ants

Recently reread the little miss misery series. Quite a good series and I really enjoyed it (again). Is complete now, which many consider a bonus. And this week I read the first three Alice Worth books. Despite having a very stereotyped Vampire/Werewolf love interest competition, the books are very good and the relationship is overall pretty mature. Alice has a pretty broken childhood which influences a lot of what she does, but it feels realistic and the books are a lot of fun. They also have some long term planning - in the first scene a ghost appears to help out Alice who has cabal ties and yet is free. Books later you find out a very good reason for that. I like that type of forward planning.

Over 345,000. Even though its past midnight in the UK, the petition is still clocking up signatures at a pretty hefty rate.

It is incredible that 10 days out, nobody has a clue as to what the outcome will be.

The speech by the New Zealand prime minister was also very good.

To balance out a bad Australian, a very good piece by a good Australian.

Bloody hell. I feel for everyone affected and feel sorrow that it happened. I'm also pissed that an Australian was involved, but not surprised because unfortunately we have a lot of racist fucks too. I thought NZ gun laws were about as tough as Australian ones, how did they kill 40?

Thought it was fantastic and in the upper tier of the MCU.

More a bunny on the road than a deer. A deer has some size to it, a bunny is just crushed.

I think the assumption is that if a new referendum starts looking likely the hard core brexiters will fall behind May’s deal.

My move would be to run on an increase in social security payments. Say it’s funded by reversing the Trump tax cuts. Older and working non-college whites would be the biggest winners, which is the demographic Dems want to capture.

You know how we always complained the AI was stupid and needed to get better......

The irony is if he'd accepted the Lib Dem's request for preferential voting without going to a referendum (or supported it in the referendum), then he wouldn't have had to worry about UKIP splitting the conservative vote, and wouldn't have needed the promise on a referendum on leaving the EU.

I think a lot of white collar jobs will also be replaced with robots or AI via machine learning programs.

It obviously depends on exactly what you're on/doing, but often that is a limitation of what they're allowed to cover. They can't cover anything to do with GPs, out of hospital procedures (even when its the same as an in-hospital procedure), and a heap of other things. Personally, assuming Labour get in I'd quite welcome a productivity commission review. There are a lot of ways I think the system at all levels could be improved. And I work in the PHI industry (well, for some of my clients anyway)!

The private health system may fall apart, and there are legitimate questions on whether or not it achieves its intended purpose. But the idea that most of the costs aren't legitimate medical expenses is plain wrong. The major people getting use out of private health insurance are old people in hospital and people starting families (i.e. pregnancy costs). Those are most definitely real costs. Although one of my major bugbears is the way the system exploits the youth. If you're under 40 and not going through a pregnancy, you're generally getting a very low return on your risk mitigation.