Interesting Links for 10-08-2012

[andrewducker]

• How does the Corby by-election change the UK's electoral mathematics?
  (tags: elections coalition uk )
• 1300 extreme porn convictions in the last year. Rather more than the original estimate of _30_
  (tags: viaCipherGoth porn uk law freespeech )
• Spotify, Pandora, Streaming Music Make Up 25 Percent of Warner Digital's revenue
  (tags: music spotify

Comments

[artkouros]

In 1998 this was considered extreme:

[andrewducker]

I am so not up to 20 characters. I do have two-factor authentication turned on though.

[steer]

"Ms Watson revealed the battered snack was invented in the take-away - which used to be known as the Haven Fish Bar - back in 1995."

I am sure that I remember talking about them as a student in the early 90s. Our snack bar served mars bar toasties at the time -- but they didn't have a deep fat fryer.

[andrewducker]

I can't remember when I first heard about them.

I have eaten one once though. It was amazing.

[steer]

Yet to try it. A scottish friend arrived at York university in 1990 and apparently that was the first time she realised that pizzas were normally round and flat, not folded in half and battered.

[andrewducker]

In my experience, chip-shop-pizzas in Scotland aren't battered, but they are deep-fried. I'm not sure that's an improvement.

I wouldn't say that Deep-Fried-Mars-Bar is something to be tried more than once. But frankly it's just a melted Mars Bar, some flour, egg, and oil. Many of the same people that scream at the thought would happily eat fish and chips, and have dessert afterwards.

[danieldwilliam]

I hadn’t realised that the electoral maths was quite as tight the Lib Dem Voice article has it and I’d assumed (partly in despair) that it wouldn’t move significantly during the Parliament

[andrewducker]

Yes. As various people point out in the comments, that alliance would be far too hard to hold together. Another five seats...

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah - It’s pretty much the Not Tory Alliance and I don’t quite see how it could actually do anything other than not be a Tory government.

A vote of no confidence would be fun.

I wonder what the SNP make of it all. I wonder if they’d prefer to be fighting the referendum with a Tory government in Westminster or a really weak Lib-Lab-Rainbow pact.

[andrewducker]

Ideally, they'd be fighting a BNP/UKIP alliance.

[xenophanean]

That stuff about avoiding being a sex-creep, some of it's right on the money, but it's also entirely negative, and reads as, "if you've got no social skills, just fuck off".

Gotta have the smooth with the rough. It's some guy who doesn't like creepy guys around his friends and wants them to go away. This isn't an unreasonable desire at all, I dislike creepy guys being around too, but this is selling abuse as advice.

He's identified lots of annoying nasty things which they do, but given no advice as to nice things to do, or ways to help people to trust you.

[andrewducker]

He's given a list of ten things that they should do (or not do - some of them are phrased positively, some negatively). If they do all of those things, then they're (probably) not being a creep. I thought it was a pretty good list myself.

He's not asking for them to have social skills - if they had social skills they wouldn't need the list. He's saying "If you have no social skills, here is a list of things to do so that you don't creep people out."

[xenophanean]

No, I'd say he's given one rather vague thing to do, and nine not to.

Know that you're responsible for your own actions.
Don't expect help from other people in dealing with your personal relations issues.
Don't expect people to tell you what you're doing wrong
Don't regard other people's behaviour as being for you
Don't touch people,
Don't get too close to people
Don't box people in
Don't use sexual innuendos
Don't follow people when they leave
Go away if people don't like you

It makes the world sound fairly bleak and unfriendly.

[xenophanean]

(Although, as I've said, I strongly agree with many of them).

How does the Corby by-election change the UK's electoral mathematics?

[cartesiandaemon]

Hm. I tend to agree with the idea that this is interesting but very optimistic in how viable it is, and how much the labour or lib dem leadership would be willing to try it.

In fact, it seems like the biggest negative stereotype about the current lib dem strategy is that the party is acting as a pushover. And I think that's partly an unfair "criticising anyone who's not a bully", and unfair in ignoring many good things. But I think it's also partly true.

So whether or not I think labour would be much better than conservative, it might be a positive thing to negotiate about it, because (a) it shows the lib dem leadership actively doing something and (b) it establishes that there options other than "just going along with conservative plans and hoping for the best", which obviously gives them more bargaining power (and gives more bargaining power to the center wing of the conservative party).

Re: How does the Corby by-election change the UK's electoral mathematics?

[andrewducker]

I do wish that the Rightmost Wing of the Conservative Party would get the picture that they either have to tack towards the centre or be out of power. Sadly, a fair chunk of them seem to think that people aren't voting for them because they aren't right-wing _enough_.