Interesting Links for 28-11-2014

[andrewducker]

• We Are Living In A Burned Universe
  (tags: life space radiation )
• British Chickens are covered in disease!
  (tags: disease chicken UK )
• Beautifully coloured rice terraces in China
  (tags: beauty China )
• A confederal UK?
  (tags: uk politics devolution )
• Why I don’t like hackathons
  (tags: programming culture )

Comments

[gonzo21]

I saw Boris Johnson and various London official type people on telly yesterday talking about how they wanted more devolution for LOndon, because they wanted to spend more of the money raised ~in~ London ~on~ London.

Where does this confederation of the UK leave the poorer parts of the country that are largely subsidised by the richer parts? Pretty much up shit creek, no?

[cmcmck]

And would one really want that tousled headed twerp in charge of anything grander than a whelk stall? :o/

[gonzo21]

His election as major was the moment I realised I couldn't really make fun of Americans anymore for voting for Dubya.

[cmcmck]

I really don't understand what people see in the man!

[momentsmusicaux]

I also find that at hackathons (and code sprints too), fuck all really gets done. I can't concentrate properly. There's too much distraction. Everyone wastes time getting their laptop to work with the wifi, and then getting the newbies' systems up and running (which is a valid endeavour, but I've spent hours doing it).

[andrewducker]

Looking at the comments here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670093

It seems that hackathons vary from "A bunch of people turn up to see what new project they can get going in 48 hours of caffeine fuelled madness!" to "A bunch of people who work in a distributed way on the same project get to spend some time in the same location" - with varying values of usefulness coming out of that.

[momentsmusicaux]

The latter is what I would call a code sprint.

[alitheapipkin]

Yeah, we do the latter at work and call them dev meetups. There are some folks connected to the project who are big fans of hackathons but they are also the people whose development philosophy is break stuff quickly and then bug fix like mad whereas the rest of us have rather more attachment to the idea of testing things before we release them!

[andrewducker]

I do sometimes think I could use them to produce some generated poetry :->

[drplokta]

A few problems with the confederation proposal:

• As far as I can see, MPs can never get a pay rise after they first become MPs, even if they then stay in a Parliament for 40 years during which time the cost of living quintuples. This seems wrong. I agree they shouldn't be able to get a pay rise between elections.
  
• York is not big enough to be the federal capital of the UK. How are you going to fit 192 embassies and four major government departments into a city of only 200,000 people? Manchester, Leeds or Birmingham would be better.
  
• Also, it's unusual for a federal state to have its capital in the jurisdiction of a single member state. It would be more normal to have a capital territory administered directly by the federal government, like DC or the ACT.
  
• It's insufficiently ambitious. If we're having a federal structure, we should include as member states Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Saint Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland

[a_pawson]

The small territories you mentioned are never going to join any sort of federal structure as they may then have to stop being tax havens.