Ed Conway (of Sky) did a nice piece on this recently covering the UK's chemical industry decline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ3hT8tqZgo

My takeaway was that it's not really high energy costs (though for sure that doesn't help) but, in the UK's case at least, much more caused by political and policy ignorance over decades. Industrial, polluting industries were simply not vote winners and none of the politicians understood or cared about the strategic implications of letting these industries collapse.

I suspect this is now changing.

It's funny how things change but stay the same. I cut my teeth online in the mid nineties with usenet and IRC. When reddit got big, subreddits always reminded me of usenet groups. Now Discord is big and reminds me of IRC. Substack reminds me of personal blogs. Twitter/X sort of reminds me of ICQ/AIM.

40+ years of deliberate policy choices to prioritise growth through finacialisation rather than domestic industrial production

Similar English expression: Less haste, more speed

This is what infuriates me with people that knock GDPR. They simply don't understand it's prime purpose: creation of a legally enforceable audit chain of data ownership. This is a prerequisite if you want to enforce how people's data is used and shared amongst private entities.

Unless you're an insider, currently you'd need to express that short via something else.

I'm in Europe and can go into my local supermarkets on Saturday and Sunday from 0900 to 2100. I can send a SEPA wire transfer on the weekend and the recipient gets it within seconds. My nearest big shopping mall (hundreds of shops) is open until 23:00 on weekends. My dentist is open on Saturdays. So yeah it works on weekends...

In Flanders, northern part of Belgium, you can get next day delivery on Sundays.

This kind of comment is just trolling, no added value.

In our case, instant on-boarding of devs with no host setup needed. It's a large, complicated repo with a lot of unusual system dependencies. We build a multi-arch base image for all this and then the devcontainer is built on-top. Devcontainer hooks then let us do all the env setup in a consistent, version controlled way. It's been a god send for us and we'll never go back.

They do but it's largely useless against all but the most unsophisticated of bots.

If you want a great book on the history of financial speculation, Devil Take the Hindmost (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452281806/) is a strong recommendation.