theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social

Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of [m/neoliberal](http://kbin.social/m/neolib

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2 yr. ago

No, they're not even proposing to replace the House of Lords here. All they're proposing is to remove the remaining 92 unelected hereditary peers (out of around 800+ total unelected peers) who survived Blair's 1999 cull of most hereditary peers.

That was my thought, I'm quite up for this. I enjoyed The Voyage Home, I enjoyed The Trouble with Tribbles - I wouldn't want all Trek to be like that but there is absolutely a place in the franchise for light-hearted takes on Trek.

No, it's member of Parliament who's not a frontbencher - i.e. who's not a government minister or an official spokesperson for their party in Parliament.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and Ed Davey don't hold government office, since they're opposition politicians, but they're not backbenchers.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Spock died for our sins according to the scriptures;

And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third movie according to the scriptures:

And that he was seen of Jim, then of the rest of the crew:

- Roddenberry 15:3-5

You do have to feel for these red wall Brexit voters.

Apparently they require constant visual assurance that they are in fact still in Britain, and can't just maintain this information in their heads like the rest of us.

eight member states, including Hungary and Italy

Fascists are why we can't have nice things.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/the-housebuilding-crisis/

Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.

[...]

Housebuilding rates in England and Wales have dropped by more than a third after the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, from 2 per cent growth per year between 1856 and 1939 to 1.2 per cent between 1947 and 2019.

This has been a key factor behind the UK’s long-standing housing crisis, which has led to inflated property prices and soaring rents in recent decades.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/JCp2k

Calling the government’s reforms a “grubby concession” to backbenchers who want to block housing development, Matthew Pennycook, shadow housing minister, has pledged that Labour would enact “mandatory targets that bite on individual local planning authorities” if it came to power.

The issue of housing and planning is set to be a point of contention in this year’s general election, with the Centre for Cities think-tank estimating that the UK has a historical backlog of 4mn unbuilt homes, with an average house in England now costing more than 10 times the average salary.

I assume that's the reaction they were going for by expressing the stat in that way, but aside from shock value it isn't that informative.

Child mortality is usually expressed as 'X per 1,000 live births' so you have some sense of scale. We'll never live in a world where zero children die before their 5th birthday (simply because of illnesses and accidents) but expressing the number of deaths per 1,000 gives you a sense of whether the number of deaths is a lot or not.

Here's a UNICEF article that provides some more context on the 4.9 million global figure for under-5 deaths: 'The global under-five mortality rate declined by 60 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022.' To add more context on 37 per 1,000: in San Marino that figure is about 1.5, in the United Kingdom it's about 4.1, whereas in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it remains above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births - which I find to be a frankly much more informative and terrifying way of understanding the number.

But removing Discovery from the timeline seems to be consistent with the prime timeline post-Discovery season 2 (in TOS etc) - e.g. Spock not talking about his human adopted sister, no further use of spore drives, and so on. It's certainly explicitly the timeline of SNW (which makes multiple references to the events of Discovery s2) and therefore the timeline of Lower Decks.

That suggests the prime timeline as we know it is an altered timeline caused by Discovery's jump to the future.

Oh yeah totally. Sorry, I thought your comment was arguing to retain the switch. Permanent DST is exactly where we should go.

It kills people.

Daylight savings time practices have been linked to increases in deadly traffic accidents, workplace injuries, medical errors and overall mortality.

In 2018, researchers in Spain penned a letter that was published in the journal Epidemiology regarding a link between deadly car accidents and daylight savings shifts. After collecting data from capital cities in Spain between 1990 and 2014, the researchers found a 30% increase in fatal traffic accidents on the day clocks sprang forwards. On the day clocks fell backwards, they saw an increase of 16%.

[...]

One of the serious health concerns related to time shifts is acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Researchers in Italy wrote a 2018 review published in the journal Internal Emergency Medicine investigating daylight savings' potential effects on heart health. They reviewed seven existing studies from the United States and Europe looking at more than 80,000 cases of acute myocardial infarction. They found an increase, from 4% to 29%, in heart attacks after clocks sprang forwards.

Incidence of stroke may also increase after a clock shift. For a 2016 study published in the journal Sleep Medicine, researchers in Finland investigated the connection. They analysed more than 3,000 hospitalizations from 2004 to 2013 that occurred in the week following seasonal clock changes. They next compared those cases to a control group of 11,000 expected hospitalizations. The findings showed that hospitalizations for ischaemic stroke, the most common type, increased by 8% in the two days following a daylight savings shift. When looking at the whole week post-shift, the increase was 3%. The association was stronger for people assigned female at birth and those who were older.

In general I get that and my instinct was similarly that it was strange not to use the word. I'd use Taoiseach for Varadkar in a way I wouldn't use the native language word for other world leaders, because I think of Ireland as a primarily English-speaking country and that's the word they still use whilst otherwise speaking in English.

But then again, I can also see that British readers like you and I who follow current affairs are going to be a lot more familiar with the term Taoiseach (or, in Calamity Truss's case, the 'Tea Sock') given it's the country next door and so hugely intertwined with British politics. I could name every Taoiseach in the last quarter century just by virtue of how much those individuals have featured in UK news - through the peace process, the financial crisis and then Brexit. I couldn't do that for the leaders of any other foreign country of Ireland's size. So I think it's not unreasonable to assume the average US or other reader might not not know what a Taoiseach is.

last couple of Picard seasons

I mean, that's a pretty astonishing statement to throw out there, grouping together probably the worst single season of Star Trek with one of the best...

What a nonsense idea. Good politicians will never exist if they have a median income imposed on them.

Do you think that qualified, capable people - doctors, lawyers, economists, engineers - are going to want to go into politics, and deal with all the pressure, attention and abuse for them and their families that comes with that, for a median income? The sort of people we should want to see more of in politics typically already take large pay cuts to become backbench MPs. We want more capable and intelligent people in politics, not fewer.

You pay peanuts and you get Truss.

I mean I suppose there are a few ways you could read this.

One is that the NYT article was inaccurate - it wouldn't be the first time that fake news around this conflict has travelled halfway around the world before the truth has had its breakfast.

But another interpretation is that tight-knit communities don't want the full horror of the final moments of these girls and women to be so publicly exposed to the world. The article points out that the NYT article effectively identified the individuals and that can't have been a helpful experience for their surviving families and friends.

Well the Whigs didn't die off; they merged with the Radicals and the Peelites to form the Liberal Party, who later merged with the SDP to form the Liberal Democrats.

I think a more realistic objective is for the combination of the Tories' broader decline plus the Tory/Reform split to knock them out of being a top two party in England. FPTP is unrelenting - I can just about imagine a scenario like the Liberals experienced in the early 20th century, where the Lloyd George/Asquith split and the trauma of governing through the First World War took them from the largest party prior to the 1918 election, to the third party following the 1922 election.

In that ideal scenario, we'd see a two-pronged squeeze where the Lib Dems supplant the Tories as the party of the middle class South of England and Outer London, and Labour supplant them in their North and Midlands seats. Once the Tories are no longer part of the FPTP duopoly, the electoral system makes it very difficult for a third party to ever get back to where it was.

I can't find the SNP and PC breakdowns, but assuming 4% and 0.5% respectively then Flavible projects this as: Lab 451, Con 75, SNP 53, Lib Dems 45, PC 3, Green 1, Reform 0. And if the Tories dropped another two points, it would leave them as the 4th party in Parliament...

Thanks for the update Ernest! I hope you continue getting well soon and I look forward to everything you've got planned for this place.