Perhaps it's not having had dreams of, or having played at, being a soldier, sailor or similar but my memory of the book is thinking "this world/galaxy is horrible but this political system is worse" although I enjoyed some of the ideas in whatever their moral indoctrination classes were called. I didn't have the language back then (I last read it sometime in my teens), but today I still occasionally look back and think of them when I see people reframing (or refusing to reframe) history. The furore around Winston Churchill where Britain's generally older and more right-wing figures stridently object to any acknowledgement of things he patently did wrong while more progressive members of the historian profession are saying "he was undoubtedly a great wartime leader, and should be lauded for that, and also for doing that while dealing with his mental health difficulties but..." Reframing the Crusades as purely about population pressure "but you have to dig deeply to prove it" remains with me as clearly as another author and "the rule of five" and the picture of the child born with six fingers.
I thought the message, the parody message came through quite clearly. I think it does in the movie too. The core film might hype up the right wing mil-SF fanbois. But the adverts, just like in Robocop, really ridicule the whole of the society. But like a lot of humour, if you're the butt of the joke, it's easy to miss it.
]]>1) The NHS works by being able to share load - COVID has stressed that to the point that patients in ICUs were being shifted from London to Plymouth and so on when London was at full capacity, which is very unusual, normally they share to a nearby hospital and we don't hear about it. In your model city, it's hard to see how that happens.
2) Likewise, we have a few regional centres of excellence which work at close to capacity in a certain specialism, so if you're in the North of England, you might have to go to Leeds to be treated for lung cancer, but to Newcastle to be treated for neuroscience disorders for example. That's not going to work in Marsopolis, you're going to have to support the overheads to treat everything (except possibly geriatric conditions).
You might spread the load, and reduce numbers a little by having someone who is a multiple specialist, so if there's a small number of cases of MS say, you have someone who specialises in that, but also deals with a more common Martian condition as well. Even with that, I'd guess at least a 50% markup in numbers but a doubling might be closer to the mark.
]]>You don't care about my sad stories right now, but I'm going through some things that parallel parts of yours. Some things are inevitably different. So I really can empathise and I hope it gets better for you. In part because that means it will get better for me too, but mostly because whatever ephemeral relationship we have through here means I don't like you hurting.
It will take time, I'm sure, but here's hoping to see you on the other side.
]]>I have used citric acid, I prefer the taste with lemon juice, but I happen to live in a world where it's often easier to get pure citric acid than lemon juice. My partner works in a lab and diagnostic quality citric acid is easy to find. You need about a 0.35M solution to get the pH right.
]]>If you live near a farm, learn how to make ricotta - it's pretty easy if you have a source of milk and citrus and either heat or cold. And although it doesn't keep long, it keeps longer than fresh milk. As someone that doesn't use milk in drinks, I make it when we have visitors and I have to get milk in, it's quick and easy enough to do routinely and uses up the excess milk in a form I like.
]]>I was musing over dinner as the news was talking about all the Tory ministers resigning and BoJo's first putative cabinet and how he'll be a force to reunite the Tory party and then the country. Apart from spraying my dinner in a very undignified fashion at the thought of BoJo reuniting the country in anything except rioting, I let their thoughts on a cabinet percolate. They're talking him having to include a number of former Remainers in high positions to try and unite the party. Makes some kind of sense. As a true scion of Brexit, he can afford to be magnanimous in victory, in a way May couldn't. But if he goes too far, he pisses off the headbangers in the ERG. Do they then rebel (again) making the political calculation that they could have a hard nub Tory Right + Brexit coalition in charge? Personally I think they're mad if they go for it, but they stand up and tell us how easy Brexit is going to be and how the EU will let them change the backstop and so forth and seem to believe the insanity they spout there... It's easy for me to see them believing they could have a coalition of the nutters to get a hard right pro-Brexit coalition in charge.
Could be a really fun balancing act. Too far right and there are defections and no confidence. Too far to the centre and the nutters risk deposing him for a "True Brexit."
]]>I think there are a batch of Tories who have held their nerve under May that she'll (somehow) see it through and see off the ERG and the nutters. If BoJo lurches the Conservative Government to be basically a Brexiteer paradise, they'll look at the opinion polls, they'll look at their long term future and jump from the Tory party. LibDems are a nice pro-Remain party that is anti-Corbyn, anti-ERG, centrist where they might feel somewhat at home.
They will then comfortably vote down the Tory government - the idea being that they cling to power under a new umbrella. For some, of course, this will be fantasy, but for some it will work. Opinion polls are pretty divided, just like the country still, but there are more and more seats around the country that are shifting to Remain as demographics works its way through. Standing as a Remain candidate in a clearly Remain party. Being able to say you campaigned Remain in the referendum too will be a vote winner in a lot of constituencies I imagine. Just as it will be a vote loser in another set of them, regardless of their normal political colour.
I imagine we'll see a four- or five-way mess of a next parliament, with the SNP + Labour + Lib-Dems as the biggest block and forming a coalition that may or may not be stable but will be pro-remain. (The SNP might be the fourth or fifth biggest party but will be enough of a bloc to give anyone a majority and it won't be the Brexit party or the Tories.)
To be honest, although I don't see it happening, I think my preferred outcome would be a Green + SNP coalition in charge... Everyone just says "fuck you all" and votes Green or SNP and screws them all over.
]]>Politics in the UK was never entirely predictable - look at how May took an election where the question was "just how overwhelming will her majority be?" and ended up with a hung parliament. The fact she's truly awful at public speaking, her manifesto contained a number of policy presentations that seemed custom-written to piss off her core electorate on the basis of "well they'll vote for us anyway" (and they didn't) and Corbyn had a batch of policies that appealed to a wide range of people who voted for him and spoke really, really well which took him from an electoral liability to a net electoral plus demonstrates that.
Crashing out next week is pretty unlikely IMO. May will be crucified if she lets it happen by the majority of her own party, nutters on the hard right notwithstanding.If the EU say "Flextension or nothing" which seems to be the current mood, May can blame the EU, which won't appease the ERG and their ilk, but won't play too badly with the Brexiteer press. If that happens, I'm not sure... the latest by-election in Newport West suggests that pro-People's Vote Labour candidates can win in pretty strongly Leave voting Labour heartlands. But it's only one datum. There are council elections on May 1st. That will give everyone some more data. And that might shift opinions in parliament to agree something, anything. Or not of course, depending on what the tealeaves look like. It means electing MEPs and so on, but meh, so what. All the people that froth about what a national humiliation it as froth about anything given half a chance.
]]>The trouble is, that the last time they tried to redraw the boundaries was under Callmedave and the coalition government. Dave had just backstabbed the LibDems about something (I think it was voting reform but I'm not 100% certain and it doesn't really matter) so the LibDems refused to back the Tory plans to redraw the boundaries. They weren't strictly Conservative plans, in the sense of "drawn up by Tory politicians" but they were asked for by the Conservative PM and part of the Tory drive to reduce the number of MPs. They would also have disproportionately hit Labour seats in the boundary redraw, partly because of that moving away from some urban centres I mentioned before.
When that parliament dissolved, we were into referendum, Brexit and it's not come back. So we've had the current constituencies since 1983, and the population has shifted a lot in the last 26 years. But deciding exactly what to do and how is a fraught question even if you don't try and reduce the number of MPs.
]]>In a lot of their heartlands in the cities where the population is stable or falling, Leave has got MORE popular. The same in a lot of Tory heartlands. But in a lot of denser population areas or where the population is rising, Remain has shot up to be a huge majority. So nationally, Remain is really popular, but in terms of parliamentary seats it's less clear cut.
We haven't been really seeing the divisions among Labour dissected as much as they have been among the Tories because Corbyn hasn't been trying to push through an unpopular negotiated deal. He may or may not have been smarter than May and started looking for a cross-parliamentary consensus early on, we'll never know (British parliamentary history suggests not, and it's easy for the leader of the opposition to suggest it's the way to do it, knowing they won't be asked to actually do so; OTOH the original joining was done by just such a process so he might have done it, with precedent, hard to say).
We hear a lot about how Brexit has divided the country. I'm not sure that's true, as a country I think we're all pretty sick of the fucking politicians rabbiting on about it and telling us what our votes meant. What it has really done is fractured ALL of the big English parties (the SNP not so much, they were firmly Remain and stay so) and I'm counting the Lib Dems as a big party despite their currently reduced number of MPs. The Tories MPs are pretty split Right v Centre, but their constituencies are harder to call. Labour splits aren't as clearly matched to their political allegiances and their constituencies are a real hodgepodge. Corbyn is trying to balance all of that and for the first time, it's actually out in the open and he has to be seen to do more than say "May's deal doesn't deliver what she promised, we oppose it," so his juggling act is newer but in the spotlight too.
]]>There are some that might be stylistic choice but I'd send back if I was proofreading a presentation. e.g. in Slide 11 there is GODWAKER Surface Installation (est. weight: 1000 tons) - I'd put 1,000 tons with a comma. There's a 2000 tons with no comma in the next bullet point so I'm thinking it's a conscious choice.
Also in Slide 11, Deployment of >1Gw of photovoltaic panels to power... should definitely be 1GW with a capital W for the units of power. Sorry, but I was proofreading a Master's thesis when I read this, I was really picky on units.
]]>There are women's organisations where it's happening. There are, as I understand it (being a white woman living in the UK, this is second hand) organisations for African Americans in the US where it's happening. There are definitely movements that I would characterise as queer rights groups, although some of them use other names, where it's happening.
The #MeToo movement has caused a change, and has caused pale penis-bearing people of power to ask some of the women around them about their sexual harassment and sexual assault experiences and why they didn't report them. When their wife, their daughter, their sister says "Oh yes, that's happened to me and I didn't tell you because... well it happens to everyone, what could you have done?" or similar, it causes attitudes to start to change.
I'm not really intending to hijack this into US politics, but the way the Senate Judiciary Committee is handling the accusation of sexual assault against the SCOTUS candidate in 2018 is totally different to only 25 years ago. How much of that is because the accuser is a white professor and not a black woman, and how much because of MeToo? (I don't know to be honest.)
But... One could (not me, I suck at speculative fiction of this type, I know I've tried) write stories set in a near future universe where #MeToo has really taken root, where there's been an equivalent for race and sexuality and society looks properly at how to address and the issues and redress complaints I think? There's a model there to work from.
]]>Very loosely, it says that as a white, queer woman I have a different experience of prejudice than a black, straight woman. However, there are overlaps, and even if we haven't lived the other's lives we can support them and try to understand them - but not assume we can help and do things, we need to listen offer what they tell us they need, not what we think they need. It's more complicated than that, but for a couple of sentences that's close enough.
There's nothing I've seen where that kind of approach to society has taken off. There's definitely feminist SF out there, a lot of it is truly excellent. But I haven't seen much where intersectionality is the rule of the day, or has successfully subverted both the patriarchy and the sexual identity "wars" we seem to be seeing in the US right now and given us a language and society in which it's not all just sunshine and flowers and perfect equality but there's a framework to deal with the problems that people have about it.
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