off the new pills, off all NSAIDs for life, and back on paracetamol for now (she pointed out he was on the minimum dose last time, so he can have more. But will that make him drink even more…? I suppose wee is easier to clean up than vomit), gabapentin is a possible: it helps some dogs with arthritis but not most.

And after that the only other option is the dreaded Librela. She did say that after a few months they can train me to give him the injections, so that would at least cut down on his car trips, but the side effects…. They’re rare, but they’re awful.

Fuck.

On balance, I think the 6am vomit is superior to the 6:30 vomit.

The former is very quickly over and done: scoop up the worst of it and flush it, roll over, go back to sleep, wash the bed sheet.

The latter, on the other hand, involves half an hour of restlessness that leaves everyone awake, putting down loo roll on that bit of the carpet only for him to throw up next to it, having to scrub it before it soaks in, realising he’s gone downstairs, coming down to a puddle (thankfully on the hard flooring) and a secondary vomit on the door mat.

See? Definitely superior.

I’m off to fail to get another hour of sleep.

Hmm. New instance makes me wonder if the plan to get Ro back by putting posters in his local Boothes needs to be revived.

(I know, wishful thinking. I do miss him and he was always much more careful about OpSec than most of our other missing. Note to self: email Holla and ask her to email Polar.)

Sausage skins apparently vv tasty, his bowl is empty!

Bollocks.

https://rawwar.medium.com/this-child-star-was-super-smart-with-his-money-5874e9881330

Way back in the year 2000, Malcolm in the middle was an incredibly popular TV show.

Malcolm (played by Frankie Muniz) plays an uber intelligent kid in a somewhat dysfunctional family. He’s ‘gifted’ intellectually, with his head well and truly screwed on.

What’s really interesting is, the character Frankie was depicting, wasn’t actually a million miles away from the reality here. […]

But in terms of the real estate, one investment really stood out for me. He bought parking lots in downtown LA — not the most conventional investment for sure.

But it’s genius, here’s why.

Think about it, you own the real estate (the land) and you can really operate the business with largely zero over heads (Frankie had a skeleton staff arrangement of just two)

Hurrah!

New rule: if you don’t even know the name of the local Instagram spot, I’m sending you to the paid car park in the village and you get a fifteen minute longer walk.

Oh, god, “Milo”, you are so obviously a woman with her tits chopped off :(

Came home to a lightly chewed pig’s ear (which he has now finished) and a completely un-touched dinner.