I wish countries would stop trying to be cute with names like ESTA, KETA, ETA, etc and call it what it is: an evisa. These countries lie and say "don't worry bro you don't need a visa bro. Just ride that plane bro. it's free bro.", then you find out there's some government portal that runs 9-5 local time five days a week (holidays off) and requires a $X fee every submission with a chance of failing for a random reason. And it can take days for a response to come.
And people will say "it's not a visa bro. You just need to upload your photo, personal info, pay a fee, and they'll get back to you in a few days to tell you whether you're allowed in." Indonesia and India have identical processes with 5 minute turnaround times. Know what they call them? E-Visas. And if you're not eligible for an evisa, you go get a normal one.
It's tedious because you search for whether a country needs a visa, and results will say "nope", but it turns out if you're from specific nationalities that get visa free travel (but not all), you don't need a visa, but you need some random application for something named with a random combination of letters. And if you don't know that specific name, a shallow search might say you're fine.
Just quit the BS. Call it an evisa. And countries that call their process evisas handle them cheaper, faster, and more easily than ESTA or whatever other scam/visa workaround other countries have.
I've never been rejected yet, but it's a pain in the ass needing to do a deep search, thinking I'm fine since no visa is required, then finding out 3 days before my flight while browsing travel forums there is some secret application I need to submit and their webpage is slow and buggy as hell.
Yes, I would understand it and that’s probably what people naturally say informally where I live in Scotland and in other dialects it’s said more like ‘go’n put your shoes on’ where the ‘n’ is very soft. But especially if I saw it in writing I would assume that they were not a native British English speaker. It’s interesting. In America I presume it’s not grammatically correct to say ‘the police officer went got his gun and shot killed the suspect’ so why does US English drop the ‘and’ from go (and) or try (and)? Curious. (Edit with some observations about dropping letters from and)
'Go put your shoes on' is just another slightly different example of pseudo-coordination. I'm guessing that is has various levels of acceptance per-dialect (even within the UK) just like 'try and'.
I feel embarrassed! Despite being from Glasgow, until now I've never made the connection between the River Kelvin (and the surrounding Kelvingrove and Kelvinbridge), the statue in the park of someone called Baron Kelvin, and the unit of measurement.
You scots are the most extreme combination of a people who have made vast parts of the modern world and people who know nothing about the achievement of their own people. I spent a year doing my postdoc in your country and have to say you guys are my favourite lot on this otherwise wretched rock.
This doesn’t totally solve the issue of SELECT’ing first then filtering, but for complex queries I’ve found CTEs very useful (whenever the database/SQL dialect supports it).
The Times could perhaps be leaning “right”. But the FT is, in my opinion, a legitimately neutral publication. At least through Britain’s default neoliberal lens.
The Times has lurched extremely far right within the last decade. The main difference between it and the Telegraph or Daily Mail is one of tone rather than content.
The FT certainly has its biases but I agree that it is generally the most reliable. Noam Chomsky once said it was the most trustworthy newspaper because of its incentives to tell the truth:
> Those who Adam Smith called ‘the masters of the universe’ have to understand the universe. They have to have a tolerably realistic understanding of the world that they are managing and controlling. That’s true of political elites as well, but the business world particularly.
> > Anwar Shaikh, the most left-wing economist in the world, introduced me to “The Wall Street Journal”. I met him in his office as he was writing the monumental “Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises”. He told that he reads the WSJ because it tells the truth about what is happening in the economy. It struck me then by the seeming oddity of the most left-wing economist in the world praising the most right-wing daily in the world. But Anwar was right. An economics daily has, in the part that deals with the real life, to be as objective as possible because if it spreads fairy tales people who believe them will lose money. Then no capitalist will buy it. For they do not like to lose money. In the trade-off between the fairy tales and cash, they chose the latter. Other dailies that appeal to the “pensée unique” do not need to worry about that kind of elemental truth. They can make things up.
Well, to be fair I don't have a huge amount of information about the FT as I'm not a subscriber. I do remember that they did publish at least some Keynesian economists during the 2008 financial crisis, although I think they were still part of the prevailing (and IMO mistaken) bias towards austerity.
But I think no publication is completely neutral. There are areas where they will accept opinions as viable alternatives, and areas where they consider opinions outside the pale and not deserving of consideration. A completely biased publication always picks one side everywhere, but 'neutral' publications usually are biased towards which opinions they will give serious consideration.
They other dimension is that articles written in a neutral 'style' aren't necessarily any less biased than ones written in polemic style.
I visit the British Library often. It's a great place to work if no meetings are on your schedule that day. The library has been noticeably quieter the past few weeks. Perhaps it's the time of year, but many individuals use the library for researching family histories or accessing esoteric items in the catalogue. I hope this is resolved soon. Public libraries are a really wonderful utility.
I used the 2nd edition of this textbook in my undergraduate studies extensively (linguistics). Coming from a non-technical background and starting to take technical classes, certain chapters were wonderful ways for me to bridge that gap. Specifically the second chapter on text normalisation helped me apply things I’d learned in 100 and 200 level classes and ultimately set me on the path to becoming an engineer. And I still use that text processing knowledge a lot in my day to day work.
I’m forever grateful to the authors for making these drafts freely accessible (there weren’t many copies of the second edition in my university library!)
I think there's a much deeper problem at Scottish Power than just IT systems. I spent close to a year trying to get them to fix an incorrect bill and nobody I talked to had any idea what to do (probably 6 or 7 people across various departments).
I know many others who have had similar problems with Scottish Power, and I'm sure there will be more testimonies in other comments.
The question on my mind is how does a company resolve such deep-rooted institutional failings?
Sounds to me more like Scottish Power is a scam run by the mob. Not entirely sure of the law in Scotland but I would publicize this theory and see if SP files a lawsuit which would open them to discovery.
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