pmyteh

It's not more important but it is in my view (and most others'?) better than canasta (or at least deeper/more strategic/more interesting). I also play Set, but they don't scratch the same itch (any more than Set is a substitute for Twilight Struggle, or either are for Galaxy Truckers).

Apart from the over-lengthy process of learning enough of a system to actually play, Bridge is a fabulous game, and one which is best where there are decent-sized clubs of competent people to play with/against. That's fine for now, at least in bigger places in England, but most of the feeder routes to these clubs have dried up: weekly kitchen table cards is fairly rare, it's not played in schools, and nearly all the university clubs have gone. We run decent teaching sessions but in most places that's not enough to keep up with current players' deaths. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The court found they were "workers" rather than employees. It's a sort of half-way status in English employment law for people who are neither employees nor self-employed. It provides some, but not all, of the rights of employment. Most relevant here, it guarantees minimum wage.

No. The standard bonfire topper is Guy Fawkes or nothing. There are a handful of places that go for the pope (Lewes perhaps?) but anti-Catholicism is much weaker than it used to be in England.

Yup. The process is a bit different now, and under the purview of the "Big 8 Management Board", but new groups are still possible.

Last one was comp.infosystems.gemini in October '21[0]

[0]: https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2021-10-22-result-comp.infosy...

There's a multinational seafarers' union called Nautilus International, so it's certainly possible. I don't know if in practice it's three national unions in a tight federation, though. A lot of labour law is national.

We have both kinds, for different occasions and audiences. Many pubs have no music, or quiet background, and are decent places for conversation. Most bars have pretty loud music as part of the atmosphere. There's a relatively fuzzy line at the loud and late opening end between bars and clubs, for which music and dancing is the whole point.

Academic pay is vastly higher in comparable US institutions, and it's fairly easy to get a work visa as an academic. The brain drain is probably weaker than you would expect because so few of us went into academia for the money, but I definitely know of talented people who have left Oxford for the US with money as one of the key reasons.

Intriguingly, "fed" is British youth slang for the police despite Britain not being a federal state and there being very few national police. A US cultural import, presumably.

One of the journals in my field is going through this at the moment. They were set up with an initial grant to cover editorial and typesetting, which is about to run out. Their two suggestions for carrying on are either to charge a couple of hundred dollars a paper for typesetting (which is apparently what it actually costs) or to require submissions in a standard LaTeX pipeline (which is not standard for my discipline but would enable it to be done automatically). I suppose a strict Word template would also suffice at the expense of annoying all the computational scholars (that's what another Diamond OA journal does in my field).

But somebody's doing the typesetting. Giving sufficiently technically competent authors that could be the authors, but otherwise some money has to be found from somewhere. I don't mind that coming from libraries or research grants if necessary: it's cheaper than Elsevier.

There was a law passed (Digital Economy Act 2017, pt.3[0]) but it's basically been shelved anyway as impractical.

In the UK many laws don't take effect immediately, but only on 'commencement' (normally by government order). If you look at the Archives copy of the act in the link, you'll see that there are several sections marked 'prospective' (not yet commenced). Although it looks like section 14 (the operative one which puts a duty to prevent access to under 18s) has been commenced, if you look at the footnote it only has been 'for specified purposes' and if you click through to look at the commencement order it's only actually in force for the purposes of subsection (b) (the Secretary of State may make regulations to define 'commercial basis' for pornography).

Although this is terribly confusing for people trying to work out what the laws are, it isn't unusual. It'll probably sit in this limbo state on the statute book for a good length of time and then be cleaned up by repeal next time the government passes a law in a similar area.

Or it might just sit there. The Easter Act 1928[1] setting a semi-fixed date for Easter is still extant but not in force. There may be older laws yet.

[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/30/part/3

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Act_1928

There is a certain amount of agency in UK parliamentary selections, but the leaderships of both major parties have (for a good while) been keen to limit that. I'm not saying that it's futile -- you'll certainly get a choice of candidates that the leaderships are happy with -- but I'm not sure it's a decent mechanism for achieving change anywhere except at the margins.

I interned briefly for an MP when I was a student. She got Sunday morning off, and spent the rest of the week in Parliament, in committee, in meetings, on the train (reading papers), in the constituency office, or attending political events. She worked extraordinary hours, which isn't unusual.

If you want to ignore your constituents and not bother (and are in a safe seat) you might do less than half of that. But MPs, as a group, are very hard working. I also think that the way we select MPs, incentivise them, and manage them is awful and that's one of the many reasons why the institution of parliament is fairly crap. Unjustified cynicism about individuals is unlikely to fix that.

I do apologise for the form letters, though. That's almost always staff work, with the MP signing the result after a brief skim. We got a lot of mail and much of it was repetitive or crankish so the replies weren't always artisanal...

In the UK you can normally submit without your supervisor's approval if you insist (and have survived the programme long enough to actually have a thesis written). The actual viva will most likely be one internal academic (not your supervisor) and one external and your supervisor won't be present.

That said, it's a pretty crappy idea under nearly all circumstances -- if your supervisor doesn't think the thesis is passable and discourages you from submitting it then it's quite likely the examiners will agree with them. And getting a terminal MPhil isn't exactly a badge of honour...

In the UK gas central heating and hot water is extremely common but I've never heard of anyone using a gas dryer. Looking them up, it seems that they were always niche and are now off the market entirely. We were all-in on gas (partly as a result of discovering gas fields under the North Sea in the mid-20th Century) and gas stoves are still popular. (Edit: though it's increasingly uncommon for new houses to be connected to mains gas at all, and I think the government is intending to formalise that at some point).

I find it fascinating how different preferences arise and end up dominating in different countries. I wonder what it is about gas dryers that make them popular in the US. Anyone got one and can enlighten me?

It's true of association football (soccer) as well, and that's much less cartel-ised. The players have successfully extracted such a high proportion of the surplus that the returns for the club owners as a group are negative.

There's not necessarily a lot they can easily do, there. Once a route is a RoW the farmer can't close or divert it without the consent of the council. If you've got a RoW crossing one of your fields diagonally then you're going to get a line trampled in your crops whether you like or or not!

Book piracy is as old as copyright. There were presses putting out editions unauthorised by the Stationers' Company when they held a legal monopoly in England, and the US was a famous hotbed of book piracy throughout the 19th Century. Dickens, amongst others, was not happy.

A proper club, who will give you training and supervision and carefully guide your initiation.

In Britain there are a number of good university clubs (I learned with ULSA at Leeds) as well as established local clubs like RRCPC, Northern Pennine Club, and Mendip Caving Group. In the US, the National Speleological Society has a network of local 'grottos'. There are established clubs in nearly all countries with good caves.

Also, caving with other enthusiasts is great fun. Outside of tech, the cavers were the closest I've ever found to 'my people'.

It depends on what you mean by 'cave'. The classic process of cave formation happens in limestone, in 'karst' areas. These aren't evenly distributed, and some countries have tons of them and others not. But there are other ways to form caves too: erosion by the sea can form sea caves, lava tubes are created by volcanic activity, and there are cave-like mines produced by humans in many places with minerals.

So you can probably find some small hole to grovel down in most places, but the good stuff is concentrated in parts of Kentucky, the Alps, the classical Karst, parts of China and so on.

There are advantages in things like braking consistency that will let you pack more trains per hour down a tunnel with automated systems. London's underground rail network increasingly has this kind of automation, where the driver presses a 'go' button and the train takes itself to the next stop, in the key bits under the city centre. It has a fairly high capital cost, though, and doesn't save you the driver, as the LonRec article shows.

The main people who want fully driverless systems are politicians who hope that no drivers == no strikes and lower salaries. Though honestly that would just move the labour power to the control room operators, even if there were a good financial case for the upgrade (which there isn't).

Trains are a completely different beast: they can't stop in line-of-sight so the complexities are mostly in engineering a safe (and failsafe) path for the train, rather than the driver watching for obstacles. There are self-driving systems, but they look quite different from self-driving cars and likely have zero AI.

Buses, on the other hand, maybe.

I think it's best to see Twitter as a network of networks. Some of those networks have moved (or at least lost enough members to Mastodon/Tumblr/wherever that the network effects are no longer strong for Twitter). Others not.

I'm an academic in computational political communication. I wasn't fond of Twitter before the move, but was there largely because my professional network was. Most or all of them are now on Mastodon, so the network effect driving me there has gone (and I've cheerfully left). My wife is an author, and book Twitter is mostly still there. Ditto the journalists.

I mean, my part of the job world was never on LinkedIn - while for others it was indispensable. This feels like the same.

The usual scenario is that a bunch of students decide that they want to be principled and/or edgy and invite someone unpopular and/or unpleasant to speak. The SU says 'no, we don't let our space be used for meetings with Nazis/homophobes/Erdogan enthusiasts/whoever', and now the university (imagined by the law as a kind of parent body of the SU) has some legal duties.

I think part of the 'menace' fought by the Act when introduced was the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Many SUs wouldn't platform pro-apartheid speakers, while student Conservative Party clubs generally took the British government line against the ANC and in favour of the SA government.

You don't give up any rights. Your company (which is a creature of statute) gets whatever rights the law gives it. Which given its privileged position (perpetual succession, limited liability etc.) are inevitably going to be different from those of actual people.

Which is fine. If you want to exercise your right to free speech you can. You can't necessarily make a company exercise those rights on your behalf because the company (in a fairly profound legal sense) isn't you and has limits by law.

It didn't happen here, either in my view. Yes, Griffin got rinsed - but the reason his vote collapsed was not that a small number of people watching Question Time suddenly realised that he wasn't any good. Rather, the rise of UKIP took away the non-fascist right wing protest vote part of his coalition, which was always a lot bigger than the National Front-esque true believers.

We're not even on our first go around this University "free speech" game. A previous Conservative government put anti-no-platform clauses into the Education (No. 2) Act 1986[0] during the previous 'politically correct' moral panic. The practical effect is to require universities themselves to make sure that there are facilities for speakers etc. that their students union refuses to host for political or moral reasons. These duties are still in force.

[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/61/section/43

Most British universities don't map cleanly onto these categories. In theory most of them (including Oxford and Cambridge) are independent educational charities. But endowments are (by US standards) small, and they're so dependent on public funding that they tend to do governments' bidding. A little less so Oxford and Cambridge, which are richer and prouder, but it's mostly a difference in degree than in kind. There's also quite a bit of direct government regulation (e.g. by the Office for Students).

There are also a few actual private universities, some non-profit (e.g. Buckingham, a free-market experiment which has survived but not thrived) and some for-profit (e.g. BPP University). But all of our major institutions are semi-public. Ish.

The only plausible problem was a Spanish veto, to avoid encouraging secession by the Basque country and Catalonia. If done with the consent of the Rest of the UK, though, I don't think that would have eventuated.

I think that the case made was arguable, but this was always the likely outcome (assuming that the Supreme Court accepted the case in the first place, which they did). It's extremely clear that the Scottish Parliament can't legislate for independence. It's also clear that they can, in general, legislate to hold referenda. The question is whether a non-binding referendum (that is, one which is advisory and non-self-executing, though obviously with political importance) on independence is in breach of the "don't legislate on independence" reservation. You could make a case that the referendum couldn't change the actual constitutional arrangements (and the Lord Advocate did) but the argument that it's part of a process of change on forbidden matters seems a stronger one to me - as the court found.

Yes - the traditional liberties of the City are long-standing and fought for. I'm not sure that being mentioned by name in Magna Carta was reason enough to leave it unreformed. The Cinque Ports have been reduced to essentially ceremonial status despite their mention (and the large majority of Magna Carta has simply been repealed over the years[0] - it's not a constitutional document in the sense that it's ever been entrenched).

[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9

It's not particularly independent, but it is the last of the unreformed medieval municipal corporations. In earlier times every borough/city corporation was chartered ad hoc and often had completely undemocratic rules for membership (e.g. selection by the outgoing members, maintaining a self-selected oligarchy, or election by an extremely restricted franchise). There was a process from the Municipal Corporations Act 1835[0] onwards where the old order was reformed into a more modern (more uniform and more democratic) county/district/borough/city councils system. We eventually ended up with the local authorities we have today.

Except for the City of London. Here, a combination of the Victorian power of the Corporation, coupled with the tiny resident population of the City (and a consequent desire by central governments to leave elections in the effective hands of the companies who employ people in the City rather than those who live there) have left a body allowed to take its own direction. Along with the Council of the Isles of Scilly (weird because Scilly is far too small to justify its own principal authority, but too far from Cornwall to be conveniently governed by it) it is one of only two really sui generis principal local authorities in England.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_Corporations_Act_183...