In the news

This is pretty outrageous. Not at all unexpected though.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/cop28-host-uae-planned-promote-oil-deals-climate-talks

Have we already forgotten that the Saudis murdered a journalist and disposed of his body in a Saudi embassy in another country.

I mean as far as I'm concerned he isn't welcome here...

https://x.com/mac_puck/status/1729094521454272829?s=08

Are those involved smart enough for it to be a thought through plan?

Easier to read version that doesn't give Musk any hits: https://nitter.net/mac_puck/status/1729094521454272829?s=08

(Just replace twitter.com with nitter.net in any URLs you post. For those of us who sacked off twitter you don't get any of the thread if you're not logged in, which makes looking at these kinds of URLs pointless.)

scary to see my own job on that list

Good tip, was just posting a link a fried sent but will do this in future

In fairness, my job is on that list - broadly speaking - and I can say that, objectively, we're not being undercut by immigrant labour.

we're not being undercut by immigrant labour

I think this line is missing the word “yet”

Nah, honestly there are significant obstacles in the way.

Amazing, the vast proportion of folks who still don't realise brexit was all about deregulation; the festival of jingoism was just a front and a bonus.

I've tried to tell some lefties this but they can't see past the racist window dressing.

The beautiful lie is better than the terrible truth. See Brexit and the NHS.

NHS is safe in Tory hands etc

Here in Oz, the LNP ('Liberal'/National Party AKA Lying Nasty Party) was so egregiously corrupt and incompetent that many folks actually noticed. Much like with the BoJo & laughable May administrations, there was some cause to hope for the glimmer of a new dawn; perhaps a new element of suspicion amongst the populace...

Fingers crossed there's at least some of that vibe... Unfortunately the ALP (Alternative Liberal Party) is as neoliberal as hell, and not many folks seem to notice how many ways they're in lockstep with the supposed opposition; it's a fucking cartel.

I have issues with the undercut by immigrant labour.

It's companies undercutting workers. With government permission.

If there are jobs to fill, people will fill them.

But then if housing and public services don't keep up it becomes a mess, same shit everywhere.

Until the government becomes more restrictive and lets industries that can't pay properly fail and funds social care and housing, this "but immigrants" pot is going to keep on the boil.

You think leftist analysis is blind to crony capitalism?

I wouldn't say that, but I'd definitely say a lot of leftists these days seem to be a bit light-on for analysis.

There's this general preoccupation with identity politics, which is a divisive trap. 99.9% of us all belong to a single identity we should be primarily concerned with; the disenfranchised. And if you include future generations, the difference to 100% is an infinitesimal rounding error.

It's insane. Emotions before intellect everywhere; critical thinking is extinct.

Unfortunately getting into the detail and wider structural issues is way to complicated to discuss, and sets up traps for yourself that the opposition can exploit.

I'm open to hearing arguments for controlling immigration. Just not basic ones that don't go further to look at the wider structural issues, and fail to acknowledge our whole economic model is built on requiring an immigrant workforce.

Do you know how they get the data, and haven't been shut down yet? Either technically or legally?

Twitter has an api so you got to nitter.net/whatever, nitter pass the "whatever" into the api call and get the data for the tweet back and present it to you without all the bloat/adverts/tracking etc of the twitter pages.

Of course this means that nitter could potentially be adding their own bloat/adverts/tracking etc - either already or in the future.

But don't twitter have API fees now? And why wouldn't they just revoke nitter's API key?

It's open source, you can look yourself: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/

I asked ChatGPT and it reckons web scraping and caching:

Nitter is an alternative front-end for Twitter that provides a more privacy-focused and lightweight experience compared to the official Twitter website. It operates by scraping Twitter's public data rather than using Twitter's official API. Here's a simplified explanation of how Nitter works:

Web Scraping: Nitter uses web scraping techniques to fetch data from Twitter's public pages. Web scraping involves parsing and extracting information from the HTML of web pages.

Privacy Enhancement: Nitter focuses on user privacy by removing tracking elements, scripts, and other components that may be present on the official Twitter website. This results in a faster and more privacy-friendly experience for users.

Caching: To reduce the load on Twitter's servers and improve performance, Nitter implements caching. This means that once it fetches data from Twitter, it stores that data locally for a certain period. Subsequent requests for the same data can then be served from the cache instead of fetching it again from Twitter.

Fairly sure ChatGPT is talking nonsense. Looking at the code, nitter looks to be calling Twitter APIs, just it's using the internal ones used by the website front-end rather than the official documented ones intended for 3rd party integrations.
That means it could break at any time but because so much of Twitter is implemented in JavaScript in the browser/app it will always have to have an API underneath that of some form which can always be reverse engineered

This is pretty outrageous. Not at all unexpected though.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/­2023/nov/27/cop28-host-uae-planned-promo­te-oil-deals-climate-talks

Big meat is in the swindle too...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/29/plans-to-present-meat-as-sustainable-nutrition-at-cop28-revealed

That's it, the discussion doesn't go anywhere cos "traps".

Brexit "we need control" ok you have it "but immigration has gone up" yeah but it's controlled and now the goalposts move again but NHS housing etc are still in crisis.

But blaming a vague group seems very productive politically.

I think limiting immigration the way the government want makes no sense. No more dependents visa for care home workers? Aside from that it's shitty and treating people as stopgaps, the UK isn't the only country with shortages.

An economic model where work doesn't pay / jobs don't natch housing demand?

it's a fucking cartel

!!!