Thoughts for The Day - June 2026
The Law of Unintended Consequences
This isn't something I'm personally bothered about, but I couldn't help but comment on the utter stupidity here: PornHub is going to demand government-approved identity, such as passports, driving licences, bank card details, that sort of thing. The central problem with this is one must be irredeemably stupid to provide that kind of information to any pornography site, regardless of whether it's run by a 'tech company'. As numerous examples had demonstrated over the past couple of years, corporations are incapable of protecting personal data. PornHub absolutely will become a prize target for compromising material, and really will end up disclosing a huge database of verified users and their viewing habits. It should also be a given that PornHub, or an insider threat, would be selling that information for a generous price.
Another problem is that, in my experience, most people don't bother with VPNs, and that means young people will be getting more extreme and exploitative content from less mainstream sites instead. I'd imagine a few of those sites would go viral through whichever mesaging apps young people are using these days.
Trans Solidarity Alliance Mass Lobbying Day
Activists gathered outside Westminster for a 'mass lobbying day', organised by the Trans Solidarity Alliance. This comes shortly after the EHRC revised its position on transgender people and public/workplace bathrooms because its previous guidance was unlawful. I think it ran into problems with the Workplace Regulations Act, of all things.
The whole TERF-Trans thing is bordering on satire, because, as it transpired, TERFs are a much greater threat to womens' safety and dignity than transgender people are accused of being.
Application Go-Live!
A couple of observations as I was deploying a few applicatios today. First, around 90% of the problems I deal with are actually data issues, even though the people responsible for that data often don't admit to it. Investigating the data first can save hours of troubleshooting, especially on a system you're not too familiar with.
Secondly, I had quite a large list of environment-related configurations to work through just before deploying the application, and they were all to do with other applications it's interacting with. I'm thinking that maybe we should treat the external applications the same way we treat software dependencies. What state are those applications in? Have the latest versions of them been deployed? Is the main application properly referencing them?
Who controls the world?
A couple of Jehova's Witnesses posed this as a rhetorical question yesterday. God ultimately controls everything, I replied. We're not even close to figuring out how or why, but He does at the most fundamental level. Bad things still happen because nature has a cruel side, and it's always in flux and seeking equilibrium.
But anyway, the two old dears had a different, ready-made answer. According to them, 'the Devil' controls the world. Oh, dear, I thought. I guess, by implication, that would mean we should be railing against an intangible entity, rather than excercising agency in more practical ways. Maybe that also means I should blame 'Satan' for my actions (I usually say a bad man did it and ran away) instead of taking personal responsibility. What a thoroughly disempowering belief to have!
Reform UK's popularity
Reform UK would win the most seats in a general election, according to a recent poll of roughly 11,000 people. Reform UK are most likely going to become the opposition party in Wales, for whatever that's worth, under a Plaid Cymru government, with Welsh Labour coming fourth. And, unfortunately, Reform UK have the vision, inspiration and personality that's completely absent among the ministers we currently have in Wales.
Their popularity is more an indictment of the mainstream political system, rather than an indication of what people really want. Most of us are sick of 'centrism', which may as well be a term for continued Thatcherism, and many think any change is preferable to the rather bleak future that promises. As things currently stand, things aren't getting better unless enough people opt for Reform UK as a protest vote.
A lot can, and will, happen over the next three years. Reform UK has yet to prove itself, and might cock things up badly enough to make people think twice about voting for them. Labour might get rid of Starmer and Reeves, and deliver the changes we were promised before the election - the alternative, of course, would be to go the way the Tories did. The Liberal Democrats and the Green Party might gain mass support by selling themselves as the alternative to 'centrism', and with solutions that give the young a future in Britain.