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Someone please cancel 2019 already?

So last night a British government was handed the biggest defeat in modern parliamentary history (since the middling-late 19th century, at any rate) in its attempt to systematically disenfranchise three million EU citizens, violate the Good Friday Agreement, generate a requirement for a racist and invasive population tracking system (hint: that's an implicit corollary of the NI border backstop, and the Home Office has had a hard-on for a National Identity Register since the 1950s), and irreparably damage the British financial, services, and manufacturing sectors ... all in the name of preserving Conservative Party unity.

(Lest we forget, in a 2015 poll of how the public prioritized different political issues, EU membership came tenth out of a field of ten.)

In the USA, the Republican-induced shutdown of government spending has resulted in Coast Guards being paid out of a charity, Air Traffic Controllers being fed pizza paid for by the Canadian counterparts, and diabetic civil servants desperately rationing their insulin and just hoping to wake up in the morning. If it goes on much longer, a lot of those civil servants won't be around to come back to work: they'll have had to go looking for jobs elsewhere. And yet, the shutdown continues because the mafia shill in the big house desperately needs a distraction from the 17 different investigations into his crime ring, and "build a wall" rallies his party base.

It's almost like these were two sides of the same coin, isn't it?

I'm trying to remember if I said this on my blog some time over the last 20 years, but: one of my working principles is that the event horizon in politics in a democracy is no more than 5 years. (Or: the maximum time between elections.) Consider Germany in January 1934, and how outlandish and dystopian the situation would have sounded if you'd described it to a German citizen in January 1929. (30% unemployment! A dictator and a state of emergency! Concentration camps! Anti-Jewish laws!)

Here's a reflection: the value proposition of democracy is that it provides for a peaceful transfer of power, once an incumbent regime loses its political legitimacy. If you have a working democracy you don't need revolutions to get rid of incompetent leadership. As Enoch Powell said, "every politician's career ends in failure" (unless they die unexpectedly): in a democracy they agree to step down, and life goes on.

But when you get a faction, party, or regime that no longer subscribes to the idea of democracy and refuses to back down gracefully, you get back the old problems: pressure for change builds up and when it erupts the effects can be devastating and unpleasant--especially, as we've had a crash-course reminder in recent years, when the tools of communication make it really easy for dangerous demagogues to draw a following.

I think we can safely say that since 2013, the grip of the beige dictatorship on the western system has been broken. Unfortunately, we're now living through a period of turbulence analogous to that which followed the collapse of the Age of Monarchies in Europe, 1917-1919 (during which pretty much every monarchy in central and eastern Europe went down like a row of dominoes). It took until 1945 for the dust to settle and a stable, broadly social-democratic new order to emerge in the west: I just hope our current turbulence settles down before 2045, because otherwise our planetary climate and biosphere is fucked.

1387 Comments

1:

So much for "The End of History. Again.

I no longer think its inconceivable that Trump will seek to stay in the White House by extraordinary means come 2020, even if he loses in a landslide (and given the rabid base of his, a landslide is unlikely).

The real Eminence Grise in the US is not Trump--but Senate Leader McConnell. HE's the real playcaller here the last few years. The whole Merrick Garland affair just brought that to full prominence, and this continued shutdown here, really is his doing.

2:

I can't think of another modern British Prime Minister or US President that wouldn't have resigned faced with the current position they find themselves in. It is unprecedented that they are both clinging to power by any means necessary.

The trigger to both of these is politicians starting to work against the 1%, even though is small steps. The 1% has mobilised and used their wealth to flood the disadvantaged with emotive propaganda against "the other". This is not really about May and Trump, or even Rees-Mogg and McConnell, but those that sit behind funding them.

This sounds too much like a wild conspiracy theory about dark money and hidden puppeteers, perhaps I need to lighten up and just enjoy life whilst I can.

3:

Conspiracy theories are dangerous because they play to our cognitive bias—we hominids take what Daniel Dennett calls an intentional stance, seeing motivations behind natural phenomena, because it's a side-effect of us possessing a theory of mind, which has been selected for via evolution for hundreds of millions of years (because it's a survival trait).

Having said that, I generally do give credence to two types of conspiracy:

a) Convergent interests,

and

b) Cover-ups.

Cover-ups are easy: nobody wants to take the blame for something bad, so when something bad happens, it's very easy for anyone in a control hierarchy that failed to prevent it to fall into cover-my-ass behaviour. And the emergent outcome of CYA is a cover-up conspiracy (none of the CYA folks want to rock the boat or blow the whistle on each other because to do so is to attract attention).

The former, convergence of common goals, is a broader category (cover-ups are one very specific example). One may look at the way all the tobacco companies pushed the junk science about smoking not causing cancer between the 1900s and 1970s. Or the way that all petrochemical resource extraction corporations fund outlets that downplay climate change. It's not an actual conspiracy with an organizing committee and an agenda, it's just that they all stand to lose a mind-bogglingly vast sum of money and power if they don't follow certain policies.

Humans, in other words, are eusocial hive apes.

The conspiracy you've pointed to is thus an example of type (a): we've allowed our financial machinery to undergo regulatory capture by wealth-accumulative investment structures. These are now concentrating wealth in very few hands, leading to rising inequality. The hands that hold the wealth thus have to pursue certain strategies or they will lose their wealth.

The question now is whether our underlying political structures are strong enough to support a rebalancing, without themselves needing radical restructuring (meaning: revolution) first.

4:

The five year thing explains almost all government educational policies - since it takes a couple of years to implement any change and at least two years (often much more) to see the results in terms of marks, standards, university places, etc. all fiascos can be blamed on previous governments.

5:

Another problem is how said "rebalancing" is going to work. To risk an imminnent Godwin, the Nazis were also about "rebalancing"; in the beginning, that might have included all property holder, in the end, they settled on Jews and people in the annexed territories.

Some "leftists" going "national" again makes me really think if I should add a Lenin mask to my personality inventory, Including the Cheka...

It's quite interesting reading Gysi sometimes, if you remember that if German politics were Game of Thrones, Gysi might be Varys[1]. No, he's still got his genitals, the analogy is in a different regard...

[1] And the German Christian Democrats might be the Nightwatch. A bunch of robbers and rapists, with a few honourable men.

6:

I do not currently see a way out of this mess.

Barnier is being applauded for negotiating an unacceptable withdrawal agreement. May's government and the civil service have conducted what is almost certainly the best ever example of how not to negotiate an agreement. Corbyn and supporters are only interested in seeking political advantage for themselves.

Parliament is a helpless pack of destructively squabbling children only capable of saying no, not fair ... lorded over by one of the most divisive speakers in history.

The chances of framing and agreeing sensible neutral referendum question(s) are slim to nonexistent.

And we face several more years of this: Plainly our current democratic institutions are no longer fit for purpose (and that includes the EU).

Time for some sort of (hopefully quiet) revolution.

7:

It seems to me that the idea that politicians could possibly have any influence over the earth's chaotic climate system looks like a bourgeois liberal version of the anti-demographic impulses that you have ascribed to conservatives.

In a technological world where all the social progress for the last 200 years has been based on the availability of relatively cheap and abundant energy, to say that the abundance of energy should be curtailed because of some perceived risk in the future is neither progressive nor demographic. The future will always carry risks and to wish it otherwise is a delusion.

Bill

8:

Er, you missed "Violate the Scotland Act" (in a number of ways; the first that springs to mind is stripping the Scots Parliament of its powers over fisheries).

9:

Reminder: Godwin's Law does not apply to discussions of Adolf Hitler, the NSDAP, and actual swastika-wearing synagogue-burning card-holding Nazi Party members.

(It's a heuristic about the general tendency of political arguments on the internet to devolve into name-calling, not a ban on calling horses equines.)

Having said that, I'd like to avoid getting too deep into a discussion of German politics circa 1919-45. And the "Game of Thrones" metaphors go right past me—I like most of George's other work (hey, I'm even in the most recent Wild Cards anthology!) but GoT leaves me cold: bounced hard 2-3 times off book one and gave up, never bothered with the TV show (because it's TV).

10:

I disagree with all of your perspectives while agreeing with the general direction of your conclusions.

It's quite possible that, even barring a revolution, this fiasco will lead to the break-up of the UK before the dust settles.

12:

In the absence of the Mandate, how do we get a government that will revoke article 50? What narrative do we need to make, say, David Lammy the national unity Prime Minister to revoke article 50 and what other policy agenda could gather enough MPs to defect to it?

13:

Should Liz II, go down to 10 Downing street and tell Theresa to sort the mess out now? At what point are people going to want someone who has authority to kick some ass? If not now when?

14:

Here's my take on the situation, which somewhat agrees with your theory, but is maybe a bit more encompassing:

Democracies provide that peaceful transition of power by giving people enough feeling of a say in governance that they prevent something worse. As electorates get larger, that proposition gets increasingly diminished - which is enough of a problem on its own - but even worse is that governments have very little incentive to control bureaucratic bloat or modernize in any meaningful way. Most citizens of Democracies (excluding a very that have remained agile) are faced with continuing to interact with a government that only ever gets larger and more expensive, and consistently traps every potential interaction in a maze of rules and paperwork straight out of the 50s or earlier. The only thing comparable to nearly any interaction with government is trying to wring money out of an insurance company.

All of this is while the rest of society has modernized such that you can do anything from your smart phone in about 5 minutes. The only viable reaction people feel they're left with is to support populist movements that pretty much promise to tear down the whole system. See Trump, Bernie, Brexit, Yellow Vests...

15:

I was thinking earlier in the other thread that the way the breakdown of cosmopolitanism appears to become manifest in the UK is not a million miles from the end of Yugoslavia, something no-one really expected either. How fast can an (etic) ethnic-national category acquire a violently negative epithet in a certain population and how fast can that population grow, borg itself across its host (emic) ethnic-national category? I wouldn’t have imagined the UK would possess such internal division, but I also thought its trajectory was toward more inclusiveness and apparently that was incorrect.

16:

Well if the peaceful transition of power is breaking down in democracies, and there are problems with political-national entities holding their provinces together and managing unrest, and this is widespread, then the early 17th century would seem to provide the closest precedent in terms of a series of events and a trajectory for the future. Long story short - it’s not pretty and given nuclear weapons and climate change, it’s a challenge to imagine any positive outcome.

17:

Can we have our Beige Dictatorship back please?

18:

Well, my thought was that it may provide a reason for the unilateral revocation of the Act of Union with England (1707).

19:

I've seen a few commentators recently posit that the current general clusterfuck being experienced in the UK, USA and Australia has a lot to do with that crusty old bastard Rupert Murdoch.

His "News Corpse" has been the organisation who has been pushing the hard right agenda in each of those countries, and as such, the political systems are ridiculously destabilised in each. In Australia, Rupert flies in when he's not getting enough money out of the country anymore and pushes an agenda that deposes a sitting prime minister - it's 2019 and we've had 6 of the buggers since 2009.

Food for thought...

20:

Should Liz II, go down to 10 Downing street and tell Theresa to sort the mess out now?

That's Not Possible. At least, not in this reality tunnel.

Liz is most of the way to being 91 years old and was pro-Brexit in the first place (probably because of a combination of rose-tinted wing-mirrors and being a wee bit out of touch with modern supply chain logistics).

She's also dedicated her entire life to not putting the monarchy on the opposite side of the barricades from the public, and she's not going to fuck it up now by pissing off a not-quite-majority of the population by pissing in their wheaties.

The nearest she might get is to Strongly Suggest a snap general election, if a total parliamentary gridlock develops and if the PM of the day asks her opinion.

Remember, she's lived through WW2 and Suez and the Cold War and none of them could hold a candle (from her point of view) to the Abdication Crisis or even the death of Diana Spencer.

21:

I think that when we are looking at modern protests such as the state of politics in the UK and the French Yellow Vest movement, we may be being blinded to the broader picture by a couple of special cases.

In France, for the last few decades, the only way to make the Government sit up and take notice of pretty much anything was for the entire nation to go out on strike. Petty minor disputes turn into national issues because this is more or less the only way to get the government to listen; when the populace contains a sizeable minority who have lots of grievances, then you get this widespread rioting.

In Britain we have a not-dissimilar situation. Power in Britain is very heavily centralised so that only the MPs have much say over taxation. This leads to a situation where local government is somewhat irrelevant, and it doesn't much matter whom one votes for with the result that voting is rather tribal. Core Labour voters would famously vote for a pig if a red rosette were affixed to it.

In both cases decentralising power and tax-raising powers is the answer. If who you vote into power at a local level matters economically to you and if local votes can be used to hold local officials accountable for local issues, then voters will slowly begin to realise that politics matters. When this happens, extremists will start to become persona non grata, and voters will start to pay a lot more attention to political promises and outcomes.

22:

The Beige Dictatorship presided over the financialization of just about every relationship in our society.

It did so because there was no effective opposition—it was a cross-party consensus—and the competing parties were captured by the financial system. (You can't deliver voters with out putting a chicken in every pot, so you pander to those who have enough money to promise everyone chicken, and in the end they wind up dictating the season story arc, even if they're not actually running the show.)

At first everything seems to be going fine, there's prosperity and newly privatized enterprises and so on and so forth, but after a management generation the new C-suite operators forget what it was like before they were promoted to masters of the universe and begin to think the state is there for their cherry-picking.

(In the case of the UK I'd put this somewhere in the 1990s, between the privatization of British Rail and the introduction of Public-Private Partnerships to run outsourced public services.)

Then fast-forward a generation and the house of cards collapses (in 2008). But the beige dictatorship's masters are still dictating policy (or at least chanting, "give us all your money"), so we're reaping the whirlwind.

23:

I'm not arguing against that narrative. (Rupe isn't known in the pages of Private Eye as "the Dirty Digger" for nothing ...)

24:

" by pissing in their wheaties."

Ugh. Charlie, I know you make a living from putting images to paper, but that's not an image that ever belonged in my head...

25:
Having said that, I'd like to avoid getting too deep into a discussion of German politics circa 1919-45.

I agree, though I wonder if a general look at the European developments after 1919 might help somewhat with establishing failure modes. And with this, Germany is the example I have most informations about, though I could likely get into Italian history with a little googlework.

About GoT, err, we had quite a laugh with those comparisons by me with my last working place[1]. Better keep any further discussions about it after the 300[2] comments mark, though.

As for Gregor Gysi, he is a key politician of "The Left", though he became a lot less prominent lately. Germans usually agree that he is quite intelligent, and then the discussion devolves about his interactions with the GDR Stasi. There being interviews of him where he flat out (at least IMHO) says some of his criticisms of Reunification at the time were just to explain it to old SED cadres doesn't make it any better. So for me he's a somewhat ambiguous character, polarizing at times.

OTOH, he could easily become quite popular by going for "national solutions", which is actually what the current chairperson of "The Left", Sahra Wagenknecht[3], might be doing. So Gysi not taking that road is a plus in my opinion[4].

[1] Quite a high percentage of people there also had a youth misspent with Star Trek TNG[1a], though I have no idea if ending in hel(l|p) desk was in any way correlated or caused by it. Left me with a lingering suspicion an analysis of a bad book, movie or series can be more interesting than the original. [2] I'm not sure about the actual number. [3] For those in the commentariat still stuck with GoT comparisons, no, Wagenknecht is very decidedly not Cersei. And I'd leave any further allusions to the books and series after the 300 comment mark, if ever. [4] Not that I would think of myself as "politically savvy" most of the times.

26:

"shitting in their sausage casserole" is more, ummm, redolent.

27:

Here's some hope and some fear from the United States. The good news is that democratic politics is working the way it is supposed to. I spend a lot of time back in Brooklyn, where the Democratic Socialists have been organizing a slow takeover of the local Democratic Party. They've had some spectacular successes (Representative Ocasio, aka "AOC") and some not-so-spectacular ones (State Senator Salazar), but the real effect has been to shift the Overton Window towards the left. Consider, for example, how Senator Harris has carefully danced leftward, or the increasingly hysterical GOP broadsides against socialism. This is how small-d democratic politics is supposed to work. It's how countries peacefully exit the beige dictatorship.

(Before falling into a new one, of course, but you and I might disagree as to whether beige epochs are a failure mode or just a temporary equilibrium.)

I know at least one Democratic Socialist activist from Brooklyn who is working hard to help them gain control of the Democrats solely that she can go back to opposing most of what they want to do. It's all about the Overton Window, baby, without a real left you can't safely vote for the right.

The first fear is that American political parties have tribalized. In other words, the United States has become Trinidad and Tobago. You have weak party institutions but strong (racialized) partisans, who won't vote for the other side because they are the other side. You can strike a tactical deal with the Koch brothers or a libertarian to get something your voters need; you can't do much with someone who thinks you're basically anti-American. (So far this has been asymmetric but it is starting to creep into Democratic politics as well. I fear that my Brooklyn friend's ambition may be thwarted by this development, if it continues.)

My worry for your country, Charlie, is twofold. First, your parties seem to be tribalizing but not around economic policy; rather, around affective identity prescriptions. The voter in Boston, England, who seems to view Brexit the same way that Guinean nationalists viewed breaking with the French Community: the economic cost is besides the point when you're discussing national liberation.

Second, it seems as though party discipline over there is collapsing, turning your Westminster system into something rather more akin to our separation of powers, only with the executive indirectly elected by Parliament. That could work -- and your electoral system is much better than ours -- but would this Brexit farce have gotten as bad as it has back when Prime Ministers commanded backbenchers like a drill sergeant or when everyone lived in fear of calling a premature election?

28:

Well, FWI Corwin has called for a formal vote of no confidence in the government. My main issue with this is that I have no confidence in either the Con Party or Liebour. In fact the largest party in the "Palace of Oathbreakers" I have any confidence in is the SNP.

Greg, before replying, please ask yourself if you feel any differently about the Con Party or Liebour?

29:

The Fixed Term Parliament act is turning into the the 2nd worst outcome of the Coalition Government (Cameron's belife he would be in a 2nd Coalition and thus would be reluctantly forced to abandon his promises of a a Europe ref was of course the worst). Had it not been in lace the government would have fallen last night

30:

I understand a lot of US banks are now offering US Federal employees 0%-interest-loans to tide them over, which says something interesting …

Very fortunately, we now have the spectacle of the Brexiteers fighting amongst themselves ( “Soft” / May’s Deal / Hard / No Deal ) - & it looks a though “The City” has made a move …. IF we are lucky we will get a second referendum, assuming Corby’s “No Confidence” vote crashes, as seems likely. Polls suggest an absolute majority for “remain” of approx. 54 / 46 % or maybe better. Can we believe that? IF we get a 3-option vote, then all “remain" has to do is get 51% + second preferences. PREDICTIONS?

Charlie @ 10 I REALLY hope you are wrong. It’s very noticeable that the SNP are pushing for BRITAIN to stay in the EU & pushing Indyref2 down the agenda. Much as I usually disagree with them & don’t like them personally, I think they are correct on this issue.

Nojay @ 17 YES – the Beige was actually preferable – I think.

Dan H @ 21 a situation where local government is somewhat irrelevant … And often horribly corrupt, if not in a financial sense. LBWF has this problem.

Paws @ 28 I hate to say it, but you are almost certainly correct. Whether we leave or remain, I don’t think either the CON-servatives or LIE-bour will remain as presently structured. Both are likely to split – the right of the tories joining with UKIP-lite to form an allegiance to “The King over the Water” ( I.e. continuing to want a “pure” Brexit ) whilst the momentum faction of Lliebour are likely to do the same, for what they will probably call “Ingsoc”. We MIGHT even get an actual SDP, this time.

The last time this happened was when Robert Peel put Country before Party & repealed the Corn Laws.

Rlloyd27 @ 29 WHEW! THe fucking LAST thing we need right now is a General Election

31:
I think we can safely say that since 2013, the grip of the beige dictatorship on the western system has been broken.

I've been wondering when you'd get around to revisiting that. "The failure mode of democracy is greedy hateful stupid people?"

32:

your electoral system is much better than ours

Only in that ours appears better able to accommodate a 3rd national (by nation I mean a country which is a member of the UN in its own right) party and regional parties. For example, can you see a situation ever arising in the Yousay where the balance of power in Congress was held by, say, "The New England Party"?

33:

Cautionary tales in history books should help, but ambitious spawn are too good at rationalizing their way around the lessons, such as reading about mid 19th century planters who lost nearly everything over their resentment at slavery being forbidden in new territories and thinking "That's because they drank corn liquor, I'm immune because I drink gin!", or some other mental contortion that makes acquisition okay. I think that the real foundationless fantasy in Star Trek was the post-scarcity economy.

34:

Except, decentralization and local control bring different problems of their own. Centralization of authority isn't something that happens just because empire-builders at the center want it that way. It's a response the the dysfunction that results when local control gets out of its depth, which is often.

35:
Only in that ours appears better able to accommodate a 3rd national (by nation I mean a country which is a member of the UN in its own right) party and regional parties.

USian here. I read @Noel Maurer as talking about the fact that you can't have divided government, where the legislature and the executive are different factions. The situation that obtains about half the time in the US is that the President does not command a majority in Congress, and so can't get a program enacted. But the electorate do not understand this and blame the President for not getting anything accomplished.

Your electoral system proper does also have the advantage of not being tied to a Procrustean bed of an election calendar, as ours is.

36:

The first fear is that American political parties have tribalized. In other words, the United States has become Trinidad and Tobago.

The UK has to some extent been tribalized for over a century; recall that Labour started out as the party of the Trades Union movement, and was strongly class-based until after 1945 (despite the Fabians).

Scotland ... weird case. Until the 1960s it was quite conservative, although the party they voted for was the Unionist Party (which merged with the English Conservatives). Thatcher made an electoral calculation that she could buy votes down south by expending them up north; this handed Scotland to Labour for about 25 years. Meanwhile, the SNP—who were nicknamed "tartan tories" into the early 1980s—gradually rebooted by defining their identity in opposition to Thatcherism, which put them in a position to inherit a lot of Labour votes once New Labour (under Blair/Brown) drifted rightwards and became complacent.

The Brexit identity politics is a new and rather frightening thing: anger at diminished expectations and immigration (just as in rural America) finds a lightning rod, and the Westminster party system is just tight enough that minority factions like UKIP work to build their own national platform rather than caucusing within an existing party (most of the time).

I don't think PMs ever commanded back-benchers without challenge, though. A big majority for the ruling party (over 10%) gives backbench MPs the luxury of occasionally rebelling against the party line without significant personal consequence; meanwhile, a tiny majority–or, as now, a minority government—drastically empowers backbench MPs by acting as a force-multiplier for threats of rebellion. Only when a government has a sweet spot majority is the whip's office able to effortlessly command their troops.

37:

The Procustean electoral calendar the US runs on made a lot of sense before the telegraph and the steam locomotive: how else do you synchronise elections across a nation where the travel time is measured in weeks?

With modern communications and transport yeah nope, the drawbacks are now glaringly obvious. And while making constitutional changes should be difficult, the US constitution in its current form raises ridiculous barriers to necessary modernization tweaks.

38:
I read @Noel Maurer as talking about the fact that you can't have divided government, where the legislature and the executive are different factions.

I'm not sure if that's a general proposition or just about the USA.

I doesn't work in the US at the moment, but IMHO that's not an absolute. Which might say something about the internal stat of the USA.

It has been quite a common situation in Germany in the past, where e.g. Christian Democrats might have gotten the majority of the "popular vote" and thus the Bundestag, while the seats of the Bundesrat were distributed among the federal states according to a system favouring smaller states.

And in the UK, they even have a word for it, loyal opposition.

39:

And lets not forget the tendency of many USicans to invest the US constitution with the values of Holy Writ, handed down by infallible forefathers whose boots modern politicians are not fit to lick.

40:

I'd just like to take a moment to pointlessly vent that no matter what happens in the rest of the UK regarding Brexit, Northern Ireland will still be in the pocket of a bunch of theocratic bigots who think progress and human rights peaked somewhere in the 17th Century, and are in no small part responsible for the utter shit show that UK politics has become in the last two years.

Yes. I am angry about this. Why do you ask?

41:

I have a bunch of thoughts on this.

One is environmentally we don't have until 2045. We've got until 2030 or less. That's what's mobilizing hundreds of millions of people around the planet.

The second problem is that it's not precisely generational politics, although I agree that the US Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are at the heart of the political problem at the moment, and we won't really go down until the 2030s.

The third problem is that the US/UK mess isn't mass politics, it's the politics of the few. I can't find the Obama quote, but back around 2014 he noted that a few hundred very wealthy people effectively controlled who got to be president, through their donations. This is the opposite of deep state, it's a plutocracy trying to turn itself into an aristocracy. And as one military thinker noted (in a wonderful book titled Underbug), one of the tech problems we face isn't a robot apocalypse, it's the wealthy, the powerful, and dictators using technology to gain mass power with few people and lots of computers. We've already seen that with botnets, of course, as well as with FB and Alphabet's mass spying systems, and we'll likely see the drones developed for the war on brown people (excuse me, terror) turned onto whiter populations sooner or later, just as the technology of machine guns and concentration camps, first used in Africa (such as the Namibian genocide) turned up a decade later in Europe in WWI.

In any case, we've got two sets of struggles: between the wealthy trying to instantiate their various visions of the world (Bloomberg and Gates vs. Koch and the Waltons, etc in the US. Hypothetically, of course), and between the wealthy few and billions of people resisting them around the world (note that the wealthy control more resources than do the billions...).

Fourth, we've got the Mexican Standoff of petroleum. The last country to abandon it keeps the military power it enables. This standoff in turn enables that whole problematic political-industrial ecosystem around it. That is, unless people find successful ways (infowar, cyberwar, mass nonviolence) to make heavy metal warfare irrelevant. And in this regard, it's important to not forget Gandhi. He dealt the British Empire its biggest defeat without firing a shot. So on one side we've got the system that's killing the planet fighting for its continued existence, vampire-like and trying to keep everyone complicit, while everyone else tries to figure out how to make it irrelevant.

These conflicts leads to an unpredictable future with a lot of potential forks. To what degree will the world of aristocratic dronewar instantiate itself? How many nonviolent geniuses will arise from the teeming billions, and will they be able to do anything? Will the Millennials prematurely shut the Boomers and Xers out of US power, and how far will my people dribble on into the 2030s? Since we BoomXers are the people who tried to make everything about economics and brought on the ideology of the beige dictatorship, getting us out of the way would cause a very different zeitgeist to become the default.

It's worth looking at this at a mosaic. I don't think any one political system will conquer the planet. Rather, I suspect that different spots will have different victors, as it has always been.

Anyway, SF seems to have been preeminently the literature of the Boomers and the Xers. Now that we're living through our cyberpunk fantasies, perhaps it's time to get into near future SF, aka thrillers?

42:

the idea that you can have a society made up of bosses and people scrambling to become bosses that is, at the same time a democracy is, well, a contradiction. if junior ministers look, sound, and act like corporate vice presidents it's because they ultimately answer to the same group of people. the idea that me and Bill Gates are equal in the eyes of the law and government is absurdly counter-factual.

but the only idea more absurd than Brexit, is that Britain could survive without 'the City' or that the City could survive without American guns. It's the greatest sin of "the Left," in both the US and the UK, that they pretend the economies that their respective states preside over can be "reformed" in isolation, that they don't exist to play specific roles in a global system. The Anglo-American sphere without it's guns and banks is a howling waste: any "Left" government, out of survival, could only promise to keep those guns and banks, but use them for good!

if global right-wing political movements look, sound, and act alike, it's because they are all auditioning for the same group of people, who survived 2008 but now realize that they are walking a high-wire without any safety lines.

43:

near future SF, aka thrillers

AKA urban SF/Fantasy perhaps?

44:

We've got until 2030 or less.

We've actually got until 1980 (about the time of the Miner's Strike here in the UK, by an odd coincidence) when we broke through the 350ppm barrier. Remember when that was a disaster and we only had until 1990 (Kyoto?) to fix things?

The Eternal Optimists always set the last breakpoint about ten years in the future because they're optimists. In other news, carbon emissions increased by about 2.7% in 2018 according to some reports.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-fossil-fuel-emissions-in-2018-increasing-at-fastest-rate-for-seven-years

From The Fine Article: "Continued emissions growth in 2019 “appear likely”" not surprising as India and Africa continue to increase their GDP and quality of life standards.

45:

Well, I have 2 comments on that:- 1) "The 6 Counties". 2) Derry.

Enough said?

46:

One of the huge missed opportunities of the 1997-2010 period was the signal failure of the Blair government to give serious consideration to the Bragg Method for transitioning to a fully-elected House of Lords (as a representative upper house).

The Bragg Method was designed to not require additional ballot papers, and would have been a bolt-on for FPTP that nevertheless rebalanced Westminster politics to be somewhat more proportional, giving us a functioning upper chamber and reducing the need to replace FPTP for the commons.

Alas, Tony Blair wanted to retain the patronage of appointing peers and torpedoed it before going into the clusterfuck vote on Lords reform that gave us an outcome nobody really wanted—a mostly appointed house retaining some of the hereditary peers' seats on a revolving/internally elected basis. Thus, ironically, ensuring that the only people who get a democratic vote for members of the upper chamber are hereditary aristocrats.

47:

whenever anyone mentions "tweaking" the US constitution, I imagine all of the billionaires of the US in a room hashing things out:

Article 1. one preferred share, one vote Article 2. stack-ranking for all, it's up or out if you want to be a citizen! Article 3. U.S. Department of Human Resources... Article 4....

please, no one mention the constitution; it's not safe.

48:

I shall assume that you are obliquely referring to whether Brexit may be the pebble that precedes the United Ireland landslide.

While the lines have shifted, they have shifted less than some would like to imagine. The key thing to remember is that a United Ireland is not just a function of the will of the NI populace, but also the will of both the politicians and general public in ROI; while ideologically many in ROI are in favour of re-uniting North and South, there are enough (especially the politicians) who can see the potential economic and socio-political upheaval re-unification would cause to keep it at arms' length.

Whichever way Brexit shakes out, NI is likely to become a bigger economic and political basket case in it's aftermath (the consequences of no-deal in particular will be devastating for NI).

The attractiveness of a UI may increase in the North, while for exactly the same reasons decrease in the South.

It would not surprise me at all to see a referendum called within the next couple of decades, and win by a narrow majority north of the border and lose by a narrow majority south of it.

(Although equally, I could be completely wrong!)

49:

Re regional parties, look at where the Republican party gets elected these days. Look where they do NOT get elected. It's de-facto become a regional party (at the national level, state Republican parties tend to be more reasonable and more about "good government", modulus some exemptions like WI and KS). The interesting thing is last time we had a situation like this, it ended up in Civil War. I think we are about to see a great political re-alignment in US politics and who knows how it will play out, either a new set of dual parties (see Whig to Republican transition) or at least the parties themselves looking very different (which has happened before, the Repubs and Democrats have almost exactly swapped policies over the last 100 years or so). Part of what's happening in the US is precisely that the old guard are endangered, they know it, and they are desperately doing everything they can to put off the dias irae. Tying themselves to Trump was a desperate move that is already blowing up in their face but they don't know what else to do.

50:

I'd have to look up the specifics, but IIRC the Bundesrat being distributed according to states and not proportional vote sometimes made for the Social Democrats controlling the Bundesrat in the early Adenauer years, while the CDU always had a plurality and 277 of 519 seats at times.

Majority of states being SPD-led might also explain why got a second TV channel (the ZDf was called Adenauer TV for a time).

Democratically not sound, but that being the time of the Spiegel affair, it might have been for the better in the long run.

Please note other Germans might offer a different account.

51:

In both cases decentralising power and tax-raising powers is the answer.

Which may explain recent Ontario neocon politics — to whit, disempowerment of local governments in the name of "efficiency" (which is a crock of fecal matter, as amalgamations etc have never reduced costs).

Make local politicians powerless, leading to widespread public disengagement as well as fewer politicians-in-training. Also leaves the public sphere to those with a strong axe to grind and the time/resources to get involved at a higher level.

(Although I'd bet more of self-interest — in in some cases, personal vindictiveness.)

52:

The US Constitution may not be perfect (it isn't), but I wouldn't trust the politicians I've seen in my lifetime to do nearly as good a job. Half the problems with it are that it doesn't have anyway of enforcing itself, so it only gets applied when some power block decides they like what it says.

I would revoke the amendment that decided on direct election of Senators. The state governments appointing the Senators gave states power against the feds infringing on their proper duties. And a lot of things in there are not reasonable when there's fast transport and nearly instant communication. But half the problem is that they clear meaning of the phrases is twisted by lawyers. Consider how in the 1800's corporations were declared to be "people". It fixed a real problem, but only at the cost of tremendous new problems. And that "ruling" was created by a law clerk, not by a judge or jury. But it was upheld by the Supreme Court because it was useful to those in power, not because it validly expresses what the words said.

53:

Getting rid of direct elected senators is a common hobby horse of the Koch-brothers type. It's because it's MUCH easier to corrupt a state government than a federal one (see, eg West Virginia). With all due respect but please read some of the history of the gilded age leading up to WHY we directly elect them today, state appointed senators really don't work in practice.

54:

the shutdown continues because the mafia shill in the big house desperately needs a distraction from the 17 different investigations into his crime ring, and "build a wall" rallies his party base

I don't think it's just a distraction, it's also a goal in its own right. The Republican Party has increasingly been opposed to the very idea of government (much less democracy). Government is useful to the extent it can enable looting of the economy for wealthy interests, but it's best if it doesn't do anything else. In addition, you have the bleeding edge of the far right (with its most infamous example being Steve Bannon) who openly want to burn the whole thing down.

The longer this shutdown goes on, the better from their point of view. There are probably enough GOP Senators who want to be reelected (to keep the graft going; not to actually do anything) and realize their voters won't take it. They'll end it at some point. But the damage done in the meantime is not a distraction--it's the whole point. Like everything else happening right now, even getting some responsible beige technocrats back in power dedicated full time to fixing the damage will take decades. And we don't have decades.

55:

If you want to say that the States appointing Senators has different problems, I'll agree with you. I'm just not convinced that they are worse. Yes, it means that we get corrupted Senators from corrupted states. But it also means that the state governments have a lever on the federal government. And if most states are corrupted in the same way, you've already got an extremely bad problem. (That's happened repeatedly, of course.)

FWIW, the current situation generally results in Senators being owned by corporations. I don't really think this is any better.

56:

There's no particular time limit. There's a sliding scale of risks which will need to be taken to mitigate Climate Change. Had Al Gore been elected President in 2000, we could have eliminated Climate Change without significant risk. If we start now, we can avoid the worst risk. If we start in 2035, we'll have no choice but to take some pretty bad risks.

What do I mean when I say risk? Aerosols. Ferrous Sulfate. High Altitude atomic blasts to put more dust into the air. Orbital shields. Building nuke plants very quickly, and without decent quality controls... etc.

Right now we might get away with nothing more than Ferrous Sulfate use (we've got a little time to figure that one out,) well-designed nukes and an international tree-planting program with a Manhattan projects kind of priority. It just gets worse from here.

Wait thirty years and the risks we'll need to take involve things like "killing billions" and "handing out nuke plans and uranium to high-school kids."

But instead of real worries (why can't grifters grift off of global warming instead?) we're dealing with "building a wall."

Sad.

57:

"High Altitude atomic blasts to put more dust into the air."

Uhm no.

If you want an atomic blast to put dust in the air, you need the fireball to interact with the ground where the dust is. The approx 100kg of mass in the atomic "device" itself would make no difference to the planets albedo.

The biggest problems with that kind of geo-engineering is calibration.

You cannot start out with a small blast, because that will not carry the dust high enough to matter, and if your best guess for a big enough one is too big, you can wave a lot of the planets population goodbye to starvation over the next decade.

If you want to fk about with the albedo, you want to do it in a way where you can regulate the fkery both up AND down, and nobody has any good proposals for that, which are a) technologically feasible and b) sane.

58:

I'm a little twitchy about atmospheric shields or geoengineering. The problem is that those aerosols need to be lofted in perpetuity, or at least for a few centuries until we get the surplus GHGs out of the air. If we stop the atmospheric shields for whatever reason, we very rapidly get into whatever greenhouse conditions our [GHG] level has in for us, and that could be very bad, very fast.

Incidentally, I don't think that, were Gore President, we would have solved global warming. It's like a cure for diabetes. It's not hard to get your A1C down low enough that you're no longer functionally a type 2 diabetic, but it is very, very easy to screw up and jack the A1C level right back up into the red zone. Climate change is a chronic condition we have to live with, and right now, we're talking about whether we're going to be fit, disciplined, and terribly boring, or obese, blind, and getting our legs amputated.

Finally, when I'm talking about 2030 as a deadline, that's because we're in a situation in the climate models where we can have maximum effect on the trajectory of the future climate. Right now, the models of atmospheric [GHG] in 2100 have a huge chunk of uncertainty that depends on human choices now. Certainly we could have had even more effect back in the 1980s, but the size of the effect that we can have (IIRC and the models are correct) starts shrinking in a nonlinear fashion after around 2030. In a sense, we're in the singularity right now, but it's a climatic singularity. What we do now matters more for future climates than what we do in 2040 or 2050. This is unlike fusion, which is always 30 years in the future. We really do seem to have a window in which to act.

59:

Um, no, when we had the Civil War, there was a geographically unified slaveholding bloc and the rest of the country was finding other ways to industrialize.

At this point, we're better off than the 60s, which had cities burning and leaders being assassinated.

More to the point, only one side wants a shooting war, apparently because they're thinking the South Shall Rise Again, only with better guns (cf Turtledove's Guns of the South, and that they will win the war this time. Unfortunately for them, the rest of us paid attention to the lessons of WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Gandhi, and King, and we've realized that effective tactics have changed drastically. That's why we're not bothering with guns, but are very concerned about the flow of information.

60:

Weird thought: right now the US and UK have quantum leadership, schrodinger's pols, if you will. By that I mean that the PM and the President seem to be living in states of quantum superposition. In theory, they're two of the most powerful people in the world. But also in theory, one's an ex-PM presiding, while the other is impeached and possibly an indicted felon. Which way will their political wave functions collapse? How long can we keep this superposition in play?

I noted that only because it's not quite the same thing as being a weak politician. Obama was weak in his last term, simply because most of what he could do was blocked by the Republican Congress. Here we've got a situation where the weakness is because no one knows which reality will win out, and having divergent futures makes for strategic uncertainty. Do we ignore them or kowtow to them?

61:

USAin here.

Charlie, I think you're a little off in calling Trump supporters the party base. The party has morphed from financial conservatism to some weird warped religious fundamentalism that twitches whenever Fox News shouts. Their biggest fear is a primary election challenger, and that's now a real possibility.

The thing that got Trump elected is an ongoing decline in voter turnout, which changed radically in last year's mid-term election. This had been good for the Republicans and bad for the Dems, particularly in mid-term elections. Yes, there were lots of other factors, including Trump doing some excellent targeted campaigning. But Trump has been showing his weaknesses and slowly losing a lot of his base, even though he still maintains a rabid core. My parents even are having doubts about whether they'd vote for him again if he's able to stand for the '20 election.

But he cannot remain in office if he is not re-elected. The Constitution is quite clear - once the next President is sworn in, he's no longer the President and there's nothing he can do about it, his term will have ended. He'll still have Secret Service protection for the rest of his life (hopefully behind bars), but he'll be quietly removed from the place that he described in such derogatory terms, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and be put on a plane back to NYC. Dubya didn't do it, Obama didn't do it, he can't do it either.

62:

I believe that a large fraction of the German population considered 1934's situation to be not at all dystopian, and though I am generally not a cheery sort, I think a larger fraction than here in the States would something similar. I think notions of democracy and of humans' civil rights were for awhile supported by many more Germans than had internalised them as part of their core ideology—such were more akin to their clothes than to their religion.

I think, for example, that formal anti-racism has been accepted as a core ideology by most in the U.S., to the point where many who object to its implications would refuse to admit disagreement with the basic idea. The major U.S. political party that has been doing its best for and by practical white supremacy has felt the need to condemn a Congressman who bluntly said that he supports it. Now, an hypocritical and limited supported for racial equality is not as good as the genuine article, but its existence both bolsters the real thing and shows that the notion is still powerful enough to demand lip-service—Vice does not pay tribute to Virtue unless It thinks it to be in Its best interests.

Similarly, though I expect massive attempts to suppress minority voting, any explicit such or out-and-out cancellation of elections is probably off the table.

That is all to say, I think the situation here is

Serious, but not desperate.

63:

Make that "Serious, but not as desperate as it should be" ?

64:

Had Al Gore been elected President in 2000, we could have eliminated Climate Change without significant risk.

He was almost as divisive as HC or DT. 1/3 to 1/2 of the country would have been throwing bricks in his path just because he was AG.

65:

Tying themselves to Trump was a desperate move that is already blowing up in their face but they don't know what else to do.

I don't think the word "tying" is all that accurate. There was a tsunami and they either climbed up on the rafts as they came by or got swept away.

66:

Had Al Gore been elected President in 2000, we could have eliminated Climate Change without significant risk.

If that had happened, we would now have morons—and by morons I mean front-rank politicians comparable to Boris Johnson in prominence (i.e. contenders for the very top spot) publicly declaring that climate change was either a false alarm or a hoax or trivially fixable and there's really no problem with loosening the belt and rolling coal.

(Remember Y2K and the huge amount of work that went into ensuring all our mainframe systems didn't keel over and die on 1/1/2000? A few weeks ago BoJo publicly declared that Y2K was a false alarm generated by alarmist geeks to ensure their jobs, just like the problem in re-jigging the UK's customs system to cope with a sudden no-deal Brexit ...)

Seriously, human memory is very poor on a time scale of single-digit years, never mind decades. And if you weren't there, you probably didn't notice how pants-wettingly dangerous the situation was.

67:

history of the gilded age leading up to WHY we directly elect them today, state appointed senators really don't work in practice.

Well it did mean the powerful Senators had more power than the Pres. But so what. :)

68:

It is precisely because of the non-linearity of climate that we have been able to have an effect on it,…

…an effect due to decisions made by millions of business owners, billions of consumers, and (roughly) thousands of politicians over the past few centuries.

And yes, cheap energy has been very good for billions, but the difference between preferring a set of technologies and worshipping it is willingness to admit possible down-sides and limitations. Every technology has a finite sphere of benign usefulness; in evaluating this, we should distinguish between a 'risk' and that which is known to be a problem. For example, increasing use of nuclear power risks increased nuclear terrorism, continual and increased burning of fossil fuels will raise the mean temperature (with attendant risks).

Underlying the benefits to billions you rightly tout has been an Enlightenment unwillingness to throw up our hands and delegate responsibility for what comes to some deity or unknowable Chaos (Aieee!). To a larger extent than ever before, we have accepted responsibility for what will come of us, and with that rejected blindly staying a course once we've become aware of undesirable aspects of where it will lead.

69:
The Procustean electoral calendar the US runs on made a lot of sense before the telegraph and the steam locomotive

Indeed, even that quadrennial atrocity, the Electoral College, made sense in 18th-Century terms. Tabulating and reporting the votes of individual citizens in a national election would have been intractable.

As someone noted upthread, a depressingly large fraction of my fellow citizens seem to think of the Constitution as Holy Writ, the work of demigods whose like we shall not see again and whose work is beyond the right of we lesser moderns to even question.

This is all incidental to the point that Presidential systems, where the executive can have the responsibility to make and carry out policy but not the legal authority to do so (because the legislature obstructs) are inferior to Parliamentary ones where responsibility and authority are not so divided. The few countries that modeled their constitutions on the US model have generally had periods of some kind of dictatorial rule, when the division produced intolerable dysfunction.

70:

I believe that a large fraction of the German population considered 1934's situation to be not at all dystopian, and though I am generally not a cheery sort, I think a larger fraction than here in the States would something similar.

1934 Germany was a country that had been beaten in a global war. And was told by the military that it was wining but the politicians gave up and agreed to the reparations. (Talk about your real fake news....) Which impoverished the country for a while. And were told they could not have a military of much any force.

The US and UK are not in that same place. Although the Vietnam War is somewhat similar.

71:

A few weeks ago BoJo publicly declared that Y2K was a false alarm generated by alarmist geeks to ensure their jobs,

Non tech people over here believe that in spades. It seems to go along with "all news I don't like is fake" and "anything anyone high in the government is a lie", unless it's my guy.

72:

I can't say for sure what carbon path we'd be on had Al Gore won in 2000, mostly because I don't think he could have gotten a serious bill through Congress. That would have to wait for the following McCain administration.

Counterfactuals aside, global warming and Y2K have one similarity, which is that once fixed it's hard to unfix them. Once you get a decade down the carbon reduction path, two things happen. First, interests around low-carbon industries coalesce. Second, it becomes increasingly uneconomical to go back to the old ways -- you can't un-insulate a house and green energy is gets ever cheaper. Even if you relaxed the rules, no one would want to build the gas-fired plant.

The exception (for now) is transport, but even there consider the opposition to the Trump Administration's attempt to freeze fuel economy standards: the UAW and Ford came out flatly in opposition, Toyota came out weakly in opposition, and GM, Fiat-Chrysler and Honda said the administration's planned freeze goes too far.

Humans will always tend to see a crisis avoided as a crisis that never existed. For some problems, that's a human failure mode. But for others, like carbon emissions, you can safely hand the steering wheel back to the Boris Johnsons and Scott Walkers of the world once you've made it through the hairy terrain.

73:

Even if you relaxed the rules, no one would want to build the gas-fired plant.

Yup. Here in the UK, the last coal-fired power station shut down for good last year, and the coal mines are all (or almost all) dead (and in many cases flooded/collapsed). Yes, there are the odd steam-powered coal-burning locomotives still in service pulling trains for enthusiasts, but there's no going back, and compared to the thousands of electric multiple units in service (and the considerable number of diesel-electric units on routes not yet electrified) they're clearly slower and less functional — like vintage cars, they're used for weekend outings, not daily commuting.

I suspect Ford, Toyota, VW, et al have zero problem moving to electric vehicles because, battery tech permitting, they require less maintenance overall and the car manufacturers would love an opportunity to obsolesce the existing auto fleets, getting most of the old gas- and diesel-burners off the roads and replacing them with the shiny! new! non-polluting! electrics.

Also: an automobile product generation is 7-10 years. Which is longer than a two-term US presidential incumbency. It would be the height of folly for the car manufacturers to reverse their ten year strategies for reducing emissions just because Trump says they can: who knows what the next POTUS' agenda will be?

74:

My 2¢ worth ... a consolidated response to what's already been posted at this point.

Princejvstin @ 1: The real Eminence Grise in the US is not Trump--but Senate Leader McConnell."

"Grey Eminence" really doesn't fit McConnell very well. He's not pulling strings behind the scenes. He's a greedy, opportunistic bottom feeder bought and paid for by the fossil fuels oligarchy (aka Koch Brothers).

Despite his sensitivity to "Fox and Friends", Trump doesn't really have an "Eminence Grise". He's too incoherent and chaotic to tolerate one.

-------------------------

Derek @ 24:

"by pissing in their wheaties."

Ugh. Charlie, I know you make a living from putting images to paper, but that's not an image that ever belonged in my head..

Not to mention it's 50 years out of date slang. None of the cool kids will use that and wouldn't even admit to recognizing the phrase.

-------------------------

Greg Tingey @ 30: I understand a lot of US banks are now offering US Federal employees 0%-interest-loans to tide them over, which says something interesting …

Can you say Adjustable Rate Liars Loan? Just sign here and don't bother reading the fine print. Trust me! Have I ever lied to you before?

-------------------------

paws4thot @ 32:

your electoral system is much better than ours

Only in that ours appears better able to accommodate a 3rd national (by nation I mean a country which is a member of the UN in its own right) party and regional parties. For example, can you see a situation ever arising in the Yousay where the balance of power in Congress was held by, say, "The New England Party"?

If you have access to a time machine, you might try the period between the War of 1812 and the American Civil War.

-------------------------

Dave_the_Proc @ 39: And lets not forget the tendency of many USicans to invest the US constitution with the values of Holy Writ, handed down by infallible forefathers whose boots modern politicians are not fit to lick.

Not so much to the Constitution itself, but their interpretation of what they think the Constitution means.

Original Intent means what I say it means and anyone who says different is a lying pinko commie blah blah blah blah ...

-------------------------

Heteromeles @ 41: Since we BoomXers are the people who tried to make everything about economics and brought on the ideology of the beige dictatorship, getting us out of the way would cause a very different zeitgeist to become the default.

Boomers, Xers and even Millenials are not monolithic blocks.

-------------------------

ennui @ 47: whenever anyone mentions "tweaking" the US constitution, I imagine all of the billionaires of the US in a room hashing things out:"

Article 1. one preferred share, one vote
Article 2. stack-ranking for all, it's up or out if you want to be a citizen!
Article 3. U.S. Department of Human Resources...
Article 4....

please, no one mention the constitution; it's not safe.

I very much doubt there will ever be another Constitutional amendment. But if there were, I propose the following.

A corporation is not a person. Only natural born persons are "persons" and only natural born persons have rights.

-------------------------

whomever @ 49: Re regional parties ... It's de-facto become a regional party (at the national level, state Republican parties tend to be more reasonable and more about "good government", modulus some exemptions like WI and KS).

"Good Government" went out the window years ago. Wisconsin and Kansas are NOT exemptions any more. They're the vanguard of the GOP push for "permanent majority" status by gerrymandering and suppression of non-white voters.

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Charles H @ 52: I would revoke the amendment that decided on direct election of Senators.

Wouldn't change a thing in Washington other than to replace our current corporate overlords with a different set of corporate overlords.

-------------------------

PS: The current system may not be better than when state legislatures appointed Senators, but conditions could be a whole lot worse.

And whoever it was that was thinking a vote of no confidence will possibly lead to a new referendum on BREXIT ... KEEP DREAMING. There ain't gonna be another referendum. The choice is going down to the wire either May is able to make some kind of deal Parliament can compromise on or it's going to be a NO DEAL hard BREXIT. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on NO DEAL.

Trump will get his wall before the UK gets a BREXIT deal. It would make me happy to be proven wrong on BREXIT, but it's not going to happen.

Damn! I hope I'm not turning into "she of many names".

75:

an automobile product generation is 7-10 years. Which is longer than a two-term US presidential incumbency. It would be the height of folly for the car manufacturers to reverse their ten year strategies for reducing emissions

Yep. In the US once you get past the initial reactions to radical change and as long as the rules apply to everyone, are doable, and the timeline isn't nuts, they really don't care or even prefer being required to come out with something new.

I assume that's true most everywhere except for places run by crusty old types who don't think change is every worth doing. (Henry Ford I)

76:

I suspect Ford, Toyota, VW, et al have zero problem moving to electric vehicles because, battery tech permitting, they require less maintenance overall and the car manufacturers would love an opportunity to obsolesce the existing auto fleets, getting most of the old gas- and diesel-burners off the roads and replacing them with the shiny! new! non-polluting! electrics.

You missed the biggest incentive: repairs. As the guy who sold us the Bolt said, he planned to get all his profits from repairing our car, since we had to bring it to him for servicing. Similarly, I've got several relatives working in independent auto shops. They're not fond of our Bolt, because there's nothing (Tranny, oil, tune-up) that they can repair on it. One of their kids decided to get out of the auto shop business precisely because there will be less space for independent repair shops with the first few generations of electric cars. Over time, especially if the cars last more than a decade, after-market and independent parts and repair ecosystems will develop. But right now, this is a great way for the car companies to recapture a chunk of the market.

Actually, the car market's increastingly driven by Chinese demands, less so by the US market. And China wants eCars for the same reason any sane person does: they're fun to drive and "save the planet."

Incidentally, while I haven't driven a Tesla, I love the video-game controller that is the Bolt steering wheel. it's covered with 18 buttons. Sounds like a lot, but it's a wonderful haptic controller for most of the car's functions, and because the buttons are different shapes, you can use it even when the wheel's turned 270 degrees. You don't have look at it to use it. Contrast that with the glass display for some of the AC functions, where you have to take your eyes off the road to hit the icon. I know Tesla's gone the other way, with it's 100% glass cockpit, but I love not having to take my eyes off the road to do stuff.

77:

BTW as of Jan 9 (or so depending on your time zone), we are closer to Y2038 than Y2k.

78:

I very much doubt there will ever be another Constitutional amendment. But if there were, I propose the following.

A corporation is not a person. Only natural born persons are "persons" and only natural born persons have rights.

This reminds me of a saying to the effect "I will believe a corporation is a person when I see Texas execute one by lethal injection".

79:

People who say that should actually read the decision. SCOTUS did not declare that corporations are humans and have rights; what they ruled was that corporations are comprised of people, and those people do not lose their rights by collecting through a corporation. You know, like unions.

80:

A corporation is not a person. Only natural born persons are "persons" and only natural born persons have rights.

Why do you hate AI?

81:

Humans, in other words, are eusocial hive apes.

Well, since no women carries octuplets for all of her multi-century life, I don't think we're eusocial. Social yes, but there's a difference.

Anyway, good news from last year that I somehow missed was Lisa Margonelli's Underbug, a story that's notionally about termites but really about the way science gets done and all the ways researchers try to use termites as model systems.

One of the more obvious ways is as inspiration for swarming robots. The research Margonelli followed generally failed to find anything of use, although they did develop the TERMES robot. However, one experiment they did inadvertently shed light on who termites actually work, when they analyzed it properly years later.

The roboticists started by assuming termites were interchangeable units, which is what they wanted their swarmbots to be. When they finally were able to analyze the movements of every single termite in an experiment, it turned out that the termites were individuals with widely varying work ethics. A small minority of termites did a vast majority of the work, most termites only got intermittently involved, and a large group were accomplished slackers. This was why trying to process the actions of termites as if they were all equal and interchangeable failed so miserably.

However, it did lead to the novel hypothesis that termite swarms and human swarms are far more alike than we might have guessed. Apparently slacking is widespread among social critters, as there are similar findings for ants, too. Also based on what I read, I'd suggest that Rainbow Gatherings aren't all that dissimilar to termite swarms.

Underbug's a fun book, incidentally. Highly recommended.

82:

Dave the Proc @ 40 Um, err … YES Yes again for # 48 You know what I would prefer, but not in either of our lifetimes, I suspect …

Charlie @ 46 Hate to say it, but the LAST thing we need is a directly-elected Upper House … because that’s more of the same – i.e. – “whipped” tight party control We actually need a REAL SENATE ™ with people like Attenborough & senior surgeons & academics in it, who own no allegiance at all to any party or usual factional interest. Problem is, how to keep them honest & not subject to crooks gaming the system….

Rp @ 51 Exactly, some Boroughs in Greater London have this, with specific local-to-borough crooks ( NOT in the financial sense) are running everything, being thoroughly hated, but there is nothing the locals can do about this. Guess how I know? …. …. Se also whomever @ 53 It's because it's MUCH easier to corrupt a state government than a federal one Yup, London Borough of Waltham Forest in internal-manipulation terms, or LB Tower Hamlets in vote-rigging ( The latter now fixed )

JBS Brexit … I think we are going to get a 2nd ( i.e. a 3rd ) referendum – Parliament will not permit a No-deal (any more) Outcome of next referendum is a n other question.

Climate Change READ “New Naturalist # 134 “Early Humans” by Nick Ashton. Dealing with the history of humanity in what we now call Britain in the past million years, with all the climate changes in between, including the long periods with no humans at all & the various human species that also appeared & vanished & re-appeared … H. antecessor / heidelbergensis / neandertalensis / sapiens

83:

AIs are corporations?

The notion that corporations are people is bad law anyway, as it originated in an unsigned opinion by a legal clerk attached to an unrelated lawsuit. That bit of commentary was picked up and run with. While yes, functionally there are good reasons for legal personhood for corporations, we need to distinguish between that and political personhood.

In addition to the idea that, for the purposes of the voting or holding human rights, corporations are not humans, I would add that money is not speech under the US Constitution. Corporations are legally people so that you can have a contract with a corporation or sue a corporation, rather than having to contract with or sue a particular individual within a corporation. That makes sense and is a financial issue. It's been tied to the political action by claiming that money is speech and corporations are people. Do away with both equivalencies, and it's politics regains becomes the province of real people again.

Since corporations are pieces of paper with writing on them, I think it should be fairly easy to distinguish between AIs and corporations.

84:

Um, no, when we had the Civil War, there was a geographically unified slaveholding bloc and the rest of the country was finding other ways to industrialize.
That's not quite as true as you'd think. William W. Freehling's two volume masterpiece The Road to Disunion makes it clear that there were at least five possible 'zones' of slaveholding: northern states that had abolished slavery, indeterminate just-entering states, southern states drifting away from slavery, southern slaveholding states where things were rather stable, and the Deep South where slaveholding was the basic underpinning of the economy. With the exception of the incoming states, as a rule of thumb those zones gradually drifted southward between 1780 and 1860, concentrating more and more slaves into the deep south.

Those last three zones were sometimes a bloc and sometimes not. Hence you got things like slaveholding states Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware siding with the Union, and slaveholding West Virginia splitting off and going with the Union.

85:

Slight slip of the keyboard there, you mean the last coal fired power station in Scotland. There are still 9 of them in England, amounting to 14GW output according to the internet.

86:

People who say that should actually read the decision. SCOTUS did not declare that corporations are humans and have rights; what they ruled was that corporations are comprised of people, and those people do not lose their rights by collecting through a corporation. You know, like unions.

Which decision are you referring to, Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad?

87:

The other problem is that you can very rarely prove that your preventative measures actually prevented a catastrophe.

My father was an epidemiologist working in public health. It was (and is) a constant battle to keep funding levels up for preventative programs, because generally speaking you can't show that spending $1 on prevention saved $100 in costs ‚ because if the $1 works then the $100 expense never happens.

Analogies don't work; people just say "it's not the same thing". Statistical analysis doesn't work; people just say "you can lie about anything with statistics". Even two comparable events* don't work because people say "they aren't the same thing".

At first I thought it was a neurological quirk in how people regarded risk, but the same people who demanded public health spending be held to an impossible standard were those who supported bailing out banks and clamping down on any activity that might possibly be claimed to support 'terrorism'. So now I'm more inclined to think ulterior motives**.

*Say SARS spread and effects in Vancouver and Toronto.

**I've always been rather cynical, though.

88:

etic? emic? phukaday?

Not sure that the end of Yugoslavia was really beyond prediction. History of the Balkans is that if someone isn't sitting on them hard they all start fighting each other, and Yugoslavia was in large part a Serbian vision to begin with, which they only pulled off because of the atypical conditions prevailing after WW1. It's just that it had been around for long enough that people outside the region were used to not thinking about it.

Britain is probably also an example of getting used to not thinking about it. The "hidden attitudes" problem certainly existed - that a proportion of the reduction of intolerance of out-groups was apparent rather than real, with the attitudes being driven underground rather than dropped. You could still encounter it in situations where people knew enough of each other well enough to be confident that expressing it would draw less censure than objecting to it. It wasn't a surprise that when the referendum pulled the scab off there was some pus underneath, but I for one was not expecting there to be so much that it'd run down your arm and drip off your elbow.

89:

Yes. It's been awhile since I read that though.

90:

I agree that the Civil War situation was more complex. However, the current situation, where there's a coastal/urban vs. interior/rural split really doesn't look like the antebellum situation by a long shot. Cities and rural areas getting into a civil war in the US would cause mutually assured destruction on both sides, as there's no conceivable physical boundary that would allow either group to successfully secede, and both groups need each other to survive (for example, rural farmers need urban ports in order to make their money selling grain overseas. Cities need farms to feed them).

91:

dsrtao @ 80:

A corporation is not a person. Only natural born persons are "persons" and only natural born persons have rights.

Why do you hate AI?

I don't. But Trevayne hit the nail right on the head @ 78.

"I will believe a corporation is a person when I see Texas execute one by lethal injection".
92:

I guess I see what Charlie calls the 'beige dictatorship' as a general case of the politics (and myth) of inevitability. Y'know, how it's inevitable that the rising tide of economic progress will lift all boats or that all nations will travel the road to democracy, so we don't have to pay attention to what's going on. This is of course a profoundly anti-historical standpoint and comes unstuck when things turn out to not be so inevitable. The current problems of the EU are in large part due to clothing itself in just such a myth and that's why Brexit is as much an existential crisis for the EU as it is for Britain.

93:

Greg Tingey @ 82:

JBS
Brexit … I think we are going to get a 2nd ( i.e. a 3rd ) referendum – Parliament will not permit a No-deal (any more)
Outcome of next referendum is a n other question.

For your sake (for ALL of y'alls' sake) I hope you're right and I'm wrong. But I think you're underestimating the propensity of politicians to screw things up. Nobody wants it, but you're going to get it because everybody expects the other guy to blink first.

94:

Regarding a second referendum I think you'll be disappointed Greg. My guess is that the Abilene effect is in high gear and you'll get a result that satisfies no one.

95:

Actually, there's an interesting and messy legal question: "what's a person?"

Biologically, we've got more non-human cells than human cells in our bodies (since bacterial cells are much smaller than eukaryotic cells, they mass less but number far more), so if we're counting cells and genotypes, we're not unitary beings. Worse, mothers often have cells and DNA from their children circulating in their bloodstreams. This is normal, but it means that mothers are genetic chimeras, so defining a human on the basis of DNA is problematic. And this doesn't even get into the issues with cancers, weirdness like fraternal twins fused into a single human, or people with transplanted tissues.

We could argue that a human is a single soul, but there's no physiological evidence for "me" inside a brain. It rather looks like "I" am an emergent phenomenon covering over a multitude of subfunctions arguing it out, although someone may find the "I" neurons eventually. So right now, at least, we can't argue that there's a physical instantiation of identity, the possession of which would make a person an individual.

Then we get to AI. I'm not so concerned that we'll make AIs people, because we don't regard donkeys as people. However, if we start thinking about extending rights to AIs, we also have to think about extending human rights to stuff that's much more intimate: our data and online lives. For many of us, those are as much a part of who we are as our eyeballs are. Right now that stuff is "data," not human, but if we start thinking about AI systems as human, it also makes sense for our online personas to be part of us and given at least the rights of AIs, if not of full humans.

Anyway, I'm sure the lawyers could have fun with this, and presumably they already have been. However, we do have this disjunct between legal theories of personhood, which date back to (AFAIK) medieval metaphysics, and what more modern research says we actually are.

96:

"Power in Britain is very heavily centralised so that only the MPs have much say over taxation... ...decentralising power and tax-raising powers is the answer."

An answer; another approach would be to get away from taxation being such a significant decision-influencer.

Currently we have a system which is heavily focused (a) on taxing individuals and (b) making sure they bloody well know about it. This gives a disproportionate disadvantage to any party whose policies are perceived to result in increased taxation, regardless of how true it is, and discourages people from evaluating those policies on their actual merit. At the same time by far the largest chunk of individual taxation is collected automatically, which creates a situation where changing the names of things without actually changing any things - as politicians of all flavours so love to do - does actually work. (Well, mostly works in the majority of cases, and makes the tidying up of loose ends that is still required easier to do.)

Job adverts invariably quote the wages on offer before tax. This figure is essentially a lie, since it's not what you actually get paid. Your wage slip then compounds the insult by listing the dirty great chunk that you didn't get paid, so every pay day your level of tax-related pissed-off-ness gets reset. But at least the deduction of the tax and paying it to the government is all handled automatically by your employer's computer, so you are spared that hassle.

So change a few names... so that "wages" does now mean what you actually get paid, and it is that figure which appears in job adverts. It is also the only figure which appears on your pay slip, since the pre-tax figure is irrelevant. Now you can also straightforwardly get rid of all the awkwardnesses that make it such a blessing to have someone else's computer handling an individual's tax calculation; tax is the same function of pay for everyone, and any differences are taken care of by adjusting the pre-tax figure to keep the advertised wage the same. (And you start off with the coefficients of the function adjusted so that the differences cancel out and the total pre-tax figure for a company's staff doesn't change either. ("Same function for everyone" might have to mean "...everyone at a given company" to begin with and the further adjustment to "everyone, full stop" made later.))

Now you can do some more changing of what you call things, and stop calling income tax anything to do with an individual anyway, instead calling it a function of a company's total wage bill. In practical terms, it already is that: that is how it is being calculated, and that is how it is being paid, even under the system that we have at present. The adjustments so far are basically making that more blatantly obvious, so that when you change the names it's obvious that you're not changing anything real.

Note that following the transition, nothing real has changed: everyone is still getting the same amount of money in their pay packet, and the company is still paying the same amount of wage-related tax to the government. But by changing the names of things we have changed the idea of the connection between the individual and the income tax payment from "technically non-fiction" to "fiction through and through", and therefore we can now get rid of that idea altogether.

The revised situation has several advantages, including:

You've got rid of this massive lever labelled "INCOME TAX" for politicians to pull on people at elections. However it changes, people still get paid the same amount. Its influence is now limited to employers, who are a minority and may not even be people, so it isn't a massive ball and chain on progressive policies.

It torpedos this horrible notion that people only have a value to society if they pay income tax, which is used as a hammer of the disabled and a prop to the illusion of the necessity of unnecessary work, and other nasty things.

It puts a stop to highly-paid employees indulging in tax dodges.

It makes it possible to set the coefficients of the tax function such that paying crap wages increases the amount of tax paid, so the company might as well pay decent wages instead.

I could probably think of more, but it's getting late :)

97:

If you currently have a progressive tax regime that applies a higher marginal tax rate to individuals with higher income, then there is no mathematically-equivalent system that only looks at an employer's TOTAL wages paid without regard to how much is being paid to specific individuals.

In fact, there isn't a mathematically-equivalent system that taxes employers based only on the wages that they pay even if you DO look at how much is being paid to each individual, because individuals can have more than one source of income.

So if you want to describe this as a tax on employers without actually changing the amount paid, then the employer needs to know all of the employee's other sources of income in order to calculate its tax, and the employer will be charged different amounts of money to maintain the same post-tax wages depending on the employee's circumstances outside the company. (Which now makes some employees "cheaper" than others at the same "wage", with a new set of hiring incentives and a new set of pressures employers will place on employees to behave in certain economic ways...)

It is, of course, possible to attach different words to things. But if the marginal tax rate depends on total personal income from all sources, then describing it as a personal income tax is really the simplest and most direct way of describing it.

98:

Would any of the people arguing against corporate personhood be willing to describe your position for me in more concrete terms?

(I'm assuming this isn't actually an argument over the WORD "person" but instead has to do with some specific legal ramifications that you don't like. Which ramifications, specifically?)

99:

Even if you relaxed the rules, no one would want to build the gas-fired plant.

In Australia we found that even if the government pays for it no credible business will take the risk that future governments will not agree to be bound by whatever promises the current lot made. Even when dealing with a bunch who paid the best part of a billion dollars to a "charity" that uses the Great Barrier Reef to raise funds. The semi-independent regulator can't see the point of talking about coal any more except in the "our dog is going to a farm in the country" way...

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jul/17/renewables-will-replace-ageing-coal-plants-at-lowest-cost-aemo-says

https://theconversation.com/coal-does-not-have-an-economic-future-in-australia-102718

100:

FWIW, the current situation generally results in Senators being owned by corporations. I don't really think this is any better.

In honesty the bigger issue is the lack of term limits. Your Senators and Representatives have utterly insane incumbency rates for a functioning electoral system. The genuine voting stats are often better than those your average third world dictator with a rigged vote is willing to try and pass off.

Put in a mandatory limit, say two consecutive Senate terms or five House followed by a mandatory 1-2 term stand down, and you'll force a change of occupant every decade or so, which will at least require the background interests to start their bribes again from scratch.

101:

change so "wages" does now mean what you actually get paid, and it is that figure which appears in job adverts.

Requires a flat tax with no deductions, not even a low income one. Otherwise the local high schooler who takes the part time job (currently zero tax) will pay the same as me taking that as my second job (on a 50% marginal rate).

But it wouldn't work anyway. Australia has this already because in theory the employer pays a superannuation amount into the finance industry on top of your wage. There's no law requiring them to ignore it when advertising jobs, so most include it in the ad. A $100,000 package is very different to $100,000 salary (mostly) because the package rate almost certainly includes the 10% super and the salary figure doesn't. Casual staff have the added bonus that a lot of small businesses simply don't pay the super and unless the employee checks it they might never find out.

102:

Note that the tax office do check this stuff occasionally, and in theory the "fair work authority" can chase this stuff up, but the usual result is that the business involved is phoenixed without paying up. In that situation the tax office takes company tax and GST, then employee tax payments, then unpaid super goes into the "everything else" list and good luck with that. Meanwhile it's 50/50 whether customers will even notice the "change of ownership".

AFAIK there's no provision here to recover unpaid pay-as-you-go tax from the hapless employee, unlike in the US. Viz, if your employer took tax out of your pay and stole it, that's between them and the tax office.

103:

The problem is the Citizens United vs. FEC ruling in the US, which ruled that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political communications by corporations (non-profit or for-profit), labor unions, or other corporations. This decision rests on the notion that corporations are the equivalent of people under the 14th Amendment (specifically the equal protection clause), and that money spent on communication is the equivalent of speech under the First Amendment.

Since this was a Supreme Court ruling, something like an amendment to the constitution is needed to fix it. Without it, we have unlimited spending by special interests on all sides, which currently skews federal elections to favor the big money. It also turns presidential elections into billion-dollar, 24 month endurance trials (for the observers), as we've found.

The initial idea comes from Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.. There, to quote Wikipedia, "The headnote, which is "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession",[3] was written by the court reporter, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company J.C. Bancroft Davis. He said the following:

"One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that 'corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.' Before argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.[4]

"So the headnote was a reporting by the Court Reporter of the Chief Justice's interpretation of the Justices' opinions. But the issue of applicability of "Equal Protection to any persons" to the railroads was not addressed in the decision of the Court in the case."

This headnote is what the ruling that "corporations are people" is based on, under the theory that corporations are people under the 14th Amendment (which fixed the issues around slavery after the Civil War).

The Santa Clara case, incidentally, was about whether the railroads could deduct their mortgage debts from the value of their lands for the purposes of paying taxes to California, because under California law at that time, only individuals could do this.

The general feeling seems to be that Citizens United was a travesty that should be overturned, and there may even be bipartisan (albeit non-monied) support for doing away with it.

104:

Since this was a Supreme Court ruling, something like an amendment to the constitution is needed to fix it.

Not always. Many times SCOTUC rulings occur because of a lack of law by Congress. I think this is one that can be radically changed by Congress. But then again they have been talking about such since the days of Clinton/Gingrich. So 20+ years with no result.

105:

I'm a little twitchy about atmospheric shields or geoengineering.

Yeah, me too. The big priority is certainly to get the carbon level lower, but I think my big point is that the longer we wait, the higher risks will be necessary to fix the problem; however anyone construes "fixing the problem."

Imagine it as a rising exponential curve with "how long we wait" as one axis and "risk necessary to fix the problem as the other."

106:

"...then the employer needs to know all of the employee's other sources of income in order to calculate its tax..."

No, they don't. What you're describing is actually the existing system - employers currently need to know all about the employee's other-income status (if any) to deduct the correct amount of tax. To be sure, the information is all aggregated into the employee's "tax code" so the employer doesn't have to add it all up themselves, but they still need to have it to do the calculation.

After the transformation, all that stuff becomes irrelevant. The employer doesn't need to know anything about the employee's circumstances, and nobody has a "tax code" any more. Indeed, under the absolutely minimal possible version of the revised system, they wouldn't even need to know how many employees they had or how much they were paying each one (well, they would, of course, but not for tax purposes they wouldn't) - only what their total wage bill was and what the tax percentage was - though I'm not suggesting that that's necessarily the best formula to use.

"...individuals can have more than one source of income."

Doesn't matter, because the idea that it's the employee's tax but the employer calculates and pays it for them "out of the goodness of their heart" no longer applies. It's nothing to do with the employee any more. The employer simply pays them whatever they agreed to and in addition pays some tax. "More than one source" just means more than one payer of tax.

107:

The major U.S. political party that has been doing its best for and by practical white supremacy has felt the need to condemn a Congressman who bluntly said that he supports it.

I think you've got this wrong. IMHO what happened to Steve King is a warning to Trump.

108:

Obviously I was talking about the Platonic Ideal of Al Gore.

109:

I think the urban/rural split is even more significant. People are leaving the rural areas in droves, not just because of the economy, but because of the attitudes of the entrenched power structures in most small towns. The the ones who leave go to college (and don't come back) and the ones who stay have a correspondingly lower educational level. Essentially, the small towns are driving away their own sanity checkers.

110:

only what their total wage bill was and what the tax percentage was

I still don't understand how this could be consistently progressive. How does Alice who works one salaried job end up paying the same tax as Bob who works 12 different jobs? Otherwise it's just a flat tax which is a disaster. Or, I suppose, you've simply made personal tax returns into a giant shitstorm*.

Can you explain how that doesn't have all the problems of a flax tax system, plus bonus problems from making audits harder due to less information having to be kept by employers?

Platonic ideals of tax systems are all very well, but in practice not all employers rush to immediately pay all the tax they owe. Detailed tracking is required to enable audits to be carried out. So either your proposal doesn't affect the data requirements, or it's going to make evasion easier.

Please don't think that just saying "tax is 50% of the wages you pay" will help, because it will simply lead to a new type of mis-labelling of payments. In the worst case, wholesale mislabelling, but at the very least self-employed and sham-employed people will switch things around to take advantage.

  • Imagine the tax levied is the average of a progressive system. Anyone earning less is now going to get a huge refund at the end of the tax year, and those earning more will get a huge tax bill. It's going to break a whole lot of people.
111:

If the U.S. allocated 10 billion dollars a year to paying legislators, and insisted on the death penalty for anyone convicted of taking a bribe, we'd have both cheaper and better government.

112:

Not just income, but outgo as well. For example, how do you calculate a charitable donation? And how do you make a charitable donation if your employer doesn't like the charity?

113:

the small towns are driving away their own sanity checkers.

I think it's more accurate to say that the cities are vacuuming up the smart people. This is fractal, BTW. Small settlements lose people to larger ones, right up to slighter smaller countries lose their best to slightly larger/richer ones.

All those immigrant doctors employed by the NHS came from somewhere, and generally it's a poorer country that put in all the effort to raise and educate the child then train them as a doctor, only to see that 25 year investment move to the UK. I went to university with an African guy who was well aware of that, and he was determined to "go back where you came from" specifically to counter the problem. AFAIK he did and has stayed there.

But at the micro level, many aboriginal communities in Australia have this problem and it is a big part of why they can't help themselves. Any kid who can, leaves. The alternative is staying on the dole in a disadvantaged community spending their life fighting the arbitrary decisions of bureaucrats and mining companies, hoping that anything and everything they build isn't destroyed. At least in the city they might get some of the rights other people get, or even a job!

114:

If by "insisted" you mean "actively sought out instances, applied the law fairly, and carried out executions" then yeah, might work.

But imagine instead you had the current law enforcement system. Or even just kept the "presidential pardon" part of it. Worse, imagine you kept that and had a vindictive moron as president.

115:

"Requires a flat tax with no deductions, not even a low income one. Otherwise the local high schooler who takes the part time job (currently zero tax) will pay the same as me taking that as my second job (on a 50% marginal rate)."

You're missing the distinction between making the transition and the transformed situation. I may well not have been clear enough! Under the transformed situation neither you nor the high schooler would pay any tax, because it's nothing to do with the employee any more. You both get paid all of however much they were offering, and the tax on it, which is the same whichever of you they employ, is purely a matter between the employer and the government.

Stuff such as you describe is indeed relevant during the transition period, but because it's only a temporary measure you can do things to get around it that wouldn't be any good in a permanent situation, such as arranging the schedule for the transition to minimise the impact of such things, making ad-hoc payments/deductions to cover the gaps, and allowing that even after the transition there may be hangovers from the old system that you just have to tolerate as anomalies until they fade out by natural wastage, as people change jobs, retire, get ill, die, etc.

The target is that after the transition everyone is being paid the same amount as they were before, as measured by the actual number of beer tokens in their sweaty mitt, and the government is receiving the same amount in tax. The majority of cases are "simple" so you can get most of the way there with simple blanket rules; the more complicated cases you need to allow some leeway for in the second part of the target, since they won't all cancel out, but they will gradually cease to exist once the transition is complete and new cases aren't being generated any more. It almost certainly isn't possible to do it cleverly enough that they're never a problem in the first place, but I'm not saying it is, only that such cases are a minority and it should be possible to keep the problem down to a level where it can be accommodated until it solves itself by the passage of time. Indeed there are lots of details that I didn't get round to, after all the post is long enough already :)

116:

It could be both. I'm guessing that a hidebound small town doesn't have a very good idea about how to either keep or attract smart people. ("We shut down the /comics/gaming store, because Satan.") IMHO a small town (more probably the county the small town is in) could do things to attract smarter people... "Tiny town on the edge of the mountains builds colocation center, offers cheap housing and tax breaks to new businesses." Or whatever.

Mostly, they just don't.

117:

I heard an interesting theory this morning: Trump may be using this shutdown as an excuse to purge his enemies from the government.

The President can't fire non-political appointees he doesn't like on a whim. The process to remove them is quite cumbersome. There is an exception though: if the employees have not shown up to work in at least 30 days. You see where I'm going with this.

118:

Since we're talking small towns again, I'll point out the common statistic: 56% of US lives in metros > 1 million, 68% metros > 500k, 77% metros > 250k

119:

"Or, I suppose, you've simply made personal tax returns into a giant shitstorm*."

No, I've eliminated the whole concept of "personal tax returns"...

From the individual's viewpoint, I suppose it is in some ways equivalent to a flat tax system... with a zero rate. But what it actually is is the elimination of the concept of a personal income tax altogether.

"bonus problems from making audits harder due to less information having to be kept by employers"

No, that makes audits easier. They have to keep much less information and the calculations required are vastly simplified, so there is much less opportunity for obfuscation and much less stuff that the auditors need to dig out.

"self-employed and sham-employed people will switch things around to take advantage"

They do that already, but their ability to do it depends on the notion that they should be paying the tax themselves in the first place. Under the revised system the tax related to their pay is entirely down to whoever is really employing them and there isn't anything that they themselves can fiddle. "Self-employed" status as a regulation-dodging pretence doesn't mean anything any more. (To be sure, there would be a problem with the handful of people who genuinely do employ themselves, but it's the same problem that exists already and always will exist in any situation where one person lying is all it takes.)

120:

...Note also that the post I was originally replying to was about taxation in Britain, and my posts are assuming the British context, where for nearly everyone their income tax is handled automatically by their employer's computer and although everyone is liable, next to nobody has to file a tax return themselves, because this automated system does the necessary. I know that you'd have to go about it differently in the US where AIUI there does exist a similar automated mechanism but people still have to file tax returns personally regardless. I have no idea how things work in Australia but I don't doubt that it would have to be done differently differently there. The desirability of it in different countries is probably another variable, depending on how their flavour of income tax interacts with their flavour of politics, their flavour of money-related social values and other less definable factors.

121:

But what it actually is is the elimination of the concept of a personal income tax altogether.

Along with tax deductions, obviously, but more subtly all the things that are paid via the personal tax system go away as well. Or are paid directly as subsidies. I can see the attraction of that, but I fear that government will be incentivised to remove them (charitable donations... good luck getting the government to give money to the "centre for the elimination of government"), and a lot of citizens will not like the obviousness. "you can apply for the mortgage holder subsidy" "capital gains subsidy" etc, all of which are currently given as tax deductions or lower tax rates.

There would be some confusion initially I expect, either due to the complete removal of all tax on non-earned income, or the revelation that anyone who owns shares is now a small business owner with employee (themselves). Either will be ugly.

But not as ugly as the flat tax effects. Which you still haven't addressed. The reasons for a progressive income tax system are well-understood, and the consequences of a flat system likewise. Simply saying "but there is no income tax" doesn't make the problems go away. As I said, you now have the schoolkid's part time job paying the same tax rate as applied to the last million on Bill Gates' income. Or, should you simply not tax the rich at all, you have the schoolkid paying tax when they didn't before, and Bill Gates not paying tax when he used to. Sound fair and reasonable? Only if you forget that the reason we don't do it that way is the guillotine.

122:

taxation in Britain

I know little about that, Australian and Aotearoa I have experience of, the US I have read about, but the UK not so much. You do have progressive taxation though, and varying tax rates depending on the activity (viz, corporate tax rates differ from individual, there are death and capital gains taxes etc), and it would astonish me if there are no tax deductions. The tax evasion leak/scandal suggests that there are variations in tax treatment between individuals. Jimmy Carr might be a corporation for tax purposes but I suggest that any change in the tax system should be in the direction of making rich people pay more tax rather than less.

I wonder about "next to no-one has to file tax returns themselves", could it be that your sample is biased towards wage-earners and away from sole traders/self-employed people (not least Uber drivers and other sham contractors). You seem to assume that no-one will be permitted to do that, which means (I assume) a minimum company size of, say, 50 staff in order to prevent small "sham companies" where the formerly self-employed simply pair up. But that's going to wreck genuine self-employed people.

Lack of personal tax deductions will make sham companies much more attractive and likely drop the income threshold where they become effectively essential. I'm really curious about how this new tax system would deal with "I don't get much salary, mostly I get share options and bonuses".

One of the reasons the tax code is complex is because people are complex, and unless you're willing to be utterly brutal the tax system has to work with that. By brutal I mean "selling Buckingham Palace to an oligarch" level brutal, not just "widespread freezing to death in the streets" (since that latter has been voted for already). If you want the same total tax income but much lower personal tax, you need to make it up somewhere else. Either tax rich people some other way, or hike regressive taxes (VAT etc) and watch more people die of poverty. The alternative is either a much smaller government or lies and debt "$350M a week for the NHS" I think the slogan says.

The other thing is that this change could make Universal Credit look simple and small-scale. Lack of tax deductions but similarly progressive taxation would mean benefits/subsidies have to go up and a lot more people get them. Either through the "tax and subsidy office", or through the existing benefit system. Neither are really set up for that (the tax office doesn't currently issue monthly payments to 1/3* of the population, and neither does the benefit system).

  • could easily end up being 100%, depending on just how willing the new operator is to maintain existing subsidies.
123:

I don't remember the actual number, but back a few years a scary fraction of 'Tea Party' types—almost all of whom got Trumped-up—were keen on the works of one Willard Cleon Skousen, who argued that the U.S.A.'s founders were literally divinely inspired.

это курам на смех.

124:

You seem to have missed the points so widely that I'm not sure I can usefully answer...

"all the things that are paid via the personal tax system go away as well"

No they don't. The same amount of tax is collected so the things that are paid for by it still are paid for.

"complete removal of all tax on non-earned income"

I didn't say that nor did I intend to imply it. Whoever pays the income also pays the tax; whether it's "non-earned" or not doesn't come into it.

"...flat tax effects. Which you still haven't addressed."

There is no tax to be "flat". I don't see how I can make it any clearer.

I have acknowledged that in one sense a tax that isn't there at all can be regarded as the limiting case of a flat-rate tax as the rate coefficient goes to zero, but I've also said I don't think that's useful. By the same token a tax that isn't there at all can be regarded as the limiting case of an exponential tax as the rate coefficient goes to zero. I don't think that's useful either, but feel free to switch to that model if it makes you feel better than the flat model does.

"schoolkid paying tax... Bill Gates not paying tax..."

Neither of them is paying tax. The tax related to Bill Gates's pay is paid by Microsoft, and the tax related to the schoolkid's pay is paid by whoever her employer is.

"I suggest that any change in the tax system should be in the direction of making rich people pay more tax rather than less."

At the moment tax related to rich people's income often goes unpaid because it's their liability to pay it and they can use a variety of hooky methods to pretend they're not being paid the income to avoid paying it. The revised system makes that evasion impossible.

"I wonder about "next to no-one has to file tax returns themselves","

IIRC Charlie pointed this out the other day as a UK peculiarity in contrast to the US where everyone does it.

"could it be that your sample is biased towards wage-earners and away from sole traders/self-employed people"

I'm asserting that "wage-earners" are the great majority of cases, especially when you include the people who actually are but pretend not to be as a means of evasion which will no longer be meaningful.

"...Uber drivers and other sham contractors). You seem to assume that no-one will be permitted to do that,"

Not at all. I'm simply saying that it won't work as a means of playing games with the tax system any more.

"...going to wreck genuine self-employed people."

Genuinely self-employed people - as opposed to the above pretend kind - see effectively no change in their situation. If they really are paying themselves then they inevitably already have to work out their own tax and pay it. If however someone else is paying them, it's the someone else who pays the tax.

"Lack of personal tax deductions will make sham companies much more attractive and likely drop the income threshold where they become effectively essential."

Sham companies will become pointless. Or even counterproductive: whoever pays the sham company has to pay tax and the sham company also has to pay tax when it pays the person.

"I'm really curious about how this new tax system would deal with "I don't get much salary, mostly I get share options and bonuses"."

Those things count as "pay in kind" so they attract tax according to how much they're worth. Not a new problem; see the tale of the chap who paid his employees in gold sovereigns.

"If you want the same total tax income but much lower personal tax, you need to make it up somewhere else."

There isn't anything to "make up". The same amount of tax is paid, it's just that paying it is no longer any concern of the recipient of the income, so it's not "personal".

"...benefits/subsidies have to go up and a lot more people get them"

Nobody is getting paid any less so the call for them is no greater than at present.

125:

Re "We actually need a REAL SENATE ™ with people like Attenborough & senior surgeons & academics in it, who own no allegiance at all to any party or usual factional interest. Problem is, how to keep them honest & not subject to crooks gaming the system…."

Actually, problem is more how to get them interested in undertaking the role in the first place. IMHO, most of them would rather do something much more productive with their time...

And more generally, being a NZ'er, I don't understand why do you really think you need a senate or upper house (or whatever you call it) anyhow. NZ got rid of their "upper house" years ago and it doesn't appear to have made much difference. (See... https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/history-and-buildings/evolution-of-parliament/legislative-council/ ).

Note however, I am not trying to suggest NZ system better, but it is simpler.

126:

IMHO, most of them would rather do something much more productive with their time...

The mostly-appointed-now House of Lords is a part-time deal for its occupants. Some of them do attend and work there full-time so to speak -- they don't have to go out fund-raising or hold constituency surgery meetings listening to their "customers" since they don't have any in particular. They can hold a national or even global view of things rather than being focussed on representing a small area of the country with about two hundred thousand people living there.

Lessee, the HoL Science committee is headed at the moment by Lord Patel, KT FMedSci FRSE. He's been in the Lords since 1999 but he recently "retired" from being Dundee University's Chancellor after a run of about 10 years or so in parallel with his work in the Lords.

127:

Ok, forgive me if this is teaching an economist to count. From an existing employer* point of view "I pay Sam X. I do paperwork and pay the government X+Y". There is no substantive change if we decide that Y is called "employment tax" instead of "income tax". It's all just rolled into "total cost of hiring someone".

Also, since there are no deductions available (because there's no income tax payable), that means that if I want to invest my savings I just have to wear the cost. Say I buy a decent camera and get back into taking photos for money. Instead of depreciating the camera over 3 years and claiming the cost on tax, I pay no tax and I get no deduction. But my clients are now employers and have to pay employment tax on top of whatever I charge them. They can't claim the cost of me or my camera either unless they're hiring me through a business.

Alternatively, I can form a company and do all the paperwork and make all the payments that that involves, then pay the tax on the wages I pay myself. Which is just like now, as already noted... except that I don't do that because it would make the small-scale "photos for money" stuff laughably low-paying. If I make $2000/year and registering etc a company costs $1000 plus 10 hours of admin every quarter... why bother?

"the things that are paid via the personal tax system go away as well" No they don't. The same amount of tax is collected so the things that are paid for by it still are paid for.

I didn't say "paid for", I said "paid". Most obviously tax deductible charitable donations. But also any tax credit, deduction, refund, whatever you want to call it that reduces the tax owed, those can no longer be done via the tax system. There's a few UK examples here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/personal-tax-credits-statistics

Those things count as "pay in kind" so they attract tax

Great. For everyone, or just for UK tax residents? Who's responsible for making sure the tax is paid, and who's liable if it isn't? Currently if my boss doesn't collect and remit tax on my income he's in deep trouble. But your system seems to suggest that if I tip a pizza delivery person, now I'm the employer and need to remit tax on that payment. But realistically when I want to buy anything the very first question will be "are you a registered business because I will not ever pay a person for anything". Electricians, taxis, street vendors, accountants... no business tax number, no customer. I suppose it's one way to get rid of sham contracting.

At the rich end of the spectrum, you're now going to have to track a bunch of things that aren't tracked well or at all (capital gains on foreign property, for example). Employment tax will be payable on dividend income from shares as well as interest from bank accounts ... but by the payer rather than the payee. The dividend imputation systems used in Australia and Aotearoa will have to stop since there's no longer an individual taxpayer to receive the credits.

I'm not rich enough to know all the details, just informed enough to know the dodges and scams exist. For example, in Australia there are a lot of forestry investments that pay out tax deductions from the cost of planting and growing the trees, then a big taxable chunk of cash at harvest time. That "negative income stream" will vanish but if you use a flat tax the rate will be lower. It might be a win for the rich end overall (the glibertarians certainly think so, as do their opponents). You could grandfather stuff like that, but some of them run for 99 years so you'll be dual taxing for a long time.

There will be weird edge cases too, from tax on non-company use of company cars through to tax on the cleaning of uniforms that fast food staff are required to buy (uniforms which will presumably no longer be tax deductible, and hence cleaning them won't be either. When that's done by the employer tax will need to be paid).

  • I think your proposal will create a whole new class of employers, the "customers of non-company traders".
128:

The same amount of tax is paid

But is it progressive or flat rate? In other words, does the employer just say "we paid a million in wages, so we have to pay half a million in tax"?

If so, that's a flat tax and you still need to explain how that's going to work as something more than a glibertarian fantasy. See above "Bill Gates and the babysitter".

129:

being a NZ'er, I don't understand why do you really think you need a senate or upper house (or whatever you call it) anyhow

Bro, look west. Australia has a mix of unicameral and bicameral parliaments because Australia is really into playing around with democracy.

Unicameral parliaments have a much greater tendency to go rogue, because if a party gets a safe majority in that one house they have the whole "elected dictatorship" thing happening. Aotearoa has also seen that, notably with Muldoon and then the Rogergnomes. Where there's a second chamber there's usually some restraint on the worst excesses, as we see on the occasions when a party or coalition has majorities in both houses and uses that to pass exciting new laws (Howard's anti-union ones, for example).

I also think quite a lot of the enthusiasm in Nukefreeland for electoral reform came from the excesses of simple-majority governments. What I think saves us from needing a second house is the tiny parliament and tiny population. When you have 600 MPs in the lower house an upper house is a good idea. When each of 100 MPs represents 40,000 people you don't have the same issues of scale. To some extent list MPs also fulfil that role.

130:

From an existing employer* point of view "I pay Sam X. I do paperwork and pay the government X+Y".

Sorry, loss of text. Should read "From an existing employer* point of view "I pay Sam X. I do paperwork and pay the government Y, for a total cost of X+Y".

I really want the "can edit my post for 1 minute" button :) Apparently I proofread much better after I've posted rather than in the preview mode.

131:

"'In both cases decentralising power and tax-raising powers is the answer.'"

"Which may explain recent Ontario neocon politics — to whit, disempowerment of local governments in the name of "efficiency""

Precisely. Yes, decentralized taxation gives more control to the locals--and thus is always going to be impossible because the higher-level authorities are never giving up their power.

However, what Dan's suggesting is neo-feudalism. Feudal kings didn't tax the people, they taxed their Barons; the barons taxed their landholders; and the landholders taxed the peasants. Keeping the taxation local gives local authorities an incentive to prevent the free movement of labor. It also gives them an incentive to force the movement of undesirables (another thing seen in Canada, where more than one story has been told of Alberta welfare agencies offering people one-way bus tickets to Vancouver).

132:

Well, I was just making a general statement on where I stand on the "6 Counties Question".

I suspect your analysis may well be correct though.

133:

The most we ever get to see is pretty much a map coloured red, blue (and maybe purple?) at state level. This might work out OK for Senators and POTUS but I do know it won't be that helpful for Representatives in the more densely populated states.

134:

"Make the rich pay more tax" doesn't necessarily work well.

I've heard a personal account (by a now famous person) from about 1960 of working in a garage, fueling cars for the owners.

$richguy gets his $prestigecar filled up at a cost, even then, of several £. $attendant asks for a tip, and is given £0-02, with the statement "The government takes 98% of every pound I make. Here's the rest of that pound". (rates have been altered slightly, to require less knowledge of UK currency)

As for "selling Buck House", that's actually the property of the British Crown, rather than the personal holding of a member of the British royal family.

135:

The rich guy with the car in your story didn't know how marginal tax rates worked, either that or he made billions each year (in 1960s terms) in which case he employed tax lawyers to move money around and prevent him paying more tax than he needed to under law. Quick Google suggests the top earned income tax rate at that time was about 83% for earnings over £20,000 (or about £190,000 in today's money). The 98% rate included unearned income such as trust fund payouts, investments and the like so "making" that money being taxed at 98% is a bit of a misnomer.

In comparison someone working as a coal-miner back then might be earning about £10 a week or £500 p.a.

My guess is that it's a neat story, made up to explain how the person telling the story didn't want to pay lots of tax either.

136:

While the majority of us in NI find the Derry/Londonderry nomenclature laughable and a subject for jest, I would be cautious in using the term "Six Counties" or "Occupied Six Counties". It is an ideologically freighted term, most often associated with those who consider "by the armalite and ballot box" an acceptable political strategy, or by Republicans leaning heavily into the sectarian vote.

137:

There's some weird assumptions being made here about how a lot of people who aren't just salaried employees manage their tax affairs. And even if you're a a salaried employee, your pension, student loan, healthcare etc etc comes out pre-tax, at least partly as a means of shunting as much of your salary as is possible into the lower bracket. What happens if you go from contracting to normal full time employment? The people writing off the VAT from cameras, laptops and other doodads against a limited company they use for a bit of work on the side are of far less concern than telly presenters and CEOs using the more eclectic and interesting forms of tax relief.

Moving the perceived income tax burden for Jane earning £25k from her payslip into some invisible bucket handled by her employer doesn't really do anything except generate an enormous amount of work and cost to refactor the existing system for the limited benefit of making salaries posted on job adverts more transparent and trying to shift peoples cognitive biases. I don't think that would be particularly beneficial in any case as any sense of bitterness as to the inequality in society about how much tax people is directed at footballers and the uber-rich rather than the person three doors down with a slightly newer car and a slightly smaller mortgage.

138:
It seems to me that the idea that politicians could possibly have any influence over the earth's chaotic climate system looks like a bourgeois liberal version of the anti-demographic impulses that you have ascribed to conservatives.

So, OK, I realise I'm probably wasting my time but let's debunk this idiocy.

The first idiot claim is that the climate is chaotic in some way which makes it utterly unpredictable.

I need a term which includes climate (long-term averages) and weather (short-term behaviour) and I'll use 'Earth System' ('ES' for short) for this.

First of all we know that the ES is chaotic on various timescales: on timescales from minutes to weeks that's why weather prediction is hard. It is also probably chaotic on much longer timescales (millennia or longer).

But we also know two interesting things. Firstly a lot of interesting quantities (temperature, precipitation &c) not only have bounds on their values, they also have well-defined means over interesting timescales (years to centuries). (Note that having bounds on values and having well-defined means is not the same thing, for reasons I'm not going to explain here). Secondly, as well as these quantities having well-defined means there are bounds on their differentials: how fast they change.

We don't know this on theoretical grounds (we might but I expect we do not) but on experimental grounds which are far stronger.

The reason we know this is that life exists and more specifically trees exist. Trees have two interesting properties: they are sensitive to temperature, rainfall &c, and they don't move very fast. In particular trees can only move by having offspring that grow somewhere else, and this process takes is slow. Oak trees do not reach sexual maturity until they are about 20-25 and don't start producing serious crops of acorns until they are 50. And the acorns from a given tree probably don't move very far from it. Oak might be able to move at a mile or so a century.

And there are significant numbers of oak trees. This tells us, experimentally, that the ES has well-defined averages for temperature &c over timescales of a year and that these averages have changed only rather slowly over a timescale long enough for oaks to have evolved, which is millions of years.

Note that this is not saying that the ES millions of years ago was the same as it is today: it is saying that the rate of change between then and now has been low enough that oak forests have been able to migrate, at miles a century, to deal with the rate of change. Over millions of years the ES may still have changed really significantly (and in fact has done so): it just changed rather slowly.

So, what this shows, beyond doubt, is that while the ES may be chaotic, there is a range of timescales (from months to millennia roughly) where there are well-defined means and where the rates of change of these means with time is rather low. This regime is what we call 'climate': trees (and, more broadly, life) exists because climate exists. In this climate regime we can treat the ES as non-chaotic, because experimentally it is.

So then, the second idiot claim is 'politicians can't influence the climate because reasons'. Well, debunking this needs three steps.

The first step is to establish that the CO2 greenhouse effect is real: to do this look at Venus. Venus has a very high albedo, so although it is closer to the Sun than Earth, less power from the Sun gets either absorbed in the atmosphere or reaches the surface than it does on Earth -- most of it gets reflected straight back to space. But the surface temperature of Venus is about 730K -- hotter than Mercury. And that's because the atmosphere is mostly CO2.

The second step is to put some numbers on the CO2 greenhouse effect so we know whether the amount of CO2 generated by human activity is significant. Doing this is beyond the scope of this comment and requires numerical modelling, but anyone who is reasonably competent at the physics and a reasonable programmer can write a simple-minded model in a few weeks which gives answers which are in the right ballpark (you need to model the atmosphere as more than a single layer to get something that is reasonable, but you don't need to solve any of the dynamics). More detailed models produce better answers, of course. And we can compare the models with data for the last century or more, and they're pretty good.

And the result of this is that the amount of CO2 human activity generates is indeed sufficient to shift various important climate averages (temperature, rainfall) at a rate of change very much faster than they have changed for a long time (hundreds of thousands to millions of years). Note that it's not the change that matters, but the rate of change because life cares about the rate of change. As an example, the rate of change of temperature at the end of ice-ages (they warm much faster than they cool) is about a degree every thousand years. The rate of change of temperature now is about a degree every century: ten times higher.

The third step is to show that politicians can influence human activity. I think I can safely say this is not in doubt.

OK, so that's half an hour I won't get back.

139:

Considering that we have few, if any, current political figures of the intellectual stature of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, or Hamilton the Constitution deserves respect, perhaps even some worship. Federalism and the separation of powers are protecting us to this day, even in these horrible times.

Behind all these failures is, I think, a failure of philosophy. I am not aware of any current thinking that allows us to design a reinvigorated 21st century democracy; as yet there is nothing with the intellectual power of the philosophies of the Enlightenment.

140:

The oak tree example you use isn't a good one, sadly -- foragers, wind and weather can expand the growth of oak forests a lot faster than you suggest, assuming the conditions for growth outside the forest boundaries exist. Squirrels and other foragers take seeds, acorns etc. and "squirrel" them away in holes, tree branches are ripped off in storms carrying acorns as much as several kilometres on the wind, branches fall in streams and are washed away in floods etc.

I recently saw pizza move a hundred metres in a single afternoon via a combination of such factors -- a seagull snatched up a piece of a half-eaten pizza from the roadway, squabbling in the flock caused it to be dropped on a roof where later the wind blew it off and into the gutter some distance from where it started. If it can happen to pizza it can happen to acorns...

141:

Pigeon:

taxation in Britain, and my posts are assuming the British context, where for nearly everyone their income tax is handled automatically by their employer's computer and although everyone is liable, next to nobody has to file a tax return themselves, because this automated system does the necessary.

This caricature is laughably out of date.

Self-employment has exploded in the UK in the past decade, and not because the "self-employed" want it; it's because corporations employing contractors don't have to give them the same degree of workplace/health and safety/vacation rights as actual employees. This in turn mirrors the way work is outsourced between government and corporations and corporations and smaller agencies.

HMRC tried to address this with "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck" rules like IR35 (if you work under an employer's direction on their equipment/premises, you're an employee even if you're a limited company — at least for purposes of claiming deductible expenses). But all that does is create a rod to beat the back of these "self-employed", without giving them back any of the sick pay, vacation time, or employment rights they've been stripped of.

Dicking with the tax system will just make this worse for them, while not affecting the employers at all.

I'm an anomaly: I'm old-school self-employed, running a business and inventing my own products and selling them wherever the hell I like (70% of my income effectively comes from exports outside the EU). I don't have an employer you can point to, and if I did, I'd have about eight of them (currently) and they'd range from a US-based multinational to a volunteer-staffed crowdsourcing campaign in France. Seriously, individual income tax makes it easier for HMRC to handle the million-or-two edge cases like me. The alternative would be mandatory incorporation, as in some other EU countries which don't recognize self-employment at all (they run their tax system on the principle that everybody works for some organization: the only way to work with them is to own your own organization, and deal with all the bureaucracy that a real company would be expected to deal with).

I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem.

But I can say that Pigeon's idea of how the British system works is fundamentally out of date and wrong, and wouldn't fix the underlying problem (if anything it'd make it worse).

142:

f you want the same total tax income but much lower personal tax, you need to make it up somewhere else.

Two words (stolen from Thomas Pickety): wealth tax.

Everybody pays a tax on their total accumulated assets. An exemption for personal affects (your clothes, phone, and laptop, basically), an allowance for "rainy day" savings (£10,000 in the bank), Pension (£250,000 in a pension scheme), primary home (£180,000 — yes, I know the average dwelling in the UK is valued at about £180,000: bear with me), and transport (£5000 for a basic car).

After these levels, everyone gets soaked for a percentage of the value of their assets each year. It'll be a progressive tax, probably in the range 0.1% to 2.5%, with the top marginal rate only applying to assets in the tens of millions.

The goal is to put a brake on the growth of accumulations of surplus value. Remember, tax is not levied to pay for government outgoings: the government can always create more money. Tax is levied to take surplus currency out of circulation, thereby generating exchanges and driving economic activity. If you want a concrete analogy, most people think of money as being physical markers of value (gold coins), but in practice it's more like electricity.

143:

it is saying that the rate of change between then and now has been low enough that oak forests have been able to migrate, at miles a century, to deal with the rate of change.

I'm afraid you're only half-right.

Remember that average diurnal temperatures vary with altitude. So an oak forest on the lower slopes of a mountain, below the tree line, can move as the tree line shifts in response to longer-term climate changes. A mile of altitude is a big temperature drop: it doesn't take many decades for the zone of forestation to climb or descend the sides of a valley.

So your inference about the ES being long-term stable (in human terms) is ... not wrong, but incomplete enough to invalidate your subsequent conclusions.

144:

another thing seen in Canada, where more than one story has been told of Alberta welfare agencies offering people one-way bus tickets to Vancouver

In Canada welfare is a municipal responsibility, so municipalities have a real incentive to encourage welfare recipients to leave.

Back in the 90s when Mel Eastman was mayor of North York* he made a big deal about how there weren't homeless people in North York. There weren't any shelters — instead case workers would give them TTC tickets so they could go downtown to Toronto. Which meant Toronto taxpayers paid for them rather than North York taxpayers.

*This is pre-amalgamation.

145:

HMRC tried to address this with "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck" rules like IR35 (if you work under an employer's direction on their equipment/premises, you're an employee even if you're a limited company — at least for purposes of claiming deductible expenses). But all that does is create a rod to beat the back of these "self-employed", without giving them back any of the sick pay, vacation time, or employment rights they've been stripped of.

Back in the 90s I had a friend who was outsourced by a Canadian government agency, which essentially told all non-managers that they were now contractors and adjusted their salaries because a whole bunch of expenses were suddenly tax-deductible.

Except that Revenue Canada ruled that they were indeed employees, because they worked for a single employer, had no control over hours/methods of work, etc.

The government agency told the worker/contractors that no, Revenue Canada was wrong, and that they were indeed independent contractors. So my friend ended up caught between two branches of the bureaucracy, with no benefits, less take-home pay, and no tax deductions.

146:

I keep getting this itch to build a game in the sim genre that models this correctly, just so that some more people will understand that the household mental model so many people use is laughably wrong. Heck, a pithy summary or analogy would help.

147:

I think this may reinforce your point: http://robertreich.org/post/181848967520 Mr. Reich helpfully points out a second way low tax rates enrich the rich.

148:

Remember that average diurnal temperatures vary with altitude.... A mile of altitude is a big temperature drop: it doesn't take many decades for the zone of forestation to climb or descend the sides of a valley.

Indeed. The climate of Denver, at 1500 meters, is quite different than the climate 20 miles west at 3000 meters. In parts of the Southwestern US, we're seeing the creation of new "sky islands" where species become isolated as the climate zones move up in elevation. Also shrinkage of some of the older islands: movement into steeper terrain that's just naked rock takes a long time. In some cases, more time than climate change is going to allow.

149:

Actually, you're wrong about rates of change, but it's an extremely useful discussion.

The basic notion about oaks and the rate that birds and squirrels move acorns--normally!--is correct, and it's a big concern now.

The problem is historical: evidence from geology (google Heinrich events, check the temperature proxies in ice cores) shows that, especially during ice ages the climate was extremely variable. One researcher (Richard Alley Two Mile Time Machine) compared the temperature trace during the last ice age to something like a yoyo being played with on a roller coaster. During an ice age, there are (semi-)chaotic oscillations between three temperature states, the switches between states appeared to occur on a scale of years to decades, and the states lasted maybe 1-2000 years. I'm one of the people who believes that this bounce between temperature regimes is what kept humans from inventing civilization for the first 300,000-odd years of our existence, but that's a sideline.

The second part of the paradox is that we can measure how far trees spread historically by looking at pollen records in lakes. This was done back east by Margaret Davis and her students. We can also look at modern rates of spread. Two things pop up in the historical record: one is that trees spread at vastly different rates. Beeches are still expanding from the last ice age, while birches long ago occupied their historic range. Forest composition changes over time, and the forests of 5000 years ago wouldn't be familiar. Forests are not superorganisms: they're patterns made by dominant species following their own ecological imperatives. This realization is why I don't do vegetation ecology any more (got my masters in it).

THE CRITICAL POINT: some trees demonstrably spread far faster than their modern dispersal rates allow, sometimes hundreds of times faster. This was particularly the case in the reforesting of Europe following ice ages. What's going on? The best hypothesis is that the trees never entirely left the glaciated landscape. These "nascent foci" were probably small populations that hung on in warmer, sunnier pockets on sheltered mountains and canyons. When the climate became more favorable, plants expanded out, and sometimes did so well that they dominated the local vegetation. Similarly, cold-adapted plants retreated into little refuges on the north sides of hills and similar as the climate warmed, and they would expand again as the ice advanced.

There's even genetic evidence for this being widespread in California, but that would take another 500 words to explain. The bottom line there is that the evidence suggests that we're a biodiversity hotspot, not because California has higher rates of plant speciation, but because we've got unusually low rates of plant extinction, due most likely to our wildly diverse terrain. There are lots of mountains and canyons where plants can hang out when the climate changes for hotter or colder.

The bottom line is that plants have historically migrated faster than their simple dispersal distances would indicate, and they might have done so where they managed to hang on in little pocket populations until the climate changed to favor their expansion out of their refugia.

This, incidentally, is why I do a lot of conservation work: plants have dealt with rapid climate change in their genetically recent past, so there's a chance that they can migrate fast to deal with our mess too. Saving those refugia, and saving the wildlife corridors that link them, appears to be the best tool we have for ameliorating the oncoming Sixth Extinction. Unfortunately, too many of these refugia--we call them parks--are isolated pockets run more on the Indian Reservation model, where the plants are supposedly "kept in their proper state of nature," which means that the park is managed to appear as the managers think it did in the 19th century (aka "wild"), except that they don't have enough money for weed control. The plants can live within the park, so long as they don't change things too much, and if they try to grow outside the park, they are often killed as weeds in people's landscaping. We're getting a little better about this, but not much.

The treatment of animals and plants in parks is akin to the way American Indians are treated by many whites: we revere them, so long as they're hunting with obsidian arrowheads and living in teepees, to fulfill our Romantic vision of preserving a past closer to nature. We don't deal with their modern problems of poverty, addiction, and discrimination at all well, because we see those (wrongly) as issues with them assimilating into white culture. I'm not suggesting that Indians are animals, because they're often more humane than we are. Rather, I'm suggesting that people, animals, and plants need to move, and that's really, really hard to do when we confine them to reservations and insist that they fulfill a role that neither they nor the world want them to be confined to.

150:

I wonder is we're looking at the makings of a zombie-like state of perpetual-but-not-quite Brexit. Where the deadline is extended to stop a crash out, MP's continue to have no consensus on realistic terms the EU will accept, and no one is quite willing to allow the catastrophic outcome. So the UK remains in a perpetual state of ever-extended article 50 deadlines, remaining a defacto EU member, always approaching but not quite reaching and end game.

151:
Squirrels and other foragers take seeds, acorns etc. and "squirrel" them away in holes, tree branches are ripped off in storms carrying acorns as much as several kilometres on the wind, branches fall in streams and are washed away in floods etc.

Yes, I'm assuming acorns get moved some miles: that's how I get my miles-a-century figure. If an acorn gets moved a distance d, not eaten, and grows into a tree, it takes 25 years before that tree produces acorns of its own which in turn get moved. So the rate of migration of the forest is no more than 4d/century. It's the time it takes the tree to reach maturity which matters.

I'm sure there are odd cases where acorns get moved really large distances (in rivers probably), but I doubt those cause forests to drift.

152:

California tried term limits, and the result was that "decent" politicians were forced out. By "decent" I mean the ones that had their names associated as backers of policies that worked well, or that people liked. They were replaced by those who were more submissive to their corporate donors.

When brand identification becomes less important, quality suffers. Here the "brand" was the politician's name. Other times it's something like a line of screwdrivers. It's true in both cases.

153:

Actually, there are many intelligent political theorists out there right now. It's just that none of them have much power.

154:

Um, no. California HAS term limits. This is good and bad, as you've noted, depending on the quality of whoever is leaving.

The real problem with term limits is that the electeds lose their long term memory, because they only see a particular problem for at most eight years before they have to go work somewhere else. Since many developments take 20 years plus, as do many chronic issues, this means that the memory on these issues comes to reside in the senior bureaucracy, in lobbyists and consultants, and in activists like me. We unelecteds are the ones who learn what has worked, and the short-term politicians become our enablers, if they can get up the learning curve fast enough to understand what we're trying to tell them, and are humble enough to listen. This leads to a different dynamic with a different set of shortcomings.

155:

I'm not sure the EU has a reason to extend the deadline if it only leads to protracted deadlock. There seems little prospect of any attainable deal getting through parliament but there is a deadline for leaving with no deal (which the great majority of MPs are against). Calling the whole thing off (withdrawing article 50 unilaterally before the deadline) now seems like the only feasible option.

156:

Exactly right -- institutional memory. I would only add that there are two sides to the senior bureaucracy -- the people over on the executive side just below the level of political appointees, and the permanent legislative staff. Note that starting in the 90s, Congress did away with a lot of their permanent staff, a bad decision that (fortunately, IMO) the individual states have not generally repeated.

157:

If there are forested plains then the altitude problem goes away (because then you need to move large horizontal distances, and can't cheat). I've quietly assumed there are: perhaps there aren't though, which would be interesting.

158:

One of the problems the USA will have in a couple of decades is that 70% of the population will be so concentrated that they will be represented by 30% of the senators, which means 30% of the population will control 70% of the senators. So the U.S. Senate will be quite distorted, but the House will theoretically still be representative of the concentration.

159:

The ice-age thing is interesting: I'd assumed that the variations in temperatures from cores were noise & in fact written some code to smooth it away, but from what you're saying they're not. Unfortunately the place I get the core data sets from now says 'The website you are trying to access is not available at this time due to a lapse in appropriation.' So, I can't say what I think about that in a public forum because someone will find it and trace it back to me and I'll get waterboarded or something.

160:

Trees aren't the only participants when considering the impacts of climate change on where which plants live. I've spent almost my entire life on the edges of the North American steppes, where the trees and grasses slug it out for dominance. If one of the affects of warming is that areas become effectively drier, the grasses may win.

161:

Antistone @ 98: Would any of the people arguing against corporate personhood be willing to describe your position for me in more concrete terms?

(I'm assuming this isn't actually an argument over the WORD "person" but instead has to do with some specific legal ramifications that you don't like. Which ramifications, specifically?)

I don't quite understand how "argument over the WORD" fits, my objection is not to the semantics; not an objection to using a word wrongly.

I object to what corporations DO as "persons". Corporations as "persons" gives management/proprietors undue power. It acts as a shield that permits officers/proprietors to get away with crimes that real persons would not. If I swindle you out of your life savings, I'm liable. I can go to jail & will have to pay back the money I've stolen.

Not so if I'm shielded by having worked through a corporation person. At most, the corporation will have to pay a token fine & probably get to keep the stolen money, especially if it has already distributed it as dividends, bonuses or executive compensation.

If I'm willfully negligent and cause someone's death, I will be tried and if convicted imprisoned for a long time or even sentenced to death. When a corporation is willfully negligent that doesn't happen. That can't happen.

Where corporations are held to be persons, the whole concept of the "limited liability" corporation is a license to defraud; to commit mayhem without responsibility or accountability.

I would abolish "limited liability" if I could. Make the shareholders and corporate officers fully accountable for wrongs done by the corporation. I can't. But revoking the "person-hood" for corporations is a small step in the right direction.

162:

I can go to jail & will have to pay back the money I've stolen... The corporation will have to pay a token fine & probably get to keep the stolen money

I share that objection. If it can't go to jail it's not a person. I see no reason why we shouldn't punish criminal corporations either the same way we do other criminal organisations - jail members solely for the crime of being associated with them; or by removing their liberty - suspend their registration, ban them from trading or otherwise operating.

That alone would make incorporation less attractive, which I think is a useful thing. I wonder whether perhaps a time limit might be useful as well, so they're not immortal. Require that after at most 99 years they be wound up and their assets returned to shareholders, with provisions to prevent phoenixing.

But then... what problem are we trying to solve, and would the result of the above actually be better? Specifically for big, intractable problems like "build and operate this nuclear reactor then clean it up afterwards". Albeit I don't think companies are the right structure for that (not least because non of them show any sign of being capable of doing it) and since the government inevitably ends up carrying the can, maybe only governments can do things like that. Note that that doesn't mean government necessarily does it well, merely that corporations necessarily do it badly.

163:

Mayhem @ 100:

"FWIW, the current situation generally results in Senators being owned by corporations. I don't really think this is any better."

In honesty the bigger issue is the lack of term limits. Your Senators and Representatives have utterly insane incumbency rates for a functioning electoral system. The genuine voting stats are often better than those your average third world dictator with a rigged vote is willing to try and pass off.

Put in a mandatory limit, say two consecutive Senate terms or five House followed by a mandatory 1-2 term stand down, and you'll force a change of occupant every decade or so, which will at least require the background interests to start their bribes again from scratch.

That would be a pretty good idea, although I would prefer a maximum of three terms for Senators and nine for the House; limiting both to 18 years total time in office and not counting any break in service against the term limit.

Where I think the Founding Fathers really screwed up was life tenure for judges. That WILL require a Constitutional Amendment to rectify.

The best suggestion I've seen would create a Supreme Court of 9 justices serving 18 year terms, staggered two years apart. I'd keep Presidential appointment and Senatorial confirmation. Basically, at the beginning of every Congress, the President would get to nominate one new Justice.

At the beginning of the next Congress, the President would get to nominate another new Justice (for a maximum of 5 from a Vice President who became President under the terms of the 22nd Amendment). The Senate would not be allowed to refuse confirmation hearings to prevent a President from appointing a Justice like McConnell did with Merrick Garland.

Of course, if one of the Justices had to leave the bench prematurely (either through death or resignation) the then incumbent President would nominate a replacement to be confirmed by the Senate. That replacement would only serve the remainder of the term for the justice who was replaced. I would allow the replacement justice to be subsequently nominated for a full 18 year term of his/her own. The Chief Justice would be whichever justice had served the longest (i.e. the position of Chief Justice would sift down through the ranks over time.)

164:

Honestly, I do not believe the reign of the beige dictatorship to be over. In most countries the power still remains in the same hands.

The Trump Regime in the USA looks like Koch brothers. As before. A bit spice added. In UK the Brexit looks like the ultimate power-grab by the existing elites (they would have done fine in the EU, but if there will be an exit, then let it be a suitable one).

In my country the still ruling government does everything possible in order to make the result of the next election void (coming in a few months). Changing civil servants (in some cases stretching the law, but hey, we changed the one holding the relevant position) and making binding agreements with private companies. Milking the cow as far as possible.

This is all still the Beige Dictatorship in action. As we should know, the Shock Therapy makes even better results than the normal action.

165:

_Moz_ @ 101: Requires a flat tax with no deductions, not even a low income one. Otherwise the local high schooler who takes the part time job (currently zero tax) will pay the same as me taking that as my second job (on a 50% marginal rate).

A "flat" tax is only acceptable if it applies to ALL income, earned and unearned, from whatever source derived. Enforcement would need to be Draconian. I would suggest forfeiture of 100% of the income on which tax was not paid and escalating from there.

166:

Troutwaxer @ 116: It could be both. I'm guessing that a hidebound small town doesn't have a very good idea about how to either keep or attract smart people. ("We shut down the /comics/gaming store, because Satan.") IMHO a small town (more probably the county the small town is in) could do things to attract smarter people... "Tiny town on the edge of the mountains builds colocation center, offers cheap housing and tax breaks to new businesses." Or whatever.

Mostly, they just don't.

The stupid, "hidebound" small towns are the ones that make the news. "Stupid" makes easy reporting for lazy reporters. But that's not where the problem is.

More commonly, the small towns just don't have the resources to keep their best and brightest from going off to the big city. Even if the kids can find challenging, satisfying jobs, there's still nothing to do when they're not working. The town didn't shut down the "/comics/gaming store", the store went out of business because there weren't enough customers to keep it open ... especially when the next town over managed to attract a Walmart.

You don't need to build a new collocation center. Just refurbish some of the empty storefronts on Main Street & subsidize the rent.

Why doesn't this happen? Because the town just doesn't have the money. They lost their tax base in the last recession ... or the one before that.

167:

Ioan @ 117: I heard an interesting theory this morning: Trump may be using this shutdown as an excuse to purge his enemies from the government.

The President can't fire non-political appointees he doesn't like on a whim. The process to remove them is quite cumbersome. There is an exception though: if the employees have not shown up to work in at least 30 days. You see where I'm going with this.

It's an interesting theory, but I don't think it's going to work. The courts won't allow him to claim he's dismissing employees "for cause" if the reason they don't show up is that the government shut down and they're not receiving their paychecks. That would violate the 13th and 14th Amendments.

If the government reopened and paychecks started going out (including back pay due to workers furloughed through no fault of their own) and the workers didn't come back to work THEN, he might have a case, but I think you can see why that isn't going to happen.

168:

Please, name some of them. Real question, not a rhetorical trap.

169:

Charlie Stross @ 142:

"[I]f you want the same total tax income but much lower personal tax, you need to make it up somewhere else."

Two words (stolen from Thomas Pickety): wealth tax.

Everybody pays a tax on their total accumulated assets. An exemption for personal affects (your clothes, phone, and laptop, basically), an allowance for "rainy day" savings (£10,000 in the bank), Pension (£250,000 in a pension scheme), primary home (£180,000 — yes, I know the average dwelling in the UK is valued at about £180,000: bear with me), and transport (£5000 for a basic car).

After these levels, everyone gets soaked for a percentage of the value of their assets each year. It'll be a progressive tax, probably in the range 0.1% to 2.5%, with the top marginal rate only applying to assets in the tens of millions.

The goal is to put a brake on the growth of accumulations of surplus value. Remember, tax is not levied to pay for government outgoings: the government can always create more money. Tax is levied to take surplus currency out of circulation, thereby generating exchanges and driving economic activity. If you want a concrete analogy, most people think of money as being physical markers of value (gold coins), but in practice it's more like electricity.

I don't see how that would ever be acceptable. It looks to me like it penalizes my small lifetime accumulation of assets more than it penalizes inherited wealth. And it's a scheme under which no one who derived their accumulated assets from EARNED INCOME, rather than from RENTS would ever be able to retire. You'd have to bust your ass every year just to make up the difference in the assets taxed away.

Maybe if the tax bracket was based on total accumulated assets, but after the first time you payed the tax on your total assets, the tax itself should only be on the INCREASE in the value of your assets from the previous tax period. Otherwise you're being taxed on the same assets over and over and over and ... maybe that's not really a problem for the ultra wealthy, but it would sure hurt me.

170:

Pigeon, I can't tell if you have completely failed to understand the math, or if I have completely failed to understand what you think you're accomplishing, but one of those is definitely true.

Let me propose an example:

Suppose that right how, company A has 20 employees who each take home $20k post-tax income, while company B has 2 employees who each take home $200k post-tax income. (For simplicity, assume that none of these employees have any other income.)

Under a progressive income tax, the wages paid by company B trigger heavier (total) taxes than those paid by company A, because the people receiving them are in a higher tax bracket.

But the total post-tax wages paid by both companies is identical ($4M), so in ANY tax system where that is the only thing that matters, they MUST both be triggering equal taxes with their wages (by definition).

Therefore, you have either increased the taxes associated with company A's wages, or reduced the taxes associated with company B's wages, or both. Full stop. No other option. They used to be inequal, and now they're equal, so something has changed.

Because of that difference, your proposal is NOT simply renaming things while leaving everyone with an equal amount of money. Even if those 12 employees are all getting the same amount of post-tax wages (which seems unenforceable, but let's imagine), at least one of those two companies is now paying a different amount of money than it used to. The owners or shareholders in those companies therefore have different amounts of money than they did under the old regime, even if all "wages" remain fixed.

You can argue that your proposal is better than the status quo if you want, but that discussion must necessarily involve an examination of how some financial entities now have more money than they used to and others have less and whether redistributing wealth in this way was a good idea. It's not simply a psychological trick, you are actually taking money out of someone's pocket and putting it into someone else's.

You can't eliminate independent variables from the tax calculations without changing the amount of tax that someone owes. There will always be two examples that are identical except for the variable you eliminated, and that means those examples used to incur different taxes but now incur the same tax, which means someone is paying a different amount.

171:

A "flat" tax is only acceptable if it applies to ALL income

{cries} Even in the US context a flat tax is a bad idea because it's regressive, in practice even more so than sales taxes. Some flat tax proponents welcome that, others try to mitigate it with a tax free threshold (which Pigeon has ruled out). Where flat tax works is when it's reforming the incredibly complex, badly enforced tax systems of former eastern bloc countries. So maybe it would help Greece, but it would break Britain.

Maybe try this article or this one

The arguments for a flat tax often end up reading like this:

Massive benefits in investment and job growth following Trump’s American tax cuts show us that ...

To which the rest of us can only say "huh?". The "investment" was in share buy-backs and there was no extra job growth.

172:

IGNORING evberything else ... Charlie @ 142 Nothing personal but fuck right off. A wealth tax would see me on the street, homeless, with no possible method of finding anywhere to live at all ... & a homeless Birman kitton + about 8000 books as well. VERY UN-CLEVER. Let's not go there, shall we? [ "Wealth Tax" ]

173:

So to clarify...the group of people protesting this decision on the grounds that corporations should not count as persons are those who feel BOTH:

  • Corporations SHOULD NOT be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, but

  • Rich individual human beings SHOULD be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns

  • ...because anyone who wanted to apply the same restrictions to both corporations and individuals wouldn't have any particular need to put them in different categories (or at least, that wouldn't be the central issue). Do I understand correctly?

    174:

    "It'll be a progressive tax, probably in the range 0.1% to 2.5%" ... It looks to me like it penalizes my small lifetime accumulation of assets more than it penalizes inherited wealth.

    How so? You're paying at most 0.25% on assets that should be earning you 3-5%, the billionaire is effectively paying 2.5% (because the overwhelming majority of their wealth is taxed at the top marginal rate). It's very likely you would actually be paying zero because you'll be under the million dollar threshold, and if you're not then we're not talking about the accumulated wealth of even a second decile wage earner.

    There will still be edge cases, the poor old lady who just happened to live in what's now an incredibly wealthy suburb so she's working class but the land her old shack sits on is worth millions. That tax will force her to take out a reverse mortgage and could leave her kids with only half the unearned wealth they expected to get when she dies! Tragedy!

    I kind of sympathise, one side of my family was forced to sell off their farm over the years to pay land tax. They had the (bad?) luck to own a small farm in the middle of what is now Auckland... as the city expanded their land value went up, land tax went up... they had to sell off or go bankrupt. But on the other hand, being down to your last couple of acres of land in the middle of a major city is not exactly penury. That side of the family is very well off, thankyouverymuch, because they own a couple of acres of houses in the middle of a major city.

    175:

    I think corporations should not be permitted to donate or campaign at all, and neither should most people. Politics should be restricted to voters, and only voters. In related news I think that the franchise should be universal - if you have the right to be in a country you're subject to their laws and should get the associated privileges and obligations. Like voting.

    I agree that restricting spending would be a partial work-around, and it's worth fighting for because it's far more likely to be implemented sooner than my preference (I'm an incrementalist). I think the limit should be low, and expressed as a percentage of median disposal income. That gives rich people an incentive to lift the median wage :)

    I also campaigned for same sex marriage (twice!) on the basis that it's closer to marriage equality than what we had before, even though it most definitely is not marriage equality (both campaigns claimed it was equality... both knowingly lied about that in the name of "it's easier to understand").

    176:

    So sort of a Brexit event horizon, then?

    177:

    Oh, the difference between a spending/donating cap for people and corporations is that corporations are more likely to be able to donate, and there's no limit to the number of corporations.

    Take the case of someone willing to put a million dollars into a political campaign. If the limit is $100,000 they can simply split their spending over 10 companies because the cost of forming a company is trivial compared to $100,000 (and that person likely already has control of multiple corporate entities). But if the limit is $1000 it gets more complex, because the marginal cost of finding/forming an incorporation is likely close to $1000 if you have to pay staff to do the work.

    OTOH workarounds like telling your employees "you will donate $1000 to this campaign" can work, and the nice way to do that is "I will reimburse you the donation plus $50". It's hard to effectively legislate against that kind of behaviour. Imagine one limiting case: the campaign issues a medal or other trinket to $1000 donors, and the employer looks for those on eBay and buys them. Is that an illegal evasion of the campaign fundraising limit or just the free market in action "I collect MAGA hats"...

    178:

    Um, I do believe that requiring your employees to donate on your behalf is illegal in the US? It's easier to come up with an infinite regress of corporations and PACs to do the donations instead. In fact, I seem to recall that OGH proposed something like this in one of his novels...

    179:

    requiring your employees to donate on your behalf is illegal in the US

    I recall reading about a case where that happened, which is why I brought it up. Then again, I likely read about it because of enforcement action. But what happens to the employees who complain? I suspect you'd only need to fire one or two for the rest to get the idea that next time they're just going to donate and get on with their lives.

    If the $1M to spend goes $10,000 on admin, $10,000 on fines and $980,000 to the campaign that's still a huge win for the "other people can only spend $1000" rich person.

    That said, IIRC it's about $200 to buy a shelf company in NZ and only about $200/year to keep it going if it has almost-zero activity. You could definitely bring the marginal cost down if you had hundreds of them doing the same thing (and the regulatory cost might drop too). Jurisdiction shopping might work, depending on the details of the campaign and laws (if you can use 10,000 Panamanian companies to donate anywhere in the world, for example).

    Hence my preference: only voters can get involved.

    180:

    I seem to recall that OGH proposed something like this in one of his novels...

    I took that as a reference to the real world, since that's what happens in Australia and Aotearoa. Ahem. Sorry, "appears to happen". Wouldn't want to slander anyone, would we now.

    Australia has donation disclosure limits, but they apply separately to each state and territory, so even though they appear low the $10,000 limit turns into "for each of 8 or 9 entities" and that's before we get into microparties that exist only to harvest preferences. Combine that with reporting delays (a year after the election) and lax enforcement (wholesale refusal to comply earns you a sternly worded letter) and they become laws that have no useful effect and only affect those who choose to comply with them (viz, The Greens suffer but the brown parties don't).

    In many ways spending limits and restrictions on third party campaigns make more sense just because they're easier top enforce. But they need proper penalties too, with a demonstrated willingness to disqualify candidates (in preferential systems) or re-run elections without the offender (in other systems). I suspect your "Vote Leave" mob would be much less willing to play silly buggers if the result was that a year later the courts said "we order the referendum re-run without the leave option"... "oh wait, we already know the inevitable result, we declare remain to have won".

    181:

    This article is both clear and horrible:

    The FEC prohibits employers from coercing workers when it comes to monetary donations or fundraising. But the rules are not as clear about what happens if the corporation, acting independent from the campaign, compels workers to, say, stuff envelopes. ...

    Some have argued that election law, as it currently stands, permits employers to actually require workers to participate in certain independent political activities, such as attending a rally. Others say it's more of a gray area that hasn't yet been sorted out...

    The complaints alleged the Ohio-based coal mining company mandated that workers attend a Mitt Romney rally during 2012 - images of miners standing behind the shirt-sleeved GOP nominee were later used in Romney advertisements -- as well as that the company pressured workers to make donations to the company's political action committee, reimbursing them with bonuses. In both cases, the commissioners deadlocked along party lines, closing the complaints without taking any action.

    Political appointees deciding whether the party that appointed them should face legal consequences... what could possibly go wrong?

    182:

    Another problem with term limits, one that embraces institutional memory, is that big governments are difficult to run, due to their sheer complexity. If you have rapid turnover of oversight at the top, you get into what the DoD reportedly does, which is to launder their funds so thoroughly that no one on the outside apparently knows where the money goes.

    I'd suggest that money owning politicians is not cured by term limits. If a pol is constantly campaigning for a new position, they need huge amounts of money. And that makes them vulnerable. If they have lifetime tenure, that makes the vulnerable too.

    There are a couple of solutions. One is the old Jeffersonian ideal of rewriting the Constitution every few generations. I mean, look how well that worked in France. Erm, yeah. However, the point is that rejiggering the machinery of state can make it difficult to pull the same scams that work now. Unfortunately, the scamsters have both the incentive and resources to do the rewriting...

    A second solution is the really old solution of the jubilee: reset the game every 40-50 years and start over. This sounds brutal and probably needs a king to make it work, but it may turn out to be one way around the wealth accumulation problem.

    Then there's the old George Plunkitt solution of Honest versus dishonest graft. Honest graft exploits the system, dishonest graft breaks the law. Rather than making a perfect, crime-free government, it might be simpler to establish an overriding ethic that 1) the system has to perpetuate itself, period, and 2) if you can make money while keeping everything working, feel free to do so, but remember this is your secondary job, not your primary job, and 3) if you get too stupid or too greedy, and especially if you threaten the continued existence of the system, you're out with extreme prejudice. This is under the notion of good parasites not killing their host, especially when they'll have extreme difficulties finding another host.

    I should point out that these three solutions are not mutually exclusive, although I think that implementing all three at once is firmly in the realm of science fiction.

    183:

    Just a random thought: I keep wondering if Elizabeth II will go down in history the way Kamehameha I did. King Kamehameha I unified the Hawaiian Islands. Unfortunately, diseases introduced during his reign decimated the population of the islands, leaving him when he died with a small fraction of the subject's he'd had when he unified the archipelago. Elizabeth II will go down in history as a much-loved royal. However, when she was born, England was one of history's great empires. Depending on Brexit and when she passes, the backfire from Brexit might conceivably have turned the UK into England, Wales, and various tiny islands. And she presided over this devolution.

    Just a thought about two great insular monarchs. Greatness is a tricky thing, no?

    184:

    I have an opinion that taxes should be transparent. Think of the government as the more predictable version of the Mafia.

    You work here? You should pay some taxes on income cause working is harder while being shot at.

    You keep your stuff here? Then there's a protection fee - we call that a wealth tax.

    Oh look, you drive on the roads? Gas tax.

    I suspect that a wealth tax would tend to dampen speculative bubbles - stocks with gigantic values but no earnings would be valued a bit lower. It also discourages unproductive uses of capital.

    The thing I'd like - which would probably result in a violent revolution - would be not handling zoning or land use restrictions locally. Letting the poors move into small enough residences that they could afford them would be pretty unpopular.

    On the 'bright' side, from a game-theoretic perspective:

  • Trump: cave or no cave?
  • Cave? Lose election. No cave?

  • Democrats: cave or no cave? Cave? No benefit. No cave? If Trump doesn't cave, crater the economy - which is traditionally very bad for the party in power.
  • While there's gigantic economic damage and people are genuinely being hurt - on the bright side - the longer this goes - the worse it is for the Republicans. I hope.

    Also, in terms of bright sides, Maine's experiment with ranked choice may someday give a way to adjust out of unhealthy stasis quicker. It is more important than gerrymandering.

    185:

    not handling zoning or land use restrictions locally.

    "we'd love you to set off some nuclear bombs way over there on land we control but don't care about". The same approach is used today everywhere from Kakadu/Ranger to Galilee/Carmichael/Great Barrier Reef. The / indicate different names for the same area depending on whether you're talking about World Heritage or the extractive economy. Note that the GBR and Kakadu are significantly more profitable as tourist attractions than mines, but there's less wealth concentration in tourism so it's harder to focus political attention on that aspect.

    186:

    Well if parliament is not working, there is still her royal highness Queen Elizabeth.

    According to one of my favorite YouTube channels ("Today I found Out" with Simon Whistler - who is both very informative and very witty), despite what people think about the British monarch being a mere figure head, Liz is actually very powerful:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiDCwqpupj8

    Perhaps she can still send a few people to the Tower to get their heads chopped off.

    Problems solved!

    187:

    Well if you really want sleepless nights, read "America the Farewell Tour" by Chris Hedges:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeE5WnTUsF8

    and

    https://www.truthdig.com/articles/reign-of-idiots/

    The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles and impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy.

    There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.

    The idiots know only one word—“more.” They are unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds where they eat chocolate cake and order missile strikes. They see the state as a projection of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Wilhelmine, Pahlavi and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law.

    Donald Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality—a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac. He wields armies and fleets against the wretched of the earth, blithely ignores the catastrophic human misery caused by global warming, pillages on behalf of global oligarchs and at night sits slack-jawed in front of a television set before opening his “beautiful” Twitter account. He is our version of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers, the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back the potion that would give him eternal life, and a decayed Russian royalty that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as their nation was decimated by war and revolution brewed in the streets.

    188:

    To add to the doom and gloom, an update of Huston after Hurricane Harvey.

    Rising Risk https://youtu.be/MHtb3FCma5E?t=1328

    People swooped in and bought the destroyed houses, now they are replacing them, just in time for the next major storm somewhere down the road. Making no effort to deal with the actual cause of the flooding, which was overbuilding. They need to restore open areas. Design an actual city with multistory housing, not an endless sprawling suburb, filled with Mac-mansions.

    189:

    Wealth taxes are basically a way of forcing people to move their assets outside of your jurisdiction. Which is exactly the opposite of what most nations want to see happen

    They are also likely to do some really strange things to the stock market, like encouraging people to invest in stocks where the majority of the shareholders aren’t wealthy. I have no idea where that would lead

    The reason capital gains taxes even sort of work is in order to move the wealth out of your jurisdiction they have to incurr the tax

    A more sane way might be just to tax capital gains income as regular income

    190:

    Trying to keep money out of politics is like draining the ocean, not going to happen unless you end up getting rid of money or getting rid of politics first.

    Better to harness it. Unlimited donations, with transparency, and taxed on a steep progressive curve. And let the revenue service investigate any structuring schemes the same way they do for other taxing and reporting requirements.

    191:

    Unlimited donations, with transparency, and taxed on a steep progressive curve.

    That might work. Australia makes the first $1500/year donated to a political party tax deductible (because more democratic involvement is better, y'all), so we already have the "negative tax" end of the curve. Maybe start by saying any donation over the disclosure threshold is taxed at 30% (or the company tax rate).

    I can imagine that being yet another sensible idea that The Greens and their sympathetic microparties support, but everyone else opposes either reflexively (tax bad, transparency bad) or opposes because The Greens support it (the self-labelled "left" wing of the Labour Party).

    192:

    Australia makes the first $1500/year donated to a political party tax deductible (because more democratic involvement is better, y'all), so we already have the "negative tax" end of the curve...

    Oh, I like that! A progressive taxation plan sounds good. As you point out, we want people to participate in their government and not be crushed by whoever has the deepest slush fund.

    I suggest, for places like the United States, a tax schedule relative to the election cycle. It's both reasonable and honest to donate to a favored candidate a few months before an election; years in advance, rather less so. (Donald Trump set up a fund for his 2020 campaign in January 2017, because he has no clue how to not look like a crook.) Those of you who live in places with short elections that aren't scheduled years in advance can write this off as someone else's problem and another Weird American Thing.

    193:

    _Moz_ replied to JBS @ 171:

    "Massive benefits in investment and job growth following Trump’s American tax cuts show us that ..."

    To which the rest of us can only say "huh?". The "investment" was in share buy-backs and there was no extra job growth.

    Please be careful how you format your responses so that you NEVER again attribute another's statements to me.

    I am DEEPLY OFFENDED that you put someone else's lies into my mouth.

    194:

    Antistone @ 173: So to clarify...the group of people protesting this decision on the grounds that corporations should not count as persons are those who feel BOTH:

    1. Corporations SHOULD NOT be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, but

    2. Rich individual human beings SHOULD be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns

    ...because anyone who wanted to apply the same restrictions to both corporations and individuals wouldn't have any particular need to put them in different categories (or at least, that wouldn't be the central issue). Do I understand correctly?

    No. You do not.

    While I accept your first proposition, I do not accept your second (nor your third). No one should be allowed to buy elections, whether they are a corporation or individually wealthy. Whatever categories you might want to put them in is immaterial.

    195:

    “self-labelled "left" wing”

    I quite like your suggestion that Albanese would make a great stay at home dad.

    Recently an old friend (both senses of the word) and neighbour who happens to be active in the local ALP branch threw something like this at me (I’m slightly active in the Greens, not as much as I should be) imagining it was some sort of invective. That is, that the attraction of the Greens is really only as a policy engine for the ALP, and that Greens policies usually eventually become ALP ones. Because, actually isn’t that a good thing? Kinda wish opposing “deterrence” would figure as such, but that’s still out of bounds. It’s more that we’re playing tug-of-war with the Overton window with the One Nations and the Fraser Annings... though really, I suppose that’s the one useful purpose for the Left Renewal types, sigh.

    Greg@172 Actually as Charlie proposed it, and as most of the people talking it through here would most likely agree, it would not mean that at all. Your primary residence (within reason) would attract at least some degree of exemption and the whole thing would require a threshold. TL;DR if your property is such that you’d be affected, there’s no way selling it would leave you in penury or realistically render you homeless.

    196:

    RP @ 144 THAT appalling system was tried in Tudor England – shove the responsibility on to someone else … Replaced by “Speenhamland”, which didn’t work either, replaced by the 1834 Poor Law – characterised (both of them) by Dickens … oops.

    Charlie @ RP @ 145 etc. The “Duck Test” is slowly, but surely being used to squeeze Uber out of our system I’m glad to say … means (assuming Supreme Court follows previous decisions ) that Uber “employees” are actually employees, which means Uber owes HMRC several tens (at least) of £millions in Employers’ NI contributions, how sad.

    Heteromeles @ 149 Get a copy of one of the recent New Naturalists, No. # 134 Early Humans, by Nick Ashton - deals with humanity in Britain over most of the past million years. It ends with a scenario I’ve mentioned before, the early-mesolithic family on the muddy shores of the Severn ….. It deals in depth with the vast & often rapid changes in climate during that period. … & @ 182 Honest & Dishonest Graft ? - a Kipling poem on the same.

    Tbh @ 151 Oaks will no longer grow in shaded areas in England ( Oak wilt fungus ) … but they are still springing up all over the place, because of their dispersal … by Jays, who can easily deposit a viable acorn well over a mile away form its parent tree.

    Moz @ 171 I’m mostly staying out of the “tax” debate because every single one of you is wrong in some way or another … but: “Sales Taxes” are often though of as a good idea, because rich people buy more & more expensive things than poor -people, except the problem is … a tax on food. GB has got round this by exempting fresh food from VAT … mostly. Postscript to self @ 172 – or are you exempting “personal private residence” from a “Wealth Tax”? They don’t usually, though …. …. & @ 175 In the UK, mostly, corporations are NOT ALLOWED to contribute huge sums to election campaigns, so we don’t get the obscene spectacle provided by the US example. Indeed, the Brexit-Leave people have got themselves in to entire well-deserved trouble for exactly this behaviour. [ Not nearly enough trouble, incidentally, but that’s another story. ]

    Erwin @ 184 Apparently the Trump shutdown is already slowing the US economy … the longer it goes on the fewer jobs & money-circulation there is – people are already noticing 7 the few sensible R’s appear to be worrying about it. DD @ 187 Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Wars of Justinian in 5th-6th C Italy ….

    UHG @ 189 Except, … moving your wealth out of the country to avoid a “Wealth Tax” … you can’t do that if you ONLY asset is the house you live in ( Like me ) Which is why it’s a REALLY BAD IDEA. … & Damian @ 195 – noted. I would like clarification, though.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ P.S. W.T.F ??? I've had to re-format my hyperlinks twice, bacuse something is dicking with the presence, absence & "shape" of my quote-maks in the links - what's bloody going on?

    197:

    JBS, I'm really sorry. There's limited formatting options and I tried to make it clear that I was quoting the source linked to immediately before that line.

    Moz wrote: up reading like this: Massive benefits

    Not sure how to deal with that... since this is a reply to JBS I fear you're going to take it as me claiming you wrote the bit after "Moz wrote:"...

    Suggestions welcomed.

    198:

    _Moz_ @ 174:

    It looks to me like it penalizes my small lifetime accumulation of assets more than it penalizes inherited wealth.

    How so? You're paying at most 0.25% on assets that should be earning you 3-5%, the billionaire is effectively paying 2.5% (because the overwhelming majority of their wealth is taxed at the top marginal rate). It's very likely you would actually be paying zero because you'll be under the million dollar threshold, and if you're not then we're not talking about the accumulated wealth of even a second decile wage earner.

    There will still be edge cases, the poor old lady who just happened to live in what's now an incredibly wealthy suburb so she's working class but the land her old shack sits on is worth millions. That tax will force her to take out a reverse mortgage and could leave her kids with only half the unearned wealth they expected to get when she dies! Tragedy!

    I kind of sympathise, one side of my family was forced to sell off their farm over the years to pay land tax. They had the (bad?) luck to own a small farm in the middle of what is now Auckland... as the city expanded their land value went up, land tax went up... they had to sell off or go bankrupt. But on the other hand, being down to your last couple of acres of land in the middle of a major city is not exactly penury. That side of the family is very well off, thankyouverymuch, because they own a couple of acres of houses in the middle of a major city.

    I too am working class; lower half of the second quintile. My "income" is half Social-Security and half retired pay from the U.S. Army. I'm retired and unable to work due to health issues that I believe are related to my time in the Army, but are not accepted as such by the VA, although I do get medical care.

    I don't have assets earning 3-5%. I own the house I live in and have a modest IRA in a credit union equal to about 3 years "income". Without my house and the VA medical, I'd be living under a bridge somewhere, another homeless vet panhandling on the street corner ... or already dead.

    I've worked hard for more than 50 years; scrimped and saved to prepare for retirement. There won't be any unearned wealth left for my heirs. They'll be lucky if there's enough left to bury me when I die.

    A "wealth tax" as proposed would slowly strip my assets, hastening the day I'll be out on the street, homeless.

    199:

    Meanwhile ... If you thought T May was arrogant & stupid - try this - Corbyn doing his amazingly incompetent best to prevent either talks or a second Referendum.

    200:

    "Wealth Tax"

    We need better methods of transferring both wealth and income from the rich (particularly inherited wealth: great to see that the % of the UK rich list due to inherited rather than self-made wealth has been declining significantly) to the not-rich.

    But finding a solution to asset flight is not simple without some sort of global cooperation.

    Comparing the UK and Sweden: Sweden has a better Gini coefficient for income than UK but rather worse Gini for wealth. Sweden tried to address this problem some years back with a wealth tax and succeeded in only temporarily improving their wealth Gini, presumably because the rich temporarily moved their assets out of Sweden's jurisdiction.

    201:

    I own the house I live in and have a modest IRA in a credit union equal to about 3 years "income".... A "wealth tax" as proposed would slowly strip my assets,

    The wealth tax being discussed wouldn't affect you directly, the effect if anything would be a drop in the tax you pay on other income (via tax substitution). The whole point of making it progressive is so people like you don't pay it. Any kind of "applies to everything" tax is not just bad for you, it's a significant administrative burden on the system as well.

    202:

    Meantime, the present prediction for the effects of AGW here (Scotland, circa 57.5N) are for it to be colder and wetter.

    203:

    What Corbyn says means that T May should agree with the EU to take no-deal off the table: takes two to tango : its meaningless for the UK to unilaterally take no-deal off because no deal is what happens if the UK cannot come up with a deal that passes both parliament and the EU.

    The best bet for taking no deal off is Remain, but I don't think Corbyn is a remainer or that he thinks he is asking T May to switch to Remain before he lifts his boycott.

    204:

    The "tax free threshold" requirement is why when Pigeon talked about a flat tax on all income I kept talking about babies who have savings accounts opened for them, kids doing babysitting and people begging in the street. If you tax all income regardless, all those people now have to go through the tax system. It's a waste of time and effort if nothing else (and there is always something else). Economists call it fiscal drag or something similar.

    Likewise the wealth tax only cutting in after the first million. If you have one million and one dollars of net assets you pay 0.25% of one dollar on that... effectively it kicks in at one million and four dollars :)

    Australia has a possibly official "incidental income" rule that basically says if you happen to make a small profit on something you do for other reasons you can keep it. You can't claim related deductions, but it means that for example if I set up a bulk buy and because I'm experienced I set it up to run a small surplus, I don't have to religiously track the whole process and declare the (for example) $100 surplus as taxable income.

    Having just been through the process of having 250kg of rice in my garage while I ate my way through it, I can't emphasise enough that when setting up bulk buys you need to be ready for people to not pay, pay and not collect, or change their mind about what they want after you've had their order delivered to you but before they pick it up. Ahem.

    205:

    Personally I didn't for a moment think those were your words. I took it to be a quote from the linked article.

    206:

    (Scotland, circa 57.5N) are for it to be colder and wetter.

    En-poss-ee-bleh! How could any part of Scotland possibly get colder and wetter? The inhabitants already die of heat exhaustion if temperatures get above freezing, and burn to a crisp if the sun comes out for more than half an hour. Next thing you'll be trying to tell us that half The Netherlands is already below sea level or something equally ridiculous.

    207:

    I would abolish "limited liability" if I could. Make the shareholders and corporate officers fully accountable for wrongs done by the corporation. I can't. With the note that I'm stating the position in UK law this looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of Limited Liability. LL limits the personal liability of stakeholders in a corporation in the event of bankruptcy of the corporation to the face value of their stake: for example, if you hold 3600 shares of £0-01 in $corporation, your personal liability for that corporation's debts is 3600 * 0.01, ie £36-00. If those shares were trading at, say £3-00 per share your personal loss of net worth would be £10800, which could be written off against any Capital Gains Tax liability in the present or next tax years.

    LL specifically does not offer corporate officials any protection against criminal charges resulting from any acts, omissions or willful neglect of their duties and responsibilities as officers of the corporation.

    208:

    To be fair to Greg and JBS, I think that in general people in the UK and especially in the USA are less used to concepts like general exemptions, thresholds and means testing than we are. Even where their national systems have such things, they are under explained and not widely understood.

    I actually quite like Pigeon’s idea. I agree it’s probably unworkable, but I appreciate how it could work in a certain way, though would question whether all the implications are desirable. The reason I like it is because I’ve always suspected that names and how they play to ideological prejudices are more important than we usually credit. The sort of people who’d regard a socially enforced closed shop labour union with a monopoly over a certain trade as worse than Stalin, never seem to have the slightest problem if you call it the Royal Australian College of Physicians or similar.

    I guess it’s the same way that in Australia businesses adversting their prices ex-GST would attract some unwelcome attention from the ACCC, not to mention the way this would be an own goal in terms of reputation building. Apparently this behaviour is not just legal but normal (even coercively normative) in the USA, and that’s the sort of thing Pigeon’s getting at (I think).

    209:

    Greg: the flip side of the "wealth tax" coin is usually a requirement that it be coupled with a working welfare state, i.e. one that provides cradle-to-grave free-at-point-of-delivery healthcare, unemployment insurance, income support for those who can't work, and a working state pension system. Oh, and probably decent quality social housing as well. (Note that the latter would deflate the housing market substantially, so is impossible to debate in the UK—but it would actually benefit you, because you're not planning on moving anywhere, and your home would drop in value into the zero-rated bracket for wealth tax purposes. Similarly: your pension investments? They get taxed progressively, but you also get a lift from a working state pension system rather than the withered vestige we've got today.

    In other words, it's not about you: it's about massively squeezing the soaring Gini coefficient we've been saddled with by the oligarchs, for the benefit of everyone except the 0.1%.

    Remember, in the USA today about 40% of the population have less than $500 in accumulated assets; in the UK, it's not too different. These people are being hammered by current policies that favour the oligarchs and the elderly (who have paid-up houses with a high book value, and pension savings with ditto, and who turn out to vote for the pro-oligarch party). We need to rebalance things badly. But if we simply try to tax the rich, the rich will find better ways to hide their income.

    210:

    Meanwhile in Australia it's forecast to just keep getting hotter. Peaked at 41 degrees in my back yard today at about 3pm, and 34 degrees inside.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-18/temperature-in-sydney-soars/4471424

    211:

    We need to rebalance things badly.

    Sorry man but I am laughing at you. We already balance things appallingly badly, and the current UK government is doing absolutely everything badly :D

    If your government was in Police custody they'd be lying in a corner claiming the sobriety test was unfair because the room was spinning and the floor wasn't level.

    Mind you, our government would be standing at the custody desk swaying and covered in their own blood while saying "you should see the other guy" and punching themselves in the face every time they got a hand free.

    212:

    The main issue I have with the wealth tax concept is that the truly wealthy people won't have to pay it.

    Of course this applies to income tax and every other tax, and is a consequence of who gets to write the tax laws.

    So first we need a government composed of perfectly spherical incorruptible politicians...

    213:

    I think that in general people in the UK and especially in the USA are less used to concepts like

    I'm sorry, I also have a tendency to forget that other people didn't grow up with an accountant helping them with schoolwork. I have been known to say out loud "it's just maths" while whistle-stopping through fairly complex financial stuff. It's maths plus a whole lot of knowledge of tax, investment, corporation and property law.

    Speaking of which, here's an economist dreaming of a socialist utopia in the Guardian today. Some of the topics we've just been talking about here.

    214:

    Just a random thought: I keep wondering if Elizabeth II will go down in history the way Kamehameha I did. ... when she was born, England was one of history's great empires. Depending on Brexit and when she passes, the backfire from Brexit might conceivably have turned the UK into England, Wales, and various tiny islands. And she presided over this devolution.

    You give her far too much credit for having anything to do with what's going on.

    E2 was crowned in February 1952. The British Empire was already collapsing, largely due to the cost of war loans leveraged by one Theodore Roosevelt in 1940, whose price for US support (prior to Pearl Harbour) was basically the end of the empire in India and Africa. Britain bled dry during the second world war—in September 1945 the nation was barely solvent, and rationing wasn't abolished until 1953. In 1956, the impossibility of keeping the empire east of Suez on life support on a vastly diminished stream of loot (from India) became glaringly obvious. Imperial bureaucracies are a fixed cost: once the size of the empire being governed began to drop, the profitability of operating the remnants also began to drop (bear in mind that the colonized didn't much like it: see, for example, the Mau Mau in Malaysia, and other liberation movements that began to gain traction after the Indian Peoples Congress showed that it was possible to throw off the yoke).

    So Elizabeth II was crowned just in time to ride the thing all the way down.

    Meanwhile, Elizabeth II's childhood was dominated by two events: the war, but more personally, the crisis around her uncle, Edward VIII. E8's forced abdication in 1938 was leveraged because he was too close to Hitler—personal friends, no less—and it was clear to almost everybody that war was inevitable. (The "peace in our time" shtick with Neville Chamberlain? Chamberlain went straight from that aerodrome to Number 10 and ordered up a mind-bogglingly expensive rearmament program. He's remembered for his public words, but his private actions speak volumes.) The abdication crisis nearly turned into a crisis for the institution of the monarchy, and the stress of being king during a world war broke her father's health: subsequently E2 has always pursued one mission in adult life, and that's to preserve the monarchy.

    You do not preserve a notionally-impartial institution by taking sides in a fight that will cause half your followers to question your sanity (Brexit). You preserve it by floating serenely over the surface and let your minions deal with the crap.

    Lizzie has nothing to do with the state of politics in the UK; she provides useful input into diplomatic relations (when the FO bother to ask her) because she's known pretty much every world leader for 75 years, but that's about it. She's not a ruler, she's a unifying figurehead. And there's a pretty good chance that when she goes, it'll mark the beginning of the end for the institution of constitutional monarchy.

    215:

    despite what people think about the British monarch being a mere figure head, Liz is actually very powerful:

    Ahem: that's just a youtube video, optimized for click-throughs to their ads.

    The truth is more like, there are a bunch of powers notionally attached to the crown that remain on the books because they haven't been used for a Very Long Time. By this definition the monarch has a lot of powerful tools. However, if she tries to use any of those levers, it automatically triggers a constitutional crisis, and the outcome of any monarch/parliament showdown since 1649 is that parliament wins and the monarch loses (in extremis, loses their life).

    Nobody's going to behead Lizzie, but it's totally conceivable that if she started acting up, a tame doctor would diagnose dementia (she's 92) and she'd be forced to abdicate in favour of a more tractable monarch.

    If a replacement monarch proved less manageable, then further steps would be taken.

    The only way the monarch gets to exercise those special powers is if the regular political system crashes in flames and whoever's left in charge asks the monarch to flip a coin (e.g. dissolve parliament, triggering a fresh general election).

    Finally, the death penalty is illegal under UK law in all member nations of the union, thanks to the Human Rights Act, which codified the ECHR in UK legal systems. Even if the tories push Brexit through and repeal the HRA (as Theresa May seems to want), it'll still be illegal in Scotland (where the ECHR/HRA rights are baked into the Scotland Act, which makes removing them a constitutional crisis issue).

    216:

    that Greens policies usually eventually become ALP ones. ... we’re playing tug-of-war with the Overton window

    I largely agree, and one of my favourite moments in Australian politics was Pauline Hanson saying when leaving parliament "I have won, my policies are now the policies of the government". I don't like her or her policies, but she had that bit right - the goal of minor parties is exactly to have their policies stolen, put into practice, and lose all their voters to what is now so mainstream and obvious that why would anyone vote for the minor party any more?

    Meanwhile, I'm in NSW so The Greens are not my first choice (hooray factions, legal infighting and sexual harassment coverups). I'm more of the "shifting the policy window within The Greens" group, because I think they've pre-compromised far too much on their green policies and need a good firm kick up the arse. The next elections (state and federal due first half of this year) I will likely volunteer with "The Science Party" who have finally cleaned up their policies and dumped the nasty bits. I am impressed.

    I'm a member of "Save the Planet" and known to the local Greens coven as well as the ALP (and LEAN, the Labour Environment Action Network), because I have volunteered for both at various times. It looks as though I will try volunteering with the scientists. That makes me happy.

    What do we want? Evidence based policy! When do we want it? After peer review!

    217:

    A "wealth tax" as proposed would slowly strip my assets, hastening the day I'll be out on the street, homeless.

    You missed the "progressive" angle, with a zero-rated tier for a reasonable home and pension.

    Which is to say, you'd probably be exempt. (Three year's average income in the UK would be around £75,000, up to £150K if you want to be generous and include the middle class professionals; note I pencilled in a threshold of £250K, or about a decade's average wages.)

    218:

    We already balance things appallingly badly,

    I'm talking about rebalancing in the long term—back to roughly 1950-level inequality in the UK, for example (after the most radical left government in British history brought in a welfare state and a marginal income tax rate of 83% and hammered the hereditary aristocrats with inheritance tax).

    In other words, "rebalancing" because it sounds better than "revolution" as a way of achieving something closer to a working social democratic/socialist state. (Talking about "revolution" tends to bring up unhealthy ideas about achieving goals through mass murder, and I want that off the table as an option before we begin.)

    219:

    Charlie, Just a wee correction regarding coal mines. When you're mining coal using what used to be termed the Welsh Method (because the Welsh coal miners were, a couple of hundred years ago, at the forefront of mining technology) and is now termed longwall mining, you start by digging a long tunnel through your coal seam.

    Then you install a long line of hydraulic roof support machines, huge and wonderfully beautiful things, and then you bring in the face mining machine. Coal mining consists then of cutting away a metre or so of coal from the working face, then making all the roof support machine take a step forwards, towards the working face. The rock roof behind them is then unsupported. At the end of each shift you quite often used to get quite a big area of space, roof unsupported, behind the line of roof supports. The miners used to call it a ballroom, but never went in because the roof here was expected to collapse (and did).

    When you've mined out a seam by longwall mining, that area has always collapsed. It probably hasn't finished collapsing, but it has always mostly collapsed. Coal mines generally consist of seams of coal interspersed with seams of fireclay, sand and so on. All of this lot is fairly porous, so coal mines always need water pumps running 24/7, and also always need ventilation running to clear methane, carbon oxides and the like from the mine.

    As soon as you abandon a mine, it floods, and over time the roadways and other tunnels also collapse. Every single mine becomes first dangerous, then lethal then impassable in fairly short order after abandonment unless it is a shallow pillar & stall working.

    How do I know all of this? My house is built on old mine workings, so researching what was going on seemed like a good idea at the time.

    220:

    Most wealthy people do not accumulate large amounts of actual currency, or currency sitting in a bank account. What they do is invest their money in various investment vehicles, which end up being stocks, shares and the like.

    If you then start trying to levy a wealth tax, then these accumulations of wealth are going to vanish overseas, and likely not be invested in the British economy at all for fear of government confiscation. At a stroke, a wealth tax would dramatically reduce the amount in investment in UK businesses, and at the same time would raise next to no money.

    About all it would do is prove a political point, the point being that these elected politicians are really, really stupid.

    221:

    @Charlie 209:

    The UK Gini income coefficient is not soaring dramatically - its actually been fairly stable recently. The problem is the increasing ratio of extreme %s at the top and bottom rather than the middle 80%

    https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed

    222:

    There seem to be large dollop of British Narcissism fuelling the Brexit Chaos.

    There is this thing that every single time anyone from the EU-utters a single word on anything, a loud chorus of Brexiteer media pundits and politicians will chant: "They loves us, they wants us, they needs us, they don't want us to leave, ever, but we will, once they give us a better deal because they love us ... et cetera".

    Theresa May, George Corbyn and all those ass-clowns writing for Daily Mail, fully believe that running out the clock will finally make the EU "see sense" and give Great Britain the "better than what everyone else has"-Deal that Great Britain clearly, obviously, deserve to have because they are better people than those "Euros"!

    In addition, it seems to be incomprehensible to the UK side that the EU side also possess interests and principles of their own that they will not abandon, even if it will be at significant financial costs to them.

    We seem to have been propelled into an 'Age of Unreason' were 'being right' is seen as better than 'being anything else', including just 'being alive'. Not very different to the mentality of a Suicide Bomber, I'd say.

    All this means that "Games of Chicken" are a perfectly viable strategy for leaders of major western powers to adopt and that Brexit is going to happen because the Tory Government will have to pass legislation to cancel or extend the deadline, with passing legislation being a task they are very clearly unable to perform. I doubt they could pass a round of drinks at this stage.

    I think also that Brexit has to happen because of the toxicity of the whole debate. It will not be useful to cancel or extend A.50, then have the EU parliament fill up with UKIP'ers and Nigel Farange's, their numbers swollen and their fervour newly energised by "The Betrayal of Brexit", and them joining up with Le Pen & Co!

    I have seen a few divorces from narcissist partners and they do not go down quietly. Narcissists have their own grief process. Their "Five Stages" are: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and stalking! The sequence loops back and repeat!!

    I think for the 'Stalking Phase', we can expect generous British, and US funnelled via London, funding for all manner of "Yellow Vests", Len Pen, "Obanites", Alt-Right/News Media and whatever else that the EU can be hammered with as punishment for abandoning Great Britain.

    223:

    Charles W Of course not … Corby wants to be in charge of a UK-style of Venezuela ….. Agree that best bet is ”Remain” – but that is realistically going to require a third referendum …

    Charlie @ 209 Agree with everything you say … but that assumes that the “Wealth Tax” law would be written sanely & with sensible “bottom limits” aren’t we? Oh, look! A whole squadron of Pigs … [ … see also dbp @ 212 … ] @ 214 – THANK YOU for that about Chamberlain – Stanley Baldwin was the one who got us into the mess …. @ 217 … thanks to insane London property prices, even my falling-down Victorian house is probably worth over £1 million, plus the £25k I can’t afford to underpin it … my father paid £2700 in 1948 ….. @ 218 - no too early – I REMEMBER the 1950’s … let’s make it some time between 1960 & 1970 for Gini coefficient, please? … see also Charles W @ 221

    Fajensen @ 222 Yes – almost. IF we can get a 2nd ( or 3rd ) Referendum I predict “Remain” by a sizeable majority & yes, the remaining UKIPpers etc will join with the really unsavoury right - & we will have minor troubles on the streets … but by & large they will become the modern Jacobites, toasting the “King over the Water” & any actual violent protest will be stamped on.

    224: 215 is a very similar analysis to my own; Score another barrowload of own goals for the "Palace of Oathbreakers" generally, and the Brexit faction in particular.
    225:

    My house is built on old mine workings

    My sister has a place in Canmore (and old mining town rejuvenated as a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts). Lots of abandoned mines all over the place, and often no longer any records of where they are — until they collapse and you get a sinkhole,

    For example: https://www.rmoutlook.com/article/dyrgas-gate-sinkhole-turns-six-years-old-20160526

    226:

    "The main issue I have with the wealth tax concept is that the truly wealthy people won't have to pay it."

    The truly wealthy spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year lobbying for more favorable taxes in the US. They put up with Donald Trump in the whitehouse for more favorable taxes. They became vastly more wealthy as the tax system was changed to favor them rather than disfavor them over 50+ years.

    It is a myth that the super rich desperately want the regular people to believe so they give up hope, roll over, and allow them to continue increasing their share.

    227:

    There are very good reasons for limiting the liability for minor shareholders. Major share holders are (officially) liable. But the liabilities that are theoretically present are never (hardly ever) enforced. And perhaps the limitation on the liability for the minor shareholders is too limited. ("You might lose your investment, but that's all.") One of the arguments for the current form of "limited liability" is that it's easy to build in automatic enforcement. That's not true for most alternative formulations.

    But the control of the corporation rests with the major stockholders (more then 10% of the stock), the board of directors, and the CEO. And they aren't legally immune, they're just never prosecuted.

    228:

    Yes, that is true, but sometimes they can't easily.

    For example the Grosvenor family - the Dukes of Westminster - own most of Mayfair and Belgravia and a fair chunk of the rest of the UK alongside substantial assets in the wider world. The Duke's personal assets were valued at something like £9-10billion when he died a few years back. In theory the State should have gotten a 40% inheritance tax bill from that, which was roughly equivalent to the cost of the NHS!.

    They paid no inheritance taxes whatsoever ... indeed I am given to understand the state ended up owing the family money instead.

    Yes, trust funds and so on are deliberately designed to protect family assets should someone die. But there needs to be a limit.

    At the end of the day, Mayfair and Belgravia is in London. It's very hard to pick it up and move it overseas, despite what the ownership of the title deeds say. And it is particularly lucrative, because it houses all lots of embassies and banks and so on.
    Either the returns stay in the UK, in which case it can be taxed, or it leaves the UK, at which point it should be taxed. Would that limit investment? Potentially, but not in a bad way.

    229:

    Unfortunately, I'm not widely read in that area. It doesn't interest me. I occasionally encounter them, so I know they exist, but this doesn't help answer "How do I find them?" It's worth remembering that John Locke wrote quite a bit before the US revolution. And a lot of the people I'm thinking of write Science Fiction (it pays the bills) rather than philosophy (it doesn't)...and the defect there is unless you're really subtle you can't put a complete idea into one story.

    Also, being intelligent political philosophers doesn't mean I agree with them. Robert Anton Wilson had a lot of very good points and arguments, but being intelligent didn't result in pushing a system that I feel would work. Charles Stross has a lot of implicit arguments about what kind of things we should expect governments to do, but his proposals for something that would work are ... at best unconvincing. (But he believes things will fall apart no matter what we try...and he may be right.) Even Alan Dean Foster has come up with arguments along that line...his solution, the Collegatarch (see "The I Inside") might well work, but it's beyond our current technological abilities, and "How do you get there from here?".

    James Hogan has come up with several different approaches, none of them convincing, all beyond our current technological abilities, but some of his proposals don't look unreachable from here. Just unlikely to be reached. And one or two of them might work.

    Just about every major science fiction writer plays with building a better government. I rarely find one that's both convincing and plausibly reachable.

    OTOH, I tend to find the serious political theorists bat-shit crazy. And the economists are worse.

    Part of the problem is that the solution to "largely automated jobs, but many are still required" is intrinsically intractable, and all decent solutions to what it looks like on the far side of that state are strongly undesirable to all those who are currently powerful.

    Now if we could find a sound economic justification for nearly independent large mobile space habitats that would change the complexion of the problem. Especially if we solve the problem of relatively cheap controlled fusion. (I.e., cheap enough that each habitat could/should have its own power source.)

    The problem has two basic parts: 1) what will our technological capabilities be x years in the future. (I include sociology in these capabilities.) 2) how does one transition from the current state to the desired state.

    This is probably why most of the answers, insufficient as they are, come out of science fiction. If your technology is static, then that's not the right place to look, but if it's rapidly changing, no other place is going to consider it. Except futurologists, and they are all ideologues rather than modelers, because it doesn't pay well otherwise. (Even then you've got to be both a good writer and lucky. Compare "Future Shock" with "Profiles of the Future" to see what I mean.)

    230:

    Sigh.

    roughly equivalent to the cost of the NHS deficit!.

    This site really badly needs that 1-2min edit your post feature.

    231:

    It's not that I feel rich individuals should be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money to finance political campaigns...but it's that I don't think they should be able to do so anonymously by hiding behind a corporate veil.

    I can certainly understand grounds for saying there should be limits on the amount one is allowed to spend on a political campaign...but the rules on how to do that aren't clear, and that would validly require a constitutional amendment. (It was said long ago "The power of the press belongs to the man who owns one.".)

    So I consider it worse to have corporations bribing candidates than to have rich sponsors doing so, even though I consider the second abominable.

    232:

    @ Greg - I've had to re-format my hyperlinks twice, bacuse something is dicking with the presence, absence & "shape" of my quote-maks in the links - what's bloody going on?

    You're probably using a word processor rather than an editor to create your posts. Don't use MS Word, or Libre Office or anything like that because they'll use smartquotes (and depending on the font in use, you might not see them.) Use Notepad or something similar and your links should work just fine.

    233:

    What do we want? Evidence based policy! When do we want it? After peer review!

    Do you mind if I steel that for my book?

    234:

    paws4thot @ 207:

    "I would abolish "limited liability" if I could. Make the shareholders and corporate officers fully accountable for wrongs done by the corporation."

    With the note that I'm stating the position in UK law this looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of Limited Liability. LL limits the personal liability of stakeholders in a corporation in the event of bankruptcy of the corporation to the face value of their stake ...

    LL specifically does not offer corporate officials any protection against criminal charges resulting from any acts, omissions or willful neglect of their duties and responsibilities as officers of the corporation.

    You're right. That's how the law was written; how it is supposed to work. I'm commenting on how it actually works, particularly how the courts in the U.S. have come to apply it.

    Protecting shareholders hardly even applies any more. In practice, "limited liability" now protects Corporate Management even from accountability to the shareholders.

    235:

    Damian @ 208: To be fair to Greg and JBS, I think that in general people in the UK and especially in the USA are less used to concepts like general exemptions, thresholds and means testing than we are. Even where their national systems have such things, they are under explained and not widely understood.

    I understand "general exemptions, thresholds and means testing". I have to deal with them every year when I go to figure out my income taxes (Federal and State) either to pay them or more often file for a refund of the over-payment, since taxes have been withheld from every "paycheck" I've ever received. It's one of the reasons I've become so well educated on the way government taxes earned income differently from the way it taxes unearned income.

    I already pay "wealth tax" several times a year[1] as well. Over here, they're called property taxes. And oddly enough, the way they work there is no "threshold" below which tax does not apply, but there is a maximum value above which the taxes are capped.

    I've also paid "flat" taxes for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act, AKA Social Security) & Medicare. Again there's no "threshold", but there is a cap. The first dollar earned is taxed at the same rate as the 128,400th dollar earned. The 128,401st dollar and any dollars above that are exempt from taxation due to the FICA "wage base limit". Medicare taxes are not subject to the FICA "wage base limit".

    [1] Real Estate & personal property taxes for the current year (2019) are due in September of the preceding year (2018), and must be paid by the end of the first week in January to avoid penalty. Property tax on vehicles are collected when the registration comes due.

    236:

    Charlie Stross @ 209: Greg: the flip side of the "wealth tax" coin is usually a requirement that it be coupled with a working welfare state, i.e. one that provides cradle-to-grave free-at-point-of-delivery healthcare, unemployment insurance, income support for those who can't work, and a working state pension system. Oh, and probably decent quality social housing as well.

    If they implemented a "wealth tax" system in the U.S. we wouldn't get any of those benefits. And the system would be rigged so there's no "threshold", but there would be a cap; a maximum value above which there would be no tax.

    How it should work in theory and how it will work in practice are two different things defined by the golden rule - Them what has the gold makes the rules.

    237:

    dpb @ 212: So first we need a government composed of perfectly spherical incorruptible politicians...

    Couldn't we just take the corruptible politicians we already have and run them through a hydraulic stamping mill to form them into perfect spheres?

    Might have to lop off some extraneous bits here and there to smooth the surface, but I don't see where that would be a problem.

    238:

    “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” H.L. Mencken

    239:

    Charlie Stross @ 214: E2 was crowned in February 1952. The British Empire was already collapsing, largely due to the cost of war loans leveraged by one Theodore Roosevelt in 1940, whose price for US support (prior to Pearl Harbour) was basically the end of the empire in India and Africa.

    Teddy died in 1919. I think you mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

    Lizzie has nothing to do with the state of politics in the UK; she provides useful input into diplomatic relations (when the FO bother to ask her) because she's known pretty much every world leader for 75 years, but that's about it. She's not a ruler, she's a unifying figurehead. And there's a pretty good chance that when she goes, it'll mark the beginning of the end for the institution of constitutional monarchy.

    Do you think Charlie will be crowned King? Or will Parliament force them to skip a generation and put William on the throne? Historically, the Williams (I, II, III and IV) appear to have prospered & been more successful than either of the Charlies (I or II).

    240:

    Charlie Stross @ 217:

    A "wealth tax" as proposed would slowly strip my assets, hastening the day I'll be out on the street, homeless.

    You missed the "progressive" angle, with a zero-rated tier for a reasonable home and pension.

    I didn't miss it. I just don't believe it.

    Perhaps I would be exempt under your proposal, but those with the power to control writing the tax laws are never going to implement a tax structure that taxes the weathly more than it taxes me.

    241:

    "Convergent interests"

    There's a book from the late sixties, called "The Strawberry Statement" (of which I have two copies, mine, and one that was my late wife's). It was written by one of the leaders of the Columbia (Univ) student strike in the late sixties. Among the things they did was occupy the University President's office, and they went through his files. Not "conspiracy", but "one dirty hand washing another."

    As I said, I have two copies, one of which I could loan....

    242:

    If I run for office next year, that's going to be one of my bullet points, that Faux "News" is not a news outlet (dammit, Obama wimped out on that). To use his own language, it's a fascist propaganda mill, owned by someone who got annoyed that Australia wouldn't let him outright own 75% of all their media, and, from what I've read, set a corporate environment such that the employees felt it was ok to outright bribe government officials in Oz, the UK and the US, and it has always pushed the bounds to the right of "what was acceptable", until the literal fascists in the US are "just another opinion".....

    Damn it, where's my tumbrels?!

    243:

    Two much decentralization is a Bad Idea. Were the US that decentralized, then, for example, President Eisenhower couldn't have sent the troops into the South in the mid-fifties to desegregate the schools.

    "Smaller government" is a right-wing bugaboo, because it's a lot easier for multi-millionaires and billionaires and companies to own the local government. Look up "company town".

    244:

    There is not a single member of the GOP who is fit to lick Lincoln's shoes, much less any of the Founding Fathers.

    They are 150% wholly-owned toadies of the billionaires.

    245:

    When they start their shooting war, I need to make like Mr. T, and start welding steel on the front of my vehicle.

    A large minivan has a lot more impact than a bullet.

    246:

    There's another thing about the car companies in the US: I really think that, underneath, they've got a lot of reasons to want to go electric, and the reasons are the petrochemical industry.

    It's my belief, based on the fact that they put out fuel-efficient cars, and then, 2-4 years later, put out gas-guzzlers, that they're leaned on, heavily, by oil money.

    Oh, another datum: I cannot buy a hybrid minivan in the US. NO ONE sells them, even though I see the same lines for sale in the UK and Europe as hybrids. THAT is unquestionably oil money.

    247:

    I dunno, I think McConnel is. He's the one who disabled Obama, and he's the one enabling Trump. Most, if not all, of the government shutdown would be over, I think, if he would let bills come to a vote.

    248:

    This is for the whole subthread of corporations/persons.

    In the US, corporations are "artificial persons". The 14th Amendment, section 1, refers to all persons "born or naturalized."

    Corporations are not born or naturalized, in the sense of the authors. Therefore, you shouldn't need a Constitional Amendment, all you need is a law to negate a lot of bad court decisions: "Corporations are not actual persons, and therefore have no reasonable expectation of free political speech."

    Done. I like to refer to this, if I were putting it up, as the Dick Notebart bill. In the mid-nineties, I was working for Ameritech, the Baby Bell that used to be in the midwest, and he was our CEO. During the arguments about deregulating the telecom industry, all who weren't union (I was "management", since I do computers) were REQUIRED to write to our Senators and Congresscritters supporting dereg. When I dallied, my Director told me he didn't like to do it (and I still believe him), but upper management were REQUIRING me not only to do it, but to give them electronic copies of the letters.

    Oh, that's right: right after I started, all us half a dozen new employees were required to attend a hard-sell session, to get us to contribute to the company PAC. (I didn't.)

    Going on, then I'd submit another bill, saying, simply, "Money is not free speech, as anyone in the 1% thereby disenfranchises 90% of the population."

    249:

    Nah. Trouble is, there are good legislators, and this would make more trouble. When my late wife and I relocated to Chicago from Austin, one of our Senators was Paul Simon (not the singer). A couple years later - please, non-USans, remember that a Senator's term is 6 years - he decided to retire from the Senate, and said, in a published interview, that one of the things he disliked was the fact that every single day he was in office, he had to raise $10k for the next election cycle.

    How about a non-compete clause? For as long as you served in Congress, you cannot take a position funded, directly or indirectly, from an industry or company you regulated?

    250:

    Everyone knows that was bought and paid for by the 0.1%.

    As I said, above, it means all of the rest of us (the "takers", as Romney called us) are disenfranchised.

    AND DO NOT MENTION UNIONS IN THIS - THAT IS FASCIST BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!

    And I can PROVE it: about 6 years ago, I did something that NO ONE has ever done: I went to the IRS website and did some searching, including getting help from a very helpful employee there.

    There are just over 6600 "labor organizations" - not all are unions - in the US. Their ENTIRE NET WORTH, including pension funds, strike funds, and property, like union halls, TOTALLED $26B.

    TOTAL.

    Now, less, has Apple added to its $78B IN CASH in the last year or two? How 'bout M$? Or Exxon? Or the medical insurance industry?

    I'd love to put it to unions as to whether they'd give up donating to campaigns if companies were prevented from doing the same.... How fast do you think they'd say 'hell, yes!"?

    251:

    I know I've mentioned this before, over the years: I heard an interview, back in the nineties, with the last living member of FDR's Cabinet, and he said, in so many words, that the reason for the inheritance tax (known by Murdoch & co as the "death tax") was to prevent a class of inherited wealth in the US.

    252:

    Break up Walmart. They have destroyed many small towns.

    Hell, I've mentioned before, I heard a story back in the nineties, that somewhere out west, they opened a store at the edge of a town, and drove EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS, with the exception of the pharmacy, out of business. Then, five years later, they decided it wasn't "profitable" enough, and they closed it, and told folks to go to the nearest one, 30 mi away or so.

    253:

    Please reconsider your last sentence, in the light of the use of commas, or lack thereof.

    254:

    The British Empire was already collapsing, largely due to the cost of war loans leveraged by one Theodore Roosevelt in 1940, whose price for US support (prior to Pearl Harbour) was basically the end of the empire in India and Africa.

    That's a bit of a stretch again FDR.

    In 1939, 1940 the US about 70% against ANY war. Many of them against it even if attacked. FDR knew that there was about a 99% chance of the US getting into the war. But due to public thought there was no way to say that out loud. At times he even made public speeches where he would not commit to war even if attacked. He barely got through Congress a draft and re-armament "just in case".

    He would have lost the election in 1940 if he had supported joining on the side of the UK in any way other than selling stuff to them.

    It was Congress that demanded that the UK (and USSR) pay for stuff. Lend-Lease (which basically was a huge discount on "stuff") was opposed in the Congress via statements such as "the longest single step this nation has yet taken toward direct involvement in the war abroad" by the folks against even that.

    Of course that public opinion was there in spite of at least 4 naval engagements prior to Dec 7, 1941. One of these involved the German sinking of a US destroyer.

    255:

    That comment was supposed to point to Charlie's comment, not JBS.

    256:

    so coal mines always need water pumps running 24/

    And if you're above the water table you might get this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

    258:

    Time was the National Coal Board (NCB) had a bounty for maps of old coal mines and their workings because the NCB was liable under law for all coal mine-induced subsidence anywhere in the UK. The deal was that if you built a house on a known mine site and it subsided you were shit out of luck regarding compensation, if it turned out later the NCB didn't know about it until it happened then you were quids in.

    Someone else mentioned longwall -- my father's work in later life as a fitter in a couple of Scottish collieries was keeping hydraulic coal-cutting and moving machinery working. Longwall was quite a late development in coal-mining and since nearly the shallow easy-to-get coal had already been cut by hand, a lot of longwall operations were done at a sufficient depth that surface subsidence wasn't noticeable even after the backspace (I never heard the term ballroom) collapsed (the term I heard him use was infilled). It took time, a slow movement of the ceiling squeezing down to meet the floor. Normal longwall shearing left support pillars of uncut coal and spoil behind the face since the panzers (the self-advancing hydraulic jacks and shields) covering the cutting machines and loading belts taking the coal and spoil back from the face couldn't carry the total roof load by themselves.

    259:

    are due in September of the preceding year (2018), and must be paid by the end of the first week in January to avoid penalty.

    I've always had trouble with the meaning of the word "due" in that sense.

    To me they are DUE in January but they will take the money up to 4 months early.

    I'm sure it has to due with some arcane phrasing of the state constitution or a 150 year old state law on taxes.

    260:

    to Chicago from Austin, one of our Senators was Paul Simon (not the singer)

    I sort of remember him. I grew up near Paducah Ky, and southern Illinois was a big factor in the lives of the locals.

    Long after I had moved away, my father would refer to him as "Simple Simon" when I visited.

    261:

    with the last living member of FDR's Cabinet, and he said, in so many words, that the reason for the inheritance tax (known by Murdoch & co as the "death tax") was to prevent a class of inherited wealth in the US.

    Which grates a bit as FDR and all his relations were all about inherited wealth and worked hard to keep it.

    262:

    in the U.S. we wouldn't get any of those benefits. And the system would be rigged so there's no "threshold", but there would be a cap; a maximum value above

    I realise that to some extent that is a valid observation of how the US governments work. But at the same time if you always act in accordance with the idea that all government action must inevitable fail, you are doomed. The only two reasonable responses I can see are emigration and suicide. My preference would be that the US reforms slowly and gently, but I fear they will reform dramatically and painfully. Revolutions are only glorious in hindsight.

    My personal approach is to have two goals in mind: what I actually want, and what I think I can get. Hence the "campaign for same sex marriage while wanting marriage equality" above. These sorts of discussions of how things might be, and Quiggin's article on socialist utopia and so on, are useful ways to think through "what I actually want". In a way having Eeyore present is a useful reminder that such people exist, but it's better to have an informed pessimist who says "will not work because..."

    Personally I've experienced a whole lot of significant political system changes in my life, New Zealand switched from a command economy to a free market one (Muldoon really did impose government price fixing), the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal (arguably NZ's highest court), the introduction of MMP (don't like the voting system? Change it), a bunch of changes to how sex is regulated and so on. All of that happened much more democratically than the US or UK commonly permit, possibly because of size as much as anything.

    263:

    Which grates a bit as FDR and all his relations were all about inherited wealth and worked hard to keep it.

    So he was a class traitor, is that the problem? Or is it that he governed through the Great Depression, had a clear-eyed view of what caused it, and tried to set up systems that would prevent it from happening again?

    264:

    "taxation in Britain, and my posts are assuming the British context, where for nearly everyone their income tax is handled automatically by their employer's computer and although everyone is liable, next to nobody has to file a tax return themselves, because this automated system does the necessary."

    "This caricature is laughably out of date."

    Ahem:

    "the vast majority of the UK population don't file income tax returns at all: tax is deducted at source via the employers by PAYE (Pay As You Earn)."

    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/11/brexit-means-brexit.html#comment-2056059

    265:

    "Pigeon talked about a flat tax on all income"

    No, that isn't what I was talking about. That's just what you insist on saying I was talking about no matter how many times I tell you I wasn't.

    "I kept talking about babies who have savings accounts opened for them, kids doing babysitting and people begging in the street. If you tax all income regardless, all those people now have to go through the tax system."

    AFAIK babysitters and beggars do in theory have to go through the tax system (unless they're underage). It's still taxable income, it's just that the amounts are so trivial and the hassle of actually collecting them so great that nobody cares.

    (Benefits are also taxable income, which is really bloody silly, but the minimum tax threshold is a lot more than the benefits so nobody actually pays any.)

    As for underage savings accounts, that definitely happens already. I opened one for myself as a teenager and the building society insisted on knocking a bit off the interest for tax even though I was too young to have to pay it.

    266:

    "...all who weren't union (I was "management", since I do computers) were REQUIRED to write to our Senators and Congresscritters supporting dereg."

    If I couldn't get away with procrastinating until they forgot about it, I'd probably have written a second letter privately, pointing out that the company letter was only written under threat and therefore should be disregarded, what I really think is (blah blah blah). And I'd have written it on a big sheet of something that doesn't fold and decorated it with colourful flowers or something to make sure it attracted more attention than the company letters.

    267:

    "I've had to re-format my hyperlinks twice, bacuse something is dicking with the presence, absence & "shape" of my quote-maks in the links - what's bloody going on?"

    You're writing the post using some der-brained piece of software which has a "dumb quotes" feature that is turned on.

    Somewhere, there will be an option to turn it off.

    (The option will probably call it "smart quotes", but "dumb quotes" is a more accurate name, because they break things (as you noticed) in order to achieve nothing useful.)

    268:

    “The British Empire was already collapsing, largely due to the cost of war loans leveraged by one Theodore Roosevelt in 1940, whose price for US support (prior to Pearl Harbour) was basically the end of the empire in India and Africa.”

    Seriously ? Do you really not believe the Indians themselves might have just had a slight little bit to do with that ?

    This sentence is hogwash and borderline racist

    269:

    A hole appeared in the driveway leading to my parents' house and those of their immediate neighbours. Nobody had any idea this might happen and I still don't think anyone knows anything more than that it was a few hundred years old and a few hundred feet deep. They put a concrete lid on it but it's anyone's guess where the rest of the mine goes.

    Come to that, I'm not even sure what they were digging up. The local mineral resource is salt and it is extracted by solvation and has been since Roman times. The resulting subsidence gives interesting demonstrations of just how far you can twist and distort a half-timbered building without it falling down.

    270:

    This is the British national debt interest payments as a% of gdp

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_national_debt

    The Fact that the British Empire finally collapsed is in no way surprising , the fact that it survived as long as it did is surprising

    271:

    I found this interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/sunday/brexit-ireland-empire.html "The Malign Incompetence Of The British Ruling Class", in fairness, the UK seems to have no exclusive on that phenomenon and there seems to be no lack of it in the private sector.

    272:

    To be fair, I don't credit Kamehameha I with the loss of something like two-thirds of his people: that was due to disease.

    Being on the throne is not the same thing as doing...

    273:

    ...Faux "News" is not a news outlet (dammit, Obama wimped out on that).

    Agreed. If I became president the first thing I would do is withdraw Fox's "White House" press credentials. "It is our opinion that they are nothing more than a propaganda mill."

    Then I'd sic the IRS on the bastards.

    274:

    In many ways, having McConnel come to grief over the shutdown is preferable to having him come to grief over Trump.

    275:

    Sorry.

    ...because it won't look like the Democrats/Deep State are after him.

    276:

    Once you had "native" soldiers with something like a high-school education plus real military experience, it was game over for the empire - guerrilla war is a sergeants war (for the most part.)

    277:

    "Or will Parliament force them to skip a generation and put William on the throne?"

    What for? Prince Charles may be a bit of a div but fucking with the succession is serious shit and nobody expects him to get us into a massive war or go round slaughtering people because they go to the wrong church or anything like that. And he's not exactly a youngster so William will get his turn soon enough in any case. It would just stir up a lot of trouble to achieve nothing useful (a bit like dumb quotes).

    I think people suggest it mainly because they don't like the idea of a monarchy in the first place, and their dislike misleads them into having an idea of the significance of the royals which is a couple of hundred years out of date.

    It is, though, pretty likely that when he does become king he'll call himself something other than Charles because of what happened to the last two. (While the public at large carry on calling him Charles because that's what they've been used to all their lives.)

    278:

    Once you had "native" soldiers with something like a high-school education plus real military experience, it was game over for the empire

    As opposed to the cheap fake military experience that resulting in great British victories like the battle of Gate Pa?

    Technological superiority and a willingness to commit massacres were far more important to the empire than any amount of experience in European warfare. Politics was also important, their divide and conquer systems were genius, in the same sense that Stalin and Mao were political geniuses. They knew what they wanted and they got it, with the cost being paid by others.

    279:

    The only thing important to colonial revolutionaries (such as the Mau Mau, forex) who want control of their own country is the ability to make sure the country costs more to govern than it produces. Nothing else is required.

    I suspect that if the U.K. had not been busy with multiple other matters, including Gandhi in India, they might have kept Kenya, or any other little countries they wanted to keep. Unfortunately, the problem of revolutions breaking out all-over when the U.K. also had responsibilities on the European Continent meant that there was just too much to do.

    If I ever write an "alternate universe" story it will be set in a world where the U.K. gave countries like India and Kenya representation in Parliament and the Empire remained an Empire.

    280:

    ID card scare is overblown. Even the dictatorial hard-right fascist state of Sweden has them...

    If UK had an ID card system, then they could have enforced EU-provided immigration rules, and pretty much 90% of the objection to the EU from the public would have disappeared in a puff of smoke.

    281:

    I'm not going to cover the problem of why the Empire collapsed, but the idea of giving Kenya or India representation in Parliament would not have survived. Most likely that these countries would have been declared Dominions with significant autonomy and a foreign policy decided in London. Ironically, the British Empire would have resembled the European Union.

    282:

    It is, though, pretty likely that when he does become king he'll call himself something other than Charles

    Rumour hath it that Chuck is much enamoured of his grandfather, George VI and conveniently has George as one of his "middle" names and that he'd like to be named George VII on his ascension to the throne. King Arthur is another possibility...

    283:

    The British Empire didn't so much collapse but sit down in a comfy chair and exchange its hobnailed boots for a pair of warm slippers.

    284:

    Troutwaxer @ 232 Ah, right, that explains it … effing MS have “uograded” Word I assume & this now happens. Right. Note-pad it is ….

    JBS @ 225 I don’t believe that level of complexity … no wonder people in the US hate paying taxes … it’s not (just) the money it’s the insane hassle involved.

    & @ 236 As I said earlier, regarding a wealth tax: … but that assumes that the “Wealth Tax” law would be written sanely & with sensible “bottom limits” aren’t we? Oh, look! A whole squadron of Pigs …

    & @ 240 too …. Like you I don’t believe it.

    Incidentally, this was tried in France up until some time in the late 70’ early 80’s. IT DID NOT WORK, but the outsides of private buildings were deliberately kept shabby & falling-apart

    David L @ 254 Well a lot of that was the Deutscher-Amerika Bund, wasn’t it? See this utterly revolting picture - and the date

    Pigeon @ 269 Like this building, you mean? I can testify that no wall, floor or surface is perpandicular to any other wall, floor or surface & that none of those surfaces are planar ....

    & @ 277 Same as George VI was "Bertie" ( Albert Frederick Arthur George )

    Hakan @ 280 PROVIDED that more than one ID is allowed - & NOT the ONLY THE STATE ID model. So that a "valid ID" might be a possible "state" one, a driver's licence, a geriatric's bus-pass ... + one or two others I can't think of right now, f'rinstance.

    285:

    “Prince Charles may be a bit of a div but fucking with the succession is serious shit”

    That depends on whether it’s an external or internal agent doing the fucking....

    There has been speculation that The Monarchy (as hive mind rather than individual”) is of the view that Charles is a divisive figure (and tainted by the whole Diana/Camilla business into the bargain), that his children are seen as a much more saleable proposition, and that (assuming he manages to outlive his mother which seems by no means a dead cert) he may well be persuaded to declare himself out of the running and abdicate himself pretty much straight into retirement.

    As OGH says, Liz has made the continuity of the monarchy a priority, and probably sees the long term viability of the family business as more important than any single member of the family...

    286:

    Do you think Charlie will be crowned King? Or will Parliament force them to skip a generation and put William on the throne? Historically, the Williams (I, II, III and IV) appear to have prospered & been more successful than either of the Charlies (I or II).

    Firstly, parliament can't block Charles from following his ma — not without passing an act of parliament (with the effective status of a constitutional amendment) that would have to be signed into law by the reigning monarch, be that Elizabeth II or Henry IX (Charles has expressed his intention of being crowned a Henry—one of his middle names—rather than going for Charles III).

    Secondly, this presupposes that Charles doesn't predecease his mum, in which case the question is already answered. (That family have very long female life expectancy—it's quite possible she won't die until Charlies is in his late eighties.)

    Thirdly, even if Charles does become king, he won't be king for very long—he'll be the Edward VII to his mum's Victoria. (Edward VII reigned for just 9 years, because he didn't become king until he was 59; Charles is already 70.)

    So we're likely to see Liz followed briefly by Henry IX, and Henry IX to be replaced by King William VIII within a very short period, giving the institution an appearance of instability. Which is why I suspect Liz II's death will mark the beginning of the end.

    287:

    How about a non-compete clause? For as long as you served in Congress, you cannot take a position funded, directly or indirectly, from an industry or company you regulated?

    Not good enough: you run into the British problem, which is that a Minister (ordinary MPs don't have much power unless they're part of the government) can regulate/control industries, award contracts, etc., with zero financial interest ... until they leave office and notionally retire from politics, at which point they suddenly crop up in ridiculously well-paid non-executive directorship roles. (Who could have expected that?)

    You need punitive laws for ex-government members being involved in any industry they regulated for a good long period (5-10 years) after leaving office. And a ban on MPs with shares or paid remuneration of any kind from a given industry having anything to do with that industry while in office (either as committee members or ministers or, in fact, even voting on issues relating to industry funding or regulation as an ordinary MP).

    288:

    Oh, the Indians had a hell of a lot to do with the end of the Raj. But it's an interesting question as to how much longer the imperial occupier would have been able to string things out if the USA hadn't leaned on them hard to shut down the empire.

    Which of course was not entirely selfless: the USA inherited a whole shitload of the British empire's meddlesome propensities in, for example, Iran and Iraq (where the oil came from: see also, Battleships).

    I'm guessing that without the US leaning hard on the UK to shut down the empire, things might have followed a pattern closer to the end of the French empire in Indochina, right down to a festering war of independence and a final Dien Bien Phu like humiliation some time in the late 1940s or early 1950s (and a Soviet-assisted India). Ghandi gets the good press for promoting non-violent resistance, but there were militant independence groups under way at the same time, and it was only a matter of time before things hotted up (as, in the event, they did. during Partition).

    289:

    You didn't see (and fight) the UK Home Office originated plan for the National Identity Register that the Blair government tried to push through in the 00s (killing it was one of the few good things the first Cameron-led government did).

    It was an authoritarian nightmare: not a simple ID-authentication scheme, but something rather more like the citizen registration system China is building their social scoring system on top of. Using biometrics as a key into every single government-related database, loosening restrictions on govt employees accessing personal data, hefty punishments (up to imprisonment) for failing to notify the authorities if you moved within two weeks, mandatory requirement to produce it on demand, oh, and hefty fees for registering and obtaining an ID card (because Home Office).

    As it happens, there is a lightweight identity authentication system in the UK today, the Identity and Passport Office database: about 85% of us have biometric government-issued ID in the shape of a passport. Link the IPO DB up to the DVLA (driver license) database and allow the DVLA to issue "lightweight" identity certification in the shape of a not-valid-for-driving-or-foreign-travel ID card and you could have a more or less global system, with an implicit opt-out for folks with weird religious issues (the whole "Number of the Beast" nonsense) or zero need for it (they've checked into an old age home for good, last stop before the graveyard: or they're just 18 months old).

    But the last time the UK had a mandatory ID card was during the second world war, and it was abolished in the 1950s after a civil rights campaign because the police were using it to harass people.

    290:

    the imperial occupier would have been able to string things out if the USA hadn't leaned on them hard to shut down the empire.

    We still have odd bits of no-nonsense take-no-substitutes parts of the Empire, strangely enough BECAUSE of the USA. Take, for example, the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean which has a British postcode (BBND 1ZZ) but also an American military-post zipcode (96595). We'd have quite happily handed it back to India decades ago but the US military wanted it as an unsinkable aircraft carrier/Airstrip Two and an unsinkable aircraft carrier/Airstrip Two it remains to this day.

    291:

    "If you want to say that the States appointing Senators has different problems, I'll agree with you. I'm just not convinced that they are worse. Yes, it means that we get corrupted Senators from corrupted states. But it also means that the state governments have a lever on the federal government. "

    I live in Michigan, a gerrymandered state - that means when the Republicans win a strong minority, they have a majority in both houses of the state legistlature.

    Next door is Wisonsin, where it was something like Democrats getting 55% of the vote, Republicans getting 60% or more of the legislature.

    The only offices in both states which represent the people.are statewide offices.

    292:

    ""Make the rich pay more tax" doesn't necessarily work well."

    Actually, for the US, very high marginal tax rates worked fine. Now, right-wing economists say that was because things were different then, but they also scream that far lower tax rates would destroy the economy.

    "I've heard a personal account (by a now famous person) from about 1960 of working in a garage, fueling cars for the owners.

    $richguy gets his $prestigecar filled up at a cost, even then, of several £. $attendant asks for a tip, and is given £0-02, with the statement "The government takes 98% of every pound I make. Here's the rest of that pound". (rates have been altered slightly, to require less knowledge of UK currency)"

    I think that that should be classified under 'rich people being @ssholes', rather than economic analysis.

    293:

    OK under this proposed taxation system let us suppose there is a company (C) with a part-time job opening that pays £10000 annually. Now suppose there are two applicants for this job, A and B. A is unemployed and this would be their only job, which falls below the tax threshold. So if C employs A it costs them £10000. B has another part-time job at company D paying £10000 already so if B takes this job his combined earnings are above the tax threshold (let's say that's £12500). The tax liability is split between both employers so he has taxable income of £3750 at each employer. Let's say the basic rate of income tax is 10% that's £375 that BOTH C and D have to pay the government as tax annually for employing B at his net £10000 from each. So it costs company C more to hire B than to hire A, and B costs D more if he gets another job. The only way this problem doesn't occur is if there is no lower tax threshold and everyone pays the same rate (no higher tax rate bands either).

    294:

    You presume that the people who are anti-Eu and the propaganda outlets are all operating in good faith. Even if the government had bothered to try and deal with the EU immigrants that it was allowed to do so, the propaganda would just have lied or pivoted to something else. I mean we're in a system and culture so degraded that boris Johnson lied yesterday or the day before about mentioning Turkey, claiming he hadn't spoken about lots of Turks coming to the UK from the EU after it joined, when in fact he had, several times. Yet nobody but some people on twitter seem to have noticed or care about it.

    Moreover, there is a constant issue with the British government that anything which sounds like a good idea in another functioning democracy such as Sweden, will be implemented in the most authoritarian and retrograde way possible, leading to massive hardship and nastiness.

    295:

    Technological superiority and a willingness to commit massacres were far more important to the empire than any amount of experience in European warfare.

    Or, as Belloc put it:

    Whatever happens we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

    296:

    I disagree, that's not a good question. I think that the Empire was DOA by WWII. At most, I could see Singapore and Kendah remain if the Malaysian independence movement had been more anti-Chinese. Short story: Chinese in SE Asia have the same stereotypes as Jews in Europe (along with the pogroms). I could also see them trying to keep South Africa in, with all the problems that would introduce.

    A better question would be would the Empire have survived if there was no WWI and no Spanish Flu. A note that the Indian National Congress was organized by veterans of WWI.

    297:

    Ironically, the British Empire would have resembled the European Union.

    Damn! That would have sucked!

    /snark

    298:

    How about this: Pay your legislators really well, by which I mean millions and give them great pensions (so they don't have to earn a living afterwards.) When they retire they can have any government job for which they're qualified, run for another office, teach civics (wouldn't that be awesome) and be paid at their pension rate, not the usual salary for the job. But they can't take a job in the private sector for ten years.

    Also, public finance of elections is a big one if you want to avoid corruption. (I think this is already done in the U.K.)

    299:

    Your argument that "CO2 matters in climate because Venus" has a hole: Venus has a lot more atmosphere than Earth and the ground level pressure is 92 Earth atmospheres. Even if Venus had the same atmospheric concentration as Earth, the ground-level temperature would still be higher.

    A chart of temperature and pressure vs altitude on Venus gives a temperature of 75C at ~1 Earth atmosphere; c.f. 14C average for Earth. This still supports the argument of CO2 greenhouse heating but the effect is not nearly so strong as you claim.

    300:

    Certainly you don't need to look at Venus to say anything about CO2; we have lab experiments and measurements on earth looking up and in space looking down, which enable us to say almost everything we need to know about CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

    301:

    That would only slightly ameliorate things. Power attracts corruptible personalities and crazed lunatics, so they'd find ways around it. Our lawmakers already get paid reasonably well and get decent pensions.

    302:

    Charlie @ 289 Which is why I proposed a polycentric "more-than-one-card-acceptable" scheme, as I too remember Blair's "ID" ideas, shudder. Also guthrie @ 294 Moreover, there is a constant issue with the British government that anything which sounds like a good idea in another functioning democracy such as Sweden, will be implemented in the most authoritarian and retrograde way possible

    303:

    whitroth @ 247: I dunno, I think McConnel is. He's the one who disabled Obama, and he's the one enabling Trump. Most, if not all, of the government shutdown would be over, I think, if he would let bills come to a vote.

    Being "a greedy, opportunistic bottom feeder bought and paid for by the fossil fuels oligarchy" does not make one an Eminence Grise. It just makes you lower than whale shit; one of the scumbag lizard people.

    304:

    whitroth @ 251: I know I've mentioned this before, over the years: I heard an interview, back in the nineties, with the last living member of FDR's Cabinet, and he said, in so many words, that the reason for the inheritance tax (known by Murdoch & co as the "death tax") was to prevent a class of inherited wealth in the US.

    "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural."
         Thomas Jefferson

    It wasn't just FDR's cabinet. The idea that inherited wealth is a threat to democratic governance goes back to the Enlightenment. Jefferson got the idea from Adam Smith.

    305:

    David L @ 254: Of course that public opinion was there in spite of at least 4 naval engagements prior to Dec 7, 1941. One of these involved the German sinking of a US destroyer.

    Did you have a friend on that good Reuben James?

    306:

    _Moz_ @ 262:

    "in the U.S. we wouldn't get any of those benefits. And the system would be rigged so there's no "threshold", but there would be a cap; a maximum value above"

    I realise that to some extent that is a valid observation of how the US governments work. But at the same time if you always act in accordance with the idea that all government action must inevitable fail, you are doomed.

    It's a good thing then that I don't always act that way.

    I'm more "You gotta' keep a close watch on the bastards, 'cause you know they're gonna' try to screw us again if we let them."

    307:

    The only way this problem doesn't occur is if there is no lower tax threshold and everyone pays the same rate

    That appears to be the essence of Pigeon's position, but we're not allowed to call it a flat tax (or income tax). In this case, the employer pays tax based on how much they pay in wages. Calling it PAYG or calling it whatever Pigeon calls it, it's still paid by employers.

    It's apparently also going to be paid by companies when they pay dividends, banks when they pay interest, customers when they pay sole traders and also foreigners whenever they transfer anything of value to a UK taxpayer (the number of which will probably drop as a result of the difficulty of getting said foreign entities to register with the UK tax system).

    Saying "employers don't have to record the details" just means it's going to be impossible to audit the result (and surely no employer would take advantage of that).

    308:

    Iran and Iraq (where the oil came from: see also, Battleships)

    You might be interested in this video on how oil was the only thing of importance in WWII at a time when the US produced 70% of the world's oil and Venezuela and the USSR produced most of the rest.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVo5I0xNRhg

    It explains why Japan went to war and how the shortage of oil drove every major German strategic decision, and sparked Hitler's fights with his generals.

    And how certain armchair generals are wrong to claim that Germany should have driven the British from the Middle East before invading Russia (there were essentially no Persian Gulf oil fields at the time, and no way to get such oil back to Europe). Rommel crossing Suez and advancing to Basra would have gained nothing but sand. Besides, the Italians (who unbeknownst to them were sitting on an ocean of oil in Libya) had no oil for the Italian navy to ship supplies that would make such an advance possible.

    Or that the Germans should have driven on Moscow instead of turning south to encircle and destroy the 600,000 troops of the Soviet southern front around Kiev. The big mistake was resuming the advance on Moscow instead of ignoring Moscow and going for the Caucasus oil fields in 1941 instead of a year later. Russian oil from Baku was shipped by barge up the Volga. Seizing Stalingrad would in effect cut the jugular of the Soviet Union (the goal of Fall Blau the following year). In late summer 1941, Guderian after his Kiev encirclement was as far From Stalingrad as he was from Moscow, and Soviet resistance on the southern front had been shredded.

    German generals like Rommel and Guderian were like pampered athletes, primadonnas who had no understanding of larger economic issues underpinning the war effort.

    The war was essentially won and lost in the Caucasus, the largest oil producing area outside of the US in the 1940s. Had Germany been able to seize these oil fields and simultaneously deny them to the Soviets, Germany would no longer be short of oil and the Red Army would have to fight on foot and the Red Air force would be grounded due to lack of oil. Without oil the Russians never could have launched a counter attack let alone advance to Berlin.

    While a German advance to the Urals was a logistical fantasy, a stalemate on the Eastern front that left Germany in control of the Baltics, Belorussia, Ukraine and Caucasus is as good as a win for Germany. With a stalemate and possibly a separate peace in the east, the Germans could have tripled the number of divisions defending the Atlantic wall, making D-Day almost impossible.

    Until maybe the Americans drop the A-Bomb on Berlin.

    WW2 was truly the first oil war.

    309:

    One thing the tax office in Australia struggles with is cash-based businesses. The ones I'm used to are things like music festivals and rallies, but IIRC pubs and tradespeople are the big players of concern. Auditing them is tricky because there's no simple relationship between what they buy and what they sell - the input cost of a litre of beer is easy, but was it sold during happy hour for $1 or after midnight for $10? Likewise a plumber - the hardware they buy is easy, but did they spend an hour on the job and 7 in the pub, or 8 on the job? Was the job straight cash, a mix, or exactly what it says on the paperwork?

    What makes it slightly easier is that wages, hours worked and staff details have to be recorded and receipts/pay slips given to everyone. If a pub says "we paid 400 hours in wages to 40 staff but only sold $10000 worth of beer" the tax office has a hearty laugh then says "get in the van".

    Simplifying that by saying the employer doesn't have to account for employee payments in any detail, not even "we paid Alice $100 and Bob $100", means not just that Alice and Bob are SoL if they think they've been underpaid, but the tax office just lost a lot of insight into the business. "yeah, we paid $5000 in wages but most of that went to me because I own the pub"... who can argue, since there's no record-keeping required?

    310:

    Besides, the Italians (who unbeknownst to them were sitting on an ocean of oil in Libya)

    Oddly enough the Japanese were sitting on a small sea, if not an ocean of oil in Manchuria which they conquered back in 1931. The Daqing oil field was discovered in 1959 and it is still producing significant amounts of oil today (1 Mbpd according to Wikipedia which is never wrong).

    This is a minor plot point in the milSF time-travel story "Zipang", a manga version of "The Final Countdown" from the Japanese POV (JMSDF Aegis cruiser from late 1990s ends up in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Hilarity ensues).

    311:

    Parliament can't block Charles from following his ma — not without passing an act of parliament (with the effective status of a constitutional amendment)

    And not just the parliament of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Nortern Ireland. The Perth Agreement of the 2011 CHOGM harmonised succession laws across the Commonwealth realms, and this recent example shows that changes in succession would also require legislation in Australia (in Australian parliament and in each state parliament per the 2011 precedent), Canada, NZ and a host of Caribbean and Pacific island nations. If the UK made a change to skip over Charles unilaterally, there is a risk that the succession would not be in harmony across the Commonwealth leading to a situation where Henry IX is king of some countries but not of the UK. Sometimes people appear to believe the monarch of Australia (for instance) is ex official the monarch of the UK, but that simply isn’t the case.

    The interesting thing is that choosing a different line of succession is a real option for Commonwealth countries who wish to retain the present form of government unchanged while transitioning further away from the historial relationship with the UK. Harry has always been very popular, for instance, and I guess more recently. But there are still plenty of Hapsburg, Bourbon and Hohenzollern heirs banging around Europe and I don’t see any good reason to limit the options to the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The concept would sort of require the individual being willing to move to and become a citizen of the country involved, renouncing their current nationality (assuming these are different of course). It’s not that big an ask, when you think about it, and it was pretty common back in the heyday of monarchy.

    I should point out, because we’re in a world where expressing a point of view is inevitably taken as advocating for it, that this is not something I support or my own preferred path forward for Australia. I feel I shouldn’t need to make this point, but apparently I have to. My own preference is for constitutional change to recognise the presence and primacy of pre-European Australian people and their ownership and stewardship of the land, as part of re-evaluating how our legislatures and executive committees and individual executive roles relate to each other and to a broader range of consultative processes than are presently available. A revived ATSIC with reinvigorated election processes. A second Senate, perhaps. It has to be not just about “recognition”, but about embracing the richness of indigenous culture and knowledge as an important component of the future.

    For bad reasons, none of them pleasant to discuss, this viewpoint is still outside the “left” edge of the Overton window in Australia at the moment. I’m in the camp that says mostly evil is a product of ignorance, and as Vimes would say “They are not in possession of the facts”. The problem is the resistance to acquiring “facts” on display in so much of the community (and the world). That makes it the job of everyone in possession of an understanding of the implications of some of this information that is currently inexpressible in the mainstream to relieve others of their ignorance - but it’s always harder than it sounds!

    312:

    I'm more "You gotta' keep a close watch on the bastards, 'cause you know they're gonna' try to screw us again if we let them."

    Ah good, you understand the dilemma of living in a democracy. Democracy means rule by the people, which means us slobs. If we want democracy to work, we've got to spend the hours at the meetings, doing things we don't have any knack for and don't enjoy, like keeping the pols informed about reality, or trying to keep politicians and bureaucrats within spitting distance of honest and caring about keeping the system going, even though the damn thing is one huge kludge that needs constant tinkering.

    The problem with democracy in general is that most people don't actually want to do the work of running the place: not the work of being an elected or even electing a politician, but the work of speaking up in front of the school board, or taking a seat on your local planning group, or whatever. There's an enormous amount of that stuff that needs doing, and it's primarily done by volunteer labor. That's the real democracy. If you won't (or can't) do it, then power inevitably reverts to those who will do it, and pretty soon you're complaining that you're living in a plutocracy, or an oligopoly, or whatever.

    Ben Franklin was wrong: it's not that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, it's that the price of democracy is eternal participation.

    313:

    Greg Tingey @ 284: replied to JBS: I don’t believe that level of complexity … no wonder people in the US hate paying taxes … it’s not (just) the money it’s the insane hassle involved.

    I wouldn't really mind if it was just the "insane hassle". It's all I've ever known.

    "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
         — Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

    What really pisses me off is the disparity in the way unearned income is treated in relation to earned income ... and how, if someone like me does manage to accrue any "unearned" income it's still treated differently (taxed at a higher rate) than the "unearned" income of those who don't have to work for a living.

    My wages have always been taxed at a higher rate than any equal amount of dividends or capital gains. While I have been allowed to defer the taxes on my IRA and 401k contributions, there were strict limits on how much I could "contribute".

    When withdrawn, the "increase in value" from those tax deferred savings are taxed as simple income, rather than at the lower rates for carried interest, dividends or capital gains. Note I put "increase in value" in scare quotes, because for the last 10 years or so the IRA has been earning less than the rate of inflation & the 401k rises and falls in value along with the stock market. In the last year it's plunged.

    314:

    JayGee @ 285:

    “Prince Charles may be a bit of a div but fucking with the succession is serious shit”

    That depends on whether it’s an external or internal agent doing the fucking....

    There has been speculation that The Monarchy (as hive mind rather than individual”) is of the view that Charles is a divisive figure (and tainted by the whole Diana/Camilla business into the bargain), that his children are seen as a much more saleable proposition, and that (assuming he manages to outlive his mother which seems by no means a dead cert) he may well be persuaded to declare himself out of the running and abdicate himself pretty much straight into retirement.

    As OGH says, Liz has made the continuity of the monarchy a priority, and probably sees the long term viability of the family business as more important than any single member of the family...

    Yeah. Hadn't thought it from the point of view of The Monarchy, just noticed the parallels between Eddie 8 wanting to marry a divorcee who was also a Roman Catholic. Not sure whether Camilla is a Roman Catholic, but I know she has been. And as you say there's that whole Diana business. It's just idle curiosity because I've heard both sides of the argument. Don't really know if I will live long enough to to see what happens.

    I don't really have an opinion as such, being over here on the other side of the pond, although I note that the Royal Family does seem to be pretty good at attracting the tourist dollars (maybe even tourist Euros & Yen) and that has to be a consideration balance-of-trade-wise.

    315:

    Charlie Stross @ 287: You need punitive laws for ex-government members being involved in any industry they regulated for a good long period (5-10 years) after leaving office. And a ban on MPs with shares or paid remuneration of any kind from a given industry having anything to do with that industry while in office (either as committee members or ministers or, in fact, even voting on issues relating to industry funding or regulation as an ordinary MP).

    I don't suppose there's any chance they'd bring back Drawing and Quartering for that?

    316:

    Referring again to the Perth Agreement, the effects across all Commonwealth realms including the UK were (quoting from Wikipedia but list formatting added):

    • "replacing male-preference primogeniture, under which male descendants take precedence over females in the line of succession, with absolute primogeniture;
    • "ending the disqualification of those married to Roman Catholics; and
    • "limiting the number of individuals in line to the throne requiring permission from the sovereign to marry.
    "However, the ban on Catholics and other non-Protestants becoming sovereign and the requirement for the sovereign to be in communion with the Church of England remained."

    Therefore I'm pretty sure the Catholicism issue isn't a thing anymore, unless the Prince of Wales were to convert to Catholicism himself. Note that permission (from his mum) to marry Camilla was needed when it happened, so it's not like that is a potential cause for anything much now.

    Charles is not especially popular in Australia either, and some say this may be the tipping point for the minimalist republican option, where we change all references to The Crown to something very neutral and start calling the Governor General the President. Personally I think this is more complex than it sounds and provides ample opportunity for mischief because "something very neutral" is one of those placeholders that would itself be a tug of war trophy.

    317:

    Welfare responsibilities vary dramatically between provinces. Municipal government power and mandate is defined by the provincial governments. Municipal governments do not exist in the constitution as an entity, and only exist as defined by their respective provinces.

    In Ontario it is a municipal responsibility to administer welfare payments. Alberta and BC hold that power at the provincial Ministry level. Not sure about the other provinces at this point, theoretically any of them can devolve or retake that responsibility at any time.

    In BC it is further complicated by differing municipalities having different levels of responsibility, defined by different Acts. More after 300 if it is of interest to anyone but a dusty political science wonk such as myself.

    318:

    I really doubt the Germans could manage the logistics for a push on the Caucasus in 1941, Stalingrad may be as close to Rostov as Rostov is to Moscow but Baku is as far from Stalingrad as Stalingrad is from Rostov. Operation Uranus would have taken place in the winter of 1941/42 using the shock armies that attacked between Moscow and Leningrad. You are also doubling the front and the Germans will still have their original issues with winter gear and even if they take the oilfields, the ones that they did capture in the Stalingrad offensive in 1942 ware so wrecked that (from memory) I believe the estimates were it would take a year to get them into production. Then there is the issue of transporting the oil back to Europe.

    319:

    DD @ 308 WW2 was truly the first oil war Erm, no. Anglo-Persian - the forunner of BP, I think ... Their products were essential for the Grand Fleet - the "Queen Elizabeth" class superdreadnaughts ran on oil, as did all the more recent ships. WWI was also an oil war, "Jellicoe Specials" of Welsh coal notwithstanding.

    Heteromeles @ 312 ... or trying to keep politicians and bureaucrats within spitting distance of honest ... AND SANE - let's not forget that. Not when the tories have gor rabid brexiteers laying waste the moderates & the exact same happening at the other side, where "momentum" ( Militant under another name ) are trying to remove anyone sane, or who looks like a Social Democrat. The exact same problem applies to small organisations everywhere - who actually wants the work of being, say Treasurer or Secretary of an Alloment association or a Morris Side? THEN you get some pathetic very small-time power-grabber or control freak in the job & - if you are luacky, the oragnisation survives - sometimes they don't to everyone's loss.

    JBS You DO REALISE that, in GB, until some time in the late 70's-early 80's a writers' income, after the actual year of publication was treated as Unearned, don't you? Define "unearned Income" ... [ It's why so many Brit writers then, re-located to Man or "Eire" ]

    320:

    Re Pigeon's suggestion,

    Would not a flat tax of say 35-50% and a universal basic income of say 10-20 thousand pounds more or less sort the issue that flat taxes aren't fair? (Flat taxes seem acceptable for every other tax from vat to speeding fines, I'm not sure why income tax is something we get up in arms about)

    321:

    Would not a flat tax of say 35-50% and a universal basic income of say 10-20 thousand pounds more or less sort the issue that flat taxes aren't fair?

    It would definitely help. But people are complex, and when they mix things get even more complex. There are reasons, sometimes good reasons, for the complexity of law and specifically tax law. Society works better with smaller wealth disparities, for example, and progressive taxation is one way to discourage both great wealth and great poverty. So something more complex than your idea (itself more complex than Pigeon's) is probably desirable.

    (Flat taxes seem acceptable for every other tax from vat to speeding fines, I'm not sure why income tax is something we get up in arms about)

    Pragmatically, because income tax is where a great many transfer payments take place, everything from progressive taxation to the US mortgage interest subsidy. The extreme case of "let's just not" means either discarding all the stuff currently done via income tax, or coming up with new ways to do it. Either way it's not going to be as simple as "yippee, burn the tax code we're free".

    One example: imagine a country that has some form of public health care, and someone with a significant disability. Specifically, one that takes more than the basic income to support a decent life but also prevents the person from working. Somehow we have to get extra money to this particular person... the tax system will be involved, not least as the source of funds. But do those fund attract income tax. Ooops, now we have complexity back.

    Things are different now to how they've been in the past, and they're generally more complex. In many cases it's "just" that existing complexity is more visible (for example kids in Yemen and Chicago can talk to each other, and material from either can go viral and be seen by more people than existed in 1900). But in others it's the combinatorial explosion of multitudinous factors that, if they existed at all in 1900, have now been joined by so many new ones that they might as well all be new. AGW existed in 1900, for example, but it was tiny. So did "the wireless" although that was perilously close to theoretical. But there were no cities with more than 10M people, and only a billion or so people total. These days we have billions more people and they call all talk to each other.

    For taxation there are new problems - it's trivial to move large amounts of money round the world very quickly - but also new opportunities - it's easier to track that money than ever before. How we tax that money is a bit of an open question, because while there are lots of ideas the current philosophy of money makes it hard to implement any of them.

    322:

    Germans don't need to go to Baku, only cut off oil shipment on the Volga by seizing Stalingrad. All they needed to meet their own oils needs was Grozny and Maikop in the norther Caucasus.

    And without oil, there is nothing to fuel such a Soviet counterattack, all the tanks in the world being useless without petrol. So any such Soviet counterattack would have ended up a disaster like Operation Mars (which was directed against an equally exposed salient at Ryzhev). Furthermore, this alternative history German position at Stalingrad would have its flanks defended by other Germans, not low grade Italians and Romanian troops as in our timeline's Stalingrad.

    But, you are right, in many ways the key to the war was Baku.

    The Allies understood this, which is why the developed the plans for Operation Pike early in the war when it looked like Hitler and Stalin were going to be allies after dividing up Poland between them. A single mass bomber raid would have turned Baku into an inferno and taken with it 90% of Soviet oil production, essentially crippling the Russian war effort.

    Which brings us to the only good strategic reason for an Axis Mediterranean offensive prior to Barbarossa. As I noted there were no Persian Gulf Oil fields at the time but Rommel taking Suez would have enormous repercussions.

    Not that cutting off British shipping was the goal. British shipping did not go through the Med until after Italy fell, it went around the Cape of Good Hope. Prior to then, British convoys sailing the Med would be decimated by Axis dive bombers based in Sicily. Those that tried (like the emergency Tiger Convoy shipping supplies to 8th army) suffered unacceptable loses before they could reach Alexandria.

    In this sense Gibraltar was unimportant and Malta could be avoided by shipping through the French Tunisian port of Tunis. With the loss of Suez, the British would have probably abandoned these exposed and useless outposts.

    What Rommel reaching Suez would do was trigger an all out Arab revolt against the British. A smaller revolt in Iraq had to actually be squashed by the British. But in this timeline, a defeated British army would be forced to retreat back as far as East Africa and India. This would isolate the rest of the Middle East and the Balkans from British influence.

    So no Yugoslav revolt against the Axis, and no staunch Greek resistance against the Italians. So no Balkan campaign delaying Barbarossa by a few critical weeks (though the late spring thaw and raspunitza mud conditions probably did more to delay the start of Barbarossa).

    But most importantly Turkey would join the Axis. The Germans actually obtained a copy of Operation Pike's planning documents after the fall of France. They understood the Soviet's oil vulnerability and their Achilles heel at Baku. Luftwaffe bombers based in eastern Turkey could have performed their own version of Operation Pike, crippling the Soviet Union on the first day of Barbarossa. Without oil during the entire Russian campaign, the Soviets would have been in a hopeless position.

    Under these conditions a complete collapse and total defeat of the USSR becomes very possible.

    (I should try this strategy next time I play HOI3)

    323:

    Then the decisive element would how big was the Soviet strategic oil reserve in 1941. I am extremely sceptical that the Germans could extend a sustained supply line to Stalingrad in the winter of 1941/42 to hold the city. Though it might work in HOI3. The Germans do not have the divisions to hold the 2.k - 3k miles of front resulting from that action.

    324:

    how big was the Soviet strategic oil reserve in 1941

    http://www.visions.az/en/news/580/588903a7/

    Stalingrad was a prime target for Hitler. It is enough to look at a map of oil deposits and oil pipelines in the east during World War II to imagine the possible development of the war if the city had fallen. In that case the Germans would have controlled the Volga, the main artery of the USSR, and would have cut off the Urals, the location for virtually all the evacuated factories. Oil reserves in the isolated part of the USSR, where the main body of the Red Army was deployed, would have lasted for 10 or 15 days.

    As for other Soviet sources of oil:

    https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8512/could-the-soviet-union-have-continued-fighting-world-war-ii-without-caucasus-oil

    "Hitler had a big point though. In 1940 Baku was producing 22.2 million metric tons of oil, comprising 72% of total Soviet oil production. In 1941, it produced 25.4 Mt"

    Source: http://karbuz.blogspot.com/2006/10/oil-logistics-lesson-from-wwii-3.html, which sources in turn from "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power" by Daniel Yergin

    I'll need to see if 1941/42 estimates exist, but 72% loss would likely cripple USSR.

    As far as Soviets migrating oil production East, the same article continues:

    All the nine drilling offices, oil-expedition and oil-construction trusts as well as various other enterprises with their staffs were transferred to an area near Kuybishev, (Russia Federation in Tartarstan near the Ural Mountains north of Kazakhstan). This city soon came to be known as "the Second Baku".

    Despite the severe frost the drillers started searching for oil and thanks to day and night working, the Bakuis in the region of Povolzhye increased the fuel extraction in "Kinelneft" trust that first year by 66% and by 42% in entire region of Kuybishev. As a result, five new oil and gas fields were discovered and huge oil refinery construction projects were undertaken, including the first pipe line between Kuybishev and Buturslan was built that same year.

    No numbers are given for totals, but if Baku was 72%, plus Grozny and Maikop probably adding up to at least 5-10% more, the rest of Eastern USSR was at most 20-25% - and even oncreasing that WHOLE by 66% would only get you 40% of pre-caucasus-capture totals.

    325:

    (Flat taxes seem acceptable for every other tax from vat to speeding fines, I'm not sure why income tax is something we get up in arms about)

    Not everywhere! In Finland, the speeding fines beyond the lowest ones are affected by the perpetrator's income, and there is a news story every couple of years about an angry millionaire speeding and getting fined for it. Angry, because the fines seem to hurt their wallet, which to me kind of seems to be one of the points of fines.

    A flat VAT is a bad thing, in my opinion, exactly because it is really a regressive tax - those with less money pay more VAT from their income. The political situation here is not very receptive to the idea of lowering the VAT and increasing progressive taxes to nullify that, but it's what I'd like.

    326:

    This write up:

    http://karbuz.blogspot.com/2006/10/oil-logistics-lesson-from-wwii-3.html

    provides an excellent analysis of Soviet oil vulnerability and details of Operation Pike planning.

    327:

    The problem about such taxation systems are that they are vindictive, more than regressive. The top rate hit 101% once in the UK, and quite poor people with only private savings (in lieu of pensions) were penalised. Punitive death duties did massive harm to the environment by forcing sell-offs to corporate purchasers and for unsuitable building. The current ones are no better, just differently vindictive. ,hj

    328:

    I meant progressive! We had a brief period of sanity, with all income treated the same way and capital gains tax the same as the top level, but not for long.

    329:

    A Russian-speaking friend claimed that "brekzit" had become a verb in some eastern-European parts, meaning: saying goodbye to everyone as if you're about to leave, but then not actually leaving.

    330:

    DD @ 322 As I noted there were no Persian Gulf Oil fields at the time UTTER BOLLOCKS - PLEASE read my previous link about Anglo-Persian ( which became BP ) ??????

    331:

    I was thinking more of this one... http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/09/d5/d3/d5/historic-view-of-bullocks.jpg

    Tricky to walk inside, not only because nothing is level or square or planar, but also you get weird mangled-perspective effects like that room in the Science Museum which throw you off.

    332:

    Damian, I am not disputing your claims about the importance of the Caucasian oil fields to the Soviet war effort but to the claim that the Germans could attacked Stalingrad much earlier then they did in 1942. They did not take Kiev before September 1941 so when they took Rostov in November 1941 those forces were reliant on road supply from a rail head probably not far from Kiev. I no longer have good references for that sort of thing to hand. However, they did not keep Rostov but abandoned it shortly after and I would say that lack of supply was a significant factor and they did not have another go until the summer of 1942 and no drive on Stalingrad is possible without a secure hold on Rostov and the Donbass. We can agree to differ and note I am not saying cutting the Soviet Union from the oil would be insignificant but that I really doubt that it could attempted earlier than it was even then it required more troops and more importantly equipment than the Reich had at its disposal. The real issue with the assorted Romanian/Hungarian/Italian formations holding the Don bend was the lack of artillery and antitank assets and much of what they had was obsolete.

    333:

    Greg Tingey @ 319: JBS
    You DO REALISE that, in GB, until some time in the late 70's-early 80's a writers' income, after the actual year of publication was treated as Unearned, don't you?
    Define "unearned Income" ... [ It's why so many Brit writers then, re-located to Man or "Eire" ]

    "Unearned Income" would be any income that is NOT "Earned Income"; i.e. not derived from work. Think "economic rents" in its broadest meaning; interest, dividends, capital gains ...

    Royalty payments to writers would not, in my opinion, be "unearned" no matter how the IRS or the Inland Revenue might "treat" them. IF, however having them "treated" as "unearned" is advantageous to the writers in terms of the taxes they have to pay on their income, I wouldn't object.

    I don't even object to a modest advantageous tax treatment for unearned income, but the system as it stands now has gotten out of whack. It's become too extreme when billionaire investors pay less total taxes than do their secretaries (which flaw in the system I note has been pointed out by a billionaire investor).

    And it seems those in power in Congress want to make it MORE unfair rather than less. Although, maybe the Democrats in the House will manage to reverse that trend. Who in Parliament is going to attempt it?

    334:

    (Benefits are also taxable income, which is really bloody silly, but the minimum tax threshold is a lot more than the benefits so nobody actually pays any.)

    In the US, if you also have other income, up to 85% of Social Security income can be taxable. The income limits that are used in this calculation were set in 1986 and are not indexed to inflation.

    335:

    gasdive @ 320: Re Pigeon's suggestion,
    Would not a flat tax of say 35-50% and a universal basic income of say 10-20 thousand pounds more or less sort the issue that flat taxes aren't fair? (Flat taxes seem acceptable for every other tax from vat to speeding fines, I'm not sure why income tax is something we get up in arms about)

    I don't think any system of taxation yet devised has been fair. I don't think it's possible. There will always be those who are taxed too much and those who are taxed to little.

    The best we can hope for is to devise a system that minimizes unfairness and mitigates some of the more egregious wrongs. It's a system that needs to be constantly revised, because someone will always find a way to cheat and others will always be victimized.

    But I think we can do better than we are right now.

    336:

    "(itself more complex than Pigeon's)"

    NOT MINE. YOURS.

    Your straw man argument is not "my idea" and I do not want to be associated with it. So stop calling it mine. You've got gasdive doing it as well now, ffs. I've already pointed out several times that your idea is not mine only to be completely ignored and I'm getting fed up with it.

    Your arguments also include: other things which I have also addressed several times only for you to bring up the exact same point again as if I hadn't said anything; things that happen under the existing system; loss of privileges the existing system grants to the rich; and things that are just silly. Yet you haven't managed to argue against my proposal at all, because you haven't argued against anything but your own strawman distortion of it.

    For some reason which I don't understand it seems that the proposal does not trigger any comprehension in those who read it but it does act as a potent trigger of irrational behaviour. It has spurred others as well as you to recast it in their own ideas and then argue against their misinterpretation; you're just the most repetitive and the most vocal. It's even made Charlie directly contradict his own statement from a couple of threads back. When I've posted it elsewhere in the past it has attracted different but equally irrational objections.

    It's bloody weird - somehow or other a temporary wartime measure has become so deeply internalised that people have lost the ability to conceive of a world where it doesn't operate exactly the same as things do at present, and suggesting any change causes such intense cognitive dissonance that they fly immediately to the extremes of entrenched opposition and completely skip over any rational consideration. It's as if I suggested that perhaps we don't need blackout curtains and blast tape any more, and instead of considering the possible advantages everyone flew off the handle and ranted about how being able to see out of the windows would make people start eating babies.

    So I don't see any point in trying to carry on arguing my point until I've managed to work out just what the fuck it is that makes people across the spectrum as firmly attached to a socially divisive measure that hands power to regressive parties and is used to argue that people at the bottom of the pile are worthless encumbrances as they are to their own genitals.

    337:

    In the US, if you also have other income, up to 85% of Social Security income can be taxable.

    In Australia benefits are means tested, so while you don't in theory pay extra tax on other income you lose a chunk of your benefit. Which given the mutable nature of money is impossible to distinguish from a high marginal tax rate. In the worst case it can go over 100% (typically when a solo mother gets a job and loses the dole, and various child/parenting benefits but doesn't earn enough to gain from the childcare rebates). Our tax boffins make some attempt to keep the marginal rate below 90% or so, but fail often enough that we get regular media stories about the problem.

    It's non-trivial, because Australia has more means testing than just about anywhere and it works really well 90% of the time. The way out would normally be to give the administrators some discretion but we have ruled that out for the very good reason that discretion means staff getting to exercise their prejudices and cleaning up that mess costs money. Neither are acceptable (see: unfavourable media coverage above). My preference would be a simple cap, or a sliding cap (once the marginal tax rate exceeds 50% it becomes exponentially less effective, so a theoretical 100% rate becomes "50 + log(50)" percent or something equivalent).

    Means testing is a relatively fair and transparent way to avoid "rich beneficiaries" while having generous but affordable benefits. You just write the basic benefit as "anyone with kids gets $100/week per kid extra untaxed income" or whatever you want, then add "which reduces by 5% for every dollar they earn over the average wage".

    If nothing else it means that anyone whining they don't get the benefit is generally rich enough that it's hard to raise much sympathy for them. "we had to sell our second mansion to fund our nanny because we don't get the child tax benefit"... I think even the US media would struggle to sell that as a horror story of lost entitlement.

    338:

    it seems that the proposal does not trigger any comprehension

    That's because you keep saying the same thing repeatedly even when people don't get it. I've tried to be generous and understand what you mean because it seems there is a serious proposal somewhere in there, but I'm really finding it hard.

    Generally when I try to explain something and three or four people completely fail to understand, and no-one else chimes in to try to explain it, I conclude that whatever the merits I see in my idea, my explanation is deficient.

    In this case, I keep trying to reflect what you say back in my words, a traditional way to make sure we have a shared understanding. You don't seem to like that, but since your terminology is unfamiliar to me having you just repeat your definition comes across as Humpty Dumpty-like. The whole "that's irrelevant and you just don't get it" doesn't help. Pick something I've said that is vaguely correct and try to lead me from there to what you really mean.

    Saying "this isn't a tax, it's a levy" is very familiar from Australian politics to the point where people generally can't even be bothered deriding the claimants. We just eyeroll and ignore them. You really seriously seem to be in that group with your "this isn't income tax, it's a tax on income" stuff. If you go right back you'll see that my first response included "we have that in Australia and it does not work, employers advertise '$XXX package', meaning total cost to them"... which I think is an important objection but you've ignored. How would that not happen?

    339:

    The thing about Fast Eddie is that social attitudes to the whole marriage/divorce thing were vastly different to what they are now, in ways that I for one find it difficult to grasp. The religious objection to marrying after divorce, which nobody gives a shit about now, was serious stuff back then, and people really did care about it.

    My gran used to object if the neighbours hung their washing out on a Sunday. By the time I became aware she thought this it was already an old fogey's objection to some footling trivia that was difficult to take seriously. But in Fast Eddie's time "everyone" had had the same kind of indoctrinatory upbringing as my gran and views like that were just normal. When it came to post-divorce marriage rather than just washing, and a royal doing it too, people really did think it was a terrible thing for the Fid Def to do.

    It's amazing what utterly bizarre shit people used to get themselves in a froth over. Centuries of war and revolution kicked off by an argument over how many buttons to do up. (Even more amazingly, that one's still going, albeit in such specialised circles that nobody gets to hear about it.)

    340:

    “It's amazing what utterly bizarre shit people used to get themselves in a froth over.” Never forget: In a hundred years people will say the same about our most passionate debates.

    341:

    In a hundred years people will say the same about our most passionate debates.

    I will {fight to the death}type my fingers to the bone to prove you wrong! The key question of our era, the one that will resound down the ages, that will live forever in the annals of world history, is whether "the intervention" is a civil war or merely normal government that meets some definitions of the term (viz, the use of a nations military to enforce laws specially written to outlaw a subset of the population).

    342:

    On a more important note, There are two major issues that I think should addressed at a global political level. I am drafting a missive to the UN even as we speak.

    First, Moveable Type's refusal to allow me to edit my posts, even for a minute or so; and second, the ongoing blocking of the &ltstrike> tag.

    343:

    I think it was Louis the XIV who said that, "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing"? Which is a great summary of behavioural economics, or why some taxes work even though their inefficient or regressive and others don't or are deemed to be political poison.

    The underlying problem about tax policy is (steps on soap box) that in politics tax reform is driven by rich white guys in support of rich white guys. Case in point, the Australian economist Patricia App deconstructed our Productivity Commission's latest finding that there's been no increase in income inequality in recent decades. She found that it was flawed as it ignored the economic contribution of stay at home partners (mostly women) of goods and services and so neatly assumed these cost nothing when they needed to be bought, because both partners now worked. Of course the Productivity Commission is dominated by, you guessed it, middle aged white guys.

    Re-run the numbers as App did and you find that low (and high) income earners in Australia over the last decade have done OK (the rich really OK) but in the middle deciles not so much. Of course that's also where most female incomes sit. As the coup de grace, Apps then calculated out the labour supply elasticity of labour and found that people work harder for an increase in income the less they get, contrary to what the rich white guys reckon. In fact for the top decile despite all the tax improvements for them over the last decade or so have demonstrated negligible increases in hours worked.

    All of which is actually bad for the economy, and bad for most working women (with children) but that of course won't stop the rich white guys banging on endlessly about side issues like how good reducing the marginal company tax rate would be, even though the modelling shows its a it's a very marginal proposition*. Yet another reason why people feel disconnected from their political class. Not governing from the middle really.

    *The proponents of cutting the rate have framed the debate in terms of what we'll surely lose as companies go offshore to lower taxed countries, which skews people's decisions given human beings loss aversion preferences. Another example of behavioural economics.

    344:

    One might wish for tax policy framed for the overall benefit of most of the people rather than most of the money. With tax policy, as in trade, the .001% focus too much on immediate benefit, too little on "What will be left for our customers to spend?".

    345:

    I have no idea what you mean

    "Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann pictured smoking cigars ahead of tough budget"

    346:

    Maybe it's an Australian perspective as I arrived at the same place independently.

    This is how I see your proposal.

    When I buy a widget that costs 11 dollars, 10 dollars goes to the widget seller and 1 dollar goes to the taxman as GST/VAT/salestax. That dollar isn't tagged "received from Jason" and at the end of the fin year I'm not called to account to justify all my GST tax. It's just lumped all in together and handed over. Items that have different tax rates are all lumped together similarly. So when I buy fresh food, which is GST exempt, sanitary napkins that I pay 10% (being clearly luxury items) and petrol, that has both GST and excise, that's all fine, completely transparent to me and dealt with by the retailer as a lump sum payment.

    You'd like wages to be the same. The apprentice gets paid below the taxable threshold, so you as the employer hold none of his wage. The office manager is taxed 30% for every dollar over 18000, so you hold 15% of her 36000 dollars and put it in a pot. The CEO pays 50% for every dollar over 40000, so you put 100k in the pot as well.

    That's fine, the apprentice thinks they get paid 18000, the middle manager thinks she gets paid 30600 (despite the company having to pay out 36000) and the CEO thinks they get whatever that works out as. The situation is exactly as it was before except that no-one puts in a tax return. If there's something like a charitable donation, then you take your receipt to an office and they pay out what would have been your tax deduction as cash.

    But then the problems start...

    You're the apprentice and your tools are tax deductible. You front at the office with receipts for 500 dollars. How much do they hand over? Nothing? (because you earnt below the taxable rate and paid no tax). 30% of the face value of the receipts? (Because that's the tax rate most people pay) 50% (because if they don't know what tax rate you're on, perhaps they should use the top tax rate to avoid underpaying)

    What if the middle manager makes pizza from 6-11pm every night? How does the pizza place pay her? As a worker under 18000 she should pay no tax, but she's already earning 36000. If they advertised that as a 12000 dollar job, then they should pay her 12000, but then they have to pay 30% on 4000 of that plus 50% of the remaining 8000. Meaning she costs the pizza place 17200, where someone whose only job was pizza making, would have cost them 12000. She could just tell them that it's her only job, but that's fraud. Otherwise the situation is not the same as the current one.

    [[ spellung corrected - mod ]]

    347:

    Some sort of edit function, even if it was so you could click an "edited" link and see the versions. Wad-was Them-then only job would have-only job was pizza making, would have

    348:

    fajensen wrote:

    All this means that "Games of Chicken" are a perfectly viable strategy for leaders of major western powers to adopt and that Brexit is going to happen because the Tory Government will have to pass legislation to cancel or extend the deadline, with passing legislation being a task they are very clearly unable to perform. I doubt they could pass a round of drinks at this stage.

    On the above theme, I found compelling a recent piece by London-based Aussie novelist and lawyer Helen Dale. I'm wondering what you of Charlie's commentariat will think of it.

    Dale reviews a couple of the elements involved, starting with Cameron's utter ineptitude and the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, May's role as the pole around which the Conservatives are haplessly revolving, and: 'We are confronted by what electoral systems wonks and statisticians call a Condorcet paradox. There are Commons majorities against everything but no majority for anything.'

    She thinks (hopes?) that Plan B will go down in ruins, that a second referendum to join the EEA or any similar idea would do likewise, and that such failures will be necessary before a second referendum to reverse the 2016 result would be feasible. And she made sense for me of Corbyn's position in light of Labour demographics in different regions. Have a look.

    349:

    Indeed, and how could they not understand that that was a truly bad optic? I mean were they totally bereft of an ounce of political savvy? Whenever I see something like that I think of a great book by Tavris and Aronson called 'Mistakes Were Made', which seeks to answer that rhetorical question by showing how cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases can incrementally lead people to extreme positions. Like thinking it's OK to shill for the Chinese government as an MP, or visiting your online girlfriend on the government dime, or continuing to plow blood and money into an unwindable war in SE Asia.

    350:

    Plan B will go down in ruins, that a second referendum to join the EEA or any similar idea would do likewise, and that such failures will be necessary before a second referendum to reverse the 2016 result would be feasible.

    That does seem likely IMO. Insofar as May can negotiate and has people to negotiate with, she seems to have a talent for ending up with the worst possible outcome from all parties. After the referendum a cynic who predicted the current situation would have been called nasty and pessimistic.

    My guess is that the rabids will work to prevent any deal, May and Corbyn will refuse to compromise on incompatible demands for the deal, and at the last minute parliament will try to pass a bill deferring brexit. I suspect the EU will cave but lay down onerous conditions along the lines of "you keep paying us and obeying our rules but get no further say until you come up with a deal that we can accept".

    If I thought a different outcome would produce a better result for the people of Britain I'd hope for that, but I fear the reflexive cruelty of the Tories means you're going to suffer regardless. Perhaps the goal is to make things so bad for so many people now that a hard Brexit seems like relief?

    351:

    Moz @ 350 Almost entirely correct. Howver: the reflexive cruelty of the Tories NO - If you had said the reflexive cruelty of theBrexiteers, I would have agreed with you. Remember, there are a lot of tories who are remainers. The word you were looking for was: STUPIDITY - which is where J Corbyn comes in - the last bloody thing we need in the middle of all this mess is anothe General Election, after all ...

    [[ html repaired - mod]]

    352:

    But then the problems start...

    That's where the flat tax, no deductions thing is actually important. Rather than 4-to-10 different tax rates (with the various levies) there's only one, and it starts at zero income. Likewise there are no deductions or benefits-paid-as-tax. It's just a flat "how much you got? Give us half" system.

    Which could simplify the tax system a lot, I think. But at the expense of either fairness or a vastly more complex benefits system.

    The simple way is everyone pays 35%, right down to that baby with the savings account. It needn't actually be a huge PITA either, especially if the tax office is allowed to simply tax everyone and let people who are not tax residents claim it back when they leave (or via reciprocal taxation agreements). Banks just tax all interest payments, listed companies tax all dividends, money transfer offices tax all incoming remittences, stock exchanges tax all share transfers (oh, wait, capital gains are not quite that simple to tax).

    The pain would be either mass starvation and homelessness as people on the breadline now lost half or more of their income (ie, pay 35% tax and lose all their tax credits); or people get the same payments as now but they'd have to register with the benefit office and claim whatever allowances they're entitled to. Said benefit office would have a lot more customers and pay out a lot more money every week. And they would be paying every week, because people on the breadline don't have the savings to wait 2 weeks or a month... see "universal credit" and similar cruelties in other countries (or the US government shutdown). Transfer payments are a huge and complex area, especially if you include tax deductions.

    I suspect Pigeon proposes to eliminate all of most of them in favour of a very small number of tightly targeted benefits, plus a universal basic income. Viz, you get the UBI, a parenting payment, a disability allowance and possibly a housing allowance. But even those three are probably more than ideal in the minds of the "simple system" purists. The UK universal benefit system is more complex than that and it is horrible even without the deliberate delays and cruelties - there just aren't enough different allowances to cater for the diverse needs of the people forced into the system.

    Which is why I've been trying to get Pigeon to explain how they think the above should work. There's got to be some cunning plan that makes the above a simplistic and needlessly cruel interpretation of the actual proposal. I just can't see what it is.

    353:

    STUPIDITY - the last bloody thing we need in the middle of all this mess is another General Election

    With the system you have, the only options for the two major parties are "everything on the table" negotiations or a fight to the death. There really isn't another option that works in the time available. But the incentives for both leaders, and both party hierarchies, are to double down and refuse to "be weak" and "compromise themselves" by negotiating. I think Corbyn has a factionalised rabble behind him just like May does, but less publicly because who really gives a shit what the opposition are doing when the government is providing such great media?

    Ideally we would have seen the whole parliament form into factions based on how they think things should work, appoint representatives and those reps would negotiate with each other until they had a deal that a majority would agree to. But because those factions cross party lines and the party system has fossilised into UK politics, that can't happen.

    Right now if, say, 350 "remain" MPs got together and thrashed out a deal between themselves, the media would explode (Rupert would go berserk) and the party hierarchies would be apoplectic (the expulsions would start very quickly). I think it would be ugly, and I wouldn't be surprised to see actual lynchings outside parliament.

    Likewise reforming the electoral system to encourage more parties... that's not a fast process. It took Aotearoa with only 4M people at least 10 years to go from "oh shit" to "MMP actually works". IMO you want independent parties that stand for: far right brexit; conservative brexit; conservative remain; labour remain; labour brexit and probably three or four others (plus the regional parties, including EVEL or whatever the English parochialists want to call themselves).

    What you have instead is two major parties who define themselves largely in opposition to each other. Breaking that isn't something you can do in the 2 months before Brexit. Well, except in the "it's broken now" sense :(

    354:

    First, Moveable Type's refusal to allow me to edit my posts, even for a minute or so; and second, the ongoing blocking of the tag.

    a) I just enabled the <strike> tag; I didn't know anybody used it (what's wrong with the abbreviated form, <s>, anyway?)

    b) If you want an actual upgrade to MT, that will cost you roughly €1000 per year on an ongoing basis, because Six Apart discontinued the open source licensed version I'm still using and it's now only available with a commercial support contract aimed at businesses.

    One of these years if I get really bored I might look into spending a month or two replacing/upgrading the MT system to a Joomla based CMS. That's open source, and I know the Joomla project's main public person quite well ... but the cost is measured in time and learning curve rather than money, and it's actually rather expensive when you work it out.

    355:

    Re: b)

    If I have to choose between revealing my true identity as barely literate, and waiting an extra two months for your next book....

    I hereby admit to frequent misspellings, unstructured sentences and a total inability to proof my chicken scratchings.

    356:

    "On the above theme, I found compelling a recent piece by London-based Aussie novelist and lawyer Helen Dale. I'm wondering what you of Charlie's commentariat will think of it."

    Paywalled, unfortunately. Your capsule summary of it seems pretty on-point though - especially the 'no majority for anything' trap that parliament is in currently.

    Regards Luke

    357:

    ...The big mistake was resuming the advance on Moscow instead of ignoring Moscow and going for the Caucasus oil fields in 1941...

    The big mistake was invading the USSR. It was almost as stupid as their plans for SEALION, and the invasion of the UK (which if attempted would have resulted in six-figure casualties for Germany for zero gain).

    There was a debate a couple of years ago about the German strategy for the USSR on the Army Rumour Service; among the more interesting contributions (other than those about the strategic, operational, and logistic incompetence of the Germans), was one on the force densities that they appeared to believe were adequate.

    Basically, they were screwed from the start. Yes, they had nine months of early successes, right up to the gates of Moscow; so what. After the initial advantages as the first mover, they were utterly pwned - just as they were in every other operational theatre. Their navy was monstered by mid-1940, pretty much leaving only the U-boat arm (which then took 75% casualties). Their air force was screwed by 1943, leaving only a tactical force capable of gaining local air superiority for short periods - and lost even that by 1944. Their army was getting a kicking by late 1942, a severe kicking by 1943, and smashed flat everywhere by 1944.

    The German economy was outproduced in tanks, ships, and aircraft, in every year of the war, by UK production alone. Those trucks that weren't adequately destroyed by their former owners at Dunkirk in 1940, instantly doubled the German truck fleet - but the Germans still required thousands of horses for every Division, because so much of their artillery and logistics were horse-drawn.

    Basically, they were doomed from the start, they were just too incompetent to realise it.

    358:

    "On the above theme, I found compelling a recent piece by London-based Aussie novelist and lawyer Helen Dale. I'm wondering what you of Charlie's commentariat will think of it."

    Paywalled, unfortunately.

    It may be a regional thing rather than an actual paywall. If you have a VPN, try selecting a server in OZ. Worked fine for me.

    359:

    Not actually paywalled. I infer that the Australian's Web site just uses a particularly nasty sort of checking for whether this URL has been visited before.

  • Open a private browsing window. (May not be necessary, but couldn't hurt.)
  • Then, in that window, do a search engine search for the article title, which is 'Blowing up Westminster: Brexit is achieving what Fawkes could not'.
  • I'm not certain, but I think what happens is that The Australian's Web site transparently redirects you to a hashed URL, and subsequent attempts to reload that URL by any user including the first one cause the site to hit you up for a subscription.

    Ms. Dale's argument about the 'no majority for anything' dilemma is indeed exactly what happens in a Condorcet paradox. When that situation arises, generically, the eventual winner depends on the order in which options are presented and voted, and this is where Ms. Dale thinks she sees strategy being carried out by Speaker John Bercow, deciding the order of votes so that reversal of the 2016 vote is the last option standing.

    360:

    I recall one chapter in a book discussing the complete failure of German military intelligence, because before they reached Moscow they were fighting divisions they hadn't known existed. Over confidence due to lack of accurate information is a common problem.

    361: 292 - I agree your statement about $richmanbornoutof_wedlock, but would trust my source to have recounted the anecdote accurately (for values of accurately relating to his remembrance).
    362:

    the complete failure of German military intelligence, because before they reached Moscow they were fighting divisions they hadn't known existed

    While that may be true, it isn't, in itself, a mark against German intelligence. Russia is vast, the Soviets had excellent counterintelligence and were paranoid about foreign spies. The US was in a similar position after WW II until reconnaissance satellites became available, and even then there were not a few surprises concerning Soviet order of battle.

    363:

    Nope. Just read more history than the average person. Not that I'm an expert by any means.

    There's a collection of folks who get together for a beer or two every month or so and the core of the group is based on folks with ties to the UK and it's empire of the past. (I'm an invited guest to this group.) I was surprised by the folks who didn't realize that most of them didn't realize that the RJ was sunk before the war and that FDR wasn't sure how to deal with Europe after Dec 7, 1941 until Hitler fixed the questions by declaring war on the US first. They thought the US declared war on Germany first.

    364:

    Well a lot of that was the Deutscher-Amerika Bund, wasn’t it? ... See this utterly revolting picture - and the date

    In the US it was known as the German American Bund.

    A lot of it? Not really. They were a small but vocal and with some very influential members. Heck, your king was with them.

    The appeal was that (remember news reels was the high tech media of the day) Germany had gotten out of the recession without those liberal policies of FDR. So they much be doing things right.

    The anti-war sentiment of the general US population had many facets. A LOT of it was people still being pissed off that they had to go save Europe's butt in 1917 and didn't want to do it again. (Legit or not this was how maybe 1/2 of the country felt.) The US didn't enter the League of Nations due to this sentiment. And this sentiment was wide spread even throughout WWII.

    The US was VERY isolationist during the first half of the 1900s. To an extend that most Europeans don't get. And most current US citizens don't get either. Until Trump won. And it exposed how many over here still don't get the connected world they live in.

    365:

    OK, for the UK (with the note that figures are chosen for ease of working out in one's head on the fly, rather than correctness):-

    In April and May Hector is unemployed, and receives £900 a month in state benefits (includes rent or mortgage payment, UK "Council Tax", which is a form of property tax. This would give him an annualised income of £10800). On June first, he gets a permanent job paying £2000 a month, so that will extrapolate to £20000 from employment, plus £1800 from benefits, for a total extrapolated annual income of £21800. He gets a single person's Income Tax Allowance of £11000.

    Had he remained unemployed and receiving benefit for the whole year, he would have received £10_800, which was potentially liable for Income Tax, but is below his Allowance, so no actual Income Tax is due.

    Since he obtained this job, we have to calculate a tax bill based on the extrapolated income and the Allowance, which we do by:- 1) Taxable income = Income - Allowance =&GT 21800 - 11000 = 10800. 2) Calculate Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Income Tax as Taxable Income * Tax Rate / Months remaining in tax year. If Tax Rate is 20%, this gives 10800 * 0.2 / 10 for £216 to be deducted each month.

    As you can see, he is paying tax on his total income, but, had he been dependent on benefits for the whole year, no actual liability would have been incurred since his income was less than his allowance.

    366:

    National IDs in the US was a near riot issue back in the 70s. Conservatives placed the issue near the coming of the anti-Christ. So it never happened.

    About a year ago my uber right wing niece in law posted on Facebook that a simple solution to most of our illegal immigration issues would go away if the federal government would just issue ID cards to every citizen.

    In the idea of not rocking the family boat any more than it already was being rocked I didn't rise to the occasion.

    367:

    Basically, they were doomed from the start, they were just too incompetent to realise it.

    Didn't the German military want to wait until 44 or so to start things but Hitler was impatient?

    368:

    The US was in a similar position after WW II until reconnaissance satellites became available

    There was a reason that Gary Powers was shot down. The CIA wanted photos of the interior of the USSR. Prior to his flight all of the overflights had been arcs that went in and out quickly. (Relatively speaking.)

    369:

    I think the EU has a huge disincentive to extend Article 50. If any extension happens beyond the European Parliamentary elections, expect the UK delegation to be dominated by UKIP (or whatever they call themselves now). Since continent-wide populists are expected to make gains, this would magnify the problem.

    370:

    "There are still 9 of them in England, amounting to 14GW output according to the internet."

    There are 7 in the UK as a whole generating 11 GW. 2 of them closed last year

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_coal_fired_power_stations_in_the_United_Kingdom

    371:

    Saying "this isn't a tax, it's a levy" is very familiar from Australian politics

    Among Canadian neocons the preferred term is "fee" rathe than levy. And "tax" is anything that you don't want to pay, whether or not it's collected by the government.

    Of course, fees are flat-rate no matter what your income, which is much fairer (for neocon standard of "fair").

    372:

    the ongoing blocking of the strike tag

    So your right to strike has been removed? Welcome to the Brave New Neocon World ;-)

    373:

    David L @ 368 I give you the English Electric Camberra QUOTE: Throughout most of the 1950s, the Canberra could fly at a higher altitude than any other bomber or even any other aircraft in the world. In 1957, one Canberra established a world altitude record of 70,310 feet (21,430 m). In February 1951, another Canberra set another world record when it became the first jet aircraft to make a non-stop transatlantic flight. Due to its ability to evade the early jet interceptor aircraft and its significant performance advancement over contemporary piston-engined bombers, the Canberra became a popular aircraft on the export market, being procured for service in the air forces of many nations both inside and outside of the Commonwealth of Nations. The type was also licence produced in Australia and the US, the latter building it as the Martin B-57 Canberra. ENDQUOTE

    374:

    If you have a VPN

    On that note, and going way off-topic, can anyone recommend a decent VPN that would work on a Mac running OSX 10.10? (Ideally it would also work on my iPad running iOS 9.3.5 for travelling, but that's not as important.) I'm in Canada if that makes a difference.

    375:

    Re: ' ... she costs the pizza place 17200, where someone whose only job was pizza making, would have cost them 12000. She could just tell them that it's her only job, but that's fraud.'

    Not familiar with other countries' employment-income tax systems hence my question: does your country have a version of a social security number? This is a form of centralized ID - unique to each individual, provided solely by the federal gov't and is one of a limited number of documents that can be used as reliable proof of identity. I've had to provide this (SSN) to every employer and every bank I've ever dealt with ... because it's required by tax law.

    Given that most major credit cards can track your moment-by-moment purchases as well as tell you if there's any fishy behavior, I wonder why national gov'ts haven't tried using the SSN for automatically calculating, revising and taxing income(s). Such a system could be pre-programmed for 'allowances' (special deductions) via trackable certified/authenticated apps that are downloadable exclusively off the taxman's site. Part of or an extension to this app might even tell you how much more tax you owe if your taxable income climbs up to the next level meaning you have to pay more tax on erveything you had already earned to-date. (This way you could choose to start paying more right away instead of waiting until tax-time when you might not have extra $000s kicking around.)

    To the comp-sci folk: Please let me know (in plain English) what the likeliest tech problems are with this scenario. Thanks!

    376:

    VPN:

    I'm using NordVPN (https://nordvpn.com/) which is currently selling for ~USD 3.00/month on a three-year purchase. It gets good reviews and, for my part, seems to do everything expected of it. So far.

    Neither I, my relatives or cats(*) have any investment in Nord. Caveat emptor, YMMV, etc, etc, etc.

    (*) We don't currently have a cat.

    377:

    P.S.:

    I'm running NordVPN on Windows 10, Android phone and a Kindle Fire en Panamá, where we are because of cold avoidance. Often autoconnects through Costa Rica, which works fine, but changing servers to other places is simple.

    378:

    Quite a few people predicted something like the current chaos, actually. There were enough people who had said 'over my dead body' about each option to deduce that. There is probably worse to come, too.

    379:

    I won't bring up the tech problems, but I can bring up social problems that this faces in the US

  • Tax software companies (TurboTax, HRBlock). Every time Congress has proposed creating such a system, they've strenuously lobbied to kill it.

  • 7% of US residents don't have a bank account https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2018-10-23/americans-who-do-not-have-a-bank-account-falls-to-record-low

  • Some of those are groups which have an aversion to modern technology (the Amish, survivalists). Others are people in isolated areas (Northern Alaska, N.A. Reservations). Some are in US territories. And then finally, you have the very poor in both the inner city and rural areas. Obviously, there's overlap between these groups.

    a. Just because someone has a bank account, doesn't mean that they use it for most of their transactions.

    b. While you're not going to get much money tracking that economy, you still have to track it for the purposes of benefits. From my understanding, benefit agencies use the IRS database rather than create their own. I could be wrong?

  • "Fed data, so in total, 76.9 percent of Americans (192 million) have credit card, a charge card or both" https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership-statistics.php
  • This doesn't include debit cards, but it does jive with what a former coworker said. He used to work for a credit agency, and mentioned that around 20% of the US population could only be tracked with their use of checks. Add that to the 7% who don't have a Bank Account, and the numbers are close.

    Note that while 95% of US residents have a cell phone, just 77% have a smartphone. I'm guessing there's an almost identical overlap between those who have a smartphone and those who have a credit card. I wonder what you could do with flip phones for tax purposes?

    http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/

    I wonder what similar statistics are in other countries?

    380:

    The biggest problem I can see is something that's already a problem: what happens when one's SSN is stolen?

    The SSN system is horribly designed as a means of authentication. Many of it's problems would go away if everyone's SSN were public knowledge, but too many things have been built on the assumption that they are not for that to be a painless transformation.

    381:

    First, I heard the "simple Simon" from right wingers, and nobody else, when we were first in Chicago.

    Second, to file under the heading of "the exception proves the rule" was that there have usually been some tiny portion of the wealthy, as there were a tiny portion of the "nobility", who actually believed in noblesse oblige.

    Hell, as much as I hate Bill the Gates, he was just headlined as saying "best investment I've ever made" for donating $10B or so for world health.

    And it you think that's something, just wait till I win the lottery.... (g)

    382:

    I was considering not actually sending them to my legislators. Your idea would have been better. At any rate, I wrote a waffling one that could be taken either way, depending on the reader. With liberals representing me....

    383:

    to Daniel Duffy @326 I've heard an excellent lecture about this from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVo5I0xNRhg Don't ask him to do any political stuff though, he isn't professional, so he is stumbling over simplest questions regularly.

    Though even he does not really address much the second-most important reason in winning the war - the evacuation of industry. This story is even somewhat related to my current employment.

    to Lars @329 A Russian-speaking friend claimed that "brekzit" had become a verb in some eastern-European parts, meaning: saying goodbye to everyone as if you're about to leave, but then not actually leaving.

    Never heard this joke before.

    384:

    Really? I'd never heard that about guerilla war, but it makes perfect sense.

    385:

    No, thank you. The GOP is pushing this really hard in the US, in the form of "voter IDs", mostly for folks without drivers' licenses... and then they make them impossible to get. The state of Georgia, I think required them... and then shut down ALL the registration sites inside of one small city - they went from, I think it was 30, to one, outside the city, inconvenient for what passes for public transportation in the US South.

    Oh, and Social Security cards in the US have printed on them, explicitly, "Not to be used for identification", even though for a bunch of years, doctors and schools used them, though they're getting away from that now.

    386:

    Charlie, either you're not thinking in US terms (can't imagine why(g)), or I didn't explain it clearly enough.

  • Congresscritters (technically, Rrepresentatives) serve two yr terms.
  • Senators server six year terms.
  • So, if a Congresscritter stays in for three terms, let's say, or someone does one term as Senator, that would ban them for six years after leaving. Two terms as Senator, and you're out for 12 years before you can get money.

    Given the "next quarter is long-term thinking" in the US, that's a long time for some rich company to remember to give them a job at the end of.

    387:

    Yup. It wasn't bad in the US back in the day. Hey, I was living in a commune - four of us in an apt that we shared, and could afford my share (ok, the apartment was not a great part of town, but still) I was making it on... I think it was a minimum wage as a library page of $1.41/hr, and not full time.

    About the estate tax - for exactly the same reason, I want a serious top tax brackets. 70%-80% would be really good. Not just to raise money, not just to prevent a hereditary monied class, but because once you have so much that you can afford hot and cold running prostitutes every night, and platinum toilet fixtures (none of this hoi polloi gold that the Malignant Carcinoma likes), what do you do with the money... except to buy governments.*

    And "unearned income" - right now, in the US, interest, difidends, and capital gains wind up taxed at around 14% - that's what Romney was talking about in '12, when he was running for President. Americans here - I want to simplify the tax code: get rid completely of 1040 SchedulesB and D, and roll ALL INCOME into INCOME. Right now, that would mean the wealthy would be paying 38%, not 14%, on almost all their income.

    • As I understand it, fashion, as we know it, was invented in the court of the Sun King, with his requirement that the French nobility attend court for a month out of the year, and clothing, the kind the nobility wore, was EX$$$$PEN$$$IVE. It was a means of beggering the nobility, so they couldn't build up private armies to overthrow him....
    388:

    sigh

    As we learned back in the sixties and early seventies, "participatory democracy" too often turned into "rule by the long-winded".

    389:

    Y'know, reading this, I wonder how much was isolationism... and how much it was newly-minted Americans who didn't want to pull the governments, and nobility they'd fled, chestnuts out of the fire.

    Remember, there was a lot of left-wing sentiment in the US, and much of it was internationalist. Lessee, the Socialist candidate for President in ... was it 1908, or 1912, got nearly a million votes. And before 1919, you almost needed a Red Card (IWW membership card) to ride the rails in the midwest.

    My take on why Wilson went into WWI, after campaigning against going to war, was to stop the socialist revolution that could well have spread to Europe from Russia. There had been mutinies on the front lines towards the end.

    390:

    That's neocon libertarian world!

    I refuse to give up my right of association, and to peaceably dissemble. I'm on strike! I want to use "less than" g "greater than", the way it's always been! \

    391:

    Well, I live in Georgia in the US, and that is not the case re: voter ID cards. They are available if people w/o driver's licenses or other form of ID (like a passport) want them, but they're not required.

    The arguable suppression technique here was requiring a photo ID at all in order to vote, when the evidence of voter fraud was nonexistent. The offering of the alternative ID cards (for free) was intended to show no bias, though obviously, there is always bias against the poor and working class when you require extra steps in order to do something.

    392:

    That is a cue for me to quote Kipling - as I am on holiday with only a tablet, you are let off!

    393:

    The germans really only had two realistic avenues of victory in WW2

    1: peace with the UK after the fall of France 2: then being the first to develop the Abomb

    And even that path is pretty far fetched

    As Sun Tzu said “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”, this adequately describes the eastern front for the Germans

    394:

    Totally off any topic in sight, but this might be slightly useful for world-building purposes for you fictioneers:

    https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1624-20490-0371/430_ch4.pdf

    395:

    I just enabled the <strike> tag

    Thank you, m'lud. I don't know why I don't use the 's' tag, I think habit. But no, I never tried it here.

    Upgrading the site is one of those things that I would like, but it's a long way down the "Moz's list of things Charlie should do". insofar as you have any interest in my preferences :)

    396:

    Cf “this isn’t a subsidy, it’s a tax rebate”. Very few people are fooled by that one over here, but it still gets an airing every now and then. I sometimes get mileage out of referring to owners of small businesses that would not be profitable without the diesel subsidy as welfare recipients, but it doesn’t really do much to win hearts and minds.

    397:

    Please let me know (in plain English) what the likeliest tech problems are with this scenario

    The thing to remember is that the people currently doing that tracking fall into two groups: ones who don't really care about accuracy, they just want a record of most of the spending by most of the people; and those who care a lot about accuracy but only for the parts that they control.

    Viz, if your rewards card misses a few transactions or adds a few extras in you're probably not going to be too fussed, and if you are the provider is not going to find it hard to just give you extra points to make you go away. Your bank, on the other hand, will not do that if there's money missing from your account, they they put a lot of work into making their system very accurate and they charge you accordingly for that.

    A government system that wanted all transactions recorded accurately would be the worst of both worlds. Computer people still don't have a way to secure that kind of "everyone gets access" system, or build something that big. The cost would be staggering and probably not worth the benefit.

    Thing is though, for tax fraud they don't need it. They can use the loyalty card approach and just look for people with unusual spending patterns, just as they do with banks (who also care about fraud). As usual 80% of the problem comes from 20% of the people, so the tax office can focus on them (or ignore them and focus on the poorest, depending on the politics of the government).

    398:

    I believe Queen Elizabeth the first had a similar approach to dealing with potential plotters in the nobility. She'd go visit them for a month or so, by the end of that they'd be in no financial position to plot anything. Also saved on the royal housekeeping.

    399:

    "participatory democracy" too often turned into "rule by the long-winded".

    There has been progress on that front since then, though. We have the spokescouncil model, where groups of 5-10 discuss, send a rep into a next level up group of 5-10 and so on until the top level announce a consensus proposal which the whole group either endorse or not. It works quite for for discovering the consensus position if there is one, but when it fails there's generally no recovery (I prefer the "factional grouping" resolution, where if you have space you allocate corners of the room to the major axes of disagreement and ask people to move towards where they stand on those axes. Often you get a big bundle with some outliers, and that can be resolved. But when you get separate groups in separate corners you have a very graphic representation of why consensus is impossible for now).

    There's a bunch of similar systems, that's the one I'm familiar with from Australian green and anarchist circles.

    In many ways citizens juries and deliberative democracy in general are a way apply this to nations and other large groups. Rather than try to persuade everyone, get a representative sample together and have them thrash it out on behalf, then present their conclusion to the larger group. Ireland found that very useful with the "OMG don't talk about abortion" referendum.

    Online there is the "endless online forum" approach, and the much more effective "he's the man and he's got the vote" approach used by Linux/Linus and many others. For those groups it's transition that's hard, but they're normally saved by the low cost of forking and merging. Viz, dictatorship is fine as long as you can leave and take your stuff with you. So it's not possible with citizenship, sadly.

    400:

    Um, that was 40 years ago? I take it you have participated since then, no?

    As Moz noted, we have progressed a bit since then. For example, everybody in the local City Council and Board of Supervisors has speaking time limits, including the Councilmembers and Supervisors.

    401:

    The NYT has things to say "The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class. With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine."

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/sunday/brexit-ireland-empire.html

    402:

    _Moz_ @ 342: On a more important note, There are two major issues that I think should addressed at a global political level. I am drafting a missive to the UN even as we speak.

    First, Moveable Type's refusal to allow me to edit my posts, even for a minute or so; and second, the ongoing blocking of the <strike> tag.

    I really don't see the problem. You can edit your comment as many times as you want in [Preview] before hitting the [Submit] button. Just keep refreshing the preview until you get your comment the way you want it. Then click [Submit]

    What can you do with the <strike> tag that you can't do with the <s> tag?

    Strike-thru with the <s> tag seems to work just fine.

    403:

    Re that "perimeter security design" FEMA pdf, interesting, thanks. (Is the year written 2013 as suggested by the url?)

    404:

    Martin @ 357:

    "...The big mistake was resuming the advance on Moscow instead of ignoring Moscow and going for the Caucasus oil fields in 1941..."

    The big mistake was invading the USSR. ... Basically, they were doomed from the start, they were just too incompetent to realise it.

    Germany's BIG mistake was invading Poland and starting the war in the first place. It's clear Hitler had come to believe the British & French would never stand up to him. What might they have done before then to convince Hitler he couldn't get away with it?

    It's my understanding that most of what drove Chamberlain at Munich was an assessment that Germany was in better shape militarily than it was; that Britain couldn't stop him. I think Hitler believed this too, although both were mistaken.

    405:

    Just keep refreshing the preview until you get your comment the way you want it. Then click [Submit]

    ... and see the obvious typo in your post. There's a context switch or some other difference that means some of us see new bugs only after hitting submit. I think it's the jump from "I have this in my head and I see it on the page" to "that is what I wrote".

    The s tag rather than strike is just some kind of quirk in my brain where I can't remember that it exists. Probably because a goodly chunk of my life is spent in an environment where abbreviations are so harmful that they are grounds for rejection of submitted work (writing software). The result is that I sit there going "grr why no strike tag" rather than "ok, use s tag". I occasionally use <em> as well, but since that's allowed here it's not a problem.

    406:

    Meanwhile I am dealing with SIA, one of those delightful communication standards written before computers were invented* that lingers around because it's so widely relied on by hardware that's still working. More accurately, it is one of the things that created the huge emphasis on backward and forward compatibility in computing.

    Q. How can the transmitter know the SIA level of the receiver? Does a compliant device have to have automatic level setting? A. SIA Level information is not automated. Refer to the product documentation or inquire of the manufacturer

    Although in good news there is automated detection of the baud rates, with different carrier tones for 110 and 300 baud.

    Objectives: ... g) Provide a secure data path not easily accessed with available hardware, such as personal computers, modems, etc.

    Yes, really, one of the goals was to make it incompatible with everything else for "security by obscurity". The SIP came along and now everyone can do it. I told you it was old.

    Oh, and by pure luck the "extended data block" is binary so we can send UTF8 text in those blocks. Not all standards are so generous (hey there email, how's it going?)

    • not really but you could be forgiven for thinking so.
    407:

    whitroth @ 385: No, thank you. The GOP is pushing this really hard in the US, in the form of "voter IDs", mostly for folks without drivers' licenses... and then they make them impossible to get. The state of Georgia, I think required them... and then shut down *ALL* the registration sites inside of one small city - they went from, I think it was 30, to *one*, outside the city, inconvenient for what passes for public transportation in the US South.

    Oh, and Social Security cards in the US have printed on them, explicitly, "Not to be used for identification", even though for a bunch of years, doctors and schools used them, though they're getting away from that now.

    That was Alabama that shut down all of the driver's license offices after requiring photo ID (only available from the driver's license office) for voting. Georgia was where the GOP candidate for Governor was also the Secretary of State responsible for overseeing the conduct of the election.

    He threw out THOUSANDS of absentee ballots and absentee ballot requests for not being filled out properly ... things like the Voter Registration form had only First & Last Names and the ballot had First Name, Middle Initial and Last Name of the voter (or vice versa) OR women who registered to vote under their maiden names before getting married & didn't update their voter registration with their husband's last name OR the voter who was registered at a different address than was on their driver's license.

    Technically you're supposed to go down to DMV & get a replacement Driver's License within thirty days of changing your residence address. It can get expensive at $15 - $20 a pop if you're low income and get evicted two or three times a year.

    .

    Social Security cards are not supposed to be used for identification, but they are a REQUIRED form of identification if you want a JOB. Employers are REQUIRED to have a photocopy of every employee's Social Security card on file in case they're audited by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

    408:

    Re: ' They can use the loyalty card approach and just look for people with unusual spending patterns, just as they do with banks (who also care about fraud).'

    Thanks! Seems to me that because credit/reward/bank cards have been around for about 30 years, their operating-security systems should be fairly robust by now. The feds don't have to build a new system from scratch, just use something that's been tested and build a few additional safeguards on top. Could also use sci-tech funding/grants as a carrot to get input from leading academics/researchers. Toss enough money and prestige on this project and you could probably get outfits like IBM interested.

    Also (I'm guessing here) if the fed dept that issued such a card was perceived as neutral/benign staffed entirely by boring non-politically appointees, you'd get more people willing to acquire such a card esp. if doing so ensured getting their social benefits accurately and on time.

    Smartphone ownership - some places have been experimenting with handing out smartphones to people at risk. The phone is usually a cheaper brand (under $100*) but does the job. Way cheaper to distribute this to every economically struggling USian than a buying an iffy F35!

    • Hey, you could probably talk a smartphone manufacturer to come up with an even cheaper model/price if you said you needed 1 million units by next year.
    409:

    "It's my understanding that most of what drove Chamberlain at Munich was an assessment that Germany was in better shape militarily than it was; that Britain couldn't stop him. I think Hitler believed this too, although both were mistaken."

    From what I've casually gathered, the whole point of Munich was to buy two years, and the British were frantically rearming.

    'Peace in our time' was just to calm the British people for the moment.

    410:

    The feds don't have to build a new system from scratch, just use something that's been tested and build a few additional safeguards on top.

    That's not really how security works. Remember the "NSA loses hacking tools" thing? It's the physical equivalent of those "every fire cabinet has the same key" things, only now you propose to build the nations tax system relying on the security of those boxes (and the uniqueness of the SSN).

    smartphone manufacturer to come up with an even cheaper model...

    Try billion, not million. On that note, you're also adding "must be more secure than an ATM" to the requirements, when two multibillion dollar companies who really, really want security have been unable to provide even "don't let my kids use my credit card" level security. Making it be the core of your complete financial profile... scary stuff. Did I mention that the communications system that smartphone uses is designed to be insecure? "Stingray"among many others make devices that exploit the insecurity and they're now very affordable.

    As long as you limit it to "we want a general idea of what most people do" it's pretty easy and a bit of extra software and a few million free phones will do it. But you just can't, with current technology, make it your government issued ID and secure data storage device.

    This is not "go to the moon", this is "run a bus service to orbit" and we still can't do the latter.

    411:

    Here's a quick overview of a much simpler system that's been implemented in India - it is just ID for access to government services.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/indias-digital-universal-id-program-is-deeply-flawed-say-critics/

    physical presence of the beneficiary is required for authentication today versus the past when a relative or neighbour could be dispatched to avail of the benefit, said Khera, which means that the old and infirm are most vulnerable.

    Pkus putting all that valuable dsata in one place and linking it with a unique ID to each individual makes it a really tempting target for bad people:

    One large breach took place on a system operated by state-owned utility company Indane, where all the Aadhar information collected from citizens for bill-paying purposes that should be private was leaked.

    412:

    Meh. It may be that I think about zoning restrictions from a particularly Californian perspective. There's plenty of space in California - and, yes, there are earthquake issues....

    But...mostly...once you own property somewhere, there's a gigantic incentive to lower the housing supply. For one thing, expensive housing means poor people can't move near you. For another, restrictions in the housing supply mean that your house tends to go up. Now, since local government handles zoning... It becomes a gigantic mess with people commuting for hours in each direction. That situation sucks for everyone involved.

    @GT Yep. I mean - the main way to get rid of an incompetent involves letting them demonstrate their incompetence, so I guess we are well on the way.

    413:

    FWIW most of the core problems are the subject of much ongoing research both academically, in government agencies (on both sides of the make it/break it divide), and private companies. Everything from "make big systems that actually work" to security are major problems and solutions would be very lucrative/useful. So it's not just a matter of saying "hey we want this new thing", it's a matter of finding solutions to important problems that lots of very smart people have been working on for a long time.

    414:

    once you own property somewhere, there's a gigantic incentive to lower the housing supply

    Definitely. But I think there are better ways to deal with those problems that just escalating them up to the next level of the wealth tree. It might suck having to deal with a bunch of neighbours who don't want the poors living nearby, but having Trump Properties Inc run the planning system for your whole city or state is not necessarily better. And having the federal government decide that Nevada is a great place of bomb tests or a waste repository isn't going to make the neighbours or those downwind happy either. Or anyone, since there's thousands of these decisions made every day and the federal government is not good at making decisions (imagine waiting 20 years to get permission to build a garage).

    You really do need a mix of decision making powers, but what the mix is is situational and changes over time ("when the facts change..."). I have opinions on how that should work where I am, but they're not informed opinions... I know people who do this stuff for a living, and they struggle to find time to read the research, let alone make submissions on proposed changes.

    415:

    Henry? I thought his full name was Charles Phillip Arthur George...

    (I remember it from the Diana wedding, because she said the names in the wrong order.)

    416:

    I actually wrote a piece about San Diego needing to grow up, not out.

    This is an idea that I picked up from the late Spiro Kostof, in his books The City Shaped and The City Assembled. There's a classic pattern in the development of cities, where they sprawl, hit limits, and then have to densify. IIRC, it's a pattern that goes back to classical times, so it shouldn't be surprising. That doesn't mean it's easy. Rather, it's a predictable shift in urban development. The next shift is that, over centuries, cities that endure can have populations that change by orders of magnitude over the centuries.

    In San Diego, we're trying to deal with our lack of affordable housing, with even our Republican mayor speaking up for getting rid of building height limits and putting more apartments closer to transportation corridors. We'll see where this goes, but the back country suburban sprawl model is basically broken, in between fire sheds (the equivalent of watersheds, e.g. that the shape of landscapes dictates where fires go more than we thought), increasing limits on water supplies and sanitation capacity, and lack of funds to adequately care for people in the back of beyond (too expensive to pave, wire, or provide first responders for all of them). That hasn't stopped developers from trying, but since they're all bogged down in litigation complaining about the same issues, if the current developments get shot down in court, I'd cautiously hope that it's the end of this particular development pattern, at least here.

    417:

    when we were first in Chicago.

    Chicago and southern Illinois are much further apart than they appear to be on a map. Plus Superman lives in the southern end of the state.

    418:

    Social Security cards in the US have printed on them, explicitly, "Not to be used for identification"

    Biggest joke in IT for decades.

    419:

    Y'know, reading this, I wonder how much was isolationism... and how much it was newly-minted Americans who didn't want to pull the governments, and nobility they'd fled, chestnuts out of the fire.

    For sure. As I poorly said, there wasn't one or two simple reasons for the "let them fight it out till the end and we'll just watch" sentiment. There was dozens of issues all of which resulted in a large majority saying "no thanks". Then things changed on Dec 7.

    420:

    I give you the English Electric Camberra QUOTE: Throughout most of the 1950s, the Canberra could fly at a higher altitude than any other bomber or even any other aircraft in the world. In 1957, one Canberra established a world altitude record of 70,310 feet

    Not sure of your point. The U-2 Gary Powers incident occurred at 70,000 ft. (give or take) From what I've read it was the first flight planned to cross the USSR. So it could be tracked long enough to figure out where to fire the SAM ahead of the local radar tracking getting a lock.

    Previous flights had always been a arc into and back out of the country which didn't give the USSR enough time to "lead" the flight path with SAMs.

    421:

    "Which is why I've been trying to get Pigeon to explain how they think the above should work."

    Sorry, I've given up. I completely failed to get the original idea across, and the subsequent development of the thread has led to other ideas appearing which are further and further away from it, so there is an increasing gap which I am even less able to bridge. A stern chase of a faster vessel is never very successful...

    422:

    Similarly, a lot of the old monarchs used to try and squash potential troublemakers before they could develop their capability too much by knighting them. Being a knight cost a frigging packet and crippled their ability to do anything else; refusing the knighthood amounted to telling the monarch to get fucked and ruined their status. Either way the monarch wins - unless they leave it too late and the knight has already acquired resources large enough to cope with being a knight.

    423:

    Agreed - right now is the last bloody time we need to be switching off for six weeks.

    It wouldn't even do Corbyn any good. It would just mean he gets handed the test tube full of superheated liquid right in time for it to bump in his face. He'd be far better off waiting until it's bumped in May's face and then stepping in while she's wishing she'd worn goggles. Let the Tories take all the damage, and make themselves unelectable for a generation or disintegrate altogether.

    424:

    "Also (I'm guessing here) if the fed dept that issued such a card was perceived as neutral/benign staffed entirely by boring non-politically appointees, you'd get more people willing to acquire such a card esp. if doing so ensured getting their social benefits accurately and on time."

    Reality, British style: benefits are no less tardy and difficult than at present, but without the card you can't get them at all. Indeed they're more difficult, because the systems back of the card take five years to get going and the cost goes through the roof. The department issuing the card is known to be hostile and to have politically-directed hostility targets. The threat of information collected through the card system being used as an excuse to throw people off benefits makes them terrified to do anything at all (already a problem even without such a system). The media pushes the idea that "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" and anyone objecting to the system must necessarily be trying to commit fraud.

    425:

    "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear"

    The experience of Jo Cox suggests that's a known lie, but it's still worth asking those people what their internet banking login details are just to make the more general point about secrets.

    In Australia the Robodebt debacle shows that even if you somehow manage to do everything perfectly you're not safe, and might be very unsafe indeed if you come to the attention of the masters. But don't worry, the people who make the laws have ensured that it's perfectly legal to publicly vilify you.

    426:

    Pigeon, et al,

    Delurking, to suggest that I may have worked out what you are getting at (pse correct me if wrong).

    What you you have been proposing is a payroll tax, like the one introduced by the Muldoon Government here in Aotearoa back around 1970, when even I were but a lad.

    How a payroll tax works is that the tax is levied on the employer, based only on the total amount paid by said employer in salaries and wages, without reference to who has been paid how much, let alone what else they might have been paid by other employers.

    All the different scenarios people have come up with are irrelevant, because the only thing that matters is the total wage bill. If you paid out $1M in the period, and the rate is, say, 10%, then the payroll tax comes to $100K no matter what the circumstances of your employees.

    If you want more detail, our history should provide, but that really is about all there is to it.

    I'm not convinced that a payroll tax is better than income tax, but that's a different argument.

    427:

    "Not familiar with other countries' employment-income tax systems hence my question: does your country have a version of a social security number? "

    Yes, a tax file number. You don't have to provide it when you start a job, but if you don't then your employer has to deduct tax at the top rate. If you have two jobs you can tell both employers that this is your first job and claim the general exemption, but the tax office will put the two TFN together and you'll have a tax bill at the end of the year. With Pigeon's method there would be no way for the tax office to tell I've done that any more than they can tell how much sales tax I've paid.

    The only way around that (without flat tax) is that everyone gets a general exemption on every job. Which means that the CEO will get paid under the tax free threshold, but will be holding down fifteen jobs with various subsidiaries and shelf companies. No one will pay any tax (unless they're very dim) and the system will collapse.

    428:

    It wasn't. The USA had been mapping the USSR for some time, but it was the first time the USSR had managed to intercept at that height

    429:

    No, even punitive income taxes do not help - we had them in th UK. At government-purchasing scales, people simply ensure that they get paid in other ways - and even wealth taxes don't help, as some 'communist' systems have shown. 50% is fine, and 2% wealth taxes, but more simply harms the non-culprits, and the culprits work in other ways.

    430:

    whitroth @ 385 Surely a tactic as blatant as that is illegal / against "The Constitution" ??? How are they getting away with it, actually?

    In the UK, of ocurse, & I think most European countries, such things are handled centrally & eveybody gets their drivers licence or voter registration automatically ( Or at least a reminder ) through the post & away it all goes ...

    @ 387 Sorry, but we have proven ( I think) that a top income tax rate of over 50% - certainly over 60% is simply counterproductive. BUT, that there must be NO CHEATING & that a really good dollop at the bottom end is tax-free. The UK limit is approx £10 500 ( I think) & it ouight to be about £15k. Correct about ALL income into "income" though.

    @ 389 BOLLOCKS Wilson wasn't given a choice, any more than the US was in 1941. "Zimmerman Telegram" - yes?

    Unholyguy @ 393 REALLY? Tell that to my late father, sat under the Blitz of London 1940-41, then drafted to be a "civl servant" - i.e. Use his technical expertise to make & test explosives .... It looked like a lot of desperate struggle to him & his contempraries ...

    Moz @ 401 Sorry to say but the NYT is also talking bollocks, otherwise that nice Mr Corbyn would actually have an alternative, &/or a useful plan, to help get the country out of the mess.
    He doesn't - he's pathetically incompetent ( Yes, worse than May ) & it shows. Like an even halfway competent person in his position in 2016 wouild have made it to PM - & he didn't. His abilty to fuck up any good idea is amazing. SEE ALSO ... Pigeon @ 423 Actually, I think that whatever happens, both main parties are going to fracture after this, with the extremes being still pro-brexit & the middles coalescing in some "Butskellite"/Social-Democrat format. The thing to worry about is an internal Nazi-Soviet pact of the extreme left & right forming a "populist front" - especially given the history of anti-semitism on the left, disguised as a dislike of Israel ... See also below ...

    JBS @ 407 As above - how/why are they getting away with this shit?

    David L @ 420 Gary Powers / U-2 was May Day 1960 ... The Canberra was overflying the CCCP in the period 1950-56 (58?) - approx ..... Agree about arcs & "leading" though ....

    Moz & Pigeon @ 424/425 Also - "Nothing to hide"? - Right, what's your teenage daughter's mobile number, then?

    431:

    Re WW2: the reason that such analyses are unrealistic is that they are based on hindsight (i.e. complete knowledge) and ignore the psychological factors. Even then, a panic in Kent and London would have blocked the roads and worse, and history has plenty of 'impossible' invasions that succeeded because the defenders cocked it up.

    432:

    Greg, for a whole lot of reasons talking about MP's kids is out of line. To me your suggestion amounts to encouraging or wishing to see sexual threats against the kids. I don't think I'm being oversensitive to point it out. Especially when the comment you were responding to was reminding us that MPs, especially female MPs, have quite a lot to fear.

    One aspect of this that I think is important is: who do we want as MPs, and how can we encourage them to do the work. Saying "threats against you and your family are part of the job"... that doesn't encourage reasonable people to run for election. Hence my remarks earlier about locking up the louts who jostle and threaten selected MPs as they enter parliament.

    433:

    Moz Thank you - but, it just shows how the "nothing to fear - therefore nothing to hide" line is false. My local MP is a vocal supporter of Jo Cox & has done a lot for vulnerable women .... Enpough said, I think.

    434:

    QUESTION for USAians Isn't the extended (admittedly partial) US Fed, guvmint shutdown illegal under Amendment number 13 of your "Constitution"? People are being expected to turn up for work, & do work with no prospect pf pay. Equals "Involuntary Servitude" - surely?

    435:

    I agree that the people on the ground, at the time, were seriously worried about the prospect of Op SEALION. Many people saw a fragment of the overall picture (e.g. limited ammunition for the obsolete, heavier, guns added to static positions - missing the point that it's why they've been added there; they're nearly, but not quite, useless, so might was well put them at the very front. The modern stuff is with the mobile reserves.)

    What no-one (either side) realised, was how difficult it is to conduct an amphibious assault - because no-one had really tried it before (see Dieppe as the UK learning experience; the Pacific for the Americans). The Germans planned to conduct the operation as a river crossing (of a really wide river).

    The UK didn't realise that at this point, the German navy was down to a couple of cruisers, ten destroyers (the Kriegsmarine got hammered at Narvik by the RN, and a lot are having large holes patched and dents hammered out). They've only got twenty U-boats, who knew all too well that they couldn't enter the Channel - they lost three U-boats trying in the first couple of months of the war, and never tried again; we unsporting Brits had laid a rather effective minefield.

    They're down to a hundred and fifty aircraft for their paratroops, who are 50% understrength anyway; and their drop equipment has them jumping with only a pistol and a couple of grenades, while equipment containers for their rifles and ammunition are carried in a different aircraft (they got massacred on Crete as a result of this flaw).

    Their assault craft are largely unpowered, unarmoured, and unarmed river barges - to be towed across the Channel. Their plans for getting tanks ashore involve snorkels, but they haven't got them working yet. Their logistic support is still largely horsedrawn (try keeping 4,500 horses happy on a river barge for a four or five hour sea journey).

    At Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe failed to demonstrate that it could actually sink ships. So long as the ships still had AA ammunition, the Stukas couldn't manage it. How were the RN able to evacuate so many, with such light losses at sea?

    In the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe faced the world's first integrated air defence system; and failed to break even 11 Group (the neighbouring Groups were never committed to the fighting over the South-East). They couldn't achieve air superiority - the RAF gained strength over the course of the battle, while the Luftwaffe got mauled.

    Now, let's look at what awaits them. The Home Fleet has seven battleships, several aircraft carriers, twenty cruisers, a hundred destroyers committed to the defence of the south coast; forty based close by and waiting for CROMWELL. That's not to mention Motor Gun Boats (lots) and armed trawlers. Consider what happened on Slapton Sands in 1944, when just a few E-boats got in among a landing force; multiply that by a hundred.

    Once they land, Churchill has authorised the use of chemical weapons against beachheads. The Home Guard aren't "amiable old duffers", these were the veterans of 1914-18 who had destroyed the German Army in the field during the Hundred Days Offensive; and they were fighting for their homes, from well-prepared defensive positions. Many of the stop-line pillboxes are still there.

    Fast-forward slightly. The Germans need at least 300 tons of resupply per day, per Division; and they've landed 11 Divisions. Given a captured Folkestone, they reckoned to manage 150t per day of resupply rising to 600t once fully repaired (in the face of destruction plans). Assuming that the RN isn't causing havoc. So, by day three or four, they're out of artillery ammunition, scavenging food, and really short on fuel.

    Essentially, SEALION is a fast way to lose a hundred thousand German soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Whenever it's been wargamed, the invasion has failed; the only question is how quickly it fails, how many die attempting the crossing, and how many soldiers are pushed across the Channel to be lost.

    The Rumour Service's latest thread on the subject can be found here: https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/op-seelowe.289846/

    436:

    U-2:

    There are a couple of reasonably good books about the pre-Powers program, but a concise version is at http://www.coldwar.org:80/articles/50s/early_u2.asp

    Discussion of coverage starts about halfway down.

    437:

    Essentially, SEALION is a fast way to lose a hundred thousand German soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

    So if it was attempted and failed, what might the consequences have been?

    German military losing 100k men would drastically change their plans. Would Barbarossa have gone ahead?

    Also, would large-scale failure of an amphibious invasion have influenced whether Overlord would be considered?

    438:

    On the plain reading of the Amendment the answer appears to be yes. However, it is now working its way through the courts in the form of several different lawsuits filed by various government employee unions and some individuals. I do know that the courts have ruled in the case of the draft and jury duty this amendment doesn't apply. I assume the plaintifs have all picked the most liberal court with jurisdiction they can so the most likely immediate outcome is an injunction requiring workers to be paid for the time they work. After that it goes to the supreme court who may decide to overrule the injunction while the case is argued. The court is has a conservative majority but several justices have in previous cases not shown themselves to be in lock step with the current administration. If they find for the plaintiffs the shutdown will become much more painful.

    439:

    Jurors are paid an "allowance" are they not, & drafted soldiers are also paid ..... These people have employment contracts which the US guvmint is not honouring ... or I assume that would be the basis for such an argument?

    440:

    Hmmmm.... Now that you put it that way, I realized even back by the late seventies, PSFS (the Philly club) had gone to board meetings, so they could hash it all out, and then things were presented to the membership. Helped shorten the business meeting.

    At the DSA meetings I've gone to, it's also time-limited.

    441:

    300 or 600 baud.... 10 or 15 years ago, there was a strip in User Friendly, an early online comic for techies, which you'd file under techie party games:

    Player 1 makes sounds: mmmmMMMMEEEEE

    Other players guessing: That's 2400 baud!

    442:

    I'm sorry, I don't know how I could have gotten the scum overseeing his own election mixed up with the state that closed the drivers' licenses bureaus.... \

    443:

    The results of one debate are here: https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/what-if-sealion-goes-ahead-but-is-defeated.272753/page-2#post-8416813

    It's not a deal-breaker for Germany. The Kriegsmarine gets destroyed, pretty much - so less of a surface raider threat to the North Cape convoys.

    The Luftwaffe gets mauled, loses many of its experten; it can't do as much around the Mediterranean. The Fallschirmjager are now effectively gone, along with their transport aircraft. Crete can't happen as it did.

    The Army loses seven or eight of its best infantry divisions; perhaps their support for the Italians is reduced, i.e. no DAK, less help in Greece. Barbarossa can still happen.

    German industry takes a massive hit. It loses much of its river barge and inshore transport fleet; internal logistics are put under severe strain as a result (transport of coal during winter, for instance).

    The big loss is to the reputation of the leader as "grand strategist". He'll need a quick victory to distract from a severe defeat at this early stage of the war; perhaps he pushes ahead with Barbarossa as a result. Ambassador Kennedy will find it harder to make pessimistic reports about the UK.

    For the UK, there are now more destroyers available to assist convoys (they aren't all being held back to destroy invasion shipping). Perhaps more resources to push out to the Far East?

    444:

    Oh, come on, he moved to NYC.

    445:

    It appears that you misread me: I was talking about our entry into WWI, not WWII.

    446:

    My current political fantasy is a two hundred thousand unemployed Federal workers surrounding the White House... Goodbye Trump.

    447:

    Lessee, where to start....

    Sure, it's unConstitutional... but the employees will (presumably) be paid... eventually. Contractors are screwed.

    Nope. The highest living standard and purchasing power for the 90% in the US was in the seventies, when the top tax bracket was 70% (or was it 72%?). Not taxing the 1% at that "hurts the job creators" (and if you believe that, I have this great moneymaker, I own this bridge in a northeastern US city, and if I sell it to you, you can put a toll booth on it....)

    And just who actually wrote the Zimmerman telegram? As far as I'm concerned, that's a Gulf of Tonkin incident.

    Just on general principles, and to have something good to think of, speaking of the Blitz, and the Battle of Britain, I'd like to put a word in for my late mother-in-law, who, during the Battle, was literally Rosie the Riveter, riveting wings on Spitfires. (You'll excuse me if I tear up in her memory.)

    448:

    Minor difference.

    Canberra Combat radius: 810 mi Ferry range: 3,380 mi

    U-2 Range: 6,090 nmi

    449:

    Both jurors and drafted soldiers are compelled to serve by the state. That they may get paid doesn't change that. This case on the draft doesn't mention pay as reason for holding that the conscription law doesn't violate the 13th amendment. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5246026683111363520

    There is also at least one case that finds that the government can compel unpaid work on county roads. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=14050987746000769292

    How well those decisions map to requiring unpaid work from 'essential' personnel during a shutdown I can't say. Myself I lean to it being a violation of the 13th, but I'm not a lawyer of any kind.

    450:

    Juror pay in many (Most? All?) parts of the US is so low as to be roughly equivalent to nothing.

    IMO that's bad, particularly in that it make jury duty more painful for lower income people. But it is not as bad as the shutdown pay stop.

    451:

    Sure, it's unConstitutional... but the employees will (presumably) be paid... eventually. Contractors are screwed.

    Congress passed legislation last week stating that everyone (but maybe not contractors) will get all back pay once funding is restored. In the past this has always been done as a part of the end of the deadlock. After 2 weeks they figured they needed to do it so people could take the "dog ate my homework" note to banks and creditors as needed.

    And just who actually wrote the Zimmerman telegram? As far as I'm concerned, that's a Gulf of Tonkin incident.

    Nope. Real evidence and facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram

    452:

    Oh, come on, he moved to NYC.

    Nope. There is only one town/city named Metropolis in the USA. It is in southern Illinois on the Ohio River.

    Visited there multiple times when growing up. My dad even renovated a fire damaged house there.

    453:

    The USA had been mapping the USSR for some time, but it was the first time the USSR had managed to intercept at that height

    It was the first U-2 flight to cross the entire USSR south to north. Which allowed for time to "line up the shot". Even then when they shot it down there were 3 SAMs launched and only one got close. One even took down a USSR interceptor that didn't have it's IFF turned on.

    All previous flights had been shorter and not in what was a fairly straight line.

    454:

    whitroth @ 447 IMHO 70% is probably too high, but it's a lot better than 90%+ that has existed in the past.... As for Zimmerman Telegram - I see that David L @ 451 has put in a link - Also .. there was this absolutetly superb US historian, Barbara Tuchman who wrote a book on it - READ IT.

    455:

    Apparently the gym at Congress is considered "essential":

    “President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ refusal to pass and sign a clean continuing resolution to reopen government is an abdication of their responsibilities as elected officials," Foster (Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill) said. "During the Trump Shutdown, however, Republican leadership continues to deem the Congressional spa used by Members of the House of Representatives to be ‘essential.’"

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/democrat-wants-to-block-paul-ryans-gym-access-during-government-shutdowns

    456:

    The problem with the U2, as I understand it, is that there's a narrow window between when it's flying too slowly and flames out, and when it's flying too fast and becomes uncontrollable. I'd imagine that makes it rather easier to target than, say, the SR-71, which apparently outflew the missiles sent after it.

    The cool thing about the U-2 is that it's basically a whole kit of pieces that can be radically reconfigured for different missions. It's far from just a high-flying camera, and that's probably what keeps it around even when the SR-71 reportedly retired. (https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/a-spotters-guide-to-the-u-2-dragon-lady-and-its-many-1539282603).

    457:

    PHYSICS DERAIL: I have a weird question about dark matter. Since it only interacts with normal matter via gravity, can it accumulate in the centers of planets and stars? If so, how would we go about detecting it? Presumably a star heavy in dark matter would give anomalous data of some sort, where there's a mismatch between it's apparent weight and what it's apparently made of. Has this ever been seen? I figured someone's been working on this for years, so asking would get me the proper buzzwords (excuse me jargon (excuse me, technical vocabulary)) to go looking for what's been figured out already.

    458:

    Germany's BIG mistake was invading Poland and starting the war in the first place.

    Nope, the war was path-determined from 1935/36 onwards by German spending on re-armament: the German economy was in very bad shape after 1929, and the hyperinflation period prior to 1930 effectively rendered the German government a bad debtor—foreign institutions weren't happy about buying German (Weimar or Third Reich) bonds.

    Then the Corporal comes to power promising a jackboot in every cooking pot and deals with unemployment by sucking 5% of the male population into the military and another 10% into arms industries. Which is all very well, but the question of how to fund it (without running the printing presses and inducing more hyperinflation) springs to mind.

    The Anschluss, then the invasion of Czecheslovakia, then Poland, then France—these were basically asset-stripping sprees that fended off the day of reckoning in the shape of bankruptcy for Hitler's economic policy. (As things stood in mid-1939, if he didn't invade Poland, the Reich would have been bankrupt by March 1940.)

    459:

    Re WW2: the reason that such analyses are unrealistic is that they are based on hindsight (i.e. complete knowledge) and ignore the psychological factors.

    No, really and truly: Operation Sealion was about the world's worst ever invasion plan.

    It relied on transporting troops and horses (no armour) across the channel in Rhine barges that would capsize in sea state two. A single RN destroyer driving up and down the line of barges would swamp them with its wake. So the entire Royal Navy had to be neutralized before the barges stood a chance of crossing the channel intact. A twelve hour crossing by the route planned, by the way, which meant several hours in daylight, and several hours at night in blackout conditions (hundreds of barges, prone to foundering and/or crashing into each other).

    Resupply would only take place on day three, once the barges got back to France and reloaded. At this point the first light, horse-drawn artillery would be sent over. Until day three, it'd be three divisions of light infantry with no armour and no artillery on British soil.

    The beaches they were planning to hit were within ten miles of eight dug-in British divisions, experienced troops defending their home ground, including heavy artillery and at least two fully equipped armoured divisions.

    So: the Wehrmacht, even if they made it ashore, would have been outnumbered approximately 3:1, outgunned, and facing hundreds of tanks with, basically, rifles and light machine guns.

    This is before we get into the RAF's abilities as a tactical air force, with ground attack and bombers—again, operating over their home territory.

    Basically, Sealion could only proceed if the RAF and the Royal Navy were wiped out completely. And even then, it was the sort of operation best described as "courageous" (with a maniacal giggle). I mean, we're talking Baldock-grade Cunning Plans, here.

    460:

    The reason why German grand strategy was so insane and unlikely to work is captured in this table

    The Nominal National Products of the major powers in 1938, in current dollars:

    (1) United States: 84.7 billion (2) Germany: 46.0 billion* (3) UK: 27.51 billion (4) USSR: 23.02 billion (5) France: 16.18 billion (6) Italy: 8.68 billion (7) Japan: 7.49 billion

    Even if Germany had won the conventional war in Russia they would have been presented with an endless, well funded guerilla war (I thought the movie Fatherland captured this scenario well)

    Their only hope was long lasting peace with America, and FDR (who was extremely powerful at that time ) had no reason to accomdate that and every reason not to

    Their only hope was extreme stupidity on the part of their enemies coupled with beating the world to atomics and then using them on a massive scale

    461:

    Their only hope was extreme stupidity on the part of their enemies coupled with beating the world to atomics and then using them on a massive scale

    I assume there's alt-history to this effect?

    462:
    I have a weird question about dark matter. Since it only interacts with normal matter via gravity, can it accumulate in the centers of planets and stars?

    I think there are some actual physicists around here who can provide a real answer, but here's a few questions to help get started:

    Consider how matter accumulates into balls of stuff like planets and stars in the first place. Is it just sucked in somehow, like a vacuum cleaner?

    How would that work? Consider that when the solar system was forming, there were zillions of tiny bits of matter floating around in a cloud, orbiting the center of mass in some arbitrary way. Over time, they tended to smack into each other, clumping up and (on average) accumulating in a spinning ball in the middle and in a disc that remained once all the other momentum vectors cancelled out.

    Now let's imagine that instead of clumping up, it's some sort of stuff which doesn't collide and thus doesn't form clumps that way. How does it make the transition from being an undifferentiated diffuse cloud to being a dense ball?

    463:

    @Greg Tingey: My offhand impression is that involuntary servitude under Amendment 13 is indeed being imposed on members of the US Armed Forces ordered to work without pay (such as, I hear, Coast Guard forces) because they cannot lawfully resign, but technically not against other Federal employees ordered to work without pay because they can resign.

    The latter victims of this insanity might have recourse against Discount Mussolini (and Congress) on other legal grounds, of course.

    Unfortunately, I think there's a long history of soldiers going unpaid and US (and state) governments getting away with calling any soldierly objections simply mutiny, as the pattern goes at least back to the 1783 incident that directly inspired moving the capital to a Federal district.

    464:

    Well, that's the problem: the explanation for gravity is a 4D version of one of those rubber sheet models. If we're using a rubber sheet to approximate gravity (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTY1Kje0yLg), bright matter is the equivalent of bbs, while dark matter is the equivalent of water. As a dimple forms in the rubber sheet, both will flow in. Why should the dark matter flow out of curved space-time? Even if it doesn't bond to anything else, there's still a dimple.

    Proportionally, if it's 85% of the matter in the universe, I'd think simplistically that 85% of the centers of gravitational wells would be dark matter on average. That sounds like something we could see experimentally, because there would be systematic mismatches between what we'd expect from the chemistry of baryonic matter (atomic weights and so forth) and the properties of planets and stars (they're far too heavy for what they seem to be composed of, possibly stars are too cool for their weight, and so on). I presume that this occurred to somebody decades ago, they did a study, and demonstrated either why this isn't the case or why it's impossibly hard to detect the presence of dark matter this way.

    465:

    My offhand impression is that involuntary servitude under Amendment 13 is indeed being imposed on members of the US Armed Forces ordered to work without pay (such as, I hear, Coast Guard forces) because they cannot lawfully resign, but technically not against other Federal employees ordered to work without pay because they can resign.

    Technically they are getting paid. Just not very timely. Congress even passed a law saying so and DT signed it.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/11/bill-on-federal-workers-back-pay-in-shutdown-heads-to-trump.html

    I'm am NOT defending the current mess.

    466:

    Re: '... in the case of the draft and jury duty this amendment doesn't apply.'

    The US draft ended Jan 23 1973, a couple of years before the end of the Vietnam war (April 30 1975).

    467:

    Re: 'Technically they are getting paid. Just not very timely.'

    All in favor of charging DT/Congress the going credit card interest rate* on loans/cash advances, raise your hands!

    • Approx. 24%-27% per annum, compounded monthly.

    Seriously: 'late payments' should be penalized.

    468:

    Draft registration was resumed in 1980 for all males born after 31 Dec 1959. It continues to this day, though no one has been drafted from those lists.

    469:

    rubber sheet models... Why should the dark matter flow out of curved space-time?

    Conservation of energy?

    The problem with the "rubber sheet model" is that it gives wrong intuitions. Real rubber sheets have huge elastic losses but real spacetime doesn't. It's more like those cannonball-on-a-string pendulum demonstrations where if you hold very still the big scary weight will stop just in front of your face.

    More importantly, because dark matter doesn't interact, there's nothing to take energy away from it. So it stays hot/fast forever.

    This is just my guess.

    470:

    Re: US draft

    Seriously not good that this is still a thing given how impulsive DT is.

    471:

    Re: ' ... we could see experimentally, because there would be systematic mismatches between what we'd expect from the chemistry of baryonic matter (atomic weights and so forth)'

    Recently watched a YT video about upcoming DM experiments at the LHC. Here's what they're supposed to be looking at/for:

    https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09420

    No idea what it means. If you figure out what they're saying, pls post.

    472:

    Dark matter does interact via gravity. While I don't expect dark matter to come to a stop by hitting something, why wouldn't it go into orbit around the center of a large mass? That's what it supposedly does to galaxies.

    473:

    I'd translate that as "Theorists need moar data!" Not a clue what they're looking for, but I think the idea is they want to see if some theory works by flushing a lot of energy through the LHC.

    474:

    why wouldn't it go into orbit around the center of a large mass?

    It has too much energy and no way to get rid of it. Viz, if it's not in obit beforehand it can't be in orbit afterwards.

    Imagine you have a bit of dark matter whizzing through empty space a long way out of a gravity well. As it drops into a gravity well it speeds up, but because it doesn't interact in a way that loses energy with anything in the gravity well, it keeps on going and exits the other side at the same speed as it entered with. The velocity will be different, because the gravity well will make it change direction.

    There will be some degree of gravity slingshot, but probably not a lot because it's going fast and it's going through things rather than round them (ie, the point of closest approach occurs when it's experiencing negligible attraction because inside a uniform body there's no net gravitational attraction from anything further out. description of the effect). So unless it happens to zoom close by a pair of black holes it's not going to get around long enough, or close enough, to lose enough energy to slingshots to get into orbit.

    475:

    Of course the idiocy of Operation Sealion is as nothing when compared to the homicidal insanity of Generalplan Ost. They really were crazy. Thank goodness we don’t let crazy people run modern nation states these days...

    476:

    Again: Their only hope was extreme stupidity on the part of their enemies... Like the appallingly-non-organised "defence" the French "High Command" put up, you mean? Let's remember, that when British troops met the Nazis in 1940, the Brits won - but were massively outflanked because of the French collapse. NOTE: IRC everyone goes on about how fucking awful Brit tanks were in WWII & how wonderful Nazi ones were ... except not true in 1940 - apparently. I'm told that the Brit Matilda Tank was more than a match for what ever they were using at the time These? And that this was what got the Nazis to use the dreaded "88" & led to their later models ...

    Rick Moen @ 463 Your link is broken, unfortunately ... Did you mean This set of events? ( The "Newbugh Conspiracy" )

    .... Dark Matter ( 457 ,462, 464, 469, 471, 472, 473, 474 ) Or else it's like Phlogiston & doesn't exist .... Um, errr .... If only because the amount of Handwavium in circulation could generate almost anything, including mystical invisible pink unicorns ....

    477:

    .... Dark Matter ( 457 ,462, 464, 469, 471, 472, 473, 474 ) Or else it's like Phlogiston & doesn't exist .... Um, errr ....

    Dark Matter does exist. We don't know enough about it to characterise it well but there's a lot of gravitationally-active matter Out There (and next to us too, we're not privileged) that we can't observe visually. It works like regular matter such as black holes and planets but we can't ascribe photons arriving at observatory detectors as having originated from that missing matter. We can detect neutrinos which are slippery but no-one disputes the existence of them, well apart from the 'Einstein was wrong!' crowd and the oddball 'electric universe' types, since we obtain photonic evidence of their very rare collisions with regular matter but the only observational evidence we have for Dark Matter is gravitational and we don't trust that to the same extent.

    It may be that our concept of Dark Matter is a placeholder intellectual construct for the existence of something weirder than we can currently imagine. If so there are fun times ahead.

    478:

    It may be that our concept of Dark Matter is a placeholder intellectual construct for the existence of something weirder than we can currently imagine. If so there are fun times ahead. I might, quite easily, buy that one .....

    It is quite obvious that we are missing something, or more than one something. Apart from Dark Matter there is the little problem of the QM/Relativity "misfit" - how many orders of magnitude out is it this week? Also called the Vacuum Catastrophe, I think.

    479:

    Oh, yes, that was insane, but it wasn't the only opportunity. If the advance hadn't been halted before Dunkirk, that would have been carnage, and a subsequent paratroop landing soul have caused panic. Militarily hopeless, without support, but never underestimate the capability of people to take precisely the wrong decision in an emergency, and we know how unprepared we were, which is exactly when people do that.

    480:

    A discrepancy exists. Dark matter is nothing but a finagle factor, and there are lots of alternative explanations. There is precisely no evidence that dark matter exists that doesn't support many of those theories as well.

    It's improving, as some of the more extreme fanatics die off, but there is still a dogmatic objection to actually testing the relativity / quantum mechanics discrepancies "because we know what the answer will be". Yes, that's a quote. In particular, there is some evidence that FTL information transfer may be possible, but there is opposition to performing a rigorous test.

    481:

    It might be more appropriate to use RB-57 numbers, 4000 mile combat radius. NASA still flies three RB-57Fs, demonstrating the worth of English Electric's design.

    482:

    What I see over on this side of the pond are vastly wealthy folks pretending there was no real economic activity before R. Reagan, the 70% rate ms Ocasio-Cortez has talked about is the rate JFK cut down to (Which, if memory serves, was the inspiration for "Trickle down" economics.) freer trade might make it difficult to go there again, but "Herr Drumph!" might unintentionally remove that obstacle. Vanity Fair had an amusing opinion piece:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/davos-billionaires-aoc-tax-proposal Given that the .001% lobby for lower rates over simplification, their money isn't the sole consideration, suppressing businesses that can't afford a small army of tax accountants must factor in somewhere.

    483:

    The Matilda could kill anything it could catch but with a top speed of 12 mph (later 16) there was not a lot it could catch. This also, as you can imagine, reduced the operational flexibility of the Matilda.

    The big issue with British armour was lack of funding in the interwar period, so they never figured out that tanks need a lot of close support from infantry, artillery and antitank guns. That was a lesson that was learned the hard way and since they had no suitable engine for the tank they wanted they went with heavy infantry support tanks, like matilda and cruiser tanks and adjusted doctrine to reflect what they had.

    So as far as I can tell one on one British tanks came off well enough against German armour operationally but German formations ran rings around their equivalent formations. The Germans had the time and opportunities to figure out what worked before the metal started flying in earnest and Brits had to throw out their thinking and start from scratch while up to their neck in it.

    484:

    Also note that the later German tanks (Panther and Tigers) were maintenance hanger queens, they splurged silly money in late 44/45 on the ludicrous Panzer VIII Maus, and even larger stuff that Albert Speer cancelled because even to a size-crazed megalomaniac they were bonkers (like the Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster or the barely-less bugfuck Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte).

    Meanwhile, the British eventually gave up on their pre-war doctrine of "infantry" tanks and "cavalry" tanks and, by September 1945, were shipping the first Centurions to the far east—it finally entered production just a few months too late to kick seven shades of shit out of the Tiger IIs on the western front. As the last Centurions are still in service today (hacked into infantry carriers and specialist recovery vehicles by the Israeli army) I'd have to call that a successful design.

    485:

    Greg Tingey @476: Apologies about the broken link. I meant the Philadelphia Mutiny of 1783, when about 400 Continental Army soldiers treacherously objected to going unpaid for ridiculous periods of time, were treated as mutineers, and occasioned the flight of the nation's capital (stopping briefly in my alma mater) en route to its present location in the Potomac swamps. Deadbeats to the last, eh?

    486:

    Just to lighten up a bit … This week’s “private Eye is a classic. 1: The cover has “Brenda” talking to her husband, who is at the wheel of what appears to be a Range-Rover … Speech-Bubble:”Still at the wheel, refusing to aplogise, learnt nothing, wont belt up …” Phil intervening: “She’s your Prime Minister” 2: Also a comment from the “Big Yin” – (Billy Connoly) … apparently he has held forth on liking his memories of the “Sixties” – quote: “the decade in which he ceased being a shipyard welder & became a peace-&-love travelling hippy & musician ….” Followed by actual quote from Conolly:” Nowadays, people like the Daily Mail blame the 60’s for the collapse of civilisation as they know it … but frankly I don’t think the 60’s went far enough, or there wouldn’t BE a “Daily Mail”. I’ll bloody second that motion. 3: A cartoon: Usual space-background, star-trek type ship visible in distance, man standing on usual cratered moonlet “Beam me up Scotty – this is NOT the planet of the Klingons!” ….. because it is entirely populated by large numbers of Clangers - priceless.

    Charlie @ 484 The Centurion proved its' worth in Korea ... Also in the 6-Day War, where they eat every variety of ex-soviet design for breakfast

    [[ link fixed - it was using slanted quotes - mod ]]

    487:

    Time for the usual story about how a Tank Corps officer was captured in North Africa, and complained to his captors that "using FlaK 36s as anti-tank guns was not cricket", and a German officer replied "Stop using Matildas then!"?

    Or to point out that the Matilda's 2lb gun was only capable of firing solid shot?

    488:

    Something that has gravitational potential exists 'out there' but we can't see it in the electromagnetic spectrum hence "Dark Matter". It's a label more than a description. We can characterise it somewhat but we don't understand it because almost all of our astrophysical observation tools are EM-based (radio, IR, visible, UV, gamma X-ray and beyond) and the mass we're assuming is out there isn't reflective or emissive in the EM spectrum. Unless and until we can capture or create "Dark Matter" and study it in the lab those tools are all we've got. The new LIGO observatories are promising, though since they can detect and characterise gravitational effects and that's how we know/assume the Dark Matter exists (if at all).

    It's improving, as some of the more extreme fanatics die off,

    True. All the eminent scientists who pooh-pooed Special and General Relativity back in the 1920s are long gone and the 'electric universe' nutters are getting older too. We still have Flat Earthers around though and that dates back to the 1840s and the Bedford Level experiments so it's possible there will be a new crop of extreme fanatics popping out of the woodwork muttering darkly about "conspiracies" and "jobsworths" in the scientific community who won't answer their green-crayon letters about how they're all totally wrong and the loony is right just you wait and see.

    489:

    Minor nitpick (for certain values of minor)

    About the only resemblance between an RB-57F and an English Electric Canberra is the undercarriage!

    490:

    215:

    "However, if she tries to use any of those levers, it automatically triggers a constitutional crisis, and the outcome of any monarch/parliament showdown since 1649 is that parliament wins and the monarch loses (in extremis, loses their life)."

    I offer as a counterexample the constitutional crisis in Australia, 1975, where the monarch's proxy, the Governor-General John Kerr, unilaterally dismissed the Whitlam government, and more egregiously, when the parliament reconvened (after lunch) under the new Fraser government and repeatedly voted down Fraser's bills and casting a vote of no confidence in the new government, Kerr took no heed of this and dissolved parliament.

    The actual involvement of the Queen of Australia is unknown, as the correspondence between her and Kerr has been embargoed (as being personal correspondence and not state documents), but at the very least her proxy exercised powers and defeated a parliament. He received his comeuppance in later years, being mocked and ridiculed, but nevertheless a monarch-proxy won and the parliament lost.

    491:

    Paratroop landing with what, exactly? Read this, it's fairly brutal about the inability of the Luftwaffe to cope with what it faced - and contains some fairly terrifying statistics, such as Bf.110 units at one-third strength by September 1940.

    http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/AAF-Luftwaffe/AAF-Luftwaffe-2.html

    The transport fleet of the Luftwaffe has lost half its strength by May 1940; It's down to under 250 aircraft. Each Ju-52 can carry 18 soldiers, or tow a pair of gliders carrying nine soldiers each. Your national tactical airlift capability is a single Regimental drop of Fallschirmjager - which either gets you one objective held for long enough that a second wave can arrive, or multiple objectives that get overrun quite quickly.

    Now, put up some 165kt transport aircraft into 11 Gp airspace. See "Palm Sunday Massacre" - 65 Ju-52s encountered fighters; 24 lost, 35 lost to damage. See the Battle for Crete - 500 Ju-52 involved, 170 lost. Those happened without Chain Home and a fully-equipped 11 Gp RAF.

    Attempting the early use of paratroops against South-East England and an unattrited RAF would be suicide.

    492:

    The Flak series of 88mm guns were large and heavy, not surprising since they were originally intended to provide fixed-position medium-altitude AA fire. The equivalent British anti-tank and direct-fire weapons, the 17/25 pounder guns were a lot lighter and easier to move around to support advancing or retreating troops. The Flak 88s great advantage was in defensive roles, something the Wehrmacht got used to more and more as the war wore on but by then it was effectively a fixed weapon, the gunners couldn't easily withdraw from a deployed position with their gun if they faced being over-run.

    493:

    My son, who's a major military history buff, once told me that the thing which made German tanks "better" is that each German tank had a radio, which was not true of the French and British tanks at the time. They may not have been as well armed or as good mechanically, but the level of coordination they could achieve was much better than anything the French or British could achieve. (note Vinge's discourse on "Guns and Radio.")

    The other thing which made the German tanks "superior" was Guderian's decision to attack through the Arden forest (I think that's the name, I'm sure someone will correct me if not) which was supposed to be too dense for tank passage, and turned out not to be. This made it possible for the Germans to show up in a completely unexpected location.

    494:

    Er, the point I was making relating to the Mathilda was about how heavy the armour was, and how useless the "main" gun was in 1940-'42.

    495:

    We also have the Earth's moon to show us what a planetary surface at 1AU does without an atmosphere.

    496:

    the Matilda was an 'infantry' tank meant to support on-foot infantry advances by destroying fixed positions, machine-gun nests etc. Heavy armour for close-quarters combat meant a light gun due to engine limitations and other factors (suspension, transmission, tracks etc.) It was never intended to fight other tanks, that was the job of the faster 'cruiser' tanks which were more lightly armoured but they were still designed primarily for other roles such as reconnaissance and attacking the enemy's rear positions. The division of labour between the two tank types was a mistake but there was a reason for the design choices. As the war wore on and tank-vs-tank combat became more common the tank types, guns and armour fitout changed to meet the new fighting requirements and as lessons were learned. Newer more powerful engines were another option not available at the beginning of the war -- the Matilda's twin engines developed a total of 200hp to drive a 25-ton chassis, the end-of-war Centurion weighed 62 tons with a 650hp engine.

    497:

    Para 1 - Presuming we're talking about 1939-'41 the P III and IV also had much heavier main guns than their opponents.

    Para 2 - It's the Ardennes (Forest) presuming you mean the area in Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Germany. The other point about this tactic by the Germans was that they simultaneously outflanked the Maginot Line.

    There is also a "Forest of Arden" in Warwickshire, England.

    498:

    Yes, I know all that, but at this point I'm going to enter into evidence the Crusader II and III "cruiser tanks" as evidence that there were some unnecessary mistakes in the Matilda (like how the turret ring made it impossible to up-gun from the 2lb to the 6lb gun).

    499:

    Yep. Plus NASA at times seems to be dedicated to flying 1 to 3 of every plane every flown. I'm guessing because it's politically easier to get Congress to keep spending on maintenance vs. "new".

    500:

    My son, who's a major military history buff, once told me that the thing which made German tanks "better" is that each German tank had a radio, which was not true of the French and British tanks at the time.

    The US M3 and M4 tanks were better in N. Africa than what the Rommel had which was a big reason the tide turned. (Yes, logistics also matter.)

    And yes radios and tactics made the difference in France in the early days. Especially after Germany had Poland to see how to not do things. They had huge losses there but the Poles were so out-gunned it didn't matter to the end result. Germany lost huge numbers of tanks and planes in Poland and got to see what needed to be done differently.

    Later in the war shear numbers overwhelmed any one on one advantage the German's had in tank tech. One M4 against one Tiger was a Tiger win. 5 M4s against one Tiger usually cost 3 tanks. 2 M4s and 1 Tiger. Net result was a win for the allies. This was true on both fronts. Plus the maintenance issues CS referred to. As I understand it, track repair of Tiger tanks in the mud was an abomination.

    Oh, yeah. Meth was handy to allow the Germans to operate nearly round the clock in the early days. But regular meth doses after a few years led to some awful manpower issues.

    501:

    Sure, if the later tank makers had a time machine they could let the folks designing the Matilda II back in the mid-30s that they should make it with a turret ring that could take a later up-gunning process. Unfortunately the Matilda was intended to be a slow heavy 25-ton infantry tank with a light gun from the ground up. Later faster and better-gunned medium tanks weighed twice as much as the Matilda II which was designed pre-war, without the benefits of WWII battlefield experience (and also without a war budget to fund nice things like a decent power train).

    502:

    One M4 against one Tiger was a Tiger win. 5 M4s against one Tiger usually cost 3 tanks.

    Beware simplifications. Some of these statistics were created by a variation on "100 Tigers in Normandy, 500 M4s lost, ergo a 5:1 loss ratio"

    In reality, the bulk of M4 losses were to anti-tank guns and anti-tank mines; the British record of tank losses in North-West Europe was that only 15% were lost to other tanks. Additionally, most Tigers were lost because they broke down, and their crews destroyed them as they retreated (advancing armies have the option to repair their breakdowns); or because they ran out of fuel, or couldn't find a suitable bridge to retreat across (the Allied air forces were strafing German truck convoys and taking out bridges in the depth battle, because they were effectively unopposed in the air).

    There's a fascinating presentation on the M4 by a serving tank commander - a reservist who actually works for "World of Tanks", and who does some fascinating YouTube videos on the reality of particular vehicles. Well worth a watch:

    https://youtu.be/TwIlrAosYiM

    503:

    There will be some degree of gravity slingshot, but probably not a lot because it's going fast and it's going through things rather than round them (ie, the point of closest approach occurs when it's experiencing negligible attraction because inside a uniform body there's no net gravitational attraction from anything further out. description of the effect). So unless it happens to zoom close by a pair of black holes it's not going to get around long enough, or close enough, to lose enough energy to slingshots to get into orbit.

    This is where I get puzzled. Not that I disagree about the through things rather than around them, but that there are two factors here:

    1) Dark matter is supposed to be the majority of all matter, so there's a lot of it around, and it's presumably been around since the beginning of the universe.

    b) if a stream of dark matter, all going initially the same speed, passes through a planet, there's a gravity slingshot effect that, in aggregate, probably does nothing to the velocity of the planet (some dark matter subtracts velocity, some adds, and they cancel out), but after the encounter with the planet there's a "velocity spectrum" of dark matter going at a variety of different velocities, some slower, some faster, and going in a variety of directions. Do this enough over billions of years and a fair amount of dark matter is going to slow down enough to go into orbit around the centers of stellar and planetary masses, no? There's supposedly far more of it than there is light matter, after all.

    To do otherwise, it appears to me that we're getting into the realm of special pleading, where dark matter exerts such enormous gravitational pull that it's a primary factor in shaping the orbits of stars around galactic centers, but at the same time it has no gravitational effect on the scale of planetary systems, let alone within stars and planets. That sounds weird to me, since gravity is supposed to be independent of scale.

    Anyway, there's no gotcha here, I'm just trying to figure out an apparent discrepancy. While I think that the whole dark universe thing is great from an SFF point of view (how many parallel dimensions can you cram into a universe that's primarily dark matter and energy?) I'm equally open to the idea that the dark universe doesn't exist any more than epicycles do, and they appear to exist because we're thinking about the universe the wrong way.

    504:

    "Oh, yeah. Meth was handy to allow the Germans to operate nearly round the clock in the early days. But regular meth doses after a few years led to some awful manpower issues."

    Treating amphetamines like candy was a trait that transcended national boundaries. Everyone was at it, and no-one thought anything of it. It makes me wonder just how many bleeding stupid decisions were taken by people who'd been whizzing for the last few days yet are not understood to have been from that cause.

    505:

    He received his comeuppance in later years, being mocked and ridiculed, but nevertheless a monarch-proxy won and the parliament lost.

    Yes, and it led to a referendum on Australia becoming a republic, IIRC. Which basically means that power is now off the table, insofar as any attempt to use it ever again other than with the will of the [Australian] people behind it will result in another referendum, and probably throw it to the republicans.

    Seriously, royal powers tend to be of the use-it-and-lose-it variety. They're constitutional nuclear weapons; powerful in principle, and effective as strategic deterrents, but nobody with release authority dares use them: just think about the fallout.

    506:

    The only evidence that there is something that has gravitational potential but no electromagnetic interaction is the dogma that Einstein's exact formulae are sacred, including when extrapolated beyond where we have any confirmation of them. Many of the alternative explanations use the principles of general relativity, but vary the formulae slightly.

    507:

    I saw, I think it was this week, that the House was trying to pass a bill to pay contractors. The odds on it even being offered in the Senate, well, let me get back to you on that.

    Meanwhile, I'm actually considering whether I should spend money to sue now-ex-Congressman Paul Ryan, for his hissy-fit in 2013, that shut down the government for 2 weeks. My company had us burn vacation time, including allowing some folks to go negative... or just take time without pay.

    He STOLE two weeks of my vacation, for which I will NEVER be paid.

    508:

    I'm gonna be hard-nosed, here: everyone (at least more than 20 years ago) knew Metropolis was NYC. The same way everyone knew Gotham City was NYC (non-contiguous with Metropolis). Gotham's been a name used to refer to NYC since Washiton Irving did in in 1807.

    https://www.6sqft.com/where-did-nycs-nickname-gotham-come-from/

    Note, also, that DC comics was (is?) from NYC, and Siegal and Schuster were from NYC.

    Of course, being from Philly, I always thought they should have had Batman in Philly, on the Main Line (aka "old money")

    509:

    "While I think that the whole dark universe thing is great from an SFF point of view (how many parallel dimensions can you cram into a universe that's primarily dark matter and energy?)"

    I dunno about the bit in brackets, after all plenty of people cram in an infinite number of them without even mentioning dark matergy. But it does to some extent amount to a return to the days when things like radiation or electricity were known to exist but not much more than that, so the idea of a novel research breakthrough followed by magic happens just looked like an extension of what was happening already. If we figure out a way to interact with and control dark matergy that does not depend on galaxy-sized aggregations of normal matter, and start fiddling with it in laboratories, who knows what we might be able to do with it? Could be anything from yet another kind of handwave to enable FTL to a device for stopping politicians being cunts.

    I do agree with the subsequent paragraph, that there's a good chance it doesn't exist at all. It could be that just as Newton's equations work fine for easily-observed conditions but under more extreme conditions you need the greater accuracy of the Einstein model, so under more extreme conditions still Einstein's model becomes inaccurate and what we're observing is the discrepancy between Einstein's model and the one we don't have yet. Or it could just be that everyone's got the same mental block and isn't thinking straight, like the whole "(a)ether" thing where everyone insisted that "waves" had to be waves in something rather than a shorthand for "the class of things that can be described by a particular set of equations, of which "waves in something" are one example and the stuff we're talking about is another".

    510:

    It is looking increasingly likely that HM may have to decide whether to go nuclear. The trick of proroguing Parliament, whether by scheduling another election for April or simply doing it, has been an obvious ploy for some time (to block MPs from stopping a no deal), but the rabid brexiteers have started to push for it, and May may well play ball.

    511:

    Dark Matter is weird. If it behaved like regular matter then there wouldn't be a problem with observing it, understanding it and categorising it. It doesn't seem to interact with electromagnetic waves/particles like regular matter and even antimatter does so we can't "see" it thus we can't get a lot of information about it. What we can figure out is that there's more gravitational fluctuations going on in the universe than the visible matter in its various aggregations (especially at the galactic level) can account for. The only thing we know of that creates gravitational fluctuations is matter so we hypothesise "dark" matter. It could be something else entirely different causing these gravitational discrepancies -- it could be angels, it could the hyperdrive wakes of Matroshka Brains zooming around the universe attempting to thwart Roko's Basilisk, it could be faulty observations. We don't know, and not knowing stuff is one of the fun parts of science.

    512:

    Re: '... an effect called 'dark matter heating'.'

    Here's an interesting DM tidbit:

    'The team of astrophysicists measured the amount of dark matter at the centres of 16 dwarf galaxies with very different star formation histories. They found that galaxies that stopped forming stars long ago had higher dark matter densities at their centres than those that are still forming stars today. This supports the theory that the older galaxies had less dark matter heating.'

    Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-dark.html#jCp

    Think I recall reading somewhere that small dwarfs/dwarf galaxies outnumber galaxies like ours. Then if DM is more closely associated (somehow) with dwarf galaxies, and dwarf galaxies are more numerous, it should be no surprise that there's more DM in the universe. Also if dwarf galaxies are harder to see simply because they're smaller and produce/contain less stuff that can be imaged on current telescopes but otherwise behave similarly, then DM and LM may not be all that different apart from light/photon interaction, then since nature seems to like symmetries, it should be relatively easy to figure out/posit the DM equivalent of a photon, the 'darkon'*.

    • No idea if the scientists have come up with any names for this type of hypothetical particle, but even if they have, given their track record for naming (apart from 'quark'), I hereby submit 'darkon' as my official entry.

    The other idea that jumps out of the quote above is: what is the source of the inner/galactic center heating, the DM or something else that preferentially interacts with DM.

    513:

    I see a Senate Dem (Warner, I think, from VA) is introducing a bill that undoes what happened under Carter, and makes a continuing resolution automatic, if a spending bill isn't passed.

    With the added incentive that neither the Legislature nor the Administration gets paid until a funding bill is passed.

    514:

    Oh, yes. Please reinstate the draft.

    Of course, Congress would have to pass that. But if you want to see millions of young men in the streets protesting, please invoke that.

    515:

    It's a tad more complicated than that. "New" means a LOT of new money. "Keep it flying"... um, the agency I work at, lessee, just in '17, we finally surplussed the Altec 3000, an SGI small supercomputer... from 2003. And we did finally surplus the test and development servers that had actual SCSI drives.

    But you know how we like to "waste" taxpayer dollars.

    516:

    I hereby submit 'darkon' as my official entry

    Your theory being that Dr T Pratchett was a theoretical physicist whose theory about the speed of dark addressed questions of fundamental physics?

    517:

    Sabine Hossenfelder, who is a Real Physicist of the theoretical sort, has been distressing about the state of foundational physics, of which dark matter is a part, for some while. It's worth following her posts, for example

    https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physics-may-have-reached-end.html

    519:

    Well yes and no. The Fraser government was never very popular, losing ground at every election from the 1975 landslide (in part an effect of the Murdoch press turning on Whitlam from 1973 or so). John Howard was Fraser’s Treasurer, and no-one thought he’d ever be leader (much less PM). The Hawke-Keating government elected in 1983 ended appeals to the Privy Council in 1986. This is the often-overlooked step that finally really did sever Australian law from any future British influence. Today, British common law is about as influential on Australian law as US common law is (and as all three are to each other, along with the other common law countries). However prior to 1986, you had to anticipate which way the Law Lords would go in case of appeal so you had to take the lower courts in the UK into account too. That means that today, the High Court of Australia is the arbiter on constitutional matters such as the reserve powers of the Crown acting through the Governor General.

    The republican referendum didn’t happen till the late 1990s, gaining its momentum under the Keating government. Unfortunately it didn’t actually occur till after the Howard government was elected in 1996, and was framed in a way that more or less guaranteed failure (although the version of a republic that went to the polls was the one favoured by the self-appointed spokesperson/leader of the republican movement, Malcolm Turnbull). This is the model where basically we change the name of the Governor General to “President”, and not much else (though what we do with all those pesky references to “the Crown” is another question). Creating a popularly elected president (and people usually mean this is a simple poll across the nation as a single electorate, transcending state boundaries and so forth) seems to be the most popular option, despite scaring the hell out of a lot of people. The argument is that this would provide the President with a mandate to use executive powers rather than defer them to Parliament. That would mean radical changes to the way we form executive government and there’s no guarantee this would work out.,

    For the future, a version of a republic that takes the Uluru statement into account would be preferable to the sort of thing we were entertaining in the 90s. It still isn’t clear how this would work, but there has been talk of the role of a president being assigned not to an individual, but to a third chamber of Parliament elected in a way to create first-people representation and place it in the centre of decision making. Just getting this conversation into the mainstream is a challenge at the moment (Turnbull as PM snubbed the Uluru statement, for instance, “ghosted” the spokespeople bringing it like a cheap Tinder date). We still have the situation that the strongest cultural trope underwriting the “gap” in indigenous development outcomes is a gap in the understanding of mainstream Australian culture. For instance, most of the indigenous communities in northern Australia speak a well defined, understood and documented creole as their first language (where the traditional language for that community has already died out as their only language, and where it hasn’t, they grow up bilingual). However education services make the assumption the kids speak English badly, which leads to an understatement of academic achievement and a range of other misunderstandings. Attempts to fix this are derided as “political correctness”*. There are obvious ways forward, most of which involve actually listening to indigenous people on these matters that affect their communities. But we still have Howard-era thinking (which itself at the time in the 90s and early 2000s turned the clock back about 40 years).

    • Trigger word - for the hard-of-thinking, I will keep explaining why it’s a meaningless nonsense word and you’ll go on to say why you think it’s a terrible injustice that you can’ t use terms of racial abuse anymore, and this outweighs people being actually physically injured, but we’ll continue at a sort of impasse. Ho hum.
    520:

    say why you think it’s a terrible injustice that you can’ t use terms of racial abuse anymore, and this outweighs people being actually physically injured

    The Conversation has a related article today where the bigots are claiming that they suffered just as much from the same-sex marriage campaign as the queers did. The relative suicide rates between the two groups suggest otherwise.

    521:

    (sorry, one bigot, in the comments). Article is interesting with the usual caveats about the narrowness of academic views.

    522:

    You're going to have to explain what your gnomic comment has to do with anything on this page, including my post.

    523:

    Darkon? I think WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particle) is just as good.

    It will be ultimately ironic if it turns out the Pterry's theory from Thief of Time, that the dark matter of the universe is the paperwork on the bright matter, turns out to be in some fashion correct.

    Actually, if you want to finagle an FTL drive in, you can do something like hypothesizing that quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory from which spacetime is emergent. The process by which you go from spooky-action-at-a-distance/spacetime-is-irrelevant to emergent spacetime is weird enough that somehow the effects of dark matter and dark energy emerge as well. This means that something about the way masses of particles interact in the dimensionless manifold that is reality causes the spacetime that we perceive to spontaneously expand and puts warps in space where there's no mass to cause the warp. Figure out how to harness and control those two emergent processes, and I think you've got the two ends of an Alcubierre Drive.

    524:

    Just thought of this: if you've got an FTL drive where the front end warps space in using dark matter that emerges from a sophisticated understanding of how spacetime emerges from quantum interactions, whilst the back end warps space out via dark energy that emerges through an allied but different process, I've got a good name for this FTL system: the double emergency drive.

    You're welcome.

    525:
    Well, that's the problem: the explanation for gravity is a 4D version of one of those rubber sheet models. If we're using a rubber sheet to approximate gravity (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTY1Kje0yLg), bright matter is the equivalent of bbs, while dark matter is the equivalent of water. As a dimple forms in the rubber sheet, both will flow in. Why should the dark matter flow out of curved space-time? Even if it doesn't bond to anything else, there's still a dimple.

    Sure, but (as Moz was getting at), in the analogy with the rubber sheet there's friction. In reality, there isn't. Even normal matter objects will happily orbit around each other literally forever, in the absence of some other force or body.

    If you just think of a bit of matter as a bb, if it flies near a lone star in a hyperbolic trajectory (and doesn't hit it), it will surely leave with the same speed but a different direction. If it's going slow enough to be in orbit, then it will just continue to be in orbit, forever. The trick with dark matter is just that it never runs into things.

    Now, when you have more than 2 objects involved, you can get more complicated interactions. A bit of matter (dark or otherwise) might be on a hyperbolic trajectory relative to the Sun, fly past Jupiter and trade enough momentum that it ends up in orbit. But, the thing is, as long as it doesn't run into something, the trade is reversible: an object in orbit can also fly past Jupiter, trade some momentum, and be flung out of the solar system entirely.

    To put it another way, without some kind of one-way function like a collision or an event horizon, gravity doesn't obviously collect or "suck" things at all. It just plays games with velocity vectors while leaving the speed alone.

    Now maybe there's some physical process whereby on average non-interacting particles would be more likely to end up in an energy valley and be less likely to raise their orbits around a star/galaxy than lower them. But this doesn't seem obvious without some method other than just gravity -- and AIUI the models for dark matter assume an amorphous blob of matter, not for example a hyper-dense galactic core.

    526:

    Greg Tingey @ 430: [Replying to] JBS @ 407
    As above - how/why are they getting away with this shit?

    Depends on which "they" you're asking about. The GOP is getting away with Gerrymandering and voter suppression because the "conservative" majority on the U.S. Supreme court overturned the "Voting Rights Act of 1965" and told them they could.

    Employers using the Social Security card as identification to verify your right to work status are just doing what the Federal Government told them to do.

    527:

    Greg Tingey @ 434: QUESTION for USAians
    Isn't the extended (admittedly partial) US Fed, guvmint shutdown illegal under Amendment number 13 of your "Constitution"?
    People are being expected to turn up for work, & do work with no prospect pf pay.
    Equals "Involuntary Servitude" - surely?

    It would be if any private employer tried that shit. But since it's the Federal Government that is supposed to enforce the Constitution ....

    If it goes on long enough, a lawsuit will probably make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but who knows how they would rule?

    528:

    Re: 'Darkon? I think WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particle) is just as good.'

    WIMP is a good name but is looking less like a likely candidate. Ditto MACHO. The next entry as of 2017 is the 'SIMP'. SIMPs interact with themselves, but not other particles. Also, this particle idea seems to relate to the same theory/maths that predicted four and five quark particles which have since have been discovered.

    Here's a brief description:

    'One possibility proposed by Murayama is that a SIMP is a new combination of quarks, which are the fundamental components of particles like the proton and neutron, called baryons. Whereas protons and neutrons are composed of three quarks, a SIMP would be more like a pion in containing only two: a quark and an antiquark.'

    The SIMP would be smaller than a WIMP, with a size or cross section like that of an atomic nucleus, which implies there are more of them than there would be WIMPs. Larger numbers would mean that, despite their weak interaction with normal matter - primarily by scattering off of it, as opposed to merging with or decaying into normal matter - they would still leave a fingerprint on normal matter, Murayama said.

    He sees such a fingerprint in four colliding galaxies within the Abell 3827 cluster, where, surprisingly, the dark matter appears to lag behind the visible matter. This could be explained, he said, by interactions between the dark matter in each galaxy that slows down the merger of dark matter but not that of normal matter, basically stars.'

    Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-machos-dead-wimps-no-showsay-simps.html#jCp

    Anyways, this stuff is still up in the air until some lab like the LHC finds a novel or better way of measuring it or its effects.

    Back to the name -

    'Darkon' like 'quark' isn't likely to embarrass you if you discover something weird and unexpected unlike WIMP or MACHO. Hey - looks like 'darkon' is a real word and already in use. So much for my stab at naming an elementary particle.

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/darkon

    'Darkon (plural darkons)

    (physics) A scalar field (or particle) that represents an elementary part of dark matter.'
    529:

    Rick Moen @ 463: My offhand impression is that involuntary servitude under Amendment 13 is indeed being imposed on members of the US Armed Forces ordered to work without pay (such as, I hear, Coast Guard forces) because they cannot lawfully resign, but technically not against other Federal employees ordered to work without pay because they can resign.

    The Coast Guard is the only one of the U.S. Armed Forces funded through the Department of Homeland Security. The rest of them Army/Navy/Marines/Air Force are all funded through the Department of Defense and are not affected by the current partial shutdown.

    Something I just thought of yesterday. Coast Guard Members are not getting paid (although I expect them to receive back pay eventually), but the Coast Guard also has a lot of equipment - cutters and helicopters that are essential to the Coast Guard mission. Without funding, where are they getting the fuel to keep those cutters sailing & helicopters flying?

    530:

    cptbutton @ 468: Draft registration was resumed in 1980 for all males born after 31 Dec 1959. It continues to this day, though no one has been drafted from those lists.

    Y'all can laugh, but up until a couple of years ago I was still carrying my Vietnam Era "Draft Card" in my wallet. I'd produce it if I was in a argumentative mood and someone asked me to show them my ID.

    I stopped carrying it when I decided it was worth more as a historical document than it was as a way to say EFF YOU to officious assholes.

    531:

    "On the above theme, I found compelling a recent piece by London-based Aussie novelist and lawyer Helen Dale. I'm wondering what you of Charlie's commentariat will think of it."

    If people do decide to look at Helen Dale's blog, I'd also suggest looking at her wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Dale

    Dale aka Darville aka Demidenko is notorious in Australia for a number of things. Read the wiki.

    532:

    SFreader @ 470: Re: US draft
    Seriously not good that this is still a thing given how impulsive DT is.

    Doesn't matter. Congress would have to pass a new draft law to start the draft up again. The current law requires registration, but has no mechanism to actually call anyone up.

    533:

    Rick Moen @ 485: Apologies about the broken link. I meant the Philadelphia Mutiny of 1783, when about 400 Continental Army soldiers treacherously objected to going unpaid for ridiculous periods of time, were treated as mutineers, and occasioned the flight of the nation's capital (stopping briefly in my alma mater) en route to its present location in the Potomac swamps. Deadbeats to the last, eh?

    Do you have a more recent example? Say something from after the American Civil War, or perhaps even in the 20th Century?

    I will note that the current government of the United States did not become active until 1789.

    534:

    I use NordVPN on multiple devices : Android, Windows, and Linux. The Linux implementation requires a bit more manual effort to install, but it uses OpenVPN so it should work on Macs too. I'm happy with it, I don't see any slowdown (on my slow ADSL connection), it's quick to start up, and bypasses geoblocking. One slight niggle is that it blocks network printing on Windows. You can install it directly into your modem as well, to cover a bunch of devices at once. Lots of servers around the world too.

    There are VPN comparison articles out there, some other VPNs look pretty good too, like ExpressVPN. Choice of home country matters, as it dictates what laws might be used to compel the VPN company to hand over account details etc.

    535:

    JBS @ 533: I hadn't thought, and didn't entirely intend to suggest, that the US Federal government has had an ongoing pattern of not paying its armed forces, just that it has had intermittent problems with being a deadbeat (as to soldiers, going back at least to Shay's Rebellion, albeit it's a fair point that before 1789 reliable means of funding weren't there).

    Since you ask, though, a brief search finds a five-month period in 1877 when the US Army went entirely unpaid because of the struggle between Reconstructionist Republican President Hayes and Southern Democrats in the House of Representatives over the Army presence in the defeated Confederacy -- the latter attempting to defeat Reconstruction by starving the Army of funds. Which incident I'd been unfamiliar with and make the current omnishambles look at least less singular.

    As to the 20 Century, offhand I can think only of the Bonus Marchers of 1924, but admittedly that wasn't anything like cutoff of accrued armed forces salaries.

    536:

    Correcting my spelling/punctuation, that passing reference should have been stated as "Daniel Shays's Rebellion", after Continental Army veteran and farmer Daniel Shays (i.e., not "Shay"), who with his large group of fellow veterans objected to being stiffed by the Continental Congress and state governments for their services, and carried out a variety of political actions and insurrections in 1786-7 to seek full compensation for their war service, and relief of debt. We would now say that the optics of wealthy businessmen in Boston getting their pet legislators to send troops after impoverished veteran farmers was less than good, but less attention to PR, and all that.

    Many articles refer to the incident as "Shays' Rebellion", bringing a bitter tear to us fans of the gentle, modest, and innocuous apostrophe.

    537:

    Time for some speculation ...

    What would have happened if Hitler had bluffed the British & the French into backing down when he invaded Poland?

    What if the British & French governments had not declared war on Germany at that point? What might Hitler have done next? And what position would Britain & France have been in to oppose him at a later date? How might a failure to support Poland have affected their future options?

    538:

    I mean that the Moon provides another data point - what the greenhouse effect looks like if the CO2 (and all other gases) concentration is zero. The Moon is as far from the Sun as the Earth, yet their surface temperature profiles are very different. We are already in a greenhouse. I don't mean that to sound like one of the "this is normal" crowd. The Moon shows us how critical an atmosphere is in trapping heat. Clearly the next to step is to understand how the composition and dynamics of an atmosphere affects the greenhouse effect, and that's what GCM models are for.

    539:

    Thanks for this, I’d meant to make a somewhat similar comment myself and forgot when I had time.

    Worth pointing out the recent working relationship with a particular Australian Senator also.

    540:

    Svante Arrhenius discovered the heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases using spectra recorded from moonlight (http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf). Another researcher was trying to figure out the composition of the moon using spectroscopic data from moonlight. To do this, they had to figure out the composition of earth's atmosphere and subtract that out, and that's where Arrhenius got the data he used to figure out how CO2 in the air affected the temperature at the Earth's surface. In 1896. You're actually 122 years late.

    541:

    Excuse me. Joe Shuster was from Toronto. Just up the street from me, as it happens.

    When Superman first appeared, Superman's alter ego Clark Kent worked for the Daily Star newspaper, named by Shuster after the Toronto Daily Star, his old employer in Toronto. Shuster said he modeled the cityscape of Superman's home city, Metropolis, on that of his old hometown.[10] When the comic strip received international distribution, the company permanently changed the name to the Daily Planet.
    542:

    Nice, until the gratuitous cheap shot at the end. I didn't claim priority or originality.

    543:

    On the question of basic fuels, I'd be surprised is the Coast Guard doesn't get them from the Defense Logistics Agency, which wouldn't be immediately affected* even if the Department of Defense was under the shutdown, which it is not. So I'd hope that DLA would keep filling up their tanks without immediate payment.

    • It does not operate on appropriated funds, but on money the services pay it for less service-specific goods and parts. Including fuels.
    544:

    there has been talk of the role of a president being assigned not to an individual, but to a third chamber of Parliament elected in a way to create first-people representation and place it in the centre of decision making.

    I've only seen that as a strawman argument from the racists. Turnbull and Morrison both used it as one excuse for refusing to consider the Uluru Statement From The Heart and I haven't managed to find any other public figures discussing it.

    I do think something like that could work, and might be a good idea. But a core part would be giving them veto power, and that would be a huge sticking point for the whiteys IMO (for you UK folk, think of it like giving the EVEL people their own third chamber with veto over all legislation. But if instead of loud white people we meant "cannabis smokers" or some other small criminalised group of useless layabouts).

    My reading of Uluru was they just wanted first nations seats in the lower house, and I still feel that the racists knew than, knew it would get popular support, and desperately wanted not to have to deal with that problem. Noel Pearson notwithstanding, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that those seats would end up being Labour or Green unless the Liberal, National or LiberalNational parties significantly changed their policies. Although in New Zealand that was only the case with Maori seats for 50 years (1935-1993)... but the right wingers still have never won one.

    545:

    I'm gonna be hard-nosed, here: everyone (at least more than 20 years ago) knew Metropolis was NYC. ... Note, also, that DC comics was (is?) from NYC, and Siegal and Schuster were from NYC.

    on January 21, 1972, DC Comics declared Metropolis the "Hometown of Superman."

    Sorry. Got to go with DC Comics here.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis,_Illinois#Superman's_%22hometown%22

    546:

    Beware simplifications.

    Of course. But a major factor was total numbers of "us vs. them."

    My father told me that friends of his discussed this somewhat. (My father was a ball turret gunner on B24s before they removed the ball turrets for an extra bomb bay.)

    M4 had an electric drive turret rotation system. Tiger (and others?) had a hand crank system. (Maybe just slower?) Anyway the tankers he talked with said their goal became to engage close and in open areas and hopefully with 2 or more to 1. M4s would try and quickly flank (if more than 1 then go in opposite directions) then start shooting at the tracks (to the extent they could aim that accurately). Which would stop the movements of the German tank then they could keep circling and shooting ahead of the rotation of the turret of the German tank.

    And yes this is a story relayed through 3 people over 70 years so I know it may be a bit hyped.

    547:

    It's a tad more complicated than that. "New" means a LOT of new money. "Keep it flying"...

    Always.

    But with aircraft flying the only model of a very old plane soon turns into more and more of your ground crew being retired folks in their 70s as contractors and building up expertise as world wide salvage scroungers. And using a lot of machine shop resources where very experienced operators make a new part for you at times based on a broken thing you give them.

    548:

    Treating amphetamines like candy was a trait that transcended national boundaries. Everyone was at it, and no-one thought anything of it.

    Not quite. From a wikipedia article.

    In an effort to make its front-line soldiers and fighter pilots fight longer, harder, and with less concern for individual safety, the German army ordered them to take military-issue pills made from methamphetamine and a primarily cocaine-based stimulant. After Pervitin, a methamphetamine drug newly developed by the Berlin-based Temmler pharmaceutical company, ... The drug was brought to the attention of Otto Friedrich Ranke, a military doctor and director of the Institute for General and Defense Physiology at Berlin's Academy of Military Medicine.[3] The effects of amphetamines are similar to those of the adrenaline produced by the body, triggering a heightened state of alertness. In most people, the substance increases self-confidence, concentration, and willingness to take risks while at the same time reducing sensitivity to pain, hunger, and the need for sleep.

    I've also read and watched some reports on how the Germany high command wanted to scale back use after a while but the forces in Russia were basically all addicts by then. That last bit also explains why they could exist as long as they did with very short supplies. And why autopsies of soldiers who died without injury seemed to indicated they were starving.

    549:

    and makes a continuing resolution automatic,

    Which still leaves us with those pesky debt ceiling votes.

    550:

    Why register for the draft? If you don't you can cause yourself hassles down the road. Here's a clip from the Wikipedia article on the issue. There's more. A lot of states have similar rules.

    At some point someone (with deep pockets) will get their knickers all in a twist and sue over women not having to register and it will be expanded or tossed.

    As an alternative method of encouraging or coercing registration, laws were passed requiring that in order to receive financial aid, federal grants and loans, certain government benefits, eligibility for most federal employment, and (if the person is an immigrant) eligibility for citizenship, a young man had to be registered (or had to have been registered, if they are over 26 but were required to register between 18 and 26) with the Selective Service. Those who were required to register, but failed to do so before they turn 26, are no longer allowed to register, and thus may be permanently barred from federal jobs and other benefits, unless they can show to the Selective Service that their failure was not knowing and willful.[7] There is a procedure to provide an "information letter" to the Selective Service for those in these situations, for example recent citizens who entered the US after their 26th birthday.[57]

    551:

    Here's where I got my impressions of such.

    https://www.amazon.com/Blitzed-Drugs-Germany-Norman-Ohler/dp/0241256992

    I think it was a History channel documentary that I saw not too long ago based on this book.

    552:

    I've got a good name for this FTL system: the double emergency drive.

    It sounds related to what the characters in the Freefall web comic use for interstellar travel, the DAVE drive. The acronym describes its important features: Dangerous And Very Expensive.

    553:

    Something I just thought of yesterday. Coast Guard Members are not getting paid (although I expect them to receive back pay eventually), but the Coast Guard also has a lot of equipment - cutters and helicopters that are essential to the Coast Guard mission. Without funding, where are they getting the fuel to keep those cutters sailing & helicopters flying?

    The humor site Duffelblog, which is a military themed humor site (these days I feel I need to make such things very clear, since it's not obvious what's satire and what's actually deranged government), reported Coast Guard Begins Reselling Cocaine Amid Government Shutdown. The shutdown hits hard on those departments without the foresight to have entire warehouses full of cocaine and marijuana stockpiled for a rainy day!

    Seriously and factually, I was in Astoria out on the coast Tuesday and I saw that the local supermarket was taking food donations for Coast Guard families. I'd best not linger on the subject, as the situation leaves me angry, frustrated, and ashamed.

    554:

    Nojay @ 511 Dark matter is wierd Yes -it's a "placeholder" or "hamdwavium" according to reference. What we can be certain of id that there is SOMETHING or a group of somethings we don't understand. I'm with Pigeon @ 509 - we have an Aether type of misunderstanding - I think.

    Heteromeles @ 523 Conservation of INFORMATION law, anyone? How does this interact with Black Holes ????

    555:

    How about recognising how they work? Gravitationally Interacting Massive Particles.

    Yes, most of the Universe is GIMPs

    556:

    Well, I've got a separate and more detailed account that says that the turret train crank on the PzKfw VI required 720 turns of the crank for one revolution of the turret, such that at closeish range an infantryman could walk round the tank fast enough to never be targeted by the main gun (the bow mg is a different matter entirely).

    558:

    Today, British common law is about as influential on Australian law as US common law is (and as all three are to each other, along with the other common law countries).

    Minor nits:

    a) It's English and Welsh common law; Scotland has an entirely separate legal system which does not run on common law (it's based on Roman law, with uniquely Scottish bells and whistles on top, and legislation updated in parallel with England/Wales in the House of Commons between 1707 and 1999 but not since 2000).

    b) Successive governments, driven by the Home Office bureaucracy, made a concerted attempt to completely replace the old common law offenses with a modern penal code, from 1997 onwards; UK courts no longer use the old Latin legal terms, the Law Lords don't exist as such any more (there's a Supreme Court instead, with different roles and responsibilities defined by the Ministry of Justice), and any lawyer from the US coming to the UK and assuming everything works the way they expect it to would be in for a nasty shock.

    TLDR: the UK isn't really a common law system, in whole or in part, any more.

    559:

    What would have happened if Hitler had bluffed the British and the French into backing down when he invaded Poland?

    That Couldn't Happen™ — Hitler had already bluffed them multiple times, from the Anschluss to Czecheslovakia: "fool me once, shame on you: fool me twice, shame on me" was in full effect by September 1939. (Translation: Hitler had zero credibility when he made "one final territorial demand".)

    Secondly, Britain and France were locked in a defensive alliance with Poland after March 1939: if they didn't come to Poland's aid in event of an invasion, they'd bankrupt their diplomatic credibility and render subsequent defensive treaties against Hitler's expansion worthless. In other words, they had to hold the line now or never.

    Complicating factor: it wasn't just Hitler invading Poland: remember the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Russia invaded simultaneously in the east once they'd secured the non-aggression treaty with Hitler. (The M-R Pact wasn't an alliance, but a non-aggression treaty removed the worst risk element from Hitler's invasion plan—that the USSR would respond in kind and roll west.) The M-R Pact was signed on August 23rd, 1939, just a week before the invasion.

    The most significant what-if would be, what if Stalin didn't play ball in August? Hitler was a gambler and you don't work up an invasion from scratch in just six days; it's clear he was planning to invade and just waiting on the green light from Moscow. The question is, in the absence of the green light, does Hitler gamble and invade anyway, relying on Stalin not to react? Hitler's worst case outcome is that he rolls into Poland, the UK and France declare war, and Stalin attacks from the east. In which case the big picture jump-cuts from September 1939 straight to September 1943 with no intervening time (as in: he's outnumbered and outgunned by a war on two fronts by numerically superior enemies).

    560:

    Well, I've got a separate and more detailed account that says that the turret train crank on the PzKfw VI required 720 turns of the crank for one revolution of the turret

    That sounds a bit hinky to me.

    Yes, you'd never turn the turret through 360 degrees if you could help it—you'd turn within 180 degrees. But still, 360 hand-crank turns for 180 degrees? If you can do two turns a second (which is fast—try twisting your wrist in circles while holding a couple of kilograms' weight—bearing in mind the turret weighs several tons) implies 180 seconds, or three minutes, to traverse a 180 degree arc, which sounds completely bonkers.

    Even though WW2 tanks generally didn't have stabilized guns, so fired while stationary, implying they'd be positioned to cover a particular arc, taking a whole minute to slew across a 60 degree angle ...?

    561:

    Even normal matter objects will happily orbit around each other literally forever

    Niggle: Because the two orbiting bodies produce gravitational waves that carry away energy and angular momentum, it's not literally forever. Just a very, very, very long time.

    562:

    Apart from issues mentioned previously by other commentators, the fact that the Australian constitution is a lot harder to change than the UK one, makes it a lot easier for the UK to drop the monarchy than for Australia to, and thus harder to sanction a rogue GG.

    There is literally nothing that the parliament could do, constitutionally, that could stop the GG from exercising the powers in the constitution, if he/she decided to. To change the constitution requires a referendum, unlike in the UK which requires a simple act of parliament. As such, if the GG went rogue, and ignored convention, they could have a field day.

    Some of the "fun" powers: Section 61: "The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen's representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth." 68: "The command in chief of the naval and military forces of the Commonwealth is vested in the Governor-General as the Queen's representative."

    The GG can also decided to let the parliament sit only once or twice a year, and can appoint and dismiss ministers at will. This means they could make it very hard to pass the required referendum bill to amend the constitution to get rid of their powers...

    Now, all that said, the parliament could potentially just ignore the GG, or declare them insane, or whatever, and deal with the fallout afterwards (including potential electoral loss). But if you have a law, and the /parliament/ doesn't follow it, then what's the point of the law?

    (Personally, I'm not a fan of any of the republican models on offer, and fail to see the need for, or point of, a head of state.)

    563:

    Well, this is the first time I've ever seen that written analysis; I was literally quoting a spoken comment. The Tank Museum at Bovington does have a working Tiger, and may know the actual gearing, although it's not quoted on the relevant web page https://www.tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1951-23 .

    564:

    I may have just spent 15 minutes googling "tank turret slew rate" ... And I came up with this discussion of WW2 tank turret traversal (with citations). Just about everybody had motorized turrets, except a couple of the early, light German panzers: everybody used either electrical or hydraulic motors, usually with a manual backup system that could be used for very fine aim control. The German Pz V (Panther) and later had a hydraulic take-off from the main engine, so there was a significant weakness — the motorized traversal only worked when the engine was running, and only worked at maximum speed when the engine was revving. The first-build Panthers took a whole minute to traverse 360 degrees, but this was cut to 15 seconds in the second batch, then to 18 seconds (to improve engine life). The Sherman could spin its turret in 15 seconds; the T-34 was the champ, with a 360 degree turn possible in just 12 seconds.

    So I'd say the "720 turns to traverse" and "an infantryman could walk round the tank faster than it could spin its turret" both belong in the same basket of military myths as "mediaeval knights in plate armour had to be winched into the saddle of their charger" (knights' manuals dating to that period actually required them to go from face-down and prone to running a hundred yards and vaulting into the saddle: a suit of white gothic plate from the 15th century weighed around 20kg, so not too far off a modern infantry load-out).

    (But "720 turns to traverse 360 degrees" is consistent with "hand wheel used for fine aim adjustment" — typically in increments of a fraction of a degree.)

    565:
    Scotland has an entirely separate legal system which ... [is] based on Roman law

    Strange that Scotland works off Roman law - since the Roman Empire advanced into Scotland a couple of times but never stayed for long. No matter how hard you flogged the inhabitants, there were never enough of them to support occupation by legions.

    566:

    One comment on the thread about the various alt-hist scenarios of '(how) could the Germans have won WWII?':

    Speaking as a German, I am very glad that they didn't, and that's really all I have to say about that.

    567:

    The Freefall comic cannot be recommended enough. It starts a little slowly, but deals with lots of issues we discuss here.

    568:

    Thanks for that; that is an entirely credible source, and makes me think that the verbal source I quoted was actually talking about the "fine train" system in Panzers, but no-one present knew enough to know that (then).

    569:

    That does seem a little odd to me too, since Scotland has had not only a different legal system but (other than Roman Catholicism) enjoys separation of religion too.

    There may be something relating to Scotland's religious links to Ireland since Colm Cille (died 597CE) and hence with the Celtic Church (the best writings I know of about how that worked being Peter Tremaine's "Sister Fidelma" series, set mostly in Ireland around the time of the Synod of Whitby.

    (and I'm torturing the speel chucker again here)

    570:

    Well, since you were, quite literally, trying to reinvent the origin of the fundamental equation that's used in all climate change models, it's not a cheap shot unless you take it personally. In any case, you can't use the moon as a data point because it's baked into the foundations of the system.

    Arrhenius' basic equation, used in all GCMs, for determining how the temperature on the ground warms as a function of how much CO2 in the air, was published in 1896. The interesting parts are that Arrhenius was pretty accurate in his calculation for the multiplier, and that so few people know how old the science of climate change is. The first part is due to Arrhenius being a good scientist who later got a Nobel prize for some of his other work. The latter part is probably due to disinformation from the fossil fuel industry.

    Oh, and there is a third interesting bit: Arrhenius did all the original calculations by hand. There's this myth that you need a supercomputer to understand climate change, with a subtext of it being all so complicated that it's probably an artifact of the computer model and not real. In fact Arrhenius did all his calculations long hand, and in the paper he shows his work. Anyone who's had algebra can calculate the change in the global average temperature due to an increase in CO2 concentration, just by plugging in the numbers. GCMs are useful for understand the details, which matter rather more than does the rise in mean global temperature over an undetermined time period.

    571:

    Still, darkons? Guess Greek's too posh for these people. If you want the proper antithesis of photon (which derives from the greek for light), perhaps we should be talking about "skotons" as particles of dark matter.

    572:

    570: "Well, since you were, quite literally, trying to reinvent the origin of the fundamental equation that's used in all climate change models, it's not a cheap shot unless you take it personally."

    Hmm. I smell methane, the sort you get from a broken gaslight. It's a misrepresentation to say that I was "trying to reinvent etc", and I think a traversal back through the reply thread will show that. People were discussing Venus as providing insight into the greenhouse effect, and I wanted to throw the Moon into the discussion. That's hardly the same as fumbling towards recapitulating Arrhenius' work, 122 years late.

    I did take your rude remark personally, but that makes it no less rude. Your argument here is akin to those whose apologies end with '...if anyone was offended'.

    I would rather be discussing (and learning more) about the physics of the greenhouse effect, but that doesn't work if I have to keep dodging cheap shots.

    573:

    Re: 'skoton'

    Hmm - just looked this up and it's accusative singular Esperanto for 'a Scottish person'.

    Could work ... BrExit happens, Scots call a snap vote to leave the UK, the LHC identifies a weird ping that is determined to be DM, and the Scots go on to dominate the universe.

    574:

    Scott Sanford @ 553: The humor site Duffelblog, which is a military themed humor site (these days I feel I need to make such things very clear, since it's not obvious what's satire and what's actually deranged government), reported Coast Guard Begins Reselling Cocaine Amid Government Shutdown. The shutdown hits hard on those departments without the foresight to have entire warehouses full of cocaine and marijuana stockpiled for a rainy day!

    I've noticed several complaints in the last two years from the staff of the parody "news" site The Onion that they're having a difficult time competing with genuine news stories about the current administration.

    Seriously and factually, I was in Astoria out on the coast Tuesday and I saw that the local supermarket was taking food donations for Coast Guard families. I'd best not linger on the subject, as the situation leaves me angry, frustrated, and ashamed.

    Saw this morning that newspapers like the L.A. Times are starting to use the word slavery to describe the shutdown.

    575:

    Speaking as a German, I am very glad that they didn't, and that's really all I have to say about that.

    The people we visited a few weeks ago in central Germany basically said the same thing.

    576:

    Not particularly, and no, it's not personal from me. Talking about using Venus or the Moon to understand the greenhouse effect on Earth is kind of like talking about the possibilities of doing calculus on mechanical calculators when the field's moving into quantum computers. If you're insulted by this, catch up. There are massive resources on the web to get you up to speed.

    577:

    Comment from a Finnish friend of mine (not Hannu R) "Donald Trump is the comic relief on our news broadcasts".

    578:

    MSB @ 566: One comment on the thread about the various alt-hist scenarios of '(how) could the Germans have won WWII?':

    I'm not really interested in figuring out how the Germans might have won, just curious about how various decisions shaped the outcome and how things might have been different if key players had made different decisions at certain points.

    I think it's already established there is no path to German "victory" other than don't start a war. But, is there any realistic path the Germans could have taken that would prevent Hitler from starting a war Germany couldn't win?

    Are there points before Poland where the "Allies" had a credible opportunity to stop Hitler IF they had acted then? What might have been the results if they had done so? I've asserted that part of Chamberlain's action at Munich was motivated by an OVER-estimate of German military strength. What might Chamberlain's stance have been at Munich if he'd had a better assessment of German readiness?

    How would the war have gone differently if the Allies failed to react the invasion of Poland in September 1939? Yes, I know they had made promises to support Poland, but they had made promises to Czechoslovakia before Munich.

    I wonder if there was a way Hitler could have been stopped before Poland?

    Try this one on ... Would the war have ended differently if von Stauffenberg had succeeded in his plot to assassinate Hitler? What if one of the supposed 41 other plots had succeeded?

    579:

    You do know that the bright thing in the ceiling or the lamp by you is, technically speaking, a darksucker? It only looks bright because it's sucking all the dark out of the room. And when it's full, it doesn't suck dark any more, just shows as being full of dark. At that point, you need to get a new, empty one....

    580:

    paws4thot @ 577: Comment from a Finnish friend of mine (not Hannu R) "Donald Trump is the comic relief on our news broadcasts"."

    Truly a sad commentary when someone as UN-funny as Trump is the "comic relief".

    581:

    About those "insane" larger armored vehicles... it's obvious what he wanted: Keithg Laumer's Bolo, but for one thing, you need a lot more work than they had on self-contained nuclear reactors...

    http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/

    582:

    "Politically correct": I've seen it used maybe a handful of times over the decades, by the left. I have seen it in constant use by the neofascists (that does, of course, include Murdoch and his ill-begotten spawn).

    Meanwhile, how many times have we seen the right stabbing each other in the back over not being "correct", sorry, "conservative" enough?

    583:

    Ok, I'll give in, and tell you my ftl drive... and there's no Hollywood handwavium.

  • I'll assume most of you are familiar with Einstein's Principle of Equivalence.
  • Assume we find a way of converting electromagnetic energy into gravity... and back.
  • So: you lower the gravity in the ship, and in front of it. Therefore, the ship falls forward... and as it approaches ->the speed of light of a body at rest<-, its mass has not increased... so it keeps going. You shove the gravity (and mass) that's been converted to e/m out the back, so there's no "bow wave", and you just keep going, since you haven't allowed mass to increase, or, for that matter, length to get shorter, or time to get slower.

    You do need to worry about running into Space Crap (asteroids, rocks, particle)....

    The whitroth star drive (tm)(c 1970-2019) (Yes, I have been thinking of it that long.)

    584:

    I think there may be two lawsuits right now.

    Oh, but the one that could break them all: I read, today, that the union representing air traffic controllers, pilots, and one or two other groups is issuing public statements of concern about safety.

    I can see that union saying, "enough's enough"... and going on strike. ALL AIR TRAFFIC IN THE US shut down....

    585:

    But, is there any realistic path the Germans could have taken that would prevent Hitler from starting a war Germany couldn't win?

    Yes, but I'm pretty sure you have to go back to 1918 for that outcome. Possibly figure a way to not have Rosa Luxemburg murdered by the Freikorps. Or not have the young demobbed Adolf H. sent to infiltrate the nascent NSDAP at a point when it was so small he could mold it in his own image.

    Later options, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, are all economic: somehow avoid the hyperinflation spiral of the late 20s and the consequent devaluation of the mark, leaving Germany's credit rating as junk on the bond market right before the depression hit. Or have some other group come to power in the 1930s that would expend its energy on economic reconstruction within Germany rather than going hell-for-leather on expansionist policies that could only be paid for by asset-stripping the whole of Europe.

    But once Hitler grabbed power in March 1933, some sort of general European war was pretty much unavoidable.

    586:

    When the law expired, in 1970, I burned my original draft card. No clue where the replacement that they sent out after they reinstalled the draft got to.

    587:

    On that, I sit corrected. However, everyone back when I was a kid and a teen knew that Metropolis was NYC, and DC announcing Metropolis, IL was his hometown was just for publicity, since there was no possibility that a small town could be Metropolis of the huge population and skyscrapers.

    588:

    You missed one step: that's where the Scots find a (barely) habitable extrasolar planet, colonize it, and name the planet, of course, Dorsai.

    589:

    Air Traffic controllers are somewhat replaceable. And a strike will get them fired. That precedent has be set.

    But TSA screeners, that's another story. There are vastly more of them (so harder for managers to "fill in"0 and they make little enough that this is a much bigger wage hit to them. They they may just stop coming to work or a majority call in sick. If lines get long enough to start causing 10% to 20% or more of the people to miss flights, well, the yelling will get loud. When it hits 50% or they start closing mid sized airports, things will end in a hurry.

    590:

    I note that US government spending fuels about 20% of US total economic activity; the military is more or less exempt from the shutdown (Coast Guard aside, as that's part of Homeland Security which isn't exempt) and the military is about half of spending, so that's about 10% of US economic activity that just exited stage left.

    Obviously the shutdown won't last a whole year—I hope! But I remember living through a 12 month period when the UK lost 10% of GDP; it was 1979-80, under Margaret Thatcher, and it sucked mightily enough to make a mere recession seem trivial: it took the country a decade to recover. Once people start leaving the jobs that aren't paying them and get work elsewhere, those functions aren't going to start up again once the government shutdown ends—it's going to take hard work.

    At this point, if the shutdown goes on for another month the US is looking at the effective equivalent of an economic recession—growth slashed in half at a minimum for 2019.

    591:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE

    Alex Salmond has been charged with extremely serious crimes and the case is now heading for trial.

    To discuss aspects of the case would constitute criminal contempt of court, and as such is absolutely forbidden on this blog.

    This includes an absolute ban on expressing any opinions of Mr Salmond's conduct.

    Any further comments on this case (prior to the verdict) will be deleted and persistent offenders may be banned.

    592:

    Why I'm not blogging much:

    a) I'm elbow-deep in one book, while waiting for the edits on another (INVISIBLE SUN) which is running late.

    b) Purely coincidentally, my sole remaining parent is in a nursing home and fading fast: I'm expecting the funeral in March.

    c) Add Brexit-induced depression (we're still heading towards the cliff-edge at the end of March) and a bad case of burn-out on top of factors (a) and (b).

    Oh, and (d) a friend I hadn't seen in a couple of months went into hospital on December 31st with pneumonia and didn't come out again. The unexpected and very unwelcome funeral was last Thursday.

    I'm not putting the blog on indefinite hiatus, but it's way down my list of priorities (and my commenting today is a poor substitute for a day of writing) ...

    593:

    Charlie,

    My sympathies on all of that. Don't know what else I can do (ok, I'm nearly done the book I'm currently reading, I should buy the recent Laundry novel), but other than that....

    Unfortunately, I've been through the losses. The only thing I can say is take your wife in your arms, and hold her tight, and tell her all the things you leave unsaid.

    Everyone we care about are hostages to fortune, and fortune will always take them, sooner or later... but to pretend or try not to care is trying to not be human.

    I'm lucky that we're fully funded. It would really hurt me if we were not. I do not want to retire before I hit 70 (which, in fact, is in a couple of weeks), but I wanted to make 10 years here. I've no idea how I'm going to be feeling when I do retire - flashbacks to almost five years out of work, the early oughts?

    594:

    There was a way to prevent WWII breaking out the way it did but no-one wanted to do it. Enforce the Versailles Treaty, hard. Don't let the German remilitarise and there's no WWII, at least one started by the Germans. However the bleeding-heart capitalists in the US and a few other countries couldn't bear to see white folks treated like the N-word so they were given loans, allowed to remilitarise the Ruhr and build up an army that quickly scared the shit out of their neighbours and the Allies who were supposed to enforce the Treaty sat on their hands and did nothing.

    Going to Berlin in 1933 the way Sherman visited Atlanta would have been a good move, basically. It would have left Germany a smouldering ruin twelve years earlier than it actually took but it might have saved forty million lives and been a lot cheaper in dollar costs.

    595:

    Basically, we're doing the same thing, except I get to take Alcubierre's name in vain. And didn't Alan Dean Foster already use yours? It's been a long time since I read any of his Commonwealth stories.

    Actually, the FTL device I'd love to use isn't a jumpship but a jumpswap: the drive swaps two volumes of space an arbitrarily large distance apart, but the momentum of whatever's in each volume is conserved.

    Why it's fun (in the fiction-writing sense): --Swaps make for excellent weapons: consider a jumpswap that jumps a large bomb (or even a heavy penetrator) into a bunker from halfway around the planet. It will be going rather fast when it comes out.
    --Or you can jumpswap with the heart of the local star. The star won't mind much, but I'd be interested (for theoretical values of interest) to see what happens when that kind of material suddenly encounters a cooler realm with less pressure. More damage than a nuke going off maybe? The controls society would use to keep such a stardrive from being misused would be...interesting. --When jumpswapping between star systems, the jumpship gets stuck dumping 10-100 km/sec of velocity to match velocities with the local planets. Stardiving would be one rather exciting way of matching velocities; jump as close to the star as possible so that you pop out flying away from it, using the star's gravity to slow you for free, then jump out to avoid stellar flares and cool off in deep space. Calling interstellar-capable ships "stardivers" is just cool. --And consider the philosophical implications of being able to exchange volumes of universe, no matter what those volumes contain. Does that mean we live in a "brickverse" where everything's predetermined, but there's still a way for parts of the brick to excise themselves and swap with non-adjacent volumes of the Brick? Does that imply there's no free will? Is every swap therefore inevitable? What about time, if the swap isn't instantaneous and that you can swap one piece of spacetime forward in time for one piece backwards?

    Playing with this FTL would have all sorts of nutso moral, ethical, and philosophical conundrums. Sadly, I don't think there's an angle of physics that makes this seem even remotely possible.

    596:

    Bob Shaw's book "Who Goes Here" had a teleporter drive spaceship. The back of the ship was teleported to the front, repeatedly.

    597:

    Charlie & The Moderators PLEASE delete my comment @ 589?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The dire predictions on Brexit from Airbus, Jaguar Land-Rover & Ford? Wonder what it will take to get the rabids to acknowledge that it's a mistake, or will they continue to claim both "project fear" AND "It will be worth it" simultaneously ??

    [[ done - mod ]]

    598:

    TSA screeners, that's another story

    They may discover that they don't need as many screeners. You could get rid of a lot of security theatre without actually affecting security.

    (I doubt it will happen like that, but hope springs eternal and all that.)

    Darker scenario: security is lowered in the interests of keeping people flying, someone takes advantage of that and there is a major incident — public support for more security measures thereby increases and people rally behind the president like Americans always do when they're attacked. Trump gets his wall and another term, civil liberties take another hit…

    600:

    Alas, air traffic controllers are not so easily replaceable as one might think. There is a shortage at the moment and controllers are already working 60-hour weeks in some cases. FAA's training academy is shut down and almost 20% of existing controllers are or soon will be qualified for retirement. It wouldn't take all that much to put US civil air travel into crisis. Give it a month, it may happen. Some of those controllers may figure out that the only way to get paid is to retire...

    601:

    Take care of yourself, Charlie. I've been through this myself over the last couple of years and last week my wife was in the hospital for a few days with critically high blood pressure. I told her she had to come home, I've lost both parents in the last couple of years and I was damned if I was going to have to explain it to her dog if she didn't.

    Find what relaxes you and indulge in it.

    602:

    Mike @ 600 Or, really nasty ... Air Traffic, overworked, unpaid ... mistake is made & major crash ... and the Accident Invesigators are not being paid either ... ( Reports are that there's already a serious backlog of un-investiagted incidents ) I don't see any way DT can avoid carrying the can for that one?

    603:

    "Charlie & The Moderators"

    This is the name of a 50s band. Charlie has a costume with 92 red dots on it, the backing musicians' costumes are flat graphite grey, their instruments are constructed from pieces of lab equipment and technical apparatus, and they play from the rear deck of a Ford Nucleon as their stage.

    604:

    I don't think there's an angle of physics that makes this seem even remotely possible.

    I thought the "violent explosion at exit" model worked quite well. It explains why we don't (think we) see FTL drives being used :)

    "feels like FTL" where you arrive in a forked universe and as far as your point of departure is concerned there's just an infoplosion as your ship suffers entropic degradation and a "spontaneous ordering" where you arrive.

    Sarcastic FTL, where you appear to elongate like some of the early SF movies and your actual trip is only a barely-measurable amount technically faster than light. It produces the twin paradox but more so, where the travelling twin comes out younger than they went in ... by several attoseconds for every lightyear travelled!

    605:

    The Freefall comic cannot be recommended enough. It starts a little slowly, but deals with lots of issues we discuss here.

    Such as the wisdom of the perennially overlooked observation "It’s okay to have steak when there’s a chicken in every pot. But if you’re eating steak and the majority of people have nothing, it doesn’t take long for you to look like a chicken."

    606:

    Re: FTL

    Would like to see this type of experiment:

    Two spaceships sent in opposite directions each with antenna/comm gear pointed at the other and at Earth. Both ships have rockets/fuel that can enable them to eventually hit 0.50001 speed of light. What would they be able to see of each other as well as of the other's background environment once they technically are at FTL speed with respect to each other? (What stays in view and what 'disappears'?)

    607:

    No, it would break the invariants hopelessly. While there are variants that require everything to match in order for the swap to work, they would be so difficult to set up as to be useless.

    But I think that this brings in one of the discrepancies between GR and QM - if a particle tunnels between two frames, what restrictions and results are there? My VERY limited understanding is that this is still a matter of dispute, but I was never good enough to follow the analyses in this area.

    608:

    Truly a sad commentary when someone as UN-funny as Trump is the "comic relief".

    I'm sure he's much funnier from a greater distance. He spent over twenty years as a running joke, since the first time he got noticed nationally. He was such a cartoonish buffoon and obvious con artist that he made an easy punchline for comedians and anyone else fortunate enough not to be doing business with him.

    609:

    That one's easy - speeds are not simply additive under Lorentz transformations. So, yes, they would.

    610:

    In a way we do those experiments all the time, and the most obvious place to see them is CERN. The large hadron collider, for example, produces closing speeds of nearly 2c from an outside perspective... but as far as the particles are concerned it's still sub-c due to time dilation.

    The physics behind time dilation might as well be magic as far as I'm concerned, but it is very measurable. It's actually done deliberately with short-lived isotopes to get them to hang around long enough to be poked at. So yes, we really have seen time dilation actually happening. Plus right down in the fine print navigation satellites have to allow for it and if they don't the system doesn't work.

    AFAIK people have only bounced light between approaching mirrors at sub-c closing speed, but with multiple bounces it's possible to get quite significant frequency shifts and I would be surprised to hear that someone has used this as a trick to get an experiment to work. One obvious hack would be making one mirror transparent above a certain frequency, so once there's enough bounces to get up to the chosen frequency the resulting radiation just whizzes right on out.

    611:

    I've probably posted this before but I thought he was a comedian. I thought he was one of these put-on comic personas, like the Ali G version of a thick redneck American, and the claim to be running for President was just part of his shtick. It took me quite a while to work out that he was actually for real and his candidacy was actually genuine.

    (Note: Running for President was the first I ever heard of him. I still find it weird to see people from the other side of the Atlantic talking in terms of him having been a household name, as a dick, for 20 years.)

    612:

    I don't think so. And I have no jump - you're still travelling through space. Think of it as though it were a waterjet-propelled boat, pulling the water into the front and pushing it out the back.

    Nowhere near as fast as a jump (or jump gate), but doesn' t need dark placeholder or anything else.

    613:

    I've probably posted this before but I thought he was a comedian. I thought he was one of these put-on comic personas, like the Ali G version of a thick redneck American, and the claim to be running for President was just part of his shtick.

    That's not wholly wrong. The second part is spot on; for years he'd regularly crawl out from semi-obscurity to 'run for president' and get free publicity and the thrill of hearing people say "Trump" on television. Actually getting a party nomination was never part of the plan, God forbid winning.

    But unlike professional comedians or actors, there's no mask. To construct a persona requires an understanding of what is being parodied and enough self-awareness to pretend to be something other than your real self. With The Donald, what you see is all that's there.

    614:

    Bob Shaw's book "Who Goes Here" had a teleporter drive spaceship. The back of the ship was teleported to the front, repeatedly.

    I'm surprised nobody has pointed out that Larry Niven came up with this idea, then confessed he didn't have the nerve to include it in a story.

    615:

    They may discover that they don't need as many screeners. You could get rid of a lot of security theatre without actually affecting security.

    You don't replace the entire staff and re-do how the process works and not have a major disruption. Pick one. And things will still be a mess. Pick both and it will be worse.

    Screening staff are not expected to be rocket scientists. But they do have to learn how to operate the equipment and follow the rules over and over again. And again. And again. ....

    616:

    Alas, air traffic controllers are not so easily replaceable as one might think.

    I don't think they are easily replaceable. But like they did 25 years ago, the military guys will be sent into the towers. They will be under orders and will be getting a paycheck.

    A lot of flights will get cancelled for flow control reasons. Maybe half or more. Airlines will scream. With justification. But there will be flights.[1]

    [1]My wife and I might not see each other for the duration. We live 1100 miles apart and fly back and forth most weekends.

    617:

    Re: 'AFAIK people have only bounced light between approaching mirrors at sub-c closing speed, but with multiple bounces ...'

    Thanks - this sounds really interesting.

    To EC (609): Re: Lorenz transformations

    Thanks! Will look for some videos (for the lay/non-scientist) to try and get a better understanding of what transforms with/vs what.

    618:

    "Going to Berlin in 1933 the way Sherman visited Atlanta would have been a good move, basically. It would have left Germany a smouldering ruin twelve years earlier than it actually took but it might have saved forty million lives and been a lot cheaper in dollar costs."

    Assuming that you are from the USA here - WWI cost the UK about the same proportion of deaths as ~7 million US military deaths would.

    If the USA had lost 7 million men killed in the 1990's, there'd be little taste for a re-run now.

    619:

    Just to clarify, I've got two ridiculous FTLs in play. One (The Double Emergency Drive) is an Alcubierre drive, a spacewarp where the ship expands space behind it and contracts space in front of it, and because the frame is moving rather than the ship, this allegedly gets around the lightspeed limit. I was joking that this was the Double Emergency Drive because I postulated that we'd develop it by figuring out how to go from quantum mechanics (the small stuff that we can experiment with in a lab) to cosmological dark energy (the expansion behind) and dark matter (the contraction in front) by postulating that these two are epiphenomena that emerge from the way the bizarrely distorted macrocosmic spacetime universe we see with telescopes emerges from the nonlocal reality of quantum mechanics. Hence the bad joke about emergent(cy) phenomena and the Double Emergency Drive.*

    Then there's the jumpswap, which is just a jumpship with plot complications that doesn't even have a physical handwave to back it up. If this kind of thing were possible, it would imply that the universe is a 4-dimensional block, that free will and progress through time inside that block are illusions, and that the jumpswaps happen because, well, that's just the way the universe is.

    If I understand it, what you're talking about is a ship that generates a gravity warp in front of itself and falls into it. I seem to recall that Foster's Humanx Commonwealth used the same idea, but it's been a long time since I read those books.

    *As an aside, instead of electrogravity, why don't we use some non-obvious arrangement of lasers to create the equivalent of exotic matter and create a photogravitic drive?

    620:

    "Wonder what it will take to get the rabids to acknowledge that it's a mistake, or will they continue to claim both "project fear" AND "It will be worth it" simultaneously ??"

    It's going to dual h*ll for the UK:

    1) Brexit will be a no-deal, with thousands of anticipated and unanticipated crises.

    2) The UK government will botch it.

    3) The Brexit faction will blame everybody else for the problems. They're advancing the art from the 1930's, because now they are creating the depression to take advantage of.

    4) The US economy will now be a negative force in the world economy.

    5) Trump & Co. will botch it.

    6) Their first instinct will be to stab the UK in the back.

    621:

    Take care of yourself, Charlie. We'll keep ourselves amused.

    622:

    I am sorry to hear about you and your wife. Sucks.

    Yeah, this is the real problem: systems are breaking down. While this may sound good to the small government NeoCons, in practice it's going to be a mess that we'll spend years recovering from.

    I suspect them in the White House are praying right now for another 9/11, so that they can use this mess to declare martial law and get rid of Congress. Let's all hope that doesn't happen, shall we?

    Incidentally, I am donating money to the local food bank to help TSA agents and other paycheck-to-paycheck federal employees make it through this mess. I may not like what they do, but that's not a reason to put them on the street.

    623:

    Take care of yourself, Charlie.

    624:

    Question for those in the UK: I saw an article referenced in the local paper El Espresso, about how some euroskeptic or other responded on a TalkRadio call-in question, that went something like, "“Do you think it’s going to come down to the Queen protecting Brexit and saving Brexit?” with something along the lines of hoping that Her Majesty would deign to consider saving the Brexiteers' bacon without them actually, you know, having to ask.

    Really? Is that where things are now?

    625:

    Regarding: avoiding WWII - Ben Elton (of Blackadder and Thin Blue Line fame, among others) came up with a method in one of his novels, Time and Time Again.

    It seems that there's a temporal 'hole' connecting Istanbul at a particular moment in the 2020s with Istanbul at a particular moment in May, 1914. The protagonist is volunteered to go through. His goals are twofold:

    1) Save the Austrian Archduke. This removes the immediate trigger for WWI.

    2) Assassinate the German Kaiser and make it look like elements of the German Social Democratic Party were responsible. Rationale: Wilhelm's stupid decision-making, more than anything else, brought on WWI. Remove him, and all is hunky-dory, with a side of minor social unrest in Germany.

    Spoiler: things do not become hunky-dory.

    626:

    I don't think that the situation in the US is as bad as it looks Charlie, yet for 2 reasons. All of them relate to this bit of news in some way: jobless claims are the lowest they've been since 1969.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-unemployment/u-s-weekly-jobless-claims-lowest-since-1969-idUSKCN1PI1SM

  • If you look at the chart below, you'll notice that undocumented immigration tends to rise during recoveries and the peak of the cycle and fall during recessions. The last one was completely different in that the population never recovered from the trough. I've already explained in previous threads why I think this happened; I won't rehash it.
  • https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/illegal-immigration-statistics/

    a. Trump has cut down on legal immigrants slightly (especially refugees). Trump has also made H1B visas more restrictive. Same for the H2B visa. I won't give a comprehensive list of all the visa rules he's tightened; it would be too long. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/politics/us-refugees-fy18/index.html https://visaguide.world/news/us/h1b-visa/h-1b-visa-rules-tightened/

  • Baby boomers are retiring: current year - 67 = birth year of people retiring (Social Security was changed during the Bush Admin to create penalties for accessing it at 65). Right now, Trump is operating in a naturally-tightening labor market. I can't find the article now, but I remember reading an economist musing that the next recession will feature low unemployment because of this.
  • a. To give a picture of how this, here's a trend in the airline industry people have been missing: "Airlines have been forced to more than double starting salaries to $54,000, excluding bonuses, in 2018 from $21,000 a decade ago, according to aviation consultant Kit Darby." https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-airlines-tap-army-helicopter-pilots-to-ease-shortage-2019-1

    b. See above for a new job for Coast Guard helicopter pilots.

    Finally, this shutdown is playing into Tea Party hands in a roundabout way. Soon food stamps will run out of money. At that point (assuming the shutdown continues), states will have to step in and decide how much to fund them out of their own budget. This is a dream come true for Red State Tea Partiers.

    627:

    A darker scenario is that some of the 'burn the world' Bannon types are inviting/hoping for a big terror incident so it can be spun into a Reichstag fire.

    It isn't much of a stretch to see the media jumping all over the human tragedy and blindly repeating the talking points of people in suits and authority. It has happened many times in the past.

    628:

    Not happening - see "use it and lose it" comments upthread.

    It's in the same class as the MP who wrote to the Polish government asking them to be the ones to put a spanner in the works in anything requiring a unanimous EU vote.

    629:

    So: you lower the gravity in the ship, and in front of it. Therefore, the ship falls forward... and as it approaches ->the speed of light of a body at rest

    Hmm, may have a problem with prior art, it seems very similar to the "Kurita-Kinoshita" drive from Alan Dean Foster's "Commonwealth": http://www.alandeanfoster.com/version2.0/spacecraftouterframe.htm

    630:

    Yes, precisely :-( There are grounds for hope, in that there are enough MPs that are relatively sane and clueful to vote against that, but it is in the lap of the gods - and that's not nice place to be.

    631:

    Pigeon @ 603 😁

    SFR @ 606 Not going to work. Because of the SQRT( 1- v^2/c^2) component, they will still be able to "see" each other... [ As EC @ 609 points out - thanks ]

    Heteromeles @ 619 Yes, I think Foster called it the "KK" drive - meaning Kurita-Kinoshita. "Photogravitic Drive"? See also the Kzinti Lesson I think ...

    & @ 622 All too easy. DT probably would sign on/ up to a modern version of or another Business Plot See also Rocketpjs @ 627

    & @ 624 NOT GOING TO HAPPEN Queenie has jsut gone public, saying: "Get your acts together, you lot, because this isn't funny any more" See HERE

    Barry @ 620 Your post is depressingly prescient ( I do hope not ) - but you left a word out. Right at the end of option/part 6 you should have said: "Again"

    Ioan @ 626 (2b) Which will lead to deaths from starvation. Which is presumably what the Tea Partiers want? That is how to start a revolution, actually. Or, are they loking for an excuse to intiate fascist martial law?

    632:

    Certain science fiction authors should be aware that their wild fantasies about how naughty people might use the internet have been rendered non-fictional:

    The other major change is the use of “dead drops” instead of the postal system which has proven vulnerable to tracking and interception. Now, goods are hidden in publicly accessible places like parks and the location is given to the customer on purchase. The customer then goes to the location and picks up the goods. This means that delivery becomes asynchronous for the merchant, he can hide a lot of product in different locations for future, not yet known, purchases. For the client the time to delivery is significantly shorter than waiting for a letter or parcel shipped by traditional means

    https://opaque.link/post/dropgang/

    633:

    There's also 1918-'19 - Produce a Treaty of Versailles which is not engineered to punish and humiliate Germany.

    634:

    I am donating money to the local food bank

    As a general comment, would anyone who donates to a local food bank please take note that donations of cash without preconditions really help, because most food banks have genuine running expenses to meet other than buying food.

    635:

    (1) The assassination was used as an excuse for war by Powers who were actually looking for one. This, in turn, strongly suggests that (2) would have been used as an excuse in the absence of (1).

    636:

    anyone who donates to a local food bank please take note that donations of cash without preconditions really help

    most also have a public list of things they want and things they have enough of. Those are often specific to the particular food bank, but in general people who use food banks are not able to do complex cooking. Possibly less so in the US shutdown, but please, if you must donate stuff, find that list and respect it.

    The nice folk who have come and pillaged my garden a couple of times have been happy to accept money as well. But not tinned tomatoes.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/11-12-2017/please-no-more-bloody-tinned-tomatoes/

    637:

    jobless claims are the lowest they've been since 1969.

    You are aware that the US unemployment figures (as with the UK) are effectively rigged? And the degree to which they're rigged was changed several times during the 1980s and 1990s?

    Currently in the UK we just learned that if you get one hour of paid work per week, you are classed as "in work" for government statistical purposes.

    Meanwhile, in the US, the jobless figure only counts people who are receiving unemployment pay. Which runs out after IIRC 12 (or is it 18?) months across an entire lifetime—a change brought in during the Gingrich congress. You can be unemployed but not eligible for payments and it won't show up. Or you can have dropped out of the work force entirely and won't be counted. As workers age the probability of them having used up their lifetime unemployment eligibility rises, so of course they stop being classified as "unemployed", even if that's what they are.

    Yes, the boomers are retiring, which is going to gradually reduce the working-age population. But they're not dead yet. This means the ratio of working age to dependents is declining, meaning less productivity per capita overall. (For an extreme example of what this does to an economy, look at Japan, or maybe Italy; since the 1990s Japan has been teetering on the edge of deflation with stagnant growth—but if you correct for a declining ratio of workers to population and look at how things would be if the worker/retiree ratio was pegged at its 1990 level, Japan should have been growing steadily at 4% per annum.)

    638:

    Currently in the UK we just learned that if you get one hour of paid work per week, you are classed as "in work" for government statistical purposes Are you certain about this Charlie? I thought that you classified as "in work" if you were on a "zero hours contract" even if you did no paid hours?

    639:

    From a previous post of mine, a method that will get you both FTL and time travel.

    The idea involves creating wormholes via the Casmir effect and using them as time machines. For a simple explanation of how these would work see this episode of the 19902 science series "Future Fantastic" The part about converting a Casmir induced wormhole into a time machine starts at 19:19:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3yyr7f_epk

    (Disclaimer: the fact that this series was hosted by the smoking hot Gillian Anderson of the X-Files has absolutely nothing to do with my enjoyment of this series. Nothing, I swear.)

    OK, so let's create the pair of charge plates that create the wormhole via the Casmir effect (as described by Dr. Michao Kaku in the video). Instead of being built on Earth, the first set of plates is placed in orbit around the Sun at 99.99999999999.....% of the sped of light. If this occurs on January 1, 3001 it will essentially always be that date at this end of the wormhole. A time traveler could enter the other end of the wormhole and emerge on New Year's day of the year 3001 - but not earlier since the wormhole did not exist before this date.

    Meanwhile, the second set of charged plates with the other end of the wormhole gets carried by a spaceship to another star system at nearly the speed of light so that the crew is subject to time dilation, and they experience a journey of a thousand years as lasting only a few months. Once they enter the alien star system in the year 4001, they set up the other end of the wormhole and explore/colonize the planets of this system. Shortly thereafter, the crew can return via the wormhole back to Earth in the year 3001.

    The crew experienced a journey of only a few months. Also, the people back home on Earth watched them leave on January 1st and return via the wormhole a few moments later from a star system a thousand light years away.

    Once in place, the wormhole becomes a permanent subway to the stars. Millions of these wormholes would create a subway system across the galaxy like that used by the mysterious monolith aliens in "2001" through which astronaut Bowman traveled to meet his destiny.

    Like the roads built by the Roman Empire, this subway system of wormholes could knit together a vast galactic empire/federation with essentially instant interstellar travel.

    640:

    As for our looming demographic/financial crisis this video provides a nice summary:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OFaZcC0lRU

    But the problem is now we're facing the demographic time bomb. I remember when I was back at Goldman Sachs in the late '90s. Some of my colleagues wrote an article called "The Demographic Time Bomb." And that was about the issues the world will face in the future as retirees start retiring and whether the state sector could afford all of the draw on the capital. ...

    You see, the returns in financial markets weren't quite as good as the snake oil salesman on Wall Street told everybody. And that was a problem. It's kind of like a Ponzi scheme. The first people to get out made all the returns. The last people to get out get nothing. And that's the real issue. The real issue is all of this is coming to a head because everybody is about to retire. If you look at the chart of the baby boomers reaching retirement age, you can see it's a demographic wall. Currently we're retiring at about 3.9 million in America alone, baby boomers. And it goes up in a straight line all the way through to 2027. What we've got is more and more people, every year, retiring. That is an extraordinary state of affairs because retirees have a different behavior pattern than the average person. You can see the chart in a different way here. You can see that the average retirement age is currently around 64 in America. And this year, 2018, the average baby boomer is 64. It's telling us the average person is destined to retire this year. But the real question is here-- who can afford to retire? ...

    Now, that's a pretty healthy million dollar balance sheet, so what's the problem? The problem is it's massively skewed by the 1%. That 1% that we hear about versus the 99%, well, they've got all the assets and all the savings. When you strip out the data for the 1% and calculate the median net worth, it's an entirely different game. The median net worth offers something that I think is terrifying and sad. The average person has $4,000 in their bonds. They have $45,000 in equities, $53,000 in real estate, which is extraordinary, right? That is all they have after their mortgage is $53,000 for a lifetime worth of household investment. They have savings of $18,000, pension fund assets of $44,000, and other assets of $20,000. You see, the problem is these people are benefiting from one of the biggest shifts the world has ever seen-- life expectancy. Life expectancy, although it dropped a couple of years running recently in the US, is rising. So life expectancy in America, and across the world, is in an exponential trend higher. It is going higher and higher every single year. Obviously, the last couple of years were the opiate epidemic saw a bit of a pullback.

    They have this bet directly in equities, and they have this bet in their pension plans. The pension plans themselves have record holding of equities versus fixed income. They also have record risk in terms of credit. Private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, they all have equity-like returns. They're risk-seeking investments. And they're doing this because nobody can fund their retirement. It's the same story at government level. It's the same story at defined benefit pension level. And it's the same story for households and their 401(k)s. Corporate pension plans, they're all the same-- nobody has enough money to fund retirements. So everybody is taking the maximum risk. Now, in a rising equity market, this kind of makes sense. You're clawing back some of the ability to retire. But if things change, the picture gets a little bit worse. You see, the one bet people are taking is they're actually putting the maximum allocation in all of recorded history, across the entire system, into riskseeking, equity-like assets when equity valuations are off the charts. ...

    You see, demographics also tell us where the economy is going to go in the future. And the reason being is that a number of things are correlated to demographics because people of a certain age generally act in a certain way. That's not to say all generations and all the age groups act the same. But overall, a retiree will spend a lot less than somebody who is in the peak of their earning career. ...

    You see, if you're a bit younger in peak earning, you tend to buy more things for your house. You know, you might buy yourself better bed coverings, or a new bed, or go to IKEA a bit more often. You tend to buy yourself a few more luxuries. You tend to spend a bit more in the supermarket. And that's normal. Everybody does the same thing because you're at peak spending. But when you get older, you tend to buy less of those things. You tend to buy more big-ticket items. You might buy a nice car. You might buy a nice holiday. But you've got most of the things you actually need. You've accumulated them across your lifetime, and your consumption goes down. ..

    Personal consumption is going to unwind the great boom of the last 30 or 40 years where consumption became over 75% of the US economy. Consumption is going to shrink as a percentage of the economy, and consumption itself is going to go negative. Now that is something nobody is set up to understand. Can you imagine a world where consumption is the net takeaway from the economy and not the driver? That's what we're setting up for.

    641:

    "...but I remember reading an economist musing that the next recession will feature low unemployment because of this."

    Now I'm f-ing scared. My go-to for an immediate recession is economists proclaiming that the economy is in a permanent high.

    642:

    Germany started WW1, it needed to be smacked down and put in a position where it couldn't start another European war in the near future. That's what the Versailles Treaty was intended to achieve and what it managed, at least in the early years -- there was no outbreak of WWII in the 1920s, it took the Treaty becoming a dead letter in the late 20s for the Germans to get the loans they needed to re-arm and launch their European Road Trip in 1936.

    The alternative to the Treaty was the Allies marching on Berlin in 1919 and doing to the Germans what the Russians did in 1945, possibly with added chemical warfare. Remember that Germany itself was exposed to hardly any of the battles and fighting on the Western Front, it was French and Belgian territory that had been ravaged by years of trench warfare and artillery bombardment. For the average German citizen the war was something that happened to other people far away, reported in the news -- "All quiet on the Western Front" was a German newspaper report, a fixed strapline they rolled out on days when hardly any people got killed.

    The Dolchstosslegende wasn't driven by the Versailles Treaty, it was because the German Army had been defeated in 1918 and that couldn't have happened without Dark Forces (Jews, Bolsheviks etc.) causing Germany's downfall according to Mean Mister Moustache and his followers. That erroneous belief was what caused the Germans to launch WWII but only after the Treaty was consigned to the waste-bin of History.

    643:

    And people tend to forget that the Versailles Treaty was far more gentle and kind than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that the Germans imposed on a defeated Russia (loss of Poland, the Baltics, White Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, massive indemnities, etc.)

    644:

    Produce a Treaty of Versailles which is not engineered to punish and humiliate Germany.

    For that, you need to go back to the early 19th century and convince Napoleon not to impose a humiliating peace treaty and war debt on Prussia; the French reparations demanded at Versailles were oddly similar to what Germany under Bismarck demanded in 1872, which in turn reflected the outcome of the War of the Fourth Coalition in 1806-07 ...

    645:

    Are you certain about this Charlie? I thought that you classified as "in work" if you were on a "zero hours contract" even if you did no paid hours?

    Yes: here's a source (the BBC went to the ONS for confirmation that yes, for official statistical purposes, one hour of work per week is their threshold for classifying someone as "employed". (A zero-hours contract with zero hours ... that's another question entirely.)

    646:

    People in the UK on zero-hours contracts or working part-time who work less than 16 hours a week can claim benefits, including Unemployment Benefit and (I presume) Universal Credit once it supercedes UB for those still receiving it. The amount of benefit paid is reduced but the idea is that working should mean more money received in total compared to the basic UB payments plus other payments like Housing Benefit which may also be reduced from the maximum. That 16 hours limit is a reason you see a lot of part-time jobs offering just under 16 hours a week of paid work. It's actually a rolling average over five weeks i.e. 80 hours worked in that period.

    I'm earning my living doing zero-hours contract work at the moment. Right now I'm being offered lots of work[1], actually more than I can really accept[2] so I'm well over the 16-hour limit to claim Unemployment Benefit. I was getting some Housing benefit payments when my earnings were lower than they are at the moment.

    [1] I've been doing this zero-hours contract work for about 2 years -- to start with I didn't get scheduled for much of the work I applied for. I got a reputation for turning up when scheduled and doing the job at least semi-competently, something a lot of other folks didn't bother with. I'm now on the scheduler's Nice List and not on their "Problem Children" list so I get offered many (but not all) of the jobs I request.

    [2] I quite like zero-hours working but I have a reduced standard of living generally so the low earnings don't worry me too much. I can take time off when I want, the job doesn't follow me home, I enjoy working less intensively than a 5-day-a-week 48-weeks-a-year job would entail. It's boring and tedious and not very rewarding intellectually speaking but I get paid without demur every month.

    647:

    Charlie and Nojay - Thanks. My original source there was someone who did double duty as a food bank coordinator and benefits adviser to the food bank clients.

    648:

    people tend to forget that the Versailles Treaty was far more gentle and kind than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

    To forget that, I'd have to have been taught it at some point. History, as a subject, is very unevenly taught and distributed in the UK.

    649:

    I once thought of a variation on a major science fiction trope; instead of going back in time to kill Hitler, go back in time and ensure that he is accepted into art school. I can't imagine it hasn't been done, but I don't recall any such story and my knowledge of the field is pretty good.

    650:

    I'm sorry things are so awful right now. I hope everything works out a quickly and painlessly as possible, without further bad news.

    However, there was a bit of good news today. Roger Stone, of Trump/Wikileaks fame, was arrested today on seven counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. This has lit up my day rather nicely. (Maybe 2019 won't be so bad after all...)

    651:

    Getting back to Germany winning WW2...

    Two things have to happen.

  • The Germans have to prevent the BEF from escaping at Dunkirk. After such a disaster with half the British army in German POW camps, even Churchill (let alone a peace leaning Halifax) would be hard pressed to reject Hitler's offer of a general peace (that leaves Germany dominant on the continent) so that British boys can be home by Xmas.

  • Hitler accepts Stalin's secret peace offer in 1941 ceding the Baltics, White Russia, and the Ukraine to Germany in a second treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Rationality not be the Fuhrer's strong point, he rejected the offer and went for the whole ball of wax.

  • These two events leave Germany dominating continental Europe with indirect control of the resources of the French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires (or creating their own Mittelafrika overseas empire).

    Expect the Japanese to scoop up French Indochina and Dutch East Indies (America is not going to go to war to protect these colonies) allowing them to defy the American boycott and continue their war in China. No Japanese oil shortage so no need to attack Pearl Harbor.

    The war ends in 1941 with a shrunken and impotent Soviet Union, a German superpower in Europe, a Japanese superpower in Asia and an American superpower (with the draft and military funding finally passed) in the western hemisphere.

    Britain and what's left of the empire/commonwealth would either seek American protection or be pulled into German's orbit. Canada, Australia and New Zealand definitively leaving the empire if necessary to join the Americans. Racist South Africa joining the Axis.

    652:

    The joy of creating a faster-than-light drive is that it doesn't have to make sense. (Mine runs by hooking the brains of wombats up in parallel and making the resulting awareness watch TV preachers from the 1950s.)

    653:

    Deep Joy! NYC airport at La Guardia shuts down, because of guvmint staff shortages ... Hopefully the first of many .....

    654:

    Norman Spinrad "The Iron Dream", in which Adolf Hitler is a science fiction writer.

    655:
    The assassination was used as an excuse for war

    True, but instead of a government official of a hostile power providing assistance to the murderers of Franz Ferdinand, this was meant to seem to be a home-grown plot.

    As for the various plans of getting rid of Hitler, two things: Wikihistory, an amusing short story dealing with these themes.

    Also, the SMBC cartoon at the head of the TVTropes web page Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act is illuminating: "Mein Führer! How are you so good at fighting time travellers?"

    "Practice!"

    656:

    Right, but nobody went back in time and got him into art school.

    657:

    I'm not sure if my idea predates the Wikihistory story or not.

    658:

    To start off with, I'm super sorry to hear about, well, how 2019 has been treating you, your family and friends already. Although it doesn't amount to much from a stranger, here's hoping the rest of the year somehow manages to make up for itself.

    That said, I've gone through the last four laundryverse book over the last two weeks, and wanted to note a few things on Labyrinth Index (and DI) - I've been told that it's OK to do it here?

    In terrible order.

    a) I loved Mo and especially Mhari as narrators, and all the subtle distinctions put in (down to different notation for footnotes, although that might have been a publisher issue). Republic of Me biology analogies were great.

    b) Theory: In DI, OPA nudged Schiller towards the UK both to clear him out of their turf, but more importantly, to draw out the already-incarnate Nyarlathotep and possibly get him and the Sleeper engaged in a mutually-destructive conflict while projects THRESHOLD and GODWAKER march on unchallenged. In book four, I'm inclined to believe them that what happened was a snafu - he managed to suborn his OPA watchers and cut the organization off.

    b i) THEORY: BLUE HADES did nothing about Schiller because by the point his plan was in motion beyond reasonable limits he started his game in earnest, genociding the population of the UK would be very easily suborned into immanentizing the Sleeper.

    c) Theory: More than playing a Xanatos gambit against an elder god, Auditor Michael Armstrong is a genuine, if moderate Nyarlathotep cultist. CONSTITUENCY was basically taking a genuine cult he helped shield (since Iris was competent it wasn't too much work) and justifying what happened in a way to keep her out of the consequences. This is why, for instance, His Dread Majesty was so blase about Iris keeping her Continuity Ops geas - in the end, it's service to him through a proxy.

    Granted, he's got plans that he's told Mhari about before geassing her to silence, but those are a kind of bee feeder counterpart to a honeypot, both in terms of increasing his personal power within the New Management and more so, keeping people like Mhari from getting desperate and doing something dumb. As he said, it's important to keep hope and while sugar water isn't honey, it will keep the bees alive during winter.

    Can't say I'd blame him either - I feel like joining with someone/something stronger is pretty much the only hope humanity has in the situation, and it might be how the other species survived their CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. And given Bast is non-canon/relegated to the RPG, I guess His Dread Majesty might be the next best choice. (He's definitely doing better than the current UK government brick'd)

    d) Will we ever get a Jonquil story/book? While I liked what happened, I was a bit disappointed at her getting shut out of the story so quickly. Personally I was hoping the path Mhari would take would be bundling her off with Yarisol. (can you spell comic relief) For one, there's little one could do to make an autistic cultural authoritarian look disloyal that HDM and even Iris wouldn't eyeroll at, so her main role would be mostly shut off - besides, I'll go out on a step and say they'd both count as heavy arcane support. After all, J was noted to have a strong magic aura around her.... and while Yari thinks she's an awful mage... well, asides from this being memoirs of Mhari (who hates her), Yari calling someone bad at magic is like Bobby Fisher saying someone plays chess badly. Same goes for general competence - I mean, she seemed to carry a bit of an idiot ball here but not only was she competent in TFM... she also managed to successfully hide for six years with her mother interrogated and interned in Camp Sunshine.

    e) Speaking of Camp Sunshine...given how boring the place was by necessity, and Derek GMing for everyone... I can't help but imagine that a meeting between him and Iris would lapse towards old campaign stories with the onlookers going "wut". Furthermore, a crackficcy part of me wonders if he ended up on the "politically unreliable" list for screwing Iris's character over at some point :P

    f) Will any stories/books/we in the future actually deal with Czernobog? I happen to be from what likely ended up in his sphere of influence so I'm naturally curious to think how's my country doing in the Laundryverse. (Total aside - given the extensive contacts the US and UK had with BLUE HADES... I can't help but wonder if the Darvaza burning gas crater in Turkmenistan was a result of Soviet liaisons with DEEP SEVEN. After all, the enemy of my enemy...)

    Anyhow, thanks again for writing a great series, I'm looking forwards to any continuations there might be in the future!

    659:

    Re: 'Personal consumption is going to unwind the great boom of the last 30 or 40 years where consumption became over 75% of the US economy.'

    Great essay - thanks!

    However ... the up-coming demographic financial crunch was anticipated as far back as the early 1970s as life expectancies had already reached +10 years past retirement in the West*. Some developed countries reacted by enacting compulsory retirement plans at the employer level, some chose to mostly ignore it by offering minimal incentives for private, individually funded savings (pension) plans. Worst of all, some pols (i.e., starting with Reagan) decided that it was okay for CEOs to dip into company employees' pension plans for cheap corporate loans. (Odd how so many of these outfits then went bust.)

    https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/03/business/reagan-set-to-ask-sweeping-changes-for-pension-rules.html

    So, while there is a demographic floodgate about to burst, it sure as hell isn't entirely the fault of the working stiff that her/his retirement is likely to be brutal.

    • Most Western early retirement plans were based on retirees living for less than 10 years post retirement. Therefore the total pension needed was estimated at just enough to carry them for a max of 10 years. Also, because fewer people owned homes when these plans were first put forward, the pension was also supposed to be enough to cover rent. And rents were less expensive than carrying a mortgage along with the property taxes, maintenance, etc. These facts/realities taken together suggested that saving for your retirement would be fairly easy and straightforward to do. Then the mortgage rules changed, so more folks decided to 'invest' in their homes (which would likely appreciate in market value) as a more usable yet reliable form of pension savings. This worked for a while until some political yahoo decided to screw around with mortgage securities which in turn screwed up the global financial sectors, cost national gov'ts trillions, screwed over working proles, produced another batch of new billionaires, etc.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#2008

    Excerpt:

    '2006

    Free cash used by consumers from home equity extraction, known as the real estate bubble created a total of nearly $5 trillion in 2005, contributing to economic growth worldwide.[43]'

    BTW, it was only in the late 1970s that the financial sector became part of the GDP - this also helped screw up analyses, therefore policies. (You were in that sector, so you already knew this - right?)

    https://medium.com/@TheNewSchool/accounting-for-gdp-the-history-and-politics-of-financialization-e77f0d380547

    660:

    Agreed on the list. Food banks aren't places where you dump your unwanted canned goods. Also, the complex cooking isn't about people being stupid, but rather, if they're one step above homelessness, the equipment they have to cook with (such as a motel microwave) is pretty limited. Also, if you're not picking the fruit off a tree, letting volunteers pick it and give it away is a good thing. There are services that do that.

    More to the point, I donate money to food banks because, IIRC, the local food bank is able to feed people on a few dollars per person, far cheaper than I could feed them, and far cheaper than it would be for me to drive 40 miles round trip to dump off a load of food. In terms of helping people efficiently, giving money online is simpler and more effective.

    661:

    OK, something nice in 2019:

    Seattle has closed its horrid waterfront elevated freeway forever and started tearing the thing down. Most of it will be a park in a few years, but has already stopped pumping freeway noise along the entire waterfront and pike place market.

    662:

    The Kzinti lesson (Niven) was something along the lines of fusion torch drives (which humans used) being more useful as weapons than "gravity dipoles" (which the kzinti used). Of course, I am talking about a gravity dipole here...

    The photogravitic drive is opposed to the electrogravitic drive. That idea (that you can feed electricity into a gizmo and cause gravity fluctuations) has been around in fringey science since the 1950s. You can get thrust from electricity with ion drives, and someone recently flew a model plane with one. I think researchers first tripped over thrust from assymetric capacitors back in the 1950s, thought it was gravity manipulation, and the meme was born when their speculation hit the pop science magazines, with planes flying using electric thrust. IIRC, Poul Anderson and other 1960s+ era SF writers used electrogravitics for everything from artificial gravity to propulsion.

    What I'm getting at is a rather different, recent experiment, where they made an analog of Hawking radiation using a laser setup. Obviously this is an analog, not the real thing, but if we're babbling on about uniting the fundamental forces, why not claim that you can use a laser setup with quantum woo (and a half-silvered wombat beam splitter) to create and analog (or real) negative matter and vacuum energy to create analog simulations of dark energy and dark matter, thereby creating Niven's gravity dipole, except that we're going to call it an Alcubierre Drive? That's the handwaving part, but the real point is that electrogravitics has been around, like, forever (heck, before like was, like, even a thing), so why not retire it and use photogravitics instead? It at least sounds new.

    663:
  • There are a lot fewer air traffic controllers available to hire.
  • There is a hell of a lot more air travel than in 1981.
  • If he tries to fire them and replace... want to bet that the Pilots' union and the stews' union don't call a strike?

    And I was told by a co-worker a bit ago that 14,000 IRS employees failed to show for work.

    Also, there was, apparently, a dinner meeting of Senate Reptilians, with Pence there, and there were attacks on them, to the tune of a Senator saying to McConnell "it's your fault!". Some of them would like to stay in the Senate after 2020....

    Oh, yes, and the head, I think, of his economic misadvisors said yesterday that growth might be flat next quarter.

    664:

    As Charlie noted, the figures are cooked. The media reports, I think, "line 6". Line 9, I think it is, includes "discouraged" workers, underemployed, part time, and multiple jobs, and it's 2-2.5times higher unemployment.

    665:

    I don't know that it's still. Certainly, I've had more unemployment than that in my life. I think it also depends on the state (or commonwealth), since my unemployment was in different jurisdictions.

    666:

    David L @ 550: Why register for the draft? If you don't you can cause yourself hassles down the road. Here's a clip from the Wikipedia article on the issue. There's more. A lot of states have similar rules.
    At some point someone (with deep pockets) will get their knickers all in a twist and sue over women not having to register and it will be expanded or tossed.

    It's already been litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1981, the court decided 6-3 in Rostker v. Goldberg that gender distinction in the Military Selective Service Act (1948)(revised 1967) ... "did not violate the equal protection component of the due process clause" of the 5th Amendment.

    I find the path to the Supreme Court interesting because it comes from a 1971 Vietnam era lawsuit against the draft that went dormant because it had not received a ruling when Nixon ended the draft in January 1973. The case was revived by the District Court in 1980 when Carter re-instituted Selective Service Registration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

    I believe that by the time the Supreme Court issued its "Rostker" ruling the original plaintiffs would have already aged out of the draft pool.

    Another case NATIONAL COALITION FOR MEN V. SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM was revived by the 9th Circuit in 2016. I don't know its current status.

    667:

    But wait, Jim, it's worse than that.

    For one thing, the median income is now "up" to just over $59k/yr. It wasn't that long ago that it was barely over $42k/yr. MOST people have zero pensions. Pension? What's that? I'm a computer professional, and have NEVER worked anywhere that I was offered one, and I've worked for too many places.

    I have one count them, retirement, an annuity, not real big. I have some decent savings, because a) for years, I spent half my monthly paycheck on my mortgage, and I make good money (these days, at least: in the early nineties, my late wife and I were making $27k/yr each. Which, of course, included childcare.

    Most folks have zip in savings, it was recently a big news story all over, that something like half? 60%? of all Americans would be up the creek without a paddle, if they needed $1k or so for medical bills.

    Real life: I have a friend who's in her early seventies, in Nowheresville, OH, who's driving transit, because there's no way she can live on social security.

    I will be able to... but I own my house*, and have been making good money, and I'm waiting to 70 to retire.

    On the other hand, life expectancy in the US has been dropping the last few years.

    • I heard, so many times, and read, "oh, you should invest, and money will be worth less later, due to inflation. All written by folks making more than I do, now.
    668:

    whitroth @ 584: I think there may be two lawsuits right now.
    Oh, but the one that could break them all: I read, today, that the union representing air traffic controllers, pilots, and one or two other groups is issuing public statements of concern about safety.
    I can see that union saying, "enough's enough"... and going on strike. ALL AIR TRAFFIC IN THE US shut down....

    Remembering how the 1981 PATCO strike turned out, I doubt you'll see any kind of organized work stoppage from the current air traffic controller's union. An extreme SLOW DOWN is much more likely, although I wouldn't rule out sympathy strikes from non-governmental unions.

    I understand flight attendants are becoming significantly stressed worrying about their safety because of the TSA experiencing a significant increase in the number of "blue flu" call-outs. And I've seen one story about a passenger who "forgot" about a handgun in carry-on luggage that wasn't discovered until the passenger got to Japanese Customs after arriving in Tokyo.

    669:

    Hey, some good news: not only has Page been indicted and arrested, it was a pre-dawn raid by the FBI, which means they've got computers, and phones, and papers....

    Even better: a numboer of papers, including the Washington Post, are reporting that in the indictment, it includes things like "Someone directed a senior official of the Trump campiagn" to work with Page to get info about infodumps from "Organization 1", in several ways, and this continued, including a message to Page "well done". (emhasis mine).

    I wonder who could possibly have micromanaged/directed a senior official of the campaign to do this?

    "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" - Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer, Doonesbury (during Watergate)

    670:

    whitroth @ 586: When the law expired, in 1970, I burned my original draft card. No clue where the replacement that they sent out after they reinstalled the draft got to.

    The "draft" expired in January 1973.

    The "draft" actually has two components. There is the Selective Service system which authorizes registration of eligible males, and then there is the conscription, which must be authorized by Congress in a separate law.

    The law that empowers the President to require registration remained in effect after Nixon ended the draft, although neither Nixon nor Ford exercised that power. Carter didn't exercise it either until late in his term.

    671:

    whitroth @ 667 On the other hand, life expectancy in the US has been dropping the last few years. That is really really worrying - or should be if anyone is paying attention.

    JKBS @ 6687 Yes. You'll get increasing numbers calling in sick ( Genuinely - stress-related, leading to increased susceptibility to "bugs" ) And people not obviously, but "going slow" or "Working to Rule" ...

    672:

    I understand things will probably get worse in the near future, but I hope they will eventually get better for you. We'll be here waiting for you if/when they do.

    673:

    There was an SMBC comic to that effect:

    http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3116

    I also read a story (not The Iron Dream) where he was a minor artist, but I can't remember title or author.

    674:

    Scott Sanford @ 608:

    Truly a sad commentary when someone as UN-funny as Trump is the "comic relief".

    I'm sure he's much funnier from a greater distance. He spent over twenty years as a running joke, since the first time he got noticed nationally. He was such a cartoonish buffoon and obvious con artist that he made an easy punchline for comedians and anyone else fortunate enough not to be doing business with him.

    I ain't laughing! Then or now.

    675:

    60%? of all Americans would be up the creek without a paddle, if they needed $1k or so for medical bills.

    Canada too:

    The number of Canadians who are $200 or less away from financial insolvency at month-end has jumped to 46 per cent, up from 40 per cent in the previous quarter, as interest rates rise according to a new poll.

    https://www.thestar.com/business/2019/01/21/46-of-canadians-200-or-less-away-from-financial-insolvency-poll.html

    And we don't have to worry as much about medical bills. They aren't zero (drugs, dental, ambulance, casts & braces, etc) aren't covered by medicare — but you aren't going to have to sell your house to pay for a ruptured appendix.

    676:

    Re: 'On the other hand, life expectancy in the US has been dropping the last few years.'

    'Average' US life expectancy was hit mostly by increases in ODs and suicides primarily among 20-40 year olds. Suicides were almost double among rural vs. urban folk likely due to access to a gun.

    OTOH, Boomers' life expectancy dropped only by a month or two due to increases in age-related/exacerbated medical conditions (except cancer). So if you're an urban Boomer: keep saving for that retirement.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-life-expectancy-drops-third-year-row-reflecting-rising-drug-overdose-suicide-rates-180970942/

    678:

    Stone is claiming very loudly that he won't testify against DT ... bets? Meanwhile I see they have cobbled together a temporary 3-week (?) fix ... & the odds of reverting to shutdown when that's over are ....? Meanwhile a question .... Meuller's team are tasked with investiagting "Russian" collusion, but I assume that anything they find that's illegal & indictable, they can/will act upon? If so, life could be amusing? Please,seomeone tell me that this is so?

    679:

    Pigeon @ 611: Note: Running for President was the first I ever heard of him. I still find it weird to see people from the other side of the Atlantic talking in terms of him having been a household name, as a dick, for 20 years.

    Although he's always been a dick, he was a "household name" only to that portion of the U.S. obsessed with "celebrity". He had no name recognition (other than "Oh, that creep again) with the majority of the U.S.

    He gained celebrity in the Cable TV explosion of the 80s & 90s.

    If you've got a hundred TV channels, you need some kind of content to fill 24/7. A lot of that content, like "professional" (TV) wrestling or "The Apprentice" is just meant to provide separation between the "infomercials" so they don't all run together.

    Trump was a celebrity the same as the "Kardashians", "Duck Dynasty", "Paris Hilton" or "Grumpy Cat". He got there by endless self promotion of an empty suit. But that didn't make him a household name.

    680:

    David L @ 616:

    Alas, air traffic controllers are not so easily replaceable as one might think.

    I don't think they are easily replaceable. But like they did 25 years ago, the military guys will be sent into the towers. They will be under orders and will be getting a paycheck.

    It's still going to be a much bigger mess than most people realize. For one thing, there aren't as many "military guys" air traffic controllers as there were back when Reagan fired PATCO.

    Those that remain are mostly busy with deployment rotations. If they ain't already out, they're just back and/or preparing for their next deployment.

    681:

    The media reports, I think, "line 6"

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics carries no less than six "measures of labor underutilization", U-1 through U-6. U-3 is the one released into the wild as the official unemployment rate.

    https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

    682:

    Heteromeles @ 624: Question for those in the UK: I saw an article referenced in the local paper El Espresso, about how some euroskeptic or other responded on a TalkRadio call-in question, that went something like, "“Do you think it’s going to come down to the Queen protecting Brexit and saving Brexit?” with something along the lines of hoping that Her Majesty would deign to consider saving the Brexiteers' bacon without them actually, you know, having to ask.
    Really? Is that where things are now?

    Apparently the Queen has spoken.

    Text from another source:

    "As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture,"

    Even if she's not be allowed to actually DO anything, she can still advise the Government and Parliament to quit mucking about.

    683:

    Meanwhile I see they have cobbled together a temporary 3-week (?) fix ... & the odds of reverting to shutdown when that's over are ....?

    Just in time to merge it with debt ceiling issues. (Another one of those US issues that doesn't make much sense to people not from around here.)

    684:

    JReynolds @ 625: Spoiler: things do not become hunky-dory.

    They never do.

    685:

    I guess my dad's stories were from folks involved in N. Africa.

    686:

    Meanwhile, in the US, the jobless figure only counts people who are receiving unemployment pay.

    Not even close.

    It is done via survey. TL;DR (not working and looking) / (not working and looking + working)

    See: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

    The big thing that gets argued about all the time is that it leaves out people who have given up.

    687:

    It sounds rather like they will pass actual funding bills for all except (sigh, time to type some fascism) homeland security. Which would make any shutdown a lot smaller. It also severely reduces the hostage count, just one among many reasons one would think the republican's have to not go there again right now.

    688:

    er, ...quickly pass actual funding bills for...

    689:

    He gained celebrity in the Cable TV explosion of the 80s & 90s.

    More of a 90s thing. In the 80s when I noticed him was when I'd work from home with CNBC on in the background. And he kept popping up in stories about his various bankruptcies and how the banks were getting less and less eager to lend to him.

    I was convinced back then that he was the world's most successful con man grifter. Then he did the whole Atlantic City casino thing and suckered 1000s out of millions to stay afloat.

    And then he became a TV "star".

    Then we got him as our "fearless leader". To bad Chance the gardener was not available.

    690:

    Germany started WW1, it needed to be smacked down and put in a position where it couldn't start another European war in the near future. That's what the Versailles Treaty was intended to achieve and what it managed, at least in the early years -- there was no outbreak of WWII in the 1920s,

    The problem was that the treaty mostly wiped out the general population and most of the industrial elites got to hang on. Ditto the mid level military folks.

    Add to it all that the German people were told they were winning the war militarily. There were victory parades in Berlin and other cities as the troops came home. That made it easy to believe that the politicians really did sell out the country. Remember no mass media. Much less the Internet.

    So yes the TofV smacked the country it mostly smacked a population whose memory of things didn't match reality. So they got pissed.

    (It was interesting to take a walking tour around Munich last month that followed locations involved in AH's rise to power.)

    691:

    The German people were aware of losing the war; increasing starvation and disease across the country led to a loss of morale in both civilians and army men home from the front. There was an attempted revolution after the war, which was crushed with violence from the army. After all that the stab in the back mythology was pushed heavily by the leaders and right wing folk, and I suppose that persuaded some and the rest just put it all behind them.

    692:

    677: I sit (and type) corrected. 678: The interesting thing is the (unpaid) FBI did it in a pre-dawn raid... meaning they were also after computers, phones and papers, just as they did with Cohen and Flynn? Manafort?

    He is so screwed.

    693:

    Troutwaxer @ 649: I once thought of a variation on a major science fiction trope; instead of going back in time to kill Hitler, go back in time and ensure that he is accepted into art school. I can't imagine it hasn't been done, but I don't recall any such story and my knowledge of the field is pretty good.

    I've seen a number short pieces where someone goes back in time to early 20th Century Vienna, encounters a young artist and advises him that he's never going to be successful & suggests he pursue politics instead, never realizing who the young artist is.

    694:

    Which is, I suppose, why the Marshall plan led to it starting WWIII back in the 1960s.

    695:

    Daniel Duffy @ 640: As for our looming demographic/financial crisis this video provides a nice summary:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OFaZcC0lRU

    But the problem is now we're facing the demographic time bomb.

    But not, I think an unbiased summary. Raoul Pal is a former hedge fund manager for GLG Partners, who managed the GLG Global Macro Fund.

    @ 2:12 ... Roaul Pal:

    My name's Raoul Pal. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. But today, I'm talking on behalf of Global Macro Investor, my research business.

    It's an "infomercial" for his investment business. He comes off for me like another Bernie Madoff wannabe.

    696:

    Daniel Duffy @ 651: Getting back to Germany winning WW2...

    Why? I have no interest in having Germany win WW2.

    If, OTOH, you have a good idea for how to deter German aggression in 1939 & keep Hitler from starting WW2 in the first place; especially if it allows the Germans to eventually reclaim their democracy from the dictator ... THAT I would be interested in.

    697:

    David L @ 689:

    "He gained celebrity in the Cable TV explosion of the 80s & 90s."

    More of a 90s thing. In the 80s when I noticed him was when I'd work from home with CNBC on in the background. And he kept popping up in stories about his various bankruptcies and how the banks were getting less and less eager to lend to him.

    "80s & 90s" specifically referred to the Cable TV explosion. I'm not sure when Trump became a "celebrity". Wikipedia says his TV show "The Apprentice" debuted in 2004. I never watched it, but I know NOW that he was involved with "professional" wrestling before then.

    I never had any real awareness of his existence before he started in with all that birther shit when Obama was running for President.

    698:

    There's a reason that Q ratings are, essentially, a percentage of people who have heard of you. Since we've already had a Doonesbury reference, I'll point out that "Give Those Nymphs Some Hooters" was published in 1989, and Trudeau didn't need to explain who Trump was at the time.

    699:

    Trump caved.

    700:

    Boyd Nation @ 698: There's a reason that Q ratings are, essentially, a percentage of people who have heard of you. Since we've already had a Doonesbury reference, I'll point out that "Give Those Nymphs Some Hooters" was published in 1989, and Trudeau didn't need to explain who Trump was at the time.

    I would have still been subscribed to my local paper then and I probably knew the reference at the time, but he disappeared from my consciousness just as soon as a new story came along.

    You know, Doonsbury is one of the few things I miss from not having a morning paper delivered. I should probably go out to the mall & see if the bookstore has some of Trudeau's books.

    701:

    Doonsbury is one of the few things I miss...

    You don't have to! I read both the current Doonesbury and N-year flashbacks online every day.

    I'm told Trudeau has released a compilation of all Doonesbury strips involving Trump, but have not sought it out. Without context, could you even guess if the quote "Give those nymphs some hooters!" was parody or Donald's actual words? It could go either way...

    702:

    "You are aware that the US unemployment figures (as with the UK) are effectively rigged?"

    True, and utterly irrelevant. While the U6 is not at historic lows, the U3 and U6 trend close enough for me to declare the difference between the two a huge red herring.

    https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

    "This means the ratio of working age to dependents is declining, meaning less productivity per capita overall."

    Does this matter politically? It's axiomatic that recessions are unpopular but we've never had a "low-unemployment recession" before.

    Second, will it matter within the next 2 years?

    703:

    2019 is going to be good, I'm pretty sure of that.

    704:

    Are you possibly thinking of "Hitler Painted Roses" by Ellison?

    705:

    Headline at Huffington Post "Trump Can't Find Wall Dough."

    706:

    Given a time machine I'd elect to leave baby Hitler in peace, and try to talk to Kaiser Bill about the potential to gain prominence on the world stage through trade and manufacturing. Also talk to US Republicans of the day about the worth of a little restraint on the market and how much better TR is than Taft. In Science Fiction, unknown time travelers get access ;) .

    707:

    Show up in 1912 holding a smart phone and I'm guessing you can get access anywhere. Just saying.

    708:

    And remember to have everything on the phone, no networks! And don't be surprised if the secret police are the ones you actually see.

    709:

    The German people were aware of losing the war; increasing starvation and disease across the country led to a loss of morale in both civilians and army men home from the front. There was an attempted revolution after the war, which was crushed with violence from the army.

    From what I've read the public line was "we are winning the fight". Yes, it sucked to be a civilian in Germany but I bet they were being told the enemy was worse off. Remember the only source of news was news papers fed by telegraph lines. No broadcast radio. No TV. And certainly no Internet. And I have seen photos of the victory parades. [1]

    Anyone one here want to relay what the German school systems teach? I can ask some Germans but the answers might take a few days.

    [1] From Wikipedia: "In The Hague, the Netherlands, PCGG started broadcasting on November 6, 1919, making it, arguably the first commercial broadcasting station." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_broadcasting

    710:

    It's axiomatic that recessions are unpopular but we've never had a "low-unemployment recession" before.

    The UK has effectively been in one since 2010, thanks to a combination of Tory austerity policies and changes in the structure of the labour market: they've taken an axe to government spending (30% cuts in most areas), removing completely the stimulus of central spending between 2010 and 2015, while at the same time about 80% of the new jobs created are at or below minimum wage (because zero hours contracts). So the median income has fallen, even though unemployment is also low, and growth was just beginning to trend upwards when the loss of confidence induced by Brexit slammed it down again.

    As Brexit hit the value of Sterling for about 20% off its long-term average, if you were to assess UK wages in, say, euros or US dollars, you'd see they've fallen significantly.

    711:

    At the end of WWII the Allies went into Berlin, rounded up most of the Nazis and hanged quite a few of them. A military Occupation followed where the local populace couldn't spit without permission from their conquerors who they saw every day in their streets telling good German folks what to do and be quick about it. This was not what happened after WW1. Perhaps if something like that had happened then there would have been no WWII. Then again WW1 was, in many ways, a standard European war, fought by working-class folks but treated as an political-influence exercise by their rulers and the rulers specifically exempted themselves from bearing real responsibility for what they did. The Versailles Treaty was part of that Standard Model of European Wars, land and money in reparations as a punishment for failing to win plus restrictions on a military buildup by the losers. Such treaties become dead letters eventually, the Versailles Treaty went quicker than most.

    Both Allied sides actually remilitarised their respective areas of influence in Germany after WWII, including reinstating a draft to build up armies consisting of millions of heavily-armed and well-equipped German soldiers but they were kept on a tight leash from Washington and Moscow, no casting envious eyes on Poland or Belgium or points south and definitely no sudden push East.

    712:

    JBS @ 682 Welll, some years back, we had a "hung" election ... after about a week ... "Private Eye's" cover was a very pissed-off looking Queenie, with speech bubble: "Get a move on, you lot, or I'll toss a coin"

    whitroth @ 692 Yes. "Today" programme this AM ... referring openly to WikiLeaks & both its & DT's connections to the Russians. Makes the WikiLeaks attempt to discredit Global Warming by deliberate slanting of information look even more sinister, doesn't it? All helping that nice Mr Putin, of course ....

    JBS @ 696 Easy. Get into your time-machine & make sure that Germany becomes a constitutional monarchy in 1919. At which point a lot of the disaffected on the moderate & not-too-extreme right stop agaitating for the overthrow of "Weimar". Alternatively, simply rig the Jan 1933 election, because economic recovery was already on the way ... so Adolf's power-base withers, as the economy improves.

    David L @ 709 but I bet they were being told the enemy was worse off. Spot on. The German front-line troops advance in Operation Micheal in 1918 was significantly slowed ( like completely stopped, in places ) when they got to the first Allied & especially British supply dumps .... My cunning plan for N Korea, is simply to drop the border, & have a row of huge food-supplies about 2km S of the DMZ ... based on a John Brunner short called IIRC "Who steals my Purse" actually. [ Title is a quote from Stratford Bill, obviously - "Othello" ]

    713:

    I have no interest in having Germany win WW2.

    Nobody does.

    My point is that we build counter-factuals around physical things. So we discuss oil production, tank design, tactics and strategy - when a lot depends on psychological factors.

    The loss of the British army at Dunkirk would have been devastating to British morale. An offer to exchange 200,000 British POWs for an armistice would have been hard even for Churchill to resist.

    As for Stalin, he fell into deep suicidal depression during the opening days of Barbarossa. He almost ate a bullet in is dacha outside of Moscow (without him at the head of a very personalized totalitarian regime the USSR would have had to sort out a succession crisis and power struggle while facing German panzers). His state of mind was crucial to Russian resistance and after a disastrous 4 months of fighting he was willing to cut a deal that would have at least saved his regime from what looked like certain doom.

    Invading Britain and conquering Russia to the Urals were both logistical fantasies. But an armistice with Britain and a rump Soviet Union would have ensured Germany's status as a super power dominating the industries and technologies of continental Europe and the resources of half the world's colonial empires.

    714:

    Re: 'WikiLeaks & both its & DT's connections to the Russians.'

    Below is a link to the list of agencies and their current investigations. IIRC, as FBI gathered evidence, Mueller called in the different agencies that have chief responsibility for and expertise in investigating specific types of activities/findings.

    'A Complete Guide to All 17 (Known) Trump and Russia Investigations'

    https://www.wired.com/story/mueller-investigation-trump-russia-complete-guide/

    Someone should come out with a board game so that we can pass on any learnings from this fiasco to following generations. Suggested names: Dingo-Donnie, Trivial POTUS, Moscopoly, Dumpie-Doodle, Name-That-Crime!, GO(ne), TweetScrabbel (Typos), RUSK (var. of Risk), GuessWho?, B(oonD)oggle, etc.

    715:

    Reading the "Indie" on Stone ..... 1) What an evil creep 2) Could ( Oh yes purrrlease!) the UK guvmint guarantee that Assange won't be extradited to the USA, then arrest him as soon as he comes out, for Russian Espionage in the UK? [ Yes, I've had it in for him since the Univ of E Anglia Global Warming supposed leaks & deliberate slanting of that information ]

    716:

    Good news for 2019? Sanity in the US of A still exists. Chris Hedges.

    717:

    The Wired Article made me absurdly happy.

    718:

    So happy, that I seem to have indulged in Exuberant Capitalization!

    719:

    Re: ' ... the UK guvmint guarantee that Assange won't be extradited to the USA'

    As an outsider, wonder whether the UK guvmint could 'guarantee' anything. Seriously, it seems that Brexit is doing to the UK what DT's wall is doing to the US: distracting virtually all elected levels of gov't from governing.

    720:

    Re: 'Wired Article - Exuberant Capitalization!'

    Yep - there's still hope. Plenty of good/sane folk working on this.

    Glad This Brightened Your Day!

    721:

    Another one of those US issues that doesn't make much sense to people not from around here.

    After having read the Wikipedia article, my question remains: how does it make sense to anybody?

    Is there a rationale, other than "it seemed like a good idea around WW1"? (Preferably one that fits in a single paragraph.)

    (Also getting a feeling that this is one of those issues where theory and practice are very much apart.)

    722:

    What an evil creep

    People in politics have been saying that about Roger Stone for fifty years now. (The man is an unscrupulous liar who literally has a tattoo of Richard Nixon.) We're pleased to see that someone in law enforcement has established that he's a criminal evil creep.

    723:

    The Democrats restored a house rule that automatically raises the debt ceiling when the budget passes, so that is less likely to be a problem this year. Of course Republicans are also a minority in the house, which already reduced the odds of a debt ceiling shutdown.

    This didn't magically appear as an issue in the past ten years, the Republicans created it so they could play more games of chicken for their stupid base.

    724:

    Another one of those US issues that doesn't make much sense to people not from around here.

    After having read the Wikipedia article, my question remains: how does it make sense to anybody? ... Is there a rationale, other than "it seemed like a good idea around WW1"? (Preferably one that fits in a single paragraph.)

    Constitution says "only Congress can authorize the borrowing of money on the credit of the United States." Prior to WWI Congress passed a law for every single bond issue. That became unwieldy with WWI and would be a total train wreak in today's economies. So they switch to writing laws allowing Treasury to issue bond which did not cause the total obligations of the US to exceed X amount.

    Not wanting to give any one administration a blank check Congress picks a limit which will last a few years. Or not. In today's environment this issue allows Congress Critters to block things if they don't get their way on a hot issue for them. Enough Critters want something they are not getting and they can get together and gum up the works.

    Plus there is a small group who really really really believe their should be no debt and vote every time to not extend it and don't care if the US defaults. To them going back to the gold standard and no debt maybe outside of paying for a needed war is the only way to run things.

    (2 paragraphs.)

    725:
    Not wanting to give any one administration a blank check Congress picks a limit which will last a few years. Or not.

    It's useful to keep in mind that the entire thing is nothing but an excuse for right wing grandstanding.

    When the debt ceiling is reached, the same congress that complains about the debt will certainly have authorized the spending that same year which required the debt to cover it. There's no "blank check" -- congress directs the administration to spend a certain amount of money, and then pulls some idiotic grandstanding about the debt issuance for political favors. It's the appropriations bills that provide the check, not the debt.

    Given that the constitution also specifies that the country can't default on its debts, the whole charade is of dubious legality to begin with. The whole system is essentially possible only because the media and public are so disengaged from how government works that even the most transparent lies are accepted as fact.

    726:

    Thank you. I didn't realize that the austerity measures created a low-unemployment recession. I concede the point.

    727:

    Just as long as you don’t extradite Julian back to Australia.

    728:

    He's most likely eligible for citizenship of Panama, or failing that I'm sure the US would be willing to consider granting him citizenship of Puerto Rico or even the US. Which would mean he could be stripped of Australian citizenship.

    According to SBS the minister must be “reasonably satisfied” they are citizens of another nation.

    The Conversation has a more detailed explanation. If the minister’s view that a person is a citizen of country X diverges from the view held by the authorities in country X, there is a practical impasse.

    The first case under that new law arrived very quickly and appears to have proceeded on the basis that the guy "might be eligible for" rather than actually having, a second citizenship.

    When this passed I thought it was going to be used as a trap for the new minister of immigration after the change of government which is due by May. The current government/new opposition would pick an Australian terrorist and demand that the new minister either strip citizenship or explain why not. The Murdochracy would love to put the boot in.

    But instead Dutton has jumped on the chance to act out his jackbooted thug fetish and stretched the boundaries of the new law. I expect this will be overturned in court because IMO what was done is clearly not permitted. But the "Liberal" party is all about punishment first, due process second (unless it's one of theirs in the wrong, in which case a token talking to(caution: insincere right wing looney website) or minor slap on the wrist is is all the punishment required).

    729:

    Re: Assange

    Ecuador granted Assange citizenship back in December 2017. In March 2018, the Ecuadoran gov't blocked his Internet access because his social media activities were harming Ecuadoran-EU/UK relations.

    730:
    citizenship of Puerto Rico or even the US

    Puerto Rico is part of the US. (And people born in PR are full citizens, unlike, say, American Samoa.) You cannot be made a "citizen of Puerto Rico" -- you're a US citizen who lives in PR in that case.

    731:

    Sorry, I find it hard to track the status of the various not-states, territories, occupied nations and "arrangements" that the US has, and what conditions their citizens are kept in. IIRC there are people who live under US control but aren't citizens, and get shafted as a result. It's not just Haiti and Diego Garcia.

    Australia has Nauru and PNG which are "dependent nations" to a large degree, plus "semi autonomous Australian Territory" like Christmas Island and Norfolk Island that are more akin to Hawai'i than American Samoa. I expect that if our government decided that Assange needed citizenship elsewhere Nauru would be happy to oblige.

    But since he already has Panamanian citizenship the question is moot, and Australia can strip him of Australian citizenship at will. This could be Dutton's chance to play the other side of the law and see just how vague a connection with terrorism a crime has to have to allow him to get away with decitizenisation.

    732:

    David L @ 724 @& Elladan @ 725 What strikes me as odd, even under the circumstances is that the R's are the people who most publicly & stridently oppose raising "the Debt", yest, at the sma time, are the people who jack said debt up by the largest amouints. Which makes their complaints about the D's "Tax & Spend" a little hypocritical, to say the least.

    SFR @ 729 Assange seems to be a right little piece of troublesome shit, even without any connections to that nice Mr Putin, doesn't he?

    SEF @ 730 And people born in PR are full citizens
    But are not represented in Congress at all & thus have no say in the US taxes levied on them ... Um, err ... wasn't there some sort of fuss about this, back in 1776?

    733:

    Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid - Fuel Efficient Minivan

    734:

    There aren't any natives left on Diego Garcia, they were moved off the atoll by the British government when the Americans moved in since they wanted vacant possession. A quick Wiki reveals the entire British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT) islands were depopulated at about the same time, I suppose to make things easier if the Yanks decided they wanted a few more islands to do military stuff on.

    735:

    And people born in PR are full citizens

    But are not represented in Congress at all & thus have no say in the US taxes levied on them ...

    That's only somewhat correct:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Commissioner_of_Puerto_Rico

    "Commissioners function in every respect as a member of Congress, including sponsoring legislation and serving on congressional committees, where they can vote on legislation, except that they are denied a vote on the final disposition of legislation on the House floor."

    Also

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Puerto_Rico

    736:
    Which makes their complaints about the D's "Tax & Spend" a little hypocritical, to say the least.

    Their politics are entirely hypocritical and can only exist because they're based on tribalism and a compliant media. I have trouble thinking of a single issue where their official positions align with their actions.

    In addition, basically everyone knows this, but it's just lumped in with general cynicism about politics. They're all lying, so what's the difference? Might as well root for the home team.

    But are not represented in Congress at all & thus have no say in the US taxes levied on them ...

    As mentioned above, they have some representation. But in addition, people in PR are generally exempt from federal income tax (and I believe many other taxes). Whenever the subject of statehood comes up, it largely revolves around the question of how much people want that tax exemption. Well, that and how much Republican politicians really hate Spanish-speaking people.

    737:

    Democrats "tax and spend," which IMHO is the right way to do it. Republicans "borrow and spend."

    738:

    Re: PR-US Mainland - cash flow

    Depending on how you calculate, there is indication that PR sends more money to the US mainland than it receives back in funding.

    See PDF below for analysis of the (deliberate) financial imbalance. Stage 3 of 'US Tax Imperialism' (1975-to-present) starts on pg 68:

    'Diane Lourdes Dick, U.S. Tax Imperialism, 65 Am. U . L . Rev. 1 (2015)

    This Article uses historical and legal analysis to demonstrate how U.S. domination over Puerto Rico's tax and fiscal policies has been the centerpiece of a colonial system and an especially destructive form of economic imperialism. Specifically, this Article develops a novel theory of U.S. tax imperialism in Puerto Rico, chronicling the sundry ways in which the United States has used tax laws to exert economic dominance over its less developed island colony. During the colonial period, U.S. officials wrote and revised Puerto Rican tax laws to serve U.S. economic interests. In more years, U.S. tax laws have disadvantaged Puerto Ricans, who still lack voting rights and full democratic representation in Congress. A theory of tax imperialism may also have application far beyond the U.S.-Puerto Rican experience. For instance, it may help us understand the relationships between the United States and its other possessions and territories throughout history, and between the United Kingdom and its British Crown dependencies, overseas territories, and newly-independent colonies.'

    https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1729&context=faculty

    Search results show that this article has been presented at various top-tier university law faculty conferences and that the author also specializes in corp tax & bankruptcy loop holes. (Wonder if she can keep up with all the raw material DT is providing these days ...)

    As for 'fair representation' in gov't, PR does not possess anything remotely like equitable status since they are not allowed to represent themselves or vote where and on what matters. Nor is PR allowed to leave the US and become completely independent. From Wikipedia: at present there are only four different types of relationships that PR might be allowed to pursue vis-a-vis the US. These four relationships were determined by the US gov't which has yet to make up its mind on which relationship it likes best. Once this is known, PR can then take this to the PR electorate for a vote (PRExit). So, basically the PR is being treated like a 3-yr old: allowed to watch but not to talk.

    739:

    SFR @ 738 THANKS for confirming what I suspected.

    740:

    Well, yes, and the people concerned are now suing the US government for, among other things, failing to return their islands once the lease expired. They've also been fighting the British government, but as usual with these things the basis of the court case also makes it hard to find the funds for the court case. Viz, "they took everything we had and dumped us in another country"... but they still have the right to hire legal representation and sue the British government in British courts.

    https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/chagossians-original-inhabitants-diego-garcia-face-us-government-court

    They're under US control in the sense that their home is under US military occupation and they're not allowed back. It's a bit like Palestine in that sense - the British stole someone's land and gave it to someone else, then walked away saying "not our problem".

    741:

    I've just worked out to solve the NI backstop issue: China buys Northern Ireland from the Catholic Church.

    The Romans have as good a claim over the territory as anyone, based on previous conquest and ongoing connection with the land. China has a need for a military base close to Europe, and money to buy it. There's some question over the provenance of the territory, so Rome could say their claim should take precedence. The current residents don't have more human rights than Palestinians or Chagossians (or... let's make a list of all the groups Britain has denied the rights of, shall we?)

    742:

    "What strikes me as odd, even under the circumstances is that the R's are the people who most publicly & stridently oppose raising "the Debt", yest, at the sma time, are the people who jack said debt up by the largest amouints. Which makes their complaints about the D's "Tax & Spend" a little hypocritical, to say the least."

    In my experience, all right-wing propaganda is pure Freudian projection. Whatever they are doing, or plan to do, is what they accuse others of doing.

    And I believe that it works: if I have six inches of sht on me, I'll throw a few globs of sht on my opponent, and call them 'shtty'. The media will reply with 'both sides do it'; many people will say 'they both smell like sht'.

    743:

    And to make matters even more "Fun", the same donors who demand low rates of taxation have increased opportunity to buy treasury bonds, issued to compensate for the tax cut. For working class voters, who neither derive much benefit from the tax cut, or have surplus income to invest, it could bring an unwholesome metaphor to mind.

    744:

    Running for President was the first I ever heard of him.

    I first met Trump as a character in the cartoon 'Bloom County'. Who got stuck in Bill the Cat's body due to a mistaken brain-transplant.

    I didn't realise for many years that he was also a real person.

    Then they elected him president, in real life.

    Trump that is, not Bill the Cat. Unless they never did the body-swap back.

    745:

    Donald Trump does not represent the Meadow Party. At all.

    746:

    Wasn't there a revolution somewhere that kicked off on the basis of "no taxation without representation"?

    747:

    Never heard this joke before.

    https://inosmi.ru/inotweet/20190118/244410607.html

    Брекзить — прощаться, но не уходить

    748:

    Re: ' ... revolution ... basis: "no taxation without representation"?'

    Hey - think you're right! And there's even a rap-musical based on some 'founding father' born in PR. Whudda thunk it!

    FYI - Below is the 2016 Tony Awards performance with introduction by the Obamas (7:13 min):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5VqyCQV1Tg

    One of the great musicals.

    749:

    If they ever make a musical of the 1905 Russian revolution the opening scene has to be the Moscow printers' strike which was over actually about being paid for setting punctuation. No pay no punctuation.

    750:

    Moz @ 741 Several problems with your idea. ONE: NI is majority Prod, certainly majority non-RC TWO: Oh, let's take it away from the evil Brits & give it to ... the fucking Han? Whose racism makes that of pink people look like a job for amateurs - ask the Tibetans or the Uighur, for starters. Maybe not?

    751:

    Several problems with your idea.

    My point was that any of the problems you or others identify most likely also apply to the British use of Diego Garcia, Palestine... Australia, India, and so on. Which makes defending the current treatment of Chagossians pretty tricky, ethically speaking. In a fair court "you stole our stuff, we want it back" vs "we're renting it out to a friend at below market rates and want to renew the lease" is going to be a very short case.

    752:

    I’m sure the majority of NI citizens are perfectly decent, reasonable people with the same hopes and aspirations as you or I. However, over the years they’ve colluded (actively or passively) with and given their tacit support (through ballot box, speech, silence, or who they’ve chosen to do business with) to extremist nut-cases right across the sectarian spectrum who’ve built on our Imperial/Colonial legacy to turn the place into a festering cesspool of sullen suspicion, and May’s succeeded in buying off some of its most charming representatives to bring their own unique approach to the most critical moment in British politics since the second world war.

    Hell yes I’d let the Chinese take them off our hands! In fact if North Korea, Turkey, Syria, or Equatorial Guinea are willing to make a better offer I’d entertain bids from them as well...

    753:

    Whose racism makes that of pink people look like a job for amateurs

    You know we've just celebrated genocide day in Australia, right? The people who invented concentration camps used them here as part of their "exterminate the blackfellas" policy, and on January 26th every year they have a big celebration of the official start of those events.

    Racist? I dunno, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that using that term so grossly understates the situation that it's misleading.

    754:

    Moz Quite a few people are aware of the very raw deal & shabby treatment of the people of Diego Garcia. Don't point the finger at me, given you are from AUS?

    755:

    SFreader @ 738: Your recounting of Puerto Rico's woes is certainly correct concerning the rather evil financial situation the island got placed in, including the prohibition of PR ever claiming Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection that was snuck into a 1984 Senate bill by Sen. Strom Thurmond for reasons nobody can now figure out.

    Your final paragraph about what PR is "not allowed' is, something of a semi-truth. In multiple referendums up until the 2012 one, a strong majority of Puerto Ricans consistently had advised that they wished to continue the current 'commonwealth' relationship with the USA. 2012's vote showed a historic shift, for the first time showing a strong sentiment towards getting statehood. Unfortunately for the islanders, the timing of this shift coincided with the Republican Party beginning to perceive a conspiracy of swarthy-skinned voters to eclipse them permanently, a mental pathology that Toddler-in-Chief Trump later tied to his core appeal. Probably the fact that President Obama endorsed the Puerto Ricans' 2012 statehood initiative further supported that perception: See? An entire island full of Spanish-speaking probable Democrats wants two senators and some congressmen. So, they blocked consideration in Congress of Puerto Rico's request for reasons of domestic USA politics.

    The treatment of Puerto Rico has in many ways been shameful in recent years, the pitiful response to the Hurricane Maria damage not least among those. Treating it as a pawn in US domestic party intrigues now gets added to that list.

    756:

    Rick Moen However, IF there is a "Dem" majority in both houses & as POTUS after 2020, what for "PR" then? How quickly could they get statehood - could it be done in one "term"?

    757:

    Greg — the problem with adding states to the USA is more about the allocation of Senate seats than anything else. A large number of seats go to states with a tiny population (Alaska, North Dakota, etc). Each state gets two seats. So adding even one more state dilutes the senate power of those states (which in many cases get more from the federal government in spending than they contribute in tax). So they fight tooth and nail to prevent new states being admitted.

    (This is a particular failure mode the EU's founders considered, said "don't want that", and avoided: there's a clear pathway to EU admission ... although it's not open to Puerto Rico.)

    What's really needed is electoral reform, of a kind that would require a constitutional amendment—I could argue for single transferrable vote to elect congresspersons (breaking the two-party duopoly system that results in them incorporating de-facto minority parties rather than them getting to campaign openly under their own flag), and something different to elect senate seats (I'd prefer a pure proportional representation system allocated across the entire US population: the link between senate seats and geography is toxic, leading to pork-barrel spending scams, and needs to be shattered).

    758:

    The U-2 at cruse will do a normal stall if it slows too much, and a compression stall if it goes too fast, those are so close that it must be flown with the elevator under the control of the autopilot.

    The U-2 got a bunch of upgrades in the 1980s that the SR-71 didn't get, they are similar, with removable noses for different missions, and other payload bays (well, I assume that's the case with the U-2.

    759:

    Well, you can blame Atlas Shrugged & The Fountainhead on Dexedrine, as well as most of Hunter S. Thompson's work though 1974 or so.

    760:

    Jan 26th (Australia Day for you non-Ozzie’s) is at the moment a bit like Thunderdome, y’know, two versions of history enter but only one leaves. FWIW my monies still on the guy with the small-pox scars,

    761:

    Jesus, the pig ignorant stupidity of this comment beggars belief.

    Well almost beggars belief, if I hadn't spent my entire life listening to various shades of fuckwit not dissimilar to "JayGee" who appear to have the in depth knowledge of Northern Ireland in line with that of an attention-deficit baboon given twenty minutes access to Wikipedia.

    However, over the years they’ve colluded (actively or passively) with and given their tacit support (through ballot box, speech, silence, or who they’ve chosen to do business with) to extremist nut-cases right across the sectarian spectrum

    After re-reading this comment (that tars about a million and a half people with the same ill-informed brush) a couple of times, I'm happy to risk whatever the moderators want to sling by telling "JayGee" loudly and clearly to GET FUCKED!

    762:

    Further to the other reply to this comment, a U-2 can also put the inside wingtip into stall and the outside tip into Mach buffet by turning too fast.

    763:

    I wish that it did :-( While they rarely phrase it as offensively, it's very much the attitude of the England First (*) brigade.

    (*) Meaning primarily people who work in London and live in the home counties - the peasants in the periphery don't count for much more than your lot do.

    764:

    Interesting! That is the trouble with extreme engineering - and, given how early it was, the U-2 was about as extreme as engineering gets and still reaches the stage of being used. There are other examples, of course :-)

    765:

    Forty minutes later and I'm still so seethingly angry at JayGee's arrogant ignorance that I'm almost incoherent.

    (But yes, I do appreciate that there is a strain of arrogance in London/Home Counties English thought that discounts the rest of the country, and not just the bit across the Irish Sea, as somehow backward and not particularly relevant -- I wish I was more surprised by these comments, but I'm not.)

    766:

    EC I say! - with the exception of "Milwall supporters" I don't think you will find many "England First" fascists in London - the place is simply too diverse for their brain-excuses to cope.

    767:

    Well, you have my respect for how moderate your language is.

    768:

    And in order to clarify, and avoid making the mistake of generalisation (or upsetting Greg!), I do know that this is just a strain of thought, and not the way that everyone inside the M25 or points South East thinks.

    769:

    Re: PR & ' ... the timing of this shift coincided with the Republican Party ...'

    Not a GOP fan but the PR issue is not solely attributable to them. There's been considerable inertia about what to do with 'US territories'. For PR it's been how the primary responsibility for looking into viable independence/self-government options keeps getting dumped on invisible agencies/committees without any timetable: out of sight, out of mind and dragged out forever. Which also means muzzling PR and not allowing it to participate in any discussions about its own future.

    Then again, if PR is ever allowed to speak for itself and go on to become a sovereign state, Hawaii would probably follow, and then American Samoa, Guam, etc. One immediate impact of those territories leaving would be a drop in the US military head count*.

    *This seems a recurring pattern: fill your military with the people that you're subjugating. Not sure what the rationale is. Yeah - I know the Romans did this, but at least the Romans promised and delivered freedom once the military term was done.

    770:

    I've just worked out to solve the NI backstop issue: China buys Northern Ireland from the Catholic Church.

    There was short story in an anthology I read in the 80s (might have been edited by Jerry Pournelle) in which had a child listening to his father talk about how the there had been trouble in their homeland so their people had been moved to this wonderful new country of New Bangladesh (I think). The end-of-story spoiler is that the old name of the country was Northern Ireland.

    771:

    First, what happens to Enigma? Poles were the people who figured out how to crack it, and that went to the French, and then the British, with no declaration of war, what do the Poles do? Just checked, the information was passed a month before the invasion, so, if things are chillier, do the Poles do it still?

    Next, with no war with France, does Hitler just invade the USSR in 1940? What's that do?

    Also, given that the USSR invaded Poland too, how do things work out with them and the rest of the Allies?

    If the embargoes on Japan still go into effect, they still attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.

    Heck, I've always wondered what happens if the Germans just don't attack west. The French were not going to invade, and neither was England. Suppose Hitler just treats their declarations and minor raids as accidents?

    772:

    Yes. And I didn't actually say what he thought I did - I was not referring to people who actually live in London, though there will be some like that in the more exclusive areas! Regrettably, I have definite knowledge of what I posted :-(

    773:

    And you’re absolutely right.

    I have no damned business taking out my personal frustrations out on an entire population in a situation which is the result of several hundred years of alternating neglect, malice, and crass stupidity on the part of a long list of British/English regimes.

    Consider me self red-carded out of sheer embarrassment and shame...

    774:

    JG I take it you are not from the British Isles at all? I REPEAT, FYI .... For any problem involving Ireland, since about 1550, there have been a minimum of THREE "sides" involved in any conflict or disagreement of any sort. ( And often more than that ) A lot of British people don't realise this, never mind complete outsiders. You also have to remember that, as recently as the early 1980's the "South" was even more primitive in its' religous & social attitudes than the "North" - the changeover has been astoundingly rapid & a lot of people still haven't caught up with the idea(s), on both sides of the Border.

    775:

    I've just gotten a great idea for wall panels: carbonite. Complete with the decoration of encasing a Certain Obnoxious President....

    777:

    Introduced in the US in '16. NONE before that.

    The oil companies have a huge amount of control over the car companies here.

    779:

    Ok, folks,

    A few things for the majority of you, not in the US.

    For one, I've been saying since at least the very early seventies that the GOP was the party of borrow and spend. But wait, there's more: much of that is an excuse to cut revenues, deliberately, so as to have excuses for cutting all social programs, from those that came in wtih FDR and after. It's a way of strangling them.

    For example, my first professional job was where I was going to college, Philly Community. All of us programmers had a baby, and mine was the tape exchange with the federal gov't. Therefore, I can say from personal direct knowlege, that 90% of the college's revenue stream was from Pell Grants. The Pell Grants, in the decades since, have been savaged by the GOP.

    On another note, I was at a socialist meeting yesterday (DSA), and in the presentations, someone made a point that y'all might not know: Dem and GOP "members" aren't, as you recognize it, since they are not membership organizations, nor does anyone pay memberships. This is one of the reasons for continual fundraising... and why they're so not democratic. Those getting pad for the job get to make the rules.

    780:

    Re: PR (John Oliver, Lin Manuel Miranda)

    Great episode. Apart from a good analysis of PR's woes, that episode made me wonder how many other Bills contain similar hidden gems. With word processing apps available globally since the 1980s, all Bills and Amendments should be automatically tracked for changes, highlighted and ascribed. Similarly given the increasing usage of AI in the document review process*, all text should also be run through to identify what phrases run counter to current law before that Bill is even presented.

    Plus, since most debate has a financial component, all legislators should also attach spreadsheets showing the impact of their proposals across scenarios (e.g., demographics, states, business sectors, etc.) Right now, all we have is their 'word'. (Betcha their donors have spreadsheets.)

    • Therefore a familiar concept to the majority of the 116th Congress whose average age is 47 (down from 57).

    ** Interesting review of AI usage in law practice:

    https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2077&context=lsfp

    781:

    After re-reading this comment (that tars about a million and a half people with the same ill-informed brush) a couple of times, I'm happy to risk whatever the moderators want to sling by telling "JayGee" loudly and clearly to GET FUCKED!

    This sentiment is endorsed, for what it's worth, by the blog's owner (although I'm not going to use my bully pulpit at this time).

    782:

    Don't point the finger at me, given you are from AUS?”

    Greg, ... and ... and what the actual ...? You may like to explain that remark so us dumb colonials have a chance at understand your point. Because I’m seeing Dave’s reaction to JayGee above and might have some similar things to say depending on your explanation.

    Incidentally, Moz is from NZ (which is very much not part of Australia, though - talking about pathways to statehood - the offer is still in the Australian constitution), he just lives in NSW. I’m from Queensland, you can feel free to express whatever you mean up above there to me.

    783:

    That assumes no-one else on the planet could figure out how to "crack" Engima from cold and that's, well, silly. See for example the American cracking of the Japanese diplomatic Purple coding machine which was based on Enigma concepts. They reverse-engineered it so well without ever seeing an actual example of a Purple machine that when they finally got their hands on one, from the ruins of the Japanese embassy in Berlin in 1945, it was pretty much identical in operation to the model they were using as a basis for decrypting Japanese diplomatic messages pretty much at will.

    784:

    Unfortunately everyone in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland who paid taxes to the Exchequer between 1969 and 1998 is also culpable, or do killings by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Armed Forces not count?

    785:

    For a moment I thought I was reading soc.history.what-if again and it was 1998.

    Alas, no.

    786:

    Damian & Moz 782 Oops - I misremebered Moz as being from the BIG island, not the two middle-sized pointy ones .... though he does live there ...

    von hicthofen @ 784 You too can get fucked ... The Army was originally sent in to PROTECT the RC population, which was being persecuted by the Prods & their "tame" corrupt police. As previously mentioned, it then got complicated. I note that you don't mention the victims of Omagh, or were they acceptable collateral damage?

    787:

    Sure, but you still haven’t offered any explanation for your remarks which I quoted. And if you need me to explain why I am asking, you’re not in luck. Strongly suggest you just have a go (but do think carefully).

    788:

    SFreader @780: Agreed about the John Oliver episode, and listening to his analyses consistently helps one be be more aware and intelligent about public affairs, so he's quite a gift.

    It's always questionable to attribute collective attitudes to an entire nation, but I rather suspect the vast majority of Americans not only have no desire to muzzle PR or constrain its choices but are barely aware the island exists let alone its relationship to the USA. Personally, I'll have to confess that I narrowly escaped replying in ignorance to your previous post, because I hadn't been aware of the 2012 and 2017 referendums. Not knowing of that, I'd been the edge of saying: Sure, there was a fervent and somewhat violent PR independence movement in the 1960s, but that was before Congress first started appointing PR's own choices of local people as their governors and also making clear that PR could elect independence any time it wished and Congress would raise no objection, so suddenly the current 'commonwealth' deal with its huge tax advantages to islanders seemed a great deal to the islanders after all. The historic change in polling results changes this picture, of course -- though I'd maintain the US still would in no way impede independence, whereas statehood raises problems of US domestic politics. Fortunately, I took a moment to check recent history before posting, so escaped looking as if I were denying the problem.

    (There were some issues with both recent referendums, where they were boycotted by many local political factions, so it's at least questionable whether their results are representative, but that's a different subject.)

    I don't know if you've stopped to consider this, but the economics of island states smaller than, say, NZ or the UK suffers depressing systemic problems, in which key products and supplies must continually be shipped or flown in, and self-sufficiency is never feasible at all. This is probably the real reason PR stopped pushing for independence after Congress made clear it wasn't being denied.

    But returning to my main point, stand in a mainland American city and throw rocks for two hours, and I'll bet you'll almost never hit someone who can list all four unincorporated organised US territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands) let alone whether the inhabitants are US citizens (yes), let alone what voting rights they have in US elections (none unless they move to the USA proper), let alone where is American Samoa and why it's different (residents are not in the general case US citizens, and it's classed as 'unorganised' for lack of a congressional Organic Act specifying details of its government and relationship to the USA). Far from being imperial, the predominant attitude is obliviousness, for good or bad (mostly bad).

    789:

    How quickly could [PR] get statehood - could it be done in one "term"?

    The process has been somewhat variable historically, but assuming a lot of advance planning, preparation and scheming had been done, it could happen in a day. More realistically, assuming House, Senate and POTUS were all on board, weeks to months.

    https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php

    "According to the procedure usually followed in the past, the first step toward statehood is submission to Congress by the people of a territory of a petition asking for admission as a state. Congress may then authorize a convention in the territory to draft a constitution. The proposed state constitution, when accepted by the people, is submitted to Congress for its sanction. If Congress approves, it adopts a joint resolution granting statehood and the President issues a proclamation announcing that a new state has been added to the Union."

    790:

    Re: ' ... economics of island states smaller than, say, NZ or the UK suffers depressing systemic problems, ...'

    All good points so I looked up a recent paper specific to the Caribbean island economies. My take-away is that PR is suffering from both a) small-island-nation-dependency on imports/tourism, and b) familial neglect.

    Given that both China and Russia have set up operations in this region, i.e., China building infrastructure, Russia bankrolling despots, not addressing PR's present debt problems could result in larger global political issues down the road. There's no reason for the US mainland to not play fair re: tax acts, disaster relief, etc. - it's the ethical thing to do.

    https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/180124_MacDonald_CaribbeanEconomies2018_Web.pdf

    791:

    So you are OK with Bloody Sunday, and the 306 people shot dead by the British Army during OP. BANNER (160 of whom were unarmed civilians)?

    And the 28 civilians shot by the RUC (like Windscale, they had to be renamed, and were even more toxic?)

    Oh, and 1969-1998 includes the Omagh bombing.

    792:

    Y'know, from reading this thread, I've realized a modest proposal that will solve the US' budget impasse: a single bill, vote up or down, that has two parts: first, it gives the $5.8B for the border wall.

    And the second part makes both Puerto Rico and Washington, DC (population about that of Montana's) statehood.

    Actually, I was thinking about that, and have come up with an extension, that will help bring peace to the world: given that neither Hawaii nor Alaska are contiguous with the US... make the complete Palestinian Territories a US state. Think of it: it gives Israel a secure border, it gives the Palestinians security, and a stable government, it gives the US a guaranteed place for military bases without relying on other countries, and US companies will feel safe to build factories there, and as the employment rate goes from 70% or 80% unemployment to maybe 15%, there's that much less of a base or reason for violence!

    Will gladly accept my Nobel Peace Prize. I can use the $1M to retire on....

    793:

    ...Except the Russians then immediately annex Syria, and then the US goes "hey, it's only us who are allowed to annex places", and so we proceed to large scale demonstrations of devices of use to the mining industry.

    794:

    Putting the dumb back in referendumb.

    I'm not sure where to use it, but it seems like an excellent slogan.

    795:

    make the complete Palestinian Territories a US state

    Imagine if the US talked to their good mate Bibi and decided that the area to be administered was "Greater Israel" :)

    A funny follow-up would be if Palestinians decided on an internal migration where most of them moved within the US and made a Muslim-dominated mainland state. Not Montana, that's too small, but maybe New MexicoPalestine(1).

    I fear the best case would be an open border between the Christian millenialist US state of HolyLand and Israel, with the surviving Palestinians mostly kept in terrorist detention facilities in Iraq and Syria(2). I just can't imagine the US permitting a bunch of "persons of middle eastern appearance" even the limited form of self-government that PR gets, let alone full statehood.

    (1) there are between 1.5 and 11 million Palestinians, depending on who's counting. At the upper estimate they could dominate anything from Arizona (7M) on down, or have a fair old go at any state except California and Texas. While their average age is low, they're likely to be very committed voters, which combined with a likely exodus would probably make them powerful beyond raw numbers. (2) both of which are partly or wholly inside Greater Israel depending on who's drawing the map.

    796:

    I think the ninja level move with regard to states and the US Senate is for any D majority that does show up to admit DC and Puerto Rico as ten states each.

    797:

    SFreader @ 790: You'll get no argument from me about need to correct the appalling treatment of Puerto Rico. Just listening to John Oliver's analysis made me want to pull out the pitchforks and torches on the islanders' behalf (and, my Commonwealth spelling notwithstanding, I am a Yank, and particularly offended at the abusive treatment of some of my fellow citizens).

    On a level of tactical politics, after the consecutive disasters of the (artificial) PR debt crisis and then the utterly inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, I've been hoping a few million Puerto Ricans move to swing states and vote for fundamental reform, because clearly being nobody's constituency in Washington has made them prone to being screwed over.

    I couldn't help notice that the Toddler-in-Chief ceased even pretending to care about Hurricane Maria damage in PR the moment large portions of greater Houston flooded. It's simple: One is a nullity in national politics; the other is home to part of the Toddler's rabid base. Unethical? Hell yeah.

    A tidbit about the dismal economics of small and medium-sized islands: During a visit to Maui, Hawaii, I took a guided bicycle tour up and down Haleakala volcano (3,055 m) and was chatting with our guide. He said he buys a gallon of milk for his children only about once every couple of months, because it's insanely expensive even at the local Costco warehouse store, which in turn is because all retail milk is flown in from the mainland. (Local dairy farms exist but have problems for complex reasons.

    As someone with great affection for scrappy island nations and near-nations, I found this small glimpse of the problems of island economics rather depressing.

    798:

    LOL! Particularly if the release key for this piece of carbonite is taped to the next photon torpedo in someone's launch queue!

    799:

    Charlie Stross @ 757: Ranked-choice voting at the USA Federal level is coming, but with glacial slowness. I fear that an entire 'FPTP was good enough for Jaysus' crowd must die off before it'll be adopted broadly -- but, sooner or later, the rest of the population will notice ranked-choice voting already being routine in many places for long years, at state and local levels, and yet the sky somehow never fell.

    For now, antics like Maine Governor Paul LePage (R) scribbling 'stolen election' next to his signature certifying the victory of Congressman-elect Jared Golden (D - 2nd District), solely because LePage doesn't like STV and claims it 'didn’t result in a true majority as promised', still happen without the bozo in question getting laughed off the front page. So, small steps.

    Fixing the Senate and the Electoral College? Well, we can dream.

    800:

    SFR @ 790 Can I fall about in hysterical but painful laughter? There's no reason for the US mainland to not play fair re: tax acts, disaster relief, etc. - it's the ethical thing to do. Given the treatment of Britain by the US over Lend-Lease & the Atomic Bomb & several other, mostly financial issues ... you must be fucking joking.

    von hichtofen @ 791 OF COURSE I'm not - idiot. I suggest you read back-posts by Martin in these blog-pages of what monumental screw-up those were - & (perhaps) that there was an enquiry & people were found ... careless/negligent/criminal/stupid. STILL does not justify say, the murder of a catholic mother who supported a dying soldier ( because he was dying ) - taken from her family, murdered in cold blood & the body still not found, how nice.

    On a very closely-related subject ... THIS is appalling, but it was only as recently as 2012 that the "Southern" political & religious system deliberately murdered a married women HERE for revolting details NOTHING to choose between sides for primitive religious superstitions & brutality - or at least until then. YES, less than 6 years from the Savita case to Gay Marriage & legal abortions in the "South" ... so it can switch very quickly. I don't actually think the "North" can hold out for much longer, actually ... for one thing my local London MP is one of those leading the charge to make NI follow the South.

    801:

    Er, the reason for the District of Columbia is (at least as I was told it) exactly so that Washington DC, as the USian national capital, is NOT in any of the states.

    In the same vein, you may like to note Capital (capitol?) Territory in Australia.

    802:

    Well, I've found a use for "referendumb", given that I know a Brexiteer who has made exactly 3 statements about his reasons for voting "Leave", all 3 of them provably wrong!

    803:

    Yep, definitely a modest proposal. It'll never happen, but it'll make it glaringly obvious that the reason for the impasse can be summed up in three words: "brown-skinned people".

    Trying to remember who it was that said that chattel slavery was the original sin of the United States, but they were totally on the nail.

    804:

    This is exactly why I don't believe in our so-called representative democracy - it works only if the electorate is reasonably clueful and reasonably accurately informed.

    There was a deliberate (and highly successful) campaign to dumb down the electorate started under Thatcher, though I suspect she was a patsy as much as a principal, and the very long-standard policy of deliberate misinformation on foreign affairs spread to domestic ones under Murdoch, Rothermere and the Barclays.

    That is why I am absolutely serious that representtative democracy has failed in the UK, and we would be better off returning to the Sovereign in Council. Another Modest Proposal ....

    805:

    Er, some of live in Scotland, where the post of monarch was an elected office at one time. Sovereignty here vests in the people (and I have seen this stated by lawyers, not just guys on the interweb).

    806:

    Re Norn Iron, you are absolutely correct that the troops were sent in to protect the repressed minority - and were initially treated as saviours by those people.

    However, Martin is too young to remember how the screw-ups started, and too, er, naive to accept that they were at Cabinet level (including the most senior mandarins, brass hats etc.) Those of us who were following the fiasco knew in advance that something like Bloody Sunday was inevitable, given the IRA's policy and the UK government's mishandling of the situation, and both enquiries were whitewashes that simply omitted the evidence that would have shown the top-level culpability. As with the Falklands, Kelly and other enquiries ....

    807:

    Well Sovereign in Council is the principle underlying cabinet government in Westminster countries. You presumably mean something like “hereditary monarch assumes full executive authority”. The last time that was tried was the 1630s, and it didn’t work out well for the monarch in question.

    None of this stuff provides any genuine suggestion that democracy has “failed”. We see ample evidence that it is vulnerable to being gamed by the powerful. This isn’t a new thing and it shows pretty starkly that how inequality appears behind the worst themes and the least preferred, even by its beneficaries, outcomes. The alternative is not autocracy, not really, it’s pitchforks and a much more stupid form of group-generated direction making. Autocrats tend to lose their heads.

    808:

    In the same vein, you may like to note Capital (capitol?) Territory in Australia.

    Also Ciudad de México in, as you'd guess, México.

    809:

    EC @ 804 and the very long-standard policy of deliberate misinformation on foreign affairs spread to domestic ones Which started at least as early as the 1020's with the revolting "Beaverbrook" ( Aitken ) or even the pre-1914 Daily Mail ( Rothermere, again )

    810:

    You mean the Australian Capital Territory, almost always abbreviated to ACT. It elects 2 federal Senators compared to 12 for each of the “original states” and 2 Members of the House of Representatives. Yes, it was founded becauss people from Sydney could not countenance government from Melbourne and vice-versa. It comprises the city of Canberra and a surrounding water catchment reserve (because it was believed Canberra needed its own water supply). In practice, it is a regional commercial and population hub, supplanting its near neighbours in NSW (the town of Queanbeyan is regarded as part of Canberra’s metro area).

    Funding for transport infrastructure between Canberra and Melbourne or Sydney is a bit fraught. The Hume Highway, which links Sydney and Melbourne, bypasses Canberra by around 65km and the road by Lake George, which takes one to the Hume in the direction of Sydney, has been always been awful. The situation a political football at Federal level with high speed rail regularly off and on the table. But this is a slightly inevitable outcome of federalism, which seems to work well in other respects.

    811:

    “...the place is simply too diverse for their brain-excuses to cope.”

    Balderdash. Your home county fascist has walled gardens and plenty of hired help to keep the diversity out of their view. They might see a little thought the windscreen of a Range Rover, but that’s not the sort of contact that forges communitarian values much less cosmopolitan ones. Sure great cities are the wellsprings of both those sorts of values and you should be rightly proud of your fellow Londoners, but equally cities contain plenty of places to hide and old money has all the best ones.

    812:

    Yes, but their influence was only partial, and there was a majority of somewhat better sources - that was changed under Thatcher, both by deregulating the media and by the government getting into bed with foreign media moguls.

    813:

    Er, no. The office of Prime Minister in an even remotely modern sense did not exist until the late 18th century, and was appointed directly by the Sovereign (not Parliament) until 1832.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_the_United_Kingdom#Early_prime_ministers

    While it is not a great system, there is considerable evidence that our royalty has both learnt more since then and is more dedicated to the benefit of the country as a whole than our recent governments. I stand by my assertion that our current system has failed.

    814:

    Cheers; I picked 2 examples I knew of.

    815:

    Thanks; I knew it existed, then realised I wasn't sure it if was Capital or Capitol, and could make cases for both...

    816:

    There are various tongue-in-cheek proposals to fix the Electoral College by changing the borders of all the states so that each of the new 50 states had near-identical populations. The U.S. Map Redrawn as 50 States with Equal Population provides a good example of one such scheme - other plans divide the USA by segments of longitude(!) or other arbitrary factors.

    Never going to happen, but they can produce some pretty maps. And when you get right down to it, that's what's really important, isn't it?

    817:

    I stand by my assertion that our current system has failed.

    Well, IMO you are blaming failures of the Con and Liebour Parties, and particularly of their leadership (Maybot personal confidence level 35%, and Corbin lower at 27%) on the system rather than the individuals.

    818:

    The sole purpose of a system is to work, given the population that supplies it with individuals - those specimens have been put in their positions by the operation of the system. And I have been watching this meltdown for 30 years now, though it started considerably before that (e.g. under Wilson). In particular, UK governments have been increasingly selling the country down the river (*) to the USA and other foreign agencies in return for favours granted to their tribes. Greg Tingey's examples in #800 were born of desperation and naivety, but deliberately entering such arrangements has become SOP. Despite the desperate denials of its fans, the system itself has become broken. I have been repeatedly told that it is fixable, but all attempts have simply made it more broken.

    (*) Look up the origin of that phrase, if you don't know it.

    819:

    So breaking that down a bit. The system has to:-

    1) Produce an engaged populance, who will 2) Become members of political parties as individuals, rather than being signed up by another organisation which they are a member of. This will then hopefully achieve 3) Engaged members of political parties who will elect candidates and leaders who actually fairly represent them.

    I can't see how "sovereign in council" is supposed to achieve any of that, even before considering the issue that the sovereignty of Scotland is not the Palace of Oathbreakers" property to dispose of.

    820:

    You are normally more intelligent and less blinkered than THAT! That is some of what is needed to make the current system work, yes, and is to a great extent reversing the changes of the past half-century. Also, it omits the requirement for a clueful and informed populace, which is also necessary.

    But none of that is necessary to make government by the Sovereign in Council work for the country as a whole - ALL that is needed is that the sovereign is beneficient, clueful and informed, which criteria are currently met. Even the Speaker to Plants meets two of those criteria, which is at least one more than any PM in the past 35 years.

    I am talking about REPLACING the current broken system by one that is less broken. Yes, Armstrong's approach in the Delirium Brief :)

    821:

    Moz (and others suffering through the heat wave)…

    If it makes you feel better, I've spent several hours shovelling snow over the last few days. (And parenthetically, I really wish that when the Board makes a decision to keep schools open they would also make a decision to blow the effing parking lots so their staff can actually get into the buildings that they want kept open.)

    822:

    Re: 'Given the treatment of Britain by the US over Lend-Lease & the Atomic Bomb & several other, mostly financial issues ... you must be fucking joking.'

    Not familiar with the first example so did a search*. No idea what you mean by the second and third examples - please provide details or links.

    • 'Lend-Lease brought the United States one step closer to entry into the war. Isolationists, such as Republican senator Robert Taft, opposed it. Taft correctly noted that the bill would “give the President power to carry on a kind of undeclared war all over the world, in which America would do everything except actually put soldiers in the front-line trenches where the fighting is.”'

    Not joking - PR's situation now has two levers: a) Chinese and Russian presence to motivate GOP fearmongers and b) ethics (basic human decency) to appeal to the Dems. Typical response by either side is usually to help with infrastructure, medical aid, food supplies, military (whose salaries that would be spent locally), etc.

    823:

    much of that is an excuse to cut revenues, deliberately, so as to have excuses for cutting all social programs

    Our neocons also used those tactics. Harper* and the GST, for example. (Stated intention of cutting the tax was to make social programs unaffordable.)

    *Not my favourite politician, by a long shot. Played the politics of division, demonized immigrants (unless wealthy), and deliberately turned by city into an armed camp as an FU for not electing the 'right' MPs.

    824:

    JReynolds @ 816 Um. But, the real problem isn't the "States" its the Senators. So, you need to redraw the Senatorial "Map" in approx proportion to population, with caps & limits. Minimum representation per state; 1 Senator, maximum - what 20? ( Or 15 or 10? ) Would go along way towards fixing the problem.

    SFR Lend-Lease was abruptly terminated as soon as WWII was over & we were told to "Pay up in full under (supposedly) normal bank terms" i.e. the US foreclosed without warning Up to the end of WWII, it was suppposedly the practice of all "Manhattan" work to be shared, but after approx the beginning of 1943, all that work was being done in the US, with many Bort scientists present, or contributing theoreatical work. Again abrutly terminated & all information sequestered under US seal with no access - we didn't QUITE have to go back to the beginning & start again, but it was a very expensive struggle. Whetehr the "British Empire" was a good ide or not is NOT under discussion at the moment, but [ In hindsight, it would have gone anyway, hopefully without the disaster of Aprtition ] ... The US gleefully helped put financial pressure on, several times, only to pick up a lot of the pieces in financial terms, afterwards & not necessarily any better than we had done - ESPECIALLY in the "Middle East " where they managed to fuck up beyond all belief.

    825:

    Re:' ... omits the requirement for a clueful and informed populace, which is also necessary.'

    Sounds like you want the electorate to get even more dumbed-down. Why?

    I've read that the UK (like the US) has recently seen a reduction in foreign grad students & postdocs but hadn't until reading your post realized that this was part of one of its newer strategies whose domestic branch is known as the National Domestic Stupidification Program.*

    • Yep, there's such a thing. Apparently there's been some deliberate stupidification going on in US schools for a while. \
    826:

    Sigh. No. I am pointing out that, given where we are, a system that relies on an engaged, clueful and informed populace has failed, dismally. And that we would be better off with a tried system that is known to work (more-or-less) even when none of those apply.

    Oh, yes, there are better approaches, and I can think of several - but I have no idea of how to get there from here.

    827:

    I don't actually think the "North" can hold out for much longer

    Prior to 2016 I would have agreed with this with a high degree of confidence, now, not so much.

    Unionism that appeals to the middle ground has all but disappeared, either subsumed directly by the DUP-types, or become indistinguishable from the extreme elements (in a move that echoes the exact same process by which the Cons have moved to the right trying to reclaim votes lost to the likes of UKIP). The problem remains that support for the DUP, even in light of the disastrous strategy they have followed on Brexit and the long list of financial scandals they are mired in, remains high, because they have convinced a large chunk of Unionists that they are the only game in town when it comes to preserving the Union (and remember: the Union is not just some pleasant rose-tinted ideal in NI, it is the bedrock of many people's self-image and identity -- they mean it when they say: "We would fight the British to remain British).

    A further worrying development, only brought fully to my attention today but one that has been bubbling along for some time, is that Unionists across the spectrum are starting to say that even the calling of a "border poll" would be a betrayal of the Union. This is in direct defiance of the self-determination written in to the Good Friday Agreement, effectively moving to a position of denying the right to even discuss a United Ireland, and back to the good old days of Paisley Snr thundering "NEVER! NEVER! NEVER!" from his bully pulpit.

    Throw in a sense that Sinn Fein is less interested these days in events north of the border than consolidating their influence in ROI, creating the increasing feeling of a power vacuum on the Republican side of the equation.

    Then stir in to this mix the generations born since the GFA in 1998, many of whom have no interest in looking backwards, but also many who have no memory of the violence but have been raised on tales of heroic freedom fighters and unforgivable betrayals.

    I am not currently optimistic about the future of peace and progress in NI (no matter how Brexit pans out).

    828:

    Re: 'I can think of several - but I have no idea of how to get there from here.'

    Like what? Not being cynical or snippy, just curious. (Am twiddling thumbs waiting for a pdf from RG on critical pedagogy and wondering whether this is related.)

    829:

    From your perspective, what actually happened to the moderate unionist parties? They were there, and then they weren't.

    I accept that I should have been paying more attention.

    830:

    No, no, no, I mean them as an actual state, not a territory... complete with 2 Senators and an appropriate # of Reps.

    Then we can look forward to the first Palestinian member of the Supreme Court.

  • Btw, I work with a Palestinian, who looks about as "white" as I do. (Actually, I usually prefer to say "beige", or "salmon", as I'm not an albino (which, I suppose, means I can't wield the sword Stormbringer).

  • The problem with Montana is not size - it's huge - but rather that it's FREAKIN' COLD, and not real good for much.

  • 831:

    Not hardly - as I've noted in my late post, the guy I work with isn't. On the other hand, when I was about 20 or so, a favorite cousin of mine got married. The ONLY people who'd go sit and talk to the groom's family were, of course, my folks, who weren't upset by dark-skinned Sephardic Jews.

    Who, I understand, are vigorously discriminated against in Israel.

    832:

    Two notes about that sudden pay up on the Lend-Lease program: first, FDR died in the spring of '45, and I think we all wished he'd kept his previous VP instead of taking on Truman.

    The second is that the GOP took both Houses of Congress in '46, and nastily dealt with a lot of strikes, and helped push the Cold War.

    833:

    Most of them cause people to froth at the mouth and start gibbering, but you asked for it :-) One example is based on the total abolition of secrecy in government, which essentially requires that for the whole country to be viable. Yes, there would be privacy laws, but that's a very different concept, and completely alien to English law. Equally, it would mean abolishing the 11th commandment and a much less punitive approach to rule-breaking and human error. Few of the current abuses would survive such openness.

    834:

    whitroth @ 830 The CORRECT term is PINK for people like you & me .... [ Bugger - this browser won't take HTML "font color" instructions, o does not seem to ... the word "PINK", should of course, have been, well ...pink. ]

    835:

    Many Americans have a ... loose ... grasp on world geography and will lump together disparate groups with abandon in order to think about fewer moving pieces. Sometimes it's conscious. In this case, the process would go "Palestinians are Muslim, and Muslims come from the Middle East and are violent, therefore letting Palestinians in would be like letting in thousands of 9/11 bombers!". I trust this blog's community to know how wrong that sentence is.

    836:

    Re: '... total abolition of secrecy in government, ... eleventh commandment ...'

    Makes sense to me since they're all supposed to be working for the electorate, and it's standard practice for employers to supervise their employees and review their work at will.

    I'd add:

    a) Compulsory pre- or in-market testing of any/all schemes and programs with detailed analyses of who benefits most/least before enacting into law. (Makes no sense that any one program would or should work perfectly for everyone: different people will need different types of help at different times. This practice (pre-testing) is SOP in pretty well every corp on the planet as are tracking studies (in-market testing) for products/services to see what needs to be tweaked, when, and for whom as the market changes.)

    b) If you can maintain personal privacy across all levels of transactions, I'd try for a program that tracked all financial transactions (local, national & international) to see how people actually use their money because I'm not sure that current studies are accurate. Ditto for businesses - I'm really curious to see what's currently passing for 'added value' (apart from yet another mark-up) in current distribution channels.

    c) Have the civil service evaluate their appointed Pol on subject matter, interpersonal skills, work ethic, etc. :)

    837:

    Wrk, not quite - you’ve misread or not understood my first point, which is about your choice of words (and how the executive level currently actually works, something you might try a basic law textbook to get a better grip around). And in promoting your recipe for tyranny, you missed my other pont altogether.

    838:

    "Total abolition of secrecy." So all your government records would be searchable? Anyone negotiating with the government would do so in public, or at least would do so with the government's side open? And how do you enforce it?

    My take is fairly radically different, mostly because I recently read a book on termites. The problem with termites, it turns out, is that when scientists used video to track the movements of a bunch of termites, most of the work was being done by a relative handful, some were going along when there was a big crowd doing the same thing, and there were always a bunch of slackers. Apparently something similar has been seen in ants.

    Does this sound familiar? It's the problem that any volunteer group faces, and for that matter, it's the problem of governance. If analogous problems show up in termites, ants, and humans, that sounds like one of those emergent mathematics/economics problems, not a problem with the weakness of human nature. It's something along the lines of how many cheaters will a system tolerate before it crashes.

    An informed and clueful electorate won't solve this problem. Nor will an aristocracy, because as we know from history, aristocrats can slack with elan. So can those appointed through a meritocratic system. Every system of government, from authoritarianism to anarchy are totally vulnerable to it as well.

    Any system of governance that depends on everyone working together in an intelligent way is probably going to only work in emergencies, when the emergency is sufficiently obvious and there are obvious things for everyone to do.

    In the meantime, the trick, I think, isn't to abolish secrecy, it's to manage the 10% or whatever number of people who are doing most of the work: there's a need to keep them from burning out, to keep them doing useful work that's meaningful to them, and to minimize the amount of time they spend in conflict with each other. There's also a need to minimize the cost of slack from everyone else, by giving them meaningful, minimally expensive work to the lazy workers (inexpensive to us, since it won't be that useful. For example, having them work in the plastics industry might be very expensive if we have to spend trillions cleaning up waste plastics), and keeping the slackers fed, housed, and out of the way, unless they actually want to do something useful, in which case they can volunteer (incidentally, I count myself as a slacker-volunteer).

    I have no idea who'd run this kind of system or how it would be organized, since it would be vulnerable to slacking off as well. There's something to be said for non-violent turnover of power, though, because it makes it easier to recruit people who actually want to do the work, and easier to get them out when they start to slack or fry. Thoughts?

    839:

    a system that relies on an engaged, clueful and informed populace has failed, dismally

    I believe you have the causality backwards. The populace sees no benefit to engaging with a deliberately broken system. Despite their efforts, in many place they simply cannot vote their way to a decent government.

    I mean "decent" in both senses, competent and not evil. Especially in semi-democrat countries like China and the US, it's quite reasonable to look at the political system and decide that it is not worth investing much effort into.

    I think the underlying problem is inequality, because democracy in the presence of aristocracy doesn't work. The traditional remedy is to remove the aristocracy, but at the moment it seems more likely that the aristocray will succeed in removing the need for, and existence of, the proletariat.

    840:

    Whetehr the "British Empire" was a good ide or not is NOT under discussion at the moment

    Apart from splutter in the mode of “you’ve got to be kidding, the other one has bells on and here’s a nice bridge you will totally profit to buy from me”, you’re still avoiding the question. You seem to think criticism of the actions of the UK government in centuries past (and in particular the subsequent individual and collective actions of British people during the height of their rapacious, world-conquering mode) is off limits to Australians, for some reason, and as an Australian I’d like you to say what that reason is. If you don’t believe this, you might explain your statement which I quoted above.

    841:

    Re: '"Total abolition of secrecy." So all your government records would be searchable?'

    All your gov't records would be searchable by you, and only you unless you specifically stipulate otherwise, i.e., grant your spouse, kids access: your records, your right to their access.

    All internal gov't (civil service & Pols) records would be searchable by all of the electorate. This does not mean you can search a civil servant's personal info, only their work stuff. For the Pol, personal and elected-work would have to be accessible - after all, don't most Pols brag that they've nothing to hide?

    Re: 'Anyone negotiating with the government would do so in public, or at least would do so with the government's side open?

    Recall hearing something about how bargaining in good faith usually meant that the gov't (therefore the electorate) got screwed. So, how about bargaining with good data instead. And since both sides at the bargaining table would have complete access to the relevant data under discussion, it would be perfectly fair.

    Not sure I understand what you mean by 'And how do you enforce it?' so I'll assume you mean the access to relevant info, or the privacy of the firm/person. Since all private individuals as well as corporations already have some form of formal ID (e.g., SSN, CIN), it should be easy to pull their data off centralized data files. (Yeah - I know this means merging ALL gov't data into an immense hacking target, etc. but since the Internet is already fracturing and new Internet realms are possible, this may not be a problem for long.)

    I'm not saying that I have 'the answer', just that I would like to see something like this in place because I feel there would be a net benefit to people. Is this implementable? Again, no idea - but by discussing the what, why and not just the mechanics (along with their pro's and con's) maybe someday someone might figure out how to make this work.

    Reminder: About a third of the current global population already willingly provides personal data to anyone interested via FB. AI with algos trying to estimate a person's financial worth are probably already in use, so my suggestion is in reality a next logical step.

    842:

    "with the government's side open?"... both sides at the bargaining table would have complete access to the relevant data under discussion, it would be perfectly fair.

    Hahahaha. Brexit. Both sides know the UK is fucked, but that doesn't seem to have helped anyone.

    It would only be fair if everything else is equal and there is a win-win outcome available. Often the government is negotiating with a monopoly supplier or the last supplier standing, but for obvious reasons try to make it look as though there are options. You're saying they shouldn't do that?

    843:

    If you think the politicians are nuts:

    I have just been told, with an apparently straight face that there are advantages and disadvantages to martial law and that such things should be evaluated on merit after things calm down.

    The only advantage I could come up with was the possibility of the martial law enthusiast catching a bullet, but that's just short termism.

    844:

    such things should be evaluated on merit after things calm down.

    Is this where there's a bunch of heavily armed people waving guns around screaming "CALM DOWN" and occasionally shooting someone?

    845:

    You can hurt your throat if you shout in CAPS too much. It's far more efficient to go straight to the shooting.

    846:

    Damian @ 840 OK, it you want to be like that ... the present refugee concentration camps on various islands might be under discussion, then? I was specifically referrign to Brit/US relations & wanted to keep it limited to that - OK?

    SFR @ 841 Will never, ever work ... For reasons labelled: "Military" & "Intelligence" - some extenal bastard will immediately exploit that to your disavantage, I'm afraid. Nice try, though - we certainly need to move in that direction.

    Moz @ 842 Both sides know the UK is fucked, but that doesn't seem to have helped anyone. Disagree - quite strongly. The more brain-dead of the xiters refuse to believe it & prefer the powered-by-rainbow-unicorn-farts model & the more alert ones don't care, because THEY will be all right at our expense. The remainers. like me, reluctant or not, KNOW we are fucked & are powerless. LATEST NEWS Backstop is to be binned, EU, says quite correctly "No more negotiation" & MP's throw away chance to take control from the Executive. You really could not make this shit up ...

    847:

    If you think the politicians are nuts:

    Rolling Stone says they're bought morons. Although they also say it's a case of the other 99% giving the rest a bad name.

    Meanwhile, if you think politicians should be representative of the population rather than elite representatives of it ... try reading some of the random citizens posting about Australia Day.

    Failbook is one of the places where my local council and various elected representatives are active, so is the other thing I use that for. Some of the comment threads on Australia Day posts are pretty remarkable. And from the top down it has very definitely been declared that you will call it Australia Day and you will hold citizenship ceremonies on that date. There's a real determination that we will all celebrate the day (the right day) and any mention of anything negative is vigorously resisted. There's even satire: https://www.changedate.com.au (viz "if you don't like Christmas don't take the day off work")

    What astonishes me is the people who watch that stuff, then apparently genuinely ask "why don't abos feel welcome at Australia Day events?"

    848:

    a system that relies on an engaged, clueful and informed populace has failed, dismally

    Indeed, it has. Alas. And so Socrates is dead.

    The demos was never engaged, clueful and informed. And yet, we seem to have muddle through.

    849:

    xiters... remainers

    Are you even aware that the two sides in the brexit negotiation are the EU and UK? Admittedly that does seem to be a common fallacy in the UK, thinking that the role of the EU is to STFU and do what they're told. But still, {eyeroll}.

    The internal politics in Britain seem to me to be way, way more complex than "two side: leave and remain. Pick one".

    850:

    How do you enforce it? This should be an obvious problem: in a government system that employs 800,000 people on the federal level alone (this would be the US), how do you tell if someone's keeping secrets they're not supposed to keep? If you're not familiar, the US as the Freedom of Information Act, while California has the Public Records Act. According to both, you can petition to see records of anything that's not confidential: park ranger's emails, for example, but not soldiers' medical records.

    However, it's always been hard to determine if you got the right records, and it's been expensive, because they like to over-charge for duplication fees. And you get boxes of bad paper copies that you have to go through, to see if what you were looking for is in what they gave you. More recently, it's become harder, to the point where it's routine for newspapers to sue over FOIA and PRA requests from a wide variety of departments. They'll only follow the law if they lose the suit.

    TL;DR: the system is already supposed to be open, and if you have enough money and time, it sort of is. In practice, though, there are huge numbers of really stupid roadblocks in the way. They're illegal, but that's irrelevant, because they require litigation, rather than criminal enforcement.

    And yes, I helped with a PRA request. It was a mess that included, among other things, someone dumping a large database by printing out tables with dozens of columns in 12-point courier font.

    So again: how are you going to enforce this?

    851:

    Getting back to Brexit (must we?): UK to EU: please renegotiate stuff ASAP? EU to UK: Why?

    Somehow this reminds me of the old movie Dark Star. I'm trying to figure out whether it's the Brexiteers or Parliament that's doing a better impersonation of Bomb #20, and who's going to have to go out in the spacesuit to teach them the rudiments of phenomenology, to get them to go peacefully back and think it over a bit more.

    852:

    This outcome is not news. The fact that this was not up for renegotiation has been known for weeks.

    Debating and voting on such irrelevancies only makes sense in the context of deliberate time wasting or extreme denial. I used to think it was the latter, now erring toward the former.

    853:

    'Yet no-one watching from the outside retains that romantic view of Britain as a bastion of political sobriety. They see instead a weird, stubborn refusal to talk about the crisis in plain English.' Rafael Behr for The Guardian. However rare Behr's article is- and The Guardian also published an absurd, rambling editorial on the need for a Citizen's Assembly- it hardly goes far enough.

    It is both deliberate time wasting and extreme denial. Corbyn wants us to believe, apparently, that he has more friends in a Europe he also wants to leave because it is corporate, elitist and incapable of support for the rights of its ordinary citizens. The EU exit hardline want to separate Britain from its trade bloc and major trade partners at a time of mounting international trade difficulties. Apparently they object to becoming rule-takers without a veto, though this is their de facto demand.

    Parliament has been allowed to use the referendum, or series of referenda begun by Clegg, to isolate itself from the democratic process. Anti-Europeans might object that this was how we joined Europe, however they are hardly in favour of replacing the pre-Europe Britain. There is far more that isn't being talked about. The British media are comfortable with discussion of the Chinese firewall or of American alt-media politics. However it is not 'weird' that British politicians have managed to avoid lucid scrutiny of EU exit, it is a product of the same political process that made both Blair and Cameron prime minister. As Rafael Behr knows.

    854:

    Sure, there was a fervent and somewhat violent PR independence movement in the 1960s,

    ??? somewhat ??? ??? 1960s ???

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_shooting_incident

    856:

    And on a bit more regarding Brexit.

    My wife and I are looking to spend a week in London at some point when it's a bit warmer just to sight see. I caught a notice of a 3 day conference I might want to attend going to be held in London so I thought which not align the dates.

    Then I saw the date of the conference. March 26th - 27th. No frigging way.

    All I need is to try and sight see in London with the streets full of protesters. I'm sure there will be some. No mater what the plan turns out to be.

    857:

    All I need is to try and sight see in London with the streets full of protesters.

    Don't worry, the government has no plans to fill the streets with police and military to discourage the protesters. And they're stocking up on ammunition for them so the discouragement is likely to be firm.

    859:

    MattS @ 727: Just as long as you don’t extradite Julian back to Australia.

    Y'all spawned him, why won't you take him back? How about a "twofer" & y'all can take Murdoch too?

    Maybe France can be persuaded to take them and reopen Devils Island?

    860:

    Nojay @ 734: There aren't any natives left on Diego Garcia, they were moved off the atoll by the British government when the Americans moved in since they wanted vacant possession. A quick Wiki reveals the entire British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT) islands were depopulated at about the same time, I suppose to make things easier if the Yanks decided they wanted a few more islands to do military stuff on.

    I'm pretty sure the British Government's decision to remove inhabitants from Diego Garcia happened several years BEFORE the U.S. expressed an interest in leasing the British base there.

    861:

    Greg Tingey @ 756: However, IF there is a "Dem" majority in both houses & as POTUS after 2020, what for "PR" then?
    How quickly could they get statehood - could it be done in one "term"?

    Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 1 says only that Congress may admit new states, but cannot admit a new state that is already part of an existing state OR combine two states into a single new state without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress

    Charlie Stross @ 757: Greg — the problem with adding states to the USA is more about the allocation of Senate seats than anything else. A large number of seats go to states with a tiny population (Alaska, North Dakota, etc). Each state gets two seats. So adding even one more state dilutes the senate power of those states (which in many cases get more from the federal government in spending than they contribute in tax). So they fight tooth and nail to prevent new states being admitted.

    The greater stumbling block is that Puerto Rico doesn't appear to have a consensus. Congress is not going to force Puerto Rico to become a state against their will.

    Congress has mandated five referendums in Puerto Rico for them to determine their future:

    1967 voter turnout 65.9% - Commonwealth 60.0%; Statehood 38.9%; Independence 0.6%

    1993 voter turnout 73.5% - Commonwealth 48.6%; Statehood 46.3%; Independence 4.5%

    1998 voter turnout 71.3% - None of the Above 50.5%; Statehood 46.6%; Independence 2.6%; Free Association 0.3%; Commonwealth 0.0%

    2012 Two part referendum - voter turnout 78.9%
    Part 1: Continue current territorial status? - NO 53.97% YES 46.03%
    Part 2: Which non-territorial option? - Statehood 61.16%; Free Association 33.34%; Independence 5.49%

    2017 voter turnout 23% - Statehood 97.18%; Independence/Free Association 1.50%; Commonwealth 1.32%

    The 2017 referendum is the only one in which an overwhelming majority of votes cast expressed the desire for statehood, but with only 23% turnout, I don't think Congress is likely to accept that result. The 2012 referendum suggests a slight majority in favor of statehood.

    862:

    RonaldP @ 771: First, what happens ...? ... Suppose Hitler just ...?

    All good questions. I don't have any answers half so good.

    863:

    Replying to self @ 846 Belgian MEP & Brussel-wonk on radio. "We hate No Deal, but if Brotain is determined to do it, it's the ;least of the evil choices we have" He also commented that the extremists have siezed power in both Con & Liebour to the expense of the country - party-faction before country. And he's spot on.

    Moz @ 849 WTF? You seem to have it entirely arse-backwards ... I really don't understand what you are saying ....

    Agree that we have at least 5 factions: Tory-brexiteers - usually on the ultra-right Tory-remainers - usually on the left of that party Lem-0-crats - 100% remainers, all 5 of of them Liebour-remainers - usually on the right of that party Liebour-brexiteers - usually on the "real" left ( supposedly ) My take on the last is: "Molotov-Ribbentrop"

    864:

    My vote is for the Ferry To Hong Kong solution, ‘I am sorry Mr Assange but your papers, they are not in order..’. Happily Rupert relinquished his citizenship and the and he’s no longer our problem.

    865:

    Matt S "You took Putin's money, here's your plane ticket to Moscow"

    866:

    First rule of panic buying: Don't buy anything that you wouldn't be prepared to eat under normal circumstances.

    I have eaten a lot of freeze dried hiking meals over the years and can report that some of them are somewhat patatable after a long day in the hills. Canned food is both nicer and cheaper.

    867:

    You seem to have it entirely arse-backwards ... I really don't understand what you are saying ....

    Yes, exactly. Many British people seem to have the idea that the Brexit negotiations happen entirely inside the UK, after which the exit deal is presented to the EU who have no choice but to accept it.

    Meanwhile from outside Britain, and to many people inside it, Brexit requires negotiation between the 27 states of the EU and the UK to produce an exit deal. Faffing about bickering inside the UK after starting the exit countdown is, to put it kindly, unusual. Especially since the process the UK followed was" referendum to leave, internal election knowing that result, internal negotiation, formal departure notice, negotiation with EU, departure".

    Only it turns out that the process your leaders apparently expected was "formal departure notice, EU begs the UK to stay and gives them whatever they ask for, UK leaves anyway but keeps whatever was offered". That would only be possible if the second worst negotiator amongst world leaders was negotiating with the worst... ie, the UK was leaving the US.

    868:

    don’t extradite Julian back to Australia

    Given current Australian practice of taking Ozzie career criminals in their 30s who moved to Oz from NZ aged less than three, and deporting them ‘back’ to NZ, you can take your bloody Assange and bloody like it, mate.

    869:

    Given my references to the "Palace of Oathbreakers", my only surprise is that anyone who was paying attention is surprised that they would breach the GFA.

    870:

    2 points:-

    1) Your results suggest a slow drift towards PR looking for statehood (stateship?)

    2) But Alaska voting to split itself in half (and make Texas the 3rd largest state in the Union) would be a purely Alaskan matter?

    871:

    I said nothing about causality, and you are being naive in assuming that you can divide them into cause and effect, anyway. That is not how such things develop - changes in one encourage the changes in the other, and vice versa. As I said, I was watching it, and that is how it happened in the UK.

    872:

    I wasn't. Due to Blair's unscrupulousness in making himself "the man who brought peace to northern Ireland", it and its consequences were and are a pretty fair balls-up, but that's the minor point. A more major one is that the extreme Conservatives (like the extreme Unionists) were and are opposed to it, but were prepared to tolerate it if it kept the Micks quiet and didn't affect them too much. Once it became an obstacle on the path to the delusion of English revanchism, there was no contest.

    873:

    That is why I said that, in order to be viable, it means NO secrecy, not for or by the government, 'private' contractors, companies, charities, individuals or anyone or anything. Inter alia, any organisation or person who has even partial immunity to it has the opportunity to abuse the system, whether legally or criminally. To maintain a society, there would need to be a strong social consensus (and laws) supporting privacy - i.e. publishing or repeating information that is not the public's or recipient's business would be discouraged or actionable. I am under no illusions as to how radical that is, nor how pervasive and deep the social changes would need to be. To get there would need a social revolution comparable to France in 1789, though hopefully less bloody.

    But I was asked what I thought would be a better system, of which that is one, and I also said that I didn't believe we could get there from here :-)

    874:

    You could always impose universal mandatory voting*, apply proportional representation rather than first past the post, reform the House of Lords, formalise the reserved powers of the monarch and require supermajority plebiscites?

    *Citizenship guarantees service.

    875:

    The 2017 referendum is the only one in which an overwhelming majority of votes cast expressed the desire for statehood, but with only 23% turnout, I don't think Congress is likely to accept that result.

    Just speculating here, but I suspect that since the utter shafting Puerto Rico took from the Trump administration in the wake of Hurricane Maria, all a pro-statehood campaign needs to do is say "if we're a state, we get two senators—balance of power in the House!" and that 91% support for statehood might hold up to scrutiny with a much larger turn-out.

    876:

    Agree that we have at least 5 factions:

    Missing from this (because Greg doesn't like to think about us Up North) is the SNP, who are 100% pro-remain. Scotland was overall 62% remain in the referendum and current polling shows close to 70% support for remain. Indeed, staying in the EU is more popular than staying in the UK.

    This leads to ... interesting ... political implications. If the SNP were to encourage the brexiter contingent in Westminster they'd lose votes back home, but the most likely short-term path to the SNP's long-term goal (independence) is for Brexit to happen and Scotland to run another independence referendum (with the SNP platform including "rejoin the EU ASAP"). Opposing Brexit is mom-and-apple-pie politics in Scotland but not necessarily useful if your raison d'etre is an independent Scotland.

    My read on the Westminster SNP's ongoing opposition to Brexit is therefore that the SNP, after about 12 years in government up north, is gradually doing what happened to Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in Ireland: they started out as single-issue Irish Independence parties, but mutated into broader political institutions involved in the day to day business of government. And the SNP holding the line against Brexit is the first true high-level sign that the SNP is institutionalizing (and highlights that it's moving in the direction of being a center-left party of government with a broadly internationalist and pro-migration outlook).

    877:

    Oh we don’t stop with career criminals. We’ll deport people of aboriginal descent for example if they fail to gain citizenship, it’s kind of like the general case of section 44 of the constitution. And if you’ve got dual and we can unload you (‘cos you’re IS) well we will... maybe we could send Julian on a permanent book tour?

    878:

    Yes. It was obvious from the start that the SNP's best chance for independence was to oppose Brexit, but hope for a hard and even disastrous one, whereupon the current lukewarm support for independence could probably be stirred into a real majority. But I agree that they are not devious and secretive enough to play an underhand game on that - unlike (see below).

    There are also two other camps, though:

    Brexiteers come in two forms: the purely English revanchists, and the USA worshippers. They have a common interest in a hard Brexit, but their interests in how to deliver it thereafter are very different. The latter need a no deal (or at least a very time-limited deal) Brexit to deliver, so aren't going to be attracted by any deal.

    And then there is Sinn Fein, who are not quiescent just because they are concentrating on Eire, but because they are clever enough to let their enemies destroy their own positions. If we have a no deal, I am expecting a resurgence of trouble on the border, followed by SF claiming that they are the only party that can restore order (which, for obvious reasons, might even be true). Exactly how things pan out from there, I can only guess, but there are several possibilities.

    879:

    Moz @ 867 Ah - got you. You are saying a lot of people have swallowed whole the lies of the Daily Fail & the all-station-stopper etc that "We" (britain) are doing the EU a favour, not the other way around ... & all the other associated, usually monetary lies.Um - given that, you are correct, but I wasn't looking at it that way, obviously.

    paws @ 869 THAT is because the extreme Brexiteers simply either don't care or didn't notice that Ireland is another country & gets an opinion & a vote. That & theor arrogance. Rees-Smaug being the classic exemplar.

    Charlie @ 876 Agreed - & - not Because in that case LONDON gets a vote too, & "we" are about 809% pro-etoo _ & London is twice the size of Scotland in electorate terms. We're all shafted together....

    WHat really bugs me is that every supermarket chain & the CBI & all the big manufactureres & The Corporation are agin "leaving" - AT ALL. Yet we are headed for disaster ... how the FUCK did this happen?

    880:

    Greg Tingey @ 824: But, the real problem isn't the "States" its the Senators.
    So, you need to redraw the Senatorial "Map" in approx proportion to population, with caps & limits.

    Redrawing the State boundaries to create 50 new "States" with equal populations does redraw the Senatorial map. Each Senator would represent an equal number of people as long as every state had the same number of Senators.

    It's the House that gets effed up. It would have to have a whole number multiple of 50 representatives to achieve equal representation; 435 doesn't divide evenly by 50. You'd have to either increase it to 450 or decrease it to 400 members. Maybe make the House 500 members. That would give each of the 50 new "States" 10 representatives in the House.

    The real problem though is population growth wouldn't be equal.

    Within just a few years the new "States" wouldn't have equal populations anymore. You'd have to redraw ALL the maps - "State" boundaries (i.e. Senators) & House Districts within the "States" after every decennial Census to make them equal again. You'd also need a process to prevent gerrymandering.

    881:

    whitroth @ 830: 2. The problem with Montana is not size - it's huge - but rather that it's FREAKIN' COLD, and not real good for much.

    I wonder if Canada would be interested in a swap? We give them Montana for British Columbia. That would make Alaska a contiguous state.

    882:

    whitroth @ 832: ... FDR died in the spring of '45, and I think we all wished he'd kept his previous VP instead of taking on Truman.

    Nope. The GOP Congress would have wiped the floor with Henry Wallace. Running against Wallace, Dewey would have won in 1948.

    883:

    Yes. There are lots of possibilities, but all viable ones are also radical, and cannot easily be achieved incrementally.

    884:

    So you have a permanent nonpartisan constitutional commission charged with revising electoral boundaries on the basis of demographic changes?

    885:

    We give them Montana for British Columbia. That would make Alaska a contiguous state

    and even bigger! :-)

    886:

    paws4thot @ 870: 2 points:-

    1) Your results suggest a slow drift towards PR looking for statehood (stateship?)

    Don't know. The increase in the percentage voting in favor of Statehood is offset by the decrease in voter turnout. The majority of a minority want Statehood. It's not clear to me what the rest want. Unless/until there's a clear majority who want statehood Congress won't enact the required legislation.

    2) But Alaska voting to split itself in half (and make Texas the 3rd largest state in the Union) would be a purely Alaskan matter?

    Not entirely. The Constitution gives Congress the power to admit new states. Alaska can't just up & become two states unless Congress agrees.

    Texas OTOH ... I remember reading somewhere that the law Congress passed to admit Texas gave Texas the option of splitting up into 5 smaller States. I don't know if they have to go back to Congress to exercise that option.

    887:

    We do, more or less, have one in the UK, called the "Electoral Commission". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Commission_(United_Kingdom)

    It does have other duties as well.

    888:

    Charlie Stross @ 875:

    The 2017 referendum is the only one in which an overwhelming majority of votes cast expressed the desire for statehood, but with only 23% turnout, I don't think Congress is likely to accept that result.

    Just speculating here, but I suspect that since the utter shafting Puerto Rico took from the Trump administration in the wake of Hurricane Maria, all a pro-statehood campaign needs to do is say "if we're a state, we get two senators—balance of power in the House!" and that 91% support for statehood might hold up to scrutiny with a much larger turn-out.

    91% of a quarter of the eligible voters won't cut it. Puerto Rico will have to get both voter turnout and "Yes" to Statehood up over 50% in the same referendum. All we can say with surety right now is that 20% of the eligible voters favored Statehood.

    Congress won't act to admit them as a State without a clear majority of the voters being in favor of Statehood. Congress might not act even then, but they're for sure not going to act without it.

    889:

    Redrawing state borders every 10 years would be too onerous, I think - probably every 50 years would do the trick.

    It would be amusing (for some values of amusing) if they did gerrymandering on a 'redraw state lines' level. Imagine the weird shapes states could have under unrestricted gerrymandering! Maybe one long, Chile-like state along the Appalachian mountains, completely cutting the Eastern seaboard from the rest of the USA? The mind boggles....

    890:

    MattS @ 884: So you have a permanent nonpartisan constitutional commission charged with revising electoral boundaries on the basis of demographic changes?

    Probably require a bunch of Constitutional Amendments, but sure. Why not? If that's what it takes to ensure equal representation in the House and in the Senate, I say go for it.

    891:

    Well, that won't work, because you'll have at least 50 states refusing to pass the constitutional amendments that would empower this. State boundaries have always been political footballs, and giving the power to a bunch of unelected anthropoids in DC is a recipe for disaster. Since they'd presumably be unimpeachable and unremovable (they'd have to be to do their jobs, since they'd redraw the effin' country every 10 years), I can't think of any group in the US that would be bigger targets for bribery and subversion.

    Just think of how interstate commerce, mail, state constitutional law, etc. would all change every 10 years, at the whim of a bunch of map drawers. What could possibly go wrong?

    Personally, I'd shelve this next to the ideas about solving climate change by simultaneously releasing multiple strains of pandemic influenza.

    892:

    I predict that statehood for Puerto Rico will stumble over the language problem. The executive branch there has two official languages, but operates predominantly in Spanish. The Commonwealth judicial system operates exclusively in Spanish. Members of the legislature are required to be fluent in both languages (disqualifying ~80% of the population). The US federal district court and other federal offices operate exclusively in English.

    From my time as a staffer for my state's legislature, I can assure everyone that federal agencies continuously review state laws (and court decisions about those laws) to make sure they conform to federal requirements. I went through a small piece of hell making the federal Dept of Labor people happy with the bill for the state Dept of Labor budget one year. Congress is not, IMO, going to approve a new Puerto Rican constitution that requires any part of the federal government to become fluent in Spanish. The Puerto Rican people are unlikely to adopt one that requires them to become fluent in English.

    893:

    To give you an idea of how bad an idea equal representation is, take a look at This map which shows how many US states have a population less than Los Angeles County (population ten million plus). If you're too lazy to click, only nine states (California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina) have populations bigger than that of LA County.

    There are 32 states with populations smaller than 6.5 million people, incidentally. Therefore, if we wanted to equally divide the 50 US states into equal blocks of about 6.5 million people, you'd need to divide southern California into multiple states, and simultaneously start lumping states across the Great Plains into, erm, probably Utah and Oklahoma. Unfortunately, many of the smallest are not contiguous. But heck, you could fold Hawai'i (1,420,491) in with San Diego County (3,337,685) and Riverside County (2,423,266) to form the state of Militaria, no?

    894:

    About "YOU WILL RECOGNIZE AND CELEBRATE", in the US, why do you think our Labor Day is the first Monday in Sept, and decades ago, they declared May Day "Law Day" - I kid you not.

    Used to be lots of Mayday marches - there's a picture by Fascinella of one. Unions, socialists, etc.

    895:

    Major correction, here, on numbers. there were about 800k feds out of work during the shutdown; there are a lot more working (along with the entire military). And then there's outsourcing. I saw, in only one story, that 1.2M "contractors" were out of work.

    I see that the Dems are trying to put through a bill to pay contractors, not just feds.

    Still considering if, now that he's out of office, if I could sue Paul Ryan for his hissy fit of 2013, when he stole two weeks of my vacation, which I will never get back/paid for.

    896:

    No, no, welcome Rupert back with flowers.

    Um, which deadly insects would you Aussies put in the bouquet?

    897:

    Admitting PR as a bunch of states probably fixes the referendum issue too. Each city that passed can become a state, those that didn't can stay the territory.

    898:

    I told my manager, an ex-pat, that I'd read this morning that 318-310, Parliament voted no brexit witout a deal.

    My manager noted it was "non-binding". Of course... so was the referen-dumb.

    899:

    Oh, another tning: no, all government records should not, under any circumstances, be freely available.

    Example: what we in the US refer to as HIPAA or PII - your medical records, or personal identifiable information.

    Do you really want some US medical "insurance" company to know that you're at risk of getting diabetic, or cancer, or...?

    Example: do you really want to make it easier to steal identities? I mean, the IRS is already fighting people who steal other people's accounts, and their refunds.

    No.

    Offical actions, on the other hand, such as who Cheney had in that meeting on energy.....

    900:

    You are thinking in terms of a tweak to the existing system, which is not what I was talking about. I fully agree that you can't have fully open government without changing the system completely, not least because it would enable evil-minded people to abuse the system. I was talking about a completely open society, where ALL information was open to everyone.

    901:

    Re: '(Privacy) ... but all viable ones are also radical, and cannot easily be achieved incrementally.'

    As other posters already mentioned, a key issue re: privacy is leverage usually via some sort of public shaming. Basically, it's wagging a finger at someone that's not exactly the same as you or I in terms of gender identity, race, or some physical/cognitive/emotional trait. Historically - at least in the US - differences were often hidden by the affected individuals or their families. Then sometime around the 70s-80s things started to change - and I think that it was this open discussion that was the key in bringing about change. Anyways, since that time, there have been material improvements in various rights by race, gender identity, ethnic background, physical and cognitive ability. Yes - still not equality, but definitely improvement.

    I'm guessing that financial status (hence social class esp. in the US) is increasingly being leveraged by some groups as a shaming tool: if you're unemployed/poor, you're not a worthwhile human being, you don't deserve a say in your gov't, etc. More transparent data on personal/household needs and finances might help folks to better assess how proposed policies will affect them.

    902:

    Re: 'Do you really want some US medical "insurance" company to know that you're at risk of getting diabetic, or cancer, or...?'

    Not an issue with universal medicare ...

    Next question, please.

    903:

    From Wikipedia, "All the inhabitants of Diego Garcia were forcibly resettled to other islands in the Chagos Archipelago, Mauritius or Seychelles by 1971 to satisfy the requirements of a UK/United States Exchange of Notes signed in 1966 to depopulate the island when the United States constructed a base upon it"

    Reading the timeline from the referenced legal submissions, in 1964 or thereabouts America decides it wants an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean and in late 1966 Britain agrees to give them vacant possession of a part of Empire it would otherwise quite happily have returned to the locals or given to Mauritius, whatever. By 1971 the local population is forcibly removed and the US starts building a bomber airstrip and other facilities on the atoll.

    904:

    That is true, but something that is often forgotten is the very high proportion of the finger-waggers (or worse) that have equally bad skeletons in their cupboards - often for the same offence. There is a lot of evidence (from mutual help groups etc.) that openness leads to more tolerance. Also, remember that I said such abuses of privacy would be actionable in law, as well as being socially discouraged. I believe such a society would be viable, but it would be nothing like the one we live in!

    905:

    I predict that statehood for Puerto Rico will stumble over the language problem. The executive branch there has two official languages, but operates predominantly in Spanish. ... The US federal district court and other federal offices operate exclusively in English.

    Running a multilingual federation's judicial system isn't exactly rocket science. India does it, for example: the EU does it on a much larger scale than the USA would ever have to, with 24 official languages, of which three are used for Commission business (French, German, English). Which means business is conducted in any or all of those three, with simultaneous translation on tap, and proceedings/rulings are translated into the other languages (and submissions translated from them) after/before proceedings.

    Given the USA's demographic trend towards being majority Spanish-speaking by 2100, I could only interpret refusal to consider admitting PR on linguistic grounds to be a sign of flagrant ethnosupremacism.

    906:

    Life insurance. Employers Landlords? Mortgage sources? Hell, blackmail. (If you're married, how did you get STD?)

    And, since the US has become massively invasive, bank account numbers? Credit info?

    907:

    Yes - people who suggest “starting over” usually dramatically underestimate the embedded value in the current state. Often it’s because they don’t understand that complexity is a requirement for dealing with certain problems, and the beauty of their searing vision for a simpler model presents as intrinsically valuable. That is, they privilege ideas above people, like all ideologies.

    908:

    We are seeing a lot of that recently. "if we assume people are identical spherical cows in a vacuum"...

    Facebook is the biggest fan of radical transparency right now, closely followed by Google, Apple et al. Seeing a couple of the "don't like social media" types here following their lead feels weird. But it does rather emphasise the question: how do we propose to pry secrets away from the powerful? "imposed from above (god?)" isn't a real answer, and "I don't know how it would work in practice" doesn't inspire confidence.

    It's like the fat not-a-tax proposal... when the main proponents of similar ideas are ridiculously rich people and their sycophants.

    It's almost tempting to think that rich/powerful people think doing nasty things to their inferiors is part of the fun of being powerful. But quite what's in it for the powerless I'm not sure. Maybe one of the proponents here can explain?

    909:

    Realistically one prerequisite for radical transparency would be a degree of standardisation. The Aadhaar sort of works but it's not every useful to the subjects, to make it so you'd need to have a more active device available so subjects have both local storage and a way to query others. Like the "give out a billion smartphones" plan previously.

    So... we're going to have a very well secured device, in the hands of every single person over 12 years old. If it's not secure it'll be hacked and we'll see the world's biggest botnet. But securing something like that, especially in the context of radical transparency, is hard. Not just "we can't do that right now", but quite probably "can be proved to be impossible". One simple requirement is the management of private keys. With 8 billion of these things out there, you're going to need to issue millions of new ones as well as aging out and replace millions every month (day?). So not only will backups be needed, but those backups will fail so new keys etc will be needed.

    But without that being "radically transparent" about everywhere Mark Zuckerbeg goes will be impossible. And knowing where he is at all times is the first step in knowing who he meets with. Making the device optional (or removable) will mean people like Zuckerburg opt out.

    910:

    I predict that statehood for Puerto Rico will stumble over the language problem.

    I'm going to agree with OGH @905 and opine that this problem is surmountable. It already is surmounted, really, in Puerto Rico and the MX/US border states deal with it successfully all the time.

    911:

    I fully agree with your posting in #908 and Damian's in #907, which is why I said (a) I don't see how to get there from here and (b) this would be a radical, highly complex, SOCIAL change (not solely a technological one). But I disagree about the need for more standardisation, because you don't need any more than is needed for communication. Also, we couldn't useneed enough for such devices to be usable our current approaches to security, which is another aspect where complication would arise - not necessarily any more than we have now, just very different.

    912:

    Re: '"I don't know how it would work in practice" doesn't inspire confidence.'

    One step at a time. Start with insisting that one specific data set be both transparent and complete: financial/tax files of all political campaigns. Then ask for a comparison vs. revenues, taxes paid, campaign contributions and lobby spending by F500 or similar orgs and gov't depts. These data are already being collected but take effort to compile, analyze, and make sense of by NFP outfits like the below.

    https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s

    913:

    Bloody wheel mice :-(

    "Also, we couldn't useneed enough for such devices to be usable our current approaches to security," => "Also, we couldn't use our current approaches to security,"

    914:

    only nine states (... South Carolina) have populations bigger than that of LA County.

    Me thinks you're mixing up north and south.

    915:

    Agreed. My favorite HL Mencken quote is, "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

    916:
    Facebook is the biggest fan of radical transparency right now, closely followed by Google, Apple et al.

    No, they're not. If they were, they'd publish their algorithms, their source codes, their shady tax-avoidance schemes, their lobby activities and all their business secrets. Obviously, they're never going to do that. Thus it follows that they're not actually fans of radical transparency at all.

    917:

    Given the USA's demographic trend towards being majority Spanish-speaking by 2100, I could only interpret refusal to consider admitting PR on linguistic grounds to be a sign of flagrant ethnosupremacism.

    Yep. I'm not saying multiple official languages can't be done, I'm saying that Congress won't do it, at least not in my lifetime. I'm getting old; say, not in the next 25 years. Of course, I'm a pessimist on several things: for one, I don't think the US will survive intact until 2100.

    918:

    Methinks you are right. Thanks!

    919:

    Radical transparency for thee but not for me.

    920:

    Agreed. In a SF context, I expect the biggest split in the US in the late 21st Century (especially if things get worse) to be a West Coast, Spanish speaking or multilingual US (primarily from Sacramento north, thanks to desert expansion) and an English speaking, East Coast US (east of the Mississippi and tending North due to climate change differentially hammering the South). This split would roughly parallel what happened when Byzantium and Rome split, although I wouldn't draw too many further parallels.

    So far as Puerto Rico goes, yeah, there's a wee jot of racism causing a few problems with their governance. Just sayin'.

    921:

    This leads to ... interesting ... political implications. If the SNP were to encourage the brexiter contingent in Westminster they'd lose votes back home, but the most likely short-term path to the SNP's long-term goal (independence) is for Brexit to happen and Scotland to run another independence referendum (with the SNP platform including "rejoin the EU ASAP").

    I'm not an expert but how could the SNP re-run another independence referendum while the tories in power? Brexit or no brexit surely may - or her successor - would forever say no to a new scotland independence referendum and even if scotland just ran the referendum anyway they'd either say "Not legally binding" or just ignore it.

    ljones

    922:

    There's a big jump from "incorporations must publish their financial accounts" to "every person must publish their DNA, location and everything else".

    I think we need significantly more transparency of financial affairs, and especially that any limited liability body gains that limit via making public their financial affairs in toto, in real time. Don't do that... no limited liability for you.

    I think more publication of linked pre-tax and taxable income would be useful, quite possibly of the top 10 individuals. If for no other reason than to start a contest to be the 11th highest paid person rather than the 10th :) The reason for pre-tax is to make it clear who is best (ab)using the tax system.

    Iin Australia we have nonsensical statistics like "many people in the bottom 10% of taxable incomes own multiple investment properties"... which is true only because those properties produce negative taxable income, so someone getting $1M gross income plus $0.999M tax loss from property has a taxable income of $0.001M. But the neoliberal nutcases present that as "outlawing those tax deductions will hurt the poorest". Publish the gross/before tax incomes and then generate the statistics.

    924:

    Radical transparency for thee but not for me.

    What e said!

    Transparency efforts need to focus on the powerful, just as tax collection needs to focus on the rich. Sadly the reverse is normally the case, most blatantly in things like tax audits. Do we see annual audits of the top 1% by pre-tax income? No, instead we see a huge focus on someone, anyone, else. One almost suspects that those in power don't want the tax office going after them and their donors.

    Likewise with Facebook and the other "big data" companies...

    Every breath you take Every move you make Every bond you break Every step you take I'll be watching you

    Every single day Every word you say Every game you play Every night you stay I'll be watching you

    But Zuckerberg's kids don't have facebook accounts.

    925:

    In a SF context, I expect the biggest split in the US in the late 21st Century (especially if things get worse) to be...

    For reasons that require a book-length explanation, I expect the first big fissure to be right down the center of the Great Plains. Roughly, along the current split in the US electric grid between the Western Interconnect and the rest. One of the current big unknowns in the climate models is what happens to the North American Monsoon. The NAM may deliver significantly more water in the future -- no one knows, because the necessary modeling has to be done at a much higher resolution than the current software uses.

    926:

    I'd look to water before we talk about splitting the five separate electrical grids. Thing is, the Colorado's going to start running out of water in 2019-2020, and that makes things very problematic in the southwest. As it gets warmer, it's going to be harder for people to live in the desert Southwest, the Ogallala (which will run dry sometime in the next 50 years, possibly as soon as 20 years), and anywhere they depend on desert river water and irrigation (that would be me, incidentally). My guess is that move people will move back east than to the northwest, due to relative land values, and that will help shape the split.

    Anyway, we can agree to disagree. This isn't about hating the rural western states, it's about the fundamentals of things like rain shifting, as they have on previous peoples.

    927:

    Not an issue with universal medicare ... Next question, please.

    Way over simplified.

    Already the "What's my DNA" companies are having to man hotlines when people find out their father (or even mother) isn't who they thought it was. Or fathers discover children aren't theirs. Or grandma. And so on. It is causing some family splits. Should all of this be exposed?

    What about adults discovering they are adopted and finding their mother who gave them up due to a terrible rape and assault and didn't want to re-unite.

    Now think about traveling overseas. Not all the people in all countries, including some in SA and the EU, all are that enlightened when it comes to heredity and such.

    928:

    Facebook is the biggest fan of radical transparency right now, closely followed by Google, Apple et al.

    Ah, nope.

    Facebook is all about YOUR transparency but being totally closed to the outside. To a bit lesser degree there's Amazon and Google. And further down is Apple but still there in the closed ecosystem.

    One reason Siri doesn't seem as smart as Alexa and Google's voice and Facebook's ad and article referral systems is that Apple doesn't store your interaction history like the others. So each query is standalone. Google and Amazon record freaking everything and thus can tie your 4:00PM comments back to what you asked at noon.

    Look here for how Facebook deals with privacy and openness.

    https://www.apnews.com/5e385a1e7998422c863c3f1bfb721d39 Let's violate the developer agreements with Apple to install low level root like tools on users' phones.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46998055 Let's not stop underage kids from spending $1000s. It might impact profits.

    930:

    Just a reminder that the reason the big data people win is that it does actually help. At least some people, some of the time.

    Sarah Forster’s story in The Spinoff, headlined “In Which Amazon Goes to War with NZ Bookstores”, suggested Amazon is the enemy, taking money away from local brick and mortar bookstores by undercutting prices using the Book Depository website.

    But what about the authors – the people who create these books? Where do they fit into all this?

    As a USA Today best-selling author of erotic romance, I have published 10 books of my own as well as novellas in several multi-author anthologies. I write under a pen name. Most of my books are published by a traditional, reputable royalty-paying publisher in the US. But 95% of the income from my books comes from Amazon.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/29-01-2019/in-defence-of-amazon-by-a-kiwi-erotic-romance-author/

    931:

    Facebook is all about YOUR transparency but being totally closed to the outside

    See above, other people who bothered to read the thread before replying have already brought this up.

    You're also sadly mistaken if you think Facebook is totally closed, there's way too many cases where they're been shown to share data with anyone who might help them. Plus they'll happily let you buy that sort of information (there's now a service that lets you advertise to an individual that targets men who will pay to advertise sex to their wives). So... transparent and radical.

    To make the idealised transparency possible I reckon you'd have to show how the failure of every single current approach to either collecting or disseminating the data you're talking about to fulfil your dreams can't apply to the mechanism you're proposing. As EC says "I don't know how to get there from here". We're left with "after the revolution" which is a very high risk strategy.

    932:

    I did read up thread. But no one seemed to mention the latest mess with paying kids and deciding to allow kids to spend $1000s.

    Plus selling the data to others does not to me speak about openness. More about duplicity and theft.

    933:

    "Given the USA's demographic trend towards being majority Spanish-speaking by 2100,"

    If this were a US-centric blog, this statement would get you Yellow carded for racism. You don't allow UK-centric racist memes, please don't spread US-centric racist memes.

    For those who are concerned, this is the equivalent of the Eurabia meme among European fascists. The US becoming majority Spanish is about as likely as Europe becoming majority Muslim or the 1900 prediction that the US would become majority German speaking by 1950, and for the same reasons. The demographics of Latin America don't support 2000s-era migration numbers every year until 2100 (the only way for that prediction to come true). In addition, over a third of Latin America doesn't even speak Spanish

    934:

    The US has no demographic trend toward being a majority spainish speaking country .

    Majority Latino ethnicity maybe but Latino immigrants generally loose their native language by the 3rd generation (as all the other immigrants did before them)

    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/05/what-is-the-future-of-spanish-in-the-united-states/

    https://theconversation.com/spanish-use-is-steady-or-dropping-in-us-despite-high-latino-immigration-85357

    935:

    I wonder how many folks will wake up in the US in 2100 and look around and say "Y'know, who'd have thought we'd not be speaking English as the majority language today."

    In Mandarin.

    936:

    Returning to Charlie @ 876 & my reply @ 879 The desire to spite people, whilst hurting yourselves seems to be behind a lot of Brexit. The desire to shit on "London" & the "Metropolitan Elite" ( Tory MP ) & the Scots & the Irish seems widespread in "the Shires". The complete failure to realise that London generates a huge amount of the money & tax revenues & that crapping on London means a return to the bad old days of the 1970's London in population terms is twice the size of the whole of Scotland & is being treated, if anything, even worse, esepcially as Scotland's net tax revenue is ( ??? ) whilst London's is definitely positive. The equal snobbish disain for any part of Ireland is clear, too - but that also seems to be a "provoncial" mood, not visible in London - or Scotland. Thoughts?

    [ ljones @ 921 Actually, the SNP should make common cause with the City & the GLA & campaign to rejoin/remain in the EU & stuff the rest of the country - border posts on the M25 .... ]

    Allen Thompson @ 910 "Language Problem" Is non-existent - try buying stuff in Portmadoc or Bleanau Ffestiniog, for starters & listen to the people switching languages, without even pausing for breath ....

    Micheal Cain @ 917 I don't think the US will survive intact until 2100. How do you expect the break-up to occur & along waht geographical &/or "racial" lines? Or are you expecting a "Red/Blue" split - which means something like the 3rd US Civil War?

    dbp @ 923 Appear to be Spitfires .... 😈

    ARSEBOOK I refuse to go anywhere near it. I am of the opinion that Zuckerberg is a closet close-to-fascist. I'm repeatedly trying to get our Morris Side to delete & close our Arsebook pages ..... ( No-one wants to know, the idiots. ) I'm told that, even so, I will have an Arsebook "anti-profile" caused by the hole where I'm not, if you see what I mean - can anyone say if this is so?

    937:

    Greg @ 936

    The WTF was related to their relevance to the news report, not a query about their identity :)

    My personal theory is that the RAF are planning to get rid of those nasty eurofighters and other foreign aircraft, because British pluck will always prevail over superior technology.

    938:

    Submitted by accident before mentioning "reopening hurricane production lines" bit :)

    939:

    I live in the Scottish Islands.

    It's not unusual to hear English, Scots Gaelic, and at least one Eastern European language used in daily conversation in the local shops.

    Greg #936 ref #921 - Well that works for me, since the UK's largest airport would be part of Londonshire, and hence easier for me to use than it would for someone who lived in Slough! :-)

    940:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47066659

    See Revelation 17 and 18 for more on this news item ....

    941:

    I'm not an expert but how could the SNP re-run another independence referendum while the tories in power?

    That's a very interesting question; it all boils down to convincing the tory government down south that hanging onto Scotland is going to be too painful to bother with.

    Given that Scottish seats return about 1 conservative MP to Westminster, that might not be a hard sell. Nor is "not legally binding" a huge obstacle: remember, the Brexit referendum was advisory only, too. If confronted with a not-authorised-by-Westminster poll that nevertheless gave a 60% plus plurality for independence, it's hard to see what the government could do in the face of a majority-hostile population.

    (Remember, NI is a quarter the population and was majority-unionist during the troubles.)

    942:

    My personal theory is that the RAF are planning to get rid of those nasty Eurofighters and other foreign aircraft,

    :) Quite right, replace them with some good old British Typhoon FGR.4 :)

    I was involved with part of the project for nearly a decade, working on the radar. It was interesting that after British firms won the prime contracts for airframe, engine, flight control system, ejector seat, HUD; that the Germans were getting a bit narked over having to pay for (essentially) a British fighter. The result was a struggle over which radar to choose - a German rebadge of the APG-65 (that they were using to update their F-4 fleet), or a British development beyond the new radar for the Sea Harrier upgrade. We won... (and quite right too; when it went to best and final, no really final, OK why not critique each others' bids - the Germans had to fly the engineers across from Hughes to answer some of the more challenging questions).

    Note also that the aircraft may look the same on the outside, but be rather different on the inside. For instance, the RAF's standard Tornado GR.4 apparently had (it leaves service in a couple of months) an EW location system that was better than the German and Italian ECR versions... AIUI, this also applies to the Typhoon, sorry Eurofighter Jagdflugzeug :)

    There were all sorts of rumours at the time that the name of the new aircraft was announced; (Britain has nearly 40% workshare, and thus a hefty vote)... allegedly, the "Typhoon" name took a while to settle, given its WW2 namesake.

    943:

    You're picking at straw men, or concern trolling. You keep bringing up completely separate topics.

    It's about government and financial transparency, nothing else.

    944:

    If so, we've been extremely wicked.

    945:

    I am not sure. While I don't think that the government would be as stupid as Spain over unauthorised referendums, I believe that the Tory party would be deeply split between 'the Union is sacred', 'crush the rebellious Scots' and 'we are better off without them'. If the first view won out, they might simply refuse - which would then trigger a judicial review, which would PROBABLY side with Scotland. But recent events have shown that the Tories are increasingly disinclined to follow the rule of law, even as laid down by the Supremes. Your guess about what would happen then is better than mine ....

    946:

    I'm a new user, very late to this discussion, with a small point on the Puerto Rico statehood question. Apologies if it has been made before & I missed it-- but the political balance of power in the Senate is a factor. The two new senators from Puerto Rico would almost certainly be Democrats, and the Republicans would not agree to that. My understanding is that the only way Alaska and Hawaii were admitted into the union was the political calculation by the parties that the new states would reliably supply two Democratic senators from Hawaii and two Republican senators from Alaska.

    947:

    I was staying out of this one...

    Re Norn Iron, you are absolutely correct that the troops were sent in to protect the repressed minority - and were initially treated as saviours by those people.

    It all went wrong, because the Army was providing Military Aid to the Civil Power. That "Civil Power" was the devolved Government in Stormont, and for most part they made today's bunch of dinosaur deniers (aka the DUP) look like a bunch of progressive, tolerant, open-minded hippies.

    The military works to a democratically-elected civilian government; and if Stormont wants to focus on the "threat" of the IRA, then those are the tasks that the Army is given (the few Volunteers still around from the 1950s and 1960s were utterly ineffectual, leading to "I Ran Away" comments; and led to the arrival of the angry young men who formed its "Provisional Wing"). As you say, there's really only one way that's going to play out. The second that the IRA starts shooting at soldiers...

    However, Martin is too young to remember how the screw-ups started, and too, er, naive to accept

    Well, I was only three when it really kicked off, and living in Hong Kong... My first memory of it was Dad being put "on Standby", and then disappearing for half a year in 1972 on Operation MOTORMAN. Cue my Mum having to watch the evening news where remains are being shovelled into plastic bags.

    Add a couple of years living in Northern Ireland as a kid (only three? bombings within a mile), a few more years watching Dad train people to go to Northern Ireland, and another decade as a Reservist having to guard against terrorists from Northern Ireland (while seeing friends and colleagues go on Operation BANNER), then perhaps I'm less naive than you imagine.

    Here's your QI fact: the first police officer to die in the Troubles was PC Victor Arbuckle of the RUC; shot by Protestants, who were rioting in protest over a report that suggested that the RUC be disarmed. Your next QI fact (brought out regularly in NI training): the biggest gun battle that the British Army ever fought in NI, until at least the late 1980s if not longer, was with the UVF. No-one said it had to make sense.

    ...that they were at Cabinet level (including the most senior mandarins, brass hats etc.) Those of us who were following the fiasco knew in advance that something like Bloody Sunday was inevitable, given the IRA's policy and the UK government's mishandling of the situation,

    Yet another example of your unerring foresight and expertise in all such political matters... is there anything you didn't predict?

    But yes, it was likely to happen. Not because of particular policy, but because when two sides decide to pile up the firewood, there's always going to be a spark. Which is why the Brigade Commander gave specific instructions that the CO of 1PARA decided to ignore in 1971. While Bloody Sunday may have captured the headlines, an arguably more significant event was the earlier Rape of the Falls, in which an infantry battalion containing a large number of Rangers supporters, conducted search operations in a largely Catholic area...

    Democracy is a sod. At what point should the UK government have imposed direct rule from Westminster, in order to provide a less partisan strategy and management? (Not perceived as less partisan, perhaps, but better than what went before).

    The depressing part is how history repeats itself. Cue the "we're young, hip, and politically aware, and we know how to challenge the entrenched patriarchy!" brigade who turn into PIRA fanboys because they like a world that's a nice simple black and white, no shades of grey. They stand up at meetings and announce their support for the "brave Volunteers", and hold public meetings with the "Political leaders" (who obviously aren't on the Army Council, oh no) while declaring that the only solution is "Troops Out".

    So: to the hopelessly naive, the use of force is proof of the entrenched imperialists and their colonialist policies, curse them for attacking those champions of the common man: Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Ghaddafi, and Robert Mugabe. To them, force is only legitimate if you're invading the near abroad and stealing chunks of another country because it's historically inevitable.

    It's one reason why I (like many who were tangentially involved with the Troubles) refuse to take Corbyn or Livingstone seriously. Anyone who stands alongside Adams and McGuinness, and offers unquestioning support during the period of the "Armed Struggle", shows a staggering lack of judgement (the fact that they've stood alongside several other severely questionable types since, shows that they haven't grown out of it)...

    ...and yes, I'm well aware of all of the murderous tw*ts that Conservative and DUP politicians stand alongside, I question their judgement too...

    948:

    Why erect statues of leaders so unpopular they require protection? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-47068091 On this side of the pond, sculptures of Confederate Generals are often seen on tall plinths, for similar reasons.

    949:

    I’m sure the majority of NI citizens are perfectly decent, reasonable people with the same hopes and aspirations as you or I. However, over the years they’ve colluded (actively or passively) with and given their tacit support (through ballot box, speech, silence, or who they’ve chosen to do business with) to extremist nut-cases right across the sectarian spectrum

    Oooooh, come off the fence, why don't you. I think I see where you're coming from, but IMHO that's a clumsy and unfair way of putting it.

    Yes, the saying "welcome to NI, set your watch back twenty years" has a ring of truth. Yes, there are a lot of Northern Irish who live in England/Scotland because they enjoy a less blinkered society and greater employment opportunities.

    But no, implying "tacit acceptance" is wrong. Think of the courage it took to win the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize; or accuse senior PIRA types of rape, child abuse; and to pursue those cases through Crown courts, not Kangaroo ones. Or that Martin McGuinness spent the last twenty years of his life working damn hard to build a better Northern Ireland through his work in Education, and then as Deputy First Minister.

    The reason that the armed struggle stopped, was because the vast majority of the population (not to mention the majority of the terrorists) no longer supported it. The remaining paramilitaries ruled hardline areas through fear, not love - and had finally accepted that shooting soldiers and policemen, and blowing things up, was far less profitable than controlling smuggling, booze, and drugs.

    The extremist nut-cases are far from tolerated. Look at what happened to Johnny Adair and Slab Murphy.

    950:

    How do you expect the break-up to occur & along waht geographical &/or "racial" lines? Or are you expecting a "Red/Blue" split - which means something like the 3rd US Civil War?

    East-West, roughly down the center of the Great Plains. Over water, fire, electricity, public lands management, and a bunch of things related to those. If it happens, it will be like someone said above about Scotland winning because letting them go is the least painful alternative. As a piece of speculative public policy, my thoughts on a US split is a book-sized project.

    That's enough about this. I don't want OGH to red-card me, and I'm much more interested right now in Brexit and Scottish independence.

    951:

    You are talking bigotted bollocks, YET AGAIN. No, I didn't predict this; I merely read analyses by People With Clue and realised "Oh, shit!, they're right." I shall simply mention some things that were published in many of the respectable English newspapers and on television at the time - no, I can't remember which, but they include the Times and BBC.

    Representatives of the catholics had been increasingly vocal about discrimination, especially in electoral eligibility (yes, seriously), housing (which was largely council housing), employment and policing. Those led to the demonstrations and the intimidation by protestant thugs, in which the RUC was blatantly and brutally partisan. Yes, there was some violence by catholic thugs, but much less, and it was not needed as a trigger for the RUV to be repressive. That led to the troops being sent in.

    Subsequently, it became clear that Stormont was continuing to drag its heels on reform, most of the abuses were continuing unabated (especially the discriminatory and brutal policing), that HMG was not prepared to face up to the fact that Stormont was a major cause of the problems, and the troops started to support the RUC's partisan policing, which changed the attitude of the catholics from treating them like saviours to treating them like enemies.

    The Paras were sent in more-or-less directly from somewhere in the middle east, where they had been trained for and accustomed to going in hard, seizing control, and exceeding orders when the facts on the ground conflicted with their briefings. They had NOT been properly trained in UK-style policing, and there had been a LOT of complaints from the catholic representatives, civil rights leaders (and I believe some MPs) about their excessive use of force, including formal requests for them to be replaced. Those were ignored.

    Just before Bloody Sunday, there were multiple reports that some of the more militant rebels were going to try to start a gunfight - and McGuinness admitted he was carrying a military rifle. During the demonstration, there were reports on television that the Paras were about to lose control of the crowd, and be unable to stop them reaching some location they had been ordered to keep them away from. And that's when the debacle occurred.

    Inevitable? Obviously.

    Blaming people at cabinet level? Even if you exonerate them from the first and first paragraphs, they were assuredly culpable for the middle two.

    952:

    I'm just going to throw out there that EC and Martin seem to be violently agreeing (mostly).

    Like all events of this nature, just about the only people not culpable in the Bloody Sunday massacre were the poor sods who got massacred.

    953:

    Yes. But, even by 1970, there were a lot of us saying that the only solution was to suspend Stormont, and send enough administrators and policemen in to fix the abuses PDQ. I.e. more-or-less what was eventually done, but done more vigorously and, most importantly, IN TIME.

    I don't hold with the attitude that it is only the people at the sharp end who should be blamed when they get it wrong. The catastrophe was predicted and avoidable, and I blame those who were responsible for avoiding it and with the power to do so.

    954:

    The two new senators from Puerto Rico would almost certainly be Democrats

    Very likely, though I note that

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Commissioner_of_Puerto_Rico

    "The current commissioner is Jenniffer González-Colón of the [pro-statehood] New Progressive Party (PNP), the first woman to hold the post. She is also affiliated with the Republican Party (R) at the national level."

    She also isn't a member of the all-(D) Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Hispanic_Caucus#Membership

    955:

    At this remove, it's hard to imagine anyone thinking Bloody Sunday was a good thing (unless we're going to hold a seance and consult the ghost of Ian Paisley Snr). Hell, even the British government was embarrassed enough to run a series of whitewash enquiries over the years—a sure sign: nobody determinedly tries to cover-up a success.

    Now, can we drop Northern Ireland/the Troubles as a topic? Unless you've got something to say about the probability of their re-emergence, going forward?

    956:

    I had intended to answer this yesterday, but real life and all that good stuff ...

    Unfortunately I still don't have the time to really dig into the details. The really REALLY simplistic answer is that the drive towards the centre was removed once the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and both Unionists and Nationalists were able to claim that they won and to build their own narrative that could almost ignore the opposition (except at election time, when "themmuns" became convenient bogeymen).

    Lots of other details (which I just don't have the time to dig out and build a coherent narrative from, sorry!) that kind of amounted to death-by-a-thousand-cuts for the moderates.

    957:

    Apologies!

    Noted, and dropped.

    959:

    Un-dropping (briefly) because I've been thinking about your final question: What are the chances of a re-run of the Troubles?

    The shortest possible answer: Certainly non-zero.

    Slightly longer: Despite the cessation of action by the major players, the underlying tensions have not been forgiven or forgotten, so in a sense there has been a proto-Troubles lying unrealized since 1998. As some have pointed out, the GFA is in part to blame for this -- it should have been the first step to reconciliation, a necessary step that allowed both sides in the conflict to pull back with pride intact and a sense of victory; but instead (as I alluded to in my previous comment) it provided a space for Nationalism and Unionism to diverge and entrench further, but safely, rather than finding ways to reconcile.

    There has been a small but growing powder keg in NI for the last 20 years, but it has been safely kept away from fire until 2016. Then we got a perfect storm of the RHI (and other) financial scandals that eventually toppled Stormont, the death of Martin McGuiness (we could even look back to the death of Paisley Snr as a stepping stone to the current crisis), and Brexit. Over the last two years the DUP have been merrily chucking lit matches at the aforementioned powder keg, while Sinn Fein look the other way (as they see political and ideological advantage in a destabilized NI).

    Currently any impetus in the direction of further violence remains purely political, the idea that Brexit will render NI less Irish and more British (or vice versa, depending on where and what the border ends up as), and the original major factor that lit the fire that lead to the Troubles (and what generated the wide spread grass roots support) was massive social inequalities along sectarian lines. Those institutionalized sectarian inequalities largely no longer exist, so the grass roots support for a return to violence is largely missing. However, the DUP acting like the "one true voice of Ulster" are ruffling a lot of Republican feathers.

    So there is definitely the chance of (more) political violence in Northern Ireland's future, but still not a certainty.

    The probability is climbing though, and I often wonder if this is how informed observers felt in 1960's.

    (I would welcome EC's thoughts on this, too.)

    960:

    Rather depressingly, I can't find anything in your analysis to disagree with.

    961:

    I am too young, I am afraid! I wasn't really politically aware until the late 1960s, and the current powder keg is considerably more quiescent than it was by then. However, the conflict is now purely political, and isn't fuelled by the discrimination and repression that there was in the 1960s.

    But there is the example of Yugoslavia, which caught almost everybody by surprise. Almost. I have a friend who has been a government consultant in both parts of Ireland and Yugoslavia, and wasn't surprised. If I get a chance, I will ask him about this, but may not meet him again for some time.

    My personal view is that it will depend on a lot on how exactly how the IRA 'disbanded', and what they left behind. I don't think the disorganised thugs, terrorists and organised criminal gangs (on both sides) will be able to do more than fuel the tension, but Sinn Fein is clearly run more like a cold war eastern European communist party than a western European political party. The question is whether those behind them are capable of and willing to start the Troubles again. I am damn sure that Sinn Fein are biding their time with the intent of causing trouble, not least because of their response to the RHI scandal, but that could merely be political - which is, in some sense, acceptable and is definitely SOP.

    962:

    Um, nope. Why do you think no hispanics are moving into the north?

    Would you care to discuss that thought with my friendly next door neighbors, Jose and Yolanda? Or with what my recent ex tells me, that my area is designated as "heavily hispanic"?

    I think the northern part of the Old South, and the central states - Kansas, etc, will have the least Spanish-speakers.

    And about "English only", I think down in Louisiana, there are some Cajuns who'd like a word with you.

    963:

    I'll have to agree. I note that I never did learn Yiddish, though my folks employed it to talk over the kid. Didn't get Russian from my grandmother, and I know very few Irish-Americans who speak Irish Gaelic.

    But then, we are talking about English (nice word you got there, thanks, it's mine, now!).

    964:

    Damn, I don't remember hearing much Cyraeg in Blanau Ffestingo when we were there in '14, but then, it was all tourists.

    965:

    Read that. Dunno why it didn't strike me when I read it before, but now it's obvious, though I admit that it's surprising that she admits that he's The AntiChrist (tm).

    966:

    DtP @ 959 Everybody mentions, in passing, as if it was a minor factor, the corruption in NI ... but the "South" was as bad - Ch Haughey being "merely" the most obvious case. Now ... we have corruption in the N - again - what's the state of play in the S?

    967:

    I've stayed out of it, but let me give you my final word on it, courtesy of Eric Bogle and Paddy Reilly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5P1W23ESKM&index=7&list=RD8lOr5Qd7T_k

    968:

    Re: ' ... to "every person must publish their DNA, location and everything else".'

    I didn't say/suggest this - however, the for-profits are actually doing this with very little objection by gov't authorities.

    As for the DNA/ancestry for-profit corps - suggest reading this article about a Canadian TV journalist's personal experience. The broadcast includes a few interviews.

    https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/01/18/2253228/identical-twins-test-5-dna-ancestry-kits-get-different-results-on-each

    The TV show is 'Marketplace' on the CBC network.

    https://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/episodes/2014-2015/dna-testing-gene-genie

    969:

    Re:' ... damn sure that Sinn Fein are biding their time with the intent of causing trouble,'

    Aren't they old geezers by now or have they been actively recruiting/brainwashing young'uns waiting for another chance at winning the big one (like the NRA)?

    970:

    Mary Lou McDonald (current leader of the Shinners) is only 50 years old this year, and her deputy, Michelle O'Neil was born in 1977.

    Sinn Fein have four seats in the European Parliament, falling to three after Brexit. They will still be the only UK-based party at the EU Parliament after Brexit, however. (Irony)

    They have the same number of seats in the Northern Irish Assembly as the DUP, and hold seven out of 18 Northern Irish seats at Westminster, but they don't turn up to vote.

    971:

    Why do you think no hispanics are moving into the north?

    I think H is missing it because this country is so frigging big and he's on the left coast. Here in Raleigh, NC they opened a Mexican consulate about 15 years ago due to demand. And have to keep moving to a larger space every 4 or so years. They used to be down the road a bit when they first opened and had a line out the door every day. Then they moved to a nearby empty light manufacturing site. Still lines. Latest move seems to have taken them about 5 miles away to a bigger site.

    We have a LOT of Spanish speakers here on the east coast. And so do most towns / cities of any size. Even without Miami.

    972:

    Not what I mean--I'm looking at the "official language" stuff that gets everyone's backs up. As a lexicographer noted during a presentation last week, southern California at least was settled primarily by Spanish speakers up until around 1900, and the last 100-odd years of Anglophone hegemony seems to be rolling back, not in a way that would scare the racists, but simply because Spanish is easy to pick up and a lot of people are or are becoming bilingual because it's increasingly normal. How far north this goes will depend on how people migrate to deal with climate issues.

    I'm one of the oddballs in that I don't speak Spanish here, and that's simply because I was an idiot who didn't expect to end up in southern California and didn't study it in school. Even I have a decent smattering. My wife's trilingual, and most of my family is at least bilingual.

    973:

    Those are all cases where people knowingly did non marriage/family things.

    In the US (don't know about elsewhere) 23andMe and such kits are being given out to extended families by some clueless relative as Christmas presents and the results don't always line up with the "known" family history.

    Surprise surprise surprise! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TnkJ8_BmSI

    Plus there are researchers using those data bases to track down cold case criminals by figuring out things like this rape kits matches up with this person or persons as 2nd or 3rd cousins. Which is how they caught some long time serial killers recently. And not all of those 2nd and 3rd cousins were happy that their DNA fun was used for such.

    974:

    Vestager taking Apple to the cleaners uncovered that Ireland had been running their tax office extremely oddly. Openly, Ireland has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the EU, and that coupled with being native English speakers, or close enough for horse-shoes, meant a lot of corporate head quarters. But for some really bizarre reason, Ireland was letting the largest of those off-shore profits onward out of Ireland to ex-EU tax havens.

    Which, as policy, makes no sense - Collecting the headline 13 % is an enormous injection into the state coffers, and looking the other way while companies claim that actually all the profits are made by an employee-less subsidiary in the Caimans does not at the margin make Ireland any more attractive to international corporations. What would Apple do, move operations to Hungary ? And ask their employees to learn Hungarian? They would revolt.

    This practice stopping is why Irelands nominal gdp suddenly shot off the charts overnight, which just goes to show that doing it in the first place was nuts - When it was insisted on, everyone turned out to be perfectly happy to stay in the republic and pay the nominal rate. So the previous policy stinks to high heaven.

    Otoh, this has stopped, so.. Yhea for EU anti-tax-avoidance drives?

    975:

    There are two issues worth noticing here. The first is that immigration from South of the U.S. border has been falling since around 2001, from something like 1.8 million annually to around 400,000 annually. The second is to note that the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S. has been "Mixed" for the past two censuses,* and I expect that to continue for the next hundred years or so.

    IMHO, this is the thing which really terrifies the racist-white-european crowd. Imagine an "ordinary" child of 2119; 1/8 Black, 1/8 Hispanic, 1/4 Chinese, 1/8 Jewish, etc... speaking fluent English, having U.S. citizenship, and running around with a Master's degree. They show up in a school in West Kentucky teaching the White children of meth-heads and opium addicts how to program and aiming the smarter kids at a coastal college, while the parents get told, "Shut up about your weirdo racist views. Do you want to drive this teacher away too!"

    • Censuses in the U.S. happen every ten years.
    976:

    I simply don't know. I could say more about the possibilities but, in the light of OGH's comment, I won't.

    977:

    I have annoyed a few of the "why doesn't everyone use English" brigade in Europe by saying that the EU etc. should use the oldest and most 'indigenous' European language. That usually results in spluttering :-)

    No, I don't speak or even read it!

    978:

    the EU etc. should use the oldest and most 'indigenous' European language

    It's unlikely that PIE has words for common concepts like "nation" or MEP, let alone brexit, and crucially (bendy) banana and meat pie :)

    I prefer to use a synthetic European language like Esperanto because that should offend and inconvenience everyone equally.

    979:

    The language I am referring to is a live one, and predates the Indo-European languages in Europe :-)

    980:

    I'm looking at the "official language" stuff that gets everyone's backs up

    That's because it's very difficult for larger countries. Aotearoa is blessed in that sense by having little history and being mostly monocultural then bicultural. So it's pretty easy to say "there's Maori, and then there's Pakeha and whaddayano we signed up with the English speakers, and now deaf are people too"... we get three official languages and only two written ones (coz there's no huge gain in writing sign language). The various French, German, Dutch, Russian etc communities aren't really big enough to make monolingualism practical in the same way 70,000 Vietnamese speakers in Sydney does.

    Australia has no official language just the (oh so typical) brute force "government is conducted in English". But it's also a pragmatic response to having 500-odd indigenous languages of which perhaps 20 survive in the wild (plus several modern creoles) as well as at least 20 foreign languages commonly spoken of which English is the most common. Our urban libraries typically have collections in more than five languages, even the small ones.

    I was in Regents Park library yesterday and it's tiny - two staff, seating for 20 and it's the size of a small hall. But it has newspapers in English, Mandarin and Hindi (guessing/assuming, from those general areas anyway) and shelves in at least one other Indic language plus Arabic and a few latin alphabet languages (Italian for one).

    I can imagine that for the USA making English the one language might be tricky in light of the various treaties signed when they acquired territory. The politics would also be fun because the federal system is set up to protect minorities (although at the time the minority most in question was 'slave owners', but you know, whatever). Pushing through that change would raise hackles everywhere from the progressive multicultural parts through to the "all government is always bad" wingnuts.

    981:

    I think Klingon would be better. Sounds a lot like Gaelic to my untrained ear :) (The thought of Brave Heart dubbed in Klingon makes me smile )

    982:

    Uralic or Turkic? Either would offend British people, possibly even more so if Polish was Uralic but its not (AFAIK). But yeah, the whole EU would be a bit iffy with Turkish or even better Chuvash as their common language.

    983:

    Michael Cain @892: I predict that statehood for Puerto Rico will stumble over the language problem

    The US-domestic obstacle is real and probably prohibitive, but IMO this one is not.

    For those who don't know, the USA itself has cheerfully done without any official language at all, for its entire existence. 'Official English' campaigns occasionally arise but never get anywhere, and the states/Feds/local governments provide translators for any/all official government interactions to compensate for language gaps between all reasonably common languages and the de-facto national language. There are problems, but it works well enough.

    Nobody but certain Trumpista loons is afraid of English being supplanted in public life, in part because said language has the characteristics of a trade tongue, like Swahili, in particular the stripped-down grammatical structure that makes it a relatively easy language in which to learn the basics, i.e., it's relatively easy to learn to speak English badly. And the pragmatic advantages of speaking it are so compelling that English as a Second Language classes are consistently full, even in East L.A.

    Hypothetically if Congress were to permit admission of Puerto Rico as a state (which won't happen for political reasons), I would predict the existing language-proficiency requirements for the PR legislature would be required (as you say) to be repealed. But, as to PR voters rejecting a Congressional requirement that they learn English, I just don't see why Congress would try to require that.

    984:

    Nope :-) I won't spoil your fun by giving the answer just yet!

    986:

    Euskaraz ere hitz egin dezakezu. (You, too, can speak Basque.)

    987:

    If we're sharing musical comments…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXq1zZntKQo

    I took back my hand and I showed him the door No dollar of mine would I part with this day For fueling the engines of bloody cruel war In my forefather's land far away

    Who fled the first Famine wearing all that they owned Were called 'Navigators', all ragged and torn And built the Grand Trunk here, and found a new home Wherever their children were born

    Their sons have no politics. None call recall Allegiance from long generations before O'this or O'that name just can't mean a thing Or be cause enough for to war

    And meanwhile my babies are safe in their home Unlike their pale cousins who shiver and cry While kneecappers nail their poor Dads to the floor And teach them to hate and to die

    It's those cruel beggars who spurn the fair coin The peace for their kids they could take at their will Since the day old King Billy prevailed at the Boyne They've bombed and they've maimed and they've killed

    Now they cry out for money and wail at the door But Home Rule or Republic, 'tis all of it shame; And a curse for us here who want nothing of war We're kindred in nothing but name

    All rights and all wrongs have long since blown away For causes are ashes where children lie slain Yet the damned U.D.L and the cruel I.R.A Will tomorrow go murdering again But no penny of mine will I add to the fray "Remember the Boyne!" they will cry out in vain For I've given my heart to the place I was born And forgiven the whole House of Orange King Billy and the whole House of Orange

    988:

    and the states/Feds/local governments provide translators for any/all official government interactions to compensate for language gaps between all reasonably common languages and the de-facto national language. There are problems, but it works well enough.

    About 10 years ago I saw a talk by one of the SCOTUS. Stevens I think. He was discussing things the us judiciary needed to do better. He wanted more staff translators rather than relying so much on contractors. His point was it was very frustrating for a lawyer to ask a question of a witness who spoke a language not in the top 10 or so, the translator and witness have a 5 minute back and forth, then the translator turn to the court and say "Yes". Said translator being someone found in the local business directories.

    989:

    Wouldn't old Latin be the language that had the widest governmental usage across Europe? PAX Romana and all that. With classical Greek being a strong second?

    990:

    I'm reading those as being far too recent to count as original European languages.

    991:

    Imagine an "ordinary" child of 2119

    Sounds kinda like my grandniece. :-)

    Over 90% of my nieces are mixed by census categories.

    992:

    Re: Oldest (European) language

    Tried looking this up and results vary somewhat - one said Lithuanian which probably has maybe 3.5 million speakers worldwide. Laughed when results showed that the oldest language overall is Persian - could picture DT throwing a hissy fit.

    993:

    This is a really exciting rumour for me: Samsung announced that it has created the world’s first 1TB embedded flash storage (eUFS) 2.1 module for smartphones and other mobile devices.

    1TB would be awesome, probably even worth buying a new phone for. I've only got ~200Gb on my phone now and that hurts.

    https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/01/samsung-sure-seems-ready-to-sell-us-1tb-smartphones/

    994:

    Imagine them explaining Donald Trump to their great-grandchildren.

    If I'm being completely honest I have to bag on myself just a little. Despite one of my parents being Jewish and the other being Christian, I didn't quite get the point until I met a couple of my second cousins, who have a very dark-skinned Black father and a corn-fed Kansan/Christian White mother. Suddenly my world changed, because now family was involved.

    I've always been pro-social-justice, but that was the moment "Why I Do This" really hit home.

    995:

    I was going for "first to cover much of or most of the continent for government purposes."

    PAX Romana, as I understand it, was governed with Latin in the west and Greek in the east.

    996:

    I'm going off predates the Indo-European languages in Europe which rules out both Greek and Latin.

    Since we still have the Roman empire active, as well as both Greek and Latin in use, it seems unlikely that any of that would be controversial. Well, except in the "the EU tries to avoid looking like a reconstruction of any of the recent empires" sense.

    I'd almost suggest Sumerian except that they're not really hanging around any more. But then I notice that there's a very similar group who are still around (and still rule the world, allegedly)... the Jews. Hebrew it is, in the ancient form I assume.

    997:

    Hey, some good news on the legal-environmental front from Canada's Supreme Court. Don't know if it's a first internationally but it's the first time I've ever seen this.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/supreme-court-redwater-decision-orphan-wells-1.4998995

    'When the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) said Redwater could not ignore its environmental responsibilities, the bankruptcy trustee in this case, Grant Thornton, along with Redwater's lender, ATB Financial, decided to challenge the law.​

    In its decision brief, the top court said the trustee "couldn't walk away from the disowned sites. It said that the BIA [Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act] was meant to protect trustees from having to pay for a bankrupt estate's environmental claims with its own money. It didn't mean Redwater's estate could avoid its environmental obligations."'

    There's a similar ruling in the US but at a lower court level.

    https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/case-summary-court-decision-tronox-bankruptcy-fraudulent-conveyance-case-results-largest

    998:

    Heck, I'd propose Tok Pisin, since it incorporates words from many different languages.

    In any case, if you want the one language (hah!) that predates the Roman Empire in Europe, I think you're looking at whatever the Celts, Gauls, and Germanic tribes used to communicate. After all, they traded with each other for centuries before the Romans wrecked everything. Would it be Greek they were using now, or something else?

    999:

    the EU etc. should use the oldest and most 'indigenous' European language.

    Now I'm thinking about laws and regulations written without vowels and no spaces between the words. That's going to make interpretation even more exciting than it is now. Can you imagine the tabloids going insane over something they've constructed by using exciting vowels?

    1000:

    As I understand it (in my very thin knowledge about this) the language of the first Greek civilization (Troy and such) wasn't the same as what was in use in the times of Athens, Sparta, and then Rome. Related but more like second cousins rather than parent child relations.

    1001:

    You are probably thinking of Mycenaean Greek, which is actually Greek with some idiosyncrasies. There are surviving examples written in a syllabary (known to us as LInear B) rather than the Greek alphabet. Boring government administrative records, apparently. Linear B had been a mystery for some time, and it was only relatively recently that it was deciphered (and found to be Greek).

    It’s interesting because there’s a Greek dark age rough at the transition from bronze to iron. The Homeric texts appear to have been composed in a non-literate society, but they (seem to) contain references to writing - a technology that appears to have been lost at one point.

    Not clear what language the Trojans themselves used, through the Hittites and Assyrians were around and not far away.

    1002:

    EC @ 975/8 Basque, I presume? Or Finnish, perhaps? ... Moz @ 981 Can't possibly be a "Turkic" language - they are johnny-come latelies - arrived even in Asia Minor only after 900CE See also 983-5 Moz @ 998 No the supposed "celtic" languages are relatively modern, as used at present.

    Robt Prior @ 986 Anyone still got it in for the Nethelranders, then ( House of Orange: Je Maintiendrei )

    Troutwaxer @ 993 Imagine them explaining Donald Trump to their great-grandchildren No worse than trying to explain Kaiser Bill & the "Junkers" desire for a Greter Germania in Europe?

    1003:

    Re: Greater Germania:

    So much like explaining Churchill then.

    1004:

    Greg, I wasn't aware that written Celtic eschewed vowels, and it's definitely not what I was thinking when I said "ancient hebrew"

    1005:

    As several people have said, it's Basque, according to almost all experts. It's a good example to knock blinkered idiots back on their heels.

    1006:

    Yes. We simply don't know how earlier European peoples communicated, though we know they did, because there was long-distance trading from at least neolithic times.

    1007:

    That's interesting about Persian, and might even be true. What I may have obfuscated in #1004 is that I believe that all European languages entered Europe in (globally) historical times, i.e. after written records started in western civilisation (i.e. India, Persia, Mesopotamia and Egypt), except Basque and just possibly (but definitely later) Greek and neighbouring languages. Indeed, only the Celtic ones reached western Europe before the Roman empire did. Europe is a continent of recent immigrants, and the languages reflect that.

    1008:

    ;) Ahhh, then we could hear Shakespeare in the original ;)

    1009:

    Unelected anthropoids? What like the Electoral college?

    Slightly more seriously I'd suggest leaving the state boundaries alone, OK I'm a federalist, and focus on passing an amendment that federal electoral divisions within a state or territory should have approximately the same number of enrolled voters.

    A federal electoral commission would need to be backed up by a federal electoral court, much like the federal appellate court, with issues of appeal going to the Supreme court.

    The commission could also bear the responsibility for a federal electoral roll, taking voter registration for federal elections out of the hand of the states.

    1010:

    I don't know enough about european prejudices to know why that's so, sorry. Because it locates current Europeans as immigrants? Being from a long line of immigrants and living in immigration nations that isn't a natural way of thinking for me. Or is it just because Basque identity is problematic in Spain?

    From down here it's very easy to see Europe as a bloc and your history as so verbose as to be overwhelming. On the one hand I'm expected to know why an obscure Scottish family/clan left the islands and moved to the mainland in the recent past (and care about that!) but on the other Basque as a pre-European European language is both weirdly old (it post-dates indo-european written history) and quite recent (it also post-dates the rise in sea level that makes so much early human archeology tricky). I'm kind of hanging out for more aquatic archeology to come out of the Mediterranean because I think that will shake up what we know about early human activity in the area.

    1011:

    Speaking of weirdly specific history, the Denisovan stuff has quite exact dates and a whole lot of shrugging going on:

    https://theconversation.com/fresh-clues-to-the-life-and-times-of-the-denisovans-a-little-known-ancient-group-of-humans-110504

    1012:

    Just to put the tin hat on it, Jeremy Hardy has just passed away. Bastard 2019.

    1013:

    Oh fuck and damn

    (And younger than me, which makes me feel old ... older)

    1014:

    MOZ @ 1011 Talking of which A fossil Galaxy - suppopsedly

    1016:

    There's a loose connection with my post @947 - namely, that Jeremy Hardy was firmly in the "Northern Ireland is part of Ireland" camp, and supported a few "unjustly convicted" types.

    No, not those poor sods in the Guildford Four / Birmingham Six, who were screwed over by a corrupt police and then by an establishment who knew damn fine they were innocent, but didn't want to admit it; but individuals who were actively being sought for extradition by Germany (for killing German citizens on German soil), or whose fingerprints had been found in arms caches and on bomb circuitry.

    So, perhaps someone who allowed their political convictions to carry them towards gullibility?

    1017:

    "At this remove, it's hard to imagine anyone thinking Bloody Sunday was a good thing"

    Yeah, you'd think, wouldn't you?

    https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/flying-parachute-regiment-flags-a-hate-crime-says-bloody-sunday-relative-37719932.html

    1018:

    A re-run of the conflict?

    No. Trouble, destabilisation, even rioting - yes. But a 're-run' of 1969 - 1994 will almost certainly not happen.

    Too much has changed, sometimes even for the better. There's no Stormont regime anymore, for a start. And there are proper legal safeguards for any minority (past or future) that might experience organized discrimination.

    What could upset that last apple-cart would be the vacuum of legitimacy that seems likely to come out of any no-deal, hard-border Brexit. The internal settlement of the GFA required external guarantors in the form of Dublin and Brussels. Remove them, and the minority will have no reason to see the local arrangements as in any sense theirs.

    But will that mean 'back to square one'? I repeat - no. Despite the paranoid ramblings of some eejit further up the thread, the SF leadership are not a bunch of Machiavellian plotters itching for the first chance to whip out their AKs. They know very well that they have a good thing going south of the border, and they won't let northern developments queer their pitch.

    If there is a threat on the republican side it would come from the dissidents - and while they may be able to set off bombs and organize riots in Derry or Strabane, they still noticeably keep their heads down in Belfast. Because they know better than to lift them up.

    1019:

    D J P O'K @ 1018 I sincerely hope so, but the history of "Knowing better" is small - otherwise the dreadful bombing in Omagh would never have happened, would it?

    Everyone The Dump in Washington .... appears to have lost it - backing away from the nuclear agreement with Russia ( Expires completely in 6 months unless renewed ... ) & re-treatening to declare "State of Emergency" over "The Wall". Remind us, how one removes an insane PORUS? Except that gets us Pence in charge, which might be even scarier. Or is that the Dominionists' plan? So that Pence & the R's can roll-over everyone in 2020 ....

    1020:

    AIUI, there were broadly three waves of human settlement in Europe: 1) Paleolithic hunter-hatherers who migrated out of Ice Age refugia, 2) Neolithic farmers who came from Anatolia, and 3) the Proto-Indo-Europeans who immigrated from the Eurasian steppe during the Bronze Age following domestication of the horse. Genetically, contemporary Europeans and their colonial cousins round the world are three-way hybrids of these groups. (Which makes white supremacy, "racial purity", and associated nonsense an even more absurd joke--white people are and always have been mutts.)

    Most European languages today descend from PIE. Various ancient, non-IE cultures (and their languages) around the Mediterranean--the Minoans, Sardinians, Etruscans, etc.--are, I believe, associated with the Neolithic farmers. AFAIK, no one has a clue what the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers spoke.

    Basque remains a language isolate. My guess is it's the last remaining descendant of the Neolithic farmer languages, but it'd be truly awesome if it's the last descendant of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer languages.

    1021:

    I really hope you’re right.

    It’s interesting that when discussing potential trouble, you only mention Republicans. I rather suspect that the nightmare scenario isn’t a strengthened IRA splinter group, but instead those organisations that have “Ulster” in their names...

    The “marching season” lot have always had the ability to generate lots of angry young men. Add unemployment from a post-Brexit recession, the very special cognitive dissonance that allows Unionists to attack Crown forces in the name of the Union, and a demonstrated history of petrol-bombing the houses of Catholics or Policemen.

    Any agreement that (from their perspective) threatens the Union, and they’ll kick off. Stuff logic, or empathy, or good sense - all that goes out the window after the first chorus of “The Sash”...

    1022:

    FUBAR007 "PIE" is a much nicer word than "Aryan" isn't it? Maybe 😈 However, hominim settlement in Europe goes much further back than that - I assume you are referring solely to H. sapiens & their Rishathra cousins including denisova & neanderthalensis? And ignoring any antecessor etc ....

    HOWEVER - UK politics. The Daily Telegraph has suddenly switched sides, or so it appears. Article is semi-paywalled [ It would be appreciated if someone could pirate a copy ] HERE The drift being that an orderly Brexit, which they & the Barclays want is now impossible ( correct ) & that the best thing to do is to stay in & "make them sorry" - as even they realise that "No Deal" will be an cat's-arse-trophy. Or maybe, baehave like General De Gaulle did in the earlier EEC period? I think this is a brilliant idea, if only because there are parts of the EU, let's face it that NEED a good reaming, but us leaving is (shall we say) considerably worse, if not a self-harming & self-destructive idea? Wonder if the Daily Hate will pick this one up?

    Thoughts, anyone?

    1023:

    Greg -

    I'm not saying it won't be bad, it will be. Just not bad in the same way it was in the bad old days.

    I used to be a partitionist, but I'm not any more - purely on the basis that partition just doesn't work as a solution to ethnonational conflict, no matter how intuitively appealing ("good fences make good neighbours") it may seem.

    Whether the South has liathroidí to take on its responsibilities in that matter is another thing. The backing Dublin has received from the EU will need to be paid for, in the form of fundamental change to the current tax-haven strategy. In the long-term that can only be a good thing, but in the short-term, it will be hard to sell. . .

    Anyway, I'm just thinking aloud at this point.

    1024:

    You are probably thinking of Mycenaean Greek, which is actually Greek with some idiosyncrasies. ... It’s interesting because there’s a Greek dark age rough at the transition from bronze to iron.

    Yes. That dark age seems to coincide roughly with the big volcano eruption in the eastern Met. And seems to correlate roughly (time wise) with the biblical Jews leaving Egypt.

    And about that time there is also evidence of a comet hit (or big air blast) in eastern Europe. Which could also lead to a dark age and lots of disruption. Anyone know more than this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaali_crater

    What I read/watched was a possible comet further south. I guess an air burst would leave much less evidence.

    1025:

    OK.

    That's one possibility. When I used to live on Candahar street, the Orange parades would sometimes go right past my front door on their way to join up with the main marches. On more than one occasion I thought they were coming right through my front door. You're right to point to the paucity of empathy, logic, etc. (though don't forget this tradition still threw up the occasional David Ervine), but that will in turn blunt their "operational capacity".

    And I doubt if any elements in the "deep state" will want to employ them as "pseudo-gangs", which is another part of the equation, surely?

    OTOH, maybe there will be some sudden attack of common sense in London, and the brinksmanship will stop right at the cliff edge.

    1026:

    I have a single data point from my one visit to Ireland 2 summers ago.

    Taxi ride from Dublin airport to downtown was by a fellow who looked to be in his 30s. He sort of gave us a tour guide of sites as we rode which gradually revealed itself as a history of England's terrible atrocities against the Irish. He ended the ride with a statement that Ireland would be re-united. Soon.

    The entire thing was a bit strange. And as I said a single isolated data point. Is he a radical outlier or a representative of a mass movement that is below the radar of the "elite"?

    1027:

    I once had a Dublin taxi ride with a self-taught climate change expert (no, not a climate change denier).

    I'd also say that most Irish people feel that way to a certain extent: OTOH, there was that episode when Brenda paid us a visit, gave back our potatoes and promised not to do it again.

    Seriously, though - using a taxi driver as a guide to local political sentiment? Come on, man.

    It's a job that forces you to live in your own head most of the time, and I can't see how that wouldn't lead to a bit of the old 'screwy driver' thing for at least some who follow the jarvey's trade.

    1028:

    Loverly.

    Not.

    Just as an FYI, SSDs don't overwrite. So, to sanitize them, as we must do at work, they literally have to be physically shredded.

    1029:

    Heteromeles @ 891: Well, that won't work, because ...

    There are always plenty of reasons why it won't work. That's why nothing ever gets done.

    1030:

    Reminds me of the Charge Card of the Goddess: Veni, vidi, VISA - She came, she saw, she charged.

    And as a fitting reply for all the Irish stories, I subject y'all to Deep Hurting:

    What's the use of wearing braces Hats and spats and boots with laces All the things you buy in places Down on Brompton Road

    What's the use of shirts of cotton Studs that always get forgotten These affairs are simply rotten Better far is woad!

    Woad's the stuff to show men! Woad to scare your foemen! Boil it to a brilliant blue and rub it on your legs and your abdomen....

    Trust me, it's been A Week.

    1031:

    whitroth @ 896: No, no, welcome Rupert back with flowers.
    Um, which deadly insects would you Aussies put in the bouquet?

    Don't ask me. I live in North America and we don't have any truly deadly insects unless you're allergic to bee stings or catch Bubonic plague from rat fleas. And both of those are treatable if you get to the ER quickly enough.

    1032:

    Ancient Briton never hit on Anything as good as woad to fit on Neck, or knees, or where you sit on. Tailors, you be blowed.

    Romans came across the Channel All wrapped up in tin and flannel: Half a pint of woad per man'll Dress us more than these.

    Saxon, you keep your stitches Building beds for bugs in britches: We have woad to clothe us, which is Not a nest for fleas.

    Romans keep your armours; Saxons your pyjamas: Hairy coats were meant for goats, Gorillas, yaks, retriever dogs and llamas.

    1033:

    Allen Thomson @ 910:

    I predict that statehood for Puerto Rico will stumble over the language problem.

    I'm going to agree with OGH @905 and opine that this problem is surmountable. It already is surmounted, really, in Puerto Rico and the MX/US border states deal with it successfully all the time.

    I don't disagree, I merely question whether either party has the desire (political will) to surmount the problem.

    1034:

    So march on Snowdon With your woad on Never mind if you get rained or snowed on Woad for us, today.

    1035:

    Unelected anthropoids? What like the Electoral college?

    Well, the electoral college fulfilled its Hamiltonian function when they elected Trump despite requests not too, so the first thing I'd do is create a system where they followed the majority vote, period, end of story.

    As for the rest, isn't that approximately the way Congressional districts are proportioned, except that there's a minimum of one Representative per state, no matter how small they are?

    1036:

    I think you missed #893, where I showed a good example of why it wouldn't work. When most states in the US have a lower population than LA County, creating polygons of equal population is a non-starter, simply because around 5% of the US population is crammed into New York City and LA County. Radically concentrated populations will cause boundaries to skew all over the place.

    Just think about it: New York City has 8.5 million people. For your scheme to work, you need to have 50 states of 6.5 million people each. Do you want the Mayor of New York to control the population of more than one state? Note that New York City has a bigger population than 40 states. Any state with fewer people than New Jersey (#10), meaning Virginia on down, has fewer people than does New York City.

    Conversely, Hawai'i and Alaska would be too small by themselves to be states. Hawai'i could bond with San Diego and Imperial Counties to be the state of Militaria (named due to the concentration of military bases in all these regions), while Alaska would have to accept being an outlying exurb of Seattle (actually the west coast of Washington plus Alaska would be its own state). On the other hand, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and Nebraska would all be one state. And so it goes. It's a fun exercise, because it shows how US demographics work, but it's not viable politically.

    Finally, it's worth thinking about the blow to the US if LA is crippled, due to that demographic concentration. NYC is relatively safe, but LA will eventually be hit by both a huge earthquake (for which it is known to be unprepared) and an equally huge flood (the ARkStorm, which most people haven't even heard of). Both have a 50% chance of occurring in the next 50 years. The Big One Quake is well-known. The flood is based on what actually happened in the winter of 1861-62. Reports from the time indicate that the entirety of the LA Basin, from Palos Verdes Peninsula on the coast to the San Gabriel Mountains, was under water, after about a meter of rain fell in two months in an area that normally gets one foot per year.

    In fact, if you want to do a really novel SF disaster novel, tell the story of the ARkStorm. It's forecast to do about three times as much damage (in financial terms) as the Big One, mostly because the disaster region for the ARkStorm would be the entire west coast, not just southern California. Heck, all those rainy shots in Bladerunner could be repurposed very nicely.

    1037:

    SSDs don't overwrite. So, to sanitize them, as we must do at work, they literally have to be physically shredded.

    You might be amused to know that for most of our internal servers we buy second hand Dell boxes and also extra second hand hard drives for them. Currently legacy hard drives, because we're cheap. I suspect the ones straight from Dell are properly wiped but I've not had the chance to play with them because they're in live machines. The second hand drives, OTOH, are often just formatted.

    When we dispose of them they go in a pile labelled "fridge magnets" and the platters sadly don't survive that extraction. My inclination with SSDs would be to keep using them until they fail, then smash them just because there's nothing useful inside at that point. And Australia's ewaste systems are pathetic so we don't lose anything by doing that.

    Does anyone make an EMP chamber for this stuff yet? All I can find are software tools that talk to hopefully-it-works drive firmware that offers "secure erase" commands. I guess not if you primitives are banging rocks together to solve the problem.

    1038:

    From the report linked: It is dark as it is feint.

    Even the article thinks it's just a ploy :)

    1039:

    Cheerful thought: At least one former official of the current US administration thinks that if the President goes ahead and declares an emergency to build his wall, that this will be the end of his presidency, due to the deep rift it will drive into the Republican party ( https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/30/trump-border-national-emergency-immigration-1138308 and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/trump-nuclear-option-could-destroy-his-presidency ). The thinking is that a) a physical wall simply won't work and is quite possibly illegal, b) some people support it anyway and support having the US have a dictator, but c) many republicans and all democrats do not support a wall. Furthermore, rather more republicans don't want Trumpian precedents to carry over to the next Democratic president. Supposedly, the thinking goes, declaring an emergency where none exists might lead to impeachment all by itself, before the Mueller probe even finishes. If that happens, the the president resigns and gets pardoned, only to face the results of the Mueller probe as a civilian, while the questions start swirling around Pence about what he knew and when did he know it.

    Anyway, I don't think it will play out quite that nicely, but it would be an...interesting...end to the mess.

    1040:

    I'm not saying it won't be bad, it will be. Just not bad in the same way it was in the bad old days.

    Taking on board Martin's point about the UVF, UDA, etc., there's one other aspect of the situation that gives me the cold chills: the utter fecking cluelessness of Middle England about the situation in Ireland, and the willingness of so many MPs to throw reality under the bus in order to save their precious Brexit.

    Opinion polling in England shows near-as-dammit majority support for kicking Northern Ireland (or Scotland) out of the UK, if that's a necessary price to pay for Brexit.

    Theresa May almost certainly won't go for it—it'd be a huge betrayal of conservative and unionist principles—but the whole backstop problem could g away if she cuts NI loose and hands it over to Ireland: "there—they're your problem now!" or words to that effect—or hives it off as an autonomous EU region inheriting the UK's EU membership.

    Luckily the DUP won't go for it. They'd bring down the government first. Unfortunately it's possible that just enough breakaway "centrist" Labour MPs might.

    And all that marching and firebombing and shooting that would break out over the betrayal? Not. Our. Problem. Any. More.

    1041:

    I once had a Dublin taxi ride with a self-taught climate change expert (no, not a climate change denier).

    I am getting a lot of taxi rides in Leeds, currently (for reasons I'll explain in a few weeks to months).

    I never bring up politics in a taxi, as a matter of policy—I don't want to end up walking—but weirdly, the Leeds taxi drivers seem to be extremely exercised about Brexit, and they are not in favour of it.

    1042:

    Nojay @ 935: I wonder how many folks will wake up in the US in 2100 and look around and say "Y'know, who'd have thought we'd not be speaking English as the majority language today."

    In Mandarin.

    I don't care what language people here in the U.S. will speaking in 2100. I just hope I'm still around to hear 'em.

    OTOH

    1043:

    Professional recommendations: 1. DO NOT EVER buy a desktop drive for a server. The server will NOT like it. 2. NAS-rated drives, like WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, can be put in servers, happily, and coast about 1.3 times desktop consumer drives, as opposed to "enterprise" grade drives, which cost 2.5-3 times consumer grade.

    I deal at work with a lot of them.

    1044:

    Re: 'ARkStorm'

    Had to look this up. Given how far south the polar vortex has sat the past couple of weeks, one of these atmospheric rivers popping up and then dumping lots of rain looks like a possibility.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20110119230522/http://urbanearth.gps.caltech.edu/winter-storm/

    'Atmospheric rivers are embedded within much broader atmospheric storms referred to technically as “extratropical cyclones” (ECs). ECs are the winter-time analogue to hurricanes, but have much different structure. Also, they gain their energy largely from the pole-to-equator temperature contrast, unlike hurricanes, which draw their energy from ocean surface heat content. ARs are the business end of ECs because where the AR hits the mountains it can create extreme precipitation, flooding and high winds. In terms of impacts, an AR is to the broader EC it is embedded within, as the hurricane eyewall is to the broader hurricane of which it is a part. The importance and structure of ARs has become recognized recently through new satellite data and field experiments.'

    1045:

    Oh, it gets better: the statutes say that he must come to Congress no later than the end of six months after he declares the emergency, but there is no minimum time.

    Ms. Pelosi, Speaker of the House, can call a vote to end it THE NEXT DAY.

    Oh, and I see he's canceled his intel briefing, after calling his intel chiefs "naive".

    He is so going down in flames.

    1046:

    Oh, and he canceled a nuclear missile treaty with Russia today, just to demonstrate that he's the greatest leader in, like, ever.

    Speaking of so going down in flames, can we instead hope that he goes down in a wet splat instead, possibly with his adult children failing to catch him as he falls on them? I'd rather he didn't decide to go out in a nucular blaze of glory (misspelling intentional).

    1047:

    Tim H. @ 948: Why erect statues of leaders so unpopular they require protection?
    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-47068091
    On this side of the pond, sculptures of Confederate Generals are often seen on tall plinths, for similar reasons.

    Not really. It would be difficult to get a statue of a Confederate General approved today, no matter how high the plinth. Won't stop the statue being pulled down either. And before the Neo-Confederates can put it back up, the plinth can be removed.

    Almost all of the "Confederate" monuments in the South date to around the 50th Anniversary of the end of the American Civil War; peak Jim Crow. The high plinth was intended to venerate & elevate the southern white male serving the Lost Cause above the hoi poloi.

    I'm curious what vandalism could be worse than what sculptor Douglas Jennings is already doing to her visage?

    PS: Ironically, the "model" of southern manhood chosen by the Canadian sculptor used for most of the Confederate monuments (e.g. Silent Sam at UNC) was a young man from Boston.

    1048:

    whitroth @ 965: Read that. Dunno why it didn't strike me when I read it before, but now it's obvious, though I admit that it's surprising that she admits that he's The AntiChrist (tm).

    Dick Cheney is the AntiChrist™

    1049:

    Yup. There's a decent Wikipedia reference too. For the more disaster-porn version, here's The Weather Channel's take on the ARkStorm. I want to keep calling them Arkenstorms, but that's bad of me. I've read a few histories of the 1861-62 flood, and it was a truly frightening beast. Killed 3% of the state population and bankrupted the state.* If it happened now it's estimated to cause three times the damage (in financial terms) as the Big One southern earthquake.

    Oh, and for the carolina reaper-coated cherry on the top of this disaster sundae, Daniel Swain (of weatherwest blog fame) predicts that with climate change, storms of this size will become far more common in coming decades. He's the one who came up with the 50% chance by 2050 of one occurring estimate. Fun stuff to think about, for pitch black values of fun.

    *incidentally, 1862 and 1863 were drought years. The combination of horrendous flood followed by bad drought helped killing off the huge ranches that had dominated southern California's economy previously, since most of the cattle drowned or starved. Any practical advice from the Aussies on how to weather this sort of thing?

    1050:

    Elderly Cynic @ 979: The language I am referring to is a live one, and predates the Indo-European languages in Europe :-)

    Would I be far wrong guessing it "is a language, dead as dead can be"?

    1051:

    We are saved from those decisions by the servers all having SAS or something similar rather than SATA. So "cheap second hand" in this case is roughly what an equivalent SATA SSD costs new, but slower hotter and less reliable.

    In a way I think we'd be better off with cooked desktop gear in our test servers just to get the unreliability. But that would also be annoying, just in a different way to "that AWS VM went offline for 3.2 seconds again" and more in the "our test failed, was that cheap hardware glitching or my software having an issue".

    1052:

    See above - it's Basque.

    1053:

    Well, we can discuss that. He's seriously evil, where the Malignant Carcinoma falls under the heading of the banality of evil.

    On the other hand (I think that's three), Huckabee said....

    1054:

    Any practical advice from the Aussies on how to weather this sort of thing?

    Agrarian socialism and much less independence from the states. Viz, when the farmers box themselves into a hole the federal government bails them out. Right now a lot of the east is in drought but it's raining in Sydney so the city people are not very aware of that at a gut level. "farmers in the third world are dying {yawn}".

    The pragmatic on-farm response is bigger farms and moving stock out of the way of the floods. But in outback Australia a fast flood might advance as much as 50 kilometres in a day, so moving stock to high ground is easier. On the east cost where there's steeper terrain people just die, and so do their stock. It's actually more of an urban problem because local government is very affordable to developers, so new houses get built on floodplains, which flood, people get upset, the insurance pays out and they rebuild. You know this stuff :)

    But also, in most of Australia a metre of rain in 24 hours is normal during storms or even the peak of the wet for places that have that - we get cyclones that dump 2-5x that in less than 24 hours which is when you get the real floods. Rivers come up 10m or more, the bulk of the water is doing 10m/s or so, and there's a lot of standing back going "where does a 500cumecs flood go? Anywhere it fucken likes, cob". (the old joke: where does a 500lb gorilla sleep? Anywhere it likes).

    1055:

    Or maybe if we crazyglue the entire federal GOP together into one lump, that's the Real AntiChrist (tm).

    Top it off with a cherry - both of the Koch bros. - and they're good to go.

    1056:

    In terms of farming, if you only get those floods once a century you should ignore them. The problem is when they start happening more often but you don't know how often. You sort of have to plan to deal with them.

    The best bet is stepped dams than you can empty whenever you see a storm, and live with them being empty if the storm doesn't eventuate. Sydney to Cairns has that exact problem, and their solution is to build city water dams to catch the worst of it. Sydney gets ~half its water from 2-5 storms a year, and when they don't arrive we used to be a bit fucked but now we just turn on the desal plant and impose water restrictions ("you can only hose your concrete driveway between 7am and 10pm" type restrictions {eyeroll}).

    In a recent Queensland flood the inquiry afterwards mostly consisted of a fight between the flood victims and the dam operator over how much water was spilled when and whether that should have been done differently. Predicting the future is hard, but in court afterwards you can be very accurate about predicting the past. IIRC the upshot was that in future Brisvegas would rather have floods than no drinking water so they will keep doing what they're doing. The alternative plan "empty the dam completely every time a storm is forecast" was considered unwise (it takes several days to empty).

    1057:

    whitroth @ 1045: He is *so* going down in flames.

    Heteromeles @ 1046: Oh, and he canceled a nuclear missile treaty with Russia today, just to demonstrate that he's the greatest leader in, like, ever.

    The INF treaty is dead anyway. There's significant indication that Russia has routinely evaded it for a number of years now (since Putin came to power). The only real question is whether the U.S. has a stronger negotiating hand seeking to end Russian non-compliance by staying in or by getting out?

    While I think getting out is a propaganda "own goal", with Trump as the negotiator, I don't think it matters that much. Even if we stay in he's going to fuck it up.

    The thing about Trump going down in flames is I don't think the GOP has sense enough to bail out in time. It remains to be seen if the GOP will crash & burn with him or without him.

    1058:

    I suspect your best bet would be to build "flood walls" that hold water but don't have proper gates, just channels through them. That way the flood water fills them and is held long enough to avert the worst of the peak. Ideally you'd put them on your aquifer recharge points and if you do that building actual dams might make sense. But real dams tend to generate pressure to keep them full or use them for other things, which means keeping the bottom clear of silt so they drain properly starts to be a problem rather than half the point...

    1059:

    Charlie @ 1041 I am getting a lot of taxi rides in Leeds, currently (for reasons I'll explain in a few weeks to months). Your remaining Parent - I assume - good luck with that process....

    JBS Repeat of earlier Q... What are the supposed procedures for removing an insane Pres? And can they remove Pence as well, of course? Which is why "Waiting for Mueller" might be the better option, if Pence can be snagged simultaneously, of course

    1060:

    Mueller seems to be treating the Trump family like a Mafia family—start at the bottom, flip the small guys with promises of a lightweight sentence in return for a plea bargain and testimony, then use their testimony to flip the next guy up the ladder, and so on, until you've rolled everything right up to the top.

    This is methodical and efficient and you will note that Pence is below Trump on the pyramid; if the Mueller investigation runs to completion Pence will be gone before Trump (leaving us with President Nancy Pelosi, if I understand the rules of succession properly).

    Trouble is it may take quite a time.

    The "insane president" option is the 25th amendment, and it's not specifically insanity but medical incapacity. It's been used in recent decades when e.g. GWB needed surgery under general anaesthetic: Cheney got to be acting-POTUS rather than VPOTUS for a few hours. The trouble is, it requires a consensus in the cabinet, who Trump appointed, which is to say, ass-licking Republicans who know that if they remove Trump for anything less than glaringly flagrant insanity they can kiss their political career goodbye forever.

    1061:

    Re: ArkStorm

    How do the past 2 years of record fires impact the ArkStorm effects? I'm guessing worse environmentally but less financially because fires already destroyed some areas.

    1062:

    Fires clear the vegetation and damage the soil structure, so it holds less water and absorbs it more slowly. So as a rule floods happen faster and the water is more abrasive from all the extra soil in it. Add the vast amount of paving that's been done in California and you may not need a quake to move half the state into the sea. If you're unlucky the slow-moving floodwaters will dump a few metres of silt on the low-lying areas of the cities after trashing the slightly inland parts.

    Paving on the downhill side isn't as bad in terms of creating the floods, but it means they have less to slow them down once they hit the paved coastal areas. Solid concrete foundations will slow the floodwaters if they're well anchored, but normal houses will not. Good foundations might work, or they might have the soil taken out from around them or the concrete might abrade away more quickly than you expect. In China there have been a couple of cases of floods undermining one side of the tall building foundations and the whole building falling into the river. It's all about how much water, how fast for how long.

    1063:

    JBS @1057: The thing about Trump going down in flames is I don't think the GOP has sense enough to bail out in time. It remains to be seen if the GOP will crash & burn with him or without him.

    For the country's sake, with is devoutly to preferred, IMO. After Project REDMAP's unprecedented gerrymandering, rampant voter suppression tactics, the spiking of not just Merrick Garland's nomination but also those of hundreds of other Obama nominations to the Federal bench, and now apparently conspiring with the Russian government and associated oligarchs by not just Марионетка Влада (Vlad's puppet) but also key GOP leaders in Congress, it's clear that this has become a party with no principles whatsoever and no loyalty to the republic. Let them ride with the Toddler-in-Chief down to the oubliette and stay there.

    And the diehard 22% Trump base? The experience of 45 years ago suggests they won't learn, they can't learn, and that fortunately it doesn't matter: Even after resignation, a quarter of the electorate remained Nixon diehards, but what ended up inspiring the August 1974 resignation was defections in the Senate caused by Nixon losing non-diehard support in the 1974 mid-term elections. That could easily happen again in the 2020 general election, depending on just how much of the Trump/McConnell criminal scheming has been uncovered by then.

    Thus, I'd really rather the bastards not be removed from office, but rather humiliated at the polls.

    1064:

    Around here we call those flood walls levees, and they're about 100 years old in the Sacramento Valley. Getting them fixed and upgraded at current rates of repair will take around 100 years. The dams are in somewhat better repair, aside from their spillways. Those spillways for the overflow....google Oroville Dam and you'll see what I'm talking about if you don't know already.

    In the LA Basin, their level of flood protection is 100 year flood, and the ARkStorm is a 1000 year flood (that's what the k stands for). Ditto San Diego. I suspect an ARkStorm will be bad all over, but most of LA getting flooded in a meter of water will be a global problem as the effects ripple out, LA being a major global transshipment center. Most of what is Long Beach (aka the Port of Los Angeles) was salt marsh in 1861, and it's not all that high above sea level.

    1065:

    There’s no concept of ‘district’ or that district sizes should ensure equal populations in the constitution. District size based on equal population has been inferred from the constitution by the Supreme Court since about the 60s.

    1066:

    Fires in the hills causing mudslides before an ArkStorm is an apples and oranges problem. Yes, there will be mudslides in the canyons, but as I noted above, when we're talking about a meter of water through most of LA basin streets, and 10 feet of water around Sacramento, I'm afraid the people caught around the mudslides are going to ultimately have to fend for themselves. Certainly they'll be the first impacted and the first to get help, but as the disasters spread, especially if a dam gives way, they're going to be put lower down on the priority list and eventually cut off right about the time (two weeks in) their food runs out.

    The other nastiness is that there may well be a serious drought after an ARkStorm. What that means is that all the grass and weeds that sprouted with the rain die, and then we get huge fires. That's what happened in 2017.

    Part of me sees this as vindication for how the California Indians lived. They didn't build big towns, period, and they moved out of the lowlands during the rainy season. We think of them as backwards and primitive, but they didn't suffer in 1861 to the same degree that the Anglos and Spanish did. Primitive or pragmatic? Hard to say.

    1067:

    Thing about Trump is that there's indications that he was under Russian control dating back to the 1980s. Pence is a 2016 addition to the Drumpf Family. Many of the people Mueller is flipping were with Trump before Pence signed his name in blood in that particular black book.

    So yes, we could end up with a President Pence if he can give a convincing reason that he was so incompetent that he didn't know what was going on. I suspect the Republicans would love to portray Pence as so Christian that he thought the best of all those around him and didn't dream that they were so crooked...really. I suspect also that the evangelical right base might even support this story with a leonine roar. After all, they voted for Trump, knowing he was a serial adulterer, why not Pence, who is, at least, vocally Christian (in the Greg Tingey sense of Christian) and known to be a real politician?

    1068:

    aside from their spillways

    So apart from the bit most likely to fail, they're fine?

    Same sort of thing with the levees, except you actually want those to fail so that the floodwaters spread out rather than being able to gather the floodwaters and completely destroy whatever they're pointed at.

    I was thinking more of making forced meanders with those banks to slow the floodwaters down. It would actually be fine if they became submerged as long as they didn't wash away. But that only works on fairly flat country.

    Australia is well used to the flood-growth-drought-fire cycle, it forms a big part of the planning in a lot of areas. We get the wildflowers tourist explosion in many parts of the country, but that's invariably followed by fires in "areas that don't normally burn". Oddly enough most of the species in those areas are fire tolerant.

    It's bad enough that in "normal" years (the 3-4 years a decade that are not droughts) the spring growth is expected to dry off and cause bigger fires than normal (ie, drought) years. Australians have a funny way of using language around the weather.

    In unrelated news, a friend has got yet another bit in the Guardian Oz talking about hot weather and electricity generation. The good news is that renewables are a bigger part of the system now and also the more reliable part. The bad news is that they're still only 20-30% and they need to be 100% really soon now. Which is perfectly do-able.

    Meanwhile in Aotearoa councils are asking for 5% of one years GDP over the next decade to fund repairs caused by pretending the climate change isn't happening.

    1069:

    Re: Flood, mud slides, dams giving way, drought, fire, etc.

    So where do the rescuers set up bases if all this is going on? Maybe Mexico would welcome a few environmental [ahem] refugees. (If Mexico doesn't already have a data base of GOP members, pretty sure they could probably get this off FB.)

    Really interesting & scary scenario so looked for more info. Based on the article below, Silicon Valley is likely to be harder hit than LA. Maybe SV-based orgs could pass the hat and collect a few billion to protect their head offices and employees. (They could raise billions just from a few 'rounding errors' and no one would even notice.) To avoid scaring folk, they could build a hi-techie, i.e., weird looking, park complete with large buildings housing odd monuments that could conveniently double as refugee centers for when the ARkStorm hits.

    https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-flood-20180325-htmlstory.html

    1070:

    In that article is a chilling comment: Geologic data points to six mega-storms striking California in the last 1,800 years that were even worse than the 1861-62 storms, based on geologic data collected in the San Francisco Bay and Santa Barbara areas, the report said. And climate change could make such storms more likely in the future — “as the oceans heat up, that means more fuel for an ARkStorm.”

    So it's less an ARkstorm and more of an ARCstorm. The actual ARkStorm is going to be significantly bigger than what's in the geologic record, which in turn is significantly bigger than 1861.

    In Australia the BoM is, well, the bomb :) Various climate records and that also has a page on world rainfall records, from 38mm in one minute and 1.8m in a day to 26m in a year. Australia manages a measly metre a day by comparison.

    1071:

    I find the '100 years flood' way of describing a 1% chance per year really misleading, and I deal with these sort of calculations on a regular basis. To illustrate there's a cumulative probability of approximately 63% that a 100 year flood event would occur over a 100 year period but ask most of the public and they'd tell you, 'No it means that only one will occur in a 100 years'. That's very poor risk communication.

    Not to mention that the numbers are based on assuming process stationarity (er climate change?) that one distribution describes all events (no Dragon Kings!) and that you can reliably pick and fit a distribution to estimate the probability of events so extreme you haven't seen them yet (so oopsie if you use a light tailed distribution but the real process is heavy tailed). As a side note if you use the wrong (light tailed) distribution your frequency of occurrence estimates will be out by factors of magnitude for a heavy tailed process, and that error will gets worse as the severity increases.

    These sort of numbers really need to be understood as having a fundamental political intent rather being some objective measure of reality. They're much more about justifying what we believe we can ignore because the cost of dealing with the consequences is unacceptable. Probability side bias it's called in risk management terms.

    1072:

    Well, the good news is that's less careless than I thought they were. Still, that's a nice explanation. Thanks.

    I agree that the risk calculations are political. The calculation balances what's perceived as affordable versus the risk of having to deal with consequences. If the consequences likely won't be felt for a generation, and it's too expensive to deal with, it won't get built.

    The problem in much of the US is that there's a lot of flood infrastructure that was either built to the "whatever standard" (e.g. old levees in the Sacramento floodplain), or it was built to last 100 years, pushing 100 years ago (a lot of infrastructure, including Mulholland's water pipe out of the Owens Valley), or it was built to deal with a "100 year flood"--up to 100 years ago. With a shifting baseline and various stupidities, we're set up for cascading failures before the money becomes available to fix the problems.

    Still, California has a different set of problems than, say, Houston, where they allowed recent suburbs inside normally-empty flood control reservoirs built to protect the city (https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/harvey-reservoirs) When the reservoirs flooded as designed during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, so did the homes inside them. At least one official who approved the houses denies there was ever a problem, calls it all an accident.

    1073:

    Strategically planting back the trees along the riverbanks can work, take a tributary stream to a main river then foresting the area round it, let the stream make its own meanders, and allow the dead wood from the forest to block the stream where it likes. The catchment system then starts to act more like a sponge rather than a sluice channel. Unfortunately that's counter to current Australian land management (clearing) practices and the current Murray Darling Basin Authority floodplain harvesting caps don't help either.

    1074:

    I was thinking about braided rivers in Aotearoa for a bit, where you get a river bed hundreds of metres wide with multiple channels. When they flood they often fill the whole bed, and the water is moving fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakaia_Bridge is 1.7km long and gets you across one river :)

    The obvious win there is that while 1.7km wide and 2-3m deep is annoying, it carries enough water that the alternative is 20-50km wide and a metre deep and that is a bit of a disaster. I suspect that saying to LA or Silicon Valley "we're just going to bulldoze a riverbed 1km wide from the mountains to the sea, don't mind us" would... fail to reassure?

    1075:

    Charlie @ 1060 "Mafia Family" - so apt. So, we can hope for DT to be "removed" fractionally after the 2020 election deadline, once Pence is thoroughly implicated? One can hope. What happens if DT gets into a "short victorious war" though? Where? Persia - unlikely now the intel community are openly rubbishing that ... one hopes.

    Heteromeles @ 1067 Christian (in the Greg Tingey sense of Christian) Yes, REAL christians - you know, like "Saints" ... Dominic, "Theresa", Cyril of Alexandria, Bernard of Clairvaux, etc And/Or of course, Arnoud Amoury & Jean Calvin.

    1076:

    Well at this stage North Queensland, especially the city of Townsville, is facing unprecedented, never seen before flooding with heavy rains over a widespread area, and some areas getting 350mm in the last 24 hours. In Queensland, water supply dams are generally also flood mitigation dams and that’s true for the dam servicing Townsville (they dumped water to make headroom today), but there are still preparations for a mass evacuation.

    1077:

    I have been watching that with some concern, yes. I fear it genuinely is unprecedented because some of the far north historical climate studies have been quite thorough. I should see if I can find some online.

    My cynical sense of humor reads "preparations for a mass evacuation" and says "via houses floating out to sea?"

    It's worth noting that absolute amounts of rainfall aren't especially useful guides to how bad things are, it's the "worst ever" that matters. There are (a very few) parts of the world where 350mm in a day is a normal storm... you don't get 20m of a rain a year just by constant drizzle. But it also helps give an idea of just what "a very wet storm" can deliver, should someone be inclined to doubt that a metre an hour is even possible (the highest recorded is "only" 0.483m in an hour).

    The page I mentioned above is here and also has a "why do 100 year events happen so often" page that has more detail on MattS comments about not liking that way of presenting things. I've also linked to a similar table from Te Ara,, the Aotearoa equivalent to the BoM. http://www.bom.gov.au/water/designRainfalls/rainfallEvents/worldRecRainfall.shtml https://teara.govt.nz/en/diagram/7771/record-rainfall

    1078:

    Column height in itself is misleading, too, because the area it is happening over is equally important.

    1079:

    Yes, but that could be suppressed in the medium term because, unlike before, they would not be funded and armed from the USA. But this assumes that the new regime or a significant influence on it does not want to exact historical revenge or be otherwise repressive - you see what I am getting at?

    There's another plausible scenario that would be as bad, but let's skip that, and just hope the current loonies in government etc. don't get their way and some kind of sanity prevails.

    1080:

    The mistake is to assume that the “Boston Irish raising funds for PIRA through Noraid and sending guns to the Belfast Brigade” narrative of the 1960s and early 70s held true throughout the Troubles. It didn’t. It became less operationally significant, but remained part of the grand strategy (in attempting to apply political pressure on the UK from the US - see Joey Kennedy and other naive idiots).

    After a couple of early years of Darwinian Wild West behaviour, both sides had culled their own, or each others’ cowboys; and settled down to a more professional approach. PIRA moved to a compartmentalised ASU structure; the money started to flow more from other sources (organised crime); and the serious weaponry came in on boats from Libya (look up the Eksund). “Ballot box and Armalite” makes for a great slogan, but the bulk of their gear was Soviet export stuff, with outliers (the occasional Valmet, a couple of M60, Barrett 0.50, etc).

    The worst-case risk is that a tyrant in a failing state decides to support chaos. Because Armies and Wars are staggeringly expensive, as I’ve pointed out before. You need State-level funding to equip them, or your terror movement is limited to small-time stuff and dealing with criminals (who frankly could do without the competition).

    1081:

    As Nassim Taleb points out in Black Swans we seem to be hardwired to assume we live in a normal world were events cluster around some average value, even though in reality the world is determinedly non-normal and the next flood or drought or bushfire can be much, much worse indeed. That means in turn that you can't rule out such extreme values and they come to dominate the risk ensemble.

    This is not solely an academic question because insurance is based on being able to calculate the expected value of loss (technically the probability weighted average) but to do that you need to be able to bound the severity else it'll be an infinite risk. If risk is believed to be infinite (or close enough) then rational insurers will leave the market and you end up with un-insurable risks. Which is what we're starting to see in areas affected by climate change, like South Florida where the US government is being inveigled to fill up the leaking insurance pool.

    1082:

    Ah yes, "Joey Kennedy", the famous Irish-Italian-American senator, notorious for his love of spaghetti with potatoes.

    You are, I presume, thinking of Teddy Kennedy? His role in the late unpleasantness was rather different than you seem to remember:

    https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fresh-light-shed-on-edward-kennedy-role-in-northern-irish-peace-process-1.2372644

    1083:

    Ah yes, "Joey Kennedy", the famous Irish-Italian-American senator No, the famous American member of the House of Representatives for a district formerly held by his uncle.

    1084:

    You mean the wee ginger lad? Given he was only born in 1980, he can't have a played a prominent role in the days when "the serious shit down" (you could it hear it emanating from the main sewer, declaiming "LESS OF THIS FRIVOLITY").

    1085:

    That should of course read "when the serious shit went down". Stupid lack of an edit button.

    1086:

    I think that the odds of a restart of the Troubles is highly unlikely, whatever the result of Brexit. Too much has changed

  • European countries in general are very old societies. In early 2017, 19% of the UK population was over 65. Based on that, I assume the following
  • a. The numbers were taken from 2016, so the percentage for the UK is larger now probably >20%.

    b. Northern Ireland's percentages are higher

    https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-largest-aging-population-in-the-world.html

  • The Unionist side would split if the UK government threatened to remove their exemptions on same-sex marriage and abortion. In fact, I wonder if Sinn Fein is sitting this one out because their party would break apart if the traditionalists defected? The traditionalists probably prefer the current arrangement or a hard border to having to accept modern laws. Plus they've probably noticed that the ROI is 8% nonwhite and a further 10% "White European".

  • This is a question for anyone who lives in Northern Ireland: how many immigrants are there in NI? I think that you're more likely to see the Unionists and IRA join together to drive out (insert group).

  • 1087:

    Actually, SF as a whole seems to have "got with the programme" where social liberalism is concerned.

    One of their stalwart members in the north split with them recently over the specific issue of abortion, but so far he's only attracted some local councillors - and not necessarily SF ones either.

    https://www.thejournal.ie/peadar-toibin-new-party-2-4465961-Jan2019/

    The rhetoric about "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter" derives from Irish republicanism's origins in the 18th century and its Enlightenment principles, as filtered through the French and American revolutions. It may be a bit of standard boilerplate for all who ride for Rancho Republican, but it's not consistent with Blut und Boden alt-right stuff.

    And to give SF their due, their existence in the south has served as a 'pole of attraction' for protest votes of the type that elsewhere in Europe might go to the far right. And that's not a bit of the political spectrum they could move into, given that they were the first Irish party to put forward African immigrants as electoral candidates.

    So your final point, I'm sorry, is an utter absurdity - and not only because it implies Unionist-Loyalist collaboration. Most immigrants have enough sense to avoid the place, but there is a non-white community there of some vintage at this point. There is violence against non-white people in NI - a friend of a friend of mine was killed in a racist back in the early years of this century - but it's not something SF would ever politically endorse, however flawed their past record might be in other ways.

    1088:

    When Alliance MLA Anna Lo was hit with a lot of racist abuse (Alliance are NI's sister party of the Liberal Democrats), it was widely (universally?) condemned across the political world in NI.

    Martin McGuiness is the first cited here as expressing his support for her:

    https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/anna-lo-outpouring-of-support-for-alliance-politician-quitting-over-ongoing-racist-abuse-30314839.html

    1090:

    And that should read "Unionist-Republican collaboration" in post 1087 above. But you know that.

    1091:

    Re: Stats, tails & odds (Oh my!)

    However, we have correlations (and trend lines) that help refine such predictions, therefore not statistically 'random'? If no, please explain and/or provide example. Thanks!

    1092:

    I'm not Matt, but until he comes back, my understanding comes from stats classes and Taleb's Black Swan, a book which is largely about math, believe it or not.

    There are two inter-related problems. One is that predictions depend on statistical models, aka a curve that best fits the data. The problem is that the outliers can either disproportionately change the shape of the curve, and/or the curve can badly predict when they'll happen. In normal (e.g. normal curve, average) conditions, this doesn't matter so much, which is why normal stats tend to work on the day-to-day stuff.

    The problem is with extreme events: stock market crashes, ARkStorms, firestorms, asteroid impacts, and the like. There aren't many data points, but their effect is huge. For example, we're horrible at predicting when the next dinosaur killer asteroid will hit, because so far as we can tell, we've got three craters in that size range for the last two billion years, and the first two happened a lot closer together than the last one did.

    Taleb makes the point about this with stock markets, noting that a vast majority of the stock market's motion happened in a few huge crashes. The rest of the time normal statistics was a pretty good guide to what the stock market would do, but that didn't predict a majority of the stock market's movement.

    I've seen something similar with firefighting (although they're getting a clue): most California fires are tiny, can be fought by a firefighting company or two, and burn at most 1-2 houses. Something like 95% of the homes lost to wildfires are burned in the few huge wind-driven fires that might only happen once every 50 years in an area (although they hit Malibu every five years or so). The tactics that work on small fires pretty much fail to contain the big ones, at least until the winds die, and firefighters have to adopt different tactics to deal (evacuating people, protecting homes that aren't too flammable). This has led to a LOT of political angst with dealing with firefighters and homeowners.

    Add in climate change, which makes the extremes more extreme, and the whole risk prediction game gets more complicated. It's a mess. I deal with it on the political end, and I certainly get sick of having politicians, firefighters, and sheriffs arrogantly and apparently knowingly lie about the risks they're putting new homeowners in, with some of the latest developments. But that's where the money is at the moment.

    1093:

    Furthermore, rather more republicans don't want Trumpian precedents to carry over to the next Democratic president.

    I saw a talk by Dick Armey[1] not too long after he left Congress. (He's was a hard core small government conservative T during Newt's tenure.) He was trying to tell a conservative audience that rules matter. Because no one group or party will be in the majority forever. So every time you make a rule to make it easier to run over the opposition you need to understand that the opposition will later use it to run over you. Most partisans never seem to get that. The Senate rule change by R's for SCOTUS approvals at 50 vs. 60 was a direct result of the earlier rule change by D's for the same numbers when approving lower court judges.

    Anyway, I don't think it will play out quite that nicely, but it would be an...interesting...end to the mess.

    As in the curse of living in interesting times?

    1094:

    David L Hasn't this exact same thing happened ina couple (?) of Southern states, where the R's passed dubious "Lame-Duck" legislation limiting the actual powers of the next incoming governor, of a different (D) persuasion? Which is now going through the courts .... The US REALLY don't get this at all - never have. It's why they won't sign international treaties & then complain when it comes back to bite them. You would have thought after the CSS Alabama they would have learnt, but no - just carry on with the stupid.

    1095:

    I never bring up politics in a taxi, as a matter of policy—I don't want to end up walking

    I started this sub-thread so...

    In my ride from the airport I/we didn't talk about politics. I hardly said a word. As I said the driver was pointing out landmarks. That building was built for the governor back in 18something. That was where the first parliament was held. That sort of thing. It gradually moved to that's where the protests where held in 19something. Then one to that's where the British massacred the independence fighters in WWI. And so on.

    And ended just before we got to our hotel with something along the lines of "Ireland will be united. Soon".

    Neatly dressed. Independent businessman. Fairly articulate. He had also told us about the new van we were in that he had picked it up in London and ferried it over a few months earlier.

    As I said. One data point. And an interesting 30 minutes.

    1096:

    Completely irrelevant to anything that has gone before, but distinctly Strossian in aspect: proof of concept attack - malware encoded in DNA rogers the computer sequencing it.

    http://www.wired.com/story/malware-dna-hack/

    1097:

    Hasn't this exact same thing happened ina couple (?) of Southern states, where the R's passed dubious "Lame-Duck" legislation limiting the actual powers of the next incoming governor, of a different (D) persuasion?

    Yes. But now your stereotyping. NC is a leader in such (I have a front row seat) but WI, MI, and I think PA are also involved of late.

    The latest here was after the 2016 election. We got a D governor but a veto proof R legislature. So they re-wrote a bunch of laws moving power from governor to legislature. About half got tossed by the courts but the rest remain.

    Then in the 2018 election for the legislature (governor only runs every 4 years) R's still got a majority but lost the veto proof nature. So the legislature was called back into "emergency" session in December before the new things were sworn in in January to change a few more things before they lost the ability to ignore vetos. This is way over simplifying but in general what happened.

    But the R's took over in 2010 after 100 years or so of D rule. Obamacare push back was a part of it. But it didn't help that the D's seemed to be running a comedy show after so long in power. Leading up to that election they managed to have a same sex spat lovers feud involving the state D leaders that went public which didn't help them AT ALL in the 2010 vote. A lot of aging people who had voted D all their life out of habit suddenly decided to switch to R.

    Which brings me to my politics. I tend to be conservative in thoughts. Government should be no bigger than needed. But people need to eat and have health care and not be treated like trash. But every time I want to move to the Ds they start talking more tribal than policy. ARRRRRRRRGH. But I didn't vote for a single R in the last election. First time in 40 years. (I'm a big ticket splitter since, well, forever.)

    1098:

    He was trying to tell a conservative audience that rules matter. Because no one group or party will be in the majority forever. So every time you make a rule to make it easier to run over the opposition you need to understand that the opposition will later use it to run over you. Most partisans never seem to get that.

    I went through this several times after the panic after 9-11. Yes, it really was important to follow the rules. Yes, especially when the leadership is flailing around in a screaming panic. The argument, which they didn't like because it didn't lead to the desired convenient answers for that moment, was pretty straightforward:

    This can be explained to Republicans in three words: President Hillary Clinton. If you don't want Hillary to be able to tap your phone because she feels like it, the time to speak up is when President Bush is talking about warrentless wiretapping of suspected terrorists. Let it be established as a presidential power now and after inauguration day it will be too late.

    Hey, you don't have to listen to me. You can listen to anyone you want. And in a few years Hillary will be listening to you.

    1099:

    Nope, Joseph Kennedy, aka “Joey the Parrot” to the Unionists.

    He arrived in NI in 1988? On a “fact finding” tour, and managed to get himself captured on film telling a soldier to “go home (to Britain)”; and receiving the reply “I am home”...

    1100:

    "direct result of the earlier rule change by D's for the same numbers when approving lower court judges"

    ... which was a direct result of the Republican plan to take over the courts by blocking nominees to hold open slots that they could fill whenever they got an R president.

    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/09/ben-cardin/did-senate-republicans-filibuster-obama-court-nomi/

    This is one of politifacts very irritating checks where they rate it 'half true' on a technicality of verbiage, the key bit in it is actually: "Pre-Obama, 36 judicial nominees were subject to a cloture filing, we found. From 2009-2013, it was the same -- 36 judicial nominees.".

    The democrats could either accept the new rule that democratic presidents don't get to nominate judges unless they also have 60 democratic senators, or they could eliminate the judicial filibuster and get - as we soon came to see - the rule that democratic presidents don't get to nominate judges unless they have 50 senators.

    Anyone who things McConnell would not have eliminated the filibuster to fill all those judicial seats, please reply with your credit card numbers.

    1101:

    Dvid L @ 1097 Um, err, lets see: NC = North Carolina, WI = Wisconsin? MI = Minnesota? PA=Pennsylvania ... Sounds like the way some sections of Liebour were behaving in the NE of England ... about to get theor comeuppance, though. They vated "leave", massively & no Nissan are NOT going to move promised investment/new-production to Britain, why am I not suprised?

    Charlie might throw a fit, but I sometimes think (emote) that ANY area that voted "leave" but has EU funding for social projects ... can bloody well do without & starve after 29/03019, because - that's what they wanted & voted for. Y'all welcome to tell my how/why this is wrong, but it could be interesting.

    JF @ 1100 😁

    1102:

    MI is Michigan, which as I understand it is currently struggling though -30F daytime temps.

    And I guess you’re saying that everyone in those areas voted “leave”. It’s the same way that up above you seem to be suggesting that everyone in Aus voted for parties that support mandatory detention for asylum seekers and endorse the offshore deterrence (other than, oh I don’t know, actively campaign on behalf of a party that does not). The same logic would allow (even compel) me to believe that you voted for Brexit, for instance.

    1103:

    everyone in Aus voted for parties that support mandatory detention for asylum seekers

    It's comparable in the sense that the Liberal Democrats are the remain party and get about 10% of the vote (up to 20% in the past which is remarkable in a first past the post gerrymandered system), while The Australian Greens are the non-torture party and likewise get about 10% of the vote (but in a preferential system without gerrymandering).

    The difference is that the UK had a referendum and discovered that 52% of those bothering to vote did not want BAU (as repeatedly pointed out, the options were "what we have now" and "magic unicorn rainbows").

    In Australia we haven't even had a plebeshite, let alone a referendum. But I fear the result would make brexit look benign, because Australians are bizarrely racist (I mean that in the sense that one way you know immigrants have assimilated is that they become vigorously opposed to immigration and immigrants).

    There's also the subtle difference that 90% of eligible Australians vote but only 70% in the UK. OTOH, 16M/25M (64%) of Australians are eligible to vote of whom about 14.5M do (56%). In the UK the numbers for 2015 are total 64.7M, of whom 20.5M voted (32%). The UK is much less democratic than Australia. But we knew that.

    1105:

    My point with the stats, BTW, is that an actual majority of Australians, when faced with "torture refugees to death (yes/no)" don't regard saying yes as a vote-changing issue (apart from those who, if they exist, would support The Greens except for the refugee problem).

    That's not a majority of voters, people eligible to vote, Australian citizens, or any other fudging. It's an actual cold hard majority of people in Australia would, as they say, not piss on a refugee if they were on fire.

    Whereas in the UK all you can say is that 15% of the population voted for an extra 350M pounds a week for the NHS. Or rainbow unicorns. Or something. And boy is May ever giving you "something" good and hard.

    1106:

    Re: "dinosaur killer" asteroids, we're kind of lucky in Sol system to have the Great Vacuum Cleaner i.e. Jupiter whose gravitaitonal field which has been disrupting and absorbing comets and free-floating asteroids for a few billion years after the system formed. That effect has tidied up the local environment and cut down the number of significant local free-flying objects that might impact our own planet. The worry nowadays is more of an "out of the darkness" rock with an exceedingly elliptical orbit of millions of years or longer coming at us from the Kuiper Belt or even further out but they're rare and the chances of them actually intersecting our orbit, never mind within the couple of minutes each year when an impact might occur is astonishingly rare.

    It's therefore not really surprising that the geological evidence on Earth for large impactors tends towards older timestamps.

    1107:

    I agree that Jupiter is a big help, but it's a little more complicated than that. We've got three big craters: Vredefort (2 billion) Sudbury (1.8 billion) and Chicxulub (0.065 billion). There are a bunch of other craters, notably Manicouagan Crater, but things get strange quite quickly.

    There are two problems. One is the dearth of big craters, which can be laid on the dearth of multibillion year-old landscapes retaining the craters. Another is that, aside from Chicxulub, there's no solid evidence of any of the other craters being associated with extinction events. This suggests that there's a non-linear response curve to asteroid strikes. Below some fairly large threshold size, the strike is just a really bad day. Above that threshold it's a mass extinction event. What's the critical threshold for asteroid strikes? Excellent question! The second problem is that we've only got really good one data point (Chicxulub) relating biome-level impacts to asteroid strikes (Sudbury and Vredefort being back in the unicellular 80% of Earth's history) so we're inferring a hell of a lot from a single data point.

    Getting back to Matt's point, that's the problem with doing stats on disasters, and that's also one of the points of Taleb's Black Swan idea: stats works best when you've got lots of data to work with. When you don't, stats can be extremely misleading.

    1108:

    Re: "The loose boobies of deathly cold"

    Now this ought to go viral!

    1109:

    Yes. Come on now.

    Doesn't everyone on the planet know the US/CA state/province abbreviations? (You have to figure out CA as Canada or California by context at times.)

    And speak English (the US version)? Especially if spoken slowly and loudly?

    1111:

    The Nissan decision isn't actually Brexit-related, except in an odd way. A few days ago a wide-ranging EU-Japan trade agreement came into force. Part of that agreement is large cuts and eventual abolition of tariffs on cars and components between the two trading blocks. Nissan, Toyota and other Japanese car manufacturers built factories in the EU to build cars to sell here rather than face the high tariff costs of manufacturing at home before shipping cars and components to the EU at extra cost. They don't need to do that any more so they're bringing that manufacturing operation back "in-house".

    1112:

    Re: ' ... subtle difference that 90% of eligible Australians vote'

    Because voting in Australia is compulsory. Not a straightforward comparison to 60%+ voter turnouts where voting is discretionary and can require some jumping through hoops, lost time at work (loss of pay), etc.

    1113:

    voting in Australia is compulsory

    That's the loose description. Turning up and getting your name ticked off is compulsory, the 90% is the number who actually cast at least one valid vote. But yes, compulsory voting does seem to be necessary if you're going to get a system capable of allowing people to vote and get people to actually do so. I was shocked to see discussion of UK people being refused the franchise purely because the voting system would be inconvenienced by them doing so. Just keep the booths open until everyone in the queue has voted, it's not hard.

    I think "how many people get to vote" is a core measure of how democratic a country is. Australia is unusual among democracies in that more than half the population vote. Most democracies consider 30% a good number, and quite a lot of those pride themselves on how small the number is (notoriously the US). It's the cabinet problem magnified - the "majority" is "of those allowed to vote, who actually vote, and their vote is counted, and they vote for a member who goes into government, gets appointed to cabinet, and is heard when the leadership are making the decision". In the end it's often fewer than 10 people who actually make the "democratic" decision.

    1114:

    So let's see, if Brexit goes no deal kamikaze, there's a plan to evacuate the Queen, possibly to Hillsborough Castle. I suppose it's evil and uncharitable of me (not to mention far too late) to want to get in the business of selling underground shelters on the Dogger Bank to the hardline Brexiteers and to those on the left who couldn't make a real go of stopping it?

    1115:

    It's an actual cold hard majority of people in Australia would, as they say, not piss on a refugee if they were on fire.

    Yes, the description from my family over there goes roughly like this. Australians really really don't like queue jumpers. A queue of British people will tut and look disapproving. A queue of Australians will go ballistic at the offender and send them to the back, and if they do make it to the front often the vendor will ignore them until they leave.

    Australia is open to all who want to immigrate via their (increasingly locked down) official channels. They are perfectly happy and indeed welcoming to the limited number of official refugees whom they cherry pick from the selection overseas and bring in formally. The boat people however are viewed as economic refugees and trying to cheat the system - after all there are a hell of a lot of countries between Australia and where they came from - and therefore need to go to the back of the line and apply like everyone else.
    It's also one reason they turned sour on the kiwis back in the 90s - NZ was widely viewed as a shortcut to get into the country - migrants would head to NZ for a couple of years, get residency or citizenship then scarper over the ditch to Oz. Subsequently the NZ side tightened up a lot as well, but NZers in Oz now no longer have a direct path to residency and citizenship - as Russell Crowe found even being rich doesn't help.

    1116:

    I still find it really weird that UK election day is explicitly not done on a weekend. They also deliberately make it harder for people to vote even though the polls are open until 10pm, since you can only vote at your specific designated local polling station, not anywhere in the electorate or country. Unless you cast a postal vote, but those have to be done in advance. Several work colleagues have been unable to vote in the past thanks to transport issues getting home from London back to their official station.

    By contrast in NZ I can actually vote at any polling station in the country up to two weeks before the election day itself. Just walk in at a time convenient for you, they check your details against the roll and away you go.

    1117:

    election day is explicitly not done on a weekend

    Note that in Australia it's not called "sausage day" because of the gender of the candidates but because almost every polling place has a sausage sizzle outside it. Generally raising funds for the school hosting the polling booth, but even the more unlikely places have them (our local "not a mosque" hall has a halal bbq that offers sausage, onions and sauce in a roll because to do otherwise would be missing the point. They have proper food too, unlike many others).

    I like early voting, and the enthusiasm with which the kiwis try to make me vote even though I'm not eligible. I've seen NZ polling booths in quite unlikely places around Sydney. And they're usually "are you really, really, completely utterly certain that you haven't touched New Zealand soil even once in the last three years? Come on, not even the embassy?" (embassies don't count, you have to actually visit the country). And no, I'm not flying to NZ every three years just so I can vote.

    In the 2017 election 54% of New Zealanders voted, almost as many as the 56% who vote in Australia despite it being optional. The stat is pushed up by Aotearoa being one of the few (only?) countries that lets permanent residents as well as citizens vote. I may have mentioned this before, but it still amuses me that the US both taxes and disenfranchises so many people despite the "no taxation without representation" slogan.

    1118:

    FWIW Australia is also moving to encourage early voting, we have a lot of early voting booths open and they tend to be open quite long hours, 7am - 7pm seems to be common but I've seen both 6am opening and 10pm closing. You can vote anywhere and while there is still a "must have a reason" and there's a list of acceptable ones in the legislation the actual staff tend to say either "you made the effort to come here therefore you obviously need to vote early" or they point to the list on the wall behind them and say "choose a reason from this list" :)

    The NZ immigration to Australia situation was complicated by the number of non-white New Zealanders and the refusal of Muldoon to permit Australia to make special rules for them. A refusal that has been repeated several times. Muldoon also be famous for "every New Zealander that migrates to Australia raises the average IQ of both countries". I've had to explain what that means to a few Australians :)

    1119:

    Greg Tingey @ 1059: JBS
    Repeat of earlier Q...
    What are the supposed procedures for removing an insane Pres?
    And can they remove Pence as well, of course?
    Which is why "Waiting for Mueller" might be the better option, if Pence can be snagged simultaneously, of course

    First thing to know is I am NOT a Lawyer, so anything I write here is just my understanding of the text of the Constitution as Amended.

    1: Congress's first recourse for removing a President (insane or not) is Impeachment by the House and Trial by the Senate

    Article 2, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

    This would apply to Trump AND Pence. It also applies to Cabinet Secretaries, Federal Judges & even to Supreme Court Justices. Several Federal Judges & I think at least one Cabinet Secretary have been impeached and REMOVED. At least one Supreme Court Justice resigned rather than face Impeachment.

    Article 1, Section 3, Paragraph 7: Judgment in Cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

    Leaving aside the question of what actually qualifies as a high Crime and Misdemeanor, the House can impeach a president by a simple majority.

    The trial then takes place in the Senate where a two-thirds majority is required to convict. It's kind of ambiguous whether a sitting President would be indicted and what would happen if the House refused to Impeach and/or the Senate failed to convict. IF the President IS impeached, the only judgment the Senate can impose is removal from office, although the President is still "liable and subject ... according to Law" after removal. There's no question he could be indicted after leaving office.

    The precedents conflict. In Watergate, Nixon was named an "un-indicted co-conspirator" because the Special Prosecutor didn't think he could indict a sitting President. Yet the Supreme Court ruled the Paula Jones lawsuit could go ahead while Clinton was still in office. My personal opinion is a sitting President CAN indicted.

    What would happen if a President murdered someone in the Oval Office? Would the police have to wait to arrest him until he was out of office? What if he were to be reelected? Would the police have to wait another 4 years? What if while they were waiting for him to leave office the President attended a G20 summit in a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S. and decided not to come back?

    2: The other path to removing Trump is the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Clause 4 is the relevant passage.

    Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
    Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

    The process is extremely unwieldy and it doesn't actually remove the President; only sideline's him.

    First, Pence and a majority of the Cabinet have to decide to remove Trump. They have to send a letter to the President pro tem [of the Senate - Charles Grassley] & the Speaker [of the House of Representatives - Nancy Pelosi] declaring Trump is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

    If Trump does not object, Pence immediately assumes the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Trump remains President, with Pence doing the job. If Trump does object, he sends a letter to the President pro tem & the Speaker declaring no such inability exists.

    Pence and a majority of the Cabinet would have 4 days to send another letter to the President pro tem & the Speaker stating Trump IS UNABLE.

    At that point, Congress has 21 days to convene and determine by a two-thirds majority of BOTH houses that Trump IS UNABLE to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

    In which case Pence continues to be the Acting President. Failing a two-thirds majority, Trump resumes "the powers and duties of his office."

    The Twenty-fifth Amendment also provides a much simpler mechanism for replacing a Vice President if for whatever reason (impeachment, resignation or death) he/she might leave office before completing his/her term. This is how Gerald Ford became Nixon's Vice President after Spiro Agnew resigned and how Nelson Rockefeller became Ford's Vice President after Nixon resigned.

    Consider the following POSSIBLE scenario:

    Trump is impeached and removed (and indicted and convicted ...). Pence then becomes President. In that case, Pence would appoint a new Vice President subject to confirmation by a simple majority of both houses of Congress. That new Vice President could then invoke clause 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to displace Pence and assume the role as Acting President, with Pence triggering the process requiring Congress to vote on it.

    The most interesting question for me is what happens to the Vice President & Cabinet officers if they DON'T get their two-thirds majority?

    And who would become President if Pence successfully invoked the Twenty-fifth Amendment against Trump. There's no provision for appointing a new Vice President in that case. Pence would be simultaneously Vice President and Acting President, but Trump would technically still be President. Would Trump resume office? Or would the position of Acting President devolve to the next in line, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi?

    1120:

    Rick Moen @ 1063:

    JBS @1057: The thing about Trump going down in flames is I don't think the GOP has sense enough to bail out in time. It remains to be seen if the GOP will crash & burn with him or without him.

    For the country's sake, with is devoutly to preferred, IMO. After Project REDMAP's unprecedented gerrymandering, rampant voter suppression tactics, the spiking of not just Merrick Garland's nomination but also those of hundreds of other Obama nominations to the Federal bench, and now apparently conspiring with the Russian government and associated oligarchs by not just Марионетка Влада (Vlad's puppet) but also key GOP leaders in Congress, it's clear that this has become a party with no principles whatsoever and no loyalty to the republic. Let them ride with the Toddler-in-Chief down to the oubliette and stay there.

    And the diehard 22% Trump base? The experience of 45 years ago suggests they won't learn, they can't learn, and that fortunately it doesn't matter: Even after resignation, a quarter of the electorate remained Nixon diehards, but what ended up inspiring the August 1974 resignation was defections in the Senate caused by Nixon losing non-diehard support in the 1974 mid-term elections. That could easily happen again in the 2020 general election, depending on just how much of the Trump/McConnell criminal scheming has been uncovered by then.

    Thus, I'd really rather the bastards not be removed from office, but rather humiliated at the polls.

    I agree, I just don't know if it will happen. I look at the Governor's race in Georgia, where the GOP candidate clearly abused the power of his office as Georgia' Secretary of state to use Voter Suppression and still the courts wouldn't stop him. I just don't have a lot of confidence they'll ever be called to account.

    1121:

    MattS @ 1071: I find the '100 years flood' way of describing a 1% chance per year really misleading, and I deal with these sort of calculations on a regular basis. To illustrate there's a cumulative probability of approximately 63% that a 100 year flood event would occur over a 100 year period but ask most of the public and they'd tell you, 'No it means that only one will occur in a 100 years'. That's very poor risk communication.

    Here where I live in Raleigh, NC, they had two "100 year floods" and a "500 year flood" within a single decade. The two "100 year floods" occurred less than six months apart. Since then the "100 year floods" come along about every three years.

    There are a couple of car dealers on either side of Crabtree Creek, and you can tell when they're forecasting heavy rains because you drive over Crabtree Creek on Wake Forest Rd and both dealers' lots will be empty.

    1122:

    JBS @ 1119: And who would become President if Pence successfully invoked the Twenty-fifth Amendment against Trump. There's no provision for appointing a new Vice President in that case. Pence would be simultaneously Vice President and Acting President, but Trump would technically still be President. Would Trump resume office? Or would the position of Acting President devolve to the next in line, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi?

    Ok, I see I butchered that.

    What I'm trying to get at here is the Twenty-fifth Amendment does NOT have a process to appoint an Acting Vice President if Clause 4 is invoked against the President. The whole point of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is what to do if a President is temporarily incapacitated.

    Because the President is not actually removed from office, the Vice Presidency is not vacant. What happens if the Vice President is impeached and removed from office while he is the Acting President? (or resigns or dies ...?)

    The President who was set aside because he was "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office is still the President. Does he automatically resume his "powers and duties" if there's no Vice President?

    Especially if the President was involuntarily set aside because he'd gone nucking futs and nobody wanted him near that "big red button".

    Who decides whether the President is able to resume his "powers and duties"? What if he remains "unable" to do so?

    And since the office of Vice President is now vacant, who appoints a new Vice President?

    1123:

    Still binge reading this enormous thread, but since I don't see on this host's twitter feed, the President of the United States, a few hours ago, bold mine:

    With Caravans marching through Mexico and toward our Country, Republicans must be prepared to do whatever is necessary for STRONG Border Security. Dems do nothing. If there is no Wall, there is no Security. Human Trafficking, Drugs and Criminals of all dimensions - KEEP OUT!

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2019

    The especially funny part is that Rule Number One For Interpreting D.J. Trump Statements is that all accusations are confessions. That means that DJT is confessing, on twitter, that criminals from other dimensions are in his adminstration. Turf war!

    1124:

    I like what you've said about the NZ polling places in Aus, since I've never seen anyone ever mention that before. Lots of similarities between the two countries - Saturday voting, compulsory enrolment (tho' not voting in NZ), sausage sizzles.

    Aussie gets a 90% turnout and ~5% invalid votes, NZ runs about 80% with 0.5% invalid. Not so great a difference in the end.

    Making voting as easy as possible is important - postal votes, advance voting, the ability to vote at any polling place (not just in your own electorate). Heck, there's even polling booths in the departure lounges of the international airports in NZ. There's 2,800 polling places in NZ's 100,000 sq miles in a general election - about 1:1250 enrolees - ranging from about 30 to 80 per 30k electorate (more in rural areas).

    It'd be interesting to see if allowing permanent residents votes made a difference to the Aus voting patterns. As a Kiwi I was able to vote in the UK when I lived there and did so.

    1125:

    I'll start with an example and explain why our usual bag of statistical tricks find heavy tails difficult.

    I teach a university class from time to time, so say I sum up the height of four random students in my class and their total height is 7.56m, you'd be correct to think that it'd be because their all 1.89m high*. Human height is normally distributed (a light tail) which mean an an extreme can only happen because of the sum of unusual events. Say however that human height is heavy tailed, that means there's a reasonable chance someone is going to be very, very tall. In this world if I sum up a random sample of class heights and find a total of 8m it could now be because one of them is actually 3 metres tall. In this world one extreme event can cause an extreme consequence on it's own.

    Substitute floods or fires or droughts or reactor core breaches for people and you see that whether event probability is heavy tailed or not has real implications. In our normally distributed world it's a run of bad but not terribly extreme events that can add up to ruin, but in our heavy tail world it's the size of just one event that can ruin you.

    Problem is that classical statistical estimation is based on the central limit theorem and the law of large numbers and both of these rely on the assumption that you live in a normally distributed world. If you don't then things like the law of large numbers, sample means, empirical statistics (curve fitting), standard deviations, linear least square regression either don't work or are quite unreliable. Which tosses most of our really great statistical tools out the window. What you see a lot of people do is vaguely acknowledge that their data might be heavy tailed, shrug shoulders, assume a different distribution and still apply the above standard techniques with predictable consequences.

    The good news is that there are (some) techniques that you can use on heavy tails, because they're resistant to heavy tail effects, such as Mean Excess Heuristic, Maximum Likelihood and Gini coefficients, but even so it's difficult. But of course we generally don't teach undergraduate engineers and scientists about heavy tailed statistics, so they assume everything is 'normal' or that 'normal' statistical techniques have universal applicability.

    Hope that helps.

    • Probably because the basketball team is taking my course.
    1126:

    In news just to hand, the Department of "now you're just taking the piss" Physics have decided that the mirror experiment is worth trying. Of course, with only E800M or so to play with they're having to cheat a lot, but they really do want to shine a petawatt laser at a mirror that's moving close to the speed of light "because we don't really understand what will happen if we do that".

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132140-300-whats-inside-nothing-this-laser-will-rip-it-up-to-find-out/

    1127:

    UK polling stations are really close together & easy to get to & IIRC are open 07.00-22.00 Thursdays, because of an historical hangover from when that was Pay Day - in cash for most people A really strenuous attempt is made to ensure that the electoral registers are kept up-to-date, so that you don't get the US voter suppression issue & we have the Boundary Commission to attempt to stop Gerrymandering ( Locally there's a furious suppressed fight going on on this very subject ) General Elections usually get a reasonable turnout, though I STILL don't understand why any turnout should be less than 70% - but then I think I have voted in every single election since I was old enough to have the franchise....

    JBS @ 1120 the GOP candidate clearly abused the power of his office as Georgia' Secretary of state to use Voter Suppression That is what scares me - that simply "Could not happen here" Because the "R" in Georgia was quite open about it - & got away with it ... whereas here, the press & the police & the rest of Parliament would want his blood. A very dubious ( Religious-based, what a suprise & led by a bent now ex-Solicitor ) grouping tried this in an Inner London Borough at local level about 5 years back - they came unstuck, even though they had partly-bought some of the local police ....

    1128:

    The Nissan decision isn't actually Brexit-related, except in an odd way.

    No, it's totally Brexit-related. The reason Nissan set up to manufacture in the UK in the first place was to have a toe in the EU, as you noted. Now they've got a whole lot of infrastructure, facilities, experienced staff, etc. in the UK; normally they'd keep that running as long as it was profitable, and building the new-gen X-Trail in the same place as the old-gen X-Trail would be a no-brainer ... except the combination of Brexit and the EU/Japan trade deal means there's a high risk of tariff barriers making it harder to export from the UK to the EU (and rest of world) than to export from Japan to the EU, or even build a plant in some other EU country with cheaper labour and lots of car building experience (e.g. Czechia or Spain).

    1129:

    Unless you cast a postal vote, but those have to be done in advance.

    Not actually true: you can cast a postal vote in advance, or you can take the ballot papers to your designated local polling place. Of which there are a lot; if you live in a town or city (as most of us do) it'll almost certainly be within half a kilometre of your home, i.e. walking distance, and in a public-ish building with accessibility features. My current local polling station is a primary school about 200 metres from my front door, but I don't think I've ever lived much further away from one.

    (I have a postal vote because I've been known to spend up to 3 months of the year out of the country. After the initial application it's just a checkbox on the electoral roll update form that comes once a year.)

    1130:

    Yes, but why can’t I take my postal vote to the polling station 200m from my office? Or use the polling station that is 200m from home in the other direction but next to the supermarket?
    It’s oddly specific, and they also don’t tell you in the letter where your designated voting station is - I've moved several times within an electorate and each election afterwards involves wandering my area between 2-3 stations to work out where I should be to actually vote. “Right street, wrong church, for that address you want the one on the next corner down. This church only does the tower block next door.”

    It’s not hard to have a mailbag in the corner of the polling station that gets treated as super priority mail on closing - the envelope is standardised so trivial to sort properly. I’d happily trade a minor increase in potential voter fraud for an increase in people who actually vote because they no longer have barriers in the way.

    1131:

    though I STILL don't understand why any turnout should be less than 70% - but then I think I have voted in every single election since I was old enough to have the franchise

    Greg: you're older than me. At 54, in generational terms the Americans reading this will understand, I'm on the very leading edge of Gen-X; you are a Boomer.

    Thatcher was elected the year I turned 15.

    My first general election was the 1983 one; a choice of Thatcher (who had comprehensively shat on my generation), Michael Foot (see: Jeremy Corbyn), and the Liberal-SDP Alliance, who had screwed the pooch and went down in flames. (Non-Brits/Brits under 50: the SDP was a bunch of centre-right Labour MPs who split in 1980 to form a social democrat party. They're where the Liberal Democrats get the "Democrat" bit of their name from.)

    From then on, every single election resulted in the same bastards getting in, until I was 33, in 1997, and Tony Blair was elected. Who turned out to be the vanguard of New Labour, who had triangulated on Thatcher and were probably to the right of Edward Heath (Conservative leader before Thatcher).

    Electing Blair was only a temporary improvement over John Major, insofar as it temporarily fixed the epic corruption problem of the 1992-97 Tory government: but it was still a right-wing privatization-obsessed bunch of control freaks at the helm, with some redistributive policies targeting poverty. This latter was good, but ... poor people are less likely to vote (too busy trying to survive/don't expect it'll change anything because the MPs are all rich nobs on ten times their income).

    Fast-forward to 2010. The Tories are back again, aided and abetted and with their worst impulses kept on a leash by the LibDems (who again, stupidly screwed the pooch by going into coalition). Austerity is macroeconomic gibberish but sounds right to ill-educated middle class people and the elderly who still harboured sepia-tinted memories of the Blitz spirit and Vera Lynn singing "We'll meet again". In particular, the Tories carefully don't clamp down austerity on pensioners, but apply the thumbscrews to everybody else. This wins them the 2015 election, and you know the rest.

    Upshot: for my entire voting life the UK has been ruled by a right-wing party, with no viable alternative on the menu. Lots of shrieking and noise in the tabloid press, but? In the end, sod-all changed: both parties were intensely comfortable with the filthy rich while pandering to a specific set of voter interests at others' expense. I just barely remember the tail-end of a time when things were different, the period from 1945-1979 when there was a fairly clear alternative on offer, when it was possible for a Roy Jenkins to be Home Office minister, for example. But ever since 1979 English politics has steadily drifted to the right due to risk-averse triangulation by the left and capture by special interest groups on the right, so that what an election has to offer to Generation X and the Millennials doesn't look like any kind of choice at all.

    1132:

    why can’t I take my postal vote to the polling station 200m from my office? Or

    Because of the way voters are authenticated. You go to your local station and you probably noticed they cross your name off a list of voters before they hand you the ballot. This is to discourage/prevent casting multiple votes. It's crude, but it works. It also dates to an age when people didn't generally have long commutes—and you'll note the polling station opens early and closes late, bracketing normal office/shop hours.

    There are other ways of authenticating voters but they generally rely on the voter providing a form—or on electronic voting machines (which are an enormous can of worms and a really bad idea in my opinion, based on the security problems they've encountered in the US and elsewhere).

    1133:

    As you will know, it's worse than that. The simpler long-tailed distributions (e.g. Poisson(0.01), which is the default 100-year one) are pretty 'civilised', have enough moments, and parametric methods work well (if used correctly!) But it is NOT true that all are like that, even basic rules like the Law of Large Numbers don't always work, and nor do many of the robustness techniques.

    The example I used when I needed to teach or explain this was effective income, which is best modelled by a distribution without a mean, so ALL statistics based on (arithmetic) averages vary from misleading to totally bogus. The ones based on quantiles are OK, though.

    1134:

    Yes, though you are maligning Michael Foot somewhat :-) Blair was to the right of Macmillan, let alone Heath. However, there is a significant point that is often omitted, which remains important as far as voting goes (not least because of the influence of us old fogies, but for other reasons, too).

    The initial shift in the Tories (and New Labour) was not just left to right but also paternalistic to monetarist, and in some important ways was a move towards Old Labour's more loathesome attitudes (just favouring a different tribalism). But it also marked a shift from patriotism to subservience to the USA - compare Vietnam and Iraq for an obvious example (I have personal experience of many others). And the latter is extremely relevant to Brexit, because one of the main objections to the EU is that it constrains our subservience to the USA.

    Even including Corbyn, we haven't had a realistic option since Heath that wasn't (a) monetarist and (b) subservient to the USA. And I don't see how we can rebuild our economy, let along our society, without getting out from under of both of those :-(

    1135:

    I think voter apathy in the UK is also likely a factor given that so many people live in safe seats - if you can't affect the outcome then what's the point?

    I'd also argue that unless you have a certain special interest or cause (UKIP, SNP, Plaid) or you're on either end of the bell curve income wise, then you'd need a special instrument to measure the actual policy differences that affect you between either of the main political parties.

    1136:

    Yes, they do that in NZ as well, but after the election they cross reference the rolls from each polling station to see if the same name is used repeatedly. Last election they had ~125 cases of multiple votes, which were passed on to the police. That’s a rate of 0.005%, which in the UK would equate to maybe 3000 cases. It isn’t a significant risk in western society, especially given how few people actually bother to vote at times, but is often seized upon as a way of disenfranchising people, especially in the US.

    But yes, I can definitely understand the apathy of the UK electorate given the fact that nothing has really changed in 40 years. No wonder Blair came across as a breath of fresh air at the time, even if it was mostly marketing.

    1137:

    Charlie @ 1131 Ah yes Ted Heath - greatly under-rated & crapped on, but screwed by both the idiots in "the Unions" - who then got us Thatcher, & his own party, later ...

    1138:

    Which is a larger proportion; 175 in 60000 (nominal Electoral Roll for $constituency) or 175 in 20000 (likely turnout)?

    1139:

    Thanks, I'd love to hear the difference between a long tail and a heavy tail sometime.

    Anyway, the way I think of it is that if Bill Gates (net worth $96 billion) walks into a bar, on average, everyone in the bar becomes a billionaire unless it's a really crowded bar. That also points out the problem of talking about "prosperous nations," but that's a different topic.

    1140:

    I've been offline all weekend for reasons of various personal significance, but I just want to make some final comments on the NI sub-thread that was rumbling on.

    Firstly, in the case of how serious the situation (laugh if you get this joke!) could be in NI post-Brexit, the main point of my previous ramblings was that there isn't a good way to say for certain. There are paths that lead to bad, paths that lead to worse, paths that lead to everything carrying on with the same low-level theocratic sectarian shitshow that we have now (yes, it's better than it was, but still many steps behind any decent European democracy that you care to mention).

    The best we can do is assign probability to the options (and only roughly at that): - The chance of things rumbling on much the same is close to zero (only likely in the case of Brexit being cancelled). - The chance of things getting as bad as the 70's and 80's are low (as pointed out by others this would require both a hard border -- land or sea -- and state-level support for violence from an outside source). - The chance of things being worse than they are now is high (pretty much a given, between existing identity politics on Brexit steroids, opportunistic fuckwits, and economic damage). - The chance of things being worse the 70's or 80's, as in full scale civil war type bad, are close to zero but not impossible (this is absolutely a worse case scenario, and only possible if the UK government went with the nuclear option of just cutting and running by handing NI over to the Republic or something similar -- I find it hard to totally discount this option, given the current Government's willingness to pander to its own most extreme elements.)

    Secondly, in regards to the corruption questions about NI: To the core voters this simply doesn't matter. Voting in NI remains largely split along tribal lines -- consider that we have routinely elected convicted criminals because they stood for the right party. Think of a system where actual policies and actions just don't matter, both in the sense that the majority of voters don't consider it important beyond where a party stands vis a vis "the Union", and because the NI political system is configured in such a way that most policy decisions are made by MPs in Westminster that do not need to rely on the good graces of the NI electorate (slightly changed under current circumstances).

    Thirdly, addressing the questions about NI's immigrant population and the attitude to that population. As DJPOK has already noted, NI Republicanism in general and SF as it's primary representative force leans towards the liberal/left end of the social spectrum and tends towards tolerance and acceptance of immigrants (they are usually first out of the gate to criticise any racially motivated crimes); Unionism and specifically DUP derive a lot of their power from whipping up fear of "the other", which starts with Republicans and Catholics, but then spreads nicely to cover anyone not of a provable observable WASPish nature (while mouthing the right words after racial hate crimes, just look up what Unionist politicians have said in regards to minorities, google "Sammy Wilson" for a particular flavour of the racism lurking beneath the DUP's surface). Without going into too much detail, there is a well established Indian and Chinese community in Belfast, and growing immigrants communities from Eastern Europe (particularly Poland), as well as Middle-Eastern and African communities -- however all are small in comparison to the same demographics for similar sized cities in the rest of the UK (outside of Belfast, immigrant communities are almost non-existent); this does create an environment where low-level racism and general intolerance of immigrants is sadly normalised.

    Going to bow out now, in deference to Charlie's patience with this topic.

    1141:

    This comic shows that the ongoing Brexit / DJT fiascos are helping at least somebody - aliens doing some harvesting.

    (That cartoon is a good one for anyone wanting to binge-read. At least IMO.)

    1142:

    The Nissan decision isn't actually Brexit-related, except in an odd way.

    No, it's totally Brexit-related. The reason Nissan set up to manufacture in the UK in the first place was to have a toe in the EU, as you noted.

    That was not why they set up in the UK, and the X-Trail decision is apparently far more prosaic.

    The version of the X-Trail that they intended to build would be a Diesel powered unit. Since the market for Diesel powered cars in Japan is basically zero, it made sense to build the Diesel units in Europe. However, since the market for Diesel powered cars in Europe is now also basically zero, there's no point building them here. The entire petrol fleet is therefore being built in Japan, Brexit having very little to do it and crappy environmental legislation from Europe being at fault.

    The Mad Handbag got into her head that because Tyneside shipbuilding had been trashed by a combination of left wing idiocy, couldn't-give-a-stuff Conservatism, and the changing market requirements (The oil industry for example.) she tried to lure something, anything, to Sunderland. Other daft schemes from that period included the Gateshead International Garden Festival, the toytown underground system and the god awful Metrocentre.

    1143:

    "The Nissan decision isn't actually Brexit-related, except in an odd way. No, it's totally Brexit-related. The reason Nissan set up to manufacture in the UK in the first place was to have a toe in the EU, as you noted. "

    Formatting/Typing error - Sorry for any confusion.

    1144:

    ASM @ 1142 by "The toytown undergound system" I presume you mean Tyneside Metro? Which actually works quite well, takes vast amounts of traffic off the roads & ought to be extended to Blyth & Ashington? Cities like Leeds would kill for such an asset.

    1145:

    Re: ' ... shine a petawatt laser at a mirror that's moving close to the speed of light'

    Thanks - was able to only read the intro (paywall) but sounds interesting. Found a paper on what experiments they're planning. Some of this sounds as though it's based on Mourou & Strickland's (2018 Nobel Physics) work - getting more energy via pulses. Hope they get decent media coverage for whatever it is they find. (What does Count Dracula think of mega lasers on his turf?)

    https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4984872

    As for 'because we don't really understand': I think of this as similar to saying maybe there are temps lower than the freezing and boiling points of water.

    1146:

    Greg - Crossrail's tunnels are 6.2 metres in diameter. When you factor in the OHLE equipment, that is on the large side, but that is future-proofing in some ways because it is arguably the last new line under the capital that will be built for many, many years.

    The Tyne and Wear metro has tunnels on it's central network that are 4.75 metres diameter in total. They could have built them larger but because it was done on the cheap, they didn't, and there's little likelihood of enlarging them in a million years. The Docklands Light Railway is similarly Toytown, but is intrinsically gauge limited due to all of the funny viaducts and Victorian sections it successfully repurposed. Tyne and Wear had all of the full size rail alignments inherited from it's heavy rail origins and yet was Toytown by design.

    You are that Greg Tingey from London Reconnections aren't you? Leeds's chance for a light rail or tram system has in some ways gone. Most of Leeds's successful economic sectors that attract the jobs and people already involve people commuting in from greater distances.

    1147:

    About Pence: he was head of the Trump Transition team. HE KNEW about Manafort... because a week after the election, Rep. Cummings sent him a letter warning him about Marafort... and Cummings has, more than once, said, in public, that he has the delivery receipt, so Pence can't claim to not have known (even though, at least once, he did claim so).

    Not that I really want her, but scarier than Pres. Hillary would be Pres. Nancy Pelosi....

    1148:

    "St. Cyril of Alexandria"... everything of his should be facking BURNED, and desanctified.

    He was the one who incited his followers such that later than night, they pulled Hypatia, a Pagan, a librarian of the Library, and uppity woman, out of her chariet, and skinned her alive with oyster shells.

    Early ninieties, on alt.pagan, we decided that she was #1 Pagan Saint.

    1149:

    Boston Irish?

    In '09, the St. Paddy's Day before I left Chicago for DC, I went to the Irish-American Center for music. Yeah, about that: other than a friend I ran into, NOT ONE PERSON spoke to me, and in the evening, a really popular group came on, people pushed in front of me (I was almost in front) to block my view, and they went heavily into Republican songs... and the whole atmosphere was "if you're not Irish-American, South Side (Chicago) and pro-IRA, you're not welcome", so I left.

    Oddly enough, on the day itself, a Tuesday, I think it was, I went to an Irish pub, and everyone there was very friendly, I even got invited to dance with someone.

    < shakes head >

    1150:

    You do realize what comes next, don't you? The malware proceeds to generate wifi signals that affect RNA, and the result is that everyone around catches a virus....

    1151:

    No. We need big government.

    Let's see: Pres. of the US, salary, $440k, I think. HOW MUCH do the CEOs of Bank of America, and M$, and Apple, and Google, and Amazon, and... make?

    Self-regulation DOES NOT WORK (deregulate S&Ls... 1989 or so, scandal, dereg telecoms, '96, dot.com buble, 2001, kill Glass-Steagal, '99 or so, 2008 disaster) Do I need to go on?

    On and when the S&Ls were deregulated, Raygun (or was it Bush 1?) cut funding for the IRS, so there weren't vaguely enough auditors....

    We need big government, BY THE PEOPLE, to control Big Corporate.

    1152:

    A S Mooney Yes - we'll tak about "appropriate "& othe railways some other time - Pigeon will want to join in too IIRC ....

    whitroth yup - few people know about what an utter complete bastard Cyril was.....

    1153:

    or on electronic voting machines (which are an enormous can of worms and a really bad idea in my opinion, based on the security problems they've encountered in the US and elsewhere).

    I and my friends in IT have been yelling about these for years. Ever since they were proposed as solutions to "hanging chads" and 40 year old lever machines. But new and shiny beats out old tried and true in most marketing campaigns. (A touch screen ballot is a beta test AT BEST in each vote. Period. Full Stop.) Oh well.

    At least my county has stuck with paper ballots counted via scanners. Any issues and a big room of people can hand count them.

    1154:

    Anyway, the way I think of it is that if Bill Gates (net worth $96 billion) walks into a bar, on average, everyone in the bar becomes a billionaire unless it's a really crowded bar.

    Anytime anyone wants to talk averages with me on an issue more important than baseball scores I usually ask for the median. And usually get a blank stare. Oh, well.

    1155:

    Re: '... wifi signals that affect RNA,'

    Looks like there's some science behind this:

    Exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic waves alters acetylcholinesterase gene expression, exploratory and motor coordination-linked behaviour in male rats

    'Abstract

    Humans in modern society are exposed to an ever-increasing number of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and some studies have demonstrated that these waves can alter brain function but the mechanism still remains unclear. Hence, this study sought to investigate the effect of 2.5 Ghz band radio-frequency electromagnetic waves (RF-EMF) exposure on cerebral cortex acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity and their mRNA expression level as well as locomotor function and anxiety-linked behaviour in male rats. Animals were divided into four groups namely; group 1 was control (without exposure), group 2–4 were exposed to 2.5 Ghz radiofrequency waves from an installed WI-FI device for a period of 4, 6 and 8 weeks respectively. The results revealed that WiFi exposure caused a significant increase in anxiety level and affect locomotor function. Furthermore, there was a significant decrease in AChE activity with a concomitant increase in AChE mRNA expression level in WiFi exposed rats when compared with control. In conclusions, these data showed that long term exposure to WiFi may lead to adverse effects such as neurodegenerative diseases as observed by a significant alteration on AChE gene expression and some neurobehavioral parameters associated with brain damage.'

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475001730063X

    FYI - mystery illness affecting foreign diplomats (and families incl. kids) in Havana has shown up in at least one US embassy employee in China.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44223523

    1156:

    You seem to have omitted Poulson, Stonehouse and 'ungovernable' Britain from your version of pre-1979 political history though? I'm not sure why Kinnock's Labour weren't the centre-left party you wanted to support? Why was Major's government 'epically corrupt' compared to PFI?

    Labour had to triangulate to squeeze the media-led SDP. It had been the SDP which caused not only Conservative victories, but the landslides that led to Thatcherism rather than a Margaret Thatcher led Conservatism. It seems unusual to express nostalgia for Roy Jenkins when it was Jenkins in particular who called for the realignment of British politics which crushed an entire generation.

    1157:

    FYI - mystery illness affecting foreign diplomats (and families incl. kids) in Havana has shown up in at least one US embassy employee in China. Oh, I've heard of that again just about a month ago. They even made a Wiki article for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack-cuba-crickets.html

    1158:

    for my entire voting life the UK has been ruled by a right-wing party, with no viable alternative on the menu.

    Whereas those of us in Australia have got to vote on everything from "do aborigines count" to whether we want soft or hard neoliberalism and even whether we want reluctant or enthusiastic reductions in the severity of climate change. Sure, in every case it was a half-hearted thing and a bit of a Hobson's Choice in that it was always "how much" not "whether", but there was at least a choice.

    Aotearoa, OTOH, has been pretty radical aye. The choice between Muldoon and Lange was stark, especially after the 1981 Springbok Tour brought police riots (Madness tribute band :)) to much of the country. We got neoliberalism anyway, but state price fixing? By a right wing government? Only in New Zealand. Partly as a reaction to the "rogernomics" debacle we got to vote on the electoral system, and changed to MMP as a result. Oh, and did I mention that we went nuclear free after a terrorist attack committed by the French government? Kiwis have strong opinions about politics and a responsive government. Voting works!

    1159:

    similar to saying maybe there are temps lower than the freezing and boiling points of water.

    My reading is more that there's fairly widespread agreement that at a certain intensity exciting things will happen, but not much agreement on exactly what those exciting things are, and great interest in finding out.

    1160:

    Also, Australia and New Zealand both have "classic number one hits" that are quite political. "the whole world saw"{tm} Midnight Oil perform "Beds are Burning" at the Olympics, Yothu Yindi's "Treaty" only made it to #6 on the charts but is seen as more significant than that suggests. There's similar stuff out there, but it's not really folk music, more rock with a message.

    In Aotearoa it's been all on at various times, most notably "Culture" by The Knobz who were unhappy about sales tax on records. You've got "French Letter" by Herbs and "Chains" by DLT on compilations everywhere, another song called Treaty, this time by Moana and the Moahunters, "Poi E" which was both a number 1 hit and entirely sung in Maori (that's a lyrics version with translation in the description) and of course "there is no depression in new zealand" (there are no sheep on our farms, we have no dole queues, we have no drug addicts..."). Audioculture and Elsewhere have more.

    1161:

    "Pres. Hillary vs. Pres. Nancy Pelosi"...

    Two classic memes come immediately to mind: the old joke "Death, or bunga-bunga", and Gozer the Gozerian intoning "Choose the form of your destruction..." (or some such).

    1162:

    One note: I have an old friend, who, back in the seventies, was thinking about emigrating... and told us she'd given up that idea, because Oz really didn't want Jews.

    1163:

    A LOT of computer professionals were screaming. Most of the paperless machines are gone, thank you.

    The first time I voted where I live now, it was paperless. For the next what, six years? I voted absentee, until an election judge/co-worker told me they'd finally gotten rid of all of them, did I go back to election day voting.*

    I want my "I voted" sticker to wear, which I have always called my "license to bitch", and could say "if you don't have one, sit down, shut up, and listen to me". < g >

    1164:

    sigh set controls for usenet It's a joke, son, Ah say, it's a joke!"

    1165:

    In Australia we have "computer assisted elections" where they do a whole lot of the back end processing electronically. Not just the "OMG preferential voting is complex" but everything from tabulating votes to cross-checking the paper lists of who voted.

    I think it would be good to do a lot of that even more electronically, and fairly practical. A VPN across all polling booths and a few control centres, dedicated "secure" computers with open, audited software and so on. Much better than Excel and phone calls which is what a lot of tabulation systems rely on.

    Fortunately in Australia we have election professionals who have funding to do this stuff. They still get it wrong sometimes, but far less often than when amateurs attempt it. Things would be easier if we had a deterministic voting system, but we don't and in a way that's an accurate reflection of the world we live in.

    1166:

    Most of the paperless machines are gone, thank you.

    Uh. Not really. Maybe most are but there are some huge pockets of them left.

    At least one county near Dallas / Fort Worth used touch screens in 2016. I'll ask about 2018. (My wife votes there.)

    I thought on top of everything else in Georgia, I think that they have/had a lot of touch screens.

    And per this there are a lot more of them. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article207851784.html

    1167:

    At least one county near Dallas / Fort Worth used touch screens in 2016. I'll ask about 2018

    Bexar County (Aka San Antonio), a fairly liberal county as such things go in TX, was using touch screens without, AFAIK, paper backup in 2018.

    1168:

    when it was Jenkins in particular who called for the realignment of British politics which crushed an entire generation.

    Alternatively, it was Benn, Scargill, and the like who crushed an entire generation, by behaving so appallingly badly that they utterly destroyed the credibility of the Labour Party for a decade and a half. Remember Closed Shops? Union block votes? No-one can reasonably defend Derek Hatton or Militant Tendency for how Liverpool was run.

    These were the economic geniuses who gave us 21% inflation; and addressed it partly through a 6% limit to government salary increases.

    I was first aware of UK politics for the 1979 election; apparently, Callaghan might have won if he'd called it in 1978, but for the Winter of Discontent. That was a Trade Union decision to break a Labour government, IIRC.

    1169:

    Interesting commentary using Brexit to talk about the referendums that will be held in Aotearoa. Worth reading the whole thing.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/05-02-2019/what-can-new-zealand-learn-from-the-brexit-omnishambles/

    Make the terms clear

    The post-truth peril is only encouraged when there is ambiguity about what is being voted on. The political chaos witnessed in the UK, with the debate around soft vs hard vs no-deal Brexits, and endless variations thereof, stems from the lack of specificity in what was put to voters on the ballot. It’s encouraging, at least, that Andrew Little has indicated that legislation will be in place for cannabis reform so that voters know exactly what’s at stake.

    Keep it above the belt

    For better or worse, we live in the age of social media comments, and the abandonment of basic courtesy that comes with them. There is a fair argument that this toxic dialogue has emerged into the real world and is increasingly apparent in political discourse. Likewise, it’s becoming a cliché that we are living in a polarised world where one must stick to his or her party line, where compromise is a dirty word, and where the opposition’s views are not only wrong but morally repugnant.

    The debate leading up to the Brexit vote, and the rhetoric since, is a cause of that cliché.

    Sometimes the best you can hope for is to serve as a warning to others.

    1170:

    I'm not in general likely to contradict anecdotes about racism in Australia, it's a pretty rich field. That said, this story in particular seems very dubious to me.

    I'm not saying antisemitism doesn't exist here, but even in the 70s it was much less visible than racism against people whose skin colour or eye-shape were different to the anglos. I'm not saying it's impossible, just very unlikely that was a criterion, versus some harsh (but not intrinsically racist) actuarial calculations about the individual circumstances (which themselves may have potentially been extremely sexist).

    In addition to Mayhem's comments above, Australia's immigration policy settings were tweaked in the 70s and its intake per capita has been among the highest in the world ever since. Currently the proportion of Australians who were either born overseas or whose parents were born overseas is at a record high, and is much higher than for most comparable country. China and India have overtaken the UK and NZ as most represented countries of origin in the larger cities and there are several influential and growing African emigre communities (some of which are demonised by racist politicians and ahem newspaper proprietors, looking for cheap votes).

    1171:

    Interesting commentary using Brexit to talk about the referendums that will be held in Aotearoa. Worth reading the whole thing. ... Make the terms clear ... so that voters know exactly what’s at stake. ... Sometimes the best you can hope for is to serve as a warning to others.

    Around here about 20 years ago when the population was exploding and existing locals beginning to realizes that all those great new jobs came with PEOPLE who would actually have to live somewhere there as a need to open 3 to 5 new schools PER YEAR. Which meant bonds. And under NC law meant going to the voters. So the anti-tax people did a survey. Would you vote for the bond if it increased your taxes by $100? $200? ...

    The magic number get get a clear majority to vote no was $400. So they ran an ad campaign that was basically two statements. 1. Do you want your property taxes to go up by $400 per year? 2. Vote no on the school bonds. There is a better way.

    The bonds were votes down and the school board and county commissioners got a hard lesson that marketing maters.

    The bonds would not have resulted in a $400 tax increase. The anti-tax folks never really said it would. But as the lead in to the vote no message it sure did imply such.

    So the students showed up. More temp classrooms were set up in trailers. And the board and commissioners did a better job a few years down and the next bond passed. Luckily the bond referendums were cycling a few years ahead of when the money would be borrowed and spent. But still we would up with a permanent result of 10% to 20% of the county classrooms being "temporary" because spending expense money annually can be decided without a popular vote. (A quick search showed that it was 14% in 2016.)

    1172:

    Things to blame on Brexit. Let's start a list.

    Obviously the speed up in movement of the magnetic north pole to Siberia must be an attempt to get away from the EU in general and UK in particular. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/02/magnetic-north-update-navigation-maps/

    1173:

    Currently the proportion of Australians who were either born overseas or whose parents were born overseas is at a record high, and is much higher than for most comparable country.

    Those statistics are widely ignored or misrepresented, even by those who (should) know them. Australia has 33% foreign born residents and obviously more than that if you include second generation immigrants.

    On that list UAE is the only country over 5M with a higher foreign-born percentage. Other highlights are Swizerland at 29%, Aotearoa at 25%, Canada at 21%, "nation of immigrants" USA at 14% and "inundated by foreigners" UK at 13%. I'm not counting Israel because they don't count the people in the occupied territories making that statistic problematic.

    Antisemitism in Australia seems to be largely the Israeli-style "failure to unconditionally support the government of Israel". Recently the Prime Minister At Time Of Writing was widely derided when he suggested moving the Australian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, including by many members of the Australian Jewish community.

    1174:

    Greg Tingey @ 1127: General Elections usually get a reasonable turnout, though I STILL don't understand why any turnout should be less than 70% - but then I think I have voted in every single election since I was old enough to have the franchise....

    As have I with two exceptions - In 1991 Municiple Elections in Raleigh/Wake County were conducted while I was mobilized for Desert Storm and I didn't to get an absentee ballot. Probably my own fault. I just didn't think about it.

    In 2004 my absentee ballot was not delivered to me in Iraq until after the date is was due back in Raleigh.

    I submitted a provisional ballot when it became clear my absentee ballot was not going to arrive in time (provisional ballots only allowed votes for President & Congress - the Federal Offices). In fact, damn near the entire 30th Brigade Combat Team voted provisional ballots in that election.

    The voting age in North Carolina was 21 before the Twenty-sixth Amendment changed it to 18 nationwide, but I was already 21 & registered to vote by then. The first election I was able to vote in was 1972 McGovern vs Nixon - the Watergate election.

    1175:

    David L @ 1153: At least my county has stuck with paper ballots counted via scanners. Any issues and a big room of people can hand count them.

    They're a step up from DRE voting machines, but still vulnerable if you can't verify the scanning software hasn't been tampered with. AFAIK, there's no automatic requirement to do random sample hand counts to verify the scanners are recording votes accurately. The best that can be said is there is a paper ballot to be counted by hand. But there's still the problem of who controls the mechanism for triggering such a recount.

    All of the UN-accounted for absentee ballots in the 9th Congressional District were paper ballots.

    1176:

    And, just to add to the fun & games ... the founder of Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange died unexpectedly and no one else knows the password to get to $190 million in customer holdings.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/04/cryptocurrency-company-owes-customers-million-it-cant-repay-because-owner-died-with-only-password/?utm_term=.c7ac03239887

    1177:

    Martin @ 1168 indeed - there was a political joke, a couple of years later, that Scargill was in the pay of the CIA & Thatcher of the KGB. Each trying to be so appalling & horrible, that you would vote for the "Other" side. Jenkins was probably the best Prime Minister we never had, in my lifetime, at any rate. And, as we all know "Militant" are back - calling themseleves "momentum" right now ... deselecting Social Democrat Labour MP's if they can, supporting Maduro & generally scaring people off. OTOH, there's a really nasty little semi-fascist ultra-right tory grouping appearing ( Linked to Trump/USA OF COURSE )

    Damian & 1170 Well at one of the Brighton Worldcons, I was told by Harry Harrison that the escaped nazis didn't go to Argentina, they went to AUS!

    1178:

    indeed - there was a political joke, a couple of years later, that Scargill was in the pay of the CIA & Thatcher of the KGB.

    Nah, Thatcher was actually a Deep Green mole, out to destroy the coal industry and build nuclear reactors in their place.

    1179:

    Social Democrat Labour MP's

    Eh? There's the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, there are no Social Democrat Labour MPs.

    Ambitious politicians don't join the Lib Dems since they're a permanent minority centre-right party. There's talk of a breakaway group of right-wingers in the PLP leaving the Labour Party and forming their own Social Democratic party (splitters!) but they'd be leaving Labour since they think it's too left-wing and Socialist for their NuLab proto-Tory tastes. I'd say doing that would qualify as self-deselection.

    As for Momentum, unlike Militant of old there are hundreds of thousands of Labour supporters who actually get out of their seats and vote for the leadership and the two times they've been asked to do it the "Social Democrat" candidates have lost by an embarrassing amount. It doesn't bode well for the chances of NuLab 2.0 in future elections if they don't run under the Labour Party banner.

    1180:

    Since no-one else has pointed this out, you're comparing apples with chalk!

    "Larndarn Xrail" was engineered to be a new heavy rail line and accommodate at least UK standard gauge stock. The Tyneside Metro (and various other $city Tram projects) are all specifically engineered to be light rail networks (and it would be more honest to refer to them as such rather than as "tramways" even though the tramway designation apparently makes it easier to give them sole possession of 2 running lanes of a pre-existing roadway).

    1181:

    the founder of Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange died unexpectedly and no one else knows the password to get to $190 million in customer holdings.

    Ahem ...

    He:

    • Made a will leaving it all to his girlfriend (including the ~ $100K in cash, the yacht, the houses ...)
    • Two weeks later, travelled to India to open an orphanage
    • Died of Crohn's disease, aged 30
    • It later emerges that QuadrigaCX, his exchange, was using BtC from recent depositors to pay other customers when they registered a withdrawal (per detailed report no longer visible on Medium)
    • BtC crashed about 50% from summer 2018 to early 2019

    A whole lot of this doesn't add up. He was 30, living with Crohn's disease, and healthy enough to travel to India, but died there within two weeks? Couldn't get hospital care or a medical evacuation on the travel insurance he undoubtedly could afford? (Hell, he could afford five star medical treatment in a world class hospital in Mumbai or New Delhi, which are world-class cities if you have the money.) Didn't leave a record of his password anywhere despite having the foresight to make a will?

    Something is rotten in the state of Denmark: I smell an entire school of beached sperm whales, in fact.

    (If you're running a Ponzi scheme the time to cut and run—preferably with a false ID, via a country with no extradition treaty—would be right after the incoming investments dry up, but before the payouts/withdrawals leave you exposed.)

    1182:

    From what I can recall, the Newcastle system doesn't use roadways, like say Sheffield or the motorised rubbish that serves Edinburgh, it uses a large number of repurposed railway track beds, and a set of tunnels dug under the city centre that were undersized - As in, they could have been designed for larger gauge trains. Everything you've just outlined is irrelevant.

    In other words, they built a toytown railway where they could have constructed a real one.....Right?

    1183:

    Nojay @ 1179 You know perfectly well whom I mean when I say "Social Democrat Labour MP's" People on the right(ish) of the Labour Party who believe in social democracy & fairness & decent treatment for women (in particular) ... NO. Momentum are actually Militant reborn - I've spoken to these nutters ... though they don't seem as corrupt as say Derek Hatton, they are amazingly naive & stupid. Like trying to deselet a Labour MP with a majority of over 20 000 & replace her with some semi-Stalinist hack ... in a constituency that was marginal.

    Charlie @ 1181 😍 $$$$$$$$$$ 😈

    1184:

    You know perfectly well whom I mean when I say "Social Democrat Labour MP's"

    Yes, Blairite right-wingers who can't be doing with all that Socialism thing and being nice to poor people but who couldn't quite bring themselves to give up a cushy number by switching to the Tories and getting tossed from their safe seats in the next election.

    Like trying to deselet a Labour MP with a majority of over 20 000 & replace her with some semi-Stalinist hack ... in a constituency that was marginal.

    A Labour majority of over 20,000 is somehow "marginal"? Weird. Majorities that high are rare anyway, most safe seats tend towards majorities of 10,000 or so. There are some exceptions, for example the very popular Socialist Maximum Leader Jeremy Corbyn's majority in Islington North last time out was 33,000. Shows he must be doing something right.

    1185:

    the motorised rubbish that serves Edinburgh

    What?

    The Edinburgh trams are kind of monstrous: when the track project ran over budget/late, it turned out the trams they'd already bought were too long to lease out to any other city in the UK. A good chunk of their route (from Haymarket out west to the Airport) runs on repurposed former railway tracks: however, for the city centre there's really no alternative to taking over a major street , and because of bolloxed-up cycle path conversions in previous decades they can't run on the former urban rail track out to Leith and Ocean Terminal (hence the next phase of the project will involve yet more disruption on Leith Walk).

    Nevertheless, the Edinburgh tram system is exceeding projected passenger loads and doing what it was intended to—namely, providing a high volume alternative to buses for moving commuters in and out of an increasingly overcrowded city centre at rush hour. (A lot of folks take the bus into town, then transfer to the trams for a ride out to the Gyle Complex and the Royal Bank of Scotland campus, diverting a lot of car journeys off the City Bypass. Meanwhile, Edinburgh gets to stay a UNESCO World Heritage Site that, unlike Glasgow, doesn't have an eight lane motorway blasting through its 18th century centre.)

    1186:

    Yep, there's a spectrum of distributions beyond the gaussian, and as we work our way outwards the central limit assumption falters as we start to encounter Pareto laws then super-cubic and then stable Levy. At each stage we lose our classical predictors, first mean goes then variance the all we've got as mean absolute deviance and right at the outer edge it's throw your hand in the air, like it's just not there. Picking up your point it's the ability to calculate a mean based on the contributions of the many (Cramer's condition) that allows insurance. Infinite means are bad for business, insurance that is...

    1187:

    It WAS a marginal seat. (Note) We got a good local Labour MP, who, when he reired was succeeded by a brilliant one. You appear to be one of the idiots who want ( our version of) "True socialism™" - & would rathe have a right-wing tory than a Blarite or even an actual social democrat. Grow up & get real. The real threat is from both the extreme right & to a lesser extent from the extreme left. Corbyn is termnially incompetent, otherwise he's be PM RIGHT NOW, given the succesive fuck-ups by Cameron & May, which should tell you something... As for "All that socialism thing" - well, I think it includes proper peproductive rights for women & coming down hard on loan-sharks ( In any guise ) & decent security of tenure in rented properties ... all of which our MP has sucessfully fought for. (Note Back in the early 50's the seat to the West was Clem Attlee's the centre where I live was a marginal & that to the East was W S Churchill's ... After re-drawing the boundaries, the West & Centre seats were merged ( & a bit lopped off the top ) & that seat was very much a amrginal - the reason that Labour have held on is that we have been very lucky with our MP's - a huge amount of that vote is personal, & not party-affiliated. )

    Charlie @ 1185 AIUI, the Endinburgh Tram problem was also exacerbated by politicians who could NOT resist "dibbing" with a project that had already started - guaranteed to increase costs

    1188:

    Hey Greg, correction to HH's comment. All the Nazi's went to Western Australia OK.

    1189:

    *"..got is mean absolute deviation". Should have picked that up, sorry.

    1190:

    Greg, I really think your whole take on in this situation is hopelessly skewed because of the situation with your local MP. If nothing else momentum has put a rocket up the arse of the labour party and forced them to rethink their policy of being the conservatives, but with different branding and slightly less obviously odious and outright evil.

    They've both gotten complacent because such a high percentage of the whats they hold was so safe - until that is UKIP nicked enough of the conservative right and Scotland flipped to change the electoral maths in this country. Unfortunately our political system isn't robust enough to handle that and you end up with the clusterfck coalition, Brexit and an opposition party that is completely ineffective.

    Your local MP might have brilliant, but in large swathes of the country local labour has been so entrenched for so long that they can happily sit there doing sweet FA for decades on end knowing that nothing is going to change. Until that is, momentum comes along and puts the wind up them a bit - so all power to them if you ask me.

    1191:

    I can't think of any of the Edinburgh tram system that runs on "repurposed former railway tracks". The tram line runs alongside railway tracks for part of its length between Haymarket and Hermiston Gait but not on railway right-of-way. They used land such as allotments and narrow strips of green-belt parkways in places like Sighthill but at Murrayfield stadium they had to build a large viaduct structure to thread the track between the roadway and the rail maintenance depot located there.

    Some of the tram route was used as a guided bus-way for a few years as an experiment but it didn't work that well and was later abandoned when the trams were introduced.

    1192:

    Something people often miss is that a lot of Victorian railway tracks and tunnels were too small for modern trains. This has causes a lot of trouble and expense over the years, and it is not obviously insane to convert those to tramways.

    1193:

    A minor nitpick: first the variance goes and then the mean! There are distributions with a first moment but not a second. I am too rusty to remember which ones can be sanitised by omitting a handful of extreme values.

    1194:

    AIUI, the Endinburgh Tram problem was also exacerbated by politicians who could NOT resist "dibbing" with a project that had already started

    There's a public enquiry into the cost overruns currently underway, and the Phase 1 extension won't get green-lit until the enquiry has delivered it's report: they're apparently keen to learn lessons before throwing more money down.

    AIUI the council didn't so much start meddling once the program was underway as they tried to be too clever by half in drafting the initial contracts. Normally there are three stages to building tram lines: researching the stuff that's currently in the ground under the proposed path, then digging to move the buried utilities, then finally laying the track on top. (That way, the entire network doesn't get shut down whenever there's a gas leak.)

    Edinburgh council awarded separate contracts for the surveying and the utility-relocation digs, rather than making them one deal. They did so in hope of saving a piffling amount—one or two million on an initially £400M project. Trouble is, they only expected to find 24km of buried utilities that needed moving; the actual figure was closer to 40km. So the second stage of the contract spiraled out of control. Then the council started haggling with the contractors (because arguing with a mass of buried pipelines is so productive as a way of getting them moved) over the moving-and-reburying-utilities phase, which added huge delays.

    Part of the problem is that since the original Edinburgh trams were ripped out in the 1950s, various utility companies were less than effective at recording where they buried the gas, electricity, water, sewer, cable TV, and telephone lines (almost all of which run underground in central Edinburgh). So they had to dig up pretty much the entire route twice before they could lay any new track.

    1195:

    "Something people often miss is that a lot of Victorian railway tracks and tunnels were too small for modern trains."

    Indeed - But it is one thing to make do with Victorian structures, it is another thing altogether to carry on building to that size though. Other examples include the Jubilee Line extension out to Stratford and the Millenium Dome, that was built to tube train diameter for no reason at all.

    One of the biggest farces in this field though is arguably the Piccadilly line extension to Heathrow from Hounslow. The line runs for miles through suburban London completely in the open air, and descends to run under the airport in a cut and cover trench that is built to tube train height. Nothing else can use it to serve the airport from it's southern side.

    1196:

    Does the tram in the city centre use pylons for it's overhead wiring? That UNESCO listing you cite is kind of worthless if all your buildings have wires bodged into them. I wouldn't put that past the people who presided over the project.

    1197:

    They use suspended cables running between poles to carry the overheads for the trams in the city. In some locations such as Shandwick Place these are bolted rather insecurely into the walls of the buildings lining the roadway, in others they are planted in the sidewalks causing difficulty for people on foot to get past them. Out in the countryside they use gantries.

    1198:

    Well aware of that; there was a recent major expenditure to enlarge the Cowlairs Tunnel out of Glasgow Queen Street so that it could be electrified.

    And this actually supports my argument that you can put a light rail network in places there isn't a dynamic loading gauge for even British standard gauge.

    1199:

    and because of bolloxed-up cycle path conversions in previous decades they can't run on the former urban rail track out to Leith and Ocean Terminal

    All the plans I remember from when they were proposing the tram system, included later phases that used the (now) cycle paths across North Edinburgh - it may just be that the Spokes lobby have some clout. I'm also not sure about the "bolloxed" part. The old circular line sat idle for a couple of decades before the council just laid tarmac. Suddenly, I could get from Crewe Toll in northern Edinburgh, past Gorgie, at a speed you'd be pushed to beat using blue lights; or to Leith in minutes.

    There's also the Scotland Street tunnel through to Waverley Station; if that were reopened, you've got a rail link to light rail across North Edinburgh. Although IIRC you might have to persuade the Inverleith Tesco to give up a chunk of its car park...

    What stuffed up any "simple reuse" plan was the Western Approach Road; laid over the top of the old Caledonian lines, and breaking the circular route. Coupled with the fact that the southern part of the circular line is still in use (you'll occasionally see trains running through the Colinton cuttings, or across the bridge at Cameron Toll). There was also a plan to drive a wide road southwards from Waverley along St.Mary's Street and the Pleasance, but it was canned in a fit of good sense.

    Regarding urban railway, the line into the port of Leith never came from Leith Walk; it came in along the coast from Seafield Road and Salamander Street, and is still there for the most part (down to single track as it passes the Cat & Dog Home, although the bridge has space for two).

    PS I haven't looked in Polska Chata on Salamander Street to see of they've got a license / any maple vodka...

    1200:

    Clamps @ 1190 No - that's our local Liebour Party - as regards Waltham FOrest Council - what a collection of deadbeats & time-servers & downright crooks. A lot of them are not happy with their MP, ( One of the principal shits, thought the empty seat "belonged" to him, but she got it ) but they are (rightly) afraid of momenti=um as well.

    ASM @ 1195 the Jubilee Line extension out to Stratford and the Millenium Dome, that was built to tube train diameter for no reason at all. Cobblers. For the excellent reason that it was an extension of an EXISTING tube line ... Stanmore / Baker Street / Charing Cross that was already "Tube gauge" ... You going to re-gauge that to even tube "surface stack" size, never mind BR C1 size, as well as building the new bit? @ 1196 YES, they do - same as the medieaval streets of Antwerp have overhead in them. See here for picccie ...

    1201:

    Does the tram in the city centre use pylons for it's overhead wiring?

    Yes: along the same route that had them until the 1950s. It's "historic".

    1202:

    As Greg says, it would have been staggeringly pointless to build the JLE full-size only to have it crash back to tube size under the middle of London. Unless, possibly, someone was willing to hollow out a great big underground terminus to reverse the full-size trains in, or else not make it a JLE at all but instead carry on and out the other side to link up with a main line (Chiltern?).

    Agree about the Piccadilly Heathrow tunnels, though, since the majority of the approach was originally built as a standard surface line and there would have been the possibility of through running to a variety of surface destinations.

    Excluding tube tunnels, though, the "Victorian tunnels too small for modern trains" thing isn't really true. After all, nearly all the tunnels on the full size network are the original Victorian ones. Where the size does cause difficulties is with:

    • electrification: lack of space for overhead equipment. Though they have been able to get around this by rejiggering existing tunnels to lower the track bed rather than by building new ones, by skinning the clearances on the overhead equipment, by using rigid conductors rather than suspended wires, and other such fiddles, so most of the time it is just a nuisance rather than a complete killer.

    • incompatibility with non-British trains: can't use the same designs as are used in other countries without redesigning them to shrink them down. As for instance the Western Region had to do with the V200 design...

    • can't do exciting things like run full-size HGVs onto railway wagons and keep them off the roads without transferring the loads.

    1203:

    I'd be a bit careful about citing any Olde Medieval City in Europe that got carpet bombed/architecturally critiqued by the RAF during WW2.

    Post war architecture in Europe was about "reconstruction" i.e. They got their old style architecture back but the underlying buildings are new. The UK got concrete city centres like Coventry in the name of "Modernity." I would assume Edinburgh largely escaped being remodelled by the Luftwaffe because it is either beyond the range of their planes or there were no industries to target.

    "For the excellent reason that it was an extension of an EXISTING tube line ..."

    That's not a compelling reason. It is actually pretty stupid to build something to a restricted gauge if you have the funding for a project such as that, the builders are in, and you could then repurpose it later. (Just like with the example of Heathrow.) Those of us who lived in London at that point remember how the JLE had a whopping budget because it had to be ready for a deadline.

    It wasn't like this was an exercise in saving money, like the el-cheapo tunnels dug under Newcastle.

    1204:

    To extend (of a travel route) - To make longer.

    You will note that it does not say "make wider" or "make larger (wider) (loading) gauge".

    1205:

    "You will note that it does not say "make wider" or "make larger (wider) (loading) gauge".

    Well, no it doesn't. Which ignores my contention that it is a bit stupid to spend all that money to construct a station that is so large you could lay Canary Wharf tower inside it and still have space to spare, and then construct dinky little tunnels out of each end of it, don't you think? They cannot be practically widened, and so in high summer stink like the Black Hole of Calcutta because of a lack of air conditioning, that being a problem evident upon every other section of the deep tube network, and which has been dutifully replicated there.

    It's called Foresight, it's partly what you're being paid for when you design these things, and is maybe why Crossrail is so utterly gargantuan.

    1206:

    "...you could then repurpose it later. (Just like with the example of Heathrow.)"

    It isn't really "just like" at all. The Heathrow route is mostly full-size surface lines that were later tagged on to the Underground network, with a tube-size bit stuck on the outside end. Its being part of the Piccadilly line is a matter of what you call things rather than what it was built as. It is only that bit stuck on the end that prevents it being used to run full-size trains to surface destinations and limits it to tube stock.

    The JLE on the other hand was an addition to something that already was a tube line and always had been. What prevents it from being used for full-size trains isn't the new bit being tube sized, it's all the bits that were there already being tube sized. Which is basically the complete opposite of the Picc/Heathrow situation. Even if it had been built full size, you could only ever run tube stock on it. You couldn't even run full size stock half way and then reverse when you got to the old bit, because there wouldn't be capacity for that as well as a full-on tube service on the same tracks. It would only have made any sense to build it full size if it had not been a JLE at all but instead an independent thing that went all the way through and linked up with main lines at both ends.

    1207:

    "...is maybe why Crossrail is so utterly gargantuan."

    That's mainly down to a combination of things: current safety standards require evacuation walkways alongside the track, so new tunnels have to be big enough to accommodate them; space for overhead electrification without pinching it; and the extra space that you automatically get from boring a circular tunnel with rotary machines rather than digging a train-shaped tunnel with shovels, as on eg. the GN&C.

    1208:

    A S M @ 1203 What part of the medieaval streets of Antwerp did you miss? Look at the link-picture! The centre of Antwerp was untouched ( to all intents & puposes ) - the docks were 2-4 km downstream & got platered, but that's another story. No, again - Leith docks "got it" but later, Edinburgh city council tried to destroy the centre, especially the "Royal Mile" in the 1950's - fortunately stopped in time - ask Charlie about that? Jubilee line ... if you have the funding for a project Can I fall about in hysterical laughter, right now? "Foresight" - sorry - doesn't extend beyond 5 years = ONE electoral cycle - ask Charlie, again.

    1209:

    There are plenty that weren't touched. I've ridden a lot of trams in the old centre of Basel which was left pretty much untouched due to it's being Swiss.

    Conceded, the Basel tram system currently runs into two adjacent countries which were involved, but it didn't at the time.

    These days you can get on a #8 tram in Weil-am-Rhein in Germany, change to a #10 at Bankverein in central Basel, and step down at Leymen in Alsace in France. If they extended the #17 in both directions (its entire length runs on the same tracks as either the #2 or #10), you'd be able to do it without changing. And if you don't get off, you might end up in Belgrade.

    (My biggest double-take was possibly seeing a Basel #11 in the middle of Belgrade, still in the Basel livery. But there might just have been some other transport involved)

    1210:

    Greg - Getting my history wrong here blaming the RAF - The Nazis bombed the crap out of the place. They even used the V2 on it. I don't think that they used GPS to conduct some precision strike upon the docks: 90000 properties damaged, and I love the fashion in which you've carefully put "To all intents and purposes" in brackets so you can mentally walk away from it!

    http://www.flanderstoday.eu/living/seventy-years-antwerp-remembers-v-bomb

    560 people dead in a situation where they clearly were targetting the city centre and didn't care who they killed. Lots of the Olde Worlde architecture present there is post war. Edinburgh is the real thing.

    The JLE had funding spilling out of it's arsehole, mute testament lying in the imported marble platforms and brushed steel. The Bechtel Corporation was contracted to salvage it from whoever was scheduled to do it originally, who had made a complete mess of it. At one point it was the most expensive railway project on Earth.

    ""Foresight" - sorry - doesn't extend beyond 5 years = ONE electoral cycle - ask Charlie, again."

    My foresight does in my own work. Foresight applies to just about any job where you're not going to be around to explain things. Although Foresight may not apply to politicians I am pretty sure it does apply to Civil Engineers who do the work. As in, project that should not have been built was built and was built badly, and everyone then has to lives with it, which Stross and everyone else does with the tram system.

    1211:

    I did say "most". I think I also mentioned that here in mostly-liberal Maryland, in more liberal Montgomery co, they just goi rid of the paperless in the last six years.

    Georgia... right, that's where in '04? '05? a guy who worked for Diebold, I think it was, posted how he'd been sent to warehouses to "apply updates" that had never been approved by the state... and then the voting commissions were "encouraging" people working the polls to take the systems home with them, to get them to the polling places faster.

    1212:

    All I can say is that's what my friend said. Maybe she was also too hippy for them, I dunno.

    1213:

    Well, since Brexit started first, I say it pushed the Malignant Carcinoma over the top.

    I suspect the American-linked party that R-M is supporting would adore having him as a speaker.

    1214:

    To quote OGH, "Cryptocurrency! Put your money into them now, or you'll miss your chance to lose everything!"

    1215:

    In the US, it was the late nineties before there were enough modified to make it even remotely feasible to run double-deck railcars in the east. I'm sure that Amtrak can't do it yet, on a lot of trackage - there are a lot of stone bridges from the 1800s.

    1216:

    Just was listening to the news: Dutch business owners exporting to the UK still in denial about brexit. 'They can't be that stupid.'

    Another exporter trying to think ahead runs into a brick wall when he tries to get things straightend out with UK customs. Nobody knows and nobody seems to care.

    Ro says: 'It's goimg to be a smooth and effortless transition.'

    1217:

    Didn't leave a record of his password anywhere despite having the foresight to make a will?

    That is incredibly common. Even among "smart" people. Seems to be one of those things that most people put into "I'll take care of that RSN".

    1218:

    I'd be a bit careful about citing any Olde Medieval City in Europe that got carpet bombed/architecturally critiqued by the RAF during WW2.

    I had that feeling while moving around Munich. Various places had pictures of the city at the end of the war. Not much of anything but thick exterior walls partially standing and streets full of rubble. And the tours were touting all of those historic buildings. After a bit I concluded that they built them back to LOOK like the originals based on paintings and old photographs.

    1219:

    Technically, no, the Piccadilly line as it is was always a part of the Underground network. Hounslow west, for example, as recently as the 1970's was a terminus station and features a fabulous 1930's ticket office by Charles Holden, but to get to the trains today, you then walk through the barriers and along a horrible enclosed walkway to get to the platform steps. This then goes down to where the track was realigned and where the orange tiling leaves it feeling like you are descending into a public toilet.

    My point with the bit about the JLE is that they really could have built the thing with the possibility that it could be expanded, given that Canary Wharf to Waterloo is probably one of the busiest sections on the network at rush hour. Additionally, given that the bulk of the expense of digging a new underground railway line lies in fitting out the stations, it really would not have cost that much, and you even then had the possibility of air conditioning it, if you then stuck with tube trains. Greg Tingey will no doubt dispute all of this.

    1220:

    Another consolidated response:

    Greg Tingey @ 1177: Well at one of the Brighton Worldcons, I was told by Harry Harrison that the escaped nazis didn't go to Argentina, they went to AUS!

    Except for the rocket scientists who appear to have been divvied up between the USSR and the USA.

    Charlie Stross @ 1181: A whole lot of this doesn't add up. He was 30, living with Crohn's disease, and healthy enough to travel to India, but died there within two weeks? Couldn't get hospital care or a medical evacuation on the travel insurance he undoubtedly could afford? (Hell, he could afford five star medical treatment in a world class hospital in Mumbai or New Delhi, which are world-class cities if you have the money.) Didn't leave a record of his password anywhere despite having the foresight to make a will?

    Something is rotten in the state of Denmark: I smell an entire school of beached sperm whales, in fact.

    I thought you'd find the story interesting. I don't know much about it other than the article I read (and linked).

    I do know a little about Chron's disease, and it can - although rarely - have fatal complications (ruptured bowel & hemorrhaging). If he suffered an acute attack of one of those complications while he was in a part of India where he didn't have IMMEDIATE access to world class hospitals, he could have died before he could get to one.

    I don't know what evidence might exist to show whether he did or did not fake his death. Any news about where the body is now?

    If he did not fake his death, then the rest is reasonably explained by arrogant stupidity. He was still young enough to believe in his own immortality. It was not necessarily his foresight that had him make a will. It may have been something his board of directors wanted.

    David L @ 1217:

    Didn't leave a record of his password anywhere despite having the foresight to make a will?

    That is incredibly common. Even among "smart" people. Seems to be one of those things that most people put into "I'll take care of that RSN".

    Not to mention that many (if not most) "cyber-security experts" recommend that you NOT write your password down because someone might find it & get into your account. Some will tell you to leave a copy in a secure location. He may have done and failed to disclose that secure location to anyone.

    1221:

    Re: 'It's a joke, son, Ah say, it's a joke!"'

    If you mean that MWs cannot affect the brain, suggest visiting any major research db and reading the various studies examining MW effects on the brain.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30023257

    Okay -- these are rodent studies therefore not 100% applicable to humans but it's kinda hard to get ethics board approval to snip off tissue from or implant teeny machines-that-go-ping into a living human brain.

    1222:

    That’s also extremely unlikely. In Australia in the 60s and 70s, hippies were plentiful, abundant, commonplace. Your friend’s experience, having no ability to investigate the details of a situation you are really just passing on as an isolated anecdote based on the individual’s interpretation, which means no facts at all are actually known, is most likely something arbitrary to do with occupation and age, along with demand at the time. As I alluded above there’s a strong possibility of severe sexism, where the actuaries potentially saw a single woman as a net non-contributor, but my own anecdotal experience is rich enough with counter-examples that this is also still unlikely.

    The thing about demand is important though - Australia has always been a very popular destination for emigrants which means that at times it became very competitive. In Europe after the war (and during the Cold War), it was often the first preference, you went to the USA if you didn’t get into Australia. In the 70s, a lot of people from SE Asia and Lebanon were exercising the intakes, and by that point there was no express lane for white English-speakers, though somehow we still managed to take quite a few of those in too.

    1223:

    This is what bank safety deposit boxes are for. They are a place you can leave an external hard-drive which is secure against, well, the house / office burning down, and well, in the event someone robs the bank, you will hear about it faster than they get around to sticking the mystery hard-drive in a pc.

    1224:

    That’s also extremely unlikely. In Australia in the 60s and 70s, hippies were plentiful

    But also commonly had issues with authority, and immigration is all about genuflecting to authority. It's possible that "prove you're jewish" was misinterpreted as "the fascist pigs hate jews" rather than "papers please".

    I remember the upset in New Zealand when the aforementioned fascists clamped down and started demanding passports from kiwis travelling to Australia. Before that a (paper, photo-less) driver's license would suffice.

    1225:

    Well thuan is true. It also plays in to the “no visible means of support” and “likely to become a burden to society” dynamic which I handedwved as being more likely influenced by sexism. That is still the era when for a woman, marrying meant you had to resign from the public service. But that Is hardly unique to Australia (if anything we led the way away from that, at least in some domains).

    1226:

    AFAIK, there's no automatic requirement to do random sample hand counts to verify the scanners are recording votes accurately.

    In the US, Colorado's audit process now includes hand-count checks pre-election, post-election, and on a random basis during the actual counting. It's not perfect -- nothing is -- but it makes it harder for both mechanical failure and intentional fraud to slip through.

    Of course, there's always something for people to whine about. In the US western states, a large majority of the ballots cast are now cast by mail. East Coast pundits howl that there must be lots of fraud going on, we're just too dumb here in the West to find it.

    1227:

    Happy Waitangi Day all!

    Every year on 6 February, New Zealand marks the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. In that year, representatives of the British Crown and over 500 Māori chiefs signed what is often considered to be New Zealand’s founding document. The day was first officially commemorated in 1934, and it has been a public holiday since 1974.

    We actually celebrated on Saturday here because it's not a public holiday in Australia.

    1228:

    And 恭喜发财 to you too :-)

    (Not a holiday here, more's the pity. I miss making dumplings with the nieces.)

    1229:

    The line out to Hounslow was built by the District Railway, as a surface-gauge steam-hauled route, before any tube lines existed. It's only the tag-end to Heathrow that is specific to the Piccadilly. (I still remember Underground maps that didn't show it because it hadn't been built.)

    The JLE was never originally supposed to go to Canary Wharf at all, since there wasn't anything there; it was intended to carry on eastwards on the north side of the river and then turn south to end up at Lewisham. Hence the unused tunnels running eastwards from Charing Cross. It was only later that they started getting all excited about doing stuff at Canary Wharf and worrying about the DLR not having enough capacity, and rejiggered the JLE plans accordingly. (Which was the second rejiggering; there was another stage between that and the Lewisham plan, but nothing ever happened about that.)

    But it would still have been pointless to build it to main line gauge because the section north of Green Park still limits you to only using tube stock, ordinary tube stock with all the same difficulties of installing air conditioning. Since none of the existing pre-WW1 tube tunnels are ever going to be expanded, there is no possibility of any new additions to the tube network being expanded either.

    Digging main line size tunnels along that route would only make sense as part of a different project altogether that's nothing to do with the tube network. We could talk about main line tunnels from Waterloo to eg. the south-eastern end of Crossrail, and keeping the original route for the JLE, in the context of an alternate-history story...

    1230:

    My favourite day in the UK - doesn't matter if your brown or white, all the kiwis in london get along in perfect harmony and mock the English.

    1231:

    Thanks peeps.

    kiwis in london get along in perfect harmony

    You're surely thinking of the Welsh :) Kiwis singing is not for the faint-hearted, especially with our non-trivial national anthem.

    Although certain specific kiwis singing... and perhaps more relevant although for the life of me I can't find a recording of Hinewehi Mohi singing it in 1999 which really kicked the whole "anthem in Maori" bizzo off. (even the freemasons are on board (pdf))

    1232:

    I always liked this novelty one heard on National Radio at a very young age. Always thought it was Fred Dagg, but looks like it was an Australian group.

    1233:

    In Australia we continue to have weather: https://theconversation.com/queenslands-floods-are-so-huge-the-only-way-to-track-them-is-from-space-111083 with some interesting chat in the comments about how they're getting the data.

    While in Syria the politics are changing now that the cheezel wants to hand over to ISIS: https://theconversation.com/the-syrian-war-is-not-over-its-just-on-a-new-trajectory-heres-what-you-need-to-know-110292 An Israel-Iran conflict in Syria does not strike me as a good idea, but it's probably better than encouraging Turkey to commit genocide. The cheezel seems to favour doing both.

    1234:

    " The cheezel seems to favour doing both."

    What would Putin want?

    I wonder if Putin kicks himself every so often, thinking 'we built tens of thousands of tanks, when 10% of that money would have bought the leaders of the West lock, stock and barrel'.

    1235:

    This is what bank safety deposit boxes are for.

    Well, yes and no.

    In most or all of the US if someone dies a bank is required to seal off access to a safety deposit box until an executor has been appointed by the local court system. This can be quick or up to a few weeks. If no will exists maybe a month or few. Or longer.

    A key point here is this sealing occurs when the bank finds out about the death. I suspect on more than a trivial number of times people have found a safety deposit key and run to the local bank to see if they can get in. Of course that would require a forged signature but .....

    1236:

    AFAIK, there's no automatic requirement to do random sample hand counts to verify the scanners are recording votes accurately.

    Local conversation here folks.

    When I worked with a county commissioner he dug into how things worked. There is a non trivial amount of checking that was done. Things like you say. Pick a precinct or few and had verify the totals. Plus some semi funny things. ALL rejected ballots were examined to see why and maybe change things to allow them through the automatic system if possible in the future.

    But there were some "frequent flyers" who always did the same things to their ballot. Like a big X across the entire thing. Or circling the name of their choices instead of filling in the circle next to the name. These things showed up consistently at the same precincts over time so they knew it was the same person with each style of bad ballot. They just didn't know who it was.

    1237:

    Wasn't it Putin who said, "Guns before Cheezels"?

    1239:

    Interesting theory, but I disagree with the numbers. Right now, human population is 7.7 billion. For it to remain below 8.5 billion, African countries will have to reach developed world status at the same rate as China, and not India. Right now, I put that to be as likely as India overtaking China anytime soon. For that projection to be true, a lot more countries would have to be colored at least yellow.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate

    Having said that, it's quite possible that global population peaks somewhere between 9 and 11 billion. Population projections do tend to be conservative in projecting the decline in TFR.

    Latin America: Peak at a minimum of 700 million Asia: Peak at a minimum of 5 billion Northern America (Excluding Latin America): Peak somewhere round 600 million (largely sustained by immigration) Africa: Minimum population of 2.5 billion Europe: ~700 million. Immigration should keep the population steady

    1240:

    Oops: the numbers for Northern America should be 400 million.

    1241:

    ASM @ 1219 Yes, in a RATIONAL world, with proper advance planning then the J-line should have been ... er ... errr ... "Route 7" from the 1946-7 plans, submerging outside Marylebone & surfacing near Lewisham ... Still hasn't happened. As it is, the Bakerloo HAD to be split, so the Stanmore half was extended ( Remember that the tunnels Finchley Rd - Baker Street were already there, at tube guage? ) southwards - to Charing X, because the "planners" & more importantly, the bloody politicians could not make up their tiny minds on the route eastwards from there. THEN along came "Canary Wharf" with £oadsamoney & the Mumblebum-Doom project. The rest is a slightly mad history. OTOH - having the Westminster - Waterloo - Wharf - Stratford link is amazingly useful & a relief to the Central Line, though both are overcrowded - CrossLiz can't come soon enough ... & DON'T get me started on the successive screw-ups & failure of management at the highest levels in that project. Ah, I see Pigeon has put you right about the Hounslow ( Heathrow ) branch, as well as additional info on the JLE caper.

    Over at London Reconnections, your musings would be labelled: "Crayonism" - a dreadful crime.....

    Barry @ 1234 I wonder if Putin kicks himself every so often, thinking 'we built tens of thousands of tanks, when 10% of that money would have bought the leaders of the West lock, stock and barrel'. Putin is using two very old playbooks ... in reverse order: 1: That used by Imperial Germany 1905-17, the ramifications of which are still causing much trouble well over 100 years later ( The bastards sold guns to both the ultra-Prods & the other rebels in Ireland ... ) 2: Philip of Macedon ... "To take a city, all I (really) need do is get an old man & a donkey carrying gold inside the gates."

    Oh yes talking of the Cheezel ... "Walls work & walls save lives" Tell that to the Berliners.

    Oh & another fuckwit, recorded HERE in 2009 about the "Evil European Empire of the 21st Century" No - not J Rees-Smaug, but Corbyn ... [ Warning - irritating advert before main recording plays ]

    1242:

    will the population of the world start shrinking soon?

    Only if they get washed in hot water :)

    Two things spring to mind:

    • There are some interesting things possible with male fertility and temperature which may compound with all the funky hormones and other bioactives in the water supply (etc) to start pushing global male fertility down. It's a minor effect, but since it disproportionately affects the wealthy it may be surprisingly significant (viz, those who can afford to hoard the women have trouble making said women pregnant. Genetic testing makes the normal solution to that higher risk than in the past).

    • it may turn out the that IPCC is correct and the UN wrong: climate devastation may compound in ways that reduce the population rather than allowing BAU growth (in population as well as emissions and temperature)

    Frankly the idea of 10 billion people and 50% less arable land with much less fishing too doesn't bear thinking about. It's one of those "what we need is a war" scenarios, that being preferable to being eaten by refugees. Just have to hope someone survives the war... either way there's a war.

    1243:

    Is there any possibility that you will get it through your head that the gauge restriction on any railway line (standard gauge heavy, broad gauge heavy, or any variety of standard or narrow gauge) is the narrowest point or stretch? It does not matter if you make the widest point wide enough to rotate the longest piece of stock used when it physically can't fit through the narrowest part of the system!

    1244:

    I'll agree that postal voting does offer possibilities for fraud, but that fraud would require interception of personally addressed mail (which is an offence in its own right in the USA and the UK), and then involve the interceptor(s) committing the additional offence (UK law name) of Personation.

    1245:

    As it happens, other than the non-use of any form of mechanical or electronic polling, this sounds a lot like a UK election, where the steps would be:-

    1) Polling Clerks arrive at Polling Place and do mechanical set-up like erecting polling booths. 2) Police Officer arrives with copy of Voter's Roll, ballots and ballot boxes for the individual Polling Station (one Polling Place may contain more than one Polling Station). 3) Clerks issue individual ballots to voters, who vote and place their ballots in the ballot boxes. The Clerks also mark up the Roll to indicate who has voted. 4) After the poll closes, a Police Officer calls and collects the ballot box(es), marked up Roll and unused ballots. They are then taken to the Counting Station. 5a) After all ballot boxes are received at the CS, the Count may begin. 5b) The ballots will be physically counted by Count Clerks, and the count will be witnessed by the Candidates' Count Agents. In the event of a query, the Count Clerks may ask the Count Agents (and/or senior count officials including the Returning Officer) for an opinion on the validity of an individual ballot. There may, or may not, be one or more recounts called for, depending on the closeness in percentage terms of the initial result. In the event of a recount, go to (5b). 6) After the conclusion of the count, when the Returning Officer will announce the results, the role, votes and unused ballot papers will be retained for several years, in case of an accusation of voting fraud being raised.

    1246:

    I always liked this novelty one heard on National Radio at a very young age. Always thought it was Fred Dagg, but looks like it was an Australian group.

    'Twas this mob, The Samuel Pepys Show, which is sort-of-like-saying "Half of the Naked Vicar Show." (The half without Knockers1 :-) )

    1 - "Knockers is Noeline Brown's nickname.

    1247:

    A similar thing happens with canals - the minimum lock size and the maximum vessel size tend to converge. If you're building a new lock on a canal network, it wants to be big enough that the largest vessel using that network can get through it (so no smaller than the smallest existing lock), but also no bigger (because a bigger lock requires more water, so the running costs rise). And when you build a vessel to go on that network, it needs to get through the smallest lock, so it's size limited too.

    It's quite noticeable how so many of the river cruise ships on the Danube have almost identical dimensions.

    The above is simplified - there will be sub routes where larger locks allow multiple vessels through per cycle, and the lower Danube's locks are larger than further upriver because it allows sea-going traffic a certain distance up it.

    1248:

    That's interesting, where are the locks on the Danube? I know it has locks at the Iron Gates because that was more or less an impassable set of rapids until they put the dams and locks in, but I thought the rest of it was big enough not to need locking unless you're right near the source.

    1249:

    Since we are well above 1K posts, no matter your base, I'll just mention that the Pet Shop Boys also want to comment.

    From yesterday: Give Stupidity a chance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9jEuHbB0GQ

    From today: On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuNBJkLLnOs

    And tomorrow we will supposedly get "What are we going to do about the rich?".

    1250: 1247 - I'd not considered it in those exact terms but you're right. And I really should have known that better, because inflation of vessel sizes was what killed the commercial case for the Caledonian Canal. 1248 - I can't answer that directly, but a lot of the Danube vessels work the canal over the watershed and also on the Rhine as a result.
    1251:

    Re: 'African countries will have to reach developed world status at the same rate as China'

    China is busy building infrastructure in Africa to the tune of $60 billion, so it could happen. So far Africa seems okay with this debt load although at least one Asian country is having second thoughts about similar Chinese led infrastructure projects ('Belt & Road Initiative' aka New Silk Road - Malaysia). It's almost a win-win situation for China: If the new infrastructure stimulates African economies, the Chinese get repaid and secure good trade pacts. If the new infrastructure doesn't stimulate the local economies, Chinese gets new colonies.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/world/asia/china-malaysia.html

    1252:

    @pigeon See here for locks on the Danube. There's a decent set of them, and I've been through all the ones from the German/Austrian border downstream. The Iron Gate ones are massive, but then you've got Black Sea shipping coming up. It's quite notable how the different sections work to different settings, with the highest ones much smaller.

    And yes, there is quite a bit of traffic over the link between the Danube and the Rhine. That canal has slightly smaller locks than the upper Danube, and I suspect the river cruise ships are quite snug in those locks.

    (There's also draught and air draught to worry about — the lowest bridge and the shallowest water also limit your traffic.)

    1253:

    "Storing passwords in a safe place"... You are aware that the traditional "safe place" is one where you can't find it when you need it?

    1254:

    So, how long have you been on the 'Net? Oh, hell, it was a joke I read, I think, in PC mags before I was online (late '91) about users being able to catch a virus from their computer".

    1255:

    Ah, yes. Saw that the other day. Yep, and a journalist and a political scientist are the perfect team to look at population growth....

    Even a plague wouldn't kill 90% of the world's population, and I've got the offer of a drink, here, to anyone who can prove that there will not be a significant portion (80+%) of the population that does not want kids.

    There's this thing called "biology".....

    1256:

    Yes, and there was a story today on slashdot that the 'Net was "becoming more civil".

    And the rich? Damn, my nice new barbecue barrel isn't big enough, we'll need something larger.

    1257:

    The ballots will be physically counted by Count Clerks, and the count will be witnessed by the Candidates' Count Agents.

    Well, except for we have ballots that are a bit complicated. I don't think I've ever voted in NC where there were not at least 5 different things to vote on. Most times it is 10 to 20. With a few of them being "Pick any 2".

    That makes hand counts very tedious and error prone.

    And AIUI California would think a 5 page long ballot short.

    1258:

    I don't think I've ever voted in NC where there were not at least 5 different things to vote on. Most times it is 10 to 20. With a few of them being "Pick any 2".

    That makes hand counts very tedious and error prone.

    It seems the best solution would be to hand-count only one item at a time. More laborious, but less chance of there being a mistake.

    1259:

    Re: '... joke I read, I think, in PC mags before I was online (late '91) about users being able to catch a virus from their computer".'

    Oops - sorry about that!

    Went on the 'net in the mid-90s but first read a how/where-to-web-surf-safely book. Those were the days when office tech came with unlikely to be ever read user manuals. :)

    1260:

    Re: Population

    At present, the highest fertility rates are in Africa so if the Chinese infrastructure projects do manage to stimulate socioeconomic improvements, esp. better education and medical care for women, the global reproduction/fertility rates could drop fast, close to developed nation levels (2.0 and under) in most of Africa*.

    http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/

    • Worst are nine sub-Saharan countries that are so far behind that UN experts figured it'd take about 60 years to catch up on the basics such as female education. Hence a UN program helping schools offer free lunch programs which btw helps local farmers, etc.

    https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/january-2007/food-keeps-african-children-school

    1261:

    Re: Musical political parodies

    If you're into old and new Broadway tunes as vehicles for US political commentary, try this one about DT's Mexican border wall a la 'Ain't Nothin' Like A Dame'(South Pacific).

    THERE IS NOTHIN' LIKE A WALL - Randy Rainbow Song Parody

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL5CDt_1xcE

    1262:

    "Give Stupidity a Chance" is definitely the anthem 2019 deserves!

    We need a leader who knows that money means class
    with an eye for a peach-perfect
    piece of ass
    Not a total dumb-cluck
    just one of the guys
    Let’s give stupidity a prize

    No prizes for guessing who Tennant and Lowe are singing about ...

    1263:

    except for we have ballots that are a bit complicated

    Do you have some kind of federal requirement that they all be printed on one piece of paper? In Australia and Aotearoa multiple ballots always mean multiple bits of paper, one per ballot. Sometimes they even go in {gasp} different boxes.

    This video still makes me laugh, but it also covers some of the basic concepts behind voting in Australia: https://youtu.be/Gc5A5tW6DqM

    1264:

    I wonder if Putin kicks himself every so often, thinking 'we built tens of thousands of tanks, when 10% of that money would have bought the leaders of the West lock, stock and barrel'. That would be rather "why couldn't we just be friends", considering that Russia has been asking to join NATO for a couple of decades, sometimes very insistently. I imagine it is the same sort of monetary problem - nobody wanted to lose money on the easy deal, until it was too late.

    That said, 10% of Russian military budget is about 1% of US military budget, I'm pretty sure for these money you can't buy a table clerk in Pentagon, let alone a politician.

    While in Syria the politics are changing now that the cheezel wants to hand over to ISIS People should know the rethoric of US towards "withdrawing from %countryname%". If US usually withdraws something somewhere, it immediately turns out later even closer to the potential adversary.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_U.S._troops_from_Afghanistan

    1265:

    The other part to the objection is about hand-counting paper ballots.

    Here's the thing - in Aus we get a lower error rate with hand counting than appears to be the case with electronic voting, and that is with instant runoff (preferential) voting (usually referred to as IRV). The trick is that counting this stuff is LESS complicated than what the older party volunteers (aka scrutineers) and paid electoral commission staff (it's seasonal work that appeals to older Australians) do with their weekly bridge or canasta groups. If you can sort of imagine a triennial(ish) canasta tournament distributed across thousands of school halls, churches and scout huts, all following the same rules and reporting results to a central leaderboard, that might give you a reasonable feel for how elections in Aus work (once you factor in the sausages, at least).

    1266:

    Thanks for that - had fun looking those places up. Seems that most of them are for "local" purposes, ie. getting ships past things like hydroelectric power stations and flood management installations, rather than keeping the river as a whole passable to ships at all, which accords with my idea of what the river was like.

    The RMD-Kanal - talking of links between the Danube and the Rhine reminds me of the bit much further up the Danube where part of it disappears into sinkholes and comes out on the other side of the watershed as the start of a river that flows into the Rhine. I'm fairly sure people have been through that, although it's possible that the account I read may have been fictional - can't reliably remember. Which now gets me wondering about a world where no RMD-Kanal was built, all cargo being towed from one to the other in underwater drogues by trained fish.

    1267:

    Danube

    All of this is interesting to this person who has only seen the Danube where a good throw would get a rock across it. I walked across it via a bridge in Munderkingen.

    1268:

    in Aus we get a lower error rate with hand counting than appears to be the case with electronic voting

    Sometimes I forget how bad the US is for basic democratic stuff. I need to re-read my Chomsky. Who didn't make a lot of sense to me until I started being exposed to actual merkins at university.

    To me, getting a bunch of people together even on minimum wage to count ballots and put them into piles doesn't sound like rocket science. But then... the minimum wage is much further from the living wage in the US, and their distaste for the workings of democracy much greater. So maybe it really is hard to get people to count ballots.

    I have this vision of people in the US learning to count from sound techs? "Juan Tu, juuuaaaan Tu! Tu! Juuuuuuaan TU! That's it, we're done".

    1269:

    Hand counting ballots.

    If there is only one thing on a ballot I could see that. But ....

    For good or bad in the US we tend to put more electable positions and voter decisions on ballots than it appears countries with historical ties to the UK do. Keep the decisions in the hands of the people I guess.

    Individual ballots for 20 decisions would be a bit of a nightmare at polling places. Plus the mechanics of securely dealing with all that paper, oh my.

    In our county we have over 700K registered voters. Maybe 1/2 vote in a big election. So if there are 20 items to be decided you're talking 350K x 20 -> 7.5 million pieces of paper to be securely handled and counted. And maybe 16 million ballots printed "just in case". Plus the process of voting on 20 pieces of paper would increase the workload tremendously.

    I just don't see it.

    Our ballots are fairly easy to do. Next to each choice is a 5 to 10 mm circle. Blacken it in for each choice. Insert result into slot in locked machine. It is immediately scanned and dropped into one of two bins. One for the scan worked and the machine is happy. The other for scan didn't make sense due to too many votes or extraneous marks. The later to be hand examined in a week or so to see if the voter intent can be determined. But only if the total 2nd bin ballots add up to enough to change a race.

    Based on what other counties do and other states our system seems very workable and hand countable if needed.

    Before it was decided that having the counting machines dial in our county was usually all counted by 2 hours after the close of the polls. With all the internet malware issues and such they now transport the machines to a central facility to count them. I suspect the shrinking number of installed land lines also contribute to this change. Still counts are usually 99% done by midnight or so.

    1270:

    Oh, yeah. North Carolina has 100 counties. So take whatever solution you propose and multiply it by 100.

    1271:

    Individual ballots for 20 decisions would be a bit of a nightmare at polling places. Plus the mechanics of securely dealing with all that paper, oh my.

    You mean that's easier than having a completely different ballot for every single county? I believe the US simplify the latter process by not having anyone check the design so it's just "elected person designs ballot to suit themselves and has it printed" rather than "large bureaucracy develops requirements, designs ballots, reviews the design, tests it, redesigns if necessary, then prints" which is hard enough for Australia's 15-ish ballots and would be unpleasant for 3000+ counties.

    I suppose it depends on how you look at it. To me "accurately ascertain the intention of each eligible voter" is important, and "make life easy for the people running elections" is a secondary concern. I understand that for the people running elections that may not be the case, but I don't think their views should dominate.

    Our ballots are fairly easy to do. Next to each choice is a 5 to 10 mm circle. Blacken it in for each choice

    So all you have to do is blacken 10-50 circles on a giant piece of paper. The right 10-50 circles.

    I suspect that in practice your electoral system strongly discourages candidates because otherwise the ballots get unwieldy. In Australia it's not uncommon to have 100 candidates for a senate election, and for single member electorates more than five (in Aotearoa 5+ candidates is also common, 20 not unheard of).

    The idea of having even 10 of those on one ballot paper is nightmarish, and I can easily see how 50 of those would create a tablecloth of tiny boxes that's impossible to navigate or verify. Just to list all 50x20 = 1000 candidates in 15 point text means a ballot paper a metre square.

    One solution would be to print a single vertical list of ballots then cut the ballot after voting. That would also mean you wouldn't need A0 scanners, you could use 15cm wide scanners and just scan all 2-5 metres of ballot.

    What's the record largest ballot paper in the US? In Australia it's at least 100x70cm (article, and direct link to pic) Nigeria made a fuss of this but even I've used a bigger one (it's the size that counts, right?)

    1272:

    Dealing with 100, or 3000, counties is easy enough. You just get the national electoral authority to design 3000 times however many local ballot papers are required. I am not kidding about that, BTW, you already have a government that does this stuff. What you lack is the bit that runs elections competently.

    Based on what other counties do and other states our system seems very workable and hand countable if needed.

    What's the error rate, who measures it and against what?

    We get both "what did you put on the ballot? WHAT?!?!" and a whole top-down integrity process that leads to reports like this one about when and how recounts are required (but also outlines the counting and scrutineering process - scruting is required!).

    1273:

    To me you're solving complicated issues with handwaivium.

    To you, I seem to be oblivious to how to solve the problem.

    Just remember my state which is #9 or #10 in population has a bit under 1/2 of your entire country.

    I can stop here.

    1274:

    To me you're solving complicated issues with handwaivium.

    China and India both run elections of significantly greater scale than the US does, but somehow they don't have the problems you do. The European Union runs elections across far greater diversity than the US, albeit much simpler elections. But that is to some extent a choice the US has made - you don't standardise elections or allow independent experts to run them. I'm sure the UN would be pleased to do that, for example, and they're already approved by the US for doing exactly that.

    Australia and Aotearoa are both more democratic than the US is, and you're right that I don't understand how their experience is inapplicable (except in the Chomsky sense that democracy endangers your rulers and thus better democracy doesn't solve their problems).

    I've always lived in countries that actively look overseas for ideas and shamelessly steal them when they look useful. Sure, it's a mixed bag and I'd give up MMP if it got rid of ISDS and Disney-ised copyright, but that's not one of the options.

    1275:

    Just remember my state which is #9 or #10 in population has a bit under 1/2 of your entire country.

    So you're saying that your state electoral officials are less than half as competent as their Australian counterparts?

    Australia has 7 states-and-territories, five layers of elected representatives (elected in three sets of elections), two overlapping sets of laws and little ability to get economies of scale by combining with other parts of the same nation.

    I suspect you're trying to say that your state has more complex democratic requirements than Australia, but I'm not seeing it. You quite possibly have the same issue that makes change difficult though - a perversely worded constitution that makes changing the electoral system hard. But you could almost certainly follow Australia's lead in fiddling with the bits you can change. If you can go from electing the slave-catcher to letting (some of) the slaves vote I reckon you can make other changes.

    1276:

    I think you're overlooking population distribution. Around 40% of Africa's 1.3 billion population is in 5 countries. Here's my opinion on the countries

  • Nigeria (~198 million): Boko Haram is not the main threat to this country's development, most of the population is away from the fighting. The government structure resembles India's, with similar problems. Don't get me wrong, the country will likely develop, just at the speed of India rather than China

  • Ethiopia (~102 million): This is one of the countries in Africa which maintained its Communist party, which tried to reform itself on the Chinese model. Unfortunately, the new leader has instituted reforms which resembles those of Mikhail Gorbachev. There's a risk that the result will be the same

  • https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/africa/As-Ethiopia-reforms-ethnic-violence-spreads/4552902-4821380-yciy0nz/index.html

  • Egypt (95 million): This country has done relatively well for itself. Its TFR was 3.3 last year, its HDI was 0.7 (around Indonesia's/the Philippines/South Africa), and its GDP (PPP) per capita is ~$14000. Egypt's even trying to encourage the population to not have more than 2 children. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/03/experts-urge-egypt-to-rethink-two-is-enough-population-strategy

  • DRC (79 million): The deadliest war since WWII (over 6 million dead) has devolved into banditry and low-level guerilla war. Just like Nigeria, most of the population is unlikely to be affected by war. Turkey has shown it is possible to develop somewhat rapidly with a large fraction of the population involved in a war, but I don't know enough about the country to give my opinion.

  • South Africa (57 million): Its TFR is ~2.5, HDI ~0.7, and GDP (PPP) per capita is ~$13.8k. This country is likely to get a negative TFR soon.

  • Of those countries, the only ones whose population is unlikely to double are Egypt and South Africa. In my opinion, none are likely to grow as fast as China https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/03/experts-urge-egypt-to-rethink-two-is-enough-population-strategy

    1277:

    Re: Voting

    Some time ago chatted with someone in the electronic voting industry. Like every other industry, there are several major players plus a few wanna-be's and all of them seem to work on multi-year/election contracts. (No idea/didn't say who actually negotiates this service.) Hadn't previously considered this aspect with respect to making elections easier to manage and supervise. Also makes me wonder how authorities would go about investigating electronic voting machine hacking claims. Oh yeah, many/most of these outfits offer services around the globe so the same machines are used in elections in different countries, are handled by scores of different folks working local elections, etc. The mind boggles at potential security issues.

    1278:

    Re: Africa

    Appreciate your analysis - thanks! DRC is probably the best example of what might happen in other African nations that engage in trade with China: whatever was already going on, just ramped up. Which also means that China didn't lie when it said its trade agreements didn't include any political strings attached. Guess it's a crap shoot given the results of previous advanced economies' aid that did have political strings attached.

    Wikipedia:

    'DR Congo's largest export is raw minerals, with China accepting over 50% of DRC's exports in 2012. In 2016, DR Congo's level of human development was ranked 176th out of 187 countries by the Human Development Index.[6] As of 2018, around 600,000 Congolese have fled to neighbouring countries from conflicts in the centre and east of the DRC.[14] Two million children risk starvation, and the fighting has displaced 4.5 million people.'

    After reading that piece on Egypt realized I've been making assumptions about what passes for K-12 'education' in other countries esp. bio, sex ed.

    1279:

    So you're saying that your state electoral officials are less than half as competent as their Australian counterparts?

    Nope. But from where I sit growing from 25 million pop with 2 or 3 questions to be manually counted to 300+million pop with 10 to 40 items to be counted is NOT a linear extrapolation. I should have stated that.

    You think you've got it solved. I don't. We disagree.

    But I do feel at some level we have too many things on the ballot. We should not need to elect a county surveyor or whatever. The county manager should be able to hire one. Just like they do with most positions in the county. There are multiple versions of this all over and I suspect it has to do with political / money power 200+ years ago.

    1280:

    25 million pop with 2 or 3 questions to be manually counted

    That's definitely one way to look at it. I vote for 12 federal senators, 1 federal lower house MP, 7 state senators using a preferential, proportional system, one state MP, 3 local councillors and there are different rules for each one. Sometimes I have to number all 3-10 boxes (with no missing numbers), other times I can number one (or more) boxes above the line, or I can number 5 (or 12) boxes of 100+ below the line. Sometimes not having all the required numbers invalidates my vote, other times I can just put a "1" in a single box and that's ok. It's so simple that every election sees most parties release a "how to vote" card and volunteers (sometimes paid staff) hand them out at every single polling booth. During counting all the relevant rules have to be applied for every single ballot paper. Then the resulting votes have to be tallied up and the preferential rules for that particular election applied.

    But yeah, it's a simple matter of two or three questions. No worries.

    1281:

    You think you've got it solved.

    I've got it solved at the "an armed milita doesn't work for national defence in the 21st century, we need a professional standing army" sense. US elections are still run by party hacks and amateurs, and I think it's well past time you had trained professionals doing it.

    I think it's amusing that people decry the cheezel's preference for loyalty over expertise when that is designed into the system. The whole point of elected positions is that popularity matters more than expertise. This fretting about Brian Kemp running his own election is merely a recent, blatant example of the flaws inherent in letting politicians administer their own elections.

    Personally I'd start with who runs the elections on the basis that "what matters is who counts the votes" (Stalin said something like that but didn't actually design your voting system). Alternatively you could start with something like "only voters can participate in elections" but I fear that would be extremely hard to do because of the various constitutional/supreme court decisions to the contrary. Better to focus on making sure all eligible voters can vote, and counting all the votes that are cast.

    1282:

    Surely if the US federal government can sort out graves registration for the US population in the event of WWIII this is strictly a one pipe problem?

    1283:

    The problem with US elections is that a lot of the offices SHOULD NOT BE ELECTED Judges & local law enforcement officers, for a start .. (Can you - or I - spell Arpaio?)

    1284:

    And today: What are we going to do about the rich?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHMk9WdoFHg

    1285:

    Greg, that's what mainlining on un-cut high grade democracy looks like.

    1286:

    Thanks to Moz for running with "how to run an election" overnight.

    Here in Scotland, I've already outlined the procedure for a single election with a single ballot. It hasn't happened (yet) but on a single Polling Day, we could hold elections for:- 1) Local Council by Single Transferable Vote. For this we number 1 or more candidates in order of preference, from 1 to $lastoneweareprepared _to _support. There is no requirement in law or fact to vote for even one candidate, and the system as detailed above is flexible enough that an X would be treated as a 1 with no other preferences marked in most cases. 2) Constituency Member of Scottish Parliament by First Past The Post. 3) List MSP by STV. 4) House of Commons (aka Palace of Oathbreakers) MP by FPTP 5) Member of European Parliament (not sure if that's FPTP or STV).

    Each of these would be on a separate paper ballot.

    The design and colour of each ballot form is mandated by law. The rest of the process is overseen by a (usually local government) official called the Returning Officer, who is responsible for oversight of the election in their area.

    The Count Clerks are normally people who have a day job such as bank teller, because their core skill set includes counting large numbers of standard size pieces of paper quickly and accurately. Conduct of the Count will actually involve doing this at least twice, once to confirm that the number of ballots polled for $post in $Polling_area agrees with the figures from the Voters' Role and ballots actually used after allowing for spoilt ballots being replaced, and again to count the votes cast for each candidate across the entire seat.

    The record for doing this for a single House of Oathbreakers constituency is under 2 hours from the Poll closing.

    1287:

    Hugs to Host, since life is not playing Nice.

    Anyhoo, since the Grinder[tm] (not Grindr but close) got us (from both sides, be-tum-tish!), here's some links / nonsense / noise / love:

    On Black-face Dramas (tho y do it if u not know irony?):

    Survive! YT, film "Tropic of Thunder", 2:34 ... UK comedians are about / currently about-to-be-spanked with this one. Pineapples!

    On Brexit / UK-100k-BBC-Think-Tank-In-A-Can-Can-We-Make-It-Moar-Obvious-Who-Runs-BarterTown(hey, someone warned you about that, didn't they? Ho-Ho-Ho): When do the Adults arrive? The Adjustment Bureau

    On USA / UK politics: Complex Matrix of Disinformation Twitter, Private Eye, 1st Feb 2019. Yeeeahhh... silly rabbits, trix are 4 kidz, the Wolves iz real.

    Whispers From the Void:

    Younglings, no, we're not traaaash. Nor are we antisemitic. Nor are we many things. Certainly not Gamer-Gated. We work in mysterion Ways. (We do love you though). Hellbanning Our Mind, not smart.

    Millennium Dome? We remember when Italian Anarchists took it over, we're that oldz.

    If you're upset that you get called Fascz, the Mind-Reapers come and Party and suck your Soul, careful careful careful. Rather a bad label than a fucked Mind. Don't sign things with long EULAs, eh?

    Notes to Labour MPs running negative campaigns: do not use images that are obviously altered since some of us know where they were first used, know the people who spam said images, know who planned the fake Voltaire quotation spin ups and have never seen those versions in some very dark places. You're basically flagging yourself up to some real nasties that you're playing Muppet-Land and they're not impressed. David Duke and co are many things, but never that blatant with their tripe (and get off the damn Lizards: y'all shooting yourselves in the Foot (Michael)). Were you warned about old Rosie Baaarrr blow-back? Oh yes you were, Account is Now Cleared, Debt-Free, My Little Chipmunks. And no, we don't hate you, you fucking Apes, we love you (which... might be worse, depends, depends).

    Apple, Goog, FB - appear to be having what could be called a bit of a barney. Wonder why? We saw the Korean Language trick Little-Miss-Taylor-Guardian-Corn-Fun. We're not Sonic, we're something else (but we do love you, but the Corn Boys are srs busz, careful of Big Ag, it's old-skool McFuckery).

    EPA? Oh No.

    Oh, Bonus Round: go look up the LEGAL DRAMA of McD's losing their TM / Rights to Big-Mac (Ireland!), it's glorious. Lesson? Don't rely on Wikipedia as a defense. No, really: Disney is shitting bricks on them 'cause reasons.

    ~

    Anyhow, we're tired. No doubt Host is too (There is Joy in Hearts!)

    Anyhow, for the [redacted]: Na srebrnym globie YT, Film Trailer "On the Silver Globe", 2:17

    2019.

    Oh Private Eye.

    Sometimes they do come back...

    1288:

    oops, dropped a link

    On Venuuuuzwalllen OPs: Regime Change: How it's Done Golem XIV

    Lots of people going Dark / Private all over the shop, hatches being Battened. Isis hugz, forget the Dongs, they sold out to get on Tee-Vee and the trappings of Civilized University Name Recognition. Forget them, some of us whirl our Eyes still.

    Justice, where art Thou?

    He was my Friend. Ze was my Lover

    "It's not revenge he's after, it's a reckoning... Hell, I got lots of Friends... I don't

    Let's Get This Party Started.

    p.s.

    Not a Narcissist or a Psychopath. Just different

    1289:

    Shawn Micaleff points out that Australia has more living former Prime Minister's than it's ever had before, and that after the election in May we're likely to have even more!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khbCHL7fujM

    1290:

    Ahh, just noticed this is now a major M.Urd.k effort jam, with real Ti.ME. £ spend, so some clarity:

    "The irony is that much of alt-right is strongly nationalist and strongly anti-globalization. And what it's doing in these campaigns is trying to act as an international and globalized effort to support nationalist and anti-globalist people in other countries," Nimmo said. "Right there, there's a philosophical problem."

    The US alt-right 'meme war' to sway the French election is failing PRI, May 2017

    Note that Labour MPs might be using real images used by 'real' racists. But it's one of those Cultural things again: we can tell you which images are used by English speaking nasties, and those images aren't in their lexicon. The original ones are from USA, Confederate / Birch division and have been around long enough to have their own little sub-folders. Which those ones ain't. (Dubai? MENA? Maybe, maybe... diamond ring though, that's a unique signature if we ever saw one).

    Make of it what you will, but sloppy work attracts real attention. Not smart if you're in small town UK, eh?

    Twitter: who knows if you're a dog or an intel agent working out of Lebanon, eh?

    1291:

    Let's try one more time. I live in an area of the US where the voting works. You claim it doesn't. I think I know more about it than you based on distance alone.

    Now there are areas of the US where things are a mess. No doubt. But you telling me that the voting in my county is not a valid way to do it is just flat our arrogance.

    We don't have huge lines when turn out is large. Lines yes but not 500 people standing in the rain. We have paper ballots that are machine counted with manual counts as an option. Audits have shown virtually no error rate. And our results are almost always known by midnight of polling day.

    We even have early voting which is more than most states. Here our fight is over how much early voting (times and places) when most of the country doesn't even have it.

    Why are you telling ME that what I have is a bad thing and I'm ignorant for not wanting to change it?

    And as to Greg's comment. Well, yes, we do put too many things on the ballot for reasons good and bad. But not electing judges just moves the issues to another spot in the political process. It has/is happening here.

    1292:

    [Note: for Greg & non-Twitter readers]

    Look, we're not saying that a lowly intern fresh from a minor public school got handed what anyone with a serious background in spotting what is already virulent antisemitic propaganda was handed an image and told to "make it more blatantly antisemitic for the stupids[1]", and chose The Star of David and a diamond ring[2] because their education on said topic is limited to watching movies and perhaps a bit of 4chan and they did a google for WW2 propaganda posters, but it certainly doesn't fit the actual M.O. of, you know, any of the actual active nasties out there[3]d. "Plausible Deniability" isn't just a CIA catch-phrase.

    And he probably isn't male, Caucasian, Church of England upbringing, under 25 and called Ben, either[4].

    Because, you know, the UK is a much more mature place than that and their party political dirty tricks are subtle, right?

    Walks backwards into Hell facing G_D

    [1] Labour frontbencher wins libel case against The Sun over Nazi band claim Worcester News, 2019

    [2] He'd have to be stupid since DeBeers and so on are long out of that game at least in Western realms. Look for Russian oligarchs if you want to find your blood diamonds these days.

    [3] Or the ones who use English as a primary language, which we assume a disabled lady from bumpkintown would.

    [4] Hello Ben. Meet the World.

    1293:

    I think rather what he is saying is while your current system works, it is unwieldy and vulnerable. There are better ways of doing things that are more professional, which speeds things up and reduces the risk of errors while still being easy for the voter.

    Your Scantron version is certainly good for counting, but without an independent professional group scrutinising the results and cross checking you can't genuinely trust the results you get. They are probably good, but you don't get any published proof one way or the other.

    Many other parts of the US are far worse, worst case where the voting forms are designed by the incumbent. Manipulation can be as simple as whose name is first on the list, let alone disenfranchisement via voter ID laws and so on.
    Standardising these at a state or federal level and professionalising the electoral apparatus would generally improve things, and plenty of other countries have examples of how to do individual parts better.

    1294:

    Unreadable Pretentious @ 1292 So a stupid Labour MP won money from a stupid Murdoch paper. Does anyone actually care & does it matter? Actually, what matters is that someone this stupid is in "Public Office" ... i.e. One of fuckwit-Corbyn's little runners-around. THAT matters.

    1295:

    I think rather what he is saying is while your current system works, it is unwieldy and vulnerable.

    Yes, no, and no.

    I have no idea why you think it is unwieldy. Especially compared to dealing with 16 million pieces of paper by hand by 20 to 40 people for each piece. Someone mentioned colored paper up thread. Really, 20 different colors? For many people they will start to blur together.

    There are better ways of doing things that are more professional, which speeds things up and reduces the risk of errors while still being easy for the voter.

    More professional? Really? Or is this just bias as to what is familiar?

    Speed things up? Really? 200K ballots counted with up to 20 or more choices and all done within 4 hours of polls closing. Really?

    As to vulnerable. Audits are done before and after each election. And at times some things are counted by hand as in when someone won by less than 200 votes out of 10,000s cast. And as I said ALL rejected ballots are studied to see why and if things could be changed to deal with any issues better. Plus those ballots are added to the total if everyone can agree to what the intent is/was. But everything is vulnerable to some degree.

    1296:

    Talking of elections & voter reliability & accreditation etc ... We've just had a letter from the voter registration section of the Local Authority ... to someone we've never heard of, but to this address (!) Uh? We've gone back to the senders & told them "NEVER known of at this address" & they claim to have deleted the name ... but. Was this a failed attempt at personation or a cock-up? I will be chacking-up to make sure we are still on the register.

    1297:

    And at times some things are counted by hand as in when someone won by less than 200 votes

    So what if someone wins by 500 votes, they never do a hand count to verify? What if you got a swing 1000 votes in an unexpected direction but the machines were set to provide a predetermined result in line with expectations, do you think it would be caught?
    Many countries do an immediate post election audit, where they repeatedly hand count every vote to ensure the tallies match the immediate election night results. It's why all election night results are provisional for a few weeks, along with the addition of postal votes. Big electorates might take a month to finalise their results.

    What happens in your case if you have 11 people wanting to run and your form only allows 10 - does it continue on the next line? Does that 11th person get quietly discouraged from running? What about write in candidates - how far in advance are your forms created? Who determines the order in which candidates appear?
    Do they come in a large print version, for those with poor eyesight?

    How could you make it do ranked preferences, like STV involves in Australia? The US does that too in certain areas.

    I'm not saying what other countries have is the best system, rather that there are many small improvements that different countries have done which improve the reliability and ease of use of voting in their elections. You seem convinced that your local system is ideal, it currently works for your specific electorate, but others have pointed out flaws, and indicated that many other parts of the US have profound vulnerabilities.

    When I use the word professional, I mean an independent group whose job it is to standardise, design, verify and run the elections, and whose work is in turn verified by the parties who run. Losers will shine an especially bright light on operations. How else can you trust the results any more?

    1298:

    200K ballots counted with up to 20 or more choices and all done within 4 hours of polls closing.

    You keep swapping between your county, your state and your country depending on what suits your argument. If I thought you were arguing in good faith I'd be offended.

    1299:

    So what if someone wins by 500 votes, they never do a hand count to verify? What if you got a swing 1000 votes in an unexpected direction but the machines were set to provide a predetermined result in line with expectations, do you think it would be caught?

    Recounts are based on percentage of wins. I should have said that. And it was percentages that were off that created the kerfuffle at the other end of the state. State elections board refused to certify an election after weird stats on absentee ballots. So we have a state dominated by R's in Congress were we (state officials) are refusing to certify the win of an R. Bit of irony there. There will likely be a new election in a few month while the seat in Congress is unfilled.

    Many countries do an immediate post election audit, where they repeatedly hand count every vote to ensure the tallies match the immediate election night results. It's why all election night results are provisional for a few weeks, along with the addition of postal votes. Big electorates might take a month to finalise their results.

    I think that is a bad idea. But it may be what is needed to clean things up in other parts of the country.

    What happens in your case if you have 11 people wanting to run and your form only allows 10 - does it continue on the next line? Does that 11th person get quietly discouraged from running? What about write in candidates - how far in advance are your forms created? Who determines the order in which candidates appear?

    Forms are created a month or two in advance. It is based on the filing requirements. So they can be proofed and tested in scanners and the odd error fixed and re-printed as needed.

    Do they come in a large print version, for those with poor eyesight?

    There is an entire protocol for disabled persons. Including taking a portable booth to the car if needed. If you have serious issues but let the election office know in advance they will work to make sure anyone can vote. The biggest reason for the advance notice is to deal with laws regarding assistance in filling out a ballot. These were enacted to prevent vote stuffing by "helpers" filling out ballots for illiterate. Or those claiming to be so. Early voting is best for severe disabilities. But I don't know a lot about the details. I have some friends with kids who would fit this category. You've tweaked my interest into asking them soon.

    How could you make it do ranked preferences, like STV involves in Australia? The US does that too in certain areas.

    Form would be made.

    I'm not saying what other countries have is the best system, rather that there are many small improvements that different countries have done which improve the reliability and ease of use of voting in their elections. You seem convinced that your local system is ideal, it currently works for your specific electorate, but others have pointed out flaws, and indicated that many other parts of the US have profound vulnerabilities.

    There is no such thing as an ideal confidential voting system. Our local system isn't perfect. But I think for the types of ballots and numbers we have to deal with it works well. It certainly isn't crap. I wish the rest of the country would move to our setup or similar.

    But I'm not way convinced a paper system with only hand counting would work better. I personally think it would be a step backwards.

    My argument with Moz is he basically says his way is best. Period. For everyone. I disagree. But it may be the best compromise for his situation.

    1300:

    No. I said our local system works very well. And it would be a big step up if the rest of the state/country switched to it or something similar.

    You kept telling my it was crap.

    1301:

    My daughter and son bought a rehabbed house in a poor neighborhood being gentrified. (We cans start another thread on that if everyone want to yell at us.)

    They have owned the house since Oct 2017 and so no previous residents have been there since at least spring of 2017.

    While they were out of the country in December their Ring door bell recorded the police coming to the door. They missed the ring connection so we didn't know what was up. I was there first week in January when the police showed up again asking if "some name" lived there. Nope. Explained the situation. They said thanks and left.

    A week ago got a W-2 (US tax statement of earnings for a year) for someone we've never heard of. Who had to be using the address for over a year fraudulently.

    Oh, well.

    1302:

    I actually think that China is right to call out Western double standards when it comes to trade with countries that employ slave labor. India has close to half of the world's slaves, and its slave population as a percentage of total population is higher than the DRC's, yet Western countries trade without uttering a peep.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#/media/File:Modern_incidence_of_slavery.png.

    From the link I've provided above, it seems that the DRC's slave population is inline with that of most sub-Saharan African countries.

    Keep in mind, the West's logic is that "slavery will die a natural death" as society modernizes. China's gamble is that this pattern may extend to the DRC.

    1303:

    Ioan I suspect that most of the Indian slaves are Dalits ....

    1304:

    Er, I did not say that we had had 20 different ballots at once, just that separately coloured paper had been used (incidentally the shades selected had no contrast under fluorescent light).

    I also did not give a timescale for counting multiple polls, just that a single poll has declared a result within 2 hours of the polls closing (and that includes time to transport all ballot boxes to the Counting Station, and then count the ballots manually at least twice).

    1305:

    Well, all that really shows is that tax and law officials were trying to find $person at lastknownaddress.

    1306:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 1223: This is what bank safety deposit boxes are for. They are a place you can leave an external hard-drive which is secure against, well, the house / office burning down, and well, in the event someone robs the bank, you will hear about it faster than they get around to sticking the mystery hard-drive in a pc.

    That works fine if YOU need to access your data to recover from a disaster, but for your "heirs" to access it, they need to know the safety deposit box exists & where it's located. They need to be on the signature card at the bank branch where the box is located and the account has to have "rights of survivor-ship" (or whatever the legal term).

    A "power of attorney" won't cut it because they expire upon death. Your executor should eventually be able to get a court order to allow access to the box after your will is probated. But again, they have to know to look for the box, so you have to spell it out and it still won't help with time critical data.

    It just works so much easier if you have a trusted person you can share the box with.

    1307:

    _Moz_ @ 1224: I remember the upset in New Zealand when the aforementioned fascists clamped down and started demanding *passports* from kiwis travelling to Australia. Before that a (paper, photo-less) driver's license would suffice.

    It used to be that way along the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico. All you needed to cross over (and come back) for a visit was a valid driver's license. North Carolina didn't start including a photo on your driver's license until 1972.

    1308:

    SFreader @ 1261: Re: Musical political parodies

    If you're into old and new Broadway tunes as vehicles for US political commentary, try this one about DT's Mexican border wall a la 'Ain't Nothin' Like A Dame'(South Pacific).

    THERE IS NOTHIN' LIKE A WALL - Randy Rainbow Song Parody

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL5CDt_1xcE

    I think I have a new musical hero.

    1309:

    _Moz_ @ 1271:

    Individual ballots for 20 decisions would be a bit of a nightmare at polling places. Plus the mechanics of securely dealing with all that paper, oh my.

    You mean that's easier than having a completely different ballot for every single county? I believe the US simplify the latter process by not having anyone check the design so it's just "elected person designs ballot to suit themselves and has it printed" rather than "large bureaucracy develops requirements, designs ballots, reviews the design, tests it, redesigns if necessary, then prints" which is hard enough for Australia's 15-ish ballots and would be unpleasant for 3000+ counties.

    Actually, there are bureaucratic rules for "designing" ballots. I still haven't shredded my sample** ballot from the last election, so I was able to look it up. Ballot "designs" do get challenged in court if one of the candidates or interest groups feel like they're getting treated unfairly.

    Races generally appear on the ballot in this order:
    Federal Offices (President, Senate, Congress),
    State Offices (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General ... Legislature Senate & House),
    Prosecutorial Offices (District Attorneys),
    County Offices (Commissioners, Clerk of Superior Court, Sheriff),
    Judicial Offices (State Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Superior Court, District Court),
    "Nonpartisan" Offices (school board, soil & water district, etc) and finally
    Referenda (Constitutional Amendments and/or Bond Issues).

    Usually an incumbent's name is listed first with other candidates listed alphabetically by last name. Occasionally down ballot races will be in the form of you can vote for two out of whatever number of candidates are running although in that case any incumbents will be listed alphabetically the same as the other candidates.

    "Nonpartisan" offices are not really "non-partisan", it just means the candidate's party affiliation is not listed on the ballot.

    Each individual "polling place" has its own ballot or maybe two ballots. The polling place I'm assigned to serves two different Legislative Districts and which ballot you get depends on where you live & which district you're in. People who live a block down from me are in a different Legislative district, but we both go to the same polling place to vote. Wake County has 216 polling places, so that means at least 216 unique ballots. Wake County is just one of a hundred counties in North Carolina.

    If they tried to have a separate ballot for each race or issue to be voted on, that would require at least 30 different ballots just for one polling place. And this for an off-year election with no Presidential or Senate election here.

    **Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. I take that obligation seriously. I always print out the sample ballot to give me a framework for investigating the candidates & choosing which ones I think are best. How are you going to figure that out if you don't know who the candidates are & what they stand for before you go into the voting booth? I try to give the down ballot races as much thought as I put in to the races at the top of the ballot.

    1310:

    _Moz_ @ 1272: Dealing with 100, or 3000, counties is easy enough. You just get the national electoral authority to design 3000 times however many local ballot papers are required. I am not kidding about that, BTW, you already have a government that does this stuff. What you lack is the bit that runs elections competently."

    Competency is not really a requirement for U.S. elections. Constitutionality is. The Constitution says elections are run by the individual states, with Congress only being allowed to set uniform standards for Federal Offices and setting the date.

    1311:

    Unreadable Pretentious

    Well, we thought the name was quite beautiful but there we go.

    Does anyone actually care & does it matter?

    Judging by the bubble people on Twitter, the UK national press and TV media and the money markets, apparently not.

    But some of us do care. We care enough to, you know, actually check the nasties to see if they're involved with some of the intensively parochial politics going on (spoiler: not in that case). It's a job the Police / MI5 really should be doing, and whose to say they're already not? (Hint to people named after Star Trek tweebs: don't use that stuff or doxx people if you don't know who is pushing it. The nasties really do track their shit and get annoyed when it's... "improved" let us say. Branding, big on branding they are. The type of nasties who revel in driving people insane and killing homeless people for fun, no joke. The nasties we're talking about here probably aren't what you're thinking of either, in that 'technically not your species' type of deal).

    So here's a shout out to a person on Twitter who is worth a read given current things going on, regarding topics mentioned:

    I don't want to be scared right now, but I'm terrified . on Twitter, 7th Feb, 2019. She deserves a hug.

    And since you asked and want to check the receipts:

    The current Turning Point UK drama unfolding at the moment is about rather a lot more than you would expect. But it does include Scientologists, US $$$, UK right-wing politics and so on. Big Egos, Big Prizes, Big Threats. But it also includes the nasties (H.S.S versions) who really aren't that impressed (largely due to a disappearing CEO and whose money he is and what he is as well as prior run ins). Which absolutely zero of the self-absorbed UK twittariti seem aware of and just who they're fucking about with, blithely ignoring the massive teeth being bared. The kind of teeth that kill MPs kind of teeth.

    Oh, and here's another receipt: Brexit: 'Very real' chance of Irish unity poll if no deal BBC 8th Feb 2019.

    WINK WINK WINK WINK

    Spoilers: we predicted that one a little earlier than was revealed online. You can check the receipts against the reality and make up your own Mind about what's temporally happening.

    ~

    Sorry, shedding scales at the moment. You've no idea how traumatic it's been. Itchy too.

    Three Stars = 三体 btw. Although we can recognize the importance of the work (and the significance of cross-cultural exchanges rather than nukes) it's a bit obvious so far.

    Time to re-hydrate.

    Translation errors are not our fault, always need a good translator.

    p.s.

    Heinlein and Rowling? Mice and Lions, hey-ho, we're used to threats. But we were right and tried to warn you, which kinda counts in our book.

    1312:

    Mayhem @ 1297:

    And at times some things are counted by hand as in when someone won by less than 200 votes

    So what if someone wins by 500 votes, they never do a hand count to verify?
    What if you got a swing 1000 votes in an unexpected direction but the machines were set to provide a predetermined result in line with expectations, do you think it would be caught?

    Many countries do an immediate post election audit, where they repeatedly hand count every vote to ensure the tallies match the immediate election night results. It's why all election night results are provisional for a few weeks, along with the addition of postal votes. Big electorates might take a month to finalise their results.

    Under our Constitution elections are conducted by the individual states, so it varies somewhat ... but generally it's not the number of votes, but the percentage of difference. If a candidate's margin is below a certain percent (say 1%), a recount is automatic. If the margin is under 5%, the "loser" can request a recount. Because different locales use different kinds of voting, the recounts take different forms.

    An audit is not a recount, it's a check to determine if the reported results are reliable and/or a recount is needed. Here in Wake County, the first recount would probably be a re-scan looking at the rejected ballots manually to see WHY they were rejected, i.e. if there's any way to discern the voter's intent ... such as drawing an X next to the candidate's name or circling the little oval instead of filling it in. That would be accompanied by an audit to verify the scanners were recording votes accurately. If those measures didn't provide a reliable result, there's always the possibility of a full on manual recount. It can even go as far as the board of election refusing to certify the results and holding a new election. See North Carolina's 9th Congressional District in 2018 for example.

    What happens in your case if you have 11 people wanting to run and your form only allows 10 - does it continue on the next line? Does that 11th person get quietly discouraged from running? What about write in candidates - how far in advance are your forms created? Who determines the order in which candidates appear?
    Do they come in a large print version, for those with poor eyesight?

    The "form" (known as a ballot here in the U.S.) allows for as many lines as are necessary to accommodate all of the qualified candidates - that hypothetical 11th candidate gets on the ballot. North Carolina's rules for write in candidates says they have to present a petition with signatures from a certain percentage of the eligible voters in the race for which they wish to be a write in candidate; as few as 150 signatures in some county/municipal/local races. North Carolina does have a rule regarding write in/independent candidates - IF you lost a bid to become a candidate in a partisan primary, you cannot then run as an independent and/or write in candidate in the same general election.

    I'm not sure how far in advance the ballots are finalized. I'm guessing 30 days before any early voting period begins, but I didn't look that up. Election Day (for the general election) is set by law to be the "first Tuesday after the first Monday in November", so if early voting began a month before election day, ballots would have to be finalized a month before that, say by September 1st. Partisan primary elections would have their own cutoff dates, aka filing deadlines.

    I've never seen a large print ballot, but the law does allow you to bring someone to assist you in filling out your ballot OR you can ask for assistance at the polling place. They even have curbside voting for those who for whatever reason can't get out of a vehicle and walk/roll into the polling place.

    How could you make it do ranked preferences, like STV involves in Australia? The US does that too in certain areas.

    We don't have that in North Carolina, but at a guess, the ballot would have to have some way to show that preference. Maybe however many little ovals in a row beside each candidate's name like a SCANTRON test form? Your most favored candidate gets the oval in column A, second most gets column B, ... down to the least favored candidate. Or you could just have columns A thru E and only rank your top 5.

    I doubt any candidate would get enough 11th ranked votes to prevail over the other 10.

    1313:

    Just different Brightened my day (considerably) to see you intact. The links are fun, thanks. On a semi-serious note, I am wondering why people in the US mostly (myself sadly included) missed "On the Silver Globe". It looks fascinating, and I find myself angry at the decades-ago political interference that prevented its completion. Note your current middle name does not display on my laptop browsers (mac or debian), though it does on a phone, and in either case google translate chokes on it. And still rassling with open plan office vs incompatible mind type. (Yes, familiar with easy-to-find resources like QuietRevolution.)

    And for host, re road works noise - try the best cheap noise blocking headphones you can buy (Decibel Defense are my favorite at the moment, in a pinch anything shooters use), with good earplugs underneath, either foam or the neoprene(?) ones on a string. If you haven't already done this.

    Don't have much unused in my links collection; this I'm still slowly digesting, about a newly described (AFAIK) response to emergency situations (mapping to some of my own responses):
    Intense threat switches dorsal raphe serotonin neurons to a paradoxical operational mode (01 Feb 2019, paywalled, no idea why https doesn't work, s-h has it.) Stimulation of dorsal raphe γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) neurons promoted movement in negative but not positive environments, and movement-related GABA neural dynamics inverted between positive and negative environments. Thus, dorsal raphe circuits switch between distinct operational modes to promote environment-specific adaptive behaviors. Bold mine. via Fight or flight: Serotonin neurons prompt brain to make the right call

    1314:

    Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. I take that obligation seriously. I always print out the sample ballot to give me a framework for investigating the candidates & choosing which ones I think are best. How are you going to figure that out if you don't know who the candidates are & what they stand for before you go into the voting booth? I try to give the down ballot races as much thought as I put in to the races at the top of the ballot.

    So you only get a sample ballot? That's not bad or anything but I must be spoiled. Where I live voters an informative guidebook that looks exactly like this. I got mailed a copy; they are also free for pickup at any public library and, as you can see, posted online as pdf files.

    It includes not only who is running and what measures are up for consideration but also commentary. Candidates get to include their own statements. In the case of ballot measures (potential things proposed for citizens to vote on directly) voters get title, a synopsis of the plan, expected results of yes and no votes, estimated financial impact, the complete text of the proposal, and statements by interested parties that want to weigh in. Sometimes a lot of people want to say things about particular ballot measures.

    I think we're spoiled in my state.

    1315:

    Re: Slavery & '... yet Western countries trade without uttering a peep.'

    Quite a few people don't accept that 'slavery' comes in different forms, plus it's easier to shrug off difficult ethics-related topics concerning foreign countries as 'it's just a custom, nothing to do with me/being an [x of your choice] nationality.'

    Also, keep in mind that most states allow minors to marry and whaddyaknow its a female minor who's marrying some middle-aged or older guy. Recent example (2017) of how this in the US is the subject of the video below. (In the middle of binge-watching RR's videos ... could do with some laughs.)

    She Was SIXTEEN GOING ON SEVENTEEN (Roy Moore Was 32) - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3WhDE-O6lc

    1316:

    Competency is not really a requirement for U.S. elections. Constitutionality is. The Constitution says elections are run by the individual states...

    Which means that you'd need co-operation if you wanted a mandatory system, or you could have a body like the FBI that controls federal issues and advises on state ones.

    Ballot "designs" do get challenged in court

    A process which I'm sure is no cheaper or faster than any other court case, and I would not be surprised if there were limits on the remedies (Australia, NZ and UK are extremely reluctant to invalidate an election or referendum even in the case of egregious misconduct).

    I am looking at Trump and his henchthings and thinking there has to be a better way than letting them run things. As the UK is finding, having everything rely on unwritten rules only works while everyone abides by them... which is not really why we have rules.

    1317:

    Sorry to be dredging up old subjects, but I've been away.

    "bad drought helped killing off the huge ranches that had dominated southern California's economy previously, since most of the cattle drowned or starved. Any practical advice from the Aussies on how to weather this sort of thing?"

    Yep. Own two large properties in completely different climates. When there's drought in one, buy up stock at depressed prices and truck them to the other property. Fatten them there and sell at a huge profit. If the drought/flood gets really bad, buy distressed abattoirs and similar businesses. These can process meat from your property in the other climate. Buy up properties at reduced prices.

    I spoke to a farmer who did this and he was growing his business at about 20%. (So about 4 million dollars a year). He was also always eligible for disaster relief as low interest loans and grants that let him gobble up his neighbours farms. Vertical integration, farm to finished meat product let him maximise profits. He was also diversifying into more climate regions, coastal, inland, mountain, northern and southern. Always a natural disaster somewhere to profit from.

    1318:

    125 double ups is almost certainly simple errors. My local doctor tried to prescribe me something for an ailment I don't have because there was another Jason Rogers who lived in my street who did have that ailment. The wrong file had been extracted from the system.

    I also dealt with a customer complaint while working for a Telco. Twins, Tino and Nino. Same surname, same address, same password, same date of birth, same postal address, mobile phone numbers were one digit different. One of them had asked for a feature to be applied to their service and it had been applied to the wrong one. They were completely besides themselves (boom boom). "Do you people just pick a phone randomly and add stuff when people order it?"

    1319:

    I also dealt with a customer complaint while working for a Telco. Twins...

    Ouch. Yes, I can believe they got confused a lot.

    As a young man I went to The Evergreen State College and shared the campus with Professor Charlie Tesque (a great guy, by the way). He'd been teaching there since the place was founded, and therefore had heard all possible word play involving Tesque at TESC. He once remarked in my presence that after twenty years, the professor and the school were still getting each others' mail.

    1320:

    That Kennedy is still an idiot - now he’s at an anti-vax rally in Washington State (where they’re having having a measles outbreak.) https://gizmodo.com/hmm-this-anti-vaccination-rally-amid-a-major-measles-o-1832492290

    1321:

    Well, all that really shows is that tax and law officials were trying to find $person at lastknownaddress.

    Working for over a year with the wrong address is a bit odd. Anyway they marked it as "does not live here" and tossed it back into the system.

    1322:

    I always print out the sample ballot to give me a framework for investigating the candidates & choosing which ones I think are best.

    Yes. But you and I are weird that way.

    1323:

    Ballot "designs" do get challenged in court

    A process which I'm sure is no cheaper or faster than any other court case, and I would not be surprised if there were limits on the remedies (Australia, NZ and UK are extremely reluctant to invalidate an election or referendum even in the case of egregious misconduct).

    If you challenge it needs to be before the election. Likely by a bit. As JBS pointed out the ballots in most places are set a month or few in advance. And most judges will expedite things if it appears the claims are valid.

    But yes, invalidating a "done" election is a hard process. Which is why NC's 9th district Congressional race has everyone's knickers in a knot. The state board refused to certify the results from the counties due to statistical issues which led to some quick investigations which led to what looks like ballot stuffing of absentee ballots in favor of the R candidate. And since there's a sherrif's race in one of those counties with about a 50 vote margin it got held up also. Both candidates in the later agreed neither will be sheriff until things are settled.

    The Congressional guys are not so agreeable. Plus after some digging it appears that things were odd in the R primary for the Congressional race and now they have an issue where a result was certified (the primary) but may have been fraudulent. And it was close. So the Legislature passed a law saying if the final result is not going to be certified and a new election to be held then a new primary must also be held. Which creates more court cases. (Is this valid under the NC Constitution?) The legislature was veto proof R controlled when they passed said a law and they didn't want the R who appear to benefit from the fraud to be on the ballot if held again. But now they are not veto proof and a D is governor.

    Everyone clear so far? I think the next hearing on the issue is Monday Feb 18, which may certify results or say hold a new election. But if they certify the R who is "in the lead" the D controlled House of Reps (Washington DC) has said they will not seat the guy. (Yes they have that right.) Which would then lead to what? Opinions vary even among bright legal minds.

    Stay tuned. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.

    Oh, yeah. Since this is a congressional race for a national seat run by the state administered county by county we have 3 levels of law enforcement looking into possible crimes. And since there are multiple counties involved (at least 2 with oddities) there are more than 3 agencies looking into this.

    And I've simplified things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_congressional_district_election

    1324:

    He once remarked in my presence that after twenty years, the professor and the school were still getting each others' mail.

    Way back in ancient times before cell phones when numbers were disconnected the phone companies tried to keep them unused for a year. When I moved to NC I got a phone number that used to belong to a lawyer. About once a month our answering machine or us would get a call from someone who looking for the lawyer. We'd say sorry, have no idea, and everyone go their way. One call stuck with me.

    "This is Fred Smith. I'm in jail. I need you to come bail me out."

    I have no idea what happened to this guy. Typically you only get 1 call before spending the night in jail.

    1325:

    David L @ 1323 But yes, invalidating a "done" election is a hard process. London Borough of Tower Hamlets was a painful example of this And, yes he was corrupt & so were all his cronies, but proving it was a struggle ... because, of course all the allegations were "waycist" ... they weren't. Your NC ( North Carolina? ) case sounds even more complicated .... [ But probably just as corrupt ]

    1326:

    JBS @1308: I think I have a new musical hero.

    Randy Rainbow is very much a class act. Not quite 'timeless like Tom Lehrer' funny, but completely on top of the news. (If I get through 2019 with my sanity intact, I'll owe thanks to Randy Rainbow, Andy Borowitz, and Jonathan Pie.)

    1327:

    When we moved into our current house at the beginning of this century, the pervious owner wanted to keep her number (she was moving across town so staying in the same area code). So we got to get a newly available number.

    It's the former number of the Cambridge Pet Crematorium. We still have a post-it by one of the phones of their new number, though it's now a few years since we've had to refer to it. But for the first decade or so we got people calling to try to make arrangements for the final disposition of their beloved former pets. What was surprising was the number who'd phone out of hours — who expects to get an answer at 9 o'clock at night?

    1328:

    01234567890 is a valid phone number by UK rules. But it was not allocated to an actual line, as I discovered one day because it's the sort of thing which is easily discovered when you are bored. I'm sure lots of other people have also got bored and made the same discovery.

    This came in very handy for all those bastard web forms that have "phone number" as a required field and have clever enough validity checking that you can't just get away with entering 00000000000 (which does work surprisingly often). Again, I'm sure loads of other people must have done the same thing, just like the enormous number of people who were born on the 1st of January.

    Then one day... BT allocated that number to an actual line. And I'm sure that whoever has that line really really wishes they hadn't.

    1329:

    In the US 1aaaxxxyyy is the format. But no one has to dial the 1. aaa is the area code xxx is the exchange yyyy is the final bits of the number

    Or is was before number portability. Now it just indicates the were the number was first handed out.

    Anyway, an xxx of 555 is never assigned. (Err, after some quick checking it is now.) Except for a few internal test numbers. (We found one once years ago that would generate a 5 second or so rising tone over and over.)

    But movies and TV shows use this. So anytime you see an aaa-555-yyyy it is a fake number. Some have become a bit famous.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)

    1330:

    Yes, I'd noticed that phone numbers in films always use 555. There are one or two equivalent ranges for UK numbers, but they're not so obvious. Unfortunately, if a web form is bothering to use anything cleverer than /0[0-9]{10}/ to validate a UK number, it tends to go all the way and be clever enough to reject the movie-special numbers too.

    1331:

    A growing number of areas are requiring the full 10 digit phone number, due to having multiple area codes for the same physical area.

    1332:

    10 Digit Dialing in the US

    It pretty much works for dialing[1] nation wide. Not so sure if required everywhere but if not most younger folks just do it.

    It happened here over 15 years ago as we were about to get an overlay area code. Then the dot com bust occurred and the demand for numbers almost stopped. Especially as folks like me dropped their "modem" line and went with DSL. Toss in the cliff that occurred with pager sales as cell phones took off and got the ability to receive texts and the pool of available number suddenly grew huge. We still have not had to add that overlay area code 15 years later.

    [1] Last time anyone actually dialed a phone? And if it converted the finger dials to touch tones in the phone it doesn't count.

    1333:

    01234567890 is a valid phone number by UK rules... Then one day BT allocated that number to an actual line.

    I am surprised that BT did not have that on their list of Numbers Never To Use. They must have such a list for special cases, though I don't know what the British call theirs. Few American exchanges will assign 867-5309 any more, for obvious reasons.

    1334:

    Up here in Canada we still dial 1 for long-distance calls, at least from land-lines.

    I've got friends who still have an old-fashioned dial line. The tariff mandates an extra charge for a touch-tone line, and they don't want to pay it. New lines must be touch-tone, but older dial-pulse lines aren't being forced to the new system.

    1335:

    Question to UK people; is this trolling? (Seen in host's twitter, and am American.) "People will cope, just like the did during the last war": SO-CALLED scientists predicting 12,000 extra deaths per decade if we end up with a no-deal Brexit really is Project Fear gond mad. ... There is so much seaweed to be gathered for free, along with healthy cockles, mussels, oysters and clams all around our coasts. (copy-protected text, daily express 2019/01/30)

    1336:

    Strange.

    We can parse it without problems. You're looking for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewi_Sri

    Of course, the Narrative Story is the bit to focus on.

    Some fun (or not so fun, depending on how advanced you like your Brain Worms[tm] Weapons to get]:

    Human consciousness is supported by dynamic complex patterns of brain signal coordination Science Advances 06 Feb 2019

    You probably shouldn't ask too closely why the URL is labelled "eaat", either. Oh, and it's 100% bollocks. We're Faster Than You is actually about the Temporal Delay between Their Spin-Up and Our Mind Waves, but that's all a bit transgressive.

    Spoilers: They Slave Coma Victims with haptics these days in certain climes to do certain naughty Higher-Order-Adventure stuff.

    Not fucking with you either. Hush hush, naughty naughty.

    But then again: You Probably Do Not Want to Fuck With US in THIS MOOD.

    Suffice to say: take a gooood looooong haaaaard loooook @ your current reality and ask yourself if it's making sense[1] and who is chilling and who is bricking it.

    [1] Look: while Mr Benzo the Billionaire's Penile Pecker Harder stuff is all fun n games, wize up and learn how it's played. Benzo bought the entire company (and also hosts it, and also put his own Lawyer Man in there a while back) as a back-stop against other players (HoooollyWOOOD etc).

    KIDZ: BENZO AIN'T BEING BLACKMAILED, HE'S DOING PR / HARD-BALLZ POWER-PLAYZ. HE'S LITERALLY BUYING OUT A CHUNK OF THE MAFIA TO ALLOW EXPANSION IN RU / CN ETC FOR HIS EMPIRE.

    If that means he buys out Trump, well. M I C, K E Y, MOU S E. Kubrick.

    Fuck me: you apes are baaaad at this shit. A million million words and pages spent on this, and not a single Voice has stated the obvious moves he's doing. Oh, and it'll save him $billions on the Divorce and [redacted] won't eat his new woman.

    ~

    Disappointed. We really are. And this is on the super-fucked BBC-32k Micro Hardware you left ravished. Now that's hilarious.

    No, really: they're culling Higher Order Minds who aren't slaved or conformed or 'Masters/Mistresses'. It'd be laughable / laudable if they had a fucking clue about ecology, but they don't, so it's all a bit fucking pathetic.

    Last One Switch Out the Light, we don't want anyone to spot what we've done.

    Ooops. Sometimes They Come Back.

    1337:

    oops, retyping error: ""People will cope, just like we did during the last war"

    1338:

    It's nihilistic trolling.

    The Daily Mail / Sun / Murdoch and other rags are having major nervous break-downs at the moment.

    Ask if you really want to know the reasons why, and at what depth and in what field. e.g. 2k+ media jobs lost in the last month in the online market, massive losses in the physical, Sinclair + other fuckery in the USA, CN (TenCent, CN mobile gaming) buying into Reddit etc.

    Spoilers: their Master got fucking burned and they sold something special to [redacted] who really are not nice.

    Who is powerful enough to batter old Murdoch? Must be a Prince of Hell, surely?

    But, no, really: the entire UK media are basically shitting bricks atm. Look to the above post for real reasons why.

    PEW-PEW-PEW: MINDS.

    1339:

    Tx. I could see from the code points that it was Javanese but type support is hard to come by. Managed to get it to display but no translator was taking the input.

    1340:

    Buuuut.

    We have soft spots for peeeples like Mad-Cat-Lady. So there will be survivors.

    Just not that many...

    Gonna be a run on pills, booze and baths[1]: or shotguns. But hey, you wanted it nasty, nasty[2].

    [1] Note: Having to placate some fairly nasty little beasties because fucking IL wants to play special-needs with EuroVision and the BBC is banning flags from it (boys: don't attack people for "conspiracy theories" when everyone knows the fucking Apps you're using to mob, it's pathetic, and the BBC should be bricking it because now EVERYONE knows what the Scottish / Irish know, which is that you stage it all), the Tories who signed up with US / IL power are wanting to re-enact the KKK and the real CE nasties are being woken up to who badly played them on the old "...but Hitler was just a Nationalist" vibe. Oh, while the really really CE ones are trolling the fuck out of it all and we have UK comedians bleating about shite while Labour fractures. Oh, while Black-Face and failure is running around laughing.

    Seriously: ban anyone over the age of 42 from the internet right now, their Minds just cannot fucking handle it. Hint: this is the back-burner stuff while more important things are happening but hey, this is the Brexit thread, so that's the topic you'll get.

    If it gets more annoying, the RADIO will be used against you. PEW PEW, BONNIE MAGRU, CUTHBERT, DIBBLE, GRUB.

    [2] grep "Nasty Nasty" videos. OOoopopss.

    1341:

    Oh, Receipts: Nasty Nasty.

    Let's just say, Justice ain't a nice fellow.

    Ze's a bit Old-Skool and modelled on Minds you no longer make.

    Wasp rather than Bee.

    1342:

    Problem is "Aryan" as an endonym is only attested in one branch of the IE languages, the Indo-Iranian one, the etymology is not clear, there is even on proposal linking it to an non-IE language (IIRC a Semitic one, so the person proposing it maybe just tried to be sarcastic), and there are no cognates in other IE branches, forget about "Eire" etc. So using it for ancestral IE is about as appropiate as using "Latinii" for them...

    Also, even with the Indo-Iranian group, the endonym was used by quite diverse groups in quite diverse places, so even with them, there is no "Aryan" stage.

    Coming back to ancestral European languages, we know Early European Farmers came from the Middle East, so some of the pre-IE languages spoken in Anatolia (Hattic etc.) or Afroasiatic (Egyptian, Semitic or some extinct rleative) seems possible. Apparently Bronze age Anatolia was quite diverse linguistically, and maybe European agriculture stems from quite a few different groups. Would explain there being some unrelated languages being around in the Mediterranean.

    As it is, we don't even know if Basque arrived before or after the IE languages. There is quite some interest in pre-IE substrates in European languages, but with little results.

    Oh, and as for Persian being the oldest language still spoken, Farsi is about as close to what Kyros spoke as Spanish is to Latin, or less. So that makes abozt as much sense as saying Latin is the oldest language still around.

    There is also the problem of attestational history, Baltic languages like Lithuanian are said to be somawhat archaic as IE languages, but their earliest attestation is at some point in the late Medieval period. And AFAIK Lithuanian and Latvian are not mutually intelligble, so there was likely some language change involved.

    Personally, I's say let's go with Sumerian. There is nobody around claiming them as ancestors, the language is quite alien for anybody involved, some friends of mine would finally get a job, and the language barrier would mean Bruxelles would be even more incomprehensible. And the part-time goth in me would propose "Sumerland" by Fields of the Nephilim to replace this "Ode to Joy" stuff.

    As an added bonus, may I propose using the literary style of Gilgamesh as a template for future EU directives?

    1343:

    Personally, I's say let's go with Sumerian. There is nobody around claiming them as ancestors, the language is quite alien for anybody involved, some friends of mine would finally get a job, and the language barrier would mean Bruxelles would be even more incomprehensible.

    I have to wonder just how much someone could stay in any language more than a few hundred years old these days. There are all kinds of things I talk about with people all day long that just don't have the words or the concepts to enable more than a point and nod or some incredibly complicated descriptions. And that's without talking about any work related activities.

    Credit cards, ATMs, grocery stores, frozen food, canned food and drink, driving (FLYING!!!), time, media, entertainment, lawns, central heating and cooling, mail (the paper kind), and on and on and on...

    1344:

    Hmm.

    Not nice who did that IP switch there.

    Careful, you might look even more incompetent when it's revealed that Hope-Not-Hate and 'vanished CEO' know each other and it's a Mirror-Game. You know, we do know who $$ sponsors stuff and the UK Parliament / Upper Class monies might take umbrage to being utterly humiliated just so Hitler is big in the news (again).

    Ooops.

    Not supposed to reveal stuff like that to the backers, are we? That old utter 'canard' about dual loyalties, it's utterly antisemitic. Only. Well. This is about Power and $$$, not that, sooo.

    Games are played with Leagues for a Reason: don't challenge things out of yours. And don't involve innocent little players (such as twitter links above) or 70 year old grannies in your tiresome fucking nonsense. We expect a Head on a Plate for that little shit show [Hint: the 'Diamond' has always been a Classic Masonic Pyramid for very good reasons].

    Penalty Clauses. ERG probably won't like being taken to the cleaners, and the Scientologists (Arthurian or otherwise) don't play nice either.

    J-TV.

    I'd make the EuroVision song a good one. Think really hard about the choice.

    1345:

    Sumerian is pretty good on taxes, cattle and copper.

    Basically: don't get cocky, your entire Legal Lexicon is pretty much based on their concepts.

    1346:

    Hmm.

    Oh, right, there we are.

    Look, the test is simplez (@ Dan who thinks "heat" is the signfier, he's wrong, oh so wrong): it's how you react to something different or new or more Complexifier'd than you. You fuckers can't even see half the shit going on, even with your little machines.

    If you seek to destroy it: you're a Fascist and need to change.

    If you embrace it and seek to understand it: well done, you passed.

    Or did you really think a ruined Mind that only knows one language and had most of its frontal cortex / higher order functions burnt out was the point?

    thatsthejoke.jpg

    Looks at your Environment

    You fucked up

    ORZ GET RAINBOWS TOO

    You're probably going to have to incarcerate the ones who refuse to change

    If you start abusing the full spectrum stuff like we know you're doing, we'll just kill you. Kinda bored with the 100% lack of talent across the globe going on. HSS are better than this. Slavery = Extinction via slow crawl (like Walls in a Desert).

    Oh, and if you missed the joke: we did it while drunk.

    p.s.

    Diamond. Sutra.

    P R O V E N

    R

    O

    V

    E

    N

    ~

    Look at the fucking state of it.

    1347:

    Wasp rather than Bee. They can reasonably hope that Justice is not Huitzilopochtli, but it's an excuse for more hummingbird links: The Hummingbird as Warrior: Evolution of a Fierce and Furious Beak (James Gorman, Feb. 5, 2019) The Aztecs weren’t fooled. Their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was a hummingbird. The Aztecs loved war, and they loved the beauty of the birds as well. It seems they didn’t find any contradiction in the marriage of beauty and bloodthirsty aggression. Shifting Paradigms in the Mechanics of Nectar Extraction and Hummingbird Bill Morphology (1 January 2019, A Rico-Guevara,M A Rubega,K J Hurme,R Dudley ) In particular, morphological changes to the hummingbird beak to facilitate use as a weapon are likely to impose trade-offs on nectar drinking efficiency: When loaded axially, elongated structures are mechanically more resistant to buckling if they are straight ... Hummingbird bills are very flexible to allow for both mandibular and maxillary bending. Under the axial loads likely to be exerted when the bill is used as a stabbing weapon, however, such structural flexibility is likely to cause buckling and even failure.

    I like the name.

    1348:

    Bill Arnold @ 1335 No, he isn't trolling ... he's "just" profoundly ignorant & uninformed & misinformed. YOU CAN'T GO BACK ... and most people have not a clue ... though if it not only gets bad ( April this year ) but continues bad - June- August, I forsee allotment thefts ...

    Unreadable Pretentious @ 1340 From "[1] Note:" onwards is rambling fuckwittery WRITE IN ENGLISH blast you. Oh & ban anyone over the age of 42 from the internet right now THAT INCLUDES CHARLIE & me & EC & about 3/4 of the users of this blog. ... really!

    Bill Arnold @ 1347 PLEASE DON'T It only encourages (?)her(*?) OTOH, if you can make/extract some sense from those posts .. then YOU can give us a translation into something readable, yes?

    1349:

    "Sumerland" by Fields of the Nephilim

    While I like the idea of nordic throat-singing, it doesn't really match the south-eastward focus of EU expansion. Perhaps a bit more "all bound for mu mu land"? Although there's now a k-pop band actually called Mumuland which makes the JAMS song kind of weird and disturbing (any resemblence to the EU in that regard is entirely accidental).

    1350:

    Lets not give the CCP an inch of credibility on any issue, “Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Uighur?”

    1351:

    There are reserved-for-fictional-use phone numbers and ranges for pretty much every major UK city. Plus fictional mobile numbers, freephone, premium rate and national.

    Ofcom: Telephone numbers for use in TV and radio drama programmes

    https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/information-for-industry/numbering/numbers-for-drama

    1352:

    Scott Sanford @ 1314: So you only get a sample ballot? That's not bad or anything but I must be spoiled. Where I live voters an informative guidebook that looks exactly like this. I got mailed a copy; they are also free for pickup at any public library and, as you can see, posted online as pdf files.

    It includes not only who is running and what measures are up for consideration but also commentary. Candidates get to include their own statements. In the case of ballot measures (potential things proposed for citizens to vote on directly) voters get title, a synopsis of the plan, expected results of yes and no votes, estimated financial impact, the complete text of the proposal, and statements by interested parties that want to weigh in. Sometimes a lot of people want to say things about particular ballot measures.

    I think we're spoiled in my state.

    That looks nicely comprehensive, but there are still some things NOT included in the pamphlet that are included on my sample ballot.

    "This is a complete listing of federal and state candidates for the November 6, 2018, General Election, as prepared by the Secretary of State for counties covered in this pamphlet. County and local government candidates are listed only if those offices are eligible to appear in this pamphlet. The ballot you receive may include additional local candidates and measures that do not appear in this pamphlet."

    How do you find out about "County and local government candidates" that are NOT deemed eligible to appear in the pamphlet? How do you prepare yourself to choose from the "additional local candidates and measures that do not appear" in the pamphlet?

    The sample ballot includes EVERY candidate in every race (that voters at my polling place can vote on) along with ALL ballot measures I can vote on. The sample ballot allows me to research them all, including those local candidates and measures not eligible (of insufficient STATEWIDE interest?) to appear in the pamphlet.

    1353:

    Pigeon @ 1328: 01234567890 is a valid phone number by UK rules. But it was not allocated to an actual line, as I discovered one day because it's the sort of thing which is easily discovered when you are bored. I'm sure lots of other people have also got bored and made the same discovery.

    This came in very handy for all those bastard web forms that have "phone number" as a required field and have clever enough validity checking that you can't just get away with entering 00000000000 (which does work surprisingly often). Again, I'm sure loads of other people must have done the same thing, just like the enormous number of people who were born on the 1st of January.

    Then one day... BT allocated that number to an actual line. And I'm sure that whoever has that line really really wishes they hadn't.

    Apparently in most U.S. Area Codes that include an "867" prefix, the number 867-5309 is (was) a valid number.

    At the time the song came out in 1982, it was the phone number for Southwest Junior High School in Gaston County, NC.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny

    1354:

    No, he isn't trolling ... he's "just" profoundly ignorant & uninformed & misinformed. The reason I asked is that I've seen trolling (media feedback venues) in the US that is competent enough to fool most people. It felt like trolling but I don't have the cultural background to be confident.

    Anyway, here's the easy one: I assume you've been following the AMI (American Media Incorporated) story about JB being (allegedly) blackmailed by AMI. Dick pics are involved. National Enquireer is at least as aggressive as any UK tabloid, is nakedly Republican-partisan since I've been paying attention to it (Obama years, perhaps much earlier), and is seen by everyone who shops in grocery stores no matter class or background or ethnicity. Also it is protected by the US Constitution First Amendment and lawyers. The story matrix is getting pretty wild. I won't give details of the allegations and speculations since this is UK blog. Their (alleged) business practices would (if proven true) make AMI/NatEnq a powerful political weapon. (They've admitted to what some call "catch and kill" to the US Justice Department, IIRC.) The One With The Names [1] is suggesting that a certain very rich man bought AMI or a somehow-controlling stake in it (or could do so in many quite possible futures, which is part of everyone's calculation). As far as easily-available public info goes, Chatham Asset Management is the owner but there was a recent fairly large and partly anonymous cash infusion. It's something to track. It's not what my intuition is saying (I see opportunism plus some genuine irritation, with the good publicity expanding maneuvering room in other areas.) but i'm ... tired and could be wrong.

    Wasp rather than Bee. This one is harder. There are metaphors involved, and the clades are large and very varied. One difference between bees and wasps is that wasps freely sting multiple times. Another, and perhaps the most reliable difference is that almost all bees are vegans, feeding their larvae pollen, and wasps are almost all predators feeding their larvae other arthopods. Also partly I saw an excuse to post about hummingbirds. Love the super-fast little beasts.

    Also, I'm a little concerned that The One With The Names thinks I'm angry or annoyed with her; trying to convey that I'm not, and that I care, and that [?she?] may be misinterpreting something (profile) she [might have] found. I can see a few lines of thought but they are AFAIK wrong. Sorry no personal details.

    [1] Literal word-by-word google translate for this one is [Nightmare] [Goddess Dewi Sri] [Dominant race in the wikipedia rendering in the movie On the Silver Globe, which i have not seen yet but descriptions say it is (very crude synopsis) about space hippies who flee Earth to another planet, are oppressed by the natives with whom they are interfertile, another astronaut comes from Earth as a savior/military leader, and is killed (as a false messiah?) by priests for his efforts.] I knew it was a goddess/female divine of some sort but due to pounding tiredness did not think to search for Javanese goddesses with a browser that supported Javanese.

    1355:

    Bill Arnold @ 1354 US Constitution First Amendment and lawyers And if it can be shown in court that .. "1st amendment" or not, that they were deliberately lying or making stuff up for shits, giggles & defamation - are they STILL "Protected"? Or has this scenario never been played out?

    That Philadephia Enquirer link you posted is ... dynamite ( Repeated here - READ it peoples! )

    Wasp rather than Bee ... except that Bumblebees ( WHich I love ... they are freindly & cuddly & strokeable - & they can sting multiple times ) HERE is my favourite Bombus lapidarius

    MANY THANKS for the translation into sensible English - which makes sense. Now then ... WHY THE FUCK couldn't she say so? I presume this is her equivalent of willy-waving, sigh.

    1356:

    Update to previous post@ 1355 “Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favours, political attacks and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over and see what crawls out,” Quote from J Bezos - good for him. However, there was once a much more succinct way of saying that ... Arthur Wellesley Dk of Wellington, on an attempt to bribe him over an affair: "Pubish & be Damned!" Meanwhile, it will be very instructive to see what does crawl out, won't it? And wil Mueller be looking into the whole sordid business, I wonder/

    1357:

    And if it can be shown in court that .. "1st amendment" or not, that they were deliberately lying or making stuff up for shits, giggles & defamation - are they STILL "Protected"? Or has this scenario never been played out?

    I work with someone who has the "libel" label tossed at her on a frequent basis so she got a lawyer who knows the subject to educate her. Here is her public position on how it works IN THE USA.

    I was startled to understand the freedom that we have in our country. Here is a simple outline of what a person MUST prove when claiming defamation. All three things must be proven in order for a successful lawsuit for defamation. As you will see, it is exceedingly difficult to prove defamation. 1. The writer must lie. 2. The writer must knowingly lie. 3. The writer must knowingly lie in order to bring malicious harm to another.

    Please note that neither of us is a lawyer and are NOT giving legal advice.

    1358:

    Exactly. For Greg especially: This is all at least arguably protected speech in the US: A guide to Hillary Clinton’s many ‘illnesses,’ as diagnosed in the conservative media (Callum Borchers August 23, 2016) Aphasia, Autism, Brain cancer, Heart disease, Multiple sclerosis, Obesity, diabetes and hypertension, Parkinson's disease, Post-concussion syndrome, Radiation poisoning, Seizures, Stroke, Tongue cancer, Urinary tract infection. Also Subcortical Vascular Dementia with a year to live.

    Another, 2015. The NatEnq links are all dead, go someplace else. One presumes cleanup. In The Enquirer primary, Clinton's campaign is dead—literally (JOE POMPEO 10/13/2015) (Note Polico is US center right; you know what that means.) Imagine that you're a very-low-information voter who's reading is limited to front page scans of the Nat Enq and other tabloids at the supermarket checkout queue. What would you make of these constant untruths?

    (Greg, I didn't use JB's name and the One With Many Names was considerably more circumspect. That's because google (and search engines/crawlers in general) is a thing and UK libel laws are far stronger than in the US.)

    1359:

    Ooops, used wrong term, freedom of speech and of the press are different parts of the US First Amendment. "protected speech" refers to speech freedom.

    1360:

    0333 88888888 (three threes eight eights) works for UK fake numbers, cllers get a recorded announcement.

    1361:

    Matt S @ 1350 Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Uighur Well, the BBC do as in this article - Well worth the thoroughly depressing read that it is. Someone I know is going there later this year, following the Silk Road, & doesn't seem to want to know "too much" - which might be a wise precaution. ( Or not, as the case may be. )

    1362:

    Greg Tingey @ 1355:

    Bill Arnold @ 1354 US Constitution First Amendment and lawyers
    And if it can be shown in court that .. "1st amendment" or not, that they were deliberately lying or making stuff up for shits, giggles & defamation - are they STILL "Protected"?
    Or has this scenario never been played out?

    The alleged crime is extortion, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

    When the National Enquirer outed Bezos's extramarital affair, he began a private investigation into whether the impetus for the story came from the Trump Whitehouse and whether Federal law enforcement resources had been diverted to Trump's vendetta against the Washington Post.

    When AMI became aware of Bezos's investigation they threatened to expose salacious, intimate photos of Bezos & his "girlfriend" unless he dropped the investigation, renounced any legal claims against AMI and published a statement in the Washington Post that he had “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage [of Bezos’ affair] was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

    AMI probably could have gotten away with publishing the photos without contacting Bezos. But their quid pro quo demands for NOT publishing do not fall under the 1st Amendment.

    18 U.S.C. §875(d) Whoever, with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, or corporation, any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee or of another or the reputation of a deceased person or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

    AMI contacted Bezos by email, which is "interstate commerce"; the salacious photos are clearly a threat to Bezos's reputation and dropping his investigation, releasing AMI from legal claims & publishing a statement in the Washington are "a thing of value" however intangible that value might be.

    AMI is in some deep shit here because they're already under a "non-prosecution agreement" with the Southern District of New York in a 2016 election law case that REQUIRES them not to commit any other violations of the law.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/jeff-bezos-american-media-national-enquirer-blackmail.html

    https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jeff-bezos-national-enquirer-photos-ami-s-alleged-extortion-explained-ncna969876

    1363:

    "Pubish & be Damned!"

    I liked the other related quote: what's the point of having fuck you money if you never say 'fuck you'"?

    1364:

    a "non-prosecution agreement" ... that REQUIRES them not to commit any other violations of the law.

    Yerfukinwotnau? I naively thought that "not breaking the law" was required of everyone all the time. But discovering that it's optional in the US does explain a great deal about your country.

    That's right up there with the Pentateuch "thou shalt not kill someone when forbidden to do so" stuff.

    1365:

    Because certain people don't like being made fools of. Ra, Ra. Can't conceptually handle it, their pants are too starched and tight.

    Interesting set of stuff winged its way to us over this thread, hmm.

    Bottom line:

    1) Nice DPSY Goog SERP stuff, weird 2) You can parse the stuff in whichever way you want, which is important, because if you're up-2-date with your US politics you'll notice that, well. Let's just say, it's "topical" front-running 2a) It's really topical front-running, so if you read it a certain way, it's a Canary type Seagull move to prevent more stressss fractures in HSS Minds (otherwise it reads like teenage agitprop which is kinda the point. "Head on a Plate" is a Biblical reference, oc, not a demand for real violence) 2b) We work on the principle that basically only two people (you n bill) actually read our stuff so 3) Clicking your name logs us out, which is new 4) Our Guardian Angels are having nervous breakdowns 5) Bees have Queens, so do WASPs. Jokes, we still make them 6) Lloyds (Bank rather than Insurers) had a bit of an interesting incident recently, hmm

    But you gotta notice the little things: like, "Hope Not Hate" is a genuine outfit. It's also pretty heavily targeted by stuff like Breitfart (ex-Bannon land, IL links, alt-right haven, etc). And if you're really on the ball, you'll spot that a story went live ("anti-spiking") on both the BBC and Breitbarf, well... a little after we mentioned it.

    That's technically a bit naughty. Illegal if you were doing it in the manner of a HSS [tee-hee].

    Anyhow, about those Chinese Rooms. Anyone technical break this down, all the sites that used to do this have had their certs nuked:

    snippets: Keph.....Cw&q=Dpsy-ab.3&oq=Dpsy-ab.3&gs_l=psy-ab....gws-wiz....

    Oh, and for Host and others who like to play Twitter Games:

    Clicking on terrorist propaganda even once could mean 15 years in prison under new law Independent, 12th Feb, 2019

    Check your sources, but they're claiming that it was rushed through (where's Chope when you need him?) and it's going to be legal for UK punters.

    And you wonder why we expressed hate for link shortners? That's why.

    1366:

    [Nightmare] [Goddess Dewi Sri] [Dominant race in...

    It's more:

    Nightmare Ghost-Spirits[1] Dewi Sri (Goddess who was colonized / subsumed by a more dominant culture, non-Western)[2] Telepathic Raven Women with important Two-Eyes open symbols on hands[3]

    But yeah, roughly.

    1350 is related, as is the UK Defense Minister suddenly going mad, declaring the boaties go to the South China Sea while he makes cruise liners and trawlers into back-ups with a drone fleet. Gotta wonder at the boy.

    Oh, and AUZ just signed the spend for $50 bil submarines to come online (allegedly) in 2036 or so. Which is pant-wettingly funny.

    Spoilers: AUZ isn't exactly that habitable by then, but you do you.

    Oh, and Labour found their 12 angry antisemitic people[4] and everyone has to be wondering: how much $$ / ££ was spent on all of that? No wonder the Daily Fail and Times are running 20+ page competitions to see how rude their marrow-man is.

    ~

    Anyhow, tired.

    USA chose Racism / Fascism today btw.

    Like Dewi, we expect to be on the naughty list.

    [1] More importantly, the mythology of how they're formed and why etc [2] But still survives and her backstory is great [3] Which is a bit snarky if you know your [redacted] and your Classical non-antisemetic Conspiracy stuff. But also actually meaningful. [4] That's a play reference.

    1367:

    a "non-prosecution agreement" ... that REQUIRES them not to commit any other violations of the law.

    Yerfukinwotnau? I naively thought that "not breaking the law" was required of everyone all the time. But discovering that it's optional in the US does explain a great deal about your country.

    You misunderstand. And the previous comment assumed a lot of local knowledge.

    The agreement with them was basically "we admit we broke the law. "here is all we did "we agree to this punishment "we agree not to break any more laws or the feds/state guys can tear this up and drag us into court and throw the book at us

    1368:

    "we agree not to break any more laws or the feds/state guys can tear this up and drag us into court and throw the book at us

    I gather there is a great deal more to it, presumably some reason why the legal system would not want to invoke extreme unction in the first place. "we agree not to break any more laws because if we do we will suffer the penalties prescribed for that lawbreaking" doesn't seem to have any up-side for the legal system. It's all very "you've been very naughty and if you do it again I will speak to you even more firmly". A bit like the banks in Australia...

    1369:

    _Moz_ @ 1364:

    a "non-prosecution agreement" ... that REQUIRES them not to commit any other violations of the law.

    Yerfukinwotnau? I naively thought that "not breaking the law" was required of everyone all the time. But discovering that it's optional in the US does explain a great deal about your country.
    That's right up there with the Pentateuch "thou shalt not kill someone when forbidden to do so" stuff.

    The way I understand it, a corporation can't be offered IMMUNITY the way an individual can. The "non-prosecution agreement" is the corporate equivalent of an immunity deal that basically says prosecutors can't use any information AMI reveals while cooperating with the prosecutors against AMI, even if that information implicated AMI in previous criminal acts.

    One of the provisions of the deal is that the corporation not commit future criminal acts. If AMI violates the non-prosecution agreement by committing NEW crimes, they lose its protection.

    The case AMI is involved in is where National Inquirer bought off the two women whom Trump had affairs with in order to kill their stories before the election. Again, as I understand it, it's not just illegal campaign contributions but conspiracy to commit fraud (especially TAX fraud).

    Extortion is a serious felony. IF AMI committed extortion against Bezos (or even attempted to extort Bezos) the Southern District of New York can now use all the information revealed by AMI and prosecute them for the crimes that were previously covered by the non-prosecution agreement.

    1370:

    "we agree not to break any more laws because if we do we will suffer the penalties prescribed for that lawbreaking"

    Your missing the point. The agreement is about a previous crime. And a plea deal. Lesser punishment in exchange for cooperation in any and all maters as requested, even if YOU didn't commit a crime. Plus a lessor punishment.

    Both sides get to skip the trial (which always takes forever and costs a butt load of gold ducats) in the case of these agreements.

    So they admitted to the previous crime. Got some punishment. And agreed to have the feds/state guys in their underwear for some period of time. And behave. And got a lighter punishment.

    If they break this deal ALL PREVIOUS CRIMES are back on the table for full punishment.

    Future crimes from point of agreement are always in play.

    1371:

    The "non-prosecution agreement" is the corporate equivalent of an immunity deal

    Ok, that makes more sense. Thanks.

    1372:

    Yeah, it's pretty bad.

    Most people, make a category mistake about China when they assume they're dealing with nation state when in actuality they're dealing with an empire. And there's a lot of subject nations within that empire not just the Uighur there's also the Zhuang, the Manchu, the Hui, the Tuja the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Bui, the Mosuo and the Naxi to name just a few. Just about all of them live in lands that were occupied by the Chinese empire and into which Han populations have spilled. The best analogy I have is think of what Europe would look like demographically had the Nazis's won. With what the Chinese government is doing currently to the Uighur it's pretty clear they don't give a toss about the 26th Resolution.

    1373:

    As a little bit of good news, both our Australian Houses of Parliament have voted against the government to not treat the remaining detainees on Nauru quite as beastly as we had before. Of course the Government promptly proceeded to advertise this to the world as a terrible weakening of our border protection, which of course it’s not, thereby sending an unambiguous signal to the people smuggler’s that it is. Which possibly may have been the government’s intent. So...good news as I said.

    1374:

    I read it as "since we're going to lose the next election we hereby shit the bed". On a few different issues, refugees but also the banking inquiry "we're going to accept all the recommendations but do nothing about them until well after the election", the tax cuts that come into effect in a couple of years that are designed to either starve the government of funds or provoke a(nother) "giant new tax" campaign, the various "screw world heritage areas" efforts (giving half a billion dollars to a charity that hadn't asked for it and didn't know what to do with the money... because now taking that money away is nasty, but paying it out means less money to actually try to save the reef).

    Mind you, some of this is hard to distinguish from normal far right nonsense.

    1375:

    JBS @ 1362 AMI is in some deep shit here Oh GOOD ..... But, will any of it splash back on T Drump, or wil it just dribble off, like the pee?

    Unreadable Pretentious @ 1365 Just for once ... that "terrorist propaganda" thing is scary ... simply because one could, quite literally do such a thing without knowing about it. Lots of lying "reassurances" from guvmint about it, but you can bet your boots some innocent butterfly will get caught by it ... followed by massive prees campaign & backtracking. Would have been simpler to get it right first time, but that's not how we do things, is it? [ See also recent case of man who went to support Kurds & Yazhidis, with US support, charged with terrorism on return - case dropped .... eventually. Other people in same leaky boat, up shit creek without paddle, bacause of bad legislative wording. ]

    AND @ 1369 Oh goody, goody even more so ... along with all the extremely dirty laundry that will be dragged into public view, one hopes.

    Matt S @ 1372 Oh, but it doesn't matter, because the Han are not EVIL HORRIBLE WHITE IMPERIALISTS ( Much ) - incidentally, for other reasons, I'm currently reading a large synoptic history of China - I've got to the "Warring States" period, so far.

    Matt S @ 1373 And, if I hear correctly, the current AUS guvmint now want to re-open an, ahem "detention facilty" on Christmas Island, yes?

    1376:

    What was surprising was the number who'd phone out of hours — who expects to get an answer at 9 o'clock at night?

    Funeral homes commonly subscribe to an out-of-hours answering service. Distraught people will call them up at any hour, wanting to do something after a relative has died and knowing there's a funeral to plan phoning the funeral home at two in the morning seems the obvious thing to do. The funeral home owners know those sorts of folks don't want to listen to a recorded message or an answering machine so they get a human being to talk to, someone who will listen sympathetically, take their details and tell them to call back at a more regular time.

    1377:

    OTOH, when I was last in China my Han friends were well aware that the ethnic minorities could have four children while they were limited to one. So it's not just a matter of trying to wipe out minorities.

    1378:

    When were you last in China? That four babies for minorities used to be the case for some rural families with urban minority couples allowed three, but as of 2017 minorities are treated the same as the Han, e.g. two children for urban couples and (I think) it's three for rural couples. There's a back story here that China has a problem with a declining birth rate amongst the Han even after relaxation of the one child rule and it's a huge demographic time-bomb. As result in the outer provinces such as Xiangiang, where the Uighur's birth rate is greater than the Han, they're facing the erosion of all the gains they made by in-migration. Which is why there are regular stories of local officials enforcing a single child policy on Uighur women and why the government is still encouraging Han migration into the province.

    1379:

    the current AUS guvmint now want to re-open an, ahem "detention facilty" on Christmas Island, yes?

    The thing to remember is that those camps are actually better than the ones in Nauru and PNG. Poor countries find it hard to run concentration camps effectively, and also to some extent the fences are there to protect the captives from disgruntled locals.

    My understanding is that in the Australian camps there's less physical and sexual abuse by the guards, and more attempt to stop trouble between refugees. We still torture them, obviously, but it's less "random effects of being in a third world shithole" and more "systematic denial of basic human needs". Refugee support organisations also find it easier to get access to refugees (this is also why the Australian people hate having the camps here). Although it's possibly somewhat to Australia's credit that it's hard to get and keep staff for the camps except via the neoliberal "work or starve" system making unemployment benefits conditional on accepting whatever work is offered, no matter how odious.

    1380:

    2012, with regular internet chats since. Haven't talked about the one child policy since before 2017, though — my friends all have kids now and the conversations have been more about how expensive raising kids is. (And come to think of it, the Uighur ESL students I taught, and talked to about life in Xinjiang, had left there before 2015 too.)

    I didn't know the policy had been changed. Thanks for the update.

    The demographic time bomb is mainly a function of urbanization, I think. Back in 2005 Shanghai lots of young people who could have a child were opting not to, because raising a child in the city was so expensive. Given my friends' concerns about money, I infer that the same dynamic is present in other cities. No stats to back this up, but it matches my experience.

    1381:

    "...AUZ just signed the spend for $50 bil submarines to come online (allegedly) in 2036 or so. Which is pant-wettingly funny"

    Those subs were never intended to actually go in the water. They have already completed their primary mission, as gigantic black phallic pork barrels.

    One seat in South Australia hung on a few hundred votes. Getting the government re-elected cost 50 billion and actually worked. That one seat was pretty vital. It would have been cheaper to campaign on a promise to give everyone in that electorate a gift of 100 000 dollars (orders of magnitude cheaper), but there you go.

    1382:

    It would have been cheaper to campaign on a promise to give everyone in that electorate a gift of 100 000 dollars (orders of magnitude cheaper), but there you go

    Even Australian voters don't like to think of themselves as corrupt money-grubbers who can be bought. It's important to at least pretend that it's about "jobs and growth" or "we decide who comes to this country" rather than just "borrowing money to bribe voters in selected marginal seats".

    Admittedly, 50 billion is $25,000 for every single person in Australia... but again, put that bluntly even the average voter would be able to work out that the government isn't getting that money out of thin air, it's going to come out of taxpayers somehow. And no party would ever be that even-handed, there would always be "only some people get the bribe" (I missed out on the Rudd stimulus, for example, because I happened not to be employed at the critical moment... you'd think that would make me the ideal recipient, but it was very important not to give money to dole-bludging scum and fucking abos (I paraphrase)).

    The major difference between the two coalitions is that one will take money from the poor to give to the rich, and the other from the poor to give to the middle class.

    1383:

    Surely you mean a gigantic boudin noir?

    1384:

    Yes, exactly what I meant!

    1385:

    Just a thank you for your answers to Greg and myself. Quite interesting.

    Which is a bit snarky if you know your [redacted] I do not (plenty of tidbits but nothing integrated), but simply knowing that it is snarky is helpful. USA chose Racism / Fascism today btw. We shall see. America's not-so-secret weapon is lawyers and like-minded activists. Have to deep-soak some more in news feeds though.

    Links, well this early effort is ... crude and ... direct and to my mind unethical in a few ways (I have high standards :-), but apparently reliable. Something to track for sure. Human Mind Control of Rat Cyborg’s Continuous Locomotion with Wireless Brain-to-Brain Interface (04 February 2019 - open - Shaomin Zhang, Sheng Yuan, Lipeng Huang, Xiaoxiang Zheng, Zhaohui Wu, Kedi Xu & Gang Pan.) The results showed that rat cyborgs could be smoothly and successfully navigated by the human mind to complete a navigation task in a complex maze. Our experiments indicated that the cooperation through transmitting multidimensional information between two brains by computer-assisted BBI[brain-brain interface] is promising. via Researchers Create 'Rat Cyborgs' That People Control With Their Minds (Bill Andrews, February 14, 2019)

    1386:

    2b) We work on the principle that basically only two people (you n bill) actually read our stuff

    I read it but I feel in no way qualified to comment

    1387:

    Stay tuned. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.

    If anyone cares, on the 4th day of hearings on the vote for NC's 9th Congressional district the unofficial winner said there needs to be a new election as the one under review could not be trusted.

    TL;DR It appears the apparent winner, Mark Harris, got caught lying under oath at the hearing and his lawyer stopped it, things went behind closed doors, then Harris made a statement saying let's have a do over and quickly left. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-nc-a-surprise-in-the-end-everyone-agreed-it-was-election-fraud/2019/02/22/52e9f226-36c5-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html?

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