It's a running joke that every Labour manifesto involves contemplating PR after the next election. This isn't even PR.
There is no perfect PR system -- heck, there is no perfect electoral system of any sort. Most people here will already know the implications of Arrow's theorem. AV is a lot closer to PR than what we have. You think we should sacrifice the good because it's not perfect?
Oh, don't be paranoid. I know this is the Internet but not everyone who disagrees with you has some covert agenda. "Astroturfer!!!"
Xest has already shown that the LDs have got some policy in which wouldn't have been there otherwise, and others including me have pointed out that the presence of the LDs in the coalition make it harder for the Conservatives to get some of the nastier policies through. Yet you don't respond to those, only repeating the complaint that there are no benefits. If it's not political smearing, why are you covering your eyes and going "la la la, I can't see them, they're not there". Incidentally, I know the difference between simply having an agenda and being an "astroturfer". Do you?
The problem is that the LDs entered a coalition with the Tories.
In other words, you hate the Tories so much that you would oppose any coalition with them. Fair enough, I can understand that. But don't try to pretend the coalition is other than it is in order to justify that position.
I wonder who grassroots LD supporters will flock to next election.
I don't know about grassroots, but I go to a folk club each week which is held at the local Liberal club, and chat to members at the bar. They don't like the outcome, but reckon it's the best available given the way the electorate voted and Labour's hostility to cooperating with them. I think they're right, and I expect much, though not all, of their grassroots support will feel the same.
Wait to see how the parliamentary vote for the referendum on electoral reform goes, if the fairly far right Tories rebel and vote against it, and Labour vote against it and the referendum doesn't hence get the go ahead, you can be sure the Lib Dems will split and the government will fall.
If Labour vote against it -- and I suspect they will -- then I think they'll be shooting themselves in the foot because it's been in their own manifesto for at least the last three elections. I think the backbench Conservatives will be easier to control, because few MPs want to bring down the government they are a part of, but if Labour go against their own manifesto then it will only take a few rebels to foul things up.
I don't know why some people seem to think the Lib Dems getting junior partner status in a coalition means we should expect to see near 100% of Lib Dem policies win through, that's utterly rediculous.
I doubt the poster you were replying to actually believes that. I've seen a lot of hardline Labour supporters feigning fury at LD "hypocrisy" for entering into a coalition that doesn't give them total control. I think he's one of them, and it's nothing but smear politics.
I'm sure they have an effect. The difference is that Labour and Conservative are dependent on corporate funding, the Liberal Democrats are not (mainly because they've never been able to raise significant amounts).
Trouble is that worldwide, politicians are relatively old people who know absolutely nothing about computers, the internet and whatever. They are often too old to have grown up with it.
That argument is getting old, too. I'm older than our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, and have been working with computers since my youth and have been online (via bulletin boards) since my college days. These things go back longer than the young guns realise, and if politicians don't understand them then there has to be another reason.
At very least you need an understanding of what normalisation gives you, particularly in terms of ensuring data consistency, before you should consider denormalization. I see all to many database "designers" bad-mouthing normalisation when i suspect they simply can't be bothered to normalise, so they go on not to bother thinking about data consistency either. Yes, there are cases where denormalization is an advantage, but there are a lot more cases where denormalization is laziness that leads to database problems.
No, FORTH is general purpose, even though it was developed for a particular domain (real-time control). The language extensibility means it's great for writing DSLs as long as security isn't an issue and you don't mind them being reverse Polish (in other words, DSLs for geeks working in god mode anyway), but it's hard to avoid whatever DSL you write being embedded within the general purpose language.
Anyway, Deep Thought was a computer and so would work in hex. Shakespeare got very close with "2B or not 2B, that is the question." (Closer than 4%, anyway).
It would seem to me, that anybody from Western Cultures that has an IQ over 100 would not want to live/work in a country like China because of its history of Human Rights violations and general intolerance for anti-state viewpoints.
If you are dumb enough not to know better I understand, but an intelligent person can surely see past the paycheck.
Why do you assume that all intelligent people are against human rights violations? The existence of the Evil Genius is at least credible. High IQ doesn't automatically make you a nice person.
In Japan they have a cool solution: the escalator ends up having two lines. The people on the left keep walking, and those on the right stand.
England too. There are even signs telling you to do that. But not if it's crowded. Then everybody stands because it's a better throughput than half standing, half walking (and they can't get everybody walking).
Speaking of stairs and escalators, England really needs to catch up on this one. When I was riding the train there I kept having little old ladies ask me to carry their luggage for them up the stairs. I can't imagine what wheelchaired people do.
They use the elevator (except they call it a lift because this is England). Seriously. Some stations don't have them yet, but most main stations do and the rest tend to get them as and when they are refurbished.
I don't think they consciously crib from the public domain. Well, not the good ones (who will credit the original if they do use it). It's just that there are only so many musical phrase length sequences of notes, and most of them sound terrible, so if you find something that sounds good the chances are somebody got there before you.
Apparently the usual defense is to identify some work already in the public domain that also sounds the same. The old joke about people coming out of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals whistling Puccini would actually be shrewd legal sense on Lloyd Webber's part if only Puccini had been dead a bit longer.
Didn't you see the "has to" in parentheses? That was to account for US. And as I recall (somebody will know how to check) that came late to the party, and the early three-letter TLDs were originally for the USA only. I certainly remember heated arguments over companies with no US presence using.com, with people arguing that they should use their own national TLDs. I'm sure I recollect that being part of the rationale for.int, another relatively recent addition and one of the few three-letter TLD's that I don't think was originally intended for US use.
That's why you get the three letter TLDs like.com and everybody else has to be satisfied with things like.co.uk and.co.cn. Same reason the UK is the only country that doesn't have the country name on its postage stamps, the USA is the only country that doesn't (have to) have its country identifier as its TLD.
If you want to say, "And I don't think a minority government would have lasted very long," then say so. What is your evidence that, on this occasion, a minority Tory government would have quickly disappeared?
What is your evidence that they wouldn't? Those negotiating the coalition had to do so on the best assumptions that they could. If pliticians could predict the future with certainty then their job would be a lot easier (although they'd probably all quit it and start playing the National Lottery instead).
Absolute time is a poor indicator. You'd have to have been in the talks to know whether any further progress was possible.
Nonsense - time is always available as a tool in diplomacy. Until time has been exhausted by some set of appropriate measures, further efforts at negotiation are worthwhile.
I didn't say that time wasn't available, I said that neither of us has any way of knowing whether it would have done any good. There were no external factors that would have strictly exhausted the time available. Had the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats done nothing, Labour would simply have remained in power -- and I'm guessing that it's because that didn't happen that you're upset. In practice, the patience of the markets was a limiting but hard to predict factor; they had to come to a resolution before the uncertainty caused a total collapse of the economy, but they couldn't tell when that was going to happen so they had to play safe.
Since WW2 there has before 2010 been one hung parliament in the UK
Since WW2 before 2010 there have been three hung parliaments. If you're going to give public lectures it would be as well to get your facts right.
What are you talking about? Had the Tories formed a minority government, the LD MPs would have had a (more) free vote. As it is, the LDs are reined in by the Clegg-Cameron duet.
And how long would have a minority government lasted?
Read again what I said: The only possible advantage of this coalition is a tempering of more extreme Tories, i.e. those who may rock the boat in favour of more extreme Conversativism in the longer term.
A significant advantage, and the best that could be got under the circumstances.
Any extreme policies wouldn't have actually got through on a minority government.
No, they would have had to have waited until the minority government collapsed at which point it was as near to certainty as elections ever are that the Conservatives would have got an absolute majority.
But what we do have instead is lots of standard issue Conservative policies with no opposition.
Which is pretty much what the electorate voted for -- the Conservatives did get the largest proportion of the vote. If you don't like it, blame the electorate, not those trying to make the best of it. One doesn't go into an election planning to form an effective opposition, one goes in to form a government. If forming an effective opposition were so important then the Conservative and Labour parties could have stood back and let the LDs form a government. They'd have had a really strong opposition.
Absolute time spent is the most glaring piece of evidence. I've spent longer helping two dogs negotiate peace.
Absolute time is a poor indicator. You'd have to have been in the talks to know whether any further progress was possible.
Assuming that the alternative was forcing another election.
The options available to the LDs were:
Form a coalition and have at least a little influence
Form a supply and confidence agreement, leading to an unstable government and an early election
Not enter into any agreement, leading to an unstable minority government and an early election
(Labour blocked the rainbow coalition, so that wasn't an option)
Assuming that the amount of money spent on another campaign would make the difference.
Lord Ashcroft seems convinced.
Assuming that a lower profile LD would result in LD voters flocking to Tories rather than Labour.
It's unlikely to be a matter of LD voters flocking anywhere, and more lilely to be a matter of turnout. And the general tendency in such circumstances is usually a swing to whatever is least likely to result in another hung parliament, ie, towards whoever got the biggest share of the vote first time around. No, none of it is certain, but the LDs will have been working on the reasonable expectation that failure to form a coalition would have led in short order to a Conservative majority government.
Yet the LD coalition government has done precisely that. Perhaps you should be more careful when reading manifestos in order to see what principles the Party is more willing to give up.
Strangely, none of the manifestos included that.
The Lib Dems were not forced into forming a coalition with anyone.
Indeed. Had they not, we would almost certainly have a Conservative government now, with no tempering of the more extreme Conservative policies. It looks to me as if they did the right thing there, but maybe you wanted to see those more extreme Conservative policies in force?
The Lib Dems had the opportunity to try much harder to require various policies as a condition of coalition, yet they required almost nothing.
Really? How do you know they didn't try as had as they could? They were in a weak position because they and the Conservatives both knew that only the Conservatives could afford to run another election campaign if no government could have been formed.
Unless Labour recovers on less Blairite lines, we may now enjoy no credible opposition in the House of Commons.
True, but you can hardly blame those in government for the opposition being useless.
You pasted a quote from the manifesto. I discussed what the language of the quote actually means.
Except that had you already read the manifesto at the time you made your comments you would have known that that was not what the language actually meant: although a grammar-Nazi reading could find your interpretation in there the remainder of the text plainly contradicted that reading. And even Fowler (2nd edition), while recognising that your reading of the which/that difference is the better one, acknowledges that using the terms the other way around isn't necessarily an error.
As for what we actually get, a lot of people seem to be forgetting that the LibDems did not win the election and we don't have a LibDem government. What they can actually get past the Tories is inevetably limited.
Restore civil liberties because civil liberties are so precious to the British people,
i.e. the classical liberty of freedom of expression (deployed as speech, assembly, photography etc., all coming under the same principle); instead quite specifically aiming to:
Restore only those civil liberties which are somehow identified as "precious" to the British people.
This has further degenerated to:
Consider those civil liberties which a small unrepresentative set of Internet lurkers with too much time on their hands (who may not even be eligible British voters) want to babble about.
Which proves that you haven't actually read the manifesto and are just trolling. Freedom of speech and assembly are specifically addressed, and the problems with photography are coming about because of abuse of anti-terrorist legislation which is also specifically addressed. How much of that they can actually get past the Conservatives is questionable (although quite a bit of that was in the Conservative manifesto too) but all the things you say are not there actually are there. Grammar Nazis get it wrong again.
Some people are concerned that in finely balanced life/death situations medical intervention could be more geared to preserving valuable organs than to preserving of life.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a running joke that every Labour manifesto involves contemplating PR after the next election. This isn't even PR.
There is no perfect PR system -- heck, there is no perfect electoral system of any sort. Most people here will already know the implications of Arrow's theorem. AV is a lot closer to PR than what we have. You think we should sacrifice the good because it's not perfect?
Oh, don't be paranoid. I know this is the Internet but not everyone who disagrees with you has some covert agenda. "Astroturfer!!!"
Xest has already shown that the LDs have got some policy in which wouldn't have been there otherwise, and others including me have pointed out that the presence of the LDs in the coalition make it harder for the Conservatives to get some of the nastier policies through. Yet you don't respond to those, only repeating the complaint that there are no benefits. If it's not political smearing, why are you covering your eyes and going "la la la, I can't see them, they're not there". Incidentally, I know the difference between simply having an agenda and being an "astroturfer". Do you?
The problem is that the LDs entered a coalition with the Tories.
In other words, you hate the Tories so much that you would oppose any coalition with them. Fair enough, I can understand that. But don't try to pretend the coalition is other than it is in order to justify that position.
I wonder who grassroots LD supporters will flock to next election.
I don't know about grassroots, but I go to a folk club each week which is held at the local Liberal club, and chat to members at the bar. They don't like the outcome, but reckon it's the best available given the way the electorate voted and Labour's hostility to cooperating with them. I think they're right, and I expect much, though not all, of their grassroots support will feel the same.
Wait to see how the parliamentary vote for the referendum on electoral reform goes, if the fairly far right Tories rebel and vote against it, and Labour vote against it and the referendum doesn't hence get the go ahead, you can be sure the Lib Dems will split and the government will fall.
If Labour vote against it -- and I suspect they will -- then I think they'll be shooting themselves in the foot because it's been in their own manifesto for at least the last three elections. I think the backbench Conservatives will be easier to control, because few MPs want to bring down the government they are a part of, but if Labour go against their own manifesto then it will only take a few rebels to foul things up.
I don't know why some people seem to think the Lib Dems getting junior partner status in a coalition means we should expect to see near 100% of Lib Dem policies win through, that's utterly rediculous.
I doubt the poster you were replying to actually believes that. I've seen a lot of hardline Labour supporters feigning fury at LD "hypocrisy" for entering into a coalition that doesn't give them total control. I think he's one of them, and it's nothing but smear politics.
I'm sure they have an effect. The difference is that Labour and Conservative are dependent on corporate funding, the Liberal Democrats are not (mainly because they've never been able to raise significant amounts).
Trouble is that worldwide, politicians are relatively old people who know absolutely nothing about computers, the internet and whatever. They are often too old to have grown up with it.
That argument is getting old, too. I'm older than our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, and have been working with computers since my youth and have been online (via bulletin boards) since my college days. These things go back longer than the young guns realise, and if politicians don't understand them then there has to be another reason.
At very least you need an understanding of what normalisation gives you, particularly in terms of ensuring data consistency, before you should consider denormalization. I see all to many database "designers" bad-mouthing normalisation when i suspect they simply can't be bothered to normalise, so they go on not to bother thinking about data consistency either. Yes, there are cases where denormalization is an advantage, but there are a lot more cases where denormalization is laziness that leads to database problems.
We know what the answer is.
No, FORTH is general purpose, even though it was developed for a particular domain (real-time control). The language extensibility means it's great for writing DSLs as long as security isn't an issue and you don't mind them being reverse Polish (in other words, DSLs for geeks working in god mode anyway), but it's hard to avoid whatever DSL you write being embedded within the general purpose language.
Anyway, Deep Thought was a computer and so would work in hex. Shakespeare got very close with "2B or not 2B, that is the question." (Closer than 4%, anyway).
"So tell me: what unique qualities do you think you can bring to the job of torturer?"
It would seem to me, that anybody from Western Cultures that has an IQ over 100 would not want to live/work in a country like China because of its history of Human Rights violations and general intolerance for anti-state viewpoints.
If you are dumb enough not to know better I understand, but an intelligent person can surely see past the paycheck.
Why do you assume that all intelligent people are against human rights violations? The existence of the Evil Genius is at least credible. High IQ doesn't automatically make you a nice person.
So when they want their projects to be fucked, they'll be in touch.
If they're allowed to survive. High IQ doesn't necessarily correlate with political shrewdness, and can be seen as a threat.
Say that to yourself when it's a hundred degrees out and your boobs, ass, and crotch are drenched in sweat.
If I had boobs to be drenched in sweat then I'd know it was time to take some exercise!
In Japan they have a cool solution: the escalator ends up having two lines. The people on the left keep walking, and those on the right stand.
England too. There are even signs telling you to do that. But not if it's crowded. Then everybody stands because it's a better throughput than half standing, half walking (and they can't get everybody walking).
Speaking of stairs and escalators, England really needs to catch up on this one. When I was riding the train there I kept having little old ladies ask me to carry their luggage for them up the stairs. I can't imagine what wheelchaired people do.
They use the elevator (except they call it a lift because this is England). Seriously. Some stations don't have them yet, but most main stations do and the rest tend to get them as and when they are refurbished.
I don't think they consciously crib from the public domain. Well, not the good ones (who will credit the original if they do use it). It's just that there are only so many musical phrase length sequences of notes, and most of them sound terrible, so if you find something that sounds good the chances are somebody got there before you.
Apparently the usual defense is to identify some work already in the public domain that also sounds the same. The old joke about people coming out of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals whistling Puccini would actually be shrewd legal sense on Lloyd Webber's part if only Puccini had been dead a bit longer.
So why does .us exist?
IN any case .com etc. are supposed to be global generic tlds and used as such. British postage stamps are clearly meant to be British.
How long has .us existed? I don't see many .gov.us addresses, and although I see plenty of .co.us addresses the .co stands for Colorado, not company.
Didn't you see the "has to" in parentheses? That was to account for US. And as I recall (somebody will know how to check) that came late to the party, and the early three-letter TLDs were originally for the USA only. I certainly remember heated arguments over companies with no US presence using .com, with people arguing that they should use their own national TLDs. I'm sure I recollect that being part of the rationale for .int, another relatively recent addition and one of the few three-letter TLD's that I don't think was originally intended for US use.
That's why you get the three letter TLDs like .com and everybody else has to be satisfied with things like .co.uk and .co.cn. Same reason the UK is the only country that doesn't have the country name on its postage stamps, the USA is the only country that doesn't (have to) have its country identifier as its TLD.
If you want to say, "And I don't think a minority government would have lasted very long," then say so. What is your evidence that, on this occasion, a minority Tory government would have quickly disappeared?
What is your evidence that they wouldn't? Those negotiating the coalition had to do so on the best assumptions that they could. If pliticians could predict the future with certainty then their job would be a lot easier (although they'd probably all quit it and start playing the National Lottery instead).
Absolute time is a poor indicator. You'd have to have been in the talks to know whether any further progress was possible.
Nonsense - time is always available as a tool in diplomacy. Until time has been exhausted by some set of appropriate measures, further efforts at negotiation are worthwhile.
I didn't say that time wasn't available, I said that neither of us has any way of knowing whether it would have done any good. There were no external factors that would have strictly exhausted the time available. Had the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats done nothing, Labour would simply have remained in power -- and I'm guessing that it's because that didn't happen that you're upset. In practice, the patience of the markets was a limiting but hard to predict factor; they had to come to a resolution before the uncertainty caused a total collapse of the economy, but they couldn't tell when that was going to happen so they had to play safe.
Since WW2 there has before 2010 been one hung parliament in the UK
Since WW2 before 2010 there have been three hung parliaments. If you're going to give public lectures it would be as well to get your facts right.
What are you talking about? Had the Tories formed a minority government, the LD MPs would have had a (more) free vote. As it is, the LDs are reined in by the Clegg-Cameron duet.
And how long would have a minority government lasted?
Read again what I said: The only possible advantage of this coalition is a tempering of more extreme Tories, i.e. those who may rock the boat in favour of more extreme Conversativism in the longer term.
A significant advantage, and the best that could be got under the circumstances.
Any extreme policies wouldn't have actually got through on a minority government.
No, they would have had to have waited until the minority government collapsed at which point it was as near to certainty as elections ever are that the Conservatives would have got an absolute majority.
But what we do have instead is lots of standard issue Conservative policies with no opposition.
Which is pretty much what the electorate voted for -- the Conservatives did get the largest proportion of the vote. If you don't like it, blame the electorate, not those trying to make the best of it. One doesn't go into an election planning to form an effective opposition, one goes in to form a government. If forming an effective opposition were so important then the Conservative and Labour parties could have stood back and let the LDs form a government. They'd have had a really strong opposition.
Absolute time spent is the most glaring piece of evidence. I've spent longer helping two dogs negotiate peace.
Absolute time is a poor indicator. You'd have to have been in the talks to know whether any further progress was possible.
Assuming that the alternative was forcing another election.
The options available to the LDs were:
(Labour blocked the rainbow coalition, so that wasn't an option)
Assuming that the amount of money spent on another campaign would make the difference.
Lord Ashcroft seems convinced.
Assuming that a lower profile LD would result in LD voters flocking to Tories rather than Labour.
It's unlikely to be a matter of LD voters flocking anywhere, and more lilely to be a matter of turnout. And the general tendency in such circumstances is usually a swing to whatever is least likely to result in another hung parliament, ie, towards whoever got the biggest share of the vote first time around. No, none of it is certain, but the LDs will have been working on the reasonable expectation that failure to form a coalition would have led in short order to a Conservative majority government.
Yet the LD coalition government has done precisely that. Perhaps you should be more careful when reading manifestos in order to see what principles the Party is more willing to give up.
Strangely, none of the manifestos included that.
The Lib Dems were not forced into forming a coalition with anyone.
Indeed. Had they not, we would almost certainly have a Conservative government now, with no tempering of the more extreme Conservative policies. It looks to me as if they did the right thing there, but maybe you wanted to see those more extreme Conservative policies in force?
The Lib Dems had the opportunity to try much harder to require various policies as a condition of coalition, yet they required almost nothing.
Really? How do you know they didn't try as had as they could? They were in a weak position because they and the Conservatives both knew that only the Conservatives could afford to run another election campaign if no government could have been formed.
Unless Labour recovers on less Blairite lines, we may now enjoy no credible opposition in the House of Commons.
True, but you can hardly blame those in government for the opposition being useless.
You pasted a quote from the manifesto. I discussed what the language of the quote actually means.
Except that had you already read the manifesto at the time you made your comments you would have known that that was not what the language actually meant: although a grammar-Nazi reading could find your interpretation in there the remainder of the text plainly contradicted that reading. And even Fowler (2nd edition), while recognising that your reading of the which/that difference is the better one, acknowledges that using the terms the other way around isn't necessarily an error.
As for what we actually get, a lot of people seem to be forgetting that the LibDems did not win the election and we don't have a LibDem government. What they can actually get past the Tories is inevetably limited.
And, as always, grammar nazism has its place. In choosing "that" rather than "which", the writer has not meant:
i.e. the classical liberty of freedom of expression (deployed as speech, assembly, photography etc., all coming under the same principle); instead quite specifically aiming to:
This has further degenerated to:
Which proves that you haven't actually read the manifesto and are just trolling. Freedom of speech and assembly are specifically addressed, and the problems with photography are coming about because of abuse of anti-terrorist legislation which is also specifically addressed. How much of that they can actually get past the Conservatives is questionable (although quite a bit of that was in the Conservative manifesto too) but all the things you say are not there actually are there. Grammar Nazis get it wrong again.
Some people are concerned that in finely balanced life/death situations medical intervention could be more geared to preserving valuable organs than to preserving of life.