Interesting Links for 29-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. The UK attorney general is lying about the law around transgender people

(tags:LGBT transgender UK politics conservatives OhForFucksSake )

2. How much money does Jack Monroe make from book sales?

(tags:books publishing money poverty food )

3. Artist Tracey Emin returns from cancer with raw Edinburgh show

(tags:Edinburgh art Scotland )

4. Uber and Lyft Are Out of Ideas, Jacking Up Prices in Desperation for Profit

(tags:taxi business epicfail )

5. Tax Flight Is a Myth: Higher State Taxes Bring More Revenue, Not More Migration

(tags:economics tax )

6. NHS bosses have blocked health advice for pregnant trans people for almost a year

(tags:NHS LGBT transgender pregnancy OhForFucksSake )

7. I'm actually hoping that Boris Johnson holds on until the next election, and drags the whole party down with him

(tags:BorisJohnson Conservatives )

8. Halsey's sold over 150 million records but her record label won't release a new song until it goes viral on TikTok. Is this the future of the music industry?

(tags:music business OhForFucksSake )

9. A weights and measures inspector takes apart the Imperial Measurements nonsense that Johnson has come out with

(tags:measurement UK OhForFucksSake nostalgia politics )

Comments

[mtbc]

I'm not convinced that that "taking apart" is entirely fair. I mean, I'm all for remaining on metric, but overdoing the rhetoric clouds the fact that there are good reasons not to revert, globalization being a massive one. I mean, goodness, the US and UK have different pints, gallons, fluid ounces (slightly), keeping it all straight is a pain. And, really, twelve inches in a foot, fourteen pounds in a stone, sixteen ounces in a pound, twenty fluid ounces in a pint? It's all inconveniently irregular.

E.g., the first bold point, "the UK transferring to metric measures had bugger all to do with our EU membership" — am I the only one remembering all the news stories about court records, food sales, etc., suddenly being constrained? https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/10/kirstyscott is the kind of thing that makes the everyday difference and convicted of falling foul of European directives on metrication by weighing and selling a bunch of bananas by the pound doesn't sound to me much like having bugger all to do with our EU membership.

I'm not persuaded by most of the other. Interest in metric is growing in the USA, for instance. I live in the USA. I follow the news closely. I work in a national scientific laboratory and follow their news too. And this growth of interest has been wholly imperceptible to me. There was a push for metric decades ago but it fell about as flat as the attempt to have consumers accept the dollar coin. They've given up on that one too.

[cmcmck]

It's a fairly scary thing when you have an Attorney General who doesn't know the law of the land.

That or her transphobia transcends her commonsense!

[qilora]

"7. I'm actually hoping that Boris Johnson holds on until the next election, and drags the whole party down with him"

uuuggggh, i know what you mean! to see such calamity is like waiting to see Trumpelstilskin lost the vote.. it gives me such a Schadenfreude!

[coth]

It's a measure of my new paranoia that reading that thread by the weights and measures inspector makes me think:

So Boris' master plan involves reverting to imperial measures because that means he can scrap all the weights and measures 'red tape' because the metric won't be needed and the imperial will be too expensive to implement.

Of course, regulation of weights and measures has been one of the primary functions of the state for thousands of years. We really would be going back to the stone age.

[anna_wing]

As far as I am aware, the countries that are still on Imperial measure are the US, Myanmar and Liberia. Though of course many places still have traditional measures for informal or specific uses. Countries around the Indian Ocean and anywhere with a large historical Indian diaspora will still retain a lot of old Indian measures. Lakh, crore, viss, reti (only for pearls), kati, and many specialised measures for gold, including one based on the seeds of the Saga tree (Adenanthera pavonine)...

I'm still not entirely certain how far a mile is...