I think Farage will probably win, but it will be a lot closer than he would like. While they will make no difference at all for his hard-core supporters, the financial allegations will be discouraging for at least some of his voters and will reduce his turnout, all serious anti-Farage tactical voters will vote for Binface as the most likely protest candidate, and a nontrivial number of voters will vote for Binface just because it would be funny to do so - Britain is the country of Boaty McBoatface, after all.[0]

According to the bookies, Binface is currently 8/1 to win (about 11% probability), and Farage 1/8 (about 89%), with the rest of the candidates nowhere. There's probably something Bayesian you could do to estimate the probability of various margins from that, but it's going to be uncomfortable for Farage no matter what - winning over Binface by an embarassingly small margin will not enhance his image, particularly if there is going to be another byelection called soon after with the financial issue continuing to be in the spotlight. The only way this works out favourably for Farage is if he scores a crushing victory over Binface with an increased voter share relative to his previous election result, and I think the odds of that are slim.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Sir_David_Attenborough#Nam...

This is a vastly superior, earlier, and more detailed article compared to the one being discussed here [0], and should replace it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888331

I came here because of a comment on the one you linked to, that includes this information:

Since the link that was posted is just an AI copyright theft site, use the original instead: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real

That article is vastly superior and is the one that should be being discussed, not this.

> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.

I think this kind of writing is low quality.

What about it reads to you as low quality? The intention seems to be to convey alarm through description of catastrophe, which was effective for me.

Disclaimer: this is only an opinion.

The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.

Maybe, but it's refreshingly different from the industrialized junk prose we get to read more and more.

This is intentional repetition. More specifically, anaphora [1]. You may not personally like it, but it is a rhetorical device used to emphasize a point. This one also comes with a nice progression: storms, storms, heat, heat, farmland, groceries.

This substack article also comes with additional graphs, a much better story flow (data is progressively introduced and explained before reaching the final plot), and was posted 2 days before the OP. I agree with GP that it is significantly superior to the OP (which is likely AI slop). Thanks for posting it.

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anaphora

I'm working on improving my PCB synthesis system; given a KiCad schematic and some extra metadata it can currently lay out and route an entire double-sided PCB with about 50 components in 4 minutes without any human intervention.

I wrote it because I was too lazy to learn how to use KiCad's layout features properly, and thought 'how hard can it be?'. Several months later, I had this.

It's not intended to compete with Altium etc. but it certainly produces compact, valid and fully design-rule-compliant boards with much less work that doing it myself or using one of the low-cost remote labour platforms.

It uses constraint logic programming to solve the hard parts of the problem. Hierarchical decomposition of the circuit design helps reduce combinatorial explosion, which was a show-stopper for early versions of the system. Current indications are that I may be able to scale it further in the longer term to deal with more complex design scenarios and larger boards, without hitting the exponential cliff.

It's the 10% chance they are worried about. Reform is very much the Farage party, and him losing to a bin in their heartland would be catastrophic; he would go from being the presumptive next Prime Minister to a national joke.

Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.

Even if Farage wins, but with a reduced majority, in an election where the alternatives are fringe or novelty candidates, it will be hard for his dignity to recover.

To be fair, we really don't know what counts as smart business attire on Sigma IX.

I thought you were making a reference to Six Sigma and their distinguished Black Belts. Like, who knows what they call themselves today?

My apologies to the beautiful people of Recyclon for the unflattering comparison.

Or military uniform, for that matter.

His birth name, and I believe still his legal name, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But he is "commonly known as" Boris Johnson, so that's what can go on the ballot paper, although his full name must still go on the registration documents. Count Binface is in the same situation.

Since he gave up his US citizenship in 2016, I don't think he's subject to a jurisdiction where "legal name" is a meaningful notion. Ultimately, this means his first name is whatever he says it is (provided that he isn't lying): you'd have to ask him. Supposing that his answer changes depending on the social context, then both "Alexander" and "Boris" would be valid answers for "what is this person's first name?".

Count Binface is in a different situation, because "Count Binface" is a stage name, which he (presumably) doesn't go as in his real life. However, stage names are still considered legal enough to go on your UK passport. Ultimately, whether he would be allowed to write "Count Binface" as his name on the registration documents would depend on what the Electoral Commission decides. I had a look last week, but couldn't find their rules.

>Ultimately, whether he would be allowed to write "Count Binface" as his name on the registration documents would depend on what the Electoral Commission decides. I had a look last week, but couldn't find their rules.

One can stand for election using any name that one is "commonly known by".

His sister still calls him Alex, at least.

Absolutely. For him the bloat is not a problem; it's a negative externality.

If only there was some way that countries could make international agreements on things...

It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.