amckinstry

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• Commented on The coming storm
  So in breaking news, we'll have a third referendum here in Ireland, on the Unified Patent Court. See https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/three-referendums-to-take-place-this-year-as-cabinet-to-sign-off-on-joining-unified-patent-court/a2068922005.html Thats two referendums on removing sexist language and the nature of the family in the constitution on March 8th (International Womens...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Writing from Ireland, I take the contrarian view that the Head of State (elected President, in our case) is not a decoration, or a day-to-day political role, but a constitutional tie-breaker. So like some other European countries our President is...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  The problem with the 'unelected' change of PM in the UK at the moment is that whats happening right now is clearly a faction fight, between the ERG and at least 1 "centrist" faction. While under FPTP people vote for...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Ireland - do the Irish really want to be saddled with the basket case of NI? Merging Irish and NI politics would be .. interesting. We're a generation after the troubles, though, and many younger voters simply don't understand...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  On Ireland: you may well be right that there will be no unification in 20 years, but its highly likely that Sinn Féin, likely to be in government in 2-3 years, will have a UI at the top of its...
• Commented on I can't even
  Going beyond this, essentially public "service points" will be (a) destination points, ie shopping, work, and (b) publicly subsidized tourist/support routes. I'm involved in (b) as part of the EV charging point policy for our local council. We have some...
• Commented on I can't even
  I think the government should also control the electric grid/gas pipelines and regulate any monopolies. You could have private entities feeding power into the grid/pipeline but they shouldn't be able to charge excess or manipulate the system to jack...
• Commented on I can't even
  One of the problems of privatisation / nationalisation is the creation of a market that can survive bad times, and what is "infrastructure". An opening example is the privatisation of lots of US military services to Halliburton, KBR, etc in...
• Commented on I can't even
  Being able to appoint some one to the job who, though sympathetic to the ruling party, is an expert actually makes more sense than the Westminster governments method of selecting the least bad option from a very small pool...
• Commented on I can't even
  The somewhat chilling conclusion I get when I ask this question is that we will only get a party of the non-billionaires when there are no more billionaires. I differ on this, but think the fight-back on billionaires is...
• Commented on London Bridge
  But that is going to be the canonical example of "Inadvisable High Value Target Creation" for a long time. Don't worry the Met police have years of experience with very large policing events. checks notes https://news.met.police.uk/news/sir-mark-rowley-appointed-as-new-metropolitan-police-commissioner-450935 The New Boss...
• Commented on London Bridge
  Are you implying the announcement was delayed to be timed for the main evening news ? Have they form for such an act ?...
• Commented on London Bridge
  Just confirmed on BBC: Queen Elizabeth has died....
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  Of the 15 countries that have Elizabeth as monarch, currenlty six are in the process of becoming republics: https://www.opindia.com/2022/04/six-caribbean-countries-to-become-republics-by-leaving-british-monarchy/ Barbados set a trend. Canada, turn out the lights when you leave, please....
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  President Boris Johnson The defence against this is three-fold: (1) explicitly limited, enumerated powers. No scope to interfere with the government in normal practice - eg. the President's speeches have to be vetted by the government, etc. (2) minimalist pay...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  I'm biased but I'd follow the Irish model (which I believe is also used by a bunch of other European and other countries, like Germany, etc). For a start it was designed as a drop-in placeholder for the UK monarch....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  For Jesus, I favour the conspiracy cockup theory. An agreement is done with the Romans to fake up a crucifixion. Its done on private land, supporters and Romans nearby only; nobody gets to examine closely. He dies suspiciously quickly, shuffled...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  Stop right there and ask why do we need an individual head of state at all? I'm coming late to the party, but in many (most?) states this is a feature, not a bug. The US example of joint Head...
• Commented on Invisible Sun: Themes and Nightmares
  But still, an entire world ? A reminder that we've already got worlds populated only by robots. Mars. Building robots that don't have Generalized AI is very plausible to me, though I suspect the training will be different than...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Maybe the contests could be kind of like Eurovision? It's worth looking at the Irish Presidency in comparison, mostly because it was designed as an exact replacement for the UK Monarchy. First off understand the role - primarily ceremonial but...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  I fully agree things will get messy, and data will be "diverted", etc. My larger point is not just the example of expenses, but that the work of ML/AI will be part of every job - classification of things, etc...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  I'm kind of interested to see what happens when we do get ubiquitous ML, sociologically speaking. Consider (one of) the simplest forms of ML: categorisation. Treat your ML system as a black box, feed it bunches of pictures labelled "cata"...
• Commented on What happens now?
  On University costs: a huge sink for money is (1) Prestige and (2) grounds and buildings. Students (by definition almost) don't know how to judge the quality of a course, except by repuation. So many go on the appearance of...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  And I well remember switches on phones that flipped between pulse and digital. Why the cordless phone I bout about 8 years ago dials with the speed of pulse, I have no clue. USanian? Because its written into the...
• Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
  For me, the question is whether BoJo wants the GFA and/or WA to fall, or at least to be in peril. There are several bits at stake. I personally know of a couple of companies who work across the Irish...
• Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
  BJ appears to be making a beeline for no-deal Brexit. It's not something that could get approved under its own name in Parliament, but put up a bill to 'protect the UK from being carved up' which effectively does...
• Commented on No comment necessary
  My comment on police training was more about my shock of lack of law training in the US in general (in my extended family I can count police/civilian advisors in 4 countries including 2 in the US). The current incumbent...
• Commented on No comment necessary
  Interesting but not surprising that the post of Sergeant at Arms, like most US police agencies I've seen, require qualifications in weapons and firearms, but no qualification in law. It appears possible to be one of the most critical law...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  The PDP-11 was as reliable as hell (though I have stories that can only be repeated in the presence of pints and the absence of lawyers). Digital/Compaq only stopped making them in the late 1990s - 1999 as I recall....
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  On the "what if" front, Someone somewhere now has the job of rewriting London Bridge, to be executed under lockdown....