China has temporarily shelved plans to build a new embassy in London, angrily accusing the British government of not doing enough to force through planning permission for the project.
China had been given until Thursday to file an appeal to Tower Hamlets council in east London after the proposals for the embassy were rejected.
Beijing bought the Royal Mint Court site for its new embassy in 2018 for £255m, with the plan to move from its long-term but relatively cramped site in Portland Place, near Regent’s Park.
Chinese officials appear to have decided that rather than appeal through the local Tower Hamlets planning process, where they have relatively little chance of success, they want central government to intervene and give assurances that it will back a resubmitted application.
It looks like the location would be noisy, as it’s adjacent to the end of the line running to Fenchurch Station to the north and a major road interchange.
I wonder what security issues might be present? There’s a lot of movemwnt through there. I guess that you could monitor radio emissions, see what Bluetooth and cell devices are passing the location.
Other MPs who still use X have begun examining alternatives, including Threads, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and the open-source platform Bluesky.
So near, yet so far. They had an enshittification sandwich and instead of swearing off it, they are wondering if they just need less nuts and more sweetcorn.
Home life is hard for tech enthusiasts. I’m tech support for the extended family and they’re pretty intolerant of my tinkering with things. Normies actually get quite upset really quickly if tech doesn’t immediately work the way they want. My router started having some problems that it took me a while to get to the bottom of, this messed with my Plex server availability. My wife got so frustrated with her TV shows not working when she wanted that she’s pretty much sworn off Plex and wants streaming subscriptions restarted.
This is where the huge popularity of Apple and their walled garden comes from. When I got married I made clear that I’m not doing tech support for any Apple products, so she switched to Android.
I’m not brave enough to push my wife to Linux (I’ve only found it to be acceptable for daily use very recently myself; and even then it was painful), when the things she uses the most are MS Office and Teams. She gets triggered if she ever needs to use my Linux computer.
Personally, Threads is the only social media platform where the content on it generally improves my mood by showing me lots of funny, cute or interesting content. It’s the only one where I don’t feel frustrated or angry or outraged by the content the algorithm surfaces or baited. It feels like the feed wants me to smile and cheer up or learn something new, rather than baiting me into getting angry and shouting at people. That counts for a lot, to me.
I mean if everyday things like food and rent are still too expensive then it’s not really recovering. I don’t really see how the pursuit of endless growth can possibly be good for regular people.
“If everyone is covered in mud, it makes it less obvious that you’re covered in shit.”
This is Liz and her cohort trying to “both sides!!” away the behaviour they incited.
It’s crab-bucket PR: if they can get enough of the media saying how bad the left is, it makes the right-wing pogroms less horrifying.
Trump did the same thing post-Charlottesville, conflating BLM and Antifa with the rich-setting, “Jews will not replace us” chanting, protestor-merdering neo-nazis who supported him.
Bluesky is amazing. I switched there from mastodon as the experience just feels better with a cool vibe. And it’s FOSS decentralised just like mastodon.
I use it as well. People hating it completely is weird. I get that for profit is stinky but most people don’t complain about that, they complain about it using a different protocol. As long as it is foss, (which it is) using a different protocol is fine, especially because their whole point of developing their own protocol is to achieve feature parity with Twitter
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