Interesting Links for 01-02-2012
Feb. 1st, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Women Are Better Than Men At Parking Cars
- Transgender People are Completely Banned From Boarding Airplanes in Canada (unless they've had reassignment surgery)
- Sarkozy wants France to be more like Germany
- Only UK film ever banned for blasphemy gets a rating after 23 year ban
- Is it acceptable to call someone 'babe'?
- Scottish Opposition party leaders unite over same-sex marriage
- Twenty Five Questions My Mother Asks Me About Indepedence Every Time She Phones
- What is it like to be in a relationship with someone who has Asperger's? - Quora
- An innovative and effective method for dealing with gangs
- Progress report: Constitutional reform
- Wish banks were smaller, with less power? Move Your Money
- Petition the government to fast track the £10,000 income tax threshold.
- The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing
- The-Observable-Universe is big. Reeeeeeally big.
- Self-steering bullet researched. Well, they say bullet, you might say tiny, tiny missle.
- We can now convert thoughts into sounds
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:20 am (UTC)When I first stayed with my now wife at her home in North Devon, I was more than a little taken aback when the middle-aged woman who served me in the local shop said to me "Thank you, my lover*". ("I'm sure I would have remembered..." I thought.)
It would be a shame if quaint little dialect expressions like "babe" or "my lover" disappeared from the language because of political correctness. Also, if the word "babe" is going to become offensive, then an awful lot of songs will need to be rewritten...
* Well actually in a North Devon accent, it was more like "moy luvver".
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:27 am (UTC)I would object to being called 'babe' or 'baby' by my husband. I'm not sure this is logical, but there you are. :)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:33 am (UTC)Do people have a right not to be offended? Well, no - and in situations where they can simply take their business elsewhere then that's fine. A publicly run service, on the other hand, has a monopoly and should generally strive to be as neutral as possible with language.
When I'm in the office I'm not going to use any kind of language that might cause anyone to be uncomfortable, because everyone has to be there, and it's not fair to them to go around wearing offensive t-shirts. And I'd feel the same way about people running my local buses, I'd want them to make everyone feel comfortable.
The people running the local corner shop can act how they like - and if their customers don't like it then there's generally another corner shop a little up the road.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 02:04 pm (UTC)Some people just call people 'babe', it's true. However, words like 'babe', 'honey', 'dear' are frequently used in a condescending, belittling way to women, especially in disagreements. To turn around and add "well, it's your fault if you choose to offended, babe," is additionally insulting.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 02:22 pm (UTC)It isn't fair if someone uses a word-that-might-have-an-offensive-connotation deliberately offensively and then uses rule 21 to say "well, it's your fault if you choose to offended, babe". In fact, you're right - it would be additionally insulting. However, I would still argue that if the speaker really meant no offence, then the listener shouldn't look for it.
If, for example, a student from North Wales goes into a village shop in rural North Devon and is "offended" when the shopkeeper calls him "my lover", I think it's the student who is in the wrong, not the shopkeeper.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 02:29 pm (UTC)I see your point of view now, and understand.
While we don't know for sure, I doubt the original bus complaint was a simple occurrence of "drivers have to stop saying babe, it's offensive" as it seems more likely that it was part of a larger dispute or behavior the complainant considered unprofessional, and the company isolated it as something they could implement service-wide.
That's just how things seem to work.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 02:35 pm (UTC)(Incidentally, I was trying to work out where I recognised your name from. I looked through some of your more recent entries and came across your brilliant post about what English words mean in New York (mostly "sandwich") which made me smile as much as it did when Andrew first linked to it. And a special bonus point for having the thing that we Brits think about as "hero" being Mark Cavendish!)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:32 am (UTC)I am suddenly strongly reminded of the bit in Obelix & Co where someone says that 'A slave's only right is work; you cannot remove that right from him'. Huh, fancy that!
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:54 am (UTC)I opened the account in 2009 (IIRC). My all-time summary shows £10 of bad debt. My tax statement for last year shows I made 41.34 on £500, after fees of 4.99. So actually more like 8%. I'd definitely recommend it.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 09:37 pm (UTC)As a result of not being able to write off losses against your income, as your marginal tax rate increases risk of default becomes progressively more expensive, which results in a skew in the interest rates between safe borrowers (A) and unsafe borrowers (C) and the unhappy consequence that those least able to pay the loans back are shafted by being given an extra high interest rate. My defaults are all 'B' loans, so £141 of default on £2900 of 'B' loans over three years is a 1.6% default rate, the result of the tax change is I need to increase the interest rate by 2.7% rather than 1.6% over 'A' borrowers to break even.
Socially this works out terribly, it means that the richest lenders have an incentive to take the safest loans, the poorest lenders the most unsafe loans, the richest borrowers get artificially better rates and the poorest borrowers get artificially worst rates.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 01:47 pm (UTC)I think the SNP are mainly a centre-left Social Democrat with a few others who might fall into the Conservative Party or elsewhere if they didn’t think that the question of independence was a trump issue. With that issue resolved these people can return to their natural home.
The Labour Party are broadly a centre-left Social Democrat party.
With no Indepedence question to resolve there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between the two.
So I guess potential outcomes are
that one or other party disbands or receives such a heavy defeat in an election that it is killed off
a merger between the SNP and Labour (which I think might be painful given the personal animosities I’ve observed) which forms the Scottish National Labour Party
some kind of Irish situation where people vote for the SNP or Labour based more on tribal loyalties than ideology or policy
the Labour Party nudges left forming becoming a left-wing party, with the SNP as a centre-left party, the Lib-Dems as a centerist party and the (renamed) Conservative Party as a centre-right party.
I’m not sure what the Conservatives would call themselves. Post the adoption of the 2018 constitution and the establishment of the independent Scottish socialist workers paradise I’m not sure how you could call a party which said “none of that, what we’ve got is rubbish” Conservative.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 03:06 pm (UTC)My guess is a lot depends on how the various parties do in the general election immediately after a Yes vote and how they position themselves.
Too many permutations for me to really get a handle on.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 11:44 am (UTC)I definitely shouldn't have read any of the comments on that one...
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 12:04 pm (UTC)> Im appalled that you are appalled by this law and can’t think for yourself. A passport first of all: doesn’t read Gender…It reads Sex…a genetic male can identify themselves as female and vice-versa…that would be gender…but sex denotes your biology, not your gender – they are two different things but thats why they ask your sex not gender.
This is technically correct... thus the corollary is that *everyone* should be asked to drop their pants and show that their bits correspond with what's written in their passport... ROTFL!
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 12:13 pm (UTC)It's dangerously discriminatory in principle, and particularly so to pre/non-op MtFs, because us girls in a practical sense dress as dudes every day so a pre-op FtM and a girl dressed in jeans is, for the purposes of this check, essentially identical - I strongly doubt a girl will be turned away for being in trousers and a men's shirt, and if a pre-op but post-hormones FtM had facial hair, well, that would require a change to their passport photo anyway and there are most definitely women with facial hair.
Basically, it's a huge, deeply ignorant balls-up by someone who's ideas of gender identity are rooted in the 1950s, but that doesn't make the argument itself about sex vs. gender, and some people are too thick to see that and basically shouldn't be allowed the internet.
If the original plan to explode every computer still using AOL in the 2k bug had worked, none of this would be happening.
At the end of the day I shouldn't ever read the comments in an article talking about gender or transgenderism because I am guaranteed to be deeply irritated by both sides of the argument.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 03:10 pm (UTC)Huh. Well, well done to the BBFC for being pro-active in responding to changes in the law, I guess.
"What is it like to be in a relationship with someone who has Asperger's? - Quora"
That was very moving.
"Self-steering bullet researched. Well, they say bullet, you might say tiny, tiny missle."
"We can now convert thoughts into sounds"
It's always the things I thought were completely ridiculous that turn out to have actually been invented!
When I heard the concept of self-steering bullets I thought "why would they be bullets, rather than missiles", but apparently self-guided by non-self-propelled bullets do make sense.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 06:02 pm (UTC)Note to the Roman Catholic Church: Marriage existed before the Roman Catholic Church, you massively occluded fucking idiots. You just defeated your own argument.
which, in fairness, is probably the smartest thing you've done for a century or so.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 06:36 pm (UTC)Wait, damn - this is an amazing idea, Apple could make millions with "ethical" versions of all their products that are exactly the same, but you get to spend more money to purchase them!
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 06:51 pm (UTC)Perhaps phones not made by supposedly suicidal Chinese workers would not broadcast dangerous wifi rays and might microwave your frontal lobes/testicles/ovaries less. Or whatever it is that phones do.
It's like the hilarious bit in an article about British pork standards where a farmer said something along the lines of "everyone knows those foreigners do horrible things when no one is looking" as part-justification for why British was better. There were actual stats later, but the assumed sinister nature of foreign farmers was quite funny.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 07:02 pm (UTC)Well, we don't call a guided artillery shell or mortar bomb a 'guided missile', so probably not. It's even debatable if a ICBM is a 'guided missile'.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 08:47 pm (UTC)A missile in this sense (as opposed to a generic missile, anything moving through the air e.g. includes arrows, thrown rocks, bullets) is a shortened version of 'guided missile'. A guided missile is normally defined as being guided and powered - being launched by an external source doesn't count. A 'rocket' (e.g. FROG Free Rocket Over Ground, WW2 aircraft-luanched rockets) is powered, normally stabilised (e.g fixed fins) but not guided - it will go where it is pointed at launch, subject to wind, gravity etc.
If you put a laser homer and guidance fins on an aircraft bomb, then you have a guided bomb (most laser and/or GPS guided bombs are kits added to standard bombs). If you put a laser homer (or GPS) and steerable fins on an artillery shell we don't call it a missile (see Copperhead). Booster and laser/GPS on an artillery shell probably meets some technical definitions, but I don't think they are refered to as missiles (see 'Extended Range Guided Munition').
Adding guidance to something pushed out of a tube by an explosion (even if the explosion is of explosives loaded into one end of the tube at the same time as what comes out of the tube) wouldn't normally cause it to be called a guided missile.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 09:57 am (UTC)