Currently getting perilously close to the end of Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer (the fourth and final book in his Southern Reach series).

I’m enjoying it, but it’s a trip. Every 100 pages or so my wife will ask how the book’s going, and I’ll respond “er, it’s gotten stranger…”.

This seems insane to me. I see foxes at least every month.

I literally just had a pair yelling their terrifying night music outside my window.

They’re common as fucking pigeons in towns and cities.

Yeah…it’s autumn.

Presumably this isn’t your first autumn.

There are lots of spiders because it’s spider season. There are always loads of spiders in September and October.

And you’re noticing all the foxes because this is their mating season, and they make a horrendous amount of noise when they’re mating.

You’ll be panicking about all the leaves on the trees dying and falling off, next.

Do the fish need to be in North Tyneside in order to be sexually attractive, or will any fish from the Tyne & Wear area do?

Would probably be pretty useful as a way for getting my son to eat it. He’s a right chilliphobe.

I cook all sorts of spice-free spicy food for him; the grown-ups can always add chilli at the table to liven it up a bit.

Interestingly, Swindon is becoming a bit of a drone manufacturing hub. This is the fourth company to announce a Swindon factory in the last few months. The others being:

• Stark
• Munin Dynamics
• Flyby

This one (Tekever) is by far and away the largest of the four, though.

I didn’t really have “Swindon becomes major arms manufacturing hub” on my Swindon bingo card, but there you go.

It’s been a very hot summer, but it’s back to more normal temperatures now.

Although it’s still pretty warm, to be honest. I think today might be the first day it’s failed to get above 18 C in the day.

Being a scrooge in a house which has all the thermal efficiency of a pile of wet cardboard, my thermostat is set at 18 (and occasionally creeping up to 19) anyway.

I’m just glad that things are finally cooling down to a more civilised temperature…

Having thoroughly learnt their lesson, Mercedes now partners with Geely Autos instead, under the Smart marque. Although I think at this point the flow of knowledge and R&D might be the other way around.

Makes sense from an internal party management point of view. Rayner remains a popular figure with the membership and the left of the party. Starmer might have known that he was going to end up needing to sack her, but it’s useful for him (not always the most popular figure with that crowd) to show some support for her and avoid sticking the knife in. Ultimately the independent ethics report was going to come back with what it came back with, and Starmer and Rayner would both agree that she couldn’t remain in role at that point- but at least it doesn’t look like Starmer was itching for an excuse.

From the voting public’s point of view, I’m not sure it makes much difference in this case. Starmer said he’d wait for the full facts, and then sacked her when he had the full facts. Anyone upset with him for not going a couple of days earlier would probably have been upset with him whatever he did anyway.

At £33 million, it’s an eye-wateringly expensive development, and there’s certainly an argument that it’s not really £33 million’s worth of benefit. But it is really very nice, and it’s nice to see investment in public transport infrastructure.

This only benefits passengers if it comes at the same time as fixing the fare structures.

At the moment it’s often cheaper to buy a split ticket, because it can be inexplicably far more expensive to buy a ticket between station A and station C than it is to buy tickets between stations A and B, and B and C on the exact same train. This would be impossible in a tap-on-tap-off type system; if it’s just used to lock people out of cheaper fares, that’s not good.

We’re stretching this analogy to breaking point here, but…

Imagine you’re running this French cum doughnut factory but you only serve local customers. One day a British tourist arrives - “oh I say how delightful!” - and buys, perfectly legally, a cum filled French doughnut. They then take it back to the UK for consumption.

The equivalent action to this would be to hop on a ferry to Calais, use a French internet connection to load up a page of 4chan on your browser, then hop back across the channel to read the page you’ve loaded back in Dover.

Which from an OSA point of view is actually fine. If a bit unlikely.

Imagine if we had an internet where you couldn’t read a newspaper online from Peru because the proprietor didn’t purchase any export license. Madness.

We don’t have “export licences” for websites, but that’s not because it’s philosophically absurd; we have lots of other restrictions on ways things can be broadcast or disseminated into the country. Websites which break UK laws (such as hosting child pornography or selling illegal goods) are frequently blocked to all UK users. You can view the OSA as an unacceptable overreach, if that’s your view- but it’s not a fundamental departure from what we already do and have done for a long time.

Other options exist; you don’t have to buy either. Volkswagen Group, Audi, Renault, BMW, Fiat etc all make EVs in Europe. Hyundai & Kia also both make excellent EVs.

Buying a Tesla is a choice these days. Nobody trips and falls into Tesla ownership. And although those cheap Chinese manufacturers look mighty tempting, they’re not the only alternative out there.

Fair. But the UK law isn’t going after the user it’s going after the provider. In another country. That’s the distinction, right?

To stick with the analogy, this would be like a French bakery taking export orders shipping to customers in the UK. They know they’re shipping to UK customers, they know their products are crossing the border into another jurisdiction, and it’s their responsibility to make sure the product meets UK standards.

If they don’t make sure their product is legal for the UK market, the government would be justified in (and indeed expected to) block the import and prevent the sale.

The law regulates where your customers/users are, not where you are.

If you run a website hosted in Zanzibar then your server may be subject to Tanzanian law. But if you want people from the UK to access your website, it also needs to comply with relevant UK law. If you don’t, the government could order ISPs to block access for UK users.

If we’re talking about some no-name blog then you probably don’t care about this. But if you’re running an e-commerce site or you’re monetizing clicks from UK users via advertising then having a large market cut off from you might hurt your bottom line.

That’s not how the internet works. They operate a website that is exposed on the internet. The key here is exposed. They aren’t coming over to the UK to operate. When you visit their site you’re going to them.

If they don’t comply, the UK will order ISPs to block access.

If 4chan really genuinely doesn’t care about UK users (“it’s not our fault some people from the UK access our site”), then they won’t be bothered about this. If the loss of UK users is considered significant to them, then clearly they are actively interested in serving the UK market.

It’s like saying a small village in France that has a bakery serving cum filled doughnuts (LOL I don’t know WTF French people like to do) serves visitors in the UK because there is a railway line in the village connected to Eurostar which in turn connects to the UK. At that point they are only serving visitors that happen to be in that little French village. And if no French laws against cum filled doughnuts exist then why should the bakery pay UK fines?

What matters is where the customer is at the time, not where they’re from. If a British person goes to France and buys food from a French shop, they are for all intents and purposes a French customer at the time the sale takes place; French food standards laws would apply.

By the same token, if you travel to France and then use the internet to access 4chan, you are a French internet user for the purposes of that interaction, and French laws would apply to you. If a French person came to the UK and accessed 4chan, British laws would apply to them at that time.

Now if your hypothetical French bakery wanted to export its products to the UK (i.e. sell them to British consumers who are in Britain), they’d need to meet British food standards. The fact that they’re a French business doesn’t exempt them from that.

This does sound like exactly the sort of opponents to really put people off opposing the OSA.

I already feel myself involuntarily warming to the OSA just because I know it pisses 4chan off.

I’m against it. Ratios are all wrong; I’d rather have 4 small Bourbons than 1 Bourbon 4x as big.

“This has nothing at all to do with racism, it’s just pride in our football team. But apropos of nothing, how about all those illegal immigrants?!”