(Thread IKs:
OwlFancier)
|
Mega Comrade posted:I'm convinced on the regular US shows get pitched as 2 seasons, then if the company likes it they might stretch it to 3. Then popularity of season 1 it gets stretched to 5 seasons. I am 100% convinced to this day that House of Cards was initially conceived of as 4 seasons of 13 episodes (for a total of 52 cards). I have no evidence for this other than that it feels too clever for it not to have been someone's idea first. The first two 13 episode seasons were good quality, season 2 a bit less so than season 1, but season 3 really seemed to be where the rot set in, they'd decided they were going to milk it for as long as it could possibly last. poo poo in season 3 started getting so strung out with filler I half expected the president to spend four episodes charging a spirit bomb. Thinking back I think House of Cards and Orange is the New Black descending into meaningless boring filler were the things that really killed my interest in serialised television. Just give me episodic content, or a one-season mini-series, I do not have the interest in some seven season epic that will descend into trash before it's done.
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2023 12:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 10:31 |
|
|
Microplastics posted:Is that where the videogame tier list ranking system comes from? Well, it derives from Japanese schooling grades, and Japan's basically Britain but with cleaner streets. They're an island, they love tea, have a monarch, like to pretend their empire wasn't monstrously evil, are ostensibly a democracy but it's the same corrupt shitheads with indistinguishable ideologies every time, there's a shitload of nonces, etc. etc.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2023 11:33
|
|
|
Jedit posted:I'm not seeing the problem here. "-ize" is the US spelling. "-ise" is correct in English. This is actually a consequence of word processing software like Microsoft Word! Before modern spellcheck software, both -ise and -ize forms were considered acceptable in British English. What was important was that you stick to one or the other in the document, so you couldn't use them interchangeably, that would look sloppy. When the earliest spellcheck functions were introduced, instead of ensuring a uniform style, they used a simpler method: -ise usage was more common than -ize in British English, so they just marked -ise as "correct" and -ize as "wrong". And now decades later we've all decided that "-ize" is wrong, because some programmer in Redmond, Washington took a shortcut.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2023 13:30
|
|
|
Catzilla posted:I’ve seen this effect quite often. How do you do it, as I can’t find the right terms to search for it? It’s usually called Zalgo text, there’s a generator for it you should be able to google now you know the term.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2023 12:29
|
|
|
smellmycheese posted:Created by a goon called , erm, Shmorky. Hatsune Miku created Zalgo
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2023 14:47
|
|
|
Pistol_Pete posted:The students experience the colleges and other city centre facilities as insiders: they live there, are part of the institutions and belong to the appropriate social class. The tourists experience these things as outsiders: they visit briefly and take photos but are not part of that social class and do not belong to the institutions. A typical student would never interact with a typical tourist and vice versa. They might be in the same physical space but are experiencing Oxford in completely different ways. However, even though they may be just visiting, an unwary tourist may find themselves a student should they roll doubles three times. something something Foucalt
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2023 10:34
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:Have I missed something (like is this a kind of 'tease' post?) I think Tesseraction just mixed up Jeri Ryan with her character's birth name. It was Jeri Ryan's husband who was the republican.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2024 17:27
|
|
|
I tried rewatching Enterprise last year and man, I just couldn’t get through all the relentless perving the show does on its women. Oh ho, let’s have hoshi crawl through a Jeffries tube and then her shirt gets caught on a nail and omg her tits are out cause she’s not wearing a bra! Ooh, time to have a conversation in the decontamination chamber while we rub antibacterial lube all over each other mmm I remember finding that poo poo uncomfortable back when it came out, now it’s painful to watch. It just made me feel really sorry for the actors to be subjected to that, Seven’s outfits were bad enough and then they somehow made it worse. Which is a shame because I think there was a good show under there, just not one I had the patience to deal with.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 14:49
|
|
|
I never could understand how Janeway could have come to the decision she did with Tuvix. Then last week in our D&D game we had a new player join us and he and the DM have cooked up this quirky idea to have him be a guy from the past who got resurrected into the wrong body in a magical mishap and he's now possessing the body of our group's former leader. And my first thought, instantly, was "I need to Tuvix this guy and get my best friend back". TACD posted:DS9 was the best classic Trek because it was a bit darker than the rest and blended episodic content into a compelling multi-season arc. Paradoxically, all the new Trek blows because it’s OTT dark or “quirky” and focuses exclusively on seasonal arcs at the expense of individual episodes or character building. This is honestly why the only one I really like is Lower Decks. Episodic content, the comedy genre and animated nature lets it get away with being quirkier and referential, the absence of professionalism among the crew is justified by them all being bottom-tier fuckups, and yet it still feels trekky. to me anyway. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jan 2, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 15:51
|
|
|
I think it pretty much has to be a skit based on nothing more than that as far as I know pretty much every ISP ships their routers with a password by default and has done for years. Who in their right mind switches it to an open connection?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 19:17
|
|
|
I always wondered how Colm Meaney felt about them having his character sing Jerusalem in DS9
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2024 22:14
|
|
|
bessantj posted:I have to kick someone out of my gang tomorrow. He's annoying has refused to work and rubs everyone up the wrong way especially if he doesn't get his own way. The other gangers have asked why I haven't gotten rid of him already. But I hate just cutting people off like that, if we don't work we don't get paid so even thought my life will be easier still feels poo poo getting rid of someone. Could you maybe have another one of your gang garrote him from behind in the car while you're driving over a bridge and then dump him out so he can sleep with the fishes? It'd be the kinder thing to do, I think.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2024 15:18
|
|
|
Well, to post something that’s at least marginally on topic, I’m coming to the end of an ordeal which shattered what little faith I still had in NHS dentistry. Back in September I began experiencing massive, skull-splitting pain in one of my teeth. I tried to contact my NHS dentist, and nobody picked up. I left a message, nobody called back. I called multiple times over two days before finally getting through, only to be told the dentist had no appointments before the end of October! They referred me to their sister clinic who did see me that day, but they couldn’t see anything wrong. Ignored everything I had to say about the source of my pain, gave me some antibiotics and sent me on my way. Cue two long months of increasingly worse pain and run around from the dentists I saw until finally someone at the hospital said I’d probably need a wisdom tooth extraction. But I’d need a referral from my dentist (who now couldn’t see me until the end of November), and then I’d join a waiting list that was five months long! At that point I broke down. I did some DIY dentistry on myself with a lockpick physically forcing my teeth apart, then began looking for a private option. Private dentist arranged a wisdom tooth extraction and also diagnosed a root canal I needed (which I later checked and saw was visible on the first x-ray I got back in September that the first dentist missed). The two procedures together along with other appointments are going to end up costing me about £2000. More if I wanted a crown on the root canalled tooth. I’m incredibly fortunate that I can afford an expense like that and not have it change my life, but Jesus, what if I couldn’t? What about all the people who can’t? People kill themselves over toothaches, I don’t think I could have lasted five months.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2024 18:03
|
|
|
killerwhat posted:Glad you're getting the tooth sorted. Has it stopped hurting? Yeah the pain mostly went away after I castawayed myself, still there but managable with painkillers, then the extraction did most of the rest of the job. The tooth needing root canal was just uncomfortable, but based on the x-ray they did today it had a huge infection underneath it that if left untreated could have seriously damaged one of the nerves in my jaw. One more treatment to go and my mouth should be mostly fixed!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2024 20:21
|
|
|
Jakabite posted:So sorry this happened to you man. For me that’s one of the things that, as a reasonably privileged person (these days anyway), has been so jarring about the last few years - I can’t really access healthcare, how the gently caress does anyone who doesn’t have my privilege? Yeah, I never want to have to basically castaway myself again, but it’s disgusting that such things have become functionally necessary now, and I guess at least I know I have the fortitude to do it. It also honestly shocked me what a different world private medical care is. I can email my dentist and she gets back to me within a few hours, I can phone and be sure they’ll pick up because the dental nurse doesn’t pull double duty as a receptionist. I can go in for an appointment and it doesn’t feel like we’re on a tight schedule because there’s not enough hours in the day. That poo poo shouldn’t feel like a premium service but it bloody well does! I’d almost forgotten what good dentistry looked like.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2024 04:49
|
|
|
Tesseraction posted:Where roughly are you based? Because even my NHS dentist often has two dedicated receptionists and a dedicated nurse for each dentist. They are public-private mind you and I think like many their registers for NHS are full until more of the elderly patients pass away. I’m in Glasgow. It’s not even just a one off kind of thing, I’m addition to my own NHS dentist, this was the situation at the clinic they sent me to since they couldn’t see me, and the apparent situation at three other dentists I got in contact with trying to find someone who would do it privately, but they were all clinics who did both NHS and private work. Most of the dentists in my area seem to be small affairs, with maybe two clinics in the premises and only one dentist on shift on the days I visited (and sometimes I’m the case of my registered dentist, no dentist at all!) It might have been presumptuous of me to assume that situation was replicated all over though.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2024 11:14
|
|
|
smellmycheese posted:The King is on form today As someone into fancy tea I will never, ever, understand how people like that. I like smokey tastes, I like tea. It's nice in blends, Russian Caravan has a little Lapsang in it and it gives this wonderful smokey note. Pure lapsang, though, tastes like you are gargling petrol. Tried it multiple times and I just don't get it. Oh no, I've become the anti-Adrian, alike in temperament but with opposite opinions on the banal.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2024 15:01
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:Ah, the combination bath/urinal. One which I do not feel compelled to just offer to delivery drivers unprompted.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2024 15:06
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:Quick none war related question, but does anyone know if Admiral is a decent car insurer? I only ask because the one I'm with at the moment has put prices up £150 for no reason and was looking around to see what is best. Admiral targets itself at the budget market, and budget insurers tend to have a few features that keep the up-front costs down: offshore call centres; courtesy cars instead of hire cars; admin fees for amendments; extra charges for doing repairs out of network, and higher excesses for specific kinds of claims that don’t show up front and centre on the price comparison page. That said a lot of “premium” insurers are have been working this stuff into their services for years now, so going budget is no longer the massive downgrade in service it used to be. As long as you don’t want to insist on having any hypothetical repairs don’t by a specific garage and aren’t making constant changes to you policy (e.g. adding and removing drivers), the main things to watch out for are the hire vs courtesy car cover and variant excesses. So, with a policy that has courtesy car cover, generally the wording in the policy will be that if you have an accident the garage doing the repairs will provide you a courtesy car subject to availability. That means that if your car is getting repaired, you’re not necessarily guaranteed a replacement car in the meantime. But more to the point, if you have an accident that writes your car off, or your car gets stolen, because there’s no repairer, there is no courtesy car. Whereas a policy that has hire cover will give you a car in the event of a claim for those sorts of things. For the excesses, it’s sometimes ridiculously hard to spot if you’re starting from a price comparison website. Different companies will put them on different things—maybe company A has a higher glass excess than competitors, maybe company B has an extra £100 excess on theft claims, Company C has a higher excess if the car is written off, bullshit like that. Check the policy you’re thinking of taking out very carefully and when you do get one, make sure to read the schedule when the paperwork arrives to check the excesses are what you thought you agreed to, because there’s nothing worse than having a poo poo day where you crash your car made even more lovely by finding out it’s going to cost you £250 more than you expected. I know all that is kind of non-specific to admiral but it’s the sort of thing to consider when weighing things up.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2024 09:44
|
|
|
DreddyMatt posted:Just a warning on this. One of their tips is that different job titles can result in lower premiums. Yeah another of the issues with tips like these is that they're often taking a niche, specific tip and generalising it out to useless cases. There are certain job titles which carry higher insurance premiums. Broadly speaking, you pay more for your insurance if your job is high profile, because there's a higher risk of your accidents being more expensive. If you're a giving a colleague a lift home from work and cause an accident that gives your friend whiplash, that friend's injury claim (that includes loss of earnings) is going to cost a lot more money if you're both TV presenters vs you both being civil servants. This means that if, say, you work as an audio engineer at the BBC, you might see a different premium for "TV/Radio Supervisor" vs "Audio Engineer". There can also be higher premiums if you're in a "driving" occupation because even if using the car for business is explicitly forbidden there is perceived to be a much higher risk that you'll decide to use the car for your job. So if you're a courier, a deliveroo driver, or a taxi driver, those job titles will probably put your insurance up. But there's going to be no difference at all between listing your occupation as "Clerical Secretary" and "Admin Assistant". If you're not potentially carrying Graham Norton or a chicken korma in the car, the insurance company is unlikely to care.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2024 13:55
|
|
|
I'd normally vote SNP but my MP is one of the Bad™ ones so I'm at a bit of a loss this time, my constituency usually doesn't get smaller parties. I'd pretty much reached the conclusion that I was going to spoil my ballot because honestly even the SNP are poo poo, but then Yousaf became the only party leader calling out the genocide in Gaza and it loving rends my heart that "don't support Israel in murdering thousands of people" has to be a point of contention in British politics. Is that worth me holding my nose and voting for a bad person? Ultimately even if my MP is re-elected, it won't actually stop the genocide.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2024 13:47
|
|
|
ThomasPaine posted:You don't go anywhere near a till most of the time though? It's an app on your phone and you just click complete and pay with Google pay and walk out. If it flags you for a check you have to go ask someone but you can do it at your leisure. Interesting, I don't think they have that here. The version we have is you get a handheld scanner, scan your stuff, then go to a special section of the tills to pay. And you get flagged for a check sometimes when you scan the barcode on the till to pay. Though it would be piss easy to steal in any case, I bring my own OAP trolley and pack it as I go, and every single time I've been asked for a bag check the cashier either just scans the items on top, or on rare occasions when they go digging in my bag they pick out easily visible items with accessible barcodes. I've hosed up twice and had items in my bag I forgot to scan, the cashier just scanned my whole shop and then charged me the correct amount, no other consequence. Maybe because I only had one item out of place each time? Either way I got flagged I think for a few extra scans in the month or two afterward before it settled back down to the same level as before.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2024 12:41
|
|
|
Maugrim posted:From reading up it appears only two of my swords are illegal due to curved blades over 50cm, though that still leaves the question of how I'm supposed to get rid of them There's a defence to this which is that curved swords hand-made using traditional methods are not illegal. If the sword cost you over £100 it almost certainly qualifies as basically every single sword ever made from the present day back to the bronze age is hand-made using traditional methods. The only thing that would actually lie outside this would be some hyper-cheap piece of trash made by like, CNC machining a sheet of steel and then wrapping one end in paracord and grinding on an edge. Maybe some fantasy swords made by casting aluminium or steel. Casting is traditional for bronze age weaponry, though, so is casting later period metals traditional or non-traditional? A grey area. Basically if it looks like a regular sword and not something you'd use for a remarkably unsafe cosplay it's probably legal.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2024 17:10
|
|
|
I have a cheap and very poor quality rennaisance-style sidesword that hangs on my wall. Turns out hand-made using traditional methods doesn't mean well made using traditional methods! I also have a synthetic practice weapon, which is the fancy term for "adult sized toy sword". It's fun to swing around every now and then. Also, the sword is fun to swing too.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2024 17:26
|
|
|
Pablo Bluth posted:There's a bbc 4 documentary, Handmade in Japan: Samurai Sword, that showed the creation of a katana by a long running family business that is worth tracking down. Hot forging, the dipping in water to cause the curved blade and the slow hand sharpening on whetstones. They cost at minimum thousands of pounds but the most exclusive are considerably more costly and I recall basically impossible to export from Japan (there's a limited supply and culturally they want to keep them ) Well, as I mentioned in the post you quoted, stamping it out of sheet metal would lie outside of traditional methods. But it's important to remember that manufacturers like the one in the documentary are making extremely high quality items, and it was not the case historically that only high quality items were made. For example, in 16th century Japan, Hideyoshi ordered a "sword hunt" where his men scoured japan seeking out and confiscating weapons from peasants and his enemies to stop them rising up against him. The sword of a peasant rebel is not necessarily going to be made to the same high standard as one made by a swordsmith prominent enough to get a BBC 4 documentary. And even officially issued weapons could be of varying price and quality--if you're the Ming emperor and need to procure 100,000 swords, you're probably not getting them from the chinese equivalent of the BBC4 guy. In the modern day, this is also true. That's why I mentioned the ~£100 price point--if it's more than £100, chances are it's made with traditional methods, because the traditional methods have been refined over thousands of years to make weapon manufacture quick and cheap. It's not going to be painstakingly made by one single person who sees it from billet of steel to finished product, but that wasn't true for the vast majority of swords at any point in history.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2024 18:08
|
|
|
Pablo Bluth posted:Has there been case law on where they define "traditional"? I think it's clear that "traditional" is being used as a proxy for expensive, to block anything that could be affordable by "gangs and youths". How cheap can you get a modern katana that has been shaped exclusively by forging/hammering? You can get a katana from Hanwei for about £200. https://www.theknightshop.com/practical-katana Hanwei's one of the "budget" sword manufacturers, it's based out of China (others are based out of India). Katanas tend to be a bit more expensive than other budget swords because there's a certain type of nerd who'll pay a premium for specifically Japanese stuff. I don't know there's been any specific case law on the definition of "traditional", I agree that when the legislation was being drawn up the lawmakers probably didn't really know what they meant by it, but generally the police and customs seem to agree that blades like these meet the legal definition. Trainee PornStar posted:Hopefully this works..  Here it is linked inline, looks like a Tod Cutler piece!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2024 18:36
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:So how about Gladiator where they used AI (or CGI or whatever) to do scenes with Oliver Reed after he died (during the making of that film) where he had been contracted to do the film? Or Peter Cushing in Star Wars Rogue 1? Are these ethical or not? The Oliver Reed may be less of an issue because he was contracted to do that film but died partway through making it, but Peter Cushing died long before Rogue 1 but on the other hand had been in at the start of the Star Wars franchise? I believe at least in Cushing's case, the filmmakers got permission from Cushing's estate to use his likeness. Still, it's the worst thing about the film (well, I'm not sure if it was worse than CGI Carrie Fisher), though perhaps that depends on how familiar you are with CGI. To me it looked off and uncanny, but I've spent most of my life playing games that use CGI to represent people. My dad on the other hand said "I thought Peter Cushing was dead?!".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 12:43
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:On an unrelated note (I hope), it seems that one of the transatlantic media class's most flamboyant cranks, Naomi Wolf, has descended to entirely new depths of batshit. If the old gods are coming back and its being caused by perfidious leftists, maybe we'll finally be able to get norse jewellery and tattoos again without worrying about looking nazi.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2024 13:56
|
|
|
ThomasPaine posted:This would be absolutely peak comedy timeline stuff. It’s a funny thought experiment. I would think though if the King was openly calling for the abolition of the monarchy the most likely outcome though would be a bunch of the Commonwealth realms taking him up on that deal and the British parliament either giving in or transferring the crown to someone else (my bet would be leaning on Andrew to make him decline and passing the throne to his daughter Beatrice). And then the media would forget all about it just like they all forgot how much they hated Camilla. All that said I’d very much doubt that Harry is particularly opposed to Monarchy per se. There may be bad blood between his family and he might have a bit of a firmer grasp on reality but Henry the Ninth would probably just try to model himself on the various Scandinavian monarchs, slimming down the expenses and pomp to appear more of a “modern” king.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2024 13:31
|
|
|
Grouchio posted:Yankee question: Do we know what prince william is like in private? In short, no. The palace are very careful to present William as an inoffensive and non-controversial royal, faithful son, dutiful husband, hard-working royal, all that, and by and large the UK media supports that view also. However there are longstanding rumours you'll generally hear reported only in non-British press that are impossible to verify but could well be true. Most prominently, there is the allegation that William has been carrying on an affair with Rose Hanbury, with the knowledge (but not acceptance) of his wife. A consequent rumour that follows from this one then is that his unfaithfulness was one of the critical causes of Harry detaching from the family--that Harry sees infidelity as the primary cause of their parents breakup and wouldn't let it go unspoken, and when the growing rift was attributed in the media to Megan's influence, William's refusal to dispel those rumours was then the straw that broke the camel's back. And now there's the rumours of William being verbally and emotionally abusive to his wife Kate, compounded with that hospital visit. There's pretty much no evidence either way on it, since it's entirely possible the staff member who "leaked" these allegations is just made up, but if evidence came out that it was true it would hardly be a shock that some filthy rich aristocrat turned out to be a shithead would it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2024 03:33
|
|
|
Ms Adequate posted:Please say sike right now PLEASE Appparently it's just named that because it goes through some areas of london which had big textile factories during the industrial revolution.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2024 10:14
|
|
|
I do think that we'd be better off finding a workable solution which does not push against the tide of technology. Its all very well and good to say "no phones in school" or whatever, but the only practical consequence of that is that you'll turn every child into a rulebreaker, and likely many will have the indifference or even endorsement of their parents as support. I think what we probably want is a sort of 2-layer parental control for phones endorsed and supported by the major manufacturers. The default parental controls don't seem to do the job because parents don't seem particularly capable of using them, but we can have it such that schools can impose their own set of parental controls on top of whatever the parent sets, that apply only at school. Use something like location services or wifi networks to have phones be aware that they're in a school, and I'm envisioning some way that the school can program in their hours and the phones will have full functionality during breaks and lunches but not during lessons, and the school can decide if, say, the phones should be completely non-functional during class time, or if certain apps like the calculator or other school-approved apps work. Essentially a form of virtual, selective signal jamming without the problems that come with literally jamming signals. There'd be technical challenges to overcome of course (need to ensure adults' phones aren't affected, for example) but I think they're resolvable.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2024 10:53
|
|
|
Zalakwe posted:This would be lovely, but I think the technical challenges you have would be completely dwarfed by the political and regulatory ones. I can definitely see issues with getting the phone manufacturers on board, sure. That would require some regulation or legislation to force them to comply, but what sort of challenges do you forsee that would dwarf the technical aspect? Like, politically I'm not sure I see a huge challenge given that our government still managed to pass the online safety bill with its encryption backdoor clause intact over the furious objections of privacy advocates and tech companies alike. They did have to admit that it was literally impossible to implement technologically, but the government seemed happy to take on the political and regulatory challenges for as long as they were attempting to ignore the technical challenges.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2024 11:32
|
|
|
Zalakwe posted:The online safety bill passed precisely because it doesn't do anything. The Government hasn't taken on the tech giants and won in any meaningful way at all. It's a total regulatory failure. If it were otherwise the companies involved would either have pulled out of the UK or would be desperately trying to solve the technical challenges involved. As is, they've just said "sorry lads, it isn't possible" and continued pretty much as normal. This is by design, there is no political will for it the situation to be otherwise and even if there was it's unlikely we have the power to force change. Occasionally someone might turn up at a committee and get a telling off but meh. Such software and hardware wouldn't necessarily need to be for the UK market alone. Like, these sorts of systems are potentially a selling point for apple and google. They can be marketed to parents as systems which safeguard child learning, they can be marketed to schools as better alternatives to trash-tier android tablets. Whack on a mandatory subscription fee per school for the service and the companies even get to siphon cash straight out of the education budgets of most rich nations (not saying this bit is good, but it's what I'd see happening). All for the cost of a second parental control layer in the OS? I do agree that this is a harder sell for the UK government specifically, but it hardly needs to be the case that such a solution would be pushed by the UK. If the EU or (less likely) the US pushed a scheme like it, I think Apple and Google would have no choice but to comply. That said, we saw Google get really salty over the whole link tax thing in Canada, threatening to pull out and even disabling news links for all Canadians, but eventually they decided paying $100m in tax was preferable to losing the revenue from news content. If something like a mandate for school-specific parental controls passed in the UK, they'd have to weigh up if the cost of implementing that was larger or smaller than their revenue from the UK. Knowing nothing about software development I have no idea how much an OS change costs--I expect it's rather expensive--but given that companies like Apple have revenues over £1b from sales in the UK every year, I don't think it's far fetched to imagine that if faced with some robust regulation that the two big phone OS companies would rather comply than pull out of the country.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2024 14:11
|
|
|
Apparently if the chamber votes to sit in private, there's not even a transcript of what is discussed? This is nuts.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2024 19:53
|
|
|
Presumably the private discussion wouldn't even be about Gaza any more, if there is discussion in private it's going to be about what to do about the speakership?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2024 20:02
|
|
|
stev posted:I've been avoiding parliament poo poo for a while now but I keep getting news alerts today. What's the actual point of all this? I can't get my head around how the UK calling for a ceasefire could actually affect anything - let alone the wording of it. Is it all sheer posturing or could something that actually matters come out of it? It's unlikely that it would have materially affected the situation in Gaza. The point was intended to force/allow MPs to put their position on what's happening on record, because voters care about what's happening. Come the elections later this year campaigners would be able to say the sitting MP voted for/against a ceasefire. So yeah from a certain viewpoint it is pure posturing, but I guess it depends on what the function of the minority is supposed to be in a legislature--they can't change the policy of the sitting government, all they can do is vote for or against motions where they will almost certainly lose or be ignored, and speak up for causes they believe in. And in this case it was the SNP effectively holding the feet of both Labour and the Conservatives to the fire, but the actions of the Speaker (and the deputy too it seems) have been deliberate in avoiding an actual division taking place, ensuring that nobody actually voted to put their views on record.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2024 20:41
|
|
|
EvilHawk posted:I don't want to sound like I'm necessarily defending Labour here - it's more that I'm weirdly interested in the Parliamentary procedures To expand on this a little, the normal procedure for an opposition day motion is as follows: 1. Debate on the motion 2. The Opposition's motion is voted on (and if politically contentious, almost always voted down by the Government) 3. Amendments to the opposition's motion are voted on 4. The motion as amended is voted on As I understand it, the usual procedure at step 3 is informed by the government's action. For some motions, the government will allow the various opposition parties to vote on their own proposed amendments to the motion, and just vote down the motion as amended. For other motions, the government will propose an amendment that rewrites the text of the motion entirely, and in such circumstances, Standing order 31 prevents any other amendment being voted on. So the original plan for this opposition day was going to be Debate, vote on the SNP's proposed text, vote on Labour's proposed text, vote on the motion. Then the conservatives propose an amendment significantly rewriting the motion, so per standing order 31, no Labour motion. Essentially the issue at play is that the only way to do a vote on the SNP's original text is via Standing Order 31, which varies the normal procedures of the house to allow an unamended text to be voted on first before amendments are put forward, but the only way to allow Labour's amendment to be voted on is to do it before Standing Order 31 is triggered, because the government's motion under the standing order bars other amendments being moved. So the Speaker thinks he can finesse this by running the Labour amendment before the Government's motion and let all three major parties have their text voted on. The problem is that without triggering Order 31, if the Labour amendment passes, the original text and the government's motion never go through. Not a problem in theory because the government are going to vote down Labour's motion and put through their own immediately after, right? ...right? So the procedure, by exception, is now this: 1. Debate on the motion 2. Labour's amendment to the motion is voted on under standard procedural rules. 3. When* Labour's amendment is not agreed to, the government moves their amendment, which triggers Standing order 31. 4. Under Standing order 31, the original text of the SNP motion is voted on 5. The government's motion is voted on 6 The motion as amdended is voted on ...And then the government announces it's withdrawing its amendment (and I believe, quietly indicating that they're not going to oppose the labour amendment, which is why it passes by voice vote). That means Standing Order 31 will not be triggered, the SNP text will not be voted on. Labour's preferred text will get voted on first, and the SNP's text will get voted on only if the first vote on Labour's text fails, which is how it would work on a Labour opposition day. This is why the speakers are so salty in responses about the government withdrawing their amendment, it ruined the plan. But it only ruined the plan because the speakers tried to finagle parliamentary procedure to do something it isn't supposed to do. I agree that technically by the rules Labour have done nothing provably wrong, this is all on the Speaker and his Cunning Plan. Arguably the cause of this was the government wrecking the Cunning Plan. But there's an inescapable feeling that something rotten happened here.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2024 23:04
|
|
|
I think specifically with multiple instances of drama on the forums over the last year or two, the mods are very sensitive to posts about killing dogs. If the post was probed it means it was probably reported, and if the post was reported and then hadn't been probed, it would probably have generated a thread of the form "The UKMT needs to be shut down because it's regulars didn't see anything wrong with this post".
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2024 10:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 10:31 |
|
|
Jakabite posted:E: ^^^^what have I missed re: goons killing dogs? Is there a canine focused Jolyon running about It's nothing particularly spicy, just your usual modding drama. A discussion happens about dog attacks, someone who doesn't like dogs pipes up and makes some comment about actually or hypothetically killing a dog, it either goes unprobed or lightly probed, and then someone makes a SAD thread about whether the poster/thread deserves to be permabanned. Here's the most recent one: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4053316&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 I think most of the thread regulars and lurkers probably know that you're nothing like that (if anything when dog discussions come up you're firmly on the "dogs good" side), but if a SAD thread pops up some people can be determined to read things in the absolute worst possible light and "the UKMT manages itself" would be a hinderance rather than a help.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2024 10:52
|
|