8 ms·

We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers

plonk 4y ago
Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?
- bengale 4y ago
  President Boris. Sounds fantastic. Perhaps not though, yeah?
  - kergonath 4y ago
    In a lot of countries, it would be much better than "prime minister Boris". Look at the president roles in Italy and Germany, for example. Not all countries in the world are the US.
    - bengale 4y ago
      We already have a non political head of state. I’m not sure I see any benefit in us switch to a system like Italy or Germany.
      - kergonath 4y ago
        I am not British, so I have no skin in the game. But the issue in general is not the fact that there is a head of state with a mostly-ceremonial role, it’s all the baggage that comes with the monarchy (detailed by others in this thread).
        bengale 4y ago
        I find the general feeling here is that the system isn't perfect, but none are really and what we have has worked for a long time and there isn't much desire to change it. We'd just be switching for the baggage of an elected head of state and I'm not sure there is any stomach here for another issue that divides so deeply after going through the Brexit campaign/process.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  - plonk 4y ago
    You could allocate only "software update" capability to one group, "execution" to another, and have a permission system for deciding who can do what.
    - Victerius 4y ago
      But what if the execution program took on a conscience of its own and decided to appropriate software update permissions for itself?
- Teever 4y ago
  Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
  - plonk 4y ago
    "Every operating system then, and every threat model, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be deployed longer, it is legacy tech, and should be deprecated." - Thomas Jefferson
    - scoopertrooper 4y ago
      Move fast and break things - Napoleon Bonaparte
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it past 19 years. At that time the sudoers will change the repositories used for OS updates." [1] "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the contents of sudoers? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of sysadmins and backdoors. It is it’s natural manure." [2] Thomas Jefferson [1] https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/h... [2] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tree-liberty-quotation https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tre...
  - simonh 4y ago
    Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
- ben_w 4y ago
  The root account was written when it was fashionable to be object-oriented, so its resource allocation is all due to inheritance. Scotland in particular is upset because of certain issues due to multiple inheritance.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    LOL. Great comment. But it's not just Scotland. The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too.
    - gumby 4y ago
      > The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too. They defined a custom method combinator that squashed the diamond problem. Implementing it was literally painful for many of the people involved. Truly a killer problem.
      - jameshart 4y ago
        And then in 16.8.8 they imported a completely new package from the Netherlands called 'Orange' (but they rebranded it), and marked a bunch of things as 'protected' to lock down inheritance.
        IncRnd 4y ago
        Even when there is an ISA relationship the subsequent objects are never quite the same as the root object for which the system was designed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- orangesite 4y ago
  Nope nope nope nope. Requiring privileged access is a code smell. Capability based government now!
- Lio 4y ago
  Been there, done that already. The British have tried that before. We called it the Interregnum[1]. It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser so the fix was a restoration plus tweaks to limit powers. You’ll note this all happening well before others decided to repeat the experiment. The system has been ticking along at some definition of “fine”[2] ever since. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Interregnum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Interregnum 2. Personally I’m less concerned about who the ceremonial head of state is than I am about having a police force that refuses to investigate the Prime Minister for breaking the law[3]. Whilst at the same time retrospectively investigating women for breaking the very same law by attending a protest about the murder of a woman by a serving officer of that very same police force. Now that is fucked up. 3. See private ABBA party.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    > It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser I thinks it’s more the case that the commons at the time couldn’t get their shit together.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    >It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser // Somehow the guy who managed to take over was an even bigger shit of a person than most of the past monarchs and so the people agreed to have a monarch again under a 'better the devil you know [and can limit with magna carta]' sort of deal. It's like how we got screwed out of PR by being offered AV.
  - dTal 4y ago
    The monarchy would love for you to believe they're only a ceremonial head of state. It makes their sinister and self-serving wielding of power much easier. In fact the Queen routinely gets laws changed in her favor, and the details of the process by which this happens are not widely known. The monarchy is a vast and private rent-seeking apparatus that exists to perpetuate the interests of its family members and their business holdings, and is inexplicably afforded vast political power and reverence. It is a rotten leftover that has no place in the 21st century. As for "some definition of fine", I think it is increasingly clear that the UK is not fine and has in fact never been fine, or even much of a democracy, and has been essentially run by a corrupt aristocracy for centuries. It's not a secret that the whole lot of them all went to Eton - that should raise eyebrows among anyone not inured to the whole sordid business. (Well, I should say that it's only really England with this issue. But England is the imperial core of the UK. Its satellite states are more sane, but thoroughly subjugated.)
- krona 4y ago
  Because investing both sovereignty and power in a single institution inexorably leads to tyranny. Examples abound.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. A good portion of the top ten democracies are 'disabled root' (constitutional monarchy): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country As a Canadian I'm not so much "against" switching away for constitutional monarchy, but rather any proposal needs to ensure we stay high in rankings. See also (2021> Pts: higher is better): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Country_rankings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Country_r... (I have no comment/idea on 'useful' these metric actually are.)
- shirro 4y ago
  As an Australian we solved this by having root's resources swapped out and hosted on storage paid for and hosted in the UK. We have another privileged account called gg which inherits all of root's privileges. Given that the root account may be transferred in the not too distant future there is increasing interest in making gg the new root. As to why we need such a privileged account in the first place to host garden parties and cut ribbons, gg provides a supervisor process that can kill deadlocked governments and respawn them. It seems a bit silly but at least our government isn't based on VMS.
lisper 4y ago
That is one of the more brilliant (and accurate) analogies I have ever seen!
SulphurSmell 4y ago
Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gxt 4y ago
  I'd see the governors has some kind kerberos authorized set of admin accounts. And we are the lowly users and sudoers.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  Something like that. And with the Governor General as the VM root.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  Technically we have a different monarch that is occupied by the same person (she is “the queen of the uk and the queen of Canada”, not really “queen of the uk and Canada”) and has the same rules of succession (implemented in a Canadian bill that must be updated in sync with the British equivalent when it changes). So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    I suggest that in the next bill, rather than updating the Crown to rest in Charles's CNAME, you acknowledge that the Crown is perpetually Elizabeth II. That way you never have to change Birthday celebrations, or anything else related.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      We already solved the birthday celebration problem. The Queen's official birthday in Canada is May 24th. Charles' official birthday in Canada will be May 24th. We just decided at some point the best monarch's birthday to celebrate is Queen Victoria and have stuck with it.
gruez 4y ago
>The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers except, even with "disabled root account", you can do "sudo su" to get a root shell. What's the equivalent of that in uk?
- simonh 4y ago
  The supreme court?
- pmyteh 4y ago
  Pretty much exactly that. The Government can (and does) request a Privy Council meeting, which issues various kinds of Orders in the name of the Queen. The Queen's Speech is another (less instrumental) way of government using the root account directly. (Or, I suppose, you could `$ sudo su`and then `# instantiate_republic` to permanently promote the usual administrator account to root. Still not clear it's wise to directly govern from account 0, though).
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    I'm not sure the Queen-in-Council is any more (or less) the person of the monarch distinct from the institutional government than, say, the Queen-in-Parliament is. Everything is done in the name of the Queen, one way or another, and almost all of it is practically at the direction of the government.
    - pmyteh 4y ago
      Yeah, maybe that stretches the analogy too far. I think it is distinct from ministers governing in their own right (or in the right of the semi-fictional unitary 'Secretary of State') though. Most statutory instruments, for example, are issued by and in the name of a minister. Obviously the appointment of the minister is an act of the Crown, and so is the passing of the original Act which authorises the order-making power. But the power is used directly from their own ministerial user account, IYSWIM.
hiddencost 4y ago
The queen was exercising secret veto power, I don't think root was disabled. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/08/queen-power-british-law-queens-consent https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  I think this is the link you meant, because when I click yours I just get a favicon: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vetted-more-than-1000-laws-via-queens-consent https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    >The documents also show that on other occasions the monarch’s advisers demanded exclusions from proposed laws relating to road safety and land policy that appeared to affect her estates, and pressed for government policy on historic sites to be altered. I like to read this as the Queen demanding that such common things like "speed limits" and "drive on the correct side of the road" shall not apply to Her Majesty.
- cwillu 4y ago
  When you disable an account, processes running under that account are still live, and can still spawn children.
  - scottswelsh 4y ago
    I hope you're not suggesting we kill the processes.
    - cwillu 4y ago
      SIGSTOP is reversible and unblockable.
    - int_19h 4y ago
ValentineC 4y ago
I don't know if this is more appropriate, but I've always thought of the monarch as PID 1, and parliament as a child process running under the root account.
neilwilson 4y ago
It's probably more like the monarch is the disabled root account, and the prime minister has an unassuming username but with ID 0. The UK has an hereditary monarch with all the pomp and no power as cover for an elected monarch with no pomp and all the power.

plonk 4y ago

Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?

bengale 4y ago
President Boris. Sounds fantastic. Perhaps not though, yeah?
- kergonath 4y ago
  In a lot of countries, it would be much better than "prime minister Boris". Look at the president roles in Italy and Germany, for example. Not all countries in the world are the US.
  - bengale 4y ago
    We already have a non political head of state. I’m not sure I see any benefit in us switch to a system like Italy or Germany.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      I am not British, so I have no skin in the game. But the issue in general is not the fact that there is a head of state with a mostly-ceremonial role, it’s all the baggage that comes with the monarchy (detailed by others in this thread).
      - bengale 4y ago
        I find the general feeling here is that the system isn't perfect, but none are really and what we have has worked for a long time and there isn't much desire to change it. We'd just be switching for the baggage of an elected head of state and I'm not sure there is any stomach here for another issue that divides so deeply after going through the Brexit campaign/process.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
- plonk 4y ago
  You could allocate only "software update" capability to one group, "execution" to another, and have a permission system for deciding who can do what.
  - Victerius 4y ago
    But what if the execution program took on a conscience of its own and decided to appropriate software update permissions for itself?
Teever 4y ago
Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
- plonk 4y ago
  "Every operating system then, and every threat model, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be deployed longer, it is legacy tech, and should be deprecated." - Thomas Jefferson
  - scoopertrooper 4y ago
    Move fast and break things - Napoleon Bonaparte
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it past 19 years. At that time the sudoers will change the repositories used for OS updates." [1] "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the contents of sudoers? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of sysadmins and backdoors. It is it’s natural manure." [2] Thomas Jefferson [1] https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/h... [2] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tree-liberty-quotation https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tre...
- simonh 4y ago
  Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
ben_w 4y ago
The root account was written when it was fashionable to be object-oriented, so its resource allocation is all due to inheritance. Scotland in particular is upset because of certain issues due to multiple inheritance.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  LOL. Great comment. But it's not just Scotland. The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too. They defined a custom method combinator that squashed the diamond problem. Implementing it was literally painful for many of the people involved. Truly a killer problem.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      And then in 16.8.8 they imported a completely new package from the Netherlands called 'Orange' (but they rebranded it), and marked a bunch of things as 'protected' to lock down inheritance.
      - IncRnd 4y ago
        Even when there is an ISA relationship the subsequent objects are never quite the same as the root object for which the system was designed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
orangesite 4y ago
Nope nope nope nope. Requiring privileged access is a code smell. Capability based government now!
Lio 4y ago
Been there, done that already. The British have tried that before. We called it the Interregnum[1]. It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser so the fix was a restoration plus tweaks to limit powers. You’ll note this all happening well before others decided to repeat the experiment. The system has been ticking along at some definition of “fine”[2] ever since. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Interregnum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Interregnum 2. Personally I’m less concerned about who the ceremonial head of state is than I am about having a police force that refuses to investigate the Prime Minister for breaking the law[3]. Whilst at the same time retrospectively investigating women for breaking the very same law by attending a protest about the murder of a woman by a serving officer of that very same police force. Now that is fucked up. 3. See private ABBA party.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser I thinks it’s more the case that the commons at the time couldn’t get their shit together.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser // Somehow the guy who managed to take over was an even bigger shit of a person than most of the past monarchs and so the people agreed to have a monarch again under a 'better the devil you know [and can limit with magna carta]' sort of deal. It's like how we got screwed out of PR by being offered AV.
- dTal 4y ago
  The monarchy would love for you to believe they're only a ceremonial head of state. It makes their sinister and self-serving wielding of power much easier. In fact the Queen routinely gets laws changed in her favor, and the details of the process by which this happens are not widely known. The monarchy is a vast and private rent-seeking apparatus that exists to perpetuate the interests of its family members and their business holdings, and is inexplicably afforded vast political power and reverence. It is a rotten leftover that has no place in the 21st century. As for "some definition of fine", I think it is increasingly clear that the UK is not fine and has in fact never been fine, or even much of a democracy, and has been essentially run by a corrupt aristocracy for centuries. It's not a secret that the whole lot of them all went to Eton - that should raise eyebrows among anyone not inured to the whole sordid business. (Well, I should say that it's only really England with this issue. But England is the imperial core of the UK. Its satellite states are more sane, but thoroughly subjugated.)
krona 4y ago
Because investing both sovereignty and power in a single institution inexorably leads to tyranny. Examples abound.
throw0101a 4y ago
> Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. A good portion of the top ten democracies are 'disabled root' (constitutional monarchy): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country As a Canadian I'm not so much "against" switching away for constitutional monarchy, but rather any proposal needs to ensure we stay high in rankings. See also (2021> Pts: higher is better): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Country_rankings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Country_r... (I have no comment/idea on 'useful' these metric actually are.)
shirro 4y ago
As an Australian we solved this by having root's resources swapped out and hosted on storage paid for and hosted in the UK. We have another privileged account called gg which inherits all of root's privileges. Given that the root account may be transferred in the not too distant future there is increasing interest in making gg the new root. As to why we need such a privileged account in the first place to host garden parties and cut ribbons, gg provides a supervisor process that can kill deadlocked governments and respawn them. It seems a bit silly but at least our government isn't based on VMS.

lisper 4y ago

That is one of the more brilliant (and accurate) analogies I have ever seen!

SulphurSmell 4y ago

Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gxt 4y ago
I'd see the governors has some kind kerberos authorized set of admin accounts. And we are the lowly users and sudoers.
pmyteh 4y ago
Something like that. And with the Governor General as the VM root.
stormbrew 4y ago
Technically we have a different monarch that is occupied by the same person (she is “the queen of the uk and the queen of Canada”, not really “queen of the uk and Canada”) and has the same rules of succession (implemented in a Canadian bill that must be updated in sync with the British equivalent when it changes). So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  I suggest that in the next bill, rather than updating the Crown to rest in Charles's CNAME, you acknowledge that the Crown is perpetually Elizabeth II. That way you never have to change Birthday celebrations, or anything else related.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    We already solved the birthday celebration problem. The Queen's official birthday in Canada is May 24th. Charles' official birthday in Canada will be May 24th. We just decided at some point the best monarch's birthday to celebrate is Queen Victoria and have stuck with it.

gruez 4y ago

>The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers except, even with "disabled root account", you can do "sudo su" to get a root shell. What's the equivalent of that in uk?

simonh 4y ago
The supreme court?
pmyteh 4y ago
Pretty much exactly that. The Government can (and does) request a Privy Council meeting, which issues various kinds of Orders in the name of the Queen. The Queen's Speech is another (less instrumental) way of government using the root account directly. (Or, I suppose, you could `$ sudo su`and then `# instantiate_republic` to permanently promote the usual administrator account to root. Still not clear it's wise to directly govern from account 0, though).
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  I'm not sure the Queen-in-Council is any more (or less) the person of the monarch distinct from the institutional government than, say, the Queen-in-Parliament is. Everything is done in the name of the Queen, one way or another, and almost all of it is practically at the direction of the government.
  - pmyteh 4y ago
    Yeah, maybe that stretches the analogy too far. I think it is distinct from ministers governing in their own right (or in the right of the semi-fictional unitary 'Secretary of State') though. Most statutory instruments, for example, are issued by and in the name of a minister. Obviously the appointment of the minister is an act of the Crown, and so is the passing of the original Act which authorises the order-making power. But the power is used directly from their own ministerial user account, IYSWIM.

hiddencost 4y ago

The queen was exercising secret veto power, I don't think root was disabled. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/08/queen-power-british-law-queens-consent https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...

GauntletWizard 4y ago
I think this is the link you meant, because when I click yours I just get a favicon: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vetted-more-than-1000-laws-via-queens-consent https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
- bombcar 4y ago
  >The documents also show that on other occasions the monarch’s advisers demanded exclusions from proposed laws relating to road safety and land policy that appeared to affect her estates, and pressed for government policy on historic sites to be altered. I like to read this as the Queen demanding that such common things like "speed limits" and "drive on the correct side of the road" shall not apply to Her Majesty.
cwillu 4y ago
When you disable an account, processes running under that account are still live, and can still spawn children.
- scottswelsh 4y ago
  I hope you're not suggesting we kill the processes.
  - cwillu 4y ago
    SIGSTOP is reversible and unblockable.
  - int_19h 4y ago

ValentineC 4y ago

I don't know if this is more appropriate, but I've always thought of the monarch as PID 1, and parliament as a child process running under the root account.

neilwilson 4y ago

It's probably more like the monarch is the disabled root account, and the prime minister has an unassuming username but with ID 0. The UK has an hereditary monarch with all the pomp and no power as cover for an elected monarch with no pomp and all the power.