The former creates a class of semi-sinecures of equally questionable quality yet beholden to the political system of the moment. Life peerages become awards for donors and loyalists, a legitimized corruption. The house’s composition becomes an ever-growing competition based on unlimited partisan appointment. The house becomes less thoughtful, more unwieldy, more pointless, more expensive. It will inevitably be abolished on this path.

In contrast aristocrats are at least less likely to owe anything to a special interest, and more likely to hold firm to unpopular but perhaps higher ideals: they owe their position to no other power center, neither voters nor parties. They are also inherently invested in the nation’s long term success. It’s hardly democratic but at least it’s not a wasteful partisan circus.

My pitch would be to keep a small number of intra-peerage elected hereditary peers, keep the bishops, add various ex officio academics - but fill the majority of seats by true sortition. Every British subject is liable to be drafted, and paid, into a year or two of part-time lordship. (Though I’d grant the whole house a right to easily expel such members, should they fail to meet basic expectations.)

  's/{people,others,friends,those that}/I/g'

  's/they/AI/g'

Nor am I, but…

> Earlier today I was asking Gemini to find me a nearby bar that would optimize for price, tastiness of drinks, and “not making me feel lonely as a solo traveler on Valentine’s day.”

…this sort of behavior I don’t believe I understand. It seems a silly abdication of living one’s own life. Here’s a poem from just me.

—

Choose a bar, ye human.

Confront your loneliness

if you must. Or flee.

Wander a bit.

Do a bar crawl.

Take up smoking.

Get wasted; be buzzed;

abstain; wander, do a bit;

fail to optimize - for at

least one opalescent moment -

if not, goddamn, why be?

They often don’t. Moreover some of the most common implementations of Apple’s MDM protocol also don’t do so automatically.

If they have remembered Canary, just compile your own Chromium with an amusing identifier.

On the rest I rather agree with you. General-purpose computers are key tools over which users should be admin. Sysadmins provide a security backstop. Full lock down is the sign of an unhealthy understanding of how the org’s value is actually created.

There is a deep tradition of chthonic ascetic monasticism in Christianity. Many, many Churches from this same period have attached anchorite cells.

It is easy to imagine similar cells/tunnels being used, unremarked, by choice or coercion.