pmyteh

I was Six Sigma trained in a former job. It's a lot of statistical process control, defect reduction, and process redesign. You could certainly use it to create a dystopia for your workforce, but it's not in any way intrinsic to the method. Where I was trained it was mostly used in a Toyota-like way to get relatively junior employees engaged in making things work better. Empowering rather than the other way around, I'd say.

VLSI Technology. As I understand it, Acorn provided the existing ARM2 chip and its design team, VLSI Technology provided design and fabrication expertise, and Apple provided capital (and the potential for the use of the design beyond Acorn).

Seems basically fine in Liverpool. I've not used them, but they don't seem to block pavements and I've only ever seen a few driven by loons. Certainly never felt at risk as a pedestrian or cyclist by one.

Their popularity has killed off a previous bike hire scheme, which is a bit of a pity, but they are a lot handier...

...and even then they built it mostly inside the mountain, next to an old slate quarry. Which is going to help national park acceptability but not the unit cost of construction I suspect.

Other possible choices are 1708 (last example of the monarch refusing royal consent to an act of parliament, Queen Anne on the Scottish Militia Bill), or 1834 (last example of the monarch dismissing their government, William IV sacking the Whigs; he had to have them back in 1835 as the Tories he installed couldn't command a majority of the Commons).

Or you can point to things like the Kerr Sacking (in Australia, but using (vice-)regal power) and say it's not quite done yet, though in decline for centuries...

The experience of doing a postgraduate degree is so far away from the experience of studying at Oxford as an undergraduate that they may as well be different universities. Different demographic makeup (much fewer private school kids, much more international students), different teaching methods (no training in 'blagging' a 1:1 tutorial with minimal reading, a very transferable skill to politics) and no time to hack around at the Union or make a name in one of the political clubs.

Honestly, the problem isn't even with all Oxford undergraduate degrees, just a slice of PPE and adjacent students who are vastly overrepresented in politics.

(My background: Leeds BA, Oxford MSc/DPhil. Don't like Starmer, though, despite our similar university choices...)

My intuition is 'yes, of course, but you don't get the opt-outs back'. So no budget rebate, Euro participation etc. Which would be a tougher sell in Britain than otherwise. I expect customs union re-entry in due course followed by single market membership (which is pretty much all upside for the EU side) and long discussions about rejoining the political institutions.

But nothing for the rest of this parliament or the next, probably. Starmer's not bold and/or reckless enough.

Plugs are fused because the current capacity of the in-wall wiring (and the breakers that protect it) is much higher than the safe current capacity of a single appliance's power lead. The circuits are often 32A and most appliances are rated for 13A or less. So without a plug fuse a fault in the appliance that draws, say, 25W would potentially overheat and set fire to the appliance cord without tripping the breaker. This is true of most countries' larger radial circuits too, I think, and the British practice of fusing plugs is a safety upgrade. How much risk it reduces in practice, I don't know.

The final ring circuit is an idiosyncracy of British wiring practice, where the cable goes out in a loop from the distribution board to sockets etc and then connects back to the board again. It allows smaller gauge wires to be run for a given current rating, and was introduced after WWII to reduce copper use during reconstruction. This does have some unusual failure modes, but the code is absolutely fine for this system as long as it's followed (including the testing regime after new installations, which will catch, for example, a ring circuit with the neutral conductor disconnected only on one side of the ring). Obviously bad work can happen anywhere.

He's not obliged to do anything. He got good PR from the initial commitment, and is now getting bad PR resiling from it. Which seems entirely straightforward.

The sample size is, honestly, mostly irrelevant for these 'headline' type analyses. A good sample of a few hundred will get you a strong estimate, while a biased sample of a few million will get you a bad one.

The classic illustration is the Literary Digest poll of the 1936 Presidential Election. They got over two million respondents and confidently predicted a heavy Roosevelt loss. George Gallup got a comparatively tiny but well sampled set of respondents and correctly estimated the Roosevelt victory. The magazine's problem was partly sampling bias (their readers were richer than the average American, amongst other things) and partly non-response bias (they got a return rate of ~25%, which is pretty good, but probably disproportionately from the most politically engaged of their readership, who hated Roosevelt).

I don't know how bad the sample is here for extrapolating to 'all those seeking dates', but the size is a distraction - the sampling is all.

(This isn't necessarily true if you're making individual profiles, searching for rare phenomena, or something else which is more in the 'big data' than 'social statistics' space, and which genuinely needs that much training data. It's also not true if you're studying the site members themselves, for whom the site members are a perfect (non-) sample. The latter is true for the in-house data science team themselves, but we shouldn't just assume their experience will extend to the rest of the world).

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a characteristically good (and easy to follow) overview:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

Well, the train didn't have the (notional) token, so the signal was correctly at danger. Which is the 1800s solution to the problem (absolute block signaling). And in the 19th century it was also difficult to reach train drivers who passed signals at danger, due to a lack of radios etc., which did cause accidents when signals failed or drivers passed them at danger.

Box-to-train emergency communication was itself definitely a solved problem by the mid 20th century, though...

There's no fare set for that pair of stations specifically[0], so no way of buying a ticket. You could get one to Stockport and another from Stockport to Manchester, but that's obviously not quite the 'any station to any other station' mentioned. There may also be some kind of Manchester all-area ticket that's valid, but again that adds a knowledge requirement.

(Denton is mildly famous amongst British rail enthusiasts as it has a 'parliamentary'[1] service of one train a week each way. Useless for actual travel, but (partly because of an unusually pleasant station buffet with good beer at Stalybridge) the regular site of meetups for rail geeks).

[0]: https://www.brfares.com/!!expert?orig=DTN&dest=MAN

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_train

The StrongARM was a DEC-designed offshoot of ARM which (amongst other things) traded off some of the low power consumption of ARM for greater performance. The last-generation Acorn computer (the RiscPC) had swappable processor cards and Acorn more-or-less force-fit the SA110 into the last generation of RiscPCs because it was so much faster than the ARM8 that was in the roadmap. There were a bunch of software incompatibilities, partly because it used a different ISA (ARM v4 instead of the v3 used by the CPUs on the existing cards) and partly because it had separate instruction and data caches that broke a lot of existing self-modifying code. An Acorn application note with differences is online[0].

Honestly, those of us with StrongARMs were prone to showing off about it because it was such a speed upgrade over the existing machine. I didn't acquire mine until 1999, well after the whole Acorn ecosystem was obsolescent, but I might well have put it in my sig anyway...

[0]: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/AN/295...

It's acting in good faith insofar as it does care about establishing transparent markets (and also protecting citizen privacy). It's fortunate (at least for itself) that these ambitions are entirely consistent with political expediency - which means they can pursue them without reserve.

If an EU company did similar it might not be hit so hard (which would be hypocritical). But that doesn't make this action (a fine for obviously anticompetitive action) in bad faith, so much as it would make the other (lack of fine) so.

Yeah, the same in the UK (though I'd quibble about 'outcompete', and 'stronger than' is quite contingent in both countries in my view).

Our public transport system still works way better than in the US. And I say that as someone who actually likes Amtrak.

More militant than Germany, way less militant than France. "Europe" isn't close to a monoculture for trades unions.

Even the UK does public transport better than the US, and our union/management relations are very similar to yours.

Kinda. Bits of it are still in force[0], despite us not having a definitive text, but much of it was written to deal with contemporary political problems and was repudiated fairly quickly. It's more important as the start of a (semi-mythical) tradition of political liberty then as an ongoing source of constitutional law.

Even more excitingly, some of the documents we consider constitutional aren't even statutes. My favourite is a pseudonymous letter to The Times sent in 1950, which authoritatively established a constitutional convention for when the monarch can refuse his Prime Minister a dissolution of Parliament[1]. (The writer, 'Senex', was the King's private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles).

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

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles

There is non-advertising-supported television and (especially) radio. The BBC and other public broadcasters fund themselves with tax or licence fee income. And when you have small children, avoiding the incessant advertising for toys by putting on CBeebies is a godsend. It's also has really good shows, as it turns out.

Radio is easier because radio broadcasting is much cheaper. At least over here there are BBC stations (locally and nationally), and things like student and hospital radio that are run by volunteers and have no or minimal advertising.

I'm not saying these models are better than ad-funded media, but the ubiquity of ads isn't an actual prerequisite of media. There have also been subscription channels without advertising (before cable companies decided to double-dip) and you can imagine other funding models like television-as-propaganda (either by an oligarch or an unfriendly state), or as philanthropy (why not run ad-free 'worthy' television as a modern version of the Carnegie Library?)

FPTP in non-US contexts very regularly has >2 candidates, despite the risk of a spoiler. England has a 2.5 party system where the Lib Dems compete in every seat and win some. Scotland and Wales have nationalist parties in addition to this (and the Scottish National Party is currently overwhelmingly dominant in seats won, as a result of one of FPTP's other failure modes). Northern Ireland has a different party system with sectional voting and ~5 effective parties. Canada has the NDP and (in Quebec) the Bloc.

One of the classic results in political science is Duverger's Law, sometimes formulated as 'under first past the post the number of effective parties tends towards two', but 'tends towards' is doing an awful lot of work. One could unkindly suggest that, like a lot of political science results, it works better in the US than in the rest of the world. And I say that as a political scientist...

FPTP has more failures than IRV in general, they're just less visible because you don't have the ranking data to work out the hypotheticals. That may be good for FPTP's popularity, but doesn't make it a decent voting system.

FWIW I also disagree with the suggestion that people can't handle it. Plenty of countries use ranked or proportional voting systems and their citizens understand how to use them just fine. They may not be able to perfectly optimise their preferences, but then they can't do it in FPTP either (and it's provably impossible to do so in every case whatever the voting system).

The suggestion was that they weren't likely to be Republicans, given that they've chosen a D over two different Rs, and presumptively wouldn't be voting in a Republican primary. I agree than with (semi-)open primaries that's not guaranteed, but it seems valid as a first approximation at least.

Having a low sprung weight is important for pantographs, and getting the 25kV off a rotating contactor would introduce another unhelpful electrical interface I suspect.

If you want to know far more than you did before about overhead line electric systems for railways, from a predominantly British perspective, I can strongly recommend Gary Keenor's (free) book:

https://archive.org/details/overhead-line-electrification-fo...

The winner here isn't the Condorcet winner, true. But in an FPTP election it seems likely the same result would occur so it's at least not worse than the 'default' US system in this case.

(Palin beats Begich in a one-winner Republican primary, given that she had more of the votes cast for the two R candidates which is ~= the votes cast in a primary with only Republican voters, then loses to Peltola in the general by 51.4 to 48.6.)

It might be that non-transferable votes as a result of preference failures would change this a bit, of course.

The East Coast Main Line is prone to dewirement (where the pantograph comes off the catenary and normally gets tangled and brings down the wire) at an unusually high rate. The folk wisdom is that the use of wired headspans instead of rigid portals, combined with a long distance between stanchions, makes it fragile. I don't know the extent to which that's true.

Set against that, the miles per technical incident for electric trains are about twice that for diesel, and a train breaking down on the ECML is also disruptive, if not obviously infrastructural...

The courts' jurisdiction for deciding what is in the 'best interest of the patient' extends only to people not competent to make their own decisions. It's a substitute for imposing the judgement of treating doctors or families, not an override of a patient's own autonomy.

It absolutely wouldn't apply here: while a competent patient can't insist on treatment doctors aren't willing to give, they're absolutely free to find one who is, in the UK or abroad, whether the treatment is effective or placebo, painless or excruciating. That does not necessarily extend to a next-of-kin; the court may rule there that the patient is better served by a relatively peaceful death rather than further treatment if it's likely to be futile and painful. Even so, that's really quite rare - a handful of very public cases about dying children notwithstanding.

The hearings are in the Family Division of the High Court, or sometimes in the Court of Protection, and the judgments are public. This[0] is a fairly typical one selected at random. A very sick child at the end of life with a progressive and incurable disease, with disagreement between the parents and medical staff about the best course of treatment. It's easy to understand and well worth a read if you're interested. I don't think the court is in any way infallible, but it's a world away from some of the more tabloid criticism that's thrown at it.

[0]: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2021/2927.html

They're doing that more here (putting neutral sections with reduced clearance under bridges) but it doesn't save everything. A major disadvantage of being early to the railway game is that we have amongst the most restrictive structure gauge in the world.

It also turns out that we've repeatedly stopped and restarted our electrification campaign over the last hundred years, such that we have little persistent expertise and excessive costs per km. So it's not just tunnels and bridges.

This. The capital costs are huge, such that it only makes marginal sense on a financial basis alone. You get further factoring in service improvements (lighter trains without diesel engines -> faster acceleration -> shorter journey tines), the societal benefits of decarbonisation, and electric trains breaking down less often, but that only moves the viable point so far.

In the extreme case, a railway which is 200 miles long and takes 3 trains a day will never have a positive financial case for electrification. So once you've electrified all the stuff that should have been done decades ago (like main lines with 10 trains an hour) and then pushed on to the marginal stuff (hourly rural lines) there's still a small core of lines left. You could just bite the bullet and electrify them anyway, or you could go with things like battery electric trains (good for short distances off an electric mainline) or biodiesel/green hydrogen. The latter are likely to be cheaper.

The model is that of Ireland or Israel: the President's actual powers are similar to those of the King - a handful of 'reserve powers' for use in corner cases. Rather than Charles having to make the call, a ceremonial president does instead.

One of the joys(?) of losing an empire is that there are a bunch of independent countries with political systems derived from yours that can provide concrete examples of the effects of possible reforms...

Looking at the photos, at least one of them crushed a pickup truck coming down in a parking lot. It'd certainly be a bad day for a bystander if they couldn't get out of the way. But, as you say, an uncontrolled landing is no better, and with probable higher impact speeds and greater risk of fire.