mobyduck648

Not necessarily true, they’re clever birds and can certainly hold grudges.

‘Blocked in your country’ unfortunately but get what you’re on about. The loss of Test Match Special on 198 kHz was actually a mild cultural loss in my opinion, cricket is supposed to arrive on a crackly amplitude-modulated carrier.

Europe has (soon to be had) two AM broadcast bands; medium wave which is more or less the same as North America but it’s shorter and has 9 kHz channels, and long wave which goes down really low from 153 to 279 kHz. Long wave is properly antiquated tech, you need genuinely enormous aerials to efficiently put it out but it covers ludicrous distance over ground wave. It used to be used for broadcasting the UK’s main radio programme to ships and remote areas, and could get a thousand miles or so out to sea with just one transmitter.

Herring gulls in extreme cases can live into their 30s. There’s probably a haggard old gull somewhere which remembers the '90s.

AM is literally on its last legs in the UK, even BBC Radio 4 shut down on it recently. Soon it’ll be just Radio Caroline and the odd hobby pirate.

We’ll come to regret it I think, the old Radio 4 signal could be picked up all over the country from like three transmitters and received on something as basic as a razor blade and coil of wire. We’re so keen to turn the internet into a massive single point of failure, and it’ll bite us in the arse with the Russians going about cutting our cables.

Depends where in the world you are I think. In the UK most people have combination water/heating natural gas boilers. Some places are on heating oil if you’re out in the sticks (or in Northern Ireland which has a different system) and some modern houses are all-electric heat pump setups. We mostly have no air con which is becoming less tenable with climate change, and water-based radiators so nothing like a furnace in American systems.

It’s like asking what variety of the ebola virus I’d like to have the least, I’m too busy bleeding out of my eyeballs to give much of a damn.

Literally the mentality of the English land-owning gentry enclosing the ancient commons and driving people off the land into dependency on them. It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.

It’s straight up kleptoparasite mentality.

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What happens to the royal perogative powers for example? We could accidentally ‘good chaps theory of government’ into a very overpowered executive like the Americans have in my view, the increasing presidentialisation of the PM role and centralisation of power in Number 10 is already a long term concern of mine.

Also there’s lots of weird technical factors around the issue , like what happens to the Crown Estate? Does it lapse to the Windsor family or to the president? Presumably we’d want to nationalise it directly by Act of Parliament but that’s a can of worms in itself.

Yeah I don’t like the monarchy but I suspect I’d like a British presidency even less. If it were up to me I’d abolish the hereditary principle but to avoid the genuine constitutional shitshow I’d simply keep the throne empty rather than abolishing it, have Parliament elect a regent from among itself periodically. A regent unlike a president holds no power in their own right, they hold it on behalf of someone else. This would keep egos in check and help prevent an overly powerful executive I think. If anything it’d be Parliament putting a much-needed brake on Downing Street.

Also historically it’d be the final culmination of the 800 year British project to subordinate monarchical authority to constitutional authority. It’s keeping the current constitutional notion of the ‘crown in parliament’ while admitting the reality no living human can actually embody it.

The popularisation of the idea that ornament is inherently bad genuinely did far more damage to the visual environment of the UK than the Luftwaffe managed with years of strategic bombing in my view.

I’m still a fan of emoticons personally, can’t beat >:( to express irritation for example.

That’s a vintage reference!

Also today I was literally at the bitter end anchoring a boat with almost all of the available chain.

fuck Thames Water

Having lived in their catchment, I cannot echo this sentiment more strongly. In a sane country their entire senior management cohort would be hauled before Parliament to explain the amount of human shit in the Thames, and why their bosses keep getting paid enormous bonuses despite this. Absolutely crooked industry, I’m fairly sure Thames Water could redirect the sewage they’re currently pumping into the river into Ofwat’s boardroom and they’d at worst get away with a slap on the wrist and ‘boys will be boys’. Absolutely pathetic, and the whole thing stinks of corruption as well as sewage.

Yeah in parts of the UK (largely England) water is privatised, and that includes sewage. You can imagine that goes swimmingly for everyone involved, especially if you like swimming in untreated human shit when you visit a river, or the regulator doing nothing about these people hiking your bills to pay their senior management higher.

Private water monopolies all belong in hell, largely because there’s no aquatic environments there for them to poison.

It takes a really bad politician to actually become a noun, for example with WW2 nearly out of living memory we all still know what a Quisling is and why you don’t want to be one. Apparently Liz Truss was spectacularly crap enough that she’s becoming to gross incompetence and doctrinaire policy what Quisling is to treason and collaboration.

undershined

This word will now live rent free in my vocabulary.