pmyteh

They are separate, but the different countries have agreed to keep them coordinated. You're right that there was a conversation about the change to absolute primogeniture, with the different realms having to agree to pass the necessary legislation. If one realm had not agreed I suspect the change wouldn't have happened, rather than the succession being split.

That said, there is precedent. Victoria didn't inherit Hanover, which had been in personal union with the UK, because it had different succession laws (which excluded women). So it's just a matter of political will really.

One of the interesting quirks of losing the empire is that there are a lot of precedents for 'Westminster model' countries becoming republics. The straightforward way is to give the reserve powers of the monarch to a mostly-ceremonial President on the Irish or Israeli model, and vest the rest formally in the government (which coincidentally also makes them subject to more parliamentary oversight). In the case of Canada/Australia etc. the Governors-General are already performing such a ceremonial presidency in reality. All that's needed is a process for electing new ones; fairly straightforward.

You're right that it would require international cooperation, though: the British parliament doesn't legislate for the other Commonwealth Realms any more.

It's the property of the Crown, which is legally a corporation sole with the monarch as the sole 'member' of the corporation. It means, for example, that Charles gets Buckingham Palace and the crown jewels automatically by operation of law on becoming king, rather than via Elizabeth's will. A similar arrangement applies to Anglican vicars who have the freehold of their church - it's owned by 'The Vicar of Bray' rather than by Rev Smith.

It's generally understood by constitutional scholars that the Crown is essentially governmental rather than private and the Crown Estate would go with the government rather than the royal family if the assets were split up on the creation of a republic.

The Queen also had extensive private wealth, including Balmoral Castle which (unlike the royal places) was hers personally rather than as monarch. IIRC it was bought privately by either Victoria or Albert rather than via the Crown Estate. This mattered after the abdication of Edward VIII, where the property of the Crown passed to George VI as the new king, but the private possessions of Edward stayed with him. I think Balmoral and Sandringham had to be bought off him so they would stay as royal residences. Presumably most of that private wealth will be bequeathed to Charles, though we won't find out: the Queen's will is, uniquely, private by statute.

Yes; the Olympus engines used were derivatives of an existing military turbojet and had reheat from the beginning. It was used for takeoff and then to get through the high-drag transonic regime as quickly as possible to minimise fuel use. Once at cruising speed the engines operated 'dry'.

There was a longer-range 'Concorde B' designed, which was intended to have larger engines with no reheat at all (as well as larger wings and some other changes) but this was cancelled when it became apparent that it would never be profitable.

Conferencing is an important part of academic life because it:

1) Provides a chance to get expert feedback on work-in-progress manuscripts and;

2) Provides the only chance many of us get for in-person interaction with colleagues working on similar problems (because many academic departments are staffed to cover all disciplinary bases, not in-depth in any given subfield).

I'm not personally that bothered about sabbatical time/research leave, but if you're in a discipline that writes books rather than papers it's very helpful to have an extended period to sit down and write. And for those who strongly prefer research to teaching then a period of research leave gives relief from the grind of what's seen as a 'day job' and the opportunity to work on research with your full brain. Some people use it similarly to 20% time to work on something novel that might be important.

Then 'https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=<doi>', where <doi> is URL escaped?

It seems to me that Crossref can give you the DOI, and once you've got that then getting to article text is pretty trivial. I must be missing something.

Once you have a DOI (from crossref or otherwise) you can get a legal download link simply by putting 'https://doi.org/' in front of it (though it will often go to a summary/login page rather than the PDF) and a SciHub PDF link by prepending 'https://sci-hub.ru/'. Or am I missing something?

It's quite a difficult problem to solve, really. The easy answer is for the existing PM to continue until the next election (which is the US model) but if they've lost the support of Parliament (which Johnson basically had) then they're not able to govern.

Given that you need a new PM, how do you pick one? There are four obvious choices:

* The Queen picks one (herself). This hasn't been done since the early 19th Century for obvious reasons.

* Parliament (or, more realistically, the Parliamentary Conservative Party or some subset of it) picks one. The difficulty is that well over half of the MPs are elected purely because of the party label against their name and not because of any intrinsic quality. And they're also very different people from the public as a whole. Is a choice of that ~200 people a good or democratic one? The 'classic' means of the Conservative party selecting a new PM in office is for a name to 'emerge' from private discussions among senior members of the party and be sent to the Queen...

* The political party as a whole picks one. This gives a broader base for discussion and support, limits the creation of closed cliques within Parliament, and reflects that the PM is, in the first instance, the leader of the party concerned and PM only because that party has a majority in the Commons. On the other hand, the people who are members of political parties are also very different people than the public as a whole, and on at least some issues tend to have less centrist views. And the choice of party members prior to an election they need to win may be expected to be more moderate than a 'mid-term' replacement where their nominee gets the powers of office without needing to appeal to the country more broadly.

* The public chooses one through a new general election. This makes the most democratic sense, but has a serious downside: there are strong game theoretic reasons for a party not to remove a PM who has lost the ability to govern if the consequence is an election that polls say that party is likely to lose. If this had been the rule than there is basically no chance that Johnson would have gone, which (given the reasons for his departure) would have been seriously problematic.

So, four bad options. Pick which one you dislike least.

If it's actually gross negligence then it's not just potentially career ending in England and Wales, it's potentially imprisonable (manslaughter by gross negligence, max penalty life imprisonment). You're also entirely liable to being sacked and being struck off the medical register. And the victim's family can and will win a medical malpractice claim against the hospital here (albeit probably for less money than the US: the big payouts here are for cases where long term care is needed).

What we need are better staffing ratios and a proper process for designing out error. The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch[0] has set out to do for hospitals what the Air Accidents Investigation Branch and NTSB do for aviation safety. Let's hope it helps.

[0]: https://www.hsib.org.uk/

Because it's something of (potentially great) value to the employer, which can be traded for something of value to the employees.

If the contract is time-limited, then you retain the leverage at the time of negotiating the next contract (though not between: that's the trade-off).

I understand they're also quite normal in some, more consensual, Northern European situations when the relationship between union and employer is sufficiently consensual that the union can be confident a strike is unlikely to be needed in order to address grievances.

There's currently no/low water pressure, so supply of even non-drinkable water is difficult.

Yes - and voting procedures are a great example. You do not want to be arguing about who is entitled to vote, or the process to be followed, when a highly controversial question is before the group. That guarantees a meta-fight about the rules, because the precise choice of counting rule etc. will benefit one 'side' of the issue. And that leads to (extra) bitterness. Choose a reasonable voting process in advance, then use that. There's no such thing as a perfect process anyway.

"Warehouse does not permit usage of storage space for rotten seafood or any kind of living quarters"

FWIW businesses are not required to accept cash. 'Legal tender' status only matters for paying off a debt; if the company doesn't extend credit to you then it's free to accept whatever payment methods it wishes.

That's not making the claim that the line of questioning is itself violence. It's making the claim that a consequence of the line of questioning is going to be violence against trans people (in an unspecified time and place).

I don't know the context, or how sane the claim is. But I don't think it's an example of what GP said.

Yeah. I've been towing my children to school in a trailer behind my (non-electric) bike. Not particularly difficult, given the route is mostly flat, though I'm grateful it's only a mile and a half each way (I'm old and unfit).

Mind you, there's only one other family that does it. Most people just walk, some drive.

This isn't particularly unusual. I live in a house (with a garden) in Liverpool and don't have a car. I cycle the 2.5 miles to work, and there are frequent buses and trains to move around more broadly.

There are certainly times it would be more convenient to have a car, and most people around here do. I've just never got around to it (though I do have a licence, and hire one maybe once a year for a trip to somewhere awkward).

If you live near the middle of London, on the other hand, a car is positively unusual: the public transport is ubiquitous, often faster than sitting in traffic, and much cheaper than parking. That's not true of most places in Europe, though.

Yeah. This is part of the issue that legislative codification is supposed to deal with. A new law is often making a diff to the old one, and you can either keep a pile of diffs in hand and work out what the current state is in your head, or you can try to make sure there is a 'master version' (the Code) which you keep patching and can check out a fresh version of when you need to read it.

England and Wales (my home jurisdiction) doesn't have either criminal or civil codes as such, but it does do a fair number of consolidating statutes - almost exactly like this new RFC. The Sexual Offences Act 2003, for example, made some changes but also consolidated the current state of sexual offences law into a single Act[0]. (You can also now see the 'as amended' versions on the web for all Acts, which is useful. If you want to know which bits of Magna Carta are still in force, well now you can[1]. This Act has the additional problem that source control was fairly shoddy in 1297 and it's not entirely clear what the actual text in force is...)

[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42 [1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9

In theory Parliament controls everything, but in practice the executive controls everything (because they control Parliament). The separation of powers that does exist is largely because of 'leakage' in Ministers' control of events. They can straightforwardly change the law, for example, but you need to change it before you do the otherwise-unlawful thing, not afterward. If you don't, the courts will nullify your actions. You can dismiss 'independent' quango heads quite straightforwardly, but it's politically expensive (and somewhat time consuming) to do so too frequently. You control the Parliamentary timetable, but there are a few gaps in it for opposition day debates and private members' bills. That sort of thing.

We do have a stable and functional democracy, though it's rather brittle against a bad-faith executive. One prominent theory is the 'good chap' model of government, which holds basically that the system is set up such that 'reasonable chaps like us' can govern well and with few constraints, but the flipside is that Johnson's impact was limited by his government's lack of competence, not by institutional constraints. That might be liberating or terrifying, depending on your views about good government.

Stone is now a 'folk' measure. People still think in them and use them, but all 'official' uses (health records, for example) are kilograms.

There are still a handful of official uses of imperial. Miles for driving, as you say, pints for draught beer etc. in pubs, miles and chains for railway distances, maybe a few others. More cases where the labels but not the size have changed, like 568g jars of jam.

Long before Blair, even. Lloyd George had a semi-official price list for honours, and I'm sure he was not the first. The current price is supposed to be £3m to the Conservative party.

Not sure that's true. I was born and brought up in York, which is heavy on tourism (important from Roman Britain to the late mediaeval, with buildings and archaeology to match). But it's also an ordinary, livable, small city. It's a railway centre, makes chocolate, and has two universities. Definitely still 'lived in'.

Of course, if you spend time around York Minster (the cathedral), or Stonegate, or the Yorvik Viking Centre, you're going to be surrounded by tourists. And the place is more expensive than it would be without the history.

> He starts talking at the ~6 minute mark and explains why renewables will never see more than 10-20% market penetration.

...and yet market penetration of wind and solar in the UK was 26.4% in July[0] and still climbing as we build more offshore wind. Plus 1.3% hydro (and 5.9% biomass if you count that as renewable).

[0]: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/electr...

Comments are a liability for most news organisations: they're generally low quality and give visibility more to those who care a great deal than those with something interesting to say.

This goes double for the UK, where we have stricter libel laws and a weaker liability shield than s.230 CDA. And treble for a story where the comments are likely to feature more heat than light.

You can, but it's not always a good idea. The 'caution' here (our equivalent to the US's Miranda warning) is "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention in questioning something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence". The intent is to prevent 'ambush' defences (introduce an alibi at trial, for example, giving no opportunity to investigate it) but it has the consequence that a "no comment" interview can be tactically risky. (And that we have no real right to silence, of course!)

In principle they shouldn't be arresting you unless they have sufficient grounds for suspecting an offence, though there are the usual accountability problems in enforcing that. The recent case of ST is a good illustration of that[0]: a 14-year old was arrested at dawn on a flimsy case of participating in the robbery of a mobile phone at school. The arrest was mostly to search his room, as well as to ensure attendance at interview, which is legal under PACE, but he was willing to attend voluntarily, as well as to agree to the search, and the timing of arrest and decision to hold in custody rather than immediately bail were also probably unlawful. He sued for false imprisonment. He lost the case because the first instance judge decided that 'whilst the arrest and detention were "reprehensible", the way the police powers had been exercised "lamentable" and it was doubtful that the actions would be "justified in the court of public opinion", there had nevertheless been reasonable grounds to suspect the Appellant of an offence of robbery and there had been reasonable grounds to believe that the arrest and detention were necessary.'

(This was overturned on appeal to the High Court, but it does show what a high bar there is for holding to account the use of powers of arrest).

[0]: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2022/1280.html

If the police invite you for a voluntary interview then you're absolutely free to refuse.

The police also have wide discretionary powers to arrest without warrant. One of those grounds is to allow "prompt and effective" investigation of a suspected offence. And PACE Code of Practice G expressly suggests "won't come to be interviewed unless arrested" is one case when this might apply.

So, in practice, if you refuse the 'voluntary' interview then you may well face a compulsory one, plus a bonus arrest record.

One of the British '100% renewable' companies used to buy renewable power and then destroy their surplus resellable renewable obligation certificates instead of selling them (each supplier was obliged to hold certificates covering x% of their supply, where x << 100). That had the consequence that the renewable power generated was genuinely additional, as the other generators would have to get their renewable obligation certificates from new generation rather than the secondary market, at the margin.

They stopped, publicly reasoning that the proceeds from selling certs could be used to build their own additional renewable generation. I suspect it was just leaving too much money on the table, though.

This is one of the roles of big archival libraries such as the British Library and the Library of Congress. Some university libraries (the Bodleian at Oxford, for example) also have vast holdings in climate-conditioned warehouses for retrieval if needed.

The difficulty with being the 'library of last resort' is that you need to be careful with the stock: if you have the only remaining copy it's not obviously a great idea to lend it out! In the case of the BL, their rarer stuff can only be accessed, supervised, in their reading rooms. Even the non-unique material is often only ILLed to another library's reading room rather than for lending.

I don't read the launch editorial as 'both sides are bad', but as a challenge to what they perceive as a sloppy and pervasive left-wing 'default' opinion. The 'new orthodoxy' language is straight out of the ongoing culture war, in particular.

If they're aiming for a London Review of Books kind of space that makes sense - LRB is decidedly left wing if pretty heterodox and broad-minded - but for the political commentary space I would have thought the Spectator already covered a contrarian conservative perspective fairly well. But then I guess I'm not in their target market.

[Edit: I see they have got Toby Young on their editorial board. Definitely Conservative (as well as conservative), then.]

That's part of the skill of a good interviewer: making sure that the audience can follow along, understanding what's actually being said. The interviewer here is obviously an audio enthusiast/record shop owner rather than a journalist, so it's not surprising that they haven't had so much practice at this!

(I've done interviewing for academic research, which has different goals but is also a skill. It's interesting how difficult it is at first.)