Most people at e.g. Oxford and Cambridge (and, I suspect, many other universities) use their university emails for a fairly wide variety of extramural correspondence, and are stuck with M$ as the provider, alas.
> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools
This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.
> or just 3 As from state schools
Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.
I don’t see how free software licences ‘sound too good to be true’, in that they don’t even sound relevantly good: they don’t suggest in the slightest that support will be available.
Gates is one of the best placed people to claim that the advantages of meeting people in person &c in disbursing his wealth (rather than just ‘giv[ing] talks’) outweigh the emissions. There’re obviously diminishing returns (do COP delegations need to be so large?) but it would be surprising if the optimum were zero flights.
The European Investment Bank provided €1.5b of funding.¹ EIB decisions don’t generally attract lots of attention from member states other than those concerned, since it is generally understood that the EIB is funding lots of projects in member states simultaneously. Similarly, the budget of the Commission and similar bodies will generally be set in advance, usually with a formal or informal understanding as to the broad distribution of funds between member states that will follow.
In any case, this project seems to me to be no more extraordinary than the redistributive effects of e.g. Medicaid or Pentagon spending, or the construction of Interstates. The Interstates, in the present US political environment, might indeed seem extraordinary; but the question is then not how one convinces people from state A to spend on state B, but how to convince people to make large long-term investments in the first place.
It’s rather odd that the ICO is saying this rather than industry lobbyists. No 10 is full of middle-aged technically unsophisticated types who want to look otherwise, and substitute credulity for wordliness, and I think Quangoland’s denizens are following the party line. (The shadow cabinet, but they aren’t that focused on growth because they have the luxury of not having to run the country.) The ensuing disasters may well be far worse than Horizon, if HMG ever gets anywhere with its AI plans.
Most important legislation, including the BNA, is government legislation (indeed, see the white paper: https://www.uniset.ca/naty/maternity/wpaper.pdf). It is therefore drafted by parliamentary counsel, whose advice remains available when amendments are proposed. Most governments also command sufficient majorities to push this kind of legislation through, or at least to come to consensus on amendments. The relevant passage seems clear enough that parliamentary counsel could have drafted it and so I doubt there were ‘too many chefs’ as you put it (although I haven’t checked Hansard).
It is also hard to see what these drafting habits have to do with the common law system. Points 1–5 could be true of a legislature in pretty much any legal tradition.
I think that it would help if you were to suggest a term people who don’t want to ‘shut down discussion about related topics all together’ should use. Otherwise, the effect (although perhaps not the intention) of deprecating the term ‘attacks on trans people’ is that the sort of discussion you admit is possible theoretically will be impossible for want of a suitable term to designate the sorts of attacks it concerns.
Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one does not need to believe everything that trans people say (surely with the result of inconsistency!) to think that the evidence they present is not wholly concocted.
Others may misidentify respectable, good, or correct arguments as ‘attacks’ in narrower senses, but that no more makes the underlying categories meaningless than the misapplication of such descriptions as ‘true’, ‘valid’, ‘scientifically established’, or ‘by definition’. I have no general pithy answer to what one should do about the sorts of attack I have described, but I venture that it is reasonable to talk or attempt to do something about them. What term would you prefer?
There is nothing wrong with the use of ‘an’ before ‘history’ and the forms of that lemma. It is unusual, and perhaps pretentious or otherwise silly, but only in the same way as ‘connexion’ is an unusual (&c) but perfectly correct spelling.
No, ‘all’ is not subjective. My threshold for ‘any’ is one, and threshold for all is, well, all of them. My threshold for a majority is the usual one, as is my threshold for eighty or sixty per cent. I am deriving the worldview that it would be absurd to deny that there is at least one dissident. It doesn’t matter whether I derive this based on an understanding of a sample that is representative of China as a whole so long as it is representative of a subset, since that is such a modest claim.
If you want to make a different point about the majority, or a very big majority, or two people, you should make that point instead. Obviously the Chinese with whom I interact are of a certain class and intellectual formation of which I must remain aware; in particular, the closeness of some to the party breeds a unique type of contempt. That is why I am not trying to generalise; seemingly, you are.
There are obviously good reasons to doubt the cruder ‘fantastical views’ that circulate in the West, but I cannot see why those reasons would lead one to doubt that there is a single ‘true Chinese dissident’. Am I to believe that every Chinese overseas I have met who freely discussed politics in a régime-sceptical way was paid off by the CIA or just trying to please me? Is every overseas dissident really just an empty NED shell? (I am sure many take money, but that doesn’t mean they also don’t have their own beliefs.) Does survey evidence that most Chinese are satisfied really mean that /all/ are? Are living standards so improved that nobody could possibly oppose the central people’s government? Is 润学 completely fabricated or reducible to economic factors?
What has Gödel incompleteness to do with that? We can just take any sentence φ as an axiom, and we’ve a trivial proof thereof.