pmyteh

80 ms·

751.
by pmyteh 9y ago
I got a tailored response from my (Labour) MP at the time of the snoopers' charter passing. He largely agreed with the substantive points I put forward against the surveillance regime, but felt unable to vote against because (IIRC) the
752.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The EU doesn't have general legislative competence for tax: it's reserved to the member States. To change this would (IIRC) require a new treaty, and the perceived loss of sovereignty would go down like a lead balloon with many of
753.
by pmyteh 9y ago
I think the difficulty with this as a general proposition is that not all rebellions/coups/revolutions end up like Syria. With the benefit of hindsight it seems clear that almost everyone would have been better off leaving Assad b
754.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It's a fascinating book, though the social contract theory that has been built on it is quite problematic. Coincidentally, this week's instalment of Existential Comics features Hobbes, and is both funny and incisive: http:/&
755.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The population of the British Indian Ocean Territory were all deported, to clear the island of Diego Garcia for a large US airbase. It's one of the grubbiest recent bits of British imperial manoevering.
756.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Government, by definition, has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. But it doesn't (even in theory) have total control over its space. It's constrained by its ability to fund and apply force (military di
757.
by pmyteh 9y ago
There a few. I published a paper in the Journal of Information Policy once, whose (small) expenses are covered by a grant, IIRC from libraries that would otherwise have to pay through a publisher. Very field specific, though.
758.
by pmyteh 9y ago
'Q' by Luther Blissett. A fictional romp through the Reformation written from the perspective of a protagonist who is on the losing side of every struggle. Low farce, high politics, a bit of sex, lots of death, and a fabulous take
759.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Per the article: "During the two-year period studied, only 78 arbitration claims resulted in judgments in favor of consumers, who got $400,000 in total relief." It's not clear what the denominator on that sum is, though it is
760.
by pmyteh 9y ago
I'm shocked that a relatively new clinical practice with only moderate evidence behind it would be overhyped to sell magazines. Shocked I tell you. I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for depression several years ago
761.
by pmyteh 9y ago
In the US, maybe. The UK uses a non-partisan Electoral Commission which has basically eliminated gerrymandering as a factor in UK politics. There are residual disputes about recent Conservative changes to the criteria given to the Commissio
762.
by pmyteh 9y ago
There's an older version of this principle used to compensate authors for library borrowing in the UK and other countries called Public Lending Right. The government puts some tax money into a pot, and it's paid out to authors in
763.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It's covered in school history classes, sufficiently anti-colonially for a certain slice of conservative talking heads to decry Britain 'talking down its glorious past'. My class covered the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in some
764.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The UK has had a succession of self-regulatory bodies which have conspicuously failed to prevent the worst criminal impulses of Fleet Street, let alone make an impact on merely poor reporting. It's also, interestingly, had some of the
765.
by pmyteh 9y ago
> How can you prove it's yours? or if someone challenges it, you register it? For an unregistered plot, in theory you demonstrate ownership by providing a series of valid conveyancing deeds back to a valid original grant. If they&#x
766.
by pmyteh 9y ago
That land is not registered in the Land Registry doesn't necessarily mean that it's held in some kind of perpetual corporation. Compulsory registration on sale was phased in after 1925 and, IIRC, you weren't obliged to regist
767.
by pmyteh 9y ago
If you're looking for a daily paper well to the left of The Guardian, can I interest you in the Morning Star? Available from your local newsagent, owned by a co-operative closely linked to the Communist Party of Great Britain. No need
768.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Not reliably, no. You can detect if it's an invalid string according to the encoding you're currently using (value > 127 for ASCII, invalid surrogate pair for UTF-16) but there are lots of byte sequences that produce valid (b
769.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Non-EU readers should bear in mind that the presidency of the EU is much much weaker than that of, say, the US. It's rotated around the countries on a schedule, and has mainly agenda-setting authority. That is, countries who hold the
770.
by pmyteh 9y ago
In Britain "political science" is strictly the process of applying (social) scientific approaches to the study of politics, with the rest of the discipline simply called "politics". Nobody trusts the political scientists
771.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It may be that having 'full' freedom is correct in some senses, but it seems fairly clear that it's non-binary. A government which firmly censors newspapers writing restaurant reviews but allows anything else is fairly clearl
772.
by pmyteh 9y ago
That is not, however, what the chart in TFA shows. It shows the bottom 5th percentile with income going down, and income gains increasing in relative (as well as absolute) terms as you get higher up the income percentiles. FWIW income inequ
773.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The author doesn't like writing using markup languages. Some of the rest of us do. I'm with him to the extent that LaTeX evangelism can be oversold - when I'm talking to curious colleagues I tend to stress the vertical learni
774.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It's generally thought she can exercise her reserve powers precisely once, before they (or the monarchy) are removed for good. Personally ordering the armed forces not to take some antidemocratic action demanded by her ministers in a t
775.
by pmyteh 9y ago
We (Britain) built the THORP plant to reprocess into mixed oxide fuel. It was billions over budget, seemingly difficult to operate without causing a stream of minor nuclear accidents, and was never commercially successful. We closed it. Car
776.
by pmyteh 9y ago
There's no entrenched right to privacy in the domestic constitution. The Human Rights Act has, though, brought Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law: > 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private
777.
by pmyteh 9y ago
The tax authorities in the UK (at least) would prefer that charities set up trading subsidiaries for commercial activities. Although there are rules for handling trading through charitable books, everything is much cleaner if the two entiti
778.
by pmyteh 9y ago
Charlie Gard has nothing to do with single payer. In the UK, if the NHS won't fund something (normally because it doesn't work or is horrifically expensive - see NICE for the gory details) you're free to go private. In Charli
779.
by pmyteh 9y ago
It's precisely that many of the participants did not have happy (or healthy) lives that makes the study interesting. You're right that the initial sample is much narrower than ideal. That's why they've broadened the stud
780.
by pmyteh 9y ago
There was a serious attempt to push an equivalent of rational choice in political science a while ago. Public choice theory holds that bureaucrats and politicians are rational actors maximising their own power. It's no longer very prom

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