Brett Dunbar

Brett Dunbar

  • Commented on Crime and Punishment
    The loans system as currently set up acts effectively as a graduate tax rather than as a loan. Repayments are linked only to the graduate's earnings and not the balance of the loan, The repayments take the the form of...
  • Commented on Existential threats
    It seems likely that the closest that the world came to a nuclear war was the Sino-Soviet border war in 1969. The USSR seriously considered a first strike on China, going so far as to actually approach the USA to...
  • Commented on Thought experiment
    High frequency trading constitutes a high proportion of trading but doesn't constitute a proportion of value. a lot of it is based on arbitraging between markets as price changes take a certain amount of time to propagate; the high frequency...
  • Commented on Three arguments against the singularity
    To give some guide as to how much that would cost; when the Winton Professorship of the Public Understanding of Risk was established at Cambridge in perpetuity in 2007 with an endowment of £3.3 million by the Winton Charitable Foundation....
  • Commented on Write the story!
    Some support for the 1980s children's TV hypothesis about Kevin "Gerbil" Carroll's nickname is provided by one of his pallbearers being Francis "Fraggle" Green; who was also the first on the scene after Gerbil's murder....
  • Commented on Cookie policy
    The rather widely repeated claim that Britain has 4.2 million CCTV cameras is not well founded. The Radio 4 programme "More or Less" on the 12th May 2008 (archive available on the BBC website) tracked down the original source, a...
  • Commented on Making (up) News
    I did say tend to be unpopular, not are always unpopular. As I pointed out democratic regimes tend to score well on the transparency international corruption perception index while dictatorships tend to score badly. A regime selected by lot has...
  • Commented on Making (up) News
    If you are elected you have to keep the electorate sufficiently happy to re elect you, if you aren't elected you don't. Dictatorships in general score worse on perceived corruption surveys than democracies. There are exceptions but the trend is...
  • Commented on Making (up) News
    In order to be re elected you need to get people to vote for you, so you need to retain popularity with the electorate so you have incentives to serve the people. Corrupt politicians tend to be unpopular. While if...
  • Commented on Making (up) News
    The problems with choosing by lot include firstly it takes a considerable period to become familiar enough with parliamentary procedure the bureaucracy and your colleagues to be effective. So you need to have a fairly long term. Secondly as the...
  • Commented on Making (up) News
    The minimum age for a Regent is 18, under the Regency Act 1937 it was 21 this was later changed by the Regency Act 1953. Under the Regency Act 1937 all of the Counsellors of State had to be 21...
  • Commented on Making (up) News
    James VIII becomes king (the highest applicable regnal number is from the Scottish succession) after legal fiction of momentary reigns of Charles III, William V, Henry IX, Andrew, Beatrice, Eugenie and Edward IX. As Viscount Severn is under eighteen there...
  • Commented on Going underground
    To nitpick a little, Sir Barnett Stross wasn't a cabinet minister. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health was a junior ministerial position....
  • Commented on Wanker
    A superinjuction is used in circumstances where mentioning the existence of the injunction would frustrate the purpose of the injunction, usually because it would disclose the information which the injunction is intended to prevent the disclosure of....
  • Commented on Looking under the street lamp again
    The self sufficient space colony isn't the first step, the first step is set up a totally self sufficient self contained habitat on Earth. It's cheaper to set up and if things go really wrong there is a breathable atmosphere...
  • Commented on "It doesn't have a major theme or anything"
    Oh I hated the film as well, apart from the PE teacher bit which was genuinely funny. I found it a highly manipulative and horribly dated story that ends up having a tragic ending only because the main character is...
  • Commented on "It doesn't have a major theme or anything"
    This prompted me to look up my least favourite book A Kestral for a Knave by Barry Hines. I found to my surprise that the ten reviews were all either four or five stars. I then submitted a one star...
  • Commented on Reasons to be Cheerful
    In the UK when buying car insurance you can buy fully comprehensive insurance which covers both you and the other party, which is what you are refering to. You can also buy third party only insurance which covers damage or...
  • Commented on Reasons to be Cheerful
    I'm not convinced that the reluctance to rebuild certain mostly black parts of New Orleans is racist. Certain areas of the city are built in areas which would be flooded frequently or even permanently without expensive drainage operations. These flood...
  • Commented on The hard edge of empire
    I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here. If today is the best time to have ever lived, and this has been true for much of the last two hundred years, it is not unreasonable to expect things to continue...
  • Commented on Books I will not write #3: No plan survives contact with the editor
    Actually Benoit Mandlebrot (as in mandlebrot set) makes a fairly strong case in his book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets that the stock market does not follow a normal or Gaussian distribution but rather follows a power-law distribution. One technique he...
  • Commented on Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
    The Entente had adopted a Churchillian strategy (as in John rather than Winston). Marlborough's battle plans usually involved attacking the French army, the strongest part of the enemy forces, rather than the allied Spanish and Bavarian forces. He worked on...
  • Commented on Why Wikipedia is the writer's friend
    One I noticed was in the episode Homecoming of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was a line "Frederick and Hans Gruenshtahler. Wanted in Germany for capital murder, terrorism, the bombing of flight 1402." The problem with that Germany does not...
  • Commented on A working hypothesis
    It was nearly every diocese in Belgium not nearly every parish, the difference in size is considerable. The diocese is the area of responsibility of a Bishop while a parish is the area of an individual church. Given the size...
  • Commented on A working hypothesis
    Legally speaking the Roma being expelled are either Romanian of Bulgarian citizens as under the transitional arrangements existing EU member states can restrict the settlement of citizens of new EU member states. Roma who have citizenship of existing EU states...
  • Commented on Interview
    How do you think that the favourable tax treatment of paper books over ebooks (paper books are exempt while ebooks are taxed at 17.5%, rising to 20% in January) will affect the take-up of ebooks in the UK?...
  • Commented on Heinlein
    That is a misquote of the early nineteenth century French politician François Guizot who said "Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head". There...
  • Commented on Closure
    The Wikipedia article on the phases of the moon is pretty clear that gibbous just means that more than half of the moon's visible surface is illuminated, during both waxing and waning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase...
  • Commented on Closure
    @60 Waxing gibbous is not a tautology as the moon also wanes gibbous. It waxes gibbous during the second week and wanes gibbous during the third week....
  • Commented on Sandbagged by the near future
    Actually it's 34.9% voted for parties other than Labour and the Conservatives. Labour got 29%, the Conservatives 36.1% and the Liberal Democrats got 23%. The other parties got a combined 11.9%....
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Propaganda