pmyteh

That's not entirely true. There are places in Z1-2 where people live in flatshares etc. on ordinary salaries. I lived in an ex-council flat near the Elephant with three other people for a few years, for example.

That doesn't change the substance of your point, though. Very few people living in Z1 or Z2 run a car unless they're rich: parking is extremely difficult and public transport is so good that there are very few reasons to want one unless you're regularly leaving London.

Habeas corpus allows you to challenge the legality of detention. If a writ were sought in this case the prison governor would present the original order of the court authorising imprisonment and the application for habeas corpus would be dismissed.

There are routes to challenge 'wrongful' detention authorised by a court, but not via habeas. Some IPP prisoners have been released by the Court of Appeal criminal division on a (very late) appeal against sentence where other factors appeared after the original sentencing. You can also challenge the refusal of the Parole Board to release you by judicial review, though this is a fairly high bar to clear.

The CBO is more reasonable than the ASBO, certainly - one of the issues with the ASBO is that 'anti-social' was defined in an enormously wide-ranging way, so could (by design) be applied to people who were not breaking the law but were unpopular with the rest of the public for whatever reason.

There remain at least two difficulties. The first is that it gives a general power to make any legal act illegal, on a person-by-person basis. So you can, for example, be exiled from a particular area by the judge, with criminal penalties for disobeying (even though that's not a prescribed punishment in itself for any criminal offence). Where the order prohibits things that are likely preparatory to further crime and not something someone would want to do otherwise (car thief prohibited from touching unoccupied cars, for example, as in a recent case) it makes a lot of sense. But it does rely on the discretion of the judge being exercised reasonably.

The second one is much blunter: if you tell someone who has already broken the law (and doesn't care) that they can't do something, they are quite likely to ignore you. So they can generate quite a lot of further punishment/court time without actually deterring much. That's more of a practical objection than a philosophical one, though.

The history of cricket in Italy is surprisingly long and they have a modestly successful national side (albeit at Associate level). Different to many countries where it is largely played by immigrants from the subcontinent. [0]

Seems a weird choice of wedge issue, though the article makes it sound like the mayor is basically shotgunning anything the Bangladeshi shipyard workers and their families enjoy, which I suppose makes some miserable sense.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_national_cricket_team

You can still buy them (though for non-industrial use is not clear why you wouldn't buy a cheaper Zero or a 2/3 for similar money).

The Pi 1 A+ is currently ~£20 including taxes: https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-model-a-75-1131?src...

Yes. And local authorities in the UK routinely have grants of arms and banners/flags of them (albeit most of them are newer and less classy than the City's).

Ditto police forces: although most smaller authorities' police have merged into larger county or larger forces, there's nothing odd in principle about a municipal police force. The City's is strange, in that it's entirely enclaved within the Met, but there are plenty of oddities out there (the Mersey Tunnels Police, say).

There are several ancient cities with 'Lord' mayors, including York.

Some of those individuals are not residents but expressly included as nominees of their businesses, a form of franchise that exists nowhere else in the UK.

It's true that the vote is exercised by the company's nominee, not the company itself, but that's only because the company itself can't show up at the polling station. Business voters are expressly included to represent their organisations[0], and do.

[0]: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-us/voting-elections/bu...

They found some volunteers and did the study! This is one of the classics from the Christmas BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

The study has... let's just say "other methodological problems". But they did do an RCT of parachute use! (The open peer review correspondence is quite fun, too).

One solution to this is to collect three different kinds of statistics.

One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.

The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.

The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.

The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.

It's easy to see how that might be beneficial for Internet: pay Openreach for last mile access but your chosen operator takes over after that. You can see an advantage for electricity and gas if you squint really hard: your supplier is responsible for buying power to add to the grid to serve you, and different suppliers can make different (if heavily constrained) choices.

It's really hard to see how this works with water. Upstream of your taps is an essentially fixed set of water collecting infrastructure. Downstream of your waste pipe is a natural monopoly sewer system which collects waste towards a single geographically determined water treatment plant. What is there for a competitive operator to change?

The honest answer is that water privatisation was the product of a very specific brand of 80s-00s magical thinking that believed the private sector was necessarily more efficient even without a plausible model of how the efficiencies would happen. There's a reason water and rail were two of the last privatisations, long after all the things like British Airways where there were reasonable grounds to believe the private sector was a better home.

Nationalised industries can be (and often are) structured as ordinary companies where the government owns all the shares.

The ability to sue thing also depends a lot on where you are. The Crown Proceedings Act 1947[0] waived most of the special protections government operations got, especially in "commercial" areas. So in practice it's not worse here than suing any other large organisation.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Proceedings_Act_1947

I thought this was an interesting question, so I looked it up. I don't have figures going back to the 1990s, but I've looked at the DfT's dataset on modal share NTS0409 [1] which has data 2002-2018.

Looking at number of trips/head, surface rail was 13 in 2002, rose to a pre-pandemic peak of 22 in 2018 and fell back to 15 in 2022. Bus (London + non-London local + long-distance) was 74, 48, and 37 respectively; motoring (car driver + car passenger + motorbike + taxi) was 694, 614, 512. Overall was 1074, 986, 862. So rail had a modal share of 1.2%, 2.2%, and 1.7% in 2002, 2018 and 2022.

The distance measure looks similar for rail: 482, 683, 493, from 7193, 6530, 5373. Modal share 6.7%, 10.5%, 9.2%. (I haven't done separate sums for buses and motoring.

So at least since 2002, it looks like rail has had a small but growing modal share of a steadily declining travel market, until disrupted by Covid to a place below peak but still considerably ahead of where it started.

Caveats: I haven't included the tube, and these data don't disambiguate light rail systems from 'other' (including flights). Rail remains dominated (like bus travel) by London & South East commuting, at least in number of trip terms.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-m...

We have a Supreme Court. It's the old House of Lords judicial committee with new robes, though: the powers are nearly identical and the legal business of the HoL has been done by the most senior judges since the 19th Century.

The nuance here is that many Acts do not set out a whole scheme: they allow government to make subordinate regulations with the force of law. The Acts are (essentially, kinda) immune from judicial review, but the implementing statutory instruments aren't. (They haven't had full parliamentary scrutiny and are in practice just executive instruments - so can be struck down without parliamentary sovereignty problems as ultra vires the government).

It's sometimes described as the 'good chap' theory of governance. Everyone is expected to be a gentleman, so flexibility is possible with an absence of formal guardrails.

It obviously handles capture by bad faith actors fairly poorly; the hope is that such people or movements can be stopped before they get that far. Johnson was pretty marginal as a PM from this point of view.

The UK courts partly relied on evidence that those asylum seekers were not always treated in accordance with the convention. The Supreme Court judgment noted cases of refoulement (expulsion to the state the asylum seeker is fleeing from) as well as structural deficiencies in the decision-making process. (https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2023/42.html at paragraphs 89 and onwards).

They also suggested that the UNHCR was mostly processing applications for asylum in third countries for ETM evacuees. An obvious difference with the UK scheme is that we expect Rwanda to grant asylum themselves.

There's never been a direct link between Quakers and the Quaker Oats people, for whatever it's worth - it's always just been a brand. The reason is reputedly that Quakers had a reputation for honesty in business, but I don't know if that's historically accurate.

Yes. The Garter and the Thistle (and the Order of Merit) are exclusively small and also in the personal gift of the sovereign. The Order of the British Empire is much larger and appointments are made on advice from the government.

I think the writer means literary in the narrower sense of 'literary fiction'. Christie was a genre writer; like F/SF etc. I understand that wasn't quite respectable in the upper echelons of the book world. Certainly the reviewers in places like the TLS would be primarily interested in literary fiction.

I am an EA of long standing, though not very active on the movement side of things. I think SBF is a big deal, at least in so far as it prominently exposed a moral weakness in the movement. A heavy use of Bayes' rule coupled with a focus on the best uses of dollars led in my eyes to SBF being seen less as a successful EA celebrity and more of a moral exemplar. We're trying to effectively improve the world! SBF has developed a magic money printing machine which will make the world awesomely better by generating dollars for EA causes! Earn-To-Give proven the best strategy because of unlimited upside risk! We should be more like SBF!

I had two problems with this: firstly that a movement focusing on extracting money from the megarich rather than 10% tithes from the public more generally may potentially generate more cash (good!) but will probably do so most effectively with thought leadership and fundraising teams and donor care and castles for conferences of important people. This loses a distinctive simplicity and non-heirarchy that feels important.

The second is that I had much less sympathy with the 'longtermism' sub-sect than SBF and many of the richer and increasingly more prominent Californian types do[0]. And that the Good Old-Fashioned EA focus on cheap but unglamorous interventions on malaria, cash transfers etc. were being increasingly overshadowed in the public eye.

So I don't think it reflects badly on EAs that SBF turned out to be shady (as you say, all groups have a worst member). But it should prompt some awkward questions about the extent that the movement was taken in by the smoke-and-mirrors act. And ideally a reconsideration about whether chasing the money and interests of SBF-types is the right direction for the movement.

[0]: I find it suspicious that the equations demonstrating the infinite importance of fairly recherché concerns on the specifics of AI safety, for example, just happen to line up with the research interests of some EA-adjacent people. That suggests people aren't discounting sufficiently for their own group biases.

Yeah, globally. Most long distance hikes seem to be a few hundred miles of mostly majestic wilderness, while the C2C is an unusually lovely and varied walk strung together from local footpaths...

It's quite normal to stay in pubs and B&Bs doing the Coast to Coast - that's how my wife and I did it for our honeymoon. Wild camping is not lawful on any(?) part of the route, and organised camp sites are relatively scarce for most of it.

Plus it's a pretty unusual through hike. It goes through three national parks, but it's nowhere wilderness and you're never more than about 10 route miles from a village. Resupply en route is fairly trivial.

Yeah, you can arrange RISC OS on the Pi to boot up into BBC BASIC V. Much of MOS is in there too, but there are things that changed between the BBC and the Archimedes (and between the Arc and the Pi) so not all code is compatible.

Could probably arrange to boot into !65Host or !BeebEm if you want an even closer similarity, though.

It's also helpful when dealing with old hot chassis appliances such as antique radios, where the metal case is wired to what is hopefully neutral but can be at line voltage if the plug or socket is wired in reverse.

A 3kW kettle is the classic 13A appliance in the UK. I'm sure people would be keen to have a higher power version if possible, but lowering to 2.3kW would waste precious tea drinking time.

I've also got a 3kW plug-in electric radiator for emergency heat in the attic, but except for poor households in crap rented accommodation (lowest capital cost per kW and portable on moving) that's pretty niche these days.

And it's still massively more of a deal for spectators then academic sport in, say, the UK.

I spent a term as an exchange student at the Catholic University of America, a smallish university with a completely unexceptional D3 football programme staffed with actual students. And they got two thousand people to their football games! Much of the campus! Alumni! People who lived in Brookland and fancied some live sport!

I mean, I knew how seriously people take high school football too. But even really good UK university sport can play to an audience of the players supportive romantic partners only. A different (and quite refreshing) world.

Yes. British local taxation is banded (and deliberately regressive WRT property values) rather than proportional. It's a compromise between the old Rates (like a US millage) and the poll tax which Thatcher disastrously tried to introduce which had no property value component at all.

Further, rates are arbitrarily constrained by central government on a value for money and/or starve the beast basis. Councils are in theory free to raise taxes less than this, but in practice the maximum increase is way less than the annual increase in what it actually costs councils to provide services[0]. Coupled with an almost complete removal of government grants (which used to represent ~35% of council income) councils have been cutting everything that moves and still circling the drain. This has been going on since 2008. Every council issuing a Section 114 notice has its own local reasons for getting to this point now, but frankly the whole sector has been buggered.

TLDR: proposition 13, but imposed by central government instead of the voters, for all possible sources of income except user fees rather than just property taxes, and with no reduction in legal responsibilities to discharge.

[0]: The most expensive local government services are intrinsically staff heavy and so suffer from Baumol's Cost Disease. Teaching class sizes are basically limited to 30, for example, and require one qualified teacher each. Child protection is the other biggest expense.

The English Bridge Union has introduced a National Grading Scheme as a supplement/replacement for master points, for exactly the reasons you suggest. It's got its idiosyncrasies, but it's a lot better than the old "number goes up".

https://www.ebu.co.uk/gradings-rankings/national-grading-sch...

It's a Britishism for stocky with an implication of fat, so probably intended as-is.

BS1363 plugs are joyfully oversized, yes (and make excellent caltrops if dropped) but they are in other ways excellently engineered. Inherently polarised, fuses to protect the appliance wiring[0], socket shutters that open on the earth pin only to prevent vigorous insertion of metal by children, sleeved conductors to avoid shock when partially inserted, essentially unbendable...

Plus, I will fight anyone who suggests that 1400W is enough for a decent kettle ;-)

[0] Admittedly this was mostly included to offset the idiosyncrasies of final ring circuit wiring, but it's still better than just a big breaker.

There's also a need to stop lobbying being used as a cover for bribery: either openly or as a quiet quid-pro-quo. Your firm's argument for the importance of a regulatory change may be useful, but the associated $10k "donation" is just corruption.

I've been reading vol. 3 of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ and the amount of illegal money routed from various Texas oil tycoons via Johnson in support of various causes is astonishing.