pmyteh

69 ms·

721.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Oh, don't be daft. It's never as careless as 'simply legislate equality'. Look at the UK's Civil Partnership Act 2004 if you want to see how this stuff is normally done. 264 clauses and 30 schedules to make clear wh
722.
by pmyteh 9y ago
They want data on Internet use (and specifically broadband Internet use) by county. That isn't a trivial ask. You can get reasonable rates at a larger scale using survey approaches (like OxIS, the British survey series from the Oxford
723.
by pmyteh 9y ago
There is a native port to the Pi of RISC OS, the ARM-based operating system that ran on Acorn's successor to the BBC (the Acorn Archimedes). The BASIC on that is also BBC Basic, including inline ARM assembler. https://www.ri
724.
by pmyteh 9y ago
That's certainly part of it. And part of the reason that Republicans control more states is (as TFA makes clear) that they made a particular effort to win them in order to control the mapmaking process for Congress. I don't know w
725.
by pmyteh 9y ago
You're right that this is not solely a Republican issue. But it does have a partisan lean; the GOP set a deliberate target of getting control of state map drawing processes, and have substantially more gerrymanders in their favour than
726.
by pmyteh 9y ago
> But when he buys, he either buys all of a company, or enough of it to have some level of control over it, and that's only possible these days if you're wealthy as he is. A lot of that is simply that he now has too much money
727.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Excise taxes on alcohol are based on quantity (of pure alcohol) not price, at least in the UK. Ditto tobacco. It's not that uncommon.
728.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It's called 'evergreening', FWIW.
729.
by pmyteh 9y ago
British middle class is... nuanced. The examples you have are certainly middle class, but then so is the primary school teacher on £25k a year. Private schooling only covers 8%ish of children, but about half the country consider themselves
730.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is an empirical analysis of wealth distribution in capitalist countries over the long term, as well as a discussion of possible causes and consequences. It's very good.
731.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Cute, but no. The blog post writer isn't doing it on a large scale, so isn't caught by their own definition. They're arguably not exploiting it, either (no return to them if you read it or not).
732.
by pmyteh 9y ago
No single voter has control, so they check each other. In principle, anyway. Democracy obviously isn't a perfect system.
733.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It may be phrased infelicitously, but I think thinking more-or-less any other good is worth more counts as anti-environmental, given that politics is an endless series of tradeoffs. I mean, in the same sense that socialists are often seen a
734.
by pmyteh 9y ago
If you're arguing that elections with less than 100% turnout are flawed as models of public opinion, I agree with you.
735.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Yes. Mandate theory is a convenient fiction with basically no basis.
736.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Because I, for one, didn't know it was happening and therefore could not participate. My chance of having my opinion count was zero. So pretty much by definition the poll is not representative of the universe of people-who-include-me.
737.
by pmyteh 9y ago
That's because you don't get to choose your issues one at a time. You get to choose a basket of issue positions at the same time as a legislator's personality. Normally from a choice of two.
738.
by pmyteh 9y ago
If few enough people vote, arguably yes (though that's a fairly complex question and depends a lot on what your conception of democracy is). But in essence, an election is a full-population poll: like a random sample with probability 1
739.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Ah, sorry. You said "results of this debate disagree with you", so I took that to be the debate's results (the vote), not the debate itself. (And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical
740.
by pmyteh 9y ago
This was in no way a hostile response. The operative sentence from the complaint is "I find the use of the term as the catchy title of an academic conference with no bearing on their situation unfortunate and write to encourage the con
741.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The results of a straw poll after a debate are not evidence for anything beyond what the people who saw the debate thought of the debaters. People vote for all kinds of reasons - the underlying merits of the case, the impressiveness of the
742.
by pmyteh 9y ago
> No it's not in the consumer's best interest. I really don't care if I'm drinking Champagne or Prosecco, as long as it tastes good. I'm not sure that's the best example. In addition to being made in differe
743.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It's an interesting bunch that. I'm not convinced that 'Welsh Lamb' is in any real sense a regional traditional food that differs from English lamb, but on consumer protection grounds I also don't reckon that you sh
744.
by pmyteh 9y ago
I'm told by my dad that his (private) dentist as a kid also used to be awful; whereas my (NHS) dentist was great. Though I'm told that surgery went downhill when our dentist retired. Very hard to separate out what's going on.
745.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It /is/ a published paper - in the BMJ (a medics' trade paper-cum-journal), which has a tradition of off-the-wall articles in its Christmas edition. Its regular readers know this, so it's only those of us in the Internet
746.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Doctor Brown Bear is a positive male role model, TFA notwithstanding. As is Granddad Dog, IMO. And there are other workers who are less of the exploited proletariat than Miss Rabbit - Daddy Pig works as some kind of architect/structura
747.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Dentistry's an odd one. In some parts of the country it certainly used to be essentially impossible to get an NHS dentist, and in others it's easy. There are multiple dental surgeries accepting new NHS patients in Oxford, for exam
748.
by pmyteh 9y ago
That's silly. If you're doing research using new statistical methods, they're almost certainly available on R first. And ggplot2 remains the best plotting library I've ever seen.
749.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Influence, certainly, but not exactly control. When the Home Office did semi-nationalise the police against the miners' strike in the 80s it was rightly something of a scandal.
750.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The even more historical problem is that surveillance powers were operated under the royal prerogative with no oversight of any kind. RIPA (that, correctly, much maligned predecessor to the Snoopers' Charter) was in one sense a step fo

More ›