cpcallen
7mo ago
it turns out that the original murder was a case of vigilantism against, allegedly, a habitual abuser of women.
This is an interesting claim—suspiciously convenient but not implausible—so I was interested in learning more. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much reported in the coverage of the pardon about the original conviction. Can you point me to your source for this?
cpcallen
1yr ago
I'm under the impression that parental (or in loco parents) supervision of children has been more or less steadily increasing since at least the 1930s, hence why kids are driven everywhere, parents get arrested for letting their teenage kids play in the park I'm unsupervised and "free range parenting" hads emerged as an effort to counter this insanity.
At what point do you think supervision decreased?
cpcallen
2yr ago
For some reason I only have downvote buttons, for both posts and comments. Is this a bug or did I do something wrong? I note that I saw only downvote arrows while not logged in, and logging in did not fix it. (I have tried force-reloading the page, opening a new tab, etc.)
Or maybe we are going to have only non-positive scores going forward? That seems… a bit negative to me. ;-)
cpcallen
6mo ago
we could make a space elevator from conventional materials
Doesn't the moon's very slow rotation (~1x month) make that rather impractical? The elevator would have to extend to and beyond the earth-moon L1 or L2 point, since lunarstationary orbits are impossible (they are outside the Moon's SOI).
cpcallen
1yr ago
This is the first UK general election where voter ID was required, having previously been trialled for local elections. Unlike in the US, this is considered by most to be a sensible technocratic fix rather than a sinister plot to disenfranchise anyone (although a few UK lefties seem to have imbibed US memes enough to see it as such).
I believe you correctly describe the general feeling about this, but even this UK centrist cannot help but notice how much more likely it is than an over–70 voter will already posess an acceptable piece of ID than an under-25 voter will. For example: why are travel passes for older persons accepted, but not ones for younger persons? Perhaps there is a good technocratric reason for the difference (maybe issuing of Freedom passes is more carefully regulated?) but I do expect that the incoming government to correct this apparent disparity rather than scrap the ID requirement altogether.
cpcallen
1yr ago
You're right that Tories are a failure on their own terms, and because of that the idea that the neoliberal wing of Labour will be some sort of an improvement is absurd to me.
I disagree. Specifically, I think that Labour is considerably more likely to be good at growing the economy and reducing the deficit for several reasons:
- Labour is much more likely to spend money on services (and in particular on public sector salaries), rather than on tax cuts for the wealthiest, and this is likely to be better for overall economic growth.
- The Conservatives dedication to austerity, Brexit and lettuce-brained tax cutting has been so appallingly damaging that it would be difficult to do worse.
- Labour has not suffered from the purge of competence and expertise that the Conservatives inflicted upon themselves in an effort to get Brexit through. There has certainly been a purge of Corbynites from the party at large, but the parliamentary party was mostly dead set against him from the beginning so this was much less costly of experience and expertise what the Tories did to themselves.
There is also historical data to suggest that Labour tends to do better on economic growth than the Conservaives, which fits with the pattern that I have repeatedly observed: that, at least in my lifetime in the US, Canada, and the UK, the centre left party (Democrats / Liberals / Labour) has typically done better on some of the key measures, such as deficit reduction, than the centre right party (Republicans / Conservatives / Tories) usually try to lay claim to. (I recall some years ago finding a nice set of graphs looking at defecits in particular; alas I can't quickly relocate them, so consider this more my stating my priors than making a specific claim.)
cpcallen
1yr ago
Nominally, yes. But would they care about his open rejection of feminist ideology so much if he were stronger? In my observation the answer is usually either "yes, but not nearly so much" or "possibly, but they'd keep their opinions to themselves, at least around him", which amounts to the same thing from his point of view.
Attractive people (of both sexes) just get cut a lot more slack for their opinions and treatment of others.
cpcallen
2yr ago
Can you elaborate about how some make folding impossible? Are you speaking only about the difficulty of avoiding taxation, or do you posit other ways that opting out, MGTOW-style, is insufficient/impossible?
(As to taxation: I can see some might the on average unequal contributions/disbursements for men and women a source of resentment, but I hardly think this is universal amongst unsuccessful men—consider that at least some are socialist—while plenty of successful men object to taxation on grounds unrelated to the disparate impact between men and women.)
cpcallen
2yr ago
Corporations benefitting at the expense of the public purse is not exactly a new idea. Indeed, it is one of the more compelling arguments against unfettered capitalism.
I would absolutely expect that corporations would like more cheap labour that is ultimately subsidised by taxpayers, especially in places where corporations are not themselves especially highly taxed. It's the same principle as Walmart workers on food stamps, writ large.
The likelihood that the general public would not buy the economic arguments in favour of immigration if they were more familiar with the numbers (at least in Denmark) may explain why those numbers do not seem to be particularly well reported.
cpcallen
2yr ago
This talking point has been repeated ad nauseum but is it really true, though? I contend not: his candidateship brought an enormous influx of new members to the Labor party, resulting in it becoming the single largest political party by membership in Europe. The parliamentary Labor party evidently believed him to be unelectable—and did everything in their power to make sure that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy—but nevertheless under his leadership the Labor party made gains against the Tories in a snap election that Teresa May had opportunistically called to try to capitalize on Labour's supposedly weak leadership and Brexit position.
Corbyn was certainly deeply polarising, and in the end not an effective leader, but "unelectable" is not plausible except insofar as as his own party was willing to shoot themselves in the foot rather than risk finding out.
cpcallen
2yr ago
I don't know if the post is fake or not, but I do know that
know he should use a cutesy throwaway called "throwRA"
is not evidence one way or another: using a username with that prefix was previously a rule in that subreddit, that rule was promulgated vigorously enough that even people like me who do not regularly browse that sub knew about it, and it created a sufficiently strong convention that 12 of the current top 25 posts (sorted by hot, as of this moment) adhere to it.
cpcallen
2yr ago
I think this is disingenuous. Babbage certainly created the first design for a programmable computer as we know it, and clearly would have given considerable thought to combining instructions together. But if Lovelace was the first person to actually spend a significant amount of time constructing lists of instructions to solve particular problems then I don't think it's unreasonable to describe her as the first programmer.
By way of (concrete) analogy: in the fourth year comp eng CPU Design course I took as an undergrad, we all created pipelined RISC CPU designs in VHDL, and used an emulator to test them. To that end I did input several sequences of instruction to ensure that the (emulated) hardware was operating as it should, with the ALU generating the correct results, the pipeline correctly handling various hazards, etc., and while these might technically be "programs" I was not "programming" in any meaningful way. Like Babbage (and thousands of students before me) I created a design for a CPU which will never physically exist. Unlike Babbage, my non-existent CPU would never attract even a single programmer.
cpcallen
2yr ago
It was clear to me that this became, very quickly, something that was pure, unadulterated 100% culture war.
This strikes me as a very American perspective—or rather, since it looks that way from here too, a very American phenomenon. Not that there were no disputes about public health measures in Europe—we have our share of anti-vaxers too—but at least here in the UK conflict didn't break down along existing political lines so obviously as it did in the US, and though we did have some of the "do as I say not as I do" shenanigans (cough Castle Barnard cough PartyGate cough) they were more from the right than the left.
cpcallen
2yr ago
Thanks for introducing me to a whole bunch of things I'd not previously been aware of. I hope your won't mind a small correction: if I have understood Wikipedia correctly, it was Cash's private mansion that burned down, while the House of Cash was turned into offices and a cafe.
cpcallen
1mo ago
Well, if I'm in a hurry then 70, but if not then I'll happily sit in the left lane with the lorries, which are limited to 60. Definitely never knowingly faster than the posted limit, since I don't want a ticket and speed cameras are ubiquitous on the motorways here.
cpcallen
1mo ago
And set up an online exchange to trade it. Maybe they could call it MTGOX, has a nice ring to it. ;-)
cpcallen
2mo ago
Some female coworkers mentioned to me that they like trans people and "have trans friends", but don't like the bathroom change.
FWIW I believe your colleges and think that the preference being revealed is that they prefer not to share a bathroom with male-presenting persons, rather than that they prefer not to share with trans women.
A very similar circumstance has arisen at a venue I and my girlfriend frequent, where all the formerly segregated toilets have for the last couple of years been officially gender-neutral, with signs describing them as such—"with toilets" and "with toilets and urinals".
The preponderance of attendees at the events I frequent nevertheless continue to use the room corresponding to the gender they present as, including a handful of non-passing-but-not-for-want-of-effort trans women.
My girlfriend has nevertheless indicated that she is quite uncomfortable with this arrangement—not so much because trans women use the formerly women's toilets, but because at least a few cis men do too.
This situation, where the toilets continue to be de-jur gender-neutral despite remaining de-facto segregated (except for some boundary-testing by inconsiderate men) seems especially absurd given that there was already a perfectly serviceable single-occupancy gender-neutral toilet available anyway!
It will be interesting to see if the recent court ruling results in any rethinking of thisarrangement but if anything I suspect it will cause the organisation that runs to be even less likely to roll back the change, since as it is they can credibly claim there are no toilets reserved for women, and therefore none that trans women might (as a result of this ruling) be denied the right to use.
cpcallen
3mo ago
Yes, but how much do they charge for smaller orders, and how much do you pay each year to own a car? In the UK we pay £2–4 for delivery of a £40+ order every few weeks (buying the rest of what we need on foot, typically once a day on the way home from the station). Let's say we spend £150/y on delivery (certainly an overestimation). No car can be owned for so little, even if you could get insurance and fuel for free.
cpcallen
6mo ago
OK, I agree that the nations of the earth are indeed the powers that be (at least to a very extensive degree). So your argument is that one would like to be able to set up a new country, but all the land on Earth is already spoken for? That is indeed an considerable difficulty, and plausibly a motivation for planetary exploration.
cpcallen
7mo ago
Thanks. It seems you are correct: Gallant may be a murderer, but his victim was truly nasty. I not a supporter of the death penalty, and vigilante justice is inherently problematic for a variety of reasons, but it's clear that Gallant and his co-convicted were taking care of a problem that the justice system had failed to.
cpcallen
7mo ago
Indeed: I've been trying to discourage people from sending me messages on Facebook ever since they broke the seamless email <-> messages gateway. I even looked in to trying to build a bit that would reply to any FB message with a request that the correspondent email me instead. Alas it was not feasible given my expertise and motivation (both relatively high).
cpcallen
1yr ago
I have frequently quipped that "the [only significant] difference between American culture and Canadian culture is that Americans are very proud of being American, while Canadians are very proud of not being American."
I grant that, with the emergence of Trumpism, it seems increasingly clear that there are in fact aspects of US culture to which we have no good answer–but you are correct that I am much happier with mediocre but universal healthcare (in Canada or my adopted homeland of Britain) and would not trade it for the America alternative.
cpcallen
1yr ago
To me the most plausible claim you make is that all is all internal feedback would have been deflected. (I'd also give you the claim that all would have been forgotten after the PM got a promotion, except that unfortunately for then the promo cycle is a lot slower than the media cycle...)
I have genuinely never understood why some people find the UN tyrannical. It seems to me that it is toothless, and even if it were not it would at worst be an institution of mediocre democracy (a bit like the EU or indeed the US). That is no tyranny. Yet "one world government" has been a meme since my childhood. That has always seemed like a worthy if probably far off goal to me—what about it do you find so objectionable?
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