The amusing thing is that to modern eyes most of these grand expensive civic monuments speak much more to the era (definitively Victorian) than the motivations of the people who chose the designers. They have far more in common with each other, to my eyes, than they do with a Tudor mansion or a 1930s public library.

If you've genuinely forgotten/don't have the keys, that could be a bigger problem. It is a defence, if charged, not to actually have the key - and they do have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt if "sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it" (53(3)(b)) - but that does ultimately involve convincing a magistrate or a jury.

There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.

But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.

If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).

You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.

The reason why I object to group-based arguments about intelligence is specifically because the intra-group differences are bigger than the inter-group differences (though I also agree with some - though not all - of the critique made by the addendum/critique/reply linked under the abstract).

"Men are taller than women" is sometimes used to teach introductory ANOVA, sometimes to argue for a diversity of crash test dummies, but also to argue at "women" are less good for something because "they" are shorter. The first is trivial. The second would mostly be better dealt with by dealing with the broad range of human heights (5th/95th percentiles?) rather than merely adding an "average woman" to the existing average man one. The third is bogus because When many men are shortarses and many women are taller than me. So we're again generally better measuring people's actual height for things where it matters. Whichever group differences in intelligence are found, you're going to end up with overlapping distributions, making the groups a crappy proxy for individual variation in any case. But that's exactly what the author advocates doing in their section 4.

If you want to establish which genes are linked to intelligence then go ahead. It's not particularly important or glamorous work as far as I can see, but whatever - the academy has always had plenty of heterodox interests in it. But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view.

The most interesting feature of it for me is that the carefully-developed bridge bidding systems don't work properly as they're implicitly based on a normal random distribution of cards. With a goulash it's likely that both sides have hands with 7+ cards in one suit, and the game is to pre-emptively bid high in "your" suit before they can do so in theirs. So you would ideally like different signaling arrangements that indicate suit length rather than quality.

I'm not convinced it's a good idea, FWIW, but it would be a lot less crappy than age verification.

I don't always agree with their stuff, but they're good faith actors.

Similarly the other way. There are classes I've given no first class (~A) marks in, because nobody earned one. Still a curve in practice, but with the top at an upper second.

Of course, if we collectively shifted to the spaced en dash then LLMs would eventually follow; it's not clear to me that any simple and deliberate sign of humanity could remain exclusive given the incentives for machines to replicate it.

Even at the European street legal limit of 250W it makes acceleration trivial.

As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.

Football fans are a bit odd. If you spend a lot of time in football crowds you get much more adept at telling when things are going to kick off and when people are only being obnoxiously loud. Both are annoying but only the first is actually dangerous. But the second can definitely make people feel unsafe. And given that you can't easily get off a train if you feel threatened it's a big problem.

When I was younger I got assaulted on the street five times, and it was always in improbable places and for no obvious reason. Some people are just shitty, some of the time.

Oxford was great (though cycling was even better); Leeds, Liverpool, and York were perfectly fine, with regular and reliable services; London's are famously efficient.

Antisocial behaviour isn't honestly that common in my experience, though I'm sure that varies by location. Had some aggro in London once, and again on a London night bus. The football special to the LNER stadium in York was properly boisterous, and quite threatening to the poor away-supporting family on the lower deck, but that at least carried a copper to make sure nothing stupid happened. Other than that, I've only ever really seen loud schoolchildren - who can be annoying but have never caused difficulty for anyone outside their group. I've honestly seen worse behaviour on the tube (and been the object of it on Cross Country Trains).

The story reads like ragebait, TBH. Brits are absolutely as keen on extolling WW2 heroism as anyone else.

And you'd get a fantastic amount more grunt uphill and a longer range with a modern battery and motor.

There are some pickups here, having said that: more rural utilities people, or landscapers who move lots of dirt, or farmers, might have one. They tend to be smaller than an F-150, but then everything's smaller in Britain including the roads...