It's the difference between proportional voting vs winner takes it all. In the latter case you can't really hold politicians accountable, as you will have to choose between effectively throwing your vote away or voting for the one opposition candidate, that often will be just as bad.
While the UK have some level of representativeness, each circuit has a winner takes it all structure, making change quite hard to achieve on a larger scale.
This might be a "grass is greener" thing. Do elected representatives actually have higher approval rating, or enact policies that better fit with public opinion, under proportional systems? Sure it'd probably make things a little better, but it won't actually solve anything hard, I think. All Western countries are struggling (and mostly failing) to deal with the same problems regardless of details like electoral system.
With proportionate representation you get what _should_ happen, in my opinion, which is sometimes nothing. If the coalition can't decide on something, then it doesn't happen, which is the correct outcome because not enough people agree about it. It represents the people (who also can not agree on it).
The alternative is a decision that most people don't agree with.
That sounds like kind of a mirror of some of peoples biggest complaints regarding bureaucracy and committees. Deadlock can not only be worse than an imperfect solution, it can be weaponized by a minority to exert outsized power and extract otherwise unthinkable concessions. We see this sometimes in the US House, where more fringe or radical groups within parties can block the literally functioning of the actual country, safe in their assumptions that the two parties will not form a majority coalition and that the parties as a whole will take more damage from the fallout than the radical groups.
I'm not saying that that makes the system worse, mind you. I'm not even saying you're wrong that it's a better system. I just think anyone who thinks any one system is the easy, obvious fix to fair and just representational government is either shortsighted, or has different priorities than I do.
That's ironically just something the British government used to pride themselves on, Pragmatism.
If it's important enough or dysfunctional enough a quick decision will be taken. There's clearly deadlock in first past post too, look at the US, if neither party advocates for it at all, it gets nowhere.
My view is it's always organised elites making the decisions, no matter the system. Nominally left-wing parties often make brazen right-wing moves, and vice-versa. The votes that matter are those of the MPs, Congress members etc. which are always influenced by a range of factors and organised factions. That's the actual decision-making mechanism.
It’s the organized elites, true, but they aren’t a monolithic block either. In a proportional system they also must spread their influence on many parties. This is a good thing. With a single party there is a greater risk of a cordyceps infection taking over, see Republicans.
IMHO the simple change that would have the biggest effect on the American political system would be to require Congresspeople to live full-time in their districts and conduct all official business over videoconference and e-mail. Lots of behavioral science has shown that the biggest generator of trust and allegiance is physical proximity and face-to-face interactions. Make all reps have their face to face interactions with their constituents and maybe they will actually start representing their constituents. It also makes lobbying a lot less economical (instead of hiring one lobbyist that can have lunch with 435 representatives, you would need 435 lobbyists, or at least 435 plane trips) and gerrymandering a bit less practical (there's a decent chance the rep would no longer live in the district and be forced to give up their seat).
That and ensuring a bidirectional feedback mechanism between the executive and legislative branch, so that laws that aren't enforced by an administration fall off the books, and presidents that don't enforce the laws lose their job. Right now, the legal corpus of the U.S. is a constantly-accreting body, which means that no matter what the President wants to do, they can find some law somewhere to justify it, and then anything they don't want to do, they just say "We don't have the resources to enforce this". This gives the President all the power. They should be a servant to the law, not its arbiter.
It's the opposite of what you say. Proportional representation isn't accountable because you don't know what coalition you're voting for - coalitions are done in backrooms after the election. Winner takes all is more accountable because the coalitions are done before the election (aka political parties). Parties are made up of different factions and they're agreed before the election.
I guess you don't live in the UK, because winner takes all is far worse for backroom deals. The deals just end up being between factions within the same party!
Deals and bargaining all happen AFTER a party takes power and completely hidden until a government can't pass their own bills like the Labour attempt to reform welfare.
With proportional representation the deals are made in order to form a government, BEFORE it has power, and are between separate political parties.
Sure there may be agreements that are not all made public, but these are much harder to keep in the "backroom".
This time everyone voted for Starmer and got friend-of-Epstein Mandelson via McSweeney as a cut-out.
PMs don't drive the agenda. The UK is one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. The people driving the agenda are billionaire and multi-millionaire donors.
PM is a sales job, not a strategy job, and increasingly ridiculous PMs have been selected because the donors have had enough of liberal democracy as a concept. If it stops working - which it pretty much has - there's going to be less resistance to removing it altogether.
Which is why there's resistance to Digital ID. There's widespread distrust - with reason - of the political establishment right across the divide.
I think he's right, actually. It rings true with what we see here in the Netherlands. People don't feel like they're "throwing their vote away" if they vote for a minor party, so politicians can't have a laid back attitude.
There are efforts to make this happen in the us starting locally and working up. The states are left to decide how they implement elections on their own with a couple of exceptions. There is a tragedy of the commons aspect to it though, as if some states adopt proportional representation but not others the ones that do not adopt it gain advantage. Ranked choice voting is taking hold much faster than pr in the us, and it is pretty slow too. It can happen though. Both are viewed as being left leaning, which doesn't really make sense to me.
If their minor party doesn't end up as part of the governing coalition, there's no sense in which people feel like their vote wound up having no effect?
That's not really true. It just means there is a gradient of success rather than outright success or loss. Particular portions of what you voted for may be successful.
First past the post means you take it all or leave it all, policywise, small things are likely to fall through the cracks.
Don't vote. By voting, you partake in a system unable to give most people effective representation. By voting, you ostensibly accept your own alienation.
This is bad advice. By voting, you accept nothing. By not voting, you merely lose the small power that voting grants you. (Why do you think people are working so hard to disenfranchise voters in the US?)
Construct better systems, by all means, but don't just ignore the system that exists.
Maybe he's actually wearing protective gear? Jeans with slide tolerant layers and padding are pretty common as warm weather gear and there are jeans style jackets as well. If you don't know what to look for it can be hard to tell the difference to regular clothing.
* Have a license
* Wear appropriate gear
* Follow speed limits
* Don't drink and ride
* Aged somewhere 30-50
* Have more than a few months experience on your bike
* etc.
You are statistically "one of the safer ones". Not safe, you are never truly safe when in traffic.
On the rare occasion I watch YouTube via my Roku stick, ads cause me to mute the tv and skip when I can. I guess I could put a mini pc behind the TV and get all the browser extensions but this compromise is good enough for my lazy self.
It takes away the ability to know what it does though, which is also often considered an important aspect. By not publishing details on how to train the model, there's no way to know if they have included intentional misbehavior in the training. If they'd provide everything needed to train your own model, you could ensure that it's not by choosing your own data using the same methodology.
IMO it should be considered freeware, and only partially open. It's like releasing an open source program with a part of it delivered as a binary.
To me it sounded like click bait. So I checked comments and concluded that it was indeed about the very visible RDS signal and not some hidden channel used by some secretive agency that would indeed be somewhat mysterious.
I don't think the fact that it worked in generating clicks is really an argument for bait titles. Given the positive comments about the content I think some editorializing could have been helpful to focus on the hacking journey aspect though, which seems to be the point rather the specifics of RDS itself.
I sure hope this does not mean a reduction in quality, one of Legos big benefits has been the longevity, lego pieces from the 70s are still in my family's rotation. Reuse should always come before recycle.
The entire Lego company is staffed by purists. I think the reason they took so long getting this done (despite being very higher-educated-Danish which means most employees are very environmentally-everything) is that they didn't manage to get it right until now.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm going to be very surprised if the quality is worse from this.
EDIT: translating this to finance terms: the Lego Group is still majority-owned by the founder's family. This is not your average public company which has to deal with constant shareholder pressure to make More Profit Right Now at the cost of future growth and sustainability. Lego knows that the only reason parents happily pay their obscene prices is because their minds go "well, ok, it's a fortune, but it's also very high-quality stuff". No other toy brand has this reputation. If they'd burn that, it would be the most stupid move in the company's history.
Legos Quality in the last decade has been on a steady decline to an absurd degree. Most of their sets now are substandard in part count, part quality, full of stickers and it's all star wars and other tie ins while the prices skyrocketed. Meanwhile the Competition has stepped up significantly and there are now multiple manufacturers selling lego compatible pieces and sets of equal or higher quality for significantly less.
I buy the occasional set for myself and then quite a few for my kids every year. I'm not seeing it myself, the quality seems as good as ever, and the designs better than ever. It's never been a cheap toy, and yeah prices have gone up as with everything.
I looked at them awhile ago while lamenting that Lego doesn't do a Star Trek line. But you can't tell me their designs are better. I watched the video of the 2 chaps going through the sets and they're just not things of beauty. Whereas I just put together the Lego Concorde and it looks, as much as possible, like the thing it's supposed to be.
Comparing an old police station with the modern one but at 3:57 Left side Modern Police Station 100€ with basically no parts, right side old station from the secondary market for 45€. It's literally twice the size and part count.
China cloning/being compatible with Lego isn't exactly a surprise, or I expect, particularly difficult (as they already manufacture plenty of plastic items in various quality/form).
>(despite being very higher-educated-Danish which means most employees are very environmentally-everything)
Sounds expensive. These academic purists are happy working in a factory, are they? Good for them! I always thought that housing costs there would be exorbitant, but I think I get it now. Legos must be what they build the houses from!
Solve one problem and you will probably need to solve another one. So I guess they live in the Lego houses, and they used what they learned to make a nice lil family business, selling high quality bricks made of oil to kids worldwide.
>I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm going to be very surprised if the quality is worse from this.
I have some bad news for you fam. "Biodegradable" means that they will dissolve in kid spit, and in landfills and especially when floating in the sea under sunny skies. Right now legos are one of the closest things we have to the One Ring, except that to get them melted down our Frodo would have to swim down to the subduction zones of the earth and deposit them into the mantle.
I know Greta is from Sweden, but surely there are no shortage of Danish 13 year olds who will furiously demand that a more environmentally friendly process for these toys be implemented. After all, you know the old quote right?
>God save us from the fury of the Northmen.
Purists be damned, call that presser and learn to compromise!
Out of every hundred pieces, maybe 4 get lost or go into the vacuum.
One need only go to charity shops in the UK to see the absolutely astonishing amounts of lego that managed to leave a family.
The “bucket” of lego bricks is a staple in many families with children, with parts coming from other peoples buckets or collations of multiple buckets.
All my lego is with my nephew, but before that it was stored with all my other toys, most of which were discarded as they were deemed unfit to continue: not the lego though.
It’s hard to get actual data on this, but in my sets I only lost about 4-5% of pieces, which is still many, and I only broke 2 or 3 pieces in my childhood.
And I was careless and rowdy, so I’m pretty much worst-case.
They didn't specify what they qualified as a multivitamin, my guess is that the definition is rather loose due to the scale of the study. There's a lot of different mixes of multivitamins in the store. You would buy the one that fit's the efficiency pattern you want to prevent. If your goal is to specifically reduce mortality rather than prevent short term fatigue, you would need to pick the right one.
From what I can tell, they haven't ensure that the long term consumption pattern was consistent either, so they may be mixing people who took multivitamins for a year around the initial study with those who took it every day for their whole life. That would reduce the effect size significantly.
The general advice on vitamin supplements is usually to take the ones you have explicit reasons for taking and to focus more on food in general. This study, while possible useful as a way to debunk highly unrealistic claims of multivitamin effectiveness, doesn't really change the picture here.
tsan will catch a bunch of potential race conditions for you, under the condition that you run it somehow. How to make sure it's run? Well, add a test for the relevant code and add it to your tsan run in your CI and you'll certainly catch a bunch of race conditions over time.
This has saved me a bunch of times when I've be doing work in code with proneness to those kind of issues. Sometimes it will just lead to a flaky test, but the investigation of the flake will usually find the root cause in the end.
While the UK have some level of representativeness, each circuit has a winner takes it all structure, making change quite hard to achieve on a larger scale.