Interesting Links for 12-09-2018

[andrewducker]

Societal issues explained (by throwing people down pits)

(tags: society satire )

The EU is betting that Brexit will make a trade deal with India a little easier.

(tags: europe india uk trade )

Why has Brexit become a legal matter when it should be a political matter?

(tags: politics uk Europe law )

Kieron Gillen's new comic looks interesting

(tags: comics roleplaying )

Brexit: Now Conservatives are suggesting the EEA for three years as a stop-gap.

(tags: uk europe doom )

There has been no Corbyn surge in Scotland

(tags: Scotland labour politics )

EA defies Belgian loot box decision, setting up potential gambling lawsuit

If they decide that loot boxes are gambling then I can't see how, for instance, Hearthstone card packs aren't. Or, indeed, Magic: The Gathering card packs. This one could be absolutely massive.
(tags: gambling games belgium )

Which artist do you think draws the most handsome/beautiful/sexiest characters in comics? Any genre. (Nice range of styles in the replies)

(tags: comics art beauty )

'She has to go': Conservative MPs meet over plot to oust Theresa May

I don't actually think she'll lose a vote of no confidence
(tags: conservatives )

Barnier confronts Raab over discovery of Brexit no-deal letters to EU27

(tags: Europe UK doom )

Movie Star's Absence Shows Perils of Show Business in China

(tags: movies China money )

Brexit: EU can 'certainly not' accept Theresa May's single market plan, Juncker warns

(tags: europe uk doom )

‘Super-recognisers’ employed by UK police to hunt criminals may not be identifying people correctly

(tags: faces vision uk police fail )

The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security

(tags: security journalism )

Finding balance in the universe, a short story

(tags: short_story scifi ethics morality )

A single gene mutation may have helped humans become optimal long-distance runners

(tags: humans genetics running )

Tom Watson says Momentum should drop speaker who vandalised Warsaw ghetto

(tags: labour Jews OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I think if the discontented Tories do try to oust May they will fail.

Their failure will make them vulnerable to a) disempowering and b) repercussions.

How May might want to use that I don't know.

[jack]

I can't believe they wrote a whole article about that without mentioning that the government can't bind itself to anything (apart from perhaps contracts with third parties).

I mean, if the brexiters will go for it, that's a lot better than the alternative. Although three years of slow death and "will they kick the can further down the road" is really not a good compromise. But that seems like a problem worth noticing.

Me: I feel like we're running out of ways to make this worse.
Nick Boles: We haven't made the economic security of the country depend on "can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it" yet.

[andrewducker]

I reckon that kicking the can further down the road will almost certainly lead to No Brexit. The more detail that comes out, the more people are changing their minds. And yes, with it not being possible to bind a future parliament, that'll be easy enough.

[jack]

I really hope so! But I really don't know, parliament seem really opposed to considering the (to me, obvious) solution and I don't know when that'll change. Or that we'll spend a decade inching closer to brundo without ever actually doing it.

[danieldwilliam]

I agree that the longer we are in a state of not yet having actually left the EU the more likely it is that we don't actually leave. And the closer we stay the easier it is to re-join.

But I think there is a state where we are in the EEA for a transitional period but where we have irreversibly left the EU.

We may discover that we trip over that point by accident.

[andrewducker]

If we're in the EEA then we have, by definition, left the EU.

However, that doesn't make it irreversible. I'm not sure anything can make it impossible for us to rejoin the EU, short of multiple nuclear strikes making the whole island uninhabitable.

[danieldwilliam]

Sorry, I realise I've not been quite precise enough in my language.

We can be in a state where we are still technically in the EU but in the process of transitioning to the EEA but that that transition is irreversible. I.E. that we have taken the decision to join the EEA once our transitional arrangements within the EU have expired and can not proceedurally reverse that decision.

I don't think it is going to be impossible for us to rejoin. Particularlly if we remain in close regulatory alignment. The EU will always have room for prosperous liberal democracies. They may want us to join Schengen and the Euro, or at least promise to at some point in the future. I'm not all together sure that they would insist. The prize of having Britain rejoin the EU might well be big enough on its own. Big economy. Big change of mind. Big apology.

[mountainkiss]

I do not know that I assume we will remain a prosperous liberal democracy.

[danieldwilliam]

Prosperous liberal democracy is a broad church.

I think my assumption with regard to the UK economy post Brexit is that it takes some sort of negative shock in 2019-2021 (ranging from big to huge) and then grows more slowly in the period 2021-2040.

"Huge" might well involve a temporary disruption to reliable food supplies and the death of hundreds of thousands of people but that would still leave us more prosperous than Albania or Bulgaria or various North African states.

I do have some concerns about the quality of the liberalness and the quality of the democraticness of our liberal democracy. We migth become more authoritarian and have a more instrusive security infrastructure but I think we are unlikely to be a full on fascist state.

But, yeah, always worth bearing in mind that prosperous liberal democracy might be a temporary state.

[andrewducker]

Aah, gotcha. I think I agree, but I'm not 100% sure.

Up until March 2019 we can reverse and stay in.

Once we hit that date, we may well have transitional agreements, but we are no longer members of the EU. So we may well have all sorts of rights (as part of the transitional arrangement), but we aren't a member of the EU or the EEA or anything else.

So joining the EEA doesn't affect our membership of the EU at that point, because we've already left.

Re: other discussion on our liberal prosperousness, I certainly fear for both of those things. The possibility of Independence there is helping me stay somewhat saneish.

[jack]

That raises a good question. We currently have lots of exceptions that were necessary to persuade us to join at all. Lots of those were good for the UK or some parts of the UK, but not really desirable overall, and if we're forced to give them up as part of rejoining in the future, fair enough.

But I am a bit scared of the Euro. Leaving and rejoining would probably mean euro. I always WANTED a single currency. I still WANT a single currency. But it seems to have been premature judging from the pain in southern Europe, if northern europe is not willing to invest a lot more in southern europe without mandating a lot of terrible austerity.

Do we say, well, hopefully it will be ok for us, the downsides are bad but the upsides are worth it and we don't have a choice? I guess so.

Hopefully we'll pay more attention to European politics than we did before. Although I'm not hopeful. The perception that the european government is too remote to influence *is* a problem, which I hope gets better.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I love the idea of a single currency. But I think it has serious drawbacks. Having the same currency across the UK meant that a prosperous financial centre in London made a northern manufacturing centre much less likely. Having the same currency across Europe seems to be causing all sorts of imbalances there.

I don't think that a single currency can be successful in the long term without much more political union. And the current situation makes things more likely to fracture than unify.

Schengen, on the other hand, will be awesome.

[jack]

I don't think that a single currency can be successful in the long term without much more political union. And the current situation makes things more likely to fracture than unify.

Yeah :(

Schengen, on the other hand, will be awesome.

Yes! Down with borders!

[danieldwilliam]

I think the specific requirement for a currency union to work are suffiently large and timely fiscal transfers and a single market. The EU / Eurozone largely has a single market. The fiscal transfers have been problematic because of the lack of the necessary political structures to decide on them and administer them and a lack of political and social cohesion. The EU is not a nation-state. That seems to be an important aspect of making a single currency work.

I think people in the USA don't much mind that their federal taxes are spent on e.g. maintaining military bases in poor states that they don't personally live in the way that Germans or Brits might mind having to spend "their" money on other countries troops based in Romania or Bulgaria.

[jack]

Well, we seem to be massively courting that with this sort of proposal :( But if we can stay in the EEA permanently we'll have dodged a lot of the worst outcomes :(

[danieldwilliam]

From where we were in July 2016 I would quite happily take permanent EEA membership right now and hope that my children are able to outlive a bunch of 60 year olds.

[jack]

Yeah :(

[movingfinger]

The loot-box decision in Belgium seems like it could make any blind purchase randomized-contents "lucky dip" illegal---including bubble gum cards, cereal box prizes, baseball cards, possibly prize machines where you put money in and get a trinket. But not outright raffles, I think---for example, I paid for chances in two community raffles in the past week, for pieces of art; both of them I lost, but although I was technically gambling by buying chances, I viewed my tickets as a donation.

Am I really understanding this correctly? (I would like to see citations for trading cards misleading children somehow or turning them into destructive gamblers.) Is the real problem here the use of real currency to purchase in-game credits which are exchanged for the loot packs, rather than requiring them to be earned by playing the game? Eliminating the cash buy would make far less money for game companies, of course, but arguably could make playing itself more addictive.

[fub]

I think the main point is that with those things (like, for instance, packs of Magic cards), the odds of getting a rare item are advertised and known in advance.