People, especially when crossing between countries where the terminology of these things is very different, tend to get confused between these two concepts. They are different but related.
There are various legal forms that an organisation can take, which give them legal personality (ie the right to sue and be sued and to make contracts). There are also unincorporated associations which do not have legal personality. Some legal forms are required to be "for profit" (e.g. a C-corp in the US or a public limited company in the UK) and so cannot take on non-profit status.
There are two meanings to non-profit. One is a legal person that cannot pay out surplus as profit to any private ownership, but must reinvest it in its goals. The other is a legal status granted by government which comes with various tax exemptions.
Most nonprofits in the sense of tax exemption are also legal persons that cannot pay out profit, though some are unincorporated associations (which lack legal personality) or trusts (which also lack legal personality). Note that a trust must have a list of trustees that you can sue; an unincorporated association has to be sued in the name of one of its officers, which can get complicated if they replace the officer during the court case. Also you may have to study the structure of the unincorporated association to work out who to sue.
In the US, nonprofits in the tax sense are covered by one of the 29 subsections of 501(c). The vast majority of the ones you've heard of are 501(c)(3). In the UK, the equivalent status is that of a registered charity. As a result, the usual meaning of a "non-profit" in the UK is the legal personality - usually either a company limited by guarantee or an industrial and provident society. The equivalent of the US meaning of "non-profit" is "charity".
For Worldcon, it's relevant that "running a worldcon" has been accepted by the IRS as falling into the category of "literary purposes" that is a legitimate purpose for a 501(c)(3). In the UK, "running a worldcon" has not been accepted by the Charity Commision as falling into the category of "the advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science" that is a legitimate purpose for a registered charity, so UK worldcons can adopt a non-profit legal personality, but cannot obtain the benefits of nonprofit status, so they normally just register as a normal limited company ("a company limited by shares") or operate as an unincorporated association, rather than becoming a company limited by guarantee, which is the usual legal form for a charity that is not a trust (trusts must either be for profit or charitable by law; most new charities are established as a CLG because the CLG can survive if the Charity Commission denies the request for charitable status, the trust would collapse, resulting in a legal mess).
TLDR: "non-profit" means different things in the US and the UK; the equivalent of a US "non-profit" is a UK "charity" and Worldcons can be a "non-profit" in the US, but the law is different in the UK and they can't be a "charity" here. They could be a (UK meaning) "non-profit", but there are no tax benefits to doing so, so they generally don't bother with the hassle.
]]>If you've got tons of spare electricity, and this only makes any sense if they do, then desalinating seawater is the least of your problems.
You're going to have the desalination, electrolysis and Sabatier plants along the coast, with them then loading into LNG tankers, so you don't have to transport the LNG or the water long distances. The hard bit is that the DAC plants really should be distributed widely, but then you have to transport the CO2 to the Sabatier plants, and it's not especially easy to transport - the easiest answer is to build the DAC at decommissioned oil well and then use the existing pipelines to transport it to the port which is where you'll co-located the factory parts.
]]>So yes, something about the size of a RAV4.
The "small" SUV is something like a Nissan Juke, which is a class of car that likely doesn't exist in the US (4210mm long, weights are ranges but 1200kg is central) - that's a very common vehicle.
]]>Zero-net-carbon LNG would be a smart way to store and transport the energy from solar, and would use existing infrastructure that Saudi already has lots of.
]]>The idea is so if they do get a 200-seat majority, they at least have some "stretch goals". There seems to be a very quiet trawl for ideas to put in there - things they can run past Starmer.
The Brown review of devolution seems to have been one of these; there is talk about some sort of re-entry into the EU single market and customs union without formally calling it that; questions about how, politically, to achieve a big housing target (one idea that has been dangled: allow councils to build council housing in other council's areas and override some of the planning constraints, but the building council becomes responsible for services - this will let Labour councils build in Tory areas, with the Tories getting the blame); House of Lords Reform (which is part of the Brown plan); sadly, probably reviving the Brown-era ID cards plan (Starmer is more of a Brownite than a Blairite, to the extent that matters 15 years after the end of the TB-GBs); probably something on immigration with a big increase in spending on courts and lawyers, but also probably a revival of large-scale detention (likely building a new detention centre for immigrants).
These are just the ones that got trailed in my direction - there's bound to be something NHS in there, and probably some education things: I suggested a few other ideas (which I won't repeat here because I don't want my fingerprints on them).
]]>Texas, etc are going to have lots of black market mifepristone once this all becomes law - it will be very easy to ship across the state border from states where it is legal. Most of those abortions will take place at home in the quiet and no-one will know, but some will, inevitably, end up getting found out, and some fraction of those will run. I do not want to find out that an abortion by using black-market drugs in Texas (when there was no other option) is to be treated the same as one using black-market drugs in Great Britain (in a situation where a free NHS option was available) and thus a woman gets extradited on some terrible procedural basis.
]]>Abortion is a criminal offense in the UK.
There is an exception if you have the signatures of two doctors and either it is before 24 weeks gestational age, or the doctors believe that the mother's life or health is at risk, or the foetus is unviable or would be born with a severe disability. That exception would clearly apply for an abortion conducted in the UK.
Certainly a woman who had an abortion in the US and then fled to the UK could be extradited if the abortion would have been criminal in the UK - which probably means that it was post-24-weeks, or not conducted by a doctor (the whole two doctors thing would almost certainly be interpreted by an English or Scottish court as meaning conducted according to local law or by a qualified doctor). A black market medical (Plan B) abortion might be extraditable, but not one by an actual doctor.
Hmmmm, I doubt there would be a "public interest" case for extradition in that situation, but I would want a real lawyer to look at that one.
]]>There is a reasonable way to achieve this, which is to use GDPR.
GDPR says that you can't store people's data without their consent (with a bunch of exceptions, but none of those apply to things like advertising).
One easy way to kill behavioural advertising would be to say that it is illegal to process data for the benefit of an organisation without that organisation having the user's consent.
So Facebook would not be able to run an advert to me using any of my data without the advertiser having obtained my consent. So, they would have to put up a complete list of all their advertisers and get users to click each one to approve accepting adverts from them. That is transparently unworkable, which is to say that their business model would be illegal.
At which point, they would have to revert to running advertising based on the content rather than based on the user they are advertising to. But that would make the actual content provider more important and the data collection on the users less important - ie it would shift the balance of power to media and journalism, and away from social media. Facebook would still be able to sell some adverts - but they'd get back to 5% margins instead of 50% margins and be much less powerful, while static ads on news websites would get better revenue.
I think that shifting power that way would be a good thing in itself (look at how much more money there is in TV than there was because of how subscription services work), but would also shift the terms and context of public debate.
]]>It's probably closest to the idea of the Pope speaking "ex cathedra" - ie the Pope speaking on behalf of the Catholic Church as a whole, rather than speaking as an individual.
When the Queen says "we", she doesn't mean a plural "everyone in the UK", but rather it's using the plural for respect (like in the second person in earlier English using "you" instead of "thou" or the similar distinction between tu/tu/du and vous/usted/Sie in French/Spanish/German) - in this case, demanding rather than giving respect.
But the respect is referring to the crown - the notional representation of her right to reign, not the physical bit of metal. So the "we" is "me, but with more respect, because I am representing the continuous thousand year history of the royal right to rule Britain, not just my own personal self".
]]>If Trump ends up in prison in the US, then anyone else on Putin's payroll (not just in the US, but in other countries too) will start looking for a way out, rather than feeling that they can always run to Russia if they get exposed.
Same reason that Kim Philby was allowed into Russia, same reason they've put up Edward Snowden. If you're a Russian agent, then knowing Russia will look after you if it all goes wrong at least means you know you have somewhere to run to.
]]>The proposed DC statehood law (HR.51) resolves this by creating a new "Capital District" consisting of just the White House and the Capitol and the major federal buildings and monuments around them, and then making the rest of DC into a state.
]]>What it did was cede all of DC except for the actual Capitol and White House buildings (and a small, uninhabited area around them) to a new state, called the "Douglass Commonwealth" (still DC, but now named for Frederick Douglass instead of Christopher Columbus). There would still be a federal district (called "the Capital District"), it just would be a couple of blocks, rather than the whole city.
Technically, that federal district would still have a non-voting delegate in the House and three electors in the electoral college (per the 23rd amendment), but there wouldn't be any voters to elect them; passing a constitutional amendment to undo the 23rd should not be overly difficult in the circumstance where the alternative is the First Lady effectively getting three votes in each future Presidential election (the President usually preserves legal residence in their home state; there are some weird constitutional and electoral problems if they run for re-election as a resident of DC; the First Lady could easily transfer residence to the White House)
A bunch of lawyers have had a good look at this, including some that are very hostile to the Democratic Party and none of them seem to have found a constitutional problem. The best argument is that not undoing the 23rd Amendment would be ridiculous, which is true, but ridiculous is not unconstitutional, and the sheer ludicrousness should make the constitutional amendment easy enough to pass.
]]>This is because the second stage is designed for Falcon 9. If FH was intended as a long-term workhorse (rather than the temporary stop-gap to SS/SH that it is), then they'd design an entirely new second stage - probably lengthen the one they have (to increase both payload volume and fuel tankage) and stick three Merlin engines on instead of just one.
But since SpaceX are going for SS/SH as their long-term heavy lift, FH only needs to be able to match the capabilities of other heavy-lift vehicles (Delta IV Heavy, etc), rather than massively exceed them as the raw surface thrust suggests it should be able to.
Obviously, it can be used for interplanetary launches - if NASA want to launch their next Mars rover on one, then it has plenty of power to do that - but it's not a step-change in capability beyond LEO.
Even SS/SH won't be a huge step-change beyond GEO until they get in-orbit refuelling working. All their plans for beyond-earth-orbit start with "launch a SS full of fuel, launch another SS with payload, refuel from the SS full of fuel and then deorbit and land the tanker".
Once you have a SS with full fuel tanks in LEO though, then you have an enormous amount of delta-v compared to anything that has ever been in orbit before. It's far more than even the third stage of Saturn V had (which is what was doing the TLI burns for Apollo).
And, of course, if you can do refuelling in LEO, you can do it in other places. Once you have the capability, you can fire off tankers to anywhere your StarShip can reach - refuelling in lunar orbit, or Mars orbit, or in a transfer orbit so you don't need fuel for the insertion burn on your payload starship (eg two starships do TJI, one tanker, one payload, the payload refuels from the tanker en route to Jupiter and then the payload has the fuel for JOI, while the tanker heads off into deep space - this would let you get to Jupiter a lot faster)
]]>You can generally spot "learning porn" shows because the contestants talk about having "been on a journey".
The idea is that there is some skill that any reasonably capable human can reach adequate competence at given X weeks full-time one-on-one training, where X is the length of a normal TV season. And it's something where viewers can tell the difference between useless and adequate, but only specialists can tell between adequate and actually good (and there aren't enough specialists for viewing figures to be affected). Viewers get to watch people learning something challenging but attainable in a supportive environment. The celebrity versions can generally get a slightly higher class of celebrity than an incompetence porn show with comparable audience figures because they don't involve ritual humiliation.
Examples include ballroom dancing (Strictly Come Dancing/ Dancing With The Stars), opera singing (Pop Star To Opera Star, ie starting with people who could actually sing), baking (GBBO), cooking (MasterChef, especially their "the professionals" version), pop singing (The Voice), etc.
The Simon Cowell franchises ([insert country here] Idol, X-Factor and [insert country here]'s Got Talent) are a combination of this with incompetence porn, in that the first half of the season is eliminating the utterly incompetent, and then the second half takes a group of basically competent performers and tries to put them through learning how to be better at it.
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