If you read the article, they practically exercise those rights up through the current day. The PM's office runs nearly all proposed legislation by them and makes changes to acts before they go up for debate. Acts have changed from threats of using the royal consent at least as recently as 2021, but it's hard to get complete numbers as most of this process happens in secret.
This is all outlined in the previous citation I gave.
As do I, I personally have never heard someone refer to a nuclear fission power plant as a nuke, but I guess I don't hang around with the same people as you...
Lowering taxes is counterproductive, though. The problem is sharing the burden with the wealthier. At some point, you can't really get something for nothing and we have to accept that if we want first-world services and infrastructure, we have to pay for them. And paying for them through taxes is way more efficient than just letting private companies extract their benefits from tolls and such.
I agree with this - I was making the point that austerity, by the terms of its own argument, hasn't worked. Reducing public spending has demonstrably not reduced our debt burden even before the pandemic, and so therefore I would suggest we abandon it.
Definitely, it was a resounding failure of the modern Neo-liberal ideas. What worries me though is the cakeist populists who are feeding on resentment and who are in power or close to it in several European countries (including the UK). There will need to be a tax increase, probably not for most people, but in terms of tax revenues.
The problem is that the effective taxation rate is unbalanced. Lowest income groups and new graduates are paying more than the highest income ones! Lowering tax on the majority of people need not lower tax so significantly if paired with higher tax rates at the top. Or so my understanding goes.
If you completely ignore the context of a global financial crisis in 2008 and pandemic in 2020, I suppose you might think austerity has been unsuccessful.
I'm genuinely curious to the reasoning behind austerity - I confess to not having any academic qualifications in economics but it does seem to me that deliberately removing services from the poorer sections of society is going to introduce more friction to the system, which will lead to poorer outcomes in general. The fact that our public debt continued to soar, even before the pandemic, seems to me to suggest that even on its own terms it wasn't a winning argument.
Do you have any sources that make the argument for austerity? This is a genuine question - as I say I have no formal background in the subject but from what I've managed to find I have found little in the way of convinvcing arguments.
Austerity is not a difficult policy to understand.
If your personal debts had grown exponentially over the past year, and your income showed no signs of exceeding your outgoings, would you not make some effort to reduce your outgoings?
Ah yes, the "maxing out the country's credit card" argument. The national debt is owed in £'s, which the government can create and destroy at will, and much of it is one arm of the government owing another arm of the government. It's nothing like personal debt.
Yes of course, the UK could simply print enough money to repay all its debts and that wouldn’t have any harmful or damaging effects on its economy whatsoever…
It's much too reductive a framing, IMO. Public sector spending is not, majorly, an "outgoing" of "the UK" in any reasonably comparable way to an individual's spend - rather, public sector money generally funds services within the UK which employ individuals who a) pay income taxes directly b) spend their income in other parts of the economy, where VAT/corporation tax/etc feed back to HMRC, and companies profit and grow.
It's really nothing like an "I've spent £5 on a beer and now that fiver is gone forever" outgoing, in scale or effect.
They actually have already - PyTorch works straight up with ROCm, and so does Tensorflow. There is a little faffing to do to get it to work but they've made great progress in the last six months.
Except consumer GPUs don't officially support ROCm, despite consistent pressure from users for years. And there's no indication of when that situation will change.
CUDA is successful because the same software works on low-powered laptop GPUs and expensive datacenter GPUs.
To this particular point, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartiate would seem to suggest (admittedly poorly cited) that there was in fact a distinction made within Spartan society between free and enslaved Spartans.
The only reference it sources is confusingly Xenophon, who you have admonished others for not reading - I confess I haven't myself, so will do some digging!
A distinction was certainly made between free citizens of Sparta and their slaves! Just to be perfectly clear, I don't disagree with that.
What I point out is that this distinction was not made by using different words that both meant "inhabitant of Sparta", in particular not "Spartiate" and "Spartan". As far as I can tell, the slaves of Sparta were only known as "helots".
The general point is that the ancients didn't think of the slaves living in a city as "citi-z-ens" of that city, probably because they were not actually citizens, in the legal sense, according to the laws of the era. For example, you will find no ancient source, and I believe no modern source either, calling the slaves living in Athens, "Athenians". They were the Athenians' slaves, they lived and worked in Athens, but they were not "Athenians".
This is not completely unlike modern times. For example, I live and work in the UK, but I'm by no means "British" and nobody would refer to me and others like me as "British", simply because we live and work in Britain. Rather, "British" is reserved for, well, citizens of the United Kingdom. The rest of us that have the malfortune to be domiciled on the British Isles are "immigrants" (or "bloody foreigners"), in any case there are different words, with different roots, to describe us.
I'm happy to clarify this further if there is still confusion. I blame the author of the blog posts for the confusion, btw.
Herodotus made a hell of a lot up, relied on oral reports and explicitly states that none of what he writes is intended to be relied on - it is merely what people told him. I think you actually need to read the linked blog that you seem so dismissive of, and come up with some substantive rebuttals to the points he makes rather than just making this rather lame appeal to historical authority.
Yes, I've read the linked blog post, thank you very much for making an ass of u and me.
And btw, that Herodotus, while being "the father of history" was full of shit, is something that any Greek school kid will tell you readily, so bringing this up is just a shallow dismissal of my point: that all we know about ancient times is what ancient authors have written, like Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Plato, and Plutarch. You will not learn more about ancient times by a blog post that quotes them second- and third-hand, all the while expressing strong personal opinions about what they have written, than if you read the actual first-hand sources, biased as they may be.
Like, you're the second or third person who makes this point: Herodotus confabulated. Sure. And who else didn't? Who else are you going to get your knowledge of what happened 2000 years ago than from the people who wrote about it all around the time it was going on?
I mean, do you think there are some other, magickally objective and accurate sources about ancient Sparta, than the ancient Greek authors I suggest people read?
No sure, just you have strongly dismissive opinions of someone you mockingly refer to as a mere blog author, and I felt I had to weigh in. I confess I definitely don't know nearly as much as I'd like about the ancient world, especially not to the extent of having read the primary sources but I feel like you're missing the point of people's reactions.
I think the underlying point is that you actually can learn more about the ancient world despite not necessarily possesing any more primary source knowledge - things can be inferred, close analysis can change perspectives and so on.
I know it isn't the point you're trying to make but you sound like you're trying to dismiss the entire premise of historical research. Like, we don't have any new information (which is patently false by the way, maybe not so relevant to this particular topic but new information comes to light pretty much daily) so therefore we should simply not think about it anymore. I'm not trying to be dismissive of your argument and you clearly feel quite strongly about it.
Do you think all historical research is bunk or just this argument?
Where did you see all that? "[A]ll historical research is bunk"? I "mockingly refer to [The Pedant] as a mere blog author"? I'm "trying to dismiss the entire premise of historical research"? You found those things in my comments? Are you replying to someone else?
Are you sure you are in conversation with me, and what I wrote, rather than some other opinion that you have confused my comments with?
I mean, what the hell? I have said none of the things you say I said and I don't even believe them! Where the hell did I write "mere blog author" about anyone?
>all we know about ancient times is what ancient authors have written
Contemporary approaches to ancient history do not rely exclusively on literary sources, but build a much fuller picture from epigraphy (inscriptions and graffiti can tell us a lot), archaeology, and numismatics.
You're right, not all knowledge comes from ancient authors. But I don't agree that there is enough information in epigrams and so on, to figure anything out with the context provided by long-form prose by authors who were sometimes even contemporary with the events they describe. I guess that's opinion though.
Which I recall being touted as one of the major advantages of systemd - specifically that binary log files would make for much easier log aggregation as it would be more efficient to send over the wire. Fast forward to today and the best way of shipping logs is to force journald to output to, uh, text, then wring it through, yes thats right, syslog, to then be sent to a central server...
At the risk of uttering a "you're holding it wrong" defense, it feels to me the issue isn't with logging format, but the stubbornness of *nix admins used to working with text. For better or worse, software moves in the direction of things large amounts of developers like the most, whether it makes sense or not.
"In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy."
I'm sorry but I really totally fail to see what is appealing about this future hellscape where literally every aspect of our lives is transacted, monetised and profitable.
What is good about this? Why is this something to aim for?
He makes the same argument that I think you're making, that these new types of "more accessible" financial markets in crypto can corrupt people if they only use it to seek out money for money's sake.
TLDR: it's a tool, that can be used for good or for bad, but like any tool it's better to have it than not.
I don't see how Ethereum or any "digital currency" solve the real world problems that will still exist. Sure, the big players in the recording industry can treat artists badly. But a service is provided, which is doing all business and marking side of things that most artists don't want to bother about.
The idea of recording companies will still exist. Maybe somehow the big incumbents get caught out by the change to a "digital economy", but all that will happen is new ones will appear, and will end up doing exactly the same as the old ones.
Digital distribution was supposed to free artists from record companies. Now it is consolidated to a few large companies like Spotify and Apple because musicians don't want to run and market their own digital store front.
