cpcallen
22hr ago
we could make a space elevator from conventional materials
Doesn't the moon's very slow rotation (~1x month) make that rather impractical? The elevator would have to extend to and beyond the earth-moon L1 or L2 point, since lunarstationary orbits are impossible (they are outside the Moon's SOI).
I have genuinely never understood why some people find the UN tyrannical. It seems to me that it is toothless, and even if it were not it would at worst be an institution of mediocre democracy (a bit like the EU or indeed the US). That is no tyranny. Yet "one world government" has been a meme since my childhood. That has always seemed like a worthy if probably far off goal to me—what about it do you find so objectionable?
cpcallen
13d ago
Thanks. It seems you are correct: Gallant may be a murderer, but his victim was truly nasty. I not a supporter of the death penalty, and vigilante justice is inherently problematic for a variety of reasons, but it's clear that Gallant and his co-convicted were taking care of a problem that the justice system had failed to.
cpcallen
14d ago
it turns out that the original murder was a case of vigilantism against, allegedly, a habitual abuser of women.
This is an interesting claim—suspiciously convenient but not implausible—so I was interested in learning more. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much reported in the coverage of the pardon about the original conviction. Can you point me to your source for this?
cpcallen
21d ago
Indeed: I've been trying to discourage people from sending me messages on Facebook ever since they broke the seamless email <-> messages gateway. I even looked in to trying to build a bit that would reply to any FB message with a request that the correspondent email me instead. Alas it was not feasible given my expertise and motivation (both relatively high).
cpcallen
5mo ago
This is the first UK general election where voter ID was required, having previously been trialled for local elections. Unlike in the US, this is considered by most to be a sensible technocratic fix rather than a sinister plot to disenfranchise anyone (although a few UK lefties seem to have imbibed US memes enough to see it as such).
I believe you correctly describe the general feeling about this, but even this UK centrist cannot help but notice how much more likely it is than an over–70 voter will already posess an acceptable piece of ID than an under-25 voter will. For example: why are travel passes for older persons accepted, but not ones for younger persons? Perhaps there is a good technocratric reason for the difference (maybe issuing of Freedom passes is more carefully regulated?) but I do expect that the incoming government to correct this apparent disparity rather than scrap the ID requirement altogether.
cpcallen
5mo ago
You're right that Tories are a failure on their own terms, and because of that the idea that the neoliberal wing of Labour will be some sort of an improvement is absurd to me.
I disagree. Specifically, I think that Labour is considerably more likely to be good at growing the economy and reducing the deficit for several reasons:
- Labour is much more likely to spend money on services (and in particular on public sector salaries), rather than on tax cuts for the wealthiest, and this is likely to be better for overall economic growth.
- The Conservatives dedication to austerity, Brexit and lettuce-brained tax cutting has been so appallingly damaging that it would be difficult to do worse.
- Labour has not suffered from the purge of competence and expertise that the Conservatives inflicted upon themselves in an effort to get Brexit through. There has certainly been a purge of Corbynites from the party at large, but the parliamentary party was mostly dead set against him from the beginning so this was much less costly of experience and expertise what the Tories did to themselves.
There is also historical data to suggest that Labour tends to do better on economic growth than the Conservaives, which fits with the pattern that I have repeatedly observed: that, at least in my lifetime in the US, Canada, and the UK, the centre left party (Democrats / Liberals / Labour) has typically done better on some of the key measures, such as deficit reduction, than the centre right party (Republicans / Conservatives / Tories) usually try to lay claim to. (I recall some years ago finding a nice set of graphs looking at defecits in particular; alas I can't quickly relocate them, so consider this more my stating my priors than making a specific claim.)
cpcallen
6mo ago
I have frequently quipped that "the [only significant] difference between American culture and Canadian culture is that Americans are very proud of being American, while Canadians are very proud of not being American."
I grant that, with the emergence of Trumpism, it seems increasingly clear that there are in fact aspects of US culture to which we have no good answer–but you are correct that I am much happier with mediocre but universal healthcare (in Canada or my adopted homeland of Britain) and would not trade it for the America alternative.
cpcallen
9mo ago
To me the most plausible claim you make is that all is all internal feedback would have been deflected. (I'd also give you the claim that all would have been forgotten after the PM got a promotion, except that unfortunately for then the promo cycle is a lot slower than the media cycle...)
cpcallen
1yr ago
I'm under the impression that parental (or in loco parents) supervision of children has been more or less steadily increasing since at least the 1930s, hence why kids are driven everywhere, parents get arrested for letting their teenage kids play in the park I'm unsupervised and "free range parenting" hads emerged as an effort to counter this insanity.
At what point do you think supervision decreased?
cpcallen
1yr ago
Ahh, I'd read only the article about the court cases. The article about Schmeister does read rather more like a hagiography.
It is interesting to realise that I have higher expectations for internal consistency if Wikipedia articles than I do for inter-article consistency.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Wow I keep forgetting how extortionate US phone plans are. Here in the UK £8/month will get you a perfectly good SIM-only plan with 10+ GB of data, and unlimited data starts at £15/month.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Is it standard, though? I've never presented any ID to court in any Canadian or UK election—and I have voted in many. I understand that the UK will now be requiring ID in future elections, but this is a novel development that the current government seems to have cribbed (like many of their more dubious electoral engineering projects) from the US Republicans.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Nominally, yes. But would they care about his open rejection of feminist ideology so much if he were stronger? In my observation the answer is usually either "yes, but not nearly so much" or "possibly, but they'd keep their opinions to themselves, at least around him", which amounts to the same thing from his point of view.
Attractive people (of both sexes) just get cut a lot more slack for their opinions and treatment of others.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Why would any government subsidize the creation of a colony with no expectation of ultimately realising the profits?
cpcallen
1yr ago
Can you elaborate about how some make folding impossible? Are you speaking only about the difficulty of avoiding taxation, or do you posit other ways that opting out, MGTOW-style, is insufficient/impossible?
(As to taxation: I can see some might the on average unequal contributions/disbursements for men and women a source of resentment, but I hardly think this is universal amongst unsuccessful men—consider that at least some are socialist—while plenty of successful men object to taxation on grounds unrelated to the disparate impact between men and women.)
cpcallen
1yr ago
For me the upvote/downvote mechanism did a lot better job of surfacing the most interesting things to read (posts and comments) that previous systems like Slashdot's moderation system.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Corporations benefitting at the expense of the public purse is not exactly a new idea. Indeed, it is one of the more compelling arguments against unfettered capitalism.
I would absolutely expect that corporations would like more cheap labour that is ultimately subsidised by taxpayers, especially in places where corporations are not themselves especially highly taxed. It's the same principle as Walmart workers on food stamps, writ large.
The likelihood that the general public would not buy the economic arguments in favour of immigration if they were more familiar with the numbers (at least in Denmark) may explain why those numbers do not seem to be particularly well reported.
cpcallen
1yr ago
I'm interested in knowing more about this. Growing up fairly poor it seemed like hand tools were ubiquitous but power tools were reserved for professionals and maybe rich hobbyists. I guess like horses and automobiles the ever-cheaper tech has reversed this dynamic?
Where do hand tool woodworking hobbyists congregate? Is Fine Woodworking magazine still relevant, or does it have too many power tools?
cpcallen
1yr ago
Not OP but: Perhaps to imply that there is much less mobility between them than the average American reader might expect had the word "class" been used instead? (And also to imply that birth remains disproportionately important in determining one's class despite increasing social and financial mobility.)
cpcallen
1yr ago
Notably the Japanese are reported to judge facial expressions much more on the eyes than other parts of the face, as compared to westerners. This is probably also why Japanese emoticons are eyes and nose laid out horizontally like so: O>O rather than full face like so: :-)
cpcallen
1yr ago
This talking point has been repeated ad nauseum but is it really true, though? I contend not: his candidateship brought an enormous influx of new members to the Labor party, resulting in it becoming the single largest political party by membership in Europe. The parliamentary Labor party evidently believed him to be unelectable—and did everything in their power to make sure that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy—but nevertheless under his leadership the Labor party made gains against the Tories in a snap election that Teresa May had opportunistically called to try to capitalize on Labour's supposedly weak leadership and Brexit position.
Corbyn was certainly deeply polarising, and in the end not an effective leader, but "unelectable" is not plausible except insofar as as his own party was willing to shoot themselves in the foot rather than risk finding out.
OK, I agree that the nations of the earth are indeed the powers that be (at least to a very extensive degree). So your argument is that one would like to be able to set up a new country, but all the land on Earth is already spoken for? That is indeed an considerable difficulty, and plausibly a motivation for planetary exploration.
More options
Context Copy link