andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2012-05-02 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2012-05-02 12:00 pm
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Interesting Links for 02-05-2012
- MPs announce that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to run News Corp
- The EU's Common Agricultural Policy is slowly being reformed.
- Unrealistic expectations of relationships are a scourge on society.
- How Marvel took The Avengers from a throwaway reference in Iron Man to a record-breaking movie
- Sleep cancels out obesity gene
- Pakistani province's high court orders government to stop censoring websites illegally
- See which parties voted the way that you would want them to.
- Want to know what TV comes out when? Then this is the most awesome site in the universe.
- The dilemmas of TV filming - camera types are changing, and the different styles cause different emotional effects
- Nine more people arrested for naming a rape victim on Twitter.
- Wormworld saga chapter 3 is out. The art is still gorgeous.
- On rape within the BDSM community
- Have 26 per cent fewer houses been built under the Coalition?
- Consumer ebooks sales increased by 366% in 2011. Still only 6% of physical books.
- Microsoft removes racy apps from Windows Phone store. So glad my apps aren't censored.
- SPDY Performance on Mobile Networks. (From the figures, I think SPDY caches will be damned useful)
- Final Fantasy 13-2 characters model Prada. (Okay, gaming is now officially completely mainstream)
- A computer built into a radiation detector. Gloriously retro-looking
- Android Ported to C# - staggeringly faster
- Vote for the person, not the party, in your local council elections (if you're in a country with a sensible voting system)
- Scottish children drinking less fizzy drinks, drinking lots of alcohol, doing no exercise, are very happy.
- Radical Honesty - a step too far?
- Cutting red tape and taxes will not revive Britain - it's spending it in the best places that will help.
- Neal Stephenson answers interview questions (including the one about his epic battle with William Gibson). Old, but good.
- Protection of Freedoms Act landmark achievement in fight for civil liberties.
no subject
What's weird is how low down the SDLP were, given that they're supposedly a left-of-centre party.
no subject
Ensures the Secretary of State has a responsibility to provide a good national health service
Bans any new NHS charges without an additional act of Parliament (thus stopping the Labour council in Manchester, where I live, from bringing in charges for using A&E, which they'd been planning to do)
Devolves decision-making to clinicians rather than administrators
Includes a statutory duty to minimise 'postcode lotteries' (trans activists I know are ecstatic about this one).
Puts a cap on the amount of money that a foundation trust can raise from private provision (a cap that wasn't there previously)
And actually *reverses* some of the privatisation Labour brought in, as well as making sure any future use of private providers must be decided not just on the basis of cost (as under Labour's legislation) but must take into account quality of service as well.
I read through the bill several times (unlike pretty much everyone I read making alarmist statements about it ending the NHS -- people with more mild criticisms, like Phil Hammond, who thinks it's a terrible bill but only the latest in a long line of such bad bils, tend to have actually read it, but the ones saying it privatises everything haven't) and found a lot in it that was bad, and that I disagree with, and that I would change if I could, but it absolutely doesn't privatise the NHS.
(My own one got 57% Lib Dem, coin toss, then I think the SNP and Plaid (even though I don't live in Scotland or Wales). Tories came slightly higher than Labour for the same reason as you.)
Northern Irish politics is weird in all sorts of ways -- while I got 57% Lib Dem, for example, I only got 11% Alliance, even though the Alliance party are officially allied with the Lib Dems.
no subject
That's not weird at all. That's the deliberate result of a poll that entirely omits such issues as tax and income distribution and social equality, which one might consider quite important to left-leaning voters. These major reasons that one might vote for a leftish party aren't mentioned at all. Lest it be thought I am biased, these issues might also be considered important to right-wing voters, whom the poll likewise deprives of an accurate reflection of a significant element of their political stance. Result: everyone ends up in the centre, oh what a surprise. And that's even before you get to some of the interesting wording of the questions.
no subject