Most people at e.g. Oxford and Cambridge (and, I suspect, many other universities) use their university emails for a fairly wide variety of extramural correspondence, and are stuck with M$ as the provider, alas.
> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools
This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.
> or just 3 As from state schools
Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.
I don’t see how free software licences ‘sound too good to be true’, in that they don’t even sound relevantly good: they don’t suggest in the slightest that support will be available.
Gates is one of the best placed people to claim that the advantages of meeting people in person &c in disbursing his wealth (rather than just ‘giv[ing] talks’) outweigh the emissions. There’re obviously diminishing returns (do COP delegations need to be so large?) but it would be surprising if the optimum were zero flights.
He also backs a number of highly visible climate initiatives targeted at the public - with money from his own foundation as well as his presence at speaking engagements. How much more effective would they be if he were more willing to eat his own cooking?
> How much more effective would they be if he were more willing to eat his own cooking?
Zero percent. Folks who scream about the hypocrisy of it would not change anything, those who don't care will continue to not care. It would result in some media fluff pieces and that's about it. Sort of like Jimmy Carter living frugally and avoiding conflicts of interest - neat to read about, people might like him more, but it didn't change a damn thing in the larger picture.
A single person no matter how rich or wasteful changing their consumptive behavior simply doesn't matter. It's a systems problem. Putting resources towards changing the system is what matters - not any individual sacrifice.
I learned this lesson the extremely hard way growing up in basic enforced poverty for environment reasons. It was a sacrifice only my family saw, no one else gave any shits other than lip service. It just scales higher when uber-rich. No one changed their behavior after talking to us and seeing how we also walked the walk. We just got some nice platitudes sent our way while they enjoyed far more luxurious lives and laughed at us in private.
Recent world-wide political events should also make it crystal clear "society" cares literally nothing about hypocrisy. It's only used as something to screech about when you disagree with whomever is engaging in it.
The European Investment Bank provided €1.5b of funding.¹ EIB decisions don’t generally attract lots of attention from member states other than those concerned, since it is generally understood that the EIB is funding lots of projects in member states simultaneously. Similarly, the budget of the Commission and similar bodies will generally be set in advance, usually with a formal or informal understanding as to the broad distribution of funds between member states that will follow.
In any case, this project seems to me to be no more extraordinary than the redistributive effects of e.g. Medicaid or Pentagon spending, or the construction of Interstates. The Interstates, in the present US political environment, might indeed seem extraordinary; but the question is then not how one convinces people from state A to spend on state B, but how to convince people to make large long-term investments in the first place.
It’s rather odd that the ICO is saying this rather than industry lobbyists. No 10 is full of middle-aged technically unsophisticated types who want to look otherwise, and substitute credulity for wordliness, and I think Quangoland’s denizens are following the party line. (The shadow cabinet, but they aren’t that focused on growth because they have the luxury of not having to run the country.) The ensuing disasters may well be far worse than Horizon, if HMG ever gets anywhere with its AI plans.
Most important legislation, including the BNA, is government legislation (indeed, see the white paper: https://www.uniset.ca/naty/maternity/wpaper.pdf). It is therefore drafted by parliamentary counsel, whose advice remains available when amendments are proposed. Most governments also command sufficient majorities to push this kind of legislation through, or at least to come to consensus on amendments. The relevant passage seems clear enough that parliamentary counsel could have drafted it and so I doubt there were ‘too many chefs’ as you put it (although I haven’t checked Hansard).
It is also hard to see what these drafting habits have to do with the common law system. Points 1–5 could be true of a legislature in pretty much any legal tradition.
Moreover, the HoL and the "ping pong" process actually gives the legislation a chance to be refined, as the lords are less motivated by party politics and more able to focus on getting good legislation through. I've heard a number of complaints about the current system that basically say that without the HoL, the quality of legislation would be significantly poorer, and that there needs to be more work done on getting bills written properly in the first place when they get proposed in the House of Commons.
Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one does not need to believe everything that trans people say (surely with the result of inconsistency!) to think that the evidence they present is not wholly concocted.
Others may misidentify respectable, good, or correct arguments as ‘attacks’ in narrower senses, but that no more makes the underlying categories meaningless than the misapplication of such descriptions as ‘true’, ‘valid’, ‘scientifically established’, or ‘by definition’. I have no general pithy answer to what one should do about the sorts of attack I have described, but I venture that it is reasonable to talk or attempt to do something about them. What term would you prefer?
I think that it would help if you were to suggest a term people who don’t want to ‘shut down discussion about related topics all together’ should use. Otherwise, the effect (although perhaps not the intention) of deprecating the term ‘attacks on trans people’ is that the sort of discussion you admit is possible theoretically will be impossible for want of a suitable term to designate the sorts of attacks it concerns.
What has Gödel incompleteness to do with that? We can just take any sentence φ as an axiom, and we’ve a trivial proof thereof.