pmyteh

69 ms·

631.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Sadly, this has little to do with an anti-authoritarian streak. It's mostly a combination of continuous property rights going back more than a thousand years (some of these unregistered bits have belonged to the Crown since the Norman
632.
by pmyteh 8y ago
The whole contract was actually £1.36bn over 10 years (NAO report, p.2), and the £113m covered the new online recruitment system (including the costs of running the old system longer than expected) and was triple the budget (p.6).
633.
by pmyteh 8y ago
His argument for why they're inalienable is completely dependent on the existence of (a particular conception of) God. I found reading the Second Treatise of Government an eye-opening experience for this reason. If we want an argumen
634.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Most people don't think about it much. The idea that we have an 'elected dictatorship' in some sense is fairly true. Constraints on the executive are basically five-fold: 1) Parliament is supreme, not the PM. So extreme acts
635.
by pmyteh 8y ago
In theory, no - the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty holds that there are no checks on the power of Parliament, which is absolute. So if it chooses to have someone's head removed for spurious reasons it does in principle have the
636.
by pmyteh 8y ago
In British usage, the government is strictly the executive. We don't have formal separation of powers, and the courts and Parliament are very clear they aren't part of the government. You can see this from Parliament's insist
637.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Ethics committees generally do not turn down research because they think it's a bad idea, but because the processes in place to protect the subject are sub-standard. In the example linked, that would probably be a heavy-duty human subj
638.
by pmyteh 8y ago
It's a kind of optimised variant of the 'runoff voting', where the election is rerun with one fewer candidate if noone gets a majority. That's where the name comes from. In these parts (the UK) the same system is known a
639.
by pmyteh 8y ago
This is highly unlikely, if only because such hiring practices would be unlawful in Britain in almost all cases. You can use diversity as a tie-breaker, and you can actively try to persuade people from various under-represented groups to ap
640.
by pmyteh 8y ago
> No income tax is far simpler. Do you know what the cost for enforcement of individual income tax is? Hint: think astronomical. I do know what the cost of enforcement of individual income tax is, at least in a sane system with effective
641.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Yes. Raspberry Pi plus RISC OS Pico will drop you straight into a BASIC prompt. And one which is largely compatible with software written the original BBC BASIC from the early 1980s, if you have that nostalgia. The embedded assembler is ARM
642.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Not so much important or memorable: most of the really important stuff on RISC OS was small-scale commercial. There was also a tendency to use BASIC minifiers to make the program fractionally faster and somewhat smaller, so the boundaries w
643.
by pmyteh 8y ago
There was lots of closed-source public domain software in earlier eras. The ethos of most of the non-commercial software on the British micros, for example, was never about the source. Stuff written in BASIC naturally came with its own sour
644.
by pmyteh 8y ago
You can recreate it with Raspberry Pi, though it's no longer the best platform for it. It can natively run RISC OS Open, which can be set up to drop you straight into a BBC BASIC prompt as in the old days. And there was plenty of sof
645.
by pmyteh 8y ago
BBC BASIC had a built-in inline assembler, which I think also made things easier for people typing in at home. Even if the program dropped to assembly language for speed, the instructions were still human-readable rather than DATA statement
646.
by pmyteh 8y ago
I have a mental disability. I also have a PhD and a well paid academic job. Disabled people really aren't inherently less productive; it depends on the job, the individual, and (critically) the attitude of the place they work.
647.
by pmyteh 8y ago
This is very field-dependent. In mine (political science) it's routine to blind the reviews in both directions. In others, papers are reviewed with the author's name and affiliation on the top. There is a further issue that if you
648.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Jimmy Carter is without question one of the all-time great ex-presidents. Whatever the successes or failings of his administration, he's used his time since to improve the world, and is honest, uncorrupt, and suitably (ex-)presidential
649.
by pmyteh 8y ago
The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.
650.
by pmyteh 8y ago
One of the ways this ends is that people of different political persuasions set up their own (social) media platforms. This has happened before with print media, where the US used to have and most of Europe still does have media with expres
651.
by pmyteh 8y ago
It is not possible to rely solely on rote memorization, and to get a PhD is supposed to require making a substantive original contribution to a field. Having said that, the skills required to get a PhD are pretty specialised - it's abs
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by pmyteh 8y ago
No (though obviously some are, and its the tabs in particular which aren't particularly bothered about accuracy). But most European newspapers are expressly part of a particular political tradition, and many are openly partisan. In the
653.
by pmyteh 8y ago
"It gives me goosebumps to think of Jason Collins' decision and the way it has been received so positively," Justin's niece, Amal Fashanu, told Yahoo! Sports on Wednesday. Amal, who was only 8 years old when her uncle di
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by pmyteh 8y ago
I've worked in female-dominated environments (I used to be a copy-typist). They were fine. No passive-aggressive anti-male comments, no questions about my sex life, no harassment. The conversation topics were about more stereotypically
655.
by pmyteh 8y ago
It's absolutely LGBT-phobic. Do you know how many out gay professional footballers there are in the UK? Zero. Because the atmosphere around sexuality in professional football is sufficiently toxic that very few people are willing to co
656.
by pmyteh 8y ago
The Washington Post and the NY Times are both very fine papers: they take the traditional 20th Century American view of journalism (attempting to be objective and authoritative, and taking accuracy seriously) which is a bit alien to the Eu
657.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Newspapers in the US were absolutely valued for their ability to generate profits. Local classified advertising revenue alone was enough that throughout the 80s and early 90s it was a very lucrative business to be in. They're also tool
658.
by pmyteh 8y ago
Part of that is that in multi -vehicle accidents bigger cars do more damage to small ones because they have more mass. So the bigger car is definitely safer for its occupants, but not necessarily better overall. Pedestrian vs SUV bull bars
659.
by pmyteh 8y ago
The CJR is a journal about the press; its writers' opinion that a free press is vital is nailed on. I don't read it as trying to push an agenda (which I suspect the author believes is shared by her readers) but to explore the tens
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by pmyteh 8y ago
It's very hard to come up with reliable likely voter models, not least because there are significant changes in people who vote every time. The opinion polls in the 2017 British general election were out, for example, because in the

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