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+1 to your comment. It is certainly a fact that the sea area adjacent to The Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Ethiopia was all land in the times of prehistoric man. I reckon they should be looking for origins of the human species in that location rather than Africa.
Add on to that the Desmond Morris theory that man evolved on the seashore e.g. body hair patterns are streamlined, our need for fish oils and that humans have cannabinoid receptors which are used in healing. (Flax is often a shore-line plant). If true, human origins are all below the sea (the flooding of the Black Sea has often been associated with the Noah’s Ark story)
Although a disaster at the time, just like Fukishima there have been no real long-term radiological problems from the event. The few problems that did arise from radioactive iodine around Chernoble could have easily been avoided by taking potassium iodide pills, but the Soviet culture of secrecy stopped that happening. Other than the Germans sending in about a quarter of a million dollars worth of firefighting equipment , I do not remember ‘the World’ doing very much, certainly the US did very little except to try and learn lessons from the incident.
I agree the Aral Sea was very much a Soviet issue. NASA has some facts on the causes of the problem, but the real cure (restoring river routes and abandoning desert cotton) is unlikely to happen due to the geopolitics of the area (Uzbeks versus the rest). Currently the real measures seem aimed at stabilising the dried-up basin through tree planting.
“My mind boggles at human nature, are the lessons of the past always forgotten and doomed to be re-enacted??”
Unfortunately I think Richard was correct in his statements:
“I earnestly believe that xenophobia covers the cause of racism, I also believe that Enoch possibly expressed his belief badly. Put bluntly, if too much change is forced too rapidly, there will be unpleasant, ‘ism’ reactions on all sides.”
I think xenophobia is an in-built animal survival reaction. In order to conserve resources for their own genes it triggers a response to attack anything that is different. e.g. crows attacking albino crows, apes attacking other tribes, ditto meerkats etc etc.
In New York I witnessed that some of the worst examples of racism were between Harlem Blacks and Koreans, friends tell me of similar tensions in Vancouver between recent (quite rich) Chinese arrivals and relatively poor local Canadians and longer established Koreans. The root cause in both cases was as Richard stated too much change too quickly which triggered the innate response.
I’m sorry to say that sexist attacks and religious attacks may have similar roots and be triggered by too great a display of being different. e.g. Gay Pride, religious clothing etc etc. The road to greater acceptance is conformity to the mean.
Side-note to Richard, please accept my deepest sympathy for your wife’s condition, and its impacts on your family.
If you want to start a fight, call an Iranian an Arab, or call an Arab a Persian. Culturally, ethnically and to a great extent religiously they are two very different peoples!
I did not understand your comment on Iran. They are probably the most tolerant of Middle East countries, a statement I’m sure Richard would support.
If your comment is because of concerns about the imprisonment of British ‘spies’, blame Bojo for his clownish actions at the Foreign Office, our failure to pay billions we owe (thanks to US pressure) and Britain’s long history of involvement in Iran’s internal affairs. (see the wiki on Mossadegh).
It is not just racism, but sexism, and religious intolerance too. As a nation we have a lot of room for improvement, but we are by no means the worst in the world.
Immigration does however have to be controlled, not for racist views, but rather for allocation of resources. Talk to a cross section of second/third generation immigrants such as children/grandchildren of ‘Kenyan Asians’ from Enoch Powell’s days and a large proportion will say that immigration needs to be controlled.
Cross Channel immigrants are not ‘Asylum Seekers’ and should never be labelled as such. The UN Charter states that Asylum should be sought in the first safe haven. They may however have genuine familial reasons, or other genuine reasons why France, Spain or Italy cannot settle them. For these people we need to improve our settlement systems within the EU. We should work hard at keeping people away from trying to make the costly and dangerous Channel crossing.
Although I try to be tolerant in my attitudes I do hate Political Correctness, it is just censorship, and infringing Free Speech by another name.
CO2 is a major by-product of the typical process to make fertilizer. You probably do not want the details but they do a controlled burn of natural gas together with steam over a nickel catalyst to make syngas which is then treated to remove the CO2 before going on to make ammonia and hence fertilizer. Normally the CO2 is worth damn-all, so not many companies bother to extract it (breweries for example have masses of the stuff produced in the brewing process). I guess a lot of companies will start to take a lot more interest in their ‘waste’ products.
I have just read that the Government and OfGen say that they could not have forecast these price increases! (I locked in my gas price in January this year, and deliberately did not shop around, so one person at least did not follow their views)
Take a look at the previously linked market data and you can see that the Government story is complete BS. The market has been on a very steady increase since May (an increase that is even now accelerating). The Government know (or should know) that base prices for Natural Gas are heavily linked to crude prices, they have also known that crude oil prices have been on a steady rise since April and are forecast to reach $75/barrel very soon.
As usual, our incompetent Government just feeds us lies and BS, and hopes that problems will magically disappear.
According to Reuters Nord Stream 2 is fully complete, and it is all in the hands of Brussels regulators. I cannot see UK gas prices falling until this pipeline gets on line, so it will be interesting to see what BoJo does when CO2 production shuts again in three weeks time. If you check the Natural Gas Futures market, you will see that the market thinks prices will be even higher in three weeks time.
BoJo is going to have to lobby the EU to let Russia shaft the Ukraine to get him off the hook of spoiling Christmas 2021 as he did for Christmas 2020. However, I guess that as Biden has waved two fingers at BoJo’s promised US trade deal, I guess BoJo will not mind a little revenge.
Geopolitical life gets interesting!
Your solution was very similar to item 7 in the link I gave. i.e. hit restart three times in a row and the automatic repair sequence is started and this will eventually give you uefi access too!
Maybe solution 6 in the following link is the way to go.
I have to confess I have never tried any of these crapped-up bios methods, so let us know what works for you.
Try a WinPE stick, if that works it gives you a command shell but I really do not know how you then force a uefi bios screen. Maybe typing ‘settings’ from the WinPE screen would work to force a restart, but I have never tried this.
Keith you will be interested in this week’s Private Eye as they do an exposé on Tesco’s empty shelves. Tesco Management claim it is all caused by BoJo’s Brexit and the resulting shortage of HGV drivers. Not so says the Eye, much of the driver shortage is also caused by Tesco’s outsourcing to companies such as Eddie Stobart, and predatory wage cutting actions on the drivers who remained with them. The result has been that many drivers, like you, have upped-sticks. Just to add to Tesco’s worries, Unite are now calling strikes in protest at Tesco’s predatory behaviours.
BoJo (The Grinch) can expect even more empty shelves at Christmas time. BoJo’s early election plans may need to be put on hold!
For our part, we are using the lessons we learned in the Middle East and Africa. Goods would come in on containers about once every two months, if you did not grab stuff when it was available you did without for another eight weeks. We are now starting to fill the freezer, and buy grandchildren Xmas toys two months earlier than normal!
More on the news confirming JayCeeDees point saying that victims of small companies going belly up need do nothing except take a photo of their gas meter using their phone. Their account will then be auctioned to the big guys with the lowest bidder winning. (lowest bidder=higher price unfortunately). At the moment with just a few thousand customers affected its all manageable, the big worry is the next tranche of companies going belly up as the bigger companies will not be able to afford taking on hundreds of thousands of price capped customers who will pay less than market price. BoJo et al better pray that the EU allow Nord Stream 2 to come on line pretty soon, and hopefully bring down the extreme spot prices now being paid.
Gas prices are a mix of something like 90% at a term prices which are related to crude oil prices and 10% spot market prices governed by supply and demand. Nord Stream 2 will mean more gas available at prices closer to term price. The Russians are quite reasonably saying that their existing pipeline (which runs through Ukraine, can only transport a finite amount), any additional demands can only be met if the new pipeline is allowed to flow.
Problem is that it is all political. No one in the UK even mentions Nord Stream 2 link , the Russian Gas Pipeline into Europe. It is finished and ready to transport Russian gas, but it has been held up for ages. Initially due to US concerns (geopolitics wrt Ukraine gas supplies from Russia), and now because of screwing around by Brussels for similar reasons.The Russians are playing the game of ‘it isn’t our fault if you will not let us use our pipeline’, and we don’t mind if you have to pay higher prices to us.
For our part, our political masters are also dancing around on eggshells. The huge Glengorm gas field east of Aberdeen was found by the Chinese state company CNOOC and is under political pressure from all sides (Scottish Green Party, US concerns and in the other direction dreams of Scottish Independence needs the revenues!). Of course no-one want to be reminded of UK gas fracking!
It is also very political due to climate change concerns (roll on warmer weather!), and the elephant in the room — there are long periods when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine which sits badly with current ‘renewables’ plans, and the forthcoming Climate Change Summit.
The net result is that politicians would like nothing better than to kick the whole mess into the long grass and hope that it all goes away.
Good luck with getting someone to take on your account, you are supposed to have a fallback but all the major suppliers are ducking and weaving as they too want to avoid huge spot prices.
September 20, 2021 at 8:18 am in reply to: Even the French think the UK is just a US lap-dog! #68742Dave I think the vaccine situation is a bit more subtle, as it looks like the Pfizer protection drops to around 30% after six months. I haven’t seen data for Oxford AstraZeneca, but I’d guess the protection is even lower.
Just imagine the outcry if it was revealed that UK people could not get a booster jab because we had given all ours to Africa!
I did not mention TPM as I don’t think it matters when this is enabled, but if anyone knows better – yell. On a VM it does matter a bit as you can only put TPM onto an encrypted VM. I would recommend doing this step after you have converted to GPT as it would avoid adding decryption time to all the reboots. (I would also recommend making a backup copy of your vm before starting, same also really applies to the full PC situation 😉 )
How to run MBR2GPT in order to convert a System Disk from MBR to GPT. You will see that there are a number of articles suggesting that Diskpart or Disk Management can be used – you should ignore these if you want to keep your installation and programs as they erase the disk before converting.
If you already have a WinPE boot stick, congratulations as you are half way there. If not you need to make the boot stick.
I suggest you log on as Admin to do the following:
Download and install Windows ADK link.
Next download and install the WinPE addon for the ADK, the link for which is in the above.
The next step is to make a WinPE Boot Stick link, this is not big and will comfortably sit in 4Gb.
Change the PC boot order to boot from the stick you just made. You should just get a large coloured terminal screen on booting. Now run Diskpart followed by List Disk, to find the ‘### number’ of the boot stick. link
Then run MBR2GPT link. with a command such as mbr2gpt /convert /disk:0
You will almost certainly get an error message at this point telling you that it cannot convert a disk containing a page file. If you get this reboot into Windows and go to Control Panel->System->Advanced System Settings and set your page file to manual and zero. Reboot and check the pagefile is zapped, then reboot to WinPE and try MBR2GPT again.
If this succeeds you need to alter your bios setting to GPT (do NOT do this before successfully changing the disk structure). Now do the final reboot.
The procedure for a VM is similar, except you have to set the WinPE stick as a hard drive and change the boot order.
As I mentioned in the previous post MBR2GPT is non-trivial. I can see a lot of bricked PCs in the change from Windows 10 to Windows 11 if M$ do not bring out a conversion program or the Easus/Aomei route is not pushed.
While MBR2GPT is the ONLY M$ route to changing a system disk to GPT without losing everything, I would recommend looking at partition managers such as Easus or Aomei first as the MBR2GPT route is not trivial. I have recently had to use this, as M$ refused to update a Win11 VM as it did not have secure boot and TPM.
In case anyone else needs to update a VM I’ll write up the procedure and post it here, later today.
September 19, 2021 at 8:52 pm in reply to: Even the French think the UK is just a US lap-dog! #68733RSS for Windows link
I actually use Liferea in Linux and have a list of World newspapers and Public Service Broadcasters that have RSS links. Unfortunately there are fewer of these than previously the case, but most major countries have one or two English speaking RSS links.
As all countries dissemble/lie over matters that are of national interest you have to read a cross section and decide ‘who gains’ from the story being told.
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