I have the luxury of not needing to vote Labour to keep anyone out, but I had let myself believe there was some sort of political hope. I guess it's just as well Labour let us all know it's not them.
Honestly what with Tony Blair, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting all sharing their _aperΓ§us_ on the subject of trans rights β short version, trans people donβt exist, should be shunted into βside roomsβ in hospitals β Iβm swinging very firmly back towards voting Green. They have their own terf wing, sure, but they seem to have largely locked them away for the duration of the campaign β rather than free-associating the abolition of trans rights on LBC, say
@considermycat I am utterly unconvinced by those of my friends who are honestly claiming that the larger his majority is, the more Starmer will feel emboldened to be more radical in Government.
I believe that he has already shown us exactly who he is, and that the larger his majority is, the more he'll be encouraged to behave exactly as he has done in opposition.
IMO, it is *Labour* that need to be tactically voted against, not the Tories (who are toast). 1/
@considermycat A bloody nose, a few winnable seats lost to a split progressive vote will, IMO, do far more to buck his ideas up.
Given the sort of political animal Starmer has shown himself to be, I feel the goal is to make him realize that if he wants a second term, he cannot treat us with the contempt that he has done thus far.
Far from a "ming vase", he's implemented a "Ming the Merciless" strategy, and I'll have none of it. /2
Unlike Ben(*), I do think that a larger majority will make the government more radical. I agree that I don't think that Starmer will want it, but I think the natural Peoples Front of Judea tendencies in the party will make it happen. Maybe I'm just overused to the Labour/TUC conferences of the eighties, but there's gonna be factions, right?
I don't see much point voting elsewhere, tbh. The tories are worse, the Lib Dems are untrustworthy (given bastards will always exist, look which party enabled the 2010 government which set this whole disaster going, and achieved none of their major policy goals) and the others don't have enough of the population agreeing with their policies, to make it just an ethical-vanity vote.
(*) The wider ActivityPub world is still a bit of a mystery to me. I can't comment, but I don't know if I'm not allowed or can't find the button.
Honestly what with Tony Blair, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting all sharing their _aperΓ§us_ on the subject of trans rights β short version, trans people donβt exist, should be shunted into βside roomsβ in hospitals β Iβm swinging very firmly back towards voting Green. They have their own terf wing, sure, but they seem to have largely locked them away for the duration of the campaign β rather than free-associating the abolition of trans rights on LBC, say
I really had thought that Labour would at least not make things *worse* for trans people, even if they did nothing to make things *better*. But they seem intent on locking in even the horrendous stuff the Tories forced through in the dying days of government β and the logic of their position will force them to go further still
re: ukpol, Labour, transphobia, whereas the Green Party
Sensitive content
Whereas the Green Party are promising things like self-ID for trans and nonbinary people, X markers in passports, and allowing schools to continue teaching about LGBTQ+ identities, rights and experiences. Oh, and not setting the planet on fire for 0.2% extra GDP growth. Sure, words are cheap, and they're not going to get anywhere remotely near power any time soon, but still. When I look back at the 2024 election, who will I *want* to have voted for?
In partnership with the Good Law Project, today (18th June 2024), TransActual alongside an anonymous trans young person acting as Second Claimant haveΒ issued court proceedings against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
Just noticed that in DS9 the Dominion are first mentionedβ¦ in a silly Ferengi episode. Canβt decide if thatβs better than Q waving the Enterprise at the Borg.
I designed a 4-bit architecture (the TINY Machine), to give my students the experience of knowing a computer so completely that they can simulate it bit for bit on the back of an envelope. I'm still writing new programs for it, but one of my favourites is
@typeswitch One year, I had a student whose (highly successful) Honours project was to make the TINY Machine actually happen on an FPGA. I was so happy to see it for real.
#ukpol Apart from the nonsense of the Tories' blithering about handing Labour a "blank cheque", how many people still know what a cheque is or what a blank one means?
In other blast-from-the-past news, I've heard the phrase "purdah" return for what we're now I hear we're supposed to call "the pre-election period of sensitivity".
From what I can see it's now called either "the pre-election period of sensitivity" or (and I refuse to say this in public company) "the pre-election period of heightened sensitivity".
Built to explore the polar regions, it explored exciting grounding opportunities in the Antarctic in 1972 and 1979. Definitely lost in 2007 after accidentally hosting a meeting of the Titanic Reenactment Society.
The accident report later suggested that the invitation for an iceberg to join the passengers and crew for an exciting evening of events had been extended rather too hastily.
The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.
My favourite note about this is a newspaper article in which an expert explains it's all rather mystifying. The ship was "perfect for ice exploration", apparently.
I'm not sure who the expert was, but I'm assuming it's this guy:
@Peternimmo the accident report is available online, and the loss is pretty convincingly explained.
There's passenger video of the ice field, it rammed into a "wall of ice" without slowing down - maybe don't try that in future - and the speed of sinking implies the damage was far worse than the "fist-sized hole" originally reported.
The expert above was interviewed before the facts came out, I've just been unfair!
@RnaudBertrand: These have undoubtedly been the wildest 72 hours in French politics in my lifetime. Pretty incredible stuff. A 𧡠So after losing big time in the EU elections to Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), ...β¦
Watching the birds in the garden, I find myself wondering about their inner life. Why does a bird decide to do what it does? If it's sitting on the fence and nothing apparently changes, why does it decide at a particular point to fly away? They're not just instinct response machines, I think. Do birds get bored? Do they post on bird twitter about the blob sitting at the black oblong and why she suddenly gets up to do something else?
Obv I have no insight into a bird's inner state though I'd be unsurprised if they had at least some emotional existence. But one can posit things that incentivise it to move without needing to invoke boredom.
Like it's got hungry enough that it's gone off to feed; or some kind of patrolling setup where it wants to check each of several territories at least so often. Or it's spotted something that you or I wouldn't notice - perhaps overhearing calls of another bird?
The cleaner and gardener are both here at the same time. I feel so middle class. (Obviously not upper class, or I'd have sent the butler to the Post Office rather than going there myself.)
Hornby's Zero1: The name reflected it was a Digital system. Unfortunately, financial issues resulted in little to no development continuing shortly after it came on the market. Zero1 became a market leader in command control despite this. dcc.wiki/DK7ib #ModelRailway #Hornby #ModelRailways #digitalcommandcontrol #modelrailroad
Hornby Railway's Zero1 was the first Command Control system built around a custom microcontroller from Texas Instruments. The Zero1 name was chosen to reflect that it was a Digital system.
A fine evening, and lovely to catch up! (For the rest of you, we've known each other since the last time I had long hair, but hadn't seen each other for decades.)
Also, you'd have got a much better photo if you'd just taken one and asked for permission afterwards. When I'm asked for a photo, I have an awkward tendency to pull a Lembit Γpik half-smile.
@ZoΓ« O'Connell Should be entirely doable in this modern era of machine learning and pattern recognition. Only snag is coping with Farage-induced deafness.
I'm guessing the punchline of all this Ed Davey stunt shenanigans is him whizzing down a zipline with one UK flag and one EU flag, but actually making it to the other end.
Forget the brig, forget having a pip removed from your collar so you're the same rank as Kim... the absolute worst punishment possible on Voyager is Janeway's "disappointed" look.
I don't know if you're registered yet as a candidate anywhere, but if you're not I would like to suggest you stand in Clacton and approach all the other parties to support you as a modern day Martin Bell
I mean obviously anybody beating that walking bag of bin juice F*r*g* is both necessary and delicious, but it would be extra delicious if it were @CountBinface
Get up, fed, showered, sit down at desk. Then stare out of the window. Get coffee. Attempt to remember what I was doing on Friday. Stare out of the window. Cry.
Boosting this as it's interesting: Medicines regulation is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998 (Sch. 5 (II)(J4)), so Holyrood cannot legislate in this area and Atkins is not stepping on Holyrood's legislative competence toes here.
The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.
Iβve not shared this in a long time. How to plan a grab and go bag. If youβre reaching for a bag like this then youβve probably left things longer than you ought to have done. That said, populism can turn things sour very fast and, whereas escape plans may be for long term or permanent exit, a grab bag may save your skin when suddenly you need an exit.
As a general rule, the state should over-supply services. There should be slack in the system almost all the time. Relaxed GPs with lots of time to talk to their patients. So many teachers that the main trouble is finding rooms for them all.
Not only does this see a better quality of service mostly, but it also cushions the system in the event of an unexpected shock.
If you have just enough professionals to deliver at 100%, you donβt have enough professionals.
@trixter Iβll distinguish between financialisation culture and product people. Some people want to play Jenga with society, safety and quality; there are others who designed and made the products and prototypes in the first place.
Plenty of βbusinessmenβ fail and only half of small businesses succeed in their first year. A respect for numbers is needed β nothing complex, just arithmetic, percentages, etc. And alongside that, energy, bravery, tenacity. And some luck.
yes, it turns everything into a massive, wasteful joke, we spend and work to do a thing, but not really, not fully. We could spend a billion and fix it all, or we could spend nine hundred million and leave some of it broken so that the nine tenths of a billion was a waste and what is broken can continue to break. . Capitalism is a dollar store where nothing is real.
the reason why the state is βwastefulβ is because contractual stuff goes to the lowest bidder, not the most cost-effective. Therefore everything is done on the cheap at first, then the cheapness shows up and has to be fixed.
What could have been 500 billion done well, is now 300 billion done poorly and an additional 600 billion of papering things over that still doesnβt do the job.
Yes. The mathematics of this is called Queueing Theory. You need "spare" resources to stop the queue growing. I don't have a link to the source, so take this with a grain of salt, but a few years ago a colleague demonstrated this with public health in the UK; there were 43 vets checking out Brit cow herds at 100% "efficiency". They needed 3 more to avoid a backlog growing. The result was billions of pounds wasted because they didn't stop mad cow disease in time.
Key principle: we need to allow for slack in processes so they can absorb delay, prevent burnout, but also have some reserves in the tank to deal with crises.
If @Tupp_ed wants to borrow my copy this can be arranged.
@DaraghOBrien @amckinstry Another factor infecting taxpayer-funded public services is the Toyota Production Method (called Lean in North America).
It's predicated on minimalism in everything. Flat management. Limits on staffing. "Just in Time" Processes. Employee training replaced by manuals. Making the staff do the janitorial work.
Unpaid overtime to make up for inadequate staffing during vacations season, flu or hurricane season, or other "unexpected" events like pandemics.
Watch all the latest episodes of Robot Chicken now over on All 4 π¬π§: http://bit.ly/robchic#RobotChicken #BabarβΊ SUBSCRIBE to Adult Swim UK: http://bit.ly/1...
Itβs also occurred to me that screwing up the country with the worst generational equality in history then training a bunch of young people how to use the guns you just gave them isβ¦ an interesting decision.
Sadly missed. I enjoyed the early days of Doge memes and even DogeCoin when it was a laugh pre bubble and people funded things like the Jamaican Bobsled team.
Funny how Brexit was the nation defining act we absolutely had to see through to it's bitter end (which will never be in sight) and now in General Election 2024 nobody wants to talk about it, and those whose identity is forever entwinned with the thing are shunned (like David Frost) or are fucking off out of politics (like Brexit 'Hardman' Steve Baker)
But don't anybody talk of undoing the mess, how dare you, ....unperson! unperson!
See also: places where LTNs got ripped out, and the streets became more dangerous and filled with cars. "Oh no, we can't try that again for another decade at least! Shhh! Don't wake the car-mad reform-dot-uk agitprop machine!!!"
Ben Evans
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •@considermycat I am utterly unconvinced by those of my friends who are honestly claiming that the larger his majority is, the more Starmer will feel emboldened to be more radical in Government.
I believe that he has already shown us exactly who he is, and that the larger his majority is, the more he'll be encouraged to behave exactly as he has done in opposition.
IMO, it is *Labour* that need to be tactically voted against, not the Tories (who are toast). 1/
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.
Ben Evans
in reply to Ben Evans • • •Sensitive content
@considermycat A bloody nose, a few winnable seats lost to a split progressive vote will, IMO, do far more to buck his ideas up.
Given the sort of political animal Starmer has shown himself to be, I feel the goal is to make him realize that if he wants a second term, he cannot treat us with the contempt that he has done thus far.
Far from a "ming vase", he's implemented a "Ming the Merciless" strategy, and I'll have none of it. /2
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •@considermycat
Unlike Ben(*), I do think that a larger majority will make the government more radical. I agree that I don't think that Starmer will want it, but I think the natural Peoples Front of Judea tendencies in the party will make it happen. Maybe I'm just overused to the Labour/TUC conferences of the eighties, but there's gonna be factions, right?
I don't see much point voting elsewhere, tbh. The tories are worse, the Lib Dems are untrustworthy (given bastards will always exist, look which party enabled the 2010 government which set this whole disaster going, and achieved none of their major policy goals) and the others don't have enough of the population agreeing with their policies, to make it just an ethical-vanity vote.
(*) The wider ActivityPub world is still a bit of a mystery to me. I can't comment, but I don't know if I'm not allowed or can't find the button.