Don't disagree with the rest of what you say, but the link you're making between sterling and debt is complete drivel. It was something Salmond plastered together when he started getting desperate and is as incorrect as Farage and co's £350mill claims. It was broadly debunked at the time, so I'm amazed anyone would still parrot it.
The fact is that debt and currency are two separate things, a debt is expressed in a currency, but is not in any way linked to that currency. The international norm for national splits is that each departing element of a nation gets a population based proportion of both a nations assets and it's debts. It doesn't matter what Scotland would choose as it's new currency, it still has to take a population share of the UK's debt. This can change but it's based on mutual agreement, and typically involves one country giving up some assets to the other in return for an equivalent reduction in debt burden, so for example, Scotland might decide it doesn't need 24 Eurofighters or whatever, and so decides to let rUK keep 12 of them in return for an equivalent reduction in debt equal to the cost of those 12 Eurofighters. There isn't however enough assets that Scotland could realistically give up to even remotely approach a complete mitigation of it's proportional debt allocation as you're suggesting.
The problem with your argument is this line:
"If Scotland leaves Sterling, it will only have to retain its own debts."
It doesn't actually make any sense, Scotland doesn't have any independent debts because it's not an independent country. Whilst it has devolution, that's ultimately just giving it control of a proportion of the UK's pot, but it's still ultimately the same pot as the UK as a whole. Scotland's debts ARE the UK's debts because Scotland is part of the UK, hence, why, if there was a split, Scotland's share would need to be calculated, and that would be done on the international norm of population proportion.
It would make absolutely no sense if a country could say, get a parent country to blow billions on defence of it, getting into debt in the process, and then declare independence, but refusing to accept that it benefitted from that debt. No international court would ever back that viewpoint because it just doesn't make any kind of sense for a splitting country to completely offload it's costs onto the other half. Scotland cannot for example argue that it did not benefit from the bank bailouts which contributed to national debt when one of the biggest bailouts at £202bn was RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland).
I actually think it would make sense for Scotland to become independent at this point and as someone that was against it in 2014, I'm wholly for it now. Scotland is too different to the rest of the UK and I can fully understand why it wouldn't want to be associated with the ignorant, bigoted, isolationist, little Englander view that has now consumed England, but that doesn't change the fact that if they do get independence that they'd have to accept their fair share of debt, no amount of nonsense talk like pretending Scottish debt is somehow separate to British debt (it isn't) or economically illiterately suggesting there is some kind of link between currency and debt (there isn't).
If nothing else, were Scotland to refuse to service their share of British debt upon independence then the rUK would refuse to acknowledge it also (as it would not be assigned to them anyway), such that the credit ratings firms would class Scotland to have defaulted. That's really not a good position to be in as a newly independent nation that needs to borrow to build up the necessary state institutions to thrive independently.
No matter what wishful thinking Salmond peddled when he got desperate, it does not change the reality of international economics. I agree though, I don't think it would matter, who would want Sterling no anyway? The Euro will far and away be a better bet over the next few decades now as Europe sorts it's problems out whilst the UK hasn't even begun with it's self-inflicted harm.
"Meanwhile, having annoyed the Chinese, Theresa May is now apparently trying to improve relations with Russia which, while it definitely needs to happen in its own right, doesn't exactly scan well in connection with alienating the Chinese the week prior."
Are you surprised? As leaders, both Putin and May are basically unelected dictators whatever shame of a democracy they profess to be legitamised by. No one voted in a democratic election of the populace for May to be PM. If she wants legitimacy she'll have to call elections, otherwise anything she does should frankly be deemed illegitimate if we wish to continue to profess to be a democracy. It's bad enough that FPTP allows parties to obtain 100% of power with only 38% of popular support, but the fact that internal party politics can lead to a completely different PM, with completely different political goals, ideas, and priorities than that which was elected is unacceptable.
Actually what you say and what TFA actually says rings true, the truly older workers (50+) I work with are happy with shit software, whereas the younger i.e. 40 get pissed off at the older guys trying to shovel shit out the door onto our customers.
So I think you're probably right, it's just that millennials have higher standard expectations in their software than much older people in the industry who are happy to try and get away with just peddling shit until their pension comes through.
Yes exactly, both the US and Russia are in the wrong on that sort of issue. The US doing it doesn't act as justification for anyone else to, quite the opposite, it highlights why no one should do it given how badly it fucked the region up. The US has been heavily criticised for it since it did so, and so should Russia be.
Given his subsequent response to me, it's pretty clear the guy is either a full on Kremlin shill, or a Trump supporting crackpot. Either way his understanding of geopolitics pertaining to Russia is slanted entirely towards the Kremlin and then some.
This explains why he made such a nonsensical statement as to pretend Russia air intrusions aren't happening. He said it himself, sovereign territory pertaining to airways is 12 miles from the coast. The world is a big place, that leaves a lot of room for Russia to NOT fly it's military aircraft illegaly, provocatively, and dangeorusly through the sovereign territory of other states. His entire argument seems to be based on the suggestion that Russia's military is apparently so inept that it can't fly a plane through a 3 mile gap.
The fact that you believe Crimea was already Russian, and hence the annexation of it was not the result of hostile Russian invasion, even though the Russian state infrastructure itself admits that this is exactly what it did highlights the fact that you simply cannot even remotely be taken seriously on this topic.
Not that that wasn't obvious when you keep repeating the assertion that flying a small fighter jet through a 3 mile gap is even remotely difficult.
It's pretty clear that you're a batshit Putin loving shill, though ironically you're so vehemently pro-Russian that you're refusing to accept even things Putin has admitted. You're justification for it all is that the US has done wrong.
It doesn't matter what the US has done, that's really irrelevant, this discussion isn't about the US aggression, and US aggression doesn't make it okay for Russia to also act as an aggressor. They're both wrong.
You're literally parroting the Russia Today state propaganda line with an added does of batshit thrown on top, you literally couldn't be more biased about the situation if you tried. When you can't even admit basic facts, that even the people you're defending admit then your credibility is completely and utterly gone.
The Harrier was always a notoriously difficult to fly, and when I saw the F-35B in hover the other week one thing that was incredibly obvious to me is how perfectly motionless it could hover compared to the Harrier which required far greater human intervention to keep steady. Watching it it just looked like a freeze frame in it's complete stillness so regardless of actual automatic landing the fly by wire systems making constant, invisible to the naked eye adjustments to keep it still. This alone made it an impressive sight.
But ultimately those things are still relatively easy to code in principle, where we still have a massive deficiency is in aforementioned IT security - how do you prevent a drone being hijacked, or disabled by some other electronic warfare attack? Even the best of the best in the world of IT security sometimes can't even keep a basic web server on the internet against malicious private individuals let alone nation states so given that it seems odd to think anyone would seriously believe we can magically get this right with drones right now to make them trustworthy enough to leave in autonomous mode immune to electronic attack. Similarly it's also still a massive leap from automatic landing which has been around for decades (so not entirely surprising it's evolved) to go to something that can do full mission, regardless of any unexpected events that turn up and that can dogfight in a constantly changing battle.
Yes autonomous drones are certainly the future of warfare, but right now all current and projected drones are still just fodder to a human pilot, we're still so far off them being a better alternative to manned fighters. I think there's at least this or one more generation of fighters to go before AI can realistically take over. The F-35 is safe long enough to be able to justify 5th gen still being manned.
But where are these drones that make the F-35 obsolete currently or in the next decade or two?
You're still missing the point that those drones don't actually exist and aren't even close to ready. There's not even any signed off programme to develop such an aircraft for the military, and as we've seen with aircraft like the F-35 itself it can typically take two decades for such programmes to reach combat anyway. On this basis alone the F-35 has at very least 20 usable years, and that's based on the almost certainly incorrect assumption that the F-35 wont evolve as such drones are developed, and that the F-35 wont be the one that's protected by drones, as opposed to attacked by them.
It's not that you're inherently wrong in what you say, I agree with your points in principle, it's just that they're not relevant right now - they might be in 20 - 30 years.
I'm amazed someone claiming they follow this news carefully isn't aware of the countless infringements. They're relatively regular and, well documented:
The fact is that Russia is a hostile nation, it's invaded Ukraine, and it's invaded Georgia, it can't pretend it's an innocent bystander that's merely hard done by as you're implying it is.
Russian aircraft are allowed to fly over this airspace if they obtain permission. However when a military aircraft, many of which are armed, enters foreign airspace unannounced, and typically with transponders off as is the case in most these incursions, then that can only be seen as a provocative act.
Russia isn't the only nation that does this, the US does it too in Asia, but two wrongs don't make a right. You're arguing that no harm may come of a Russian aircraft entering sovereign airspace of other nations, in your view, does that remain true even when they actually launch weapons as in Ukraine and Georgia? Given that they have done this, do you seriously still think it's a sensible argument to suggest that armed Russian aircraft entering airspace unannounced should always be considered benign?
It sounds like you're making an awful lot of excuses for Russia over things that simply cannot be excused. The idea that Russian pilots can't navigate a 5km gap making incursion into Finnish or Estonian airspace with armed warplanes with transponders off acceptable is utterly laughable, and pointing out that you can't pass through the English channel without infringing British or French airspace is relevant why? you also can't pass over Moscow without infringing Russian airspace, so what? The fact that the channel is joint sovereign British/French air space is entirely meaningless other than to distract from the fact Russia is a persistent and aggressive violator of sovereign airspace.
There is genuinely no issue with Russian aircraft sticking to international airspace, avoiding civilian airline routes, or announcing routes and flying with transponders on. There's not even any problem with it passing through sovereign airspace of other nations with permission. But that's not what's happening is it? Russia is violating sovereign airspace proper with armed aircraft, flying transponders off, and flying in civilian flight paths unannounced and outside the control and hence potential awareness of air traffic control. It's doing this in the context having recently used such subversive tactics of pretending to be not Russian military to annex sovereign territory of another nation.
Nothing about the F-35 precludes development of drones though, and the West already seems to be leading the way on that front too. There's no reason the F-35 couldn't in itself be the basis of a drone.
We still have a long way to go in terms of things like AI, and IT security before we can realistically replace manned fighter fleets - I agree we'll get there at some point and that yes, then manned fighters will become obsolete, but that doesn't mean the F-35 doesn't have a purpose over the next decade, or two, or three. No opponent has, or will have in the immediate future a drone that can make an F-35 irrelevant, Russia for example is struggling to even get a 5th gen manned fighter project off the ground even with India's cooperation and financing (the PAK-FA is all but cancelled at this point - 12 aircraft on order by Russia is not a succesful delivery) let alone an autonomous 5th gen fighter that meets the AI and security challenges such a project faces. China has more of a chance, but it's still got some way to go, and even it's attempts at a 5th gen fighter are largely based off stolen IP from the West, rather than the kind of original development and innovation that you need to create something completely new like a fully autonomous drone that makes manned fighters like the F-35 wholly irrelevant.
The closest thing at the moment is an AI in a simulator in the West, but this is really not all that far off a video game AI - there's still an insane amount of work to do to translate that into a real drone in the sky that both works in the world of real physics rather than merely simulated physics, and that is secure enough to be sent over enemy airspace without risk of being hijacked.
People always say this but the reality is no one knows how global security is going to change through the lifetime of an aircraft and aircraft themselves are evolved to deal with new and emerging threats. People said the same about Europe's Eurofighter Typhoon 5 years ago, and yet it's already having to intercept 4.5th Gen Russian fighters that are infringing European airspace in the Baltic.
In many ways though it kind of works like nuclear deterrents and MAD; in large part the reason we don't have to send things like F-22s up against Su-37s is precisely because Russia knows if it forces such a confrontation it'll lose. The very fact we have the qualitative edge is in itself a reason for not having to use it. If we ditch it because we believe we don't need it, then we're more likely to find that we need it, only then we wont have it and we'll have already lost.
Yes, but Virgin Media does not have any 1.6Gbps+ offering, which is what you're claiming you have. For that you'd have to go to BT because Virgin Media does not commission lines of that speed to individuals.
Except you can. In fact, you can't even use the feature without explicitly consenting for this information to be collected and sent to Microsoft, and even if you do this you can later disable it at any point, and then on top of that once it's disabled you can actually delete all collected data to date.
Of course, you could (and probably will) theorise they do it anyway, but given the amount of times they explicitly give the users choice and require consent they'd be slaughtered by the likes of the EU if they did that because they'd be explicitly lying to customers and breaking data protection law as a result. It just isn't worth billions of dollars of fines.
So yeah, unfortunately this isn't a good story to throw out the old Microsoft hatred in, because they've actually done a pretty good honest job of data collection in terms of this feature. If anything this is an example of good practice, requiring explicit opt-in, allowing any-time opt-out, and allowing subsequent deletion of stored data to date.
For which we have no way of linking the results to your actual connection. That link could be to anyone's results, or if they're you're results we have absolutely no evidence that they're from your connection. In other words, the link is entirely meaningless.
"Like I'm going to complain if it's slightly more."
It's not just slightly more, it's 1.4Gbps more.
"Anyone sensible these days referring to Internet connection speeds are talking about the speeds they can get on the Internet."
You don't seem to grasp this topic. The speed you're claiming to get on the internet, i.e. 203Mb/s is equivalent to a 1.6Gbps connection. The speed result you've given doesn't even remotely match your claimed connection speed, it's literally over an order of magnitude faster than the speed you're claiming you have, that is, the internet speed test results you're showing do not even remotely match the connection you claim to have, they far and away exceed it, well beyond the speed of any connection available to consumers in the UK. If you're trying to complain that this site is using the terms Mbps and Mb/s interchangeable then you're simply lying, because, thanks to the fact the site is public, it was trivial for me to run the test and confirm that it does in fact use the terms correctly, which you are not doing. You therefore need to either:
1) Admit you're lying, and that this isn't your speed test
or
2) Change your claim to pretend you have a 1.6Gbps connection
"But if you want to know more about the Virgin Media aspect, I believe it's using EuroDOCSIS v3.0 currently, there is a nice little table on Wikipedia showing the connection through-puts on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..."
Ironically this entirely disproves your whole argument because even with the maximum channel configuration in that link, you still couldn't quite achieve the connection speed you claim to have from your link.
I suggest next time you try and fake your connection speed as being 200Mbps you look for a speed test of just short of 25Mb/s, then it'll actually make sense, but right now you're showing a speed test for a connection that no consumer in the UK can get and that isn't even available as any standard business package, it'd require a specially commissioned line from BT, which, given your apparent lack of understanding of the difference between Mbps and Mb/s it's pretty clear you'd have no idea what to ask for to acquire anyway, much less before you manage to find the necessary hundreds of thousands, likely millions of pounds to get the line installed and commissioned. Virgin don't even have the capacity to provide such a connection.
I was a bit surprised when I read the thread that someone would accuse you of lying, it seemed a bit odd and I wasn't aware you're a person that would be considered to be a serial liar. Given the fact you've now utterly destroyed your own case by providing "evidence" that isn't, I'm saddened to see that whoever it is that declared you a liar does in fact seem to be right. It seems an incredibly odd thing to lie about, but I assume you must have some insecurity issues or similar that cause you to do it, but whatever, I'm not your psychiatrist. I'd just suggest you either figure out what motivates you to lie, and stop it, or if you must persist in lying, to actually understand the topic well enough to actually pull it off in future.
"While I thoroughly agree with your post - your choice of a 'good' third choice was terrible."
I don't see how this can realistically be blamed on Churchill, it was an inherited problem, and Britain was in the midst of war with barely enough resources to feed it's own population. What exactly could he have even done by that point? India was already defacto out of British rule by that point anyway because it was a condition of India's support for Britain in the war, hence why a mere 4 years later they were able to transition to full independence.
Do I think Churchill was perfect? No, his government after all was responsible for the treatment of Turing and Turing's resultant death. But Churchill did a lot of incredibly good things as well, the European Court of Human Rights being an obvious example, but his efforts post-war were what led directly, and indirectly to things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, the EU and so on and so forth - institutions he either led creation of, or created the environment in which such institutions could be created have created decades of European stability, and given justice to and protected the human rights of millions.
If you judge him by the standards of the time he was far and away about the most progressive leader going. Of course, standards at the time were pretty poor sure, but it's still a night and day choice between Churchill, Stalin and Hitler - declaring him one of the worst leaders in history is rather over the top hyperbole, you're effectively basing that on making him guilty of inaction in not pulling a magic trick to resolve a problem he did not cause and could not realistically resolve, and ignoring the fact that the ideas he had and institutions he created are what have led to the stability and success of the modern Western world. This is something that is all too well being eroded as modern leaders regularly declare things like human rights as bad, or try and shout down the international criminal court because it dares to try and tackle war criminals and so forth. Churchill sought to create structures and institutions that would prevent or minimise the likelihood of the atrocities of World War II ever coming to the fore on that scale again, and to bring justice when they do happen. As much as modern world leaders are now fighting back against that, he has to date, been completely successful, and so if you do blame those 3 million Indian deaths on him you must also credit him with the 100s of millions of lives he's saved both in helping to push an end to the war, and with the prevention of further instability preventing further wars and war crimes since. You cannot simply pick some indirect problem and blame it on him without also accepting the other indirect good things.
Because the reality is numerous studies (well, those from impartial organisations) have shown immigration is of net economic benefit to the UK, and not one single prime minister would ever be willing to create a situation where we go into recession because we've decided to cripple a number of industries just because of a bunch of blame gaming.
Migration to the UK was already controllable for migrants coming from outside the EU, and we already had a points system for those people, and yet, more people still migrate from outside the EU than inside, despite the propaganda meaning that even where we could control immigration we can't and wont. IIRC the most recent figures showed something like 272,000 migrants from outside the EU last year, but only about 236,000 from inside. If we really wanted to we could've cut immigration in half by just banning migration from non-EU sources already, but we don't and wont, because we need things like scientists, doctors, nurses, teachers, fruit pickers, and so on and so forth because no one here wants to or can do those jobs.
This is precisely why so many top Brexiters fled with their tails between their legs when they won the vote - populism is such an easy politics to get people onside because humans mostly appear to love being angry, so pick something to get them angry at and they'll rally around you. The difficult bit is if you win you then have to somehow square your populist lies and blame gaming with reality - this is also the problem we now have by way of increased racism in the UK. Politicians like Farage put so much effort into blame gaming and demonising minorities that hate crime is massively up, and an MP even got killed in the run up to the referendum.
Note that I'm not trying to generalise here, migrants are not a net economic benefit to every country - the number of Syrian migrants seen in some European states and the lack of the lack of suitable jobs for them, as well as migration into the US do result in net costs, it's just simply not true of Britain where they're net contributors.
Of course there are more than economic arguments, talk of integration (though I don't buy those personally - violent football hooligans born and bred in Britain also don't integrate, it's not a migrant specific thing, some people are just assholes), but economics is at the core of a politician, particularly a prime minister's calculations. No PM will ever put themselves in a position where they have say "Guys! I fixed the immigration problem, but yeah, your grandma died because we ran out of nurses, oh and taxes are going to have to go up to make up the shortfall in income to pay the police too. We're also out of carrots for Christmas this year, no one to go and pick them.".
Technically though yes, as an island, there's nothing to stop us from physically locking down our country as such, though even then people will smuggle across to some degree.
"So yes, getting things done in the U.S. system is harder, and it's easier for a few states to block legislation. That doesn't mean the U.S. system has greater legitimacy, quite the opposite. The state governments are barely accountable for their actions, and even a party with strong popular support can fail to get its legislation passed thanks to the byzantine electoral system."
I think you have a rose tinted view of the UK's electoral system if you genuinely believe it leads to greater accountability. Let's be clear here, the ruling party has 100% of the power in the UK despite only representing 37% of the voting electorate in this parliament, worse though, party leaders determine the direction of the country and are typically the figurehead that people vote for, and as such when there is a handover in this case, the country can be pushed in a direction that is completely against the will of the people. Theresa May now has the option to take the country in whatever direction she wants for 4 years despite having no democratic mandate to do so, beyond on one simple point, that we should leave the EU but with no definition of when or how.
The UK would be better if it had proportional representation, but it doesn't, due to first past the post, the UK's electoral system nearly always turns out what can be best described as minority backed dictatorship as the British system almost never turns out a party backed by a majority, or a coalition backed by a combined majority. The last government was the first exception in a hundred years where we had a coalition that actually represented a compromise goverment covering over 50% of the population's votes.
The idea of our system is that it leaves us with local representatives, but even this is broken and is in itself the source of the problem - at local level the representatives can be even less representative, in some constituencies a represented is elected with less than 25% of local support, this absurd situation means that someone who is meant to represent his local region is actually opposed by over 75% of the people that live there. If those 75% are liberal and support gay married, whereas the other 25% are an organised church loving, gay hating minority, then that representative may vote in a manner that the vast majority of his constituents are firmly opposed to.
Germany is one of the better examples of governance in the world. Picking between the UK and US electoral systems is like narrowing yourself to a choice between Stalin and Hitler as your leader when you could instead go with a 3rd option and just have Churchill.
That's not really a great comparison because Queen Elizabeth has no executive powers, whereas Obama does.
The reality is that the UK simply just doesn't have a president equivalent, the closest thing is our prime minister, who, as you say, also doubles as leader of the house. All of Obama's executive powers are held by the Prime Minister in the UK.
Actually, from all the people I know who didn't vote they didn't vote because they said they just couldn't tell who was lying and who wasn't, so didn't feel informed enough to vote. It's not that they didn't care, it's that they'd rather make no choice than a bad choice. Their feelings on the matter weren't "Don't care" but typically something like "I want the best for my country, and kids", they just had no idea which option that was.
Of course, many people who did vote also had no idea who was lying to them, either they just decided the opposite, that it's better to risk making a bad choice than no choice.
The referendum result was clear, but it's certainly not the case that the British public made an informed choice. The result of the referendum was by and large an uninformed choice. Not that it matters, but I suspect if the debate was much more clearly informative that many of those that didn't vote would have and I suspect in a fully informed debate many people wouldn't have taken the risk. Ultimately leave won the referendum, but lost the argument, because much of what remain predicted would happen has happened - Farage admitted he lied about the NHS, other leavers like Daniel Hannan admitted they lied that they'd be able to bring immigration down now, Cameron has in fact left and we do in fact now have 4 years of dictatorship ahead of us, the pound has in fact tanked, and the FTSE 250 is down whilst the 100 is being proped up only by a commital of £250bn stimulus reserve (12 years equivalent of EU fees) by the BOE. Project fear turned out to be project fact, and team leave fled for the hills when their bluff was called leaving everyone else to suffer the consequences and clean up the mess.
After all is said and done it looks most likely that we'll end up in the EEA, paying the same amount we do currently, without a seat at the table, and having suffered a few years of reduced economic capability. The whole things looks like it will have become a completely unnecessary needlessly damaging exercise with nothing clear to show for it.
From that I don't think hardly anyone really had their say as such, I just think millions of people had a completely random stab in the dark. The number of us who had done our own fact checking to verify the claims from both sides (by actually looking up and understanding statistics on the economy, migration and so forth) and who were able to vote on the actual facts were an absolutely tiny minority.
"You are wrong. They are lost sales -- just not a 1:1 ratio."
How do you know this, where is your data? I never used to watch super hero movies, like the Marvel and DC ones, they were never my thing I thought, until I did actually download the first Avengers movie and really liked it. As a result I bought it on Bluray along with all the other surrounding films like Captain America, Iron Man, and some of the DC ones like Green Lantern.
Not only was my pirated copy of Avengers not a lost sale, it actually has netted them over 30 additional Bluray sales now. So that's a ratio of 30 movies purchased for one pirated movie.
So again, where is your data? I'd wager not only is it unlikely that there are not lost sales from piracy, but there are in fact gained sales as is most definitely the case with me. Were I not able to download that initial Avengers movie, the industry would now be down 30 sales including a copy of that movie itself.
You seem to be making wholly unfounded assertions, without having anything to back them up.
I think it's very much a case of two wrongs don't make a right. Just because Hillary did wrong, doesn't make it legally acceptable to hack into the computer of a government employee. I mean, let's be clear here, he had no way of knowing she was guilty of wrong doing before he hacked in, thus he was clearly hacking with malicious intent.
So therein lies the problem for him, he only exposed wrongdoing after he'd committed a malicious act, and stumbling across something like that doesn't undo what he did before. If you hold up a bank with a sawn off shotgun, but find someone unconcious and give them first aid and save their life it doesn't change the fact you're a bank robber.
So what you really meant then was "Give me any example cases other than those that exist because I want to make a point that I can't make legitimately".
"The issues you raise are problems with the voting system, but to my mind this doesn't mean the system as a whole is not democratic."
How can you realistically separate the two? The is is the method of implementation and if the method of implementation doesn't implement democracy then it's not a real democracy.
"Your power of representation is through your PM and councillors. So you have the potential to influence decisions by lobbying your representative. You can do that whether you voted for them or not."
A representative by definition, has to represent you, but if you've voted against them then you've done so because they do not represent your beliefs. It doesn't matter that you can speak to them if they're not going to listen - people in North Korea can speak to Kim Jong Un but that doesn't change the fact he's a dictator.
If you want a system with representatives that's truly democratic you need something (ironically) closer to the system we have to MEPs where by they're elected proportionally but still represent an area in such a manner that the share of party representatives mimics the popular vote closely enough to allow a majority of people to be represented by someone that actually represents them, rather than someone that doesn't as under FPTP.
"It's things like this that create a democracy. I consider those avenues more powerful than voting from the perspective of a single individual."
I think you're using a very odd definition of democracy, typically a democracy requires majority rule, and we do not have that in the UK.
The fact we've had one instance of democracy on one single issue out of the literally tens of thousands doesn't make us a democracy. We're still ultimately an elected dictatorship with minority rule - the only time this wasn't true was in the 2010 election term whereby we ended up with two parties working in compromise who offered compromise representation for 59% of the population but how common are compromise coalitions? Once in a hundred years it seems.
Effectively therefore between that and the referendum you can reasonably say that the UK system is capable of producing a democratic outcome on rare occasions, but the vast majority of the time is simply not democratic.
That's before you even factor in the whole unelected Lords thing where they can outright strike down legislation regardless of whether the public wants it.
Any claim that the UK is a genuine and consistently democratic country is merely a whitewash to pretend we're somehow superior than countries we oppose like Russia.
There are really two paths to achieving actual lasting democracy in the UK and the electorate rejected the one that keeps local representatives but elects the one that is at least partially representative of over half their electorate (AV) so the only other option is proportional representation which we've consistently been denied the option of - precisely because we're not a true democracy amusingly enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't disagree with the rest of what you say, but the link you're making between sterling and debt is complete drivel. It was something Salmond plastered together when he started getting desperate and is as incorrect as Farage and co's £350mill claims. It was broadly debunked at the time, so I'm amazed anyone would still parrot it.
The fact is that debt and currency are two separate things, a debt is expressed in a currency, but is not in any way linked to that currency. The international norm for national splits is that each departing element of a nation gets a population based proportion of both a nations assets and it's debts. It doesn't matter what Scotland would choose as it's new currency, it still has to take a population share of the UK's debt. This can change but it's based on mutual agreement, and typically involves one country giving up some assets to the other in return for an equivalent reduction in debt burden, so for example, Scotland might decide it doesn't need 24 Eurofighters or whatever, and so decides to let rUK keep 12 of them in return for an equivalent reduction in debt equal to the cost of those 12 Eurofighters. There isn't however enough assets that Scotland could realistically give up to even remotely approach a complete mitigation of it's proportional debt allocation as you're suggesting.
The problem with your argument is this line:
"If Scotland leaves Sterling, it will only have to retain its own debts."
It doesn't actually make any sense, Scotland doesn't have any independent debts because it's not an independent country. Whilst it has devolution, that's ultimately just giving it control of a proportion of the UK's pot, but it's still ultimately the same pot as the UK as a whole. Scotland's debts ARE the UK's debts because Scotland is part of the UK, hence, why, if there was a split, Scotland's share would need to be calculated, and that would be done on the international norm of population proportion.
It would make absolutely no sense if a country could say, get a parent country to blow billions on defence of it, getting into debt in the process, and then declare independence, but refusing to accept that it benefitted from that debt. No international court would ever back that viewpoint because it just doesn't make any kind of sense for a splitting country to completely offload it's costs onto the other half. Scotland cannot for example argue that it did not benefit from the bank bailouts which contributed to national debt when one of the biggest bailouts at £202bn was RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland).
I actually think it would make sense for Scotland to become independent at this point and as someone that was against it in 2014, I'm wholly for it now. Scotland is too different to the rest of the UK and I can fully understand why it wouldn't want to be associated with the ignorant, bigoted, isolationist, little Englander view that has now consumed England, but that doesn't change the fact that if they do get independence that they'd have to accept their fair share of debt, no amount of nonsense talk like pretending Scottish debt is somehow separate to British debt (it isn't) or economically illiterately suggesting there is some kind of link between currency and debt (there isn't).
If nothing else, were Scotland to refuse to service their share of British debt upon independence then the rUK would refuse to acknowledge it also (as it would not be assigned to them anyway), such that the credit ratings firms would class Scotland to have defaulted. That's really not a good position to be in as a newly independent nation that needs to borrow to build up the necessary state institutions to thrive independently.
No matter what wishful thinking Salmond peddled when he got desperate, it does not change the reality of international economics. I agree though, I don't think it would matter, who would want Sterling no anyway? The Euro will far and away be a better bet over the next few decades now as Europe sorts it's problems out whilst the UK hasn't even begun with it's self-inflicted harm.
"Meanwhile, having annoyed the Chinese, Theresa May is now apparently trying to improve relations with Russia which, while it definitely needs to happen in its own right, doesn't exactly scan well in connection with alienating the Chinese the week prior."
Are you surprised? As leaders, both Putin and May are basically unelected dictators whatever shame of a democracy they profess to be legitamised by. No one voted in a democratic election of the populace for May to be PM. If she wants legitimacy she'll have to call elections, otherwise anything she does should frankly be deemed illegitimate if we wish to continue to profess to be a democracy. It's bad enough that FPTP allows parties to obtain 100% of power with only 38% of popular support, but the fact that internal party politics can lead to a completely different PM, with completely different political goals, ideas, and priorities than that which was elected is unacceptable.
Lower your undercarriage so that you can be tracked whilst pulling high-G missile evasion manoeuvres?
Great idea, assuming you don't plan to land the thing again afterwards.
Actually what you say and what TFA actually says rings true, the truly older workers (50+) I work with are happy with shit software, whereas the younger i.e. 40 get pissed off at the older guys trying to shovel shit out the door onto our customers.
So I think you're probably right, it's just that millennials have higher standard expectations in their software than much older people in the industry who are happy to try and get away with just peddling shit until their pension comes through.
Yes exactly, both the US and Russia are in the wrong on that sort of issue. The US doing it doesn't act as justification for anyone else to, quite the opposite, it highlights why no one should do it given how badly it fucked the region up. The US has been heavily criticised for it since it did so, and so should Russia be.
Given his subsequent response to me, it's pretty clear the guy is either a full on Kremlin shill, or a Trump supporting crackpot. Either way his understanding of geopolitics pertaining to Russia is slanted entirely towards the Kremlin and then some.
This explains why he made such a nonsensical statement as to pretend Russia air intrusions aren't happening. He said it himself, sovereign territory pertaining to airways is 12 miles from the coast. The world is a big place, that leaves a lot of room for Russia to NOT fly it's military aircraft illegaly, provocatively, and dangeorusly through the sovereign territory of other states. His entire argument seems to be based on the suggestion that Russia's military is apparently so inept that it can't fly a plane through a 3 mile gap.
The fact that you believe Crimea was already Russian, and hence the annexation of it was not the result of hostile Russian invasion, even though the Russian state infrastructure itself admits that this is exactly what it did highlights the fact that you simply cannot even remotely be taken seriously on this topic.
Not that that wasn't obvious when you keep repeating the assertion that flying a small fighter jet through a 3 mile gap is even remotely difficult.
It's pretty clear that you're a batshit Putin loving shill, though ironically you're so vehemently pro-Russian that you're refusing to accept even things Putin has admitted. You're justification for it all is that the US has done wrong.
It doesn't matter what the US has done, that's really irrelevant, this discussion isn't about the US aggression, and US aggression doesn't make it okay for Russia to also act as an aggressor. They're both wrong.
You're literally parroting the Russia Today state propaganda line with an added does of batshit thrown on top, you literally couldn't be more biased about the situation if you tried. When you can't even admit basic facts, that even the people you're defending admit then your credibility is completely and utterly gone.
Oh I completely believe you don't worry :)
The Harrier was always a notoriously difficult to fly, and when I saw the F-35B in hover the other week one thing that was incredibly obvious to me is how perfectly motionless it could hover compared to the Harrier which required far greater human intervention to keep steady. Watching it it just looked like a freeze frame in it's complete stillness so regardless of actual automatic landing the fly by wire systems making constant, invisible to the naked eye adjustments to keep it still. This alone made it an impressive sight.
But ultimately those things are still relatively easy to code in principle, where we still have a massive deficiency is in aforementioned IT security - how do you prevent a drone being hijacked, or disabled by some other electronic warfare attack? Even the best of the best in the world of IT security sometimes can't even keep a basic web server on the internet against malicious private individuals let alone nation states so given that it seems odd to think anyone would seriously believe we can magically get this right with drones right now to make them trustworthy enough to leave in autonomous mode immune to electronic attack. Similarly it's also still a massive leap from automatic landing which has been around for decades (so not entirely surprising it's evolved) to go to something that can do full mission, regardless of any unexpected events that turn up and that can dogfight in a constantly changing battle.
Yes autonomous drones are certainly the future of warfare, but right now all current and projected drones are still just fodder to a human pilot, we're still so far off them being a better alternative to manned fighters. I think there's at least this or one more generation of fighters to go before AI can realistically take over. The F-35 is safe long enough to be able to justify 5th gen still being manned.
But where are these drones that make the F-35 obsolete currently or in the next decade or two?
You're still missing the point that those drones don't actually exist and aren't even close to ready. There's not even any signed off programme to develop such an aircraft for the military, and as we've seen with aircraft like the F-35 itself it can typically take two decades for such programmes to reach combat anyway. On this basis alone the F-35 has at very least 20 usable years, and that's based on the almost certainly incorrect assumption that the F-35 wont evolve as such drones are developed, and that the F-35 wont be the one that's protected by drones, as opposed to attacked by them.
It's not that you're inherently wrong in what you say, I agree with your points in principle, it's just that they're not relevant right now - they might be in 20 - 30 years.
I'm amazed someone claiming they follow this news carefully isn't aware of the countless infringements. They're relatively regular and, well documented:
http://www.ibtimes.com/despite...
https://theaviationist.com/201...
http://www.baltictimes.com/rus...
http://www.upi.com/Business_Ne...
http://sputniknews.com/europe/...
http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Art...
http://uawire.org/news/media-r...
The fact is that Russia is a hostile nation, it's invaded Ukraine, and it's invaded Georgia, it can't pretend it's an innocent bystander that's merely hard done by as you're implying it is.
Russian aircraft are allowed to fly over this airspace if they obtain permission. However when a military aircraft, many of which are armed, enters foreign airspace unannounced, and typically with transponders off as is the case in most these incursions, then that can only be seen as a provocative act.
Russia isn't the only nation that does this, the US does it too in Asia, but two wrongs don't make a right. You're arguing that no harm may come of a Russian aircraft entering sovereign airspace of other nations, in your view, does that remain true even when they actually launch weapons as in Ukraine and Georgia? Given that they have done this, do you seriously still think it's a sensible argument to suggest that armed Russian aircraft entering airspace unannounced should always be considered benign?
It sounds like you're making an awful lot of excuses for Russia over things that simply cannot be excused. The idea that Russian pilots can't navigate a 5km gap making incursion into Finnish or Estonian airspace with armed warplanes with transponders off acceptable is utterly laughable, and pointing out that you can't pass through the English channel without infringing British or French airspace is relevant why? you also can't pass over Moscow without infringing Russian airspace, so what? The fact that the channel is joint sovereign British/French air space is entirely meaningless other than to distract from the fact Russia is a persistent and aggressive violator of sovereign airspace.
There is genuinely no issue with Russian aircraft sticking to international airspace, avoiding civilian airline routes, or announcing routes and flying with transponders on. There's not even any problem with it passing through sovereign airspace of other nations with permission. But that's not what's happening is it? Russia is violating sovereign airspace proper with armed aircraft, flying transponders off, and flying in civilian flight paths unannounced and outside the control and hence potential awareness of air traffic control. It's doing this in the context having recently used such subversive tactics of pretending to be not Russian military to annex sovereign territory of another nation.
Nothing about the F-35 precludes development of drones though, and the West already seems to be leading the way on that front too. There's no reason the F-35 couldn't in itself be the basis of a drone.
We still have a long way to go in terms of things like AI, and IT security before we can realistically replace manned fighter fleets - I agree we'll get there at some point and that yes, then manned fighters will become obsolete, but that doesn't mean the F-35 doesn't have a purpose over the next decade, or two, or three. No opponent has, or will have in the immediate future a drone that can make an F-35 irrelevant, Russia for example is struggling to even get a 5th gen manned fighter project off the ground even with India's cooperation and financing (the PAK-FA is all but cancelled at this point - 12 aircraft on order by Russia is not a succesful delivery) let alone an autonomous 5th gen fighter that meets the AI and security challenges such a project faces. China has more of a chance, but it's still got some way to go, and even it's attempts at a 5th gen fighter are largely based off stolen IP from the West, rather than the kind of original development and innovation that you need to create something completely new like a fully autonomous drone that makes manned fighters like the F-35 wholly irrelevant.
The closest thing at the moment is an AI in a simulator in the West, but this is really not all that far off a video game AI - there's still an insane amount of work to do to translate that into a real drone in the sky that both works in the world of real physics rather than merely simulated physics, and that is secure enough to be sent over enemy airspace without risk of being hijacked.
People always say this but the reality is no one knows how global security is going to change through the lifetime of an aircraft and aircraft themselves are evolved to deal with new and emerging threats. People said the same about Europe's Eurofighter Typhoon 5 years ago, and yet it's already having to intercept 4.5th Gen Russian fighters that are infringing European airspace in the Baltic.
In many ways though it kind of works like nuclear deterrents and MAD; in large part the reason we don't have to send things like F-22s up against Su-37s is precisely because Russia knows if it forces such a confrontation it'll lose. The very fact we have the qualitative edge is in itself a reason for not having to use it. If we ditch it because we believe we don't need it, then we're more likely to find that we need it, only then we wont have it and we'll have already lost.
Yes, but Virgin Media does not have any 1.6Gbps+ offering, which is what you're claiming you have. For that you'd have to go to BT because Virgin Media does not commission lines of that speed to individuals.
Except you can. In fact, you can't even use the feature without explicitly consenting for this information to be collected and sent to Microsoft, and even if you do this you can later disable it at any point, and then on top of that once it's disabled you can actually delete all collected data to date.
Of course, you could (and probably will) theorise they do it anyway, but given the amount of times they explicitly give the users choice and require consent they'd be slaughtered by the likes of the EU if they did that because they'd be explicitly lying to customers and breaking data protection law as a result. It just isn't worth billions of dollars of fines.
So yeah, unfortunately this isn't a good story to throw out the old Microsoft hatred in, because they've actually done a pretty good honest job of data collection in terms of this feature. If anything this is an example of good practice, requiring explicit opt-in, allowing any-time opt-out, and allowing subsequent deletion of stored data to date.
"A link to a known speed testing website."
For which we have no way of linking the results to your actual connection. That link could be to anyone's results, or if they're you're results we have absolutely no evidence that they're from your connection. In other words, the link is entirely meaningless.
"Like I'm going to complain if it's slightly more."
It's not just slightly more, it's 1.4Gbps more.
"Anyone sensible these days referring to Internet connection speeds are talking about the speeds they can get on the Internet."
You don't seem to grasp this topic. The speed you're claiming to get on the internet, i.e. 203Mb/s is equivalent to a 1.6Gbps connection. The speed result you've given doesn't even remotely match your claimed connection speed, it's literally over an order of magnitude faster than the speed you're claiming you have, that is, the internet speed test results you're showing do not even remotely match the connection you claim to have, they far and away exceed it, well beyond the speed of any connection available to consumers in the UK. If you're trying to complain that this site is using the terms Mbps and Mb/s interchangeable then you're simply lying, because, thanks to the fact the site is public, it was trivial for me to run the test and confirm that it does in fact use the terms correctly, which you are not doing. You therefore need to either:
1) Admit you're lying, and that this isn't your speed test
or
2) Change your claim to pretend you have a 1.6Gbps connection
"But if you want to know more about the Virgin Media aspect, I believe it's using EuroDOCSIS v3.0 currently, there is a nice little table on Wikipedia showing the connection through-puts on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..."
Ironically this entirely disproves your whole argument because even with the maximum channel configuration in that link, you still couldn't quite achieve the connection speed you claim to have from your link.
I suggest next time you try and fake your connection speed as being 200Mbps you look for a speed test of just short of 25Mb/s, then it'll actually make sense, but right now you're showing a speed test for a connection that no consumer in the UK can get and that isn't even available as any standard business package, it'd require a specially commissioned line from BT, which, given your apparent lack of understanding of the difference between Mbps and Mb/s it's pretty clear you'd have no idea what to ask for to acquire anyway, much less before you manage to find the necessary hundreds of thousands, likely millions of pounds to get the line installed and commissioned. Virgin don't even have the capacity to provide such a connection.
I was a bit surprised when I read the thread that someone would accuse you of lying, it seemed a bit odd and I wasn't aware you're a person that would be considered to be a serial liar. Given the fact you've now utterly destroyed your own case by providing "evidence" that isn't, I'm saddened to see that whoever it is that declared you a liar does in fact seem to be right. It seems an incredibly odd thing to lie about, but I assume you must have some insecurity issues or similar that cause you to do it, but whatever, I'm not your psychiatrist. I'd just suggest you either figure out what motivates you to lie, and stop it, or if you must persist in lying, to actually understand the topic well enough to actually pull it off in future.
Oh a link on the internet, well that's proven that then.
Besides, that link doesn't even make any sense, you claim you're on a 200Mbps connection, but that speed test shows over 200Mb/s.
To hit 203Mb/s as you claim via your speedtest, you'd actually need a 1.6Gbps connection.
"While I thoroughly agree with your post - your choice of a 'good' third choice was terrible."
I don't see how this can realistically be blamed on Churchill, it was an inherited problem, and Britain was in the midst of war with barely enough resources to feed it's own population. What exactly could he have even done by that point? India was already defacto out of British rule by that point anyway because it was a condition of India's support for Britain in the war, hence why a mere 4 years later they were able to transition to full independence.
Do I think Churchill was perfect? No, his government after all was responsible for the treatment of Turing and Turing's resultant death. But Churchill did a lot of incredibly good things as well, the European Court of Human Rights being an obvious example, but his efforts post-war were what led directly, and indirectly to things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, the EU and so on and so forth - institutions he either led creation of, or created the environment in which such institutions could be created have created decades of European stability, and given justice to and protected the human rights of millions.
If you judge him by the standards of the time he was far and away about the most progressive leader going. Of course, standards at the time were pretty poor sure, but it's still a night and day choice between Churchill, Stalin and Hitler - declaring him one of the worst leaders in history is rather over the top hyperbole, you're effectively basing that on making him guilty of inaction in not pulling a magic trick to resolve a problem he did not cause and could not realistically resolve, and ignoring the fact that the ideas he had and institutions he created are what have led to the stability and success of the modern Western world. This is something that is all too well being eroded as modern leaders regularly declare things like human rights as bad, or try and shout down the international criminal court because it dares to try and tackle war criminals and so forth. Churchill sought to create structures and institutions that would prevent or minimise the likelihood of the atrocities of World War II ever coming to the fore on that scale again, and to bring justice when they do happen. As much as modern world leaders are now fighting back against that, he has to date, been completely successful, and so if you do blame those 3 million Indian deaths on him you must also credit him with the 100s of millions of lives he's saved both in helping to push an end to the war, and with the prevention of further instability preventing further wars and war crimes since. You cannot simply pick some indirect problem and blame it on him without also accepting the other indirect good things.
Because the reality is numerous studies (well, those from impartial organisations) have shown immigration is of net economic benefit to the UK, and not one single prime minister would ever be willing to create a situation where we go into recession because we've decided to cripple a number of industries just because of a bunch of blame gaming.
Migration to the UK was already controllable for migrants coming from outside the EU, and we already had a points system for those people, and yet, more people still migrate from outside the EU than inside, despite the propaganda meaning that even where we could control immigration we can't and wont. IIRC the most recent figures showed something like 272,000 migrants from outside the EU last year, but only about 236,000 from inside. If we really wanted to we could've cut immigration in half by just banning migration from non-EU sources already, but we don't and wont, because we need things like scientists, doctors, nurses, teachers, fruit pickers, and so on and so forth because no one here wants to or can do those jobs.
This is precisely why so many top Brexiters fled with their tails between their legs when they won the vote - populism is such an easy politics to get people onside because humans mostly appear to love being angry, so pick something to get them angry at and they'll rally around you. The difficult bit is if you win you then have to somehow square your populist lies and blame gaming with reality - this is also the problem we now have by way of increased racism in the UK. Politicians like Farage put so much effort into blame gaming and demonising minorities that hate crime is massively up, and an MP even got killed in the run up to the referendum.
Note that I'm not trying to generalise here, migrants are not a net economic benefit to every country - the number of Syrian migrants seen in some European states and the lack of the lack of suitable jobs for them, as well as migration into the US do result in net costs, it's just simply not true of Britain where they're net contributors.
Of course there are more than economic arguments, talk of integration (though I don't buy those personally - violent football hooligans born and bred in Britain also don't integrate, it's not a migrant specific thing, some people are just assholes), but economics is at the core of a politician, particularly a prime minister's calculations. No PM will ever put themselves in a position where they have say "Guys! I fixed the immigration problem, but yeah, your grandma died because we ran out of nurses, oh and taxes are going to have to go up to make up the shortfall in income to pay the police too. We're also out of carrots for Christmas this year, no one to go and pick them.".
Technically though yes, as an island, there's nothing to stop us from physically locking down our country as such, though even then people will smuggle across to some degree.
"So yes, getting things done in the U.S. system is harder, and it's easier for a few states to block legislation. That doesn't mean the U.S. system has greater legitimacy, quite the opposite. The state governments are barely accountable for their actions, and even a party with strong popular support can fail to get its legislation passed thanks to the byzantine electoral system."
I think you have a rose tinted view of the UK's electoral system if you genuinely believe it leads to greater accountability. Let's be clear here, the ruling party has 100% of the power in the UK despite only representing 37% of the voting electorate in this parliament, worse though, party leaders determine the direction of the country and are typically the figurehead that people vote for, and as such when there is a handover in this case, the country can be pushed in a direction that is completely against the will of the people. Theresa May now has the option to take the country in whatever direction she wants for 4 years despite having no democratic mandate to do so, beyond on one simple point, that we should leave the EU but with no definition of when or how.
The UK would be better if it had proportional representation, but it doesn't, due to first past the post, the UK's electoral system nearly always turns out what can be best described as minority backed dictatorship as the British system almost never turns out a party backed by a majority, or a coalition backed by a combined majority. The last government was the first exception in a hundred years where we had a coalition that actually represented a compromise goverment covering over 50% of the population's votes.
The idea of our system is that it leaves us with local representatives, but even this is broken and is in itself the source of the problem - at local level the representatives can be even less representative, in some constituencies a represented is elected with less than 25% of local support, this absurd situation means that someone who is meant to represent his local region is actually opposed by over 75% of the people that live there. If those 75% are liberal and support gay married, whereas the other 25% are an organised church loving, gay hating minority, then that representative may vote in a manner that the vast majority of his constituents are firmly opposed to.
Germany is one of the better examples of governance in the world. Picking between the UK and US electoral systems is like narrowing yourself to a choice between Stalin and Hitler as your leader when you could instead go with a 3rd option and just have Churchill.
That's not really a great comparison because Queen Elizabeth has no executive powers, whereas Obama does.
The reality is that the UK simply just doesn't have a president equivalent, the closest thing is our prime minister, who, as you say, also doubles as leader of the house. All of Obama's executive powers are held by the Prime Minister in the UK.
Actually, from all the people I know who didn't vote they didn't vote because they said they just couldn't tell who was lying and who wasn't, so didn't feel informed enough to vote. It's not that they didn't care, it's that they'd rather make no choice than a bad choice. Their feelings on the matter weren't "Don't care" but typically something like "I want the best for my country, and kids", they just had no idea which option that was.
Of course, many people who did vote also had no idea who was lying to them, either they just decided the opposite, that it's better to risk making a bad choice than no choice.
The referendum result was clear, but it's certainly not the case that the British public made an informed choice. The result of the referendum was by and large an uninformed choice. Not that it matters, but I suspect if the debate was much more clearly informative that many of those that didn't vote would have and I suspect in a fully informed debate many people wouldn't have taken the risk. Ultimately leave won the referendum, but lost the argument, because much of what remain predicted would happen has happened - Farage admitted he lied about the NHS, other leavers like Daniel Hannan admitted they lied that they'd be able to bring immigration down now, Cameron has in fact left and we do in fact now have 4 years of dictatorship ahead of us, the pound has in fact tanked, and the FTSE 250 is down whilst the 100 is being proped up only by a commital of £250bn stimulus reserve (12 years equivalent of EU fees) by the BOE. Project fear turned out to be project fact, and team leave fled for the hills when their bluff was called leaving everyone else to suffer the consequences and clean up the mess.
After all is said and done it looks most likely that we'll end up in the EEA, paying the same amount we do currently, without a seat at the table, and having suffered a few years of reduced economic capability. The whole things looks like it will have become a completely unnecessary needlessly damaging exercise with nothing clear to show for it.
From that I don't think hardly anyone really had their say as such, I just think millions of people had a completely random stab in the dark. The number of us who had done our own fact checking to verify the claims from both sides (by actually looking up and understanding statistics on the economy, migration and so forth) and who were able to vote on the actual facts were an absolutely tiny minority.
"You are wrong. They are lost sales -- just not a 1:1 ratio."
How do you know this, where is your data? I never used to watch super hero movies, like the Marvel and DC ones, they were never my thing I thought, until I did actually download the first Avengers movie and really liked it. As a result I bought it on Bluray along with all the other surrounding films like Captain America, Iron Man, and some of the DC ones like Green Lantern.
Not only was my pirated copy of Avengers not a lost sale, it actually has netted them over 30 additional Bluray sales now. So that's a ratio of 30 movies purchased for one pirated movie.
So again, where is your data? I'd wager not only is it unlikely that there are not lost sales from piracy, but there are in fact gained sales as is most definitely the case with me. Were I not able to download that initial Avengers movie, the industry would now be down 30 sales including a copy of that movie itself.
You seem to be making wholly unfounded assertions, without having anything to back them up.
I think it's very much a case of two wrongs don't make a right. Just because Hillary did wrong, doesn't make it legally acceptable to hack into the computer of a government employee. I mean, let's be clear here, he had no way of knowing she was guilty of wrong doing before he hacked in, thus he was clearly hacking with malicious intent.
So therein lies the problem for him, he only exposed wrongdoing after he'd committed a malicious act, and stumbling across something like that doesn't undo what he did before. If you hold up a bank with a sawn off shotgun, but find someone unconcious and give them first aid and save their life it doesn't change the fact you're a bank robber.
So what you really meant then was "Give me any example cases other than those that exist because I want to make a point that I can't make legitimately".
"The issues you raise are problems with the voting system, but to my mind this doesn't mean the system as a whole is not democratic."
How can you realistically separate the two? The is is the method of implementation and if the method of implementation doesn't implement democracy then it's not a real democracy.
"Your power of representation is through your PM and councillors. So you have the potential to influence decisions by lobbying your representative. You can do that whether you voted for them or not."
A representative by definition, has to represent you, but if you've voted against them then you've done so because they do not represent your beliefs. It doesn't matter that you can speak to them if they're not going to listen - people in North Korea can speak to Kim Jong Un but that doesn't change the fact he's a dictator.
If you want a system with representatives that's truly democratic you need something (ironically) closer to the system we have to MEPs where by they're elected proportionally but still represent an area in such a manner that the share of party representatives mimics the popular vote closely enough to allow a majority of people to be represented by someone that actually represents them, rather than someone that doesn't as under FPTP.
"It's things like this that create a democracy. I consider those avenues more powerful than voting from the perspective of a single individual."
I think you're using a very odd definition of democracy, typically a democracy requires majority rule, and we do not have that in the UK.
The fact we've had one instance of democracy on one single issue out of the literally tens of thousands doesn't make us a democracy. We're still ultimately an elected dictatorship with minority rule - the only time this wasn't true was in the 2010 election term whereby we ended up with two parties working in compromise who offered compromise representation for 59% of the population but how common are compromise coalitions? Once in a hundred years it seems.
Effectively therefore between that and the referendum you can reasonably say that the UK system is capable of producing a democratic outcome on rare occasions, but the vast majority of the time is simply not democratic.
That's before you even factor in the whole unelected Lords thing where they can outright strike down legislation regardless of whether the public wants it.
Any claim that the UK is a genuine and consistently democratic country is merely a whitewash to pretend we're somehow superior than countries we oppose like Russia.
There are really two paths to achieving actual lasting democracy in the UK and the electorate rejected the one that keeps local representatives but elects the one that is at least partially representative of over half their electorate (AV) so the only other option is proportional representation which we've consistently been denied the option of - precisely because we're not a true democracy amusingly enough.