cpcallen
26d 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
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).
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?
cpcallen
6mo 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
6mo 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
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
11mo 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
11mo 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.)
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.
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