The most bootlicking anglos in the world are the Australians , despite the extreme competition that NZ and the UK give them. The Orwellian definition IS the real name.
Leeway for human interpretation of laws is not a bug, it's a feature. It doesn't make things bad laws.
This was the whole problem with the ludicrous "code is law!" movement a handful of years ago. No, it's not, law is made for people, life is imprecise and fairness and decency are not easy to encode.
Well for a start, it assumes good faith on the part of the participants, rather than the default assumption of bad faith and corruption you'd like to project.
There are also built-in controls in the form of reviews and appeals.
And more generally, humans are squishy and imprecise, trying to apply precise, inflexible, code-like law to immensely analog situations is not a recipe for good outcomes.
Why should anyone assume good faith about or trust any part of the government? It is well known, studied and documented that justice is not uniform in practice. Yes, ideally it is not, but we do not live in some abstract utopia where judges are not corrupt.
It's so odd that people would say that it is a feature that judges are inconsistent. Juries are one thing, but judges driving their own agendas independent of lawmakers and juries is not a great look.
>going through life with that attitude seems like a recipe for unhappiness and frustration.
Going through life in blissful ignorance of the incompetence and malice driving the systems of violence and control around you is even worse. Unhappiness and frustration are necessary prerequisites to any improvements to quality of life. Terminally happy people are just grazing cattle, fit only for the slaughterhouse.
> Going through life in blissful ignorance of the incompetence and malice driving the systems of violence and control around you is even worse.
I’m not ignorant of that, I disagree that it matches reality.
And see that’s what I’m talking about. There’s no reasoned view of the world here just unthinking, unfocused vitriol.
> Happy people are just grazing cattle, fit only for the slaughterhouse.
Yet here I live in a stable democracy with a historically unprecedented standard of living. It’s not perfect, but the idea that judges should not use judgement and compassion in the application of the law just seems nuts. It’s a human system for humans, not some branch of mathematics. :shrug:
The reason you live in a stable democracy with a historically unprecedented standard of living is that generations of unhappy and frustrated people made it so. It certainly isn't thanks to the people satisfied with the status quo, who maintained faith in either the virtue of the Church or the Crown. Progress depends on unreasonable people doing unreasonable things like killing monarchs and nailing theses to church doors.
>It’s not perfect, but the idea that judges should not use judgement and compassion in the application of the law just seems nuts.
I agree with you. They should. Absolutism in terms of the law reduces to fascism, and even the "code is law" crowd discover religion as soon as they realize code can have loopholes just as laws can. But we shouldn't assume by default that the courts will act fairly, because they won't, they will act in their own interests as all power structures do, and fairly only when fairness isn't a threat to those interests.
For the same reason we shouldn't assume software created by humans and controlled by the those very same power structures would be any better.
Those unhappy people were not, for the most part, mindless reactionaries who declared everything was shit and every human a demonic mire of corrupt motives.
I’m not “Happy with the status quo”, that’s a gross misrepresentation of my posts. I’m critical of mindless cynicism and the pointless stress and unhappiness such people put themselves through because their distrust is aimless, facile, ungrounded and as a result useless.
I would argue it also belongs in decisions of whether to convict and what to convict someone of.
The law cannot encode the entirety of human experience, and can’t foresee every possible mitigating circumstance. Given the fact of a conviction regardless of sentence can have such a huge impact on someone’s life, I think there is room for compassion and good judgement in multiple places.
In systems I'm familiar with, magistrates handle a lot of the minor criminal cases without juries, and civil cases don't usually have a jury either, which covers probably a majority of all court cases.
True, but they do involve judgements, and magistrates courts do involve convictions. And you’ll get decisions from public prosecutors in the US or UK whether to take something to trial in the first place, which can involve a determination of whether a trial is even in the public interest.
:shrug: either way, as I say, IMHO having a flexible system that involves informed judgement in lots of places but with the possibility of appeals, reviews etc is a feature, not a bug.
There's plenty of room for flexibility while still being honest and consistent about the rules. If a judge thinks someone should get away with murder, say, just be honest about it rather than invent ways to avoid calling it murder.
Really, there are three parts to a judgement: facts, the law, and the application of them. There should be no leeway in determining what the law says about a given situation. If that is not decidable, it is a bug. However, what a fair judgement is given the facts and the law, is really a separate issue. You can introduce measures to give clear guidance what the law says, and still give judges flexibility. One of the upsides of "code is law" in that respect is being able to provide a clear statement of what the law says and require the judge to then explain in their judgement why that justifies or does not justify a given judgement.
A lot of bad judgement might be a lot more blatant (or not happen) if the judge had to justify outright ignoring the law.
'The law' is open to judicial and legal interpretation. There isn't always a single 'the law' to interpret in complex cases. While there are many, many rules, they are not as simple as code and they rely on deep layers of precedent. Common law is made up of case history more than statute.
> One of the upsides of "code is law" in that respect is being able to provide a clear statement of what the law says
No, "code is law" in fact always ignored what any actual law said, in favour of framing everything as a sort of contract, regardless of whether said contract was actually fair or legal, and it removed the human factor from the whole equation. It was a basic failure to understand law.
Ugh, GBNews, outrage fodder for idiots and the elderly with no ability to navigate the modern information landscape.
You can tell it's watched almost exclusively by old people because all the ads on the channel are for those funeral pre-pay services or retirement homes.
> because aristocrats and monarchs don't seek power in most systems;
This… well, I’d urge you to read some English history. I’m choosing English because it’s the one I know best.
It is a litany of power struggles, of brother and sister plotting to kill aunt, uncle and father, nephew cousin, niece and anybody else. Of factionalism in court, bloody takeovers and power struggles. Noble houses vying for position as the monarch’s favoured ones, taking land and riches from less favoured houses, or winning it back. Scions of noble houses at war with each other over succession. Monarchs slaughtering potential usurpers. 9 day monarchies as one successor is positioned against another when the old king died, all based on religious backing…
There were long periods of stability under certain monarchs too, but often these coincide with periods of extrinsic conflict. Sometimes their wars of adventure would come close to bankrupting the country. Other times their choice of who to marry (or divorce) would cause massive loss of life.
They very much select for the power hungry, the venal, the egotistical and those capable of subterfuge and great violence to their own blood.
> Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar
> And this is probably coming, a few years from now.
Given how often I say "Hey Siri, fast forward", expecting her to skip the audio forward by 30 seconds, and she replies "Calling Troy S" a roofing contractor who quoted some work for me last year, and then just starts calling him without confirmation, which is massively embarassing...
Also in the good old days if you sealed the wrong number you had some time to just hang up without harm done. Today the connection is made the moment you pressed the button or in this case when Siri decided to call.
Happened to me too while being in the car. With every message written by Siri it feels like you need to confirm 2 or 3 times (I think it is only once but again) but it calls happily people from your phone book.
That's an extreme case though, and not what this sort of thing is aimed at.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, it's common for pump prices to vary significantly even within a small radius. But they're all on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so you can see what the price is ahead of time.
If it's 14c cheaper per litre (coming up for 10%) to go 500m one direction vs 500m another direction, which one are you going to choose?
We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au
I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of 10-15%, occasionally 20%.
In a country where fuel is as expensive as it is in the UK, people are going to use that.
> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.
We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).
The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:
> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.
Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.
But how accurate was the data on those older apps?
Petrolprices.com (for example) seems to have been built on user-reported data rather than petrol-station reported data, and it's easy to find fairly recent criticisms of the whole thing being inaccurate. And an inaccurate comparison site is fairly useless IMHO.
I lived in the UK until 2021 and I must admit I'd never heard of them. Whereas here in WA everyone uses fuelprices. There are probably other factors involved here as well, as we have a weird weekly or biweekly price cycle (though I think this has ended somewhat in the last two years) where every second Tuesday fuel was dirt cheap as they were trying to clear down the tanks ahead of the next delivery.
Is the 'new part' not that the vendors are being forced to actually publish comparison data rather than rely on third parties to gather it?
Other than a time lag (and petrol prices don't generally change often enough to matter IME), I can't say I ever noticed any of them being that inaccurate.
myAutomate (the owners of Petrolprices.com) talk about having "over 60 years combined expertise in the fuel industry", so I suppose I'd be surprised if it's all crowdsourced data - they've probably made arrangements with at least the big players, in which case the forced publication is much of a muchness?
>the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience
Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
Social media is not the open internet, pretty much by definition. With a few notable, niche exceptions it’s big centralised services entirely in the control of single companies.
They’ve long been explicitly targeting human psychology for profit, it’s hardly surprising there’s a backlash. But that doesn’t mean the open internet is dead. In fact the open internet could benefit from the slaying of these centralised monsters.
I know you're making a point by linking it to 1984, but Oceania is a real name for a continent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania
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