With all due respect, this is the kind of attitude which caused people to leave Stack Overflow en masse. We're discussing interestingly complex political procedures, this event has triggered several.
On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century.
For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.
Yeah Winky the house elf definitely rubbed me up the wrong way for how pitiful she made the condition of freedom seem.
> Oh, and Kingsley Shacklebolt is quite an interesting name to give a fictional black person.
I'll be honest this one sailed over my head when I was a kid, I always assumed because he's a magical policeman the Shacklebolt referred to handcuffs. There's a lot of things named along those lines.
I have a 1950s mark 2 Shturmanskie as my main watch, the same model Yuri Gagarin wore into space. It's a 'frankenwatch' in that it's been assembled from parts of other watches, albeit in this case they're the right parts from the right period except the dial, which is a reproduction to avoid the considerable amount of radium the Soviets liked to put in their pilot watches.
Now that is an unreliable watch! It'll usually lose maybe a minute a day which is actually pretty decent for something from when Khrushchev was in power, but it likes to randomly stop or occasionally start running fast or slow according to its mood. I'm not sure how much of it is because it's a Soviet frankenwatch and how much is that it's hard to find people who'll work on Soviet watches in the UK.
To be fair it depends so much on the city. Oxford is a great example, driving there is a hellish experience because it's a historic place with notable buildings which too important to knock down, especially in order to replace them with roads and car parks. They try to cram cars in anyway and it's just miserable. In reality the whole city centre should be pedestrianised because that's what the city is actually supposed to be designed around. Remove the private cars and buses, taxis, and yes of course delivery drivers will have plenty of room.
This perfectly legitimate argument for Oxford would be silly to make about say Milton Keynes.
It's not the only example of extreme immorality that's presented pretty causally in the series.
I loved the books as much as anyone, but Azkaban struck me as utter barbarism even then. You're telling me that prisoners, regardless of what they were actually sentenced for, get psychologically tortured through the magical induction of deep despair until they develop a form of dementia? And this happens whether you're a murderous dark wizard or you do a bit of magical petty theft or fraud? The Ministry using Dementors for law enforcement would morally justify rebellion against it in my view, not only are they slavers they're also torturers on a scale that would make many dictatorships blush.
It's obvious that the Ministry a wicked institution, but it's also an incompetent one since the Dementors aren't even really loyal to them; they jump ship to the Death Eaters as soon as they get the chance to.
I have never heard the name Beeching spoken with more venom than in Wales, I used to live in Mid Wales and now I live in Cardiff. If I wanted to visit where I used to live by train, I'd have to do a multi-hour detour of a sightseeing trip around the West Midlands, deep into England. The Beeching Axe literally cut Wales in half and the consequences are felt to this day, even though there wasn't much outright salting the Earth to make sure the terrible decision couldn't be reversed as there was in some cases, the Welsh government doesn't have the money to reinstate the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen line which would deal with a lot of these north-south issues.
Also it's not just Wales where Beeching carried out intense vandalism of public infrastructure, the South West was severely affected too. Basically anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power. The general assumption was that private cars would replace the local trains, which as someone who currently doesn't drive for medical reasons really makes my blood boil. While perhaps not in intent, in effect the Beeching Axe was a profound kick in the teeth for the disabled.
I've not used Windows in a very long time so forgive my ignorance, but I always heard that it was a bad idea to connect an XP machine to the internet because of the amount of malware sloshing about. In practice is that much of a problem for modern-day XP enthusiasts?
There's something so uncanny about the mismatch between the regard in which Blair is generally held by British people and the regard in which he seems to hold himself.
If I were him I'd have retired from public life and kept a very low profile after Iraq, and everything else for that matter. He doesn't seem to realise that his modern interventions alienate everyone, even Alastair Campbell of all people seemed uncomfortable to the degree he seems to uncritically sing the praises of people like Larry Ellison recently.
A lot of the demand is from guitar amps, while you can just as well simulate the behaviour of a valve amp these days there's still plenty of demand for the real deal. As long as the likes of Fender, Marshall and so on want to supply valve amps to the mass market there'll probably be factories producing ECC83s, EL34s and the other common audio valves. In a lot of ways the combination of electric guitar + valve amp basically is the instrument in some styles.
There's also a niche HiFi market, my daily driver audio amp is a 1960s Leak EL84 amp. It's a cool bit of living history and it's very non-fatiguing to listen to for long periods.
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I really do think the class system holds us back as a society in Britain, George Orwell had a lot to say on this subject in England your England and I fear the decline he describes in the 1940s only accelerated through the 20th century and into the 21st. That essay is a good read for anyone interested in the topic, although of course much has happened since it was written.
I resented being constantly 'corrected' on the local accent I was picking up from school as a child, but now I appreciate that an RP or close to RP accent turns down the difficulty slider in certain British interactions.
> [UI] should have stopped changing almost 30 years ago
In some ways it did, modern CLIs haven't changed that much fundamentally from their older counterparts. You can do more things but someone using a CLI 30 years ago wouldn't be phased by modern ones; the interaction model has barely changed.
They're all emulating the video terminals of yore too, which themselves were descended from even older teletypewriters.
I love learning about pre-internet ways of transferring data on the back of other things. Another cool example is that the UK is only shutting down its longwave AM radio service this month (as opposed to decades ago) because the carrier is phase-modulated with data telling older electric meters to switch over. For years this was the only reason such an antiquated radio system stayed alive.
I'm planning on building my own Teletext service at some point as part of a wider analogue TV project. It's a cool form for things like the news because you have to be very concise for it to work in such a constrained format; it's the opposite of today where long-form content that doesn't really say anything is dirt cheap to emit at scale. Some of the British services had rudimentary games too like Bamboozle, a quiz game which relied on hexadecimal pages the remote couldn't enter manually.
One thing I'd also like to reinstate is NICAM digital stereo which British analogue TV used to have, most modulators I've come across only generate a mono FM subcarrier in PAL mode so looks like I'm going to be building my own modulator.
> They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system.
It was more that the RMBK was more designed around existing Soviet manufacturing capacity, they could and did build more conventional reactor designs as well but they required enormous pressure vessels the USSR only had one factory to produce. The RBMK on the other hand is not a monolithic pressure vessel, it's a collection of hundreds of individual pressurised tubes which were much easier for the Soviet manufacturing base to produce. It was actually a clever idea on the face of it, the problem was more it had inherently dangerous behaviour in certain regimes (the infamous positive void coefficient of reactivity) and the positive scram effect wasn't known until well into their deployment. The operators were also given contradictory operating instructions which failed to highlight the safety-critical nature of certain parameters.