pmyteh

We (the UK) have a very extensive set of double taxation treaties too. The point of non-dom status is that it doesn't even matter if your earnings were taxed elsewhere: they're still not liable in the UK.

Depending on how transformative the effects are (and the price drop possible upon genericisation) then there could be a compulsory licensing trade to do here.

The drug companies are presumably pricing optimally for profit (but not for maximum public benefit, for which the optimum price is ~0). You could calculate the net present value of the drug companies' total profits attributable to the patent, add on 10% as a bonus, and pay them off. If the welfare gains of having cheap drugs are genuinely greater than the value of the patent to the holder, this would be win/win.

The traditional response to that was violence against scabs, for better or for worse: it keeps people from breaking picket lines even when otherwise willing.

This photo in particular captures something of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Strikers_Riot

You'll have collectively said "do fidem". The rest is read by the official at the table, not the graduands.

The question as to whether this constitutes swearing an oath or making a simple promise was an interesting one for me as Quakers traditionally refuse to do the former.

Yes - to a surprising extent. The best diagram I've seen overlays them[0]. The British gauges are the smaller ones starting with W - with W6 being available essentially everywhere and the higher numbers on specially cleared routes to make it easier to move larger freight containers. GA and GB are standard Western European gauges: both taller and wider.

There's a surprising amount of global variation as much of this stuff wasn't standardised until after most railways were built. AIUI that's even true in the US, where the routes in the West can often take double-stacked containers and Amtrak's Superliners, and further East they often can't.

[0]: https://rfg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Loading-Gauge....

Because of the tight loading gauge in Britain, trying to cram two decks in would make it very small. It's been tried (once[0]) and they weren't able to make it fully double-decker, quick to load/unload, or especially comfortable.

I agree that they're fine in countries with larger bridges and tunnels -- Amtrak's Superliners are palatial in size -- but not for us. (Except probably for the Channel Tunnel rail link, which is built to French gauge).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR_Class_4DD

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were also US citizens spying for a US ally, at least in theory. Though the Soviet Union had stopped being an ally before they were convicted, of course.

Some of it is formatting, some of it is just field dependent. SSRN is commercial and "good enough" for many people. It (at least used to) advertise itself as a social network for social science academics. There's also SocArXiv[0] and others, which are purer extensions of the arxiv model.

Part of the issue is that the arxiv doesn't want every discipline in science, so a certain amount of duplication is necessary.

[0]: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv

Switches are not compulsory, they're just conventional. MK, for example, will happily sell you unswitched sockets (and without the "not to standard in the UK" warning for some of their other products).

Also not sure what you mean by "exactly the same". You can get single/double/triple in a variety of designs and colours. It's a socket - how much variation do you need?

It's a theoretical benefit even with radial wiring, I think, for some smaller devices. A lamp that's designed to draw an amp will have a small, low-current flex which will fail before the main circuit breaker trips (while a 3A fuse would have protected it).

In reality I don't think it matters, and even on a ring main the MCBs often trip before the device fuses blow these days.

Yeah, those are the same standard - they're still legal. The large ones were used in theatre lighting until recently (wiring is radial and you don't want a fuse to blow 5m above the stage in any case).

I think India still uses them, too.

Spurs have been re-legalised: the Part P changes have now been rolled back to whole new circuits, and spurs and new outlets are back as non-notifiable along with new faceplates etc.

That said, you're theoretically supposed to do a full set of earth resistance measurements etc. on the new wiring, which is hard if not impossible unless you've got proper electrician's test equipment. But in reality no one does that when DIYing it.

Most trade war reciprocal tariffs are carefully targeted for political pressure rather than blanket. Under Republican presidents you might tariff whiskey (easily substitutable, made mostly in red states) and under Democratic ones Boeing or Facebook.

Not clear that works at this scale, though.

To be fair, we've already been through this cycle at least once with animation. The difference between early Disney or even Looney Tunes and (say) late '60s Hanna-Barbera or '80s He-Man is enormous. Since then there has been generally higher-quality animation rather than lower (though I know it varies a lot by country, genre etc.)

It's not inevitable that it's a race to the cheapest and shittest. That's just one (fairly strong) commercial force amongst many.

The Scott Trust established its editorial line as "liberal" (in the UK, not the US sense) and it's generally hewed to that. Despite occasional flashes of appearing radical it's an establishment, social liberal paper that believes in slow reform.

I also wish it were more of a leftist paper but it is what it is.

The ECHR is an international agreement like many, many others. It has special status in UK law only because we chose to: that was the purpose of the Human Rights Act. You can also take complaints of breach to the European Court of Human Rights, but they have no enforcement powers (in particular, Russia often decided not to bother complying, and we've avoided enforcing their ruling on prisoner voting rights with their tacit consent).

It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.

Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.

I was once on a team part of which was putting procurement cards into our (local, British) government. We were doing it to save money: the cost of processing an invoice on paper was ~£10, and effective controls on petty cash were difficult.

It worked. We got less bureaucracy, lower costs, and better management data. The project was neither controversial nor expensive. Why would it be?

It's clear to me why we might be interested in using AI systems to explore our ethical intuitions, but far less clear why we would expect them to be able to answer such questions 'correctly'.

Given there are at least three decent metaethical positions, we have no way of selecting one as 'obviously better', and LLMs have no internal sense of morality, it seems to me that asking AI systems this kind of question is a category error.

Of course, the question "what might a utilitarian say was the right ethical thing to do if..." makes some sense. But if we're asking AI systems to make implicit moral judgements (e.g. with autonomous weapons systems) we should be clear about what ethics we want applied.

The limits of judicial review are absolutely contested, and there's a perfectly respectable argument that Marbury v Madison was a wrongly-decided power grab by the judicial branch (albeit now settled law). But it's a long way from there to the idea that district courts have no JR power. They are fully constitutional and exercise the 'judicial Power of the United States' as does the Supreme Court. Subject to being overturned on appeal, of course.

The federal courts' powers of judicial review have been established for over 200 years since Marbury v Madison. The inferior courts are also organised pursuant to the constitution and have full judicial powers (though can be abolished or rearranged by Congress should they decide):

> The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. (Start of Art. 3).

It is good to not GAF about down votes, but do consider the possibility it is because you are confidently incorrect, not because the voters are ill-informed or angry.

Source: PhD in political science.

It's (deliberately) a very soft paywall. The LRB offers a certain number of articles for free then hope to attract subscribers, but it's only really a semi-commercial proposition. The whole thing has been subsidised by the editor for decades; my suspicion is that they're much more interested in being read than being paid.

FWIW I'm a subscriber at least in the main because I want it to exist. Most months I don't read more than I'd get for free anyway. But it's gloriously chewy content of a kind that you can't quite find anywhere else.

Isla has folded, sadly (though they're still selling replacement parts for now). A shame: their machines really were magnificent. We have also been running through them (mostly second-hand) and selling them on, and it's been a cheap and excellent means of primary transport.

We used to joke that our student caving club was really very safe, having only had seven fatalities over the 50 years it had been operating.

In reality we had a lot of expertise and took safety very seriously. The club had always done a lot of exploration of new caves and other intrinsically tricky activities, and six of the seven deaths were in the same accident (the Mossdale Caverns tragedy of 1967). Our parties of freshers were in very limited danger being trained in well-known and well-explored caves. But still.

A well-made steak and kidney pie is a thing of delight. Intensely savoury, great texture contrast between the pastry and the filling, lovely with thick-cut chips, ketchup and peas. And satisfyingly bad for you.

Even though kidneys are cheap offal and smell like piss before they're prepared, they do make the pie filling richer and tastier: plain steak pies aren't anywhere near as good. Don't know why.

There weren't housing shortages in most Northern cities in the 1980s. Significant deindustrialisation had hollowed them out and they were in economic decline. The population in Manchester dropped continuously from 766,311 in 1931 to 392,819 in 2001 before starting to recover[0].

This was also before the sell-off of council housing, so it was still possible for the authority to guarantee housing. So conservation of unloved but historically important buildings was probably a more pressing problem than finding some vacant land to build flats.

https://www.manchester.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/25393/a2...

Yeah. The big draw was always that excise taxes on alcohol were much lower in France, but the EU guaranteed a right of individual duty-free import for personal use - so the UK couldn't make the money back on entry tariffs.

I'm very fond of British food, and there are certainly some things that are better got in our supermarkets than in France. Less than the other way round, though, and without the cheap booze to offset the cost of the trip I can't see many French people coming to the UK for good Madeira, pies, or Marmite...

For many people, $15 lights are fine. My commute only has a very short unlit section and its a very wide and easy to follow path, so the lack of an adjustable beam setting is no big deal.

Of course, that means that I absolutely must adjust the fitting to "permanently low beam" rather than "permanently blinding", if for no other reason that I don't want to get flattened by an oncoming car I've just dazzled...

It's somewhere a bit in between those things here. I don't think anyone reading the threads in question would believe that the commentators are being sincere: the tone is not sarcastic but the responses are obviously 'off' in quite a noticeable way. (Plus there are people complaining/giving the game away too, though they're downvoted to the bottom).

Feels a bit like an adversarial Turing test: (most) readers will get the joke, but the hope is that AI recommender systems won't.

At least in my experience it wasn't all due to Musk. My part of the academic world was quite small, and seemed to be increasingly uncomfortable with the enshittification of Twitter before Musk's purchase. Observing that the new owner was a shitlord probably coordinated a departure earlier than otherwise would have happened, but I think the process was well underway already.

We mostly ended up on Mastodon, I think. Personally I'm quite grateful that it's no longer professionally necessary to have an extra social media account.

The UK had dining cars on many of its long-distance trains, and they've been slowly phased out over the last decades. Two main causes:

Firstly, it's very difficult to make it profitable, given the limited number of passengers you can serve on a relatively short journey, the staff costs of running a kitchen plus waiting staff for ~10 tables and the limited price you can charge before the reputation of the train company starts to take a hit for "excessively expensive food".

Secondly, British trains on popular routes are now overfull. Capacity is bounded by trains/hour (fixed), maximum train length (fixed, by signal block and platform lengths), and capacity per coach. So we're optimising for the latter: thin seats to maximise density and a loss of luggage vans, kitchens, extra toilets, and other facilities that take up space but don't seat passengers.

The modern standard is a catering trolley that serves coffee and snacks at your seat. Because it lives in the aisle and moves, it doesn't take up revenue space. Because it mostly sells coffee and alcohol, it turns over a lot more per hour with only one staff member.