The queen (or king) can abdicate but would not have the power to abolish the British monarchy. That's a constitutional change and would presumably take a Parliamentary act.
If she wanted to abolish the monarchy, she could have spurred that change pretty easily I think.
A hell of a way to end the Monarchy would have been to use the royal prerogative to install an anti-brexit Prime Minister a couple years ago (against convention, but that's the point). Presumably that'd be enough to get them to abolish the Monarchy. And it would have been an fitting end to the Monarchy, a legacy of the previous era, to have the Queen, who held it for the current era, expend it's last bit of power to stay in the EU, which might be one of the top players in the next era.
Well that's how it'd be written if it was a movie at least.
“Unless it impacts your performance during working hours” — Shouldn’t the employer just note the poor performance and tell you to improve, rather than police your personal life? Under your reasoning, an employer could require a certain number of hours of sleep per night.
SEC pursued junk bond pioneer Michael Milken in the 1980s, Ivan Boesky before that… unsure of specifics of SEC personnel getting to “high office” because of that but seems obvious that high profile successful prosecutions would be career-making
(Granted those examples are from the 80s but i would think there are more recent examples…)
Milken was prosecuted by Rudy Giuliani which didn’t hurt Giuliani’s career, but Rudy was a US district attorney or something, not SEC
Agree with your sentiment generally though, seems like a boatload of people could have been put away after the financial crisis but they instead profited from bailouts
Milken's prosecution didnt really hurt his career much either. Hes still a billionaire (and if I remember right, his brother did very well too).
PS - read Den of Thieves again - there is an imo strong parallel between what was going on with junk bonds in the 80s and what is happening now with VC money. When Milken was indicted, he couldn't keep all the balls in the air anymore and the whole thing fell apart. I'm very interested to see what parallel will play out this time and when.
Didn’t hurt his career much? He was barred from the securities industry forever. Sure he had a lot of money left, but how can you know where his career would go if he weren’t prosecuted? That’s like saying that if Bill Gates were forced to cash out of Microsoft in the 80s it wouldn’t have affected his career much because, after all, he would still be a billionaire
"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN."
And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?
I was just dismayed to see the story sink so fast (but I get it now) — the article involves an interesting discussion of how scientific consensus is represented in the media and how it relates to social media, which seem like very HN-friendly topics… shame that so many are eager to flag something like this based on (as seems likely) some sort of forbidden-topic litmus test
thanks for the list. The suppression I'm talking about occurred before your earliest link, threads closed, cut off, etc. I remember because I learned about Yuri Deigin's research in April and no discussion of it was allowed on HN which should be a place for reasoned discussion
Reasoned discussion has a fraught relationship with large groups.
I'd be a bit careful about the word "allowed" because that posits an "allower" when much of the process you're describing is stochastic. I'm not trying to evade responsibility for the part that we play (at least I hope I'm not), but it's so much more complicated than just "allow v. unallow".
you think of the problem you are solving as "avoid flamewars including through automation to make the task easier on a no-profit forum"
I think there needs to be more room for "(perhaps heated) discussion of actual science in the face of an ongoing existential threat to vast swathes of western civilization and the third world"
I think there needs to be more room for discussion of a seemingly real, Orwellian-Huxleyan ideological takeover of important cultural institutions like wikipedia, the NY Times, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., a left wing doppelganger to the Red Scare of the 50's.
full disclosure: I'm a former leftie, I know the propaganda I used to spew in the name of the earnest conviction of what morally superior people we lefties were compared to those awful troglodytes, and I remember how easily the centrists would be convinced to go along by nice words. I mean, black lives DO matter, right? but BLM Inc(tm) is a Marxist led radical coalition that sees further violence as helping the cause by proving their case.
It's a black box from an outside perspective, but generally I imagine it's factors such as appearing political or the sort of thing that would be reported in mainstream media (both of which are somewhat discouraged by site guidelines), or being repetitive (there have been a number of articles discussed recently on this topic).
This is not a new issue. Here's a discussion on the subject:
