theinspectorst

@ theinspectorst @kbin.social

Posts

55
Comments

440
Joined

3 yr. ago

Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of m/neoliberal

Moderating

UK Economy feddit.uk

2y ago

I bet the Vulcans never tried to "Save Daylight" by changing the clocks twice a year

Oh yeah totally. Sorry, I thought your comment was arguing to retain the switch. Permanent DST is exactly where we should go.

2y ago

I bet the Vulcans never tried to "Save Daylight" by changing the clocks twice a year

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

It kills people.

Daylight savings time practices have been linked to increases in deadly traffic accidents, workplace injuries, medical errors and overall mortality.
In 2018, researchers in Spain penned a letter that was published in the journal Epidemiology regarding a link between deadly car accidents and daylight savings shifts. After collecting data from capital cities in Spain between 1990 and 2014, the researchers found a 30% increase in fatal traffic accidents on the day clocks sprang forwards. On the day clocks fell backwards, they saw an increase of 16%.
[...]
One of the serious health concerns related to time shifts is acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Researchers in Italy wrote a 2018 review published in the journal Internal Emergency Medicine investigating daylight savings' potential effects on heart health. They reviewed seven existing studies from the United States and Europe looking at more than 80,000 cases of acute myocardial infarction. They found an increase, from 4% to 29%, in heart attacks after clocks sprang forwards.
Incidence of stroke may also increase after a clock shift. For a 2016 study published in the journal Sleep Medicine, researchers in Finland investigated the connection. They analysed more than 3,000 hospitalizations from 2004 to 2013 that occurred in the week following seasonal clock changes. They next compared those cases to a control group of 11,000 expected hospitalizations. The findings showed that hospitalizations for ischaemic stroke, the most common type, increased by 8% in the two days following a daylight savings shift. When looking at the whole week post-shift, the increase was 3%. The association was stronger for people assigned female at birth and those who were older.

2y ago

Terry Matalas On Why Janeway And Harry Kim Weren’t In ‘Star Trek: Picard’ And The Fate Of The Enterprise-E

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

last couple of Picard seasons

I mean, that's a pretty astonishing statement to throw out there, grouping together probably the worst single season of Star Trek with one of the best...

2y ago

Liz Truss spent £15,000 of taxpayer money on catering during Australia flight

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

What a nonsense idea. Good politicians will never exist if they have a median income imposed on them.

Do you think that qualified, capable people - doctors, lawyers, economists, engineers - are going to want to go into politics, and deal with all the pressure, attention and abuse for them and their families that comes with that, for a median income? The sort of people we should want to see more of in politics typically already take large pay cuts to become backbench MPs. We want more capable and intelligent people in politics, not fewer.

You pay peanuts and you get Truss.

2y ago

Tories hit rock bottom with support hitting record low of 20 per cent, new poll shows

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Well the Whigs didn't die off; they merged with the Radicals and the Peelites to form the Liberal Party, who later merged with the SDP to form the Liberal Democrats.

I think a more realistic objective is for the combination of the Tories' broader decline plus the Tory/Reform split to knock them out of being a top two party in England. FPTP is unrelenting - I can just about imagine a scenario like the Liberals experienced in the early 20th century, where the Lloyd George/Asquith split and the trauma of governing through the First World War took them from the largest party prior to the 1918 election, to the third party following the 1922 election.

In that ideal scenario, we'd see a two-pronged squeeze where the Lib Dems supplant the Tories as the party of the middle class South of England and Outer London, and Labour supplant them in their North and Midlands seats. Once the Tories are no longer part of the FPTP duopoly, the electoral system makes it very difficult for a third party to ever get back to where it was.

2y ago

Tories hit rock bottom with support hitting record low of 20 per cent, new poll shows

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

I can't find the SNP and PC breakdowns, but assuming 4% and 0.5% respectively then Flavible projects this as: Lab 451, Con 75, SNP 53, Lib Dems 45, PC 3, Green 1, Reform 0. And if the Tories dropped another two points, it would leave them as the 4th party in Parliament...

2y ago

RE: Is Ernest still here?

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Thanks for the update Ernest! I hope you continue getting well soon and I look forward to everything you've got planned for this place.

2y ago

Can you build a British voter?

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

I found this a really interesting tool for understanding the picture across different bits of the electorate.

2y ago

With Labour in his sights, left-winger Galloway wins in English town

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

There is very little to read into this. Rochdale is an unusual constituency, Galloway is an unusually high profile candidate, there was no official Labour or Green candidate. Still, he failed to even win 40% of the vote yesterday.

This sort of thing is his speciality. He's personally won three seats from Labour over the last few decades but never in circumstances that can be repeated by other candidates in other seats. This will be no different.

Also he's a deeply unpleasant individual. It's frustrating that the false charge of antisemitism gets thrown round like confetti by supporters of the Netanyahu regime, because when an actual bonafide antisemite like Galloway comes along people don't realise that this time the shoe does fit. His previous support for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party is total horseshoe theory stuff.

2y ago

UK-born woman Shamima Begum who joined ISIS loses appeal over citizenship removal

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Totally. In my alternative scenario where she was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl called Shania, the Daily Express would have turned her into a Madeleine McCann-like figure and campaigned every day on their front pages to 'bring our girl home'.

2y ago

UK-born woman Shamima Begum who joined ISIS loses appeal over citizenship removal

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

A child who was groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists is now being punished for it. Also this is a punishment that is only being applied to her because she has Bangladeshi ancestors so the government argues she is hypothetically eligible for a Bangladeshi passport (which the government of Bangladesh has no intention of giving her), and so the Tories can pretend they're not illegally rendering her stateless.

This is literally a punishment that, by the Tories' own formulation of their rule, would not be applied if the sex trafficking victim was a white girl called Shania with English parents instead of a brown girl called Shamima.

We're supposed to be a country where people are treated equally before the law. But the Tories are now claiming that they and any future government has the right to render any Briton with some hypothetical right to a foreign passport (for example, most second generation immigrants and every single Jewish Briton) stateless at the whim of the home secretary.

2y ago

Shamima Begum loses bid to regain UK citizenship

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

I'm all for appropriately punishing people for the crimes they commit. But we usually don't deprive solo-nationality citizens of their citizenship (leaving them stateless) for the crimes she is accused of - this is a punishment that is only being applied to UK (including UK-only) nationals who have recent foreign ancestors (i.e. so who could hypothetically - but often not in practice - be eligible for another country's citizenship - in her case, Bangladesh). We also don't usually apply extreme punishments like this to people for crimes committed as children, and we don't usually punish children who were groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists as if they were the perpetrators.

The reality is that if Shamima Begum was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl whose parents and grandparents were all from Surrey, the media would have described her as a victim of sex trafficking; and the law that permits this punishment to be applied to her could not even have been used.

The legal system should not treat UK citizens differently according to whether or not the Tories think they look a bit foreign.

2y ago

China using cyanide to 'destroy' Scarborough on purpose — BFAR

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

I was similarly pretty confused here that it was referring to the little seaside town in Yorkshire, which I assume all these other Scarboroughs (that I too had never heard of) are named after.

2y ago

Mandatory voting, yes or no?

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

I'm a hard no.

I think people should vote, and voting is generally pretty easy in this country - including easy access to postal and proxy voting. So anyone who fails to do the basic bare minimum in a democratic society (of turning out to vote in a general election every five years) is someone who is clearly so disengaged from politics that I really wouldn't want them casting their uninformed RNG vote and deciding the future of this country.

This is what happened at the EU referendum. There had long been an assumption that a higher turnout was good for Remain (Leavers were more motivated, so higher turnout meant it was more likely that moderate Remain voters were turning out). But what actually happened was turnout went so high that it blew past them and into a load of nihilists who didn't give a shit about anything and voted Leave just for the fuck of it. These are not the people who should be deciding our future.

I would prefer that voter turnout was higher than it is, but that's because I think political engagement should be higher. That's the thing we should be targeting; voter turnout is the symptom, not the cause. If you force people who aren't evenly barely politically engaged to cast a vote, you're asking for a shitshow.

2y ago

Faith school banning parts of geography lessons, Ofsted finds

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Ahh, that makes sense!

2y ago

Faith school banning parts of geography lessons, Ofsted finds

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

I'm unsurprised that a religious school is failing to teach science properly, but which bits of geography are they objecting to?

2y ago

What normies see when someone posts here claiming Discovery isn't canon

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Worf's Klingon prosthetics literally changed between season 1 and seasons 2-7 of TNG. This obviously raises serious continuity issues about whether seasons 2-7 of TNG are even canon...

https://screenrant.com/star-trek-worf-tng-klingon-makeup-change-reason/

2y ago

Islamophobia is endemic in the UK and getting worse, says Yousaf

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Humza Yousaf became the first Muslim head of state in western Europe in 2023 when he was appointed First Minister of Scotland.

This is a really specific point, but the sub-heading irks me in several ways.

First, how do so many people not know the difference between a head of state and a head of government? Scotland's head of state is Charles III.

Second, by what definition is Yousaf the first Muslim head of government in western Europe? I assume they must at least mean 'in western Europe in the modern era', since various parts of Iberia obviously had Muslim rulers for over seven centuries in the Middle Ages.

Third, Scotland isn't an independent state, and the head of government of the United Kingdom is Rishi Sunak. So if they're counting Humza Yousaf, that means they're counting leaders at sub-national levels of government (such as devolved government in the UK, Länder in Germany, etc). But if they're counting devolved government, why does Humza Yousaf (first minister of Scotland, population 5.4 million, since 2023) count but Sadiq Khan (mayor of London, population 8.8 million, since 2016) apparently doesn't?

2y ago

Finland votes: Stubb wins presidency

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theinspectorst @kbin.social 2y ago

Anyway it was two right-wingers in the second round so

A centrist, europhile, pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism, former patron of Helsinki's Pride event, vs the literal Green League candidate.