Biden ditches trade deal talks with Britain
theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social Posts 18Comments 262Joined 2 yr. ago
theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social
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Fair enough!
Whilst I love this, you do realise that 25 December is the first day of Christmas, not the twelfth? So the Twelve Days of Christmas run from 25 December to 5 January (which is why it's considered bad luck to keep your Christmas tree up after 5 January, aka 'Twelfth Night').
You've started your countdown 12 days too early!
None. They got a minority of the vote. They got a majority of the seats. It's FPTP.
The Tories got a minority of the vote at the last election. Most people voted non-Tory. Most people voted for a second referendum.
Won't make it through the Lords (and it wasn't in the Tory manifesto so they can't Parliament Act it) and even if does it might still fail its third reading in the Commons when the feral wing of the Tories start making more insane demands.
... followed by an inflation shock from a jump in the price of imported fuel and commodities, due to an actual war between two European countries - something that literally none of the other prime ministers on that list had to deal with.
Sunak's government is awful and deserves to be ejected from office in a landslide - but it hardly helps (and possibly even undermines) the case against them to pretend that what has happened to household real incomes this Parliament isn't overwhelmingly due to factors way outside of their control.
That is exactly how the US system works, with a handful of exceptions.
For the election of a Senator or Representative - it's almost always FPTP. The candidate that gets the most votes wins the seat, regardless of whether or not they got a majority of the vote. The state of Georgia is an example of an exception, as they hold a runoff election for Senator if the leading candidate falls short of 50% - as happened with the elections of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both of which went to runoff.
For the presidential election, this also how it works in the vast majority of cases. 100% of a state's electoral college vote goes to the candidate that gets the most votes, regardless of whether or not they got a majority of the votes in the state. You have a situations like Texas in 2020 giving 38 electoral college votes to Trump and zero to Biden (versus a proportional allocation of more like 20 Trump, 17 Biden and 1 Jorgensen). That electoral college system results in situations like 1992, when Bill Clinton got a 370 vote electoral college landslide on 43% of the vote because of Ross Perot's third-party candidacy, as well as situations like 2000 and 2016 where a Republican candidate who came 2nd in the national vote still came 1st in the electoral college by virtue of coming first past the post in enough individual states. (I believe the exceptions are Nebraska and Maine, which split their electoral college votes.)
First past the post - the party with the most votes 'wins'. It's in contrast to a range of other systems that rely on proportionality or preferential voting to ensure that the party or parties with majority support wins.
For example, imagine a scenario where there are 10 constituencies electing a representative by FPTP. In each of those 10 constituencies, the result is identical as follows:
- Nazi - 40%
- Liberal - 30%
- Socialist - 20%
- Conservative - 10%
Under FPTP, the Nazi would be the top candidate in every constituency, and so win 10 out of 10 seats and have total control of the legislature, even though 60% of people voted anti-Nazi. This is the system in the UK and US.
Under a proportional system, you would allocate the seats in proportion to the votes cast - so 4 for the Nazis, 3 for the Liberals, 2 for the Socialists and 1 for the Conservatives. The non-Nazis would then have a legislative majority (6 out of 10 seats) that reflects how people actually voted, and could form an anti-Nazi coalition government. This is the system in the Netherlands or Germany for example.
Under a preferential system, you still elect seats on a constituency basis, but you make sure that the winning candidate is preferred by a majority of voters in the constituency - either by having multi-round elections or by having voters rank candidates instead of just voting for one. In a simplified system, you could rule out all but the top two candidates (in this case, Nazi and Liberal), and then have a second round of votes two weeks later for voters to decide between those two candidates to represent their seat. This tends to favour more moderate candidates so it's likely under such a system that the Liberal would generally defeat the Nazi in the second round in most seats. This is the system in France.
There are also hybrid systems like Single Transferrable Vote, which simultaneously achieve proportionality and preferential voting - this is used in Ireland.
Geert Wilder wins Dutch election
35 of the 150 seats in parliament
Let's please stop using FPTP language to describe very non-FPTP systems and outcomes.
Yeah, Spanish. That's the point. There were penguins, then was French, it was Spanish, it was British. It was never Argentinian. There were never civilians there.
The only civilians who have lived there are the Falkland Islanders, who identify as British. Argentina's claim is based on the Spanish once having a very limited military presence there, on which basis they want to assert some sort of imperialist sovereignty over a bunch of civilians whose ancestors have been there for hundreds of years and who have only ever considered themselves British.
'Get them back'. What does 'back' even mean in this statement? Of all the countries that have ever legitimately ruled the Falklands, Argentina was never one of them.
The penguins have a better claim to the Falklands than Argentina...
“Of course there should be support for people to help them into work but ultimately there is a duty on citizens if they are able to go out to work they should. Those who can work and contribute should contribute.”
There's not a tonne superficially wrong with it phrased in these terms. I think there are plenty of disabled people who are able and willing to work from home and there should be government support to help them get such jobs. There are plenty of non-disabled people who work from home most/all the time these days also.
But I think the thing that pushes it over the edge is the unnecessary double reference to people needing to do their 'duty' and to 'contribute' - it's framing the matter in a way that presupposes disabled people are some sort of burden, whilst seeming superficially reasonable. Classic Tory dog whistle.
I'd rather go after her for that than for the reasonable suggestion that disabled people can work from home when they're able to.
Okay, but that's not really what they did with Sela.
Sela wasn't 'Tasha returned' - she had nothing in common with Tasha (in terms of personality or her role in the show) except for being played by the same actress. She clearly wasn't just a backdoor soap opera route for Tasha to return.
Also she was only actually in four episodes (on the first of which the character wasn't identified and Denise Crosby was an uncredited voice only). Sela's brief appearances were so memorable that we tend to forget how minor her role actually was across the span of TNG - Tomalak had a bigger role, for example.
The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that's an obvious reason for the management to go.
American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that's trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that's something that should be applauded.
The Host - the one where Riker ends up hosting the symbiont.
JMS has been trying to distil and bottle it unsuccessfully for years. He told an amazing five-year story over B5's first four seasons, but then each time he goes back to tell more stories in that universe it becomes more and more clear that he can't come up with anything capable of standing next to what he's already done there.
Context: they crammed the planned s4 and s5 into s4 because they thought they would get cancelled, but then they got unexpectedly renewed so JMS had to write what was effectively an epilogue s5.
That's a neat story but doesn't bear much relation to reality. The Democrats want to fulfill the US's obligations to both Israel and Ukraine, whereas many Republicans want to see Russian flags flying in Kyiv. The Senate Democrats blocked the Israel-only package because the Republican Congress may then not send a Ukraine package, hence the Democrats wanting the two together.
Historically yes, although I don't think there's been one as bad as Suella before, and certainly not one who is now among the betting market favourites to be the next Tory leader once they're in opposition.
I see her more as a symptom of the nihilism that has overtaken British conservatism since the 2016 referendum. They've become obsessed with fighting meaningless symbols and vibes, and fixated on pulling down their opponents rather than building something up themselves. Nothing positive matters to them, it's all about destruction.
In the 1980s, Thatcher's Tories sold the British lower middle-class on a vision of home-owning, share-owning popular capitalist democracy, in which entrepreneurs and small-business owners would guide us all into a prosperous future. What positive vision like that do Tories have to offer to voters today? Single-sex toilets and criminalising the homeless? Suella literally has said that her 'dream' in politics is to deport refugees to Rwanda. They have nothing positive to offer and Suella's rise is a symptom of that.
If only there was something we could do to give us more clout in these trade negotiations. Like - hear me out - if we could club together with a bunch of other friendly mid-sized economies and negotiate collectively with Washington on that basis.