marksbrown

Alternative Vote is not Proportional Representation. And to be very clear, liberal democrat MPs, including Nick Clegg, were photographed with signed papers saying that if they were ever in government they would abolish tuition fees. A cynical ploy to win university constituencies.

That said, the country was reeling from the 2008 banking crisis, that even with a competent PM in Brown (despite his 'ignorant woman') comment was leading a Labour government into its 14th year. Even then David Cameron only won a minority government. If the lib dems hadn't backed the Tories into office, very likely we would have seen a second general election within short order.

Collective self interest does not require active organisation.

For the moment "yesterday for old reddit" on firefox android works quite well.

I'm a huge fan of Bandcamp

In the UK we allow it for various national infrastructure projects. This approach would allow for far better estimates of costs.

The 'simplest' method is to allow landowners to declare the value of the land they own. Tax based on this value and let governments buy at the stated land value. Everything else is fluff.

There are extensions that redirect to old.reddit.com with mobile friendly CSS.

Funnily enough, a common idea! What would Feynman do? | Fabulous adventures in coding https://share.google/iSEhAqL9NhAstSlRE

For mobile, the firefox extension 'yesterday for old reddit' works nicely to modify css.

A master blacksmith can shoe a horse an' all. Laser alignment is also a solved problem with a machine. Just because something can be done by hand does not mean it has any intrinsic value.

Sure but here in the UK schools will use what is cheapest, free or part of a wider package of software already used. RM web filtering or smoothwall make me want to bash my skull against a wall at times. Finally School IT staff are not judged on their ability to manage a web filter well. Safeguarding is (rightly) the primary concern and so if an existing solution can be said to block the more egregious parts of the internet, it's irrelevant if it blocks the useful parts too.

Well I won't reiterate all of 'bad education' by Bryan Caplan but to my mind exams are imperfect because:

1. Schools are not equal. It's not fair to compare students when they usually have no choice over their teachers. 2. Exams cover an arbitrary syllabus controlled by undemocratic exam boards. 3. Topics are chosen by exam boards that can be examined not by importance. 4. Students who perform poorly under stress of exam conditions are punished for it. 5. Exams serve no real purpose. Children are not chickens being graded for sale. They're at best a weak signal of aptitude.

I would much prefer exams to serve as a prerequisite of sitting a future course rather than an assessment at the end. That way teachers can actually teach rather than continuously repeat the same content.

Unfortunately the internet has been corrupted by JavaScript. A website is rarely loading a single site anymore. Try noscript and you'll quickly see that, even a trivial website loads dozens of dependencies. Dependencies that shift over time.

Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.

Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!

A good example in the UK is teaching students the FOIL technique for algebraic expansion. Students typically can expand (ax+b)(cx+d) because they've learnt a recipe but cannot expand say (ax2+bx+c)(dx+e).

Many schools here focus on such tricks (nix the tricks was a great book focusing on such things) as schools here are judged on pass/fail rates.

In general, exams are an excellent way to assess students en masse at their ability to remember similar problems but not inherent problem solving techniques. The latter I've found is possible to teach 1to1 but far harder with a class of varying abilities.

An absolutely fantastic engine in my experience. I've used it with students (rather than pygame) due to its bare bones nature. I love how with a simple class structure of update and draw, students can gain a tangible grasp of oop concepts as well as implementing their own ideas. 10/10

A developer, a wireshark installation & a great deal of patience later. Still, yet another argument for right to repair.

Microsoft failed to capture the internet. IE6 can still cause sane minds to crack.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Or a tiny portion of a railway! Do you have a citation for that 16 billion?

Their output is fairly low due to surrounding trees and housing. I did consider wind for heating water however. That might be feasible with a large enough savonius turbine.

We're using Trojan t105 6 V ones. I agree that they help but they do watering with regularity.

Yes. But the engine is at least fifty years old and so I'm not inclined to run it just for electricity. Plus it doesn't do it any good to run in idle without any change in revs.

So living on a narrowboat in the UK this is something I have experience with. We have a 335 W panel with an MPPT connected to a 200 Ah 12 V flooded lead acid battery. The battery in reality has a capacity of half that and in the 6 years of seasonality it has probably halved.

A few things :

* you don't need a fridge in winter so you can just turn it off. * charging battery banks / laptops in sunny periods results in the battery bank being useful in times when the weather isn't so kind. * no amount of solar is enough in the deep of winter. * any amount of solar is too much in the height of summer. * pubs are great for charging devices. * lead acid batteries last substantially longer if you only let them drop to half their true capacity and regularly charge them. Yes alternatives exist but there's something to be said for making what you have work for as long as possible.

This from a lousy novel about the impossibility of divorce. The phrase you're uttering is from a flighty aristocrat who in the novel sees virtue in poverty. Perhaps in stead of pithy phrases we could engage with the topic at hand?

For a small business expense and the annoyance of having to extend effort to change something that just works, it was a pretty sensible decision. Now I've got to go down the rabbit hole of playing the free market game for what should just be a damn simple thing. Why is web hosting & email so difficult in 2023!?!

What is an SME supposed to do? I need static web-hosting and an email server that will not get blocked by Google!

I honestly cannot believe the hubris. A 20% price hike and removal of features mid-term. If I don't pay for the email accounts I apparently didn't pay for, I will lose my business email accounts. I get the impression I should just have stuck with : <official sounding>_<country> @ gmail.com and moved on with my life. Maddening.

SimpleGraph might be worth a look. I've found it useful. https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/simple-graph

I won't deny the UK doesn't have issues with race but it is not the US. Here class politics matter far more. Electing a multimillionaire married to a billionaire was never going to end well electorally.