pmyteh

Yes - it's called goulashing. The cards are stacked and dealt out in groups of three and four to produce wild distributions.

The most interesting feature of it for me is that the carefully-developed bridge bidding systems don't work properly as they're implicitly based on a normal random distribution of cards. With a goulash it's likely that both sides have hands with 7+ cards in one suit, and the game is to pre-emptively bid high in "your" suit before they can do so in theirs. So you would ideally like different signaling arrangements that indicate suit length rather than quality.

...and those rank titles were deliberately chosen at the formation of the Met to make it expressly look non-military. The Peelian principles are still a good read.

I suspect the easiest way would be to ban advertising things designed to appeal to children, which is content-based rather than reader-based and cuts with the grain of some previous restrictions in the UK (no junk food ads on children's TV, for example, no tobacco add at all). It's intent-based and so less gamable, and would tank the value proposition of British kids online, if enforced, by lowering the CPM rate.

I'm not convinced it's a good idea, FWIW, but it would be a lot less crappy than age verification.

You're right to be concerned about thinktank-washing, but FIPR themselves are fine: one of the academic:policy bridge groups rather than an astroturfing organisation funneling dark money.

I don't always agree with their stuff, but they're good faith actors.

Agreed, but there are differences between different classes too: the students vary somewhat in intrinsic quality and motivation, and in those years I've done a particularly good job of teaching and motivation the results can be better overall because the students are putting more effort in.

Similarly the other way. There are classes I've given no first class (~A) marks in, because nobody earned one. Still a curve in practice, but with the top at an upper second.

I think this is more of a style issue than one of correctness: lots of high-quality typeset output has used em dashes for parenthetical phrasing and plenty has used (spaced) en dashes. Bringhurst is a partisan for the en dash, for example, saying that "The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for the best text faces." (/Elements/ version 2.5, p.80).

Of course, if we collectively shifted to the spaced en dash then LLMs would eventually follow; it's not clear to me that any simple and deliberate sign of humanity could remain exclusive given the incentives for machines to replicate it.

I fitted a Bafeng mid-drive motor to my city bike and it's fabulous for hills. Because the power goes through the existing drivechain you can get high torque simply by switching to first gear. No minimum speed, power kicks in after half a turn of the pedals. Coupled with hub gears you can change at rest it's a marvel.

Even at the European street legal limit of 250W it makes acceleration trivial.

In the UK government records are generally covered by Crown Copyright (which is its own slightly more restrictive weird thing) rather than in the public domain. I haven't checked to see what the status of the court listings are, but the default is very different to the US.

British canals are smaller than you imagine, and were even when they were commercial waterways. The standard lock widths are only 7ft or 14ft (2.1m/4.3m) so the boats are narrow, proportionally long, and very small compared to a Rhine barge or something.

As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.

Ugh, that's grim.

Football fans are a bit odd. If you spend a lot of time in football crowds you get much more adept at telling when things are going to kick off and when people are only being obnoxiously loud. Both are annoying but only the first is actually dangerous. But the second can definitely make people feel unsafe. And given that you can't easily get off a train if you feel threatened it's a big problem.

When I was younger I got assaulted on the street five times, and it was always in improbable places and for no obvious reason. Some people are just shitty, some of the time.

This depends a lot on where you are. I've lived in York, Darlington, Leeds, London, Oxford, and Liverpool for decent periods and used buses in all of them regularly. Only Darlington was really unpleasant for buses - they were often every half an hour and if one came early and you missed it you would be left in the cold for ages without information.

Oxford was great (though cycling was even better); Leeds, Liverpool, and York were perfectly fine, with regular and reliable services; London's are famously efficient.

Antisocial behaviour isn't honestly that common in my experience, though I'm sure that varies by location. Had some aggro in London once, and again on a London night bus. The football special to the LNER stadium in York was properly boisterous, and quite threatening to the poor away-supporting family on the lower deck, but that at least carried a copper to make sure nothing stupid happened. Other than that, I've only ever really seen loud schoolchildren - who can be annoying but have never caused difficulty for anyone outside their group. I've honestly seen worse behaviour on the tube (and been the object of it on Cross Country Trains).

I read the advert as claiming that the headphones for that Walkman are 1.4oz, which seems plausible (they're a very flimsy design).

The history curriculum is (like nearly everything else) nationally set. The content of the leaving exams is also not set by the school (but by the national boards). It's possible that one school has decided to do something daft, but honestly not likely.

The story reads like ragebait, TBH. Brits are absolutely as keen on extolling WW2 heroism as anyone else.

I don't think the speed would be an enormous problem; the legal (powered) speed limit for e-bikes in the UK is essentially the same as when the C5 was new, at 25km/h. So as long as you stick with a stock EU/UK standard controller you should be fine.

And you'd get a fantastic amount more grunt uphill and a longer range with a modern battery and motor.

The larger vans used by tradespeople in the UK, like a full size Ford Transit, would be fine with those loads (though I agree I wouldn't stick a dead deer in one as they're harder to hose out than a pickup bed). 10ft long loadspace, 1400kg payload, plenty of room for couches, beds and things. They're quite different beasts than the smaller kind like a minivan with removable seats. Plus it rains so much here that having a roof on is generally an advantage.

There are some pickups here, having said that: more rural utilities people, or landscapers who move lots of dirt, or farmers, might have one. They tend to be smaller than an F-150, but then everything's smaller in Britain including the roads...

Yes, though I'd be careful about assuming that votes are Conservatives <-> Reform on a left-right median voter model. The other aspect that Reform has (and will have at least until it forms a government) is anti-system/populist credentials. Labour had a little of that last time (they are a deeply establishment party, especially under current leadership, but they were coming off a period as very public opposition to the government and the current state of things) but will have very little next time.

It's certainly not a given that all the 2024 Reform vote would have gone to the Conservatives: a good chunk of it would have likely been disgusted abstention, another chunk to other anti-system parties (mostly of the right fringe, I suspect, but not excluding the Greens despite wild ideological differences), and likely a further (if smaller) chunk to other parties which were simply not the Conservatives (including Labour and the Lib Dems).

Edit: the best analysis on this is likely to be in the latest volume of the long-standing The British General Election of XXXX series, which has just been published online[0]. I haven't had time to look at it yet, though.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-95952-3

The 31 months was for literally inciting a mob to burn down a building with asylum seekers inside, in the middle of a riot. Yes, from the Internet rather than in person, and she's now very vigorous in claiming she didn't intend anyone to actually do it. But yeah. Likely criminal even in the US under the "imminent lawless action" exception.

Musk had bugger all to do with the rape gangs scandal, which broke literally years ago, and has been brought up with regularity by the newspapers here since. (For what it's worth there have also been plenty of non-Pakistani groups doing similar things and getting away with it. The main problem seems to be that no one in authority misses, or listens to, dropout teenage girls who have fallen off the radar - which makes them easy pickings for nonces.)

I don't know about the others. The sign holder was likely within the 150m buffer zone put around abortion clinics last year, though. Given the content of the sign (which just steps over the letter of the statutory prohibition not to influence patients' decisions while being entirely morally unobjectionable) I suspect it was a deliberate setup for arrest for outrage, just like the Palestine Action people. But I could be wrong.

It's perhaps also worth noting that Britain's traditions of free speech have never been as absolutist as the US (the last successful prosecution for blasphemous libel was as recent as the 70s and it's still technically a crime to advocate for a republic) but that raucous objections to government have very rarely been the target in recent centuries. The major difference in practice is that being grossly offensive isn't constitutionally protected. You're still not likely to get done for it, though.

I mean, you're supposed to call the police or Network Rail: there are placards on the (remains of the) bridge with the telephone number. But yes, it's not uncommon to have to send a train to examine the line (at slow speed, able to stop within line-of-sight) after extreme weather.

There is technology that could detect rail breaks, in the form of track circuits: feed a current into a rail, detect whether it gets to the other end (or bridge the two rails at the other end of the circuit and see if it gets back to the start of the other rail). A variation of this is commonly used in signalling systems to verify that the track is clear: if a pair of wheels is in the track section then the signal will short across the rails and make the circuit show 'occupied'.

Ultimately, though, this kind of stuff is expensive (semi-bespoke safety-critical equipment every few miles across an enormous network) and doesn't reduce all risks. Landslides don't necessarily break rails (but can cause derailments), embankments and bridges can get washed out but the track remains hanging, and lots of other failure modes.

There are definitely also systems to confirm that the power lines aren't down, but unfortunately the wires can stay up and the track be damaged or vice versa, so proving one doesn't prove the other. CCTV is probably a better bet, but that's still a truly enormous number of cameras, plus running power supplies all along the railway and ensuring a data link, plus monitoring.

His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the rural gentry and his gardener, who barely fight. The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.

When there are multiple simultaneous elections happening in the UK you get multiple ballot papers - one per race. You then put them into separate ballot boxes. This obviously doesn't scale elegantly to the kind of ballots that go from President to dog-catcher, but you could certainly separate them into pink, blue, yellow, and white ballots and count in parallel.

Carlisle is small (and not currently licensed for public use) - not an ideal place to drop a 737 if there's a choice. It's also not that far from Prestwick so may have had similar weather. Newcastle and Teesside are both on the East coast and likely to be affected by similar weather to Edinburgh given the storm coming in from the North East. The next closest will be Manchester or Leeds/Bradford, with Manchester being larger, closer to where passengers want to go (Glasgow) and further away from the storm.

There's precedent for this kind of situation to generate quite extensive investigations. An incident in 2017 where a flight from the Isle of Man to Belfast was unable to land in a storm, diverted back to the IOM, then landed in unsafe weather conditions because of insufficient fuel to divert again got a 48 page report[0], safety recommendations, and the airline being banned from the UK.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82ede440f0b...

Common until a hundred years or so ago. We also don't have the jail/prison distinction that the US has, and they're all officially called "His Majesty's Prison X" so it's not a common word in British English anymore, except in US import. So "jail" is now standard if used.

People absolutely used to buy (paper) newspapers for the crosswords: they were incredibly sticky and not expensive to make. I don't know whether that still works in an era with tons of free online puzzles, but if the NYT crossword is particularly competent/unusual/good for some reason then I'd not be surprised at all if the crossword sub drove news reading rather than the other way around.

(My experience is more with the British-style cryptic crossword, where every pseudonymous setter has a different 'flavour' and fans have passionate favourite days of the week in a given publication, let alone preferring the Times to the Guardian or whatever. I don't think the American style generates quite such obsessive fandom, but people do love their games...)

Some of it is probably about the scope of UK judicial review. Acts of Parliament are absolutely exempt from being struck down. The closest you can get is a "declaration of incompatibility" that a bill is incapable of being read in such a way as complying with the European Convention on Human Rights. If at all possible the courts will gloss and/or interpret hard to come up with a compliant reading. And an incompatibility declaration just suggests Parliament looks again: it doesn't invalidate a law by itself.

Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this includes the regulations that flesh out the details of Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even when they need Parliamentary approval).

In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be implemented in a Convention compatible way then the courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.

The consequences can look something like the report of this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are, Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back. But the regulations are not void ab inito.

People say that, but is it true? Any examples?

MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, doesn't have a covert action arm. Which is not to say that our government hasn't done any fuckery with other countries' politics (we're also a former imperial power) but it does lessen the temptation and the capability.

We (the UK) have a very extensive set of double taxation treaties too. The point of non-dom status is that it doesn't even matter if your earnings were taxed elsewhere: they're still not liable in the UK.

Depending on how transformative the effects are (and the price drop possible upon genericisation) then there could be a compulsory licensing trade to do here.

The drug companies are presumably pricing optimally for profit (but not for maximum public benefit, for which the optimum price is ~0). You could calculate the net present value of the drug companies' total profits attributable to the patent, add on 10% as a bonus, and pay them off. If the welfare gains of having cheap drugs are genuinely greater than the value of the patent to the holder, this would be win/win.

The traditional response to that was violence against scabs, for better or for worse: it keeps people from breaking picket lines even when otherwise willing.

This photo in particular captures something of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Strikers_Riot

You'll have collectively said "do fidem". The rest is read by the official at the table, not the graduands.

The question as to whether this constitutes swearing an oath or making a simple promise was an interesting one for me as Quakers traditionally refuse to do the former.