Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Everflow

  • wholewheat pancakes

    There are two ingredients I quite like, freshly ground whole wheat flour and really good extra virgin olive oil (EVVO). I have replaced all other added fats in my cooking with EVOO, even in ice cream!

  • mirroring

  • Have I turned into a "Prepper"

    The reality is that my life in the past 5 years has been slowly evolving to more self sufficient lifestyle. Hobbies and projects that I have been interested in have been moving me naturally towards a more self reliant future.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADIYTUS Wordo: GUESS

  • Hostage families call to shut down Israeli economy in protest of Gaza takeover plan

    Family members of hostages held in the Gaza Strip called on Saturday for a shutdown of Israel's economy following the Israeli security cabinet decision of the security cabinet to take control of Gaza City.

    Anat Angrest, whose son Matan is being held captive in the Gaza Strip, addressed the Israeli public and business leaders in a statement issued Saturday.

  • ‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse

    “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

    “I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

    Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

• Residential Rights

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 2

    This has pretty serious implications. Residents cannot ascertain which of their neighbours are members of the RMC and thus have formal control over board of directors that chooses the estate manager.

    Roughly speaking, we'd expect one member per dwelling (i.e., if we count up the number of houses on the estate, and add it to the number of flats, that's how many members there should be). But the RMC's articles suggest there may be non-residential units that carry RMC membership rights/obligations too.

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 3

    There's a widespread misconception about the role of leases and transfer deeds in relation to membership of the RMC. Specifically, that if it says in a lease or a transfer that the owner of the lease (or of the property transferred) that the new owner has a right or an obligation to join the company, then that means that person must be a member.

    Just to step back and think about it in the abstract: being a member of a company brings benefits (e.g., dividends) and risks (having to bail out the company if it goes bankrupt). It's therefore untenable that anyone could become a member of a company except by their agreement with the company itself or by trading places with an existing member. (In the case of RMCs, the benefit is having a say in the governance, and the risk is potentially unlimited liability for meeting the RMC's running costs).

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 4

    As it happens, the *original* tenant named on the leases is a company that seems to have been a subsidiary of the Housing Association. When flats were sold on a 100% basis, the new tenant stepped into the shoes of this subsidiary.

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 5

    So far, we've been through some ways of making informed guesses about who is a member of the RMC that the residents need to take back under control.

    This is all assuming that the directors are actually following the rules, but the rules are vague about what land constitutes the relevant "Estate" and what constitutes a "unit". It seems the directors may be able to designate commercial premises as units for the purposes of enrolling people as members of the RMC.

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 6

    Even if one doesn't know who the members of the RMC are, knowing an upper bound on how many of them there could be is itself useful: if five percent of the voting members of a company demand a general meeting, then the directors must call one, or those members can call it themselves.

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 7

    Having gone through the whole rigmarole of how one might work out who is a member of the estate's RMC and why, how does it all fit together with day-to-day management?

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 8

    So a group of, say, 300 homeowners would elect a smaller group of half a dozen or so, to hire and fire a single individual or firm. It basically can't work any other way. Yet the situation, though it recurs across the country, is constantly misrepresented: [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • What I'm playing 🐭📖 Moss: Book II | You can high-five the mouse!

    Moss is a VR "third-person" platformer set in a story book where you help a little mouse on a big adventure. All six VR players liked it so much that there's a sequel! Moss: Book II picks up right after the events of the first game, after you helped Quill kill the big bad snake.

  • intelligent machines

    Open up your laptop or desktop computer, or even your tablet or smartphone, and strip it down to the basics. (Careful, this may void your warranty.) You’ll find a motherboard : a hard board with circuits printed on it. This board, also called a logic board, is like the soil of a garden. Not a garden of vegetables, though—a garden of chips. Now, the indigenous peoples of the Americas figured out long ago that if you plant certain vegetables next to each other, they will enrich the soil and help each other grow: for example, squash, corn, and beans—the “Three Sisters”. Look over your motherboard and you’ll see a whole family of chips spread throughout: RAM chips, ROM chips, a CMOS or two, EEPROMs for flash memory, and so forth. Each of these has a specific job to do and helps your device function. Without each part, the whole would be little more than an expensive brick. But like Sauron’s ring, one chip rules them all: the CPU, or central processing unit. Often called the “brain” of a computer, it carries out billions of instructions per second, conducting a digital orchestra that gives your device a life of its own.