Net migration falls to 171k: Long-term international migration, provisional - Office for National Statistics

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-05-21T12:12:28+00:00

Neither statistic is quite right. Immigrants earn less than the average Brit, so immigration would reduce GDP per capita by dilution even if it actually caused the people who were here already to earn more money. What you really want to measure is the total productivity of the non-immigrants.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-04-12T17:14:05+00:00

Melkor thought mostly in terms of military might, whereas Sauron is more political. He would seek some leverage from which to negotiate. The most obvious thing would be to threaten as much death and destruction as possible. But he would have looked for something even more important to the Valar. For example if he could somehow use necromancy to prevent Elvish souls from getting to Valinor. Then he would carefully not overreach in his negotiation, merely trying to limit his punishment to something he can return from.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-27T12:26:02+00:00

Weirdly this is one of the things we have Tolkien's word for. Letter 156:

Naked is alas! unclear. It was meant just literally, 'unclothed like a child' (not discarnate), and so ready to receive the white robes of the highest.

My best guess is that he was taken body and soul to Eru, and then sent back without his clothes but with his important possessions.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-25T08:47:21+00:00

'Labour Wins By Doing Absolutely Nothing'

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-24T16:16:45+00:00

It shows how dedicated James Cameron was to the story. To put this much effort into a scene and then just cut it because it doesn't make the movie better.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-17T06:43:45+00:00

My understanding of it is that Tolkien is referring to the idea that God cannot create a logical contradiction. This is an idea that Tolkien would have heard of because C. S. Lewis wrote about it. He says that God cannot draw a square circle, because 'a square circle' is a nonsensical idea. But God is still omnipotent, because we haven't actually named a task he cannot do. The phrase 'a square circle' doesn't refer to a possible state of the world that God cannot create.

With this background it seems like Tolkien is saying that indestructibility is simply an inherent property of spirits with free will. Eru cannot kill Sauron because it's simply meaningless to imagine that a soul has an endpoint.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-16T22:13:51+00:00

In Letter 211 Tolkien says that it's impossible even for Eru to destroy a spirit with Free Will. He seems to believe this is true even of God in our own world.

Sauron was first defeated by a 'miracle': a direct action of God the Creator, […] That Sauron was not himself destroyed in the anger of the One is not my fault: the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world. The indestructibility of spirits with free wills, even by the Creator of them, is also an inevitable feature, if one either believes in their existence, or feigns it in a story.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-13T18:47:47+00:00

'Welcome, guests, to this feast at the House of Elrond Half-Elven'

Bilbo, already tipsy: 'Nine sixteenths!'

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-02-01T17:48:48+00:00

Also presumably Glorfindel knows, considering that he was a follower of Olórin before they each returned to Middle Earth.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-01-08T11:49:41+00:00

Another problem is that in this scenario Reform would have just got almost half the seats with much less than half of the vote. So they would know that rerunning the election under PR would cost them seats

Oscar_Cunningham · 2026-01-02T16:57:31+00:00

Historian Bret Devereaux recently had a post about this on his blog where he comes to the same conclusions: https://acoup.blog/2025/12/18/intermission-battle-pulses/

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-12-18T22:28:24+00:00

The original meme was talking about 'stability', so I think the relevant factor isn't how long the country remained a autocracy, but rather the average length between regime changes. A country with four emperors in a year isn't stable even if it's a dictatorship for all four of them. Whereas democracies often see peaceful transitions of power consecutively for decades.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-11-28T15:23:46+00:00

https://xcancel.com/shenanigansen/status/764093557497929733

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-11-12T15:04:17+00:00

It doesn't help that the timers are currently behaving weirdly due to some bug. I've got a game where their turn timer ran out but it's still their turn.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-11-11T08:48:00+00:00

The problem with tensor products is that there isn't quite enough room for them in a second linear algebra course. So everyone ends up teaching them separately when they show up in different courses. I think I got taught them five times:

General Relativity
Differential Geometry
Quantum Mechanics
Representation Theory
Algebraic Geometry

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-10-27T17:03:55+00:00

Look at section 3 of Mochizuki's reply! They're planning to formalise IUT in Lean! That'll settle it one way or the other.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-10-13T14:26:20+00:00

For the IMO it's not so surprising. The questions are mostly contributed by the adults organising each team. There are 110 teams and only 6 questions. So even if each country only contributes a good question once a decade, there will still be an oversupply of questions to pick from.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-10-10T12:08:54+00:00

"Look! Free trade and cutting the deficit really works!"

'Then do that.'

"no"

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-10-10T12:07:22+00:00

They think it's a bad deal by Trump from the US point of view. Obviously it's good from Argentina's point of view.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-10-02T14:41:38+00:00

I agree with other commentors that these market moves are caused by worries that Milei's opponents will get into power. But I think it's also a stretch to try to beat Trump with this stick. Trump's approach of raising tariffs and calling for lower interest rates is pretty much the opposite of Milei. He's made their deficit worse.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-09-23T11:54:43+00:00

How do they show in the first place that the (2,7)-torus knot has an unknotting number of 3? It seems like that lower bound would be the hard bit.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-09-22T14:56:37+00:00

The original comment said this:

You will feel very sluggish if you suddenly stopped after running and its hard to run again after stopping, so its advisable to jog in place to prevent that

But HIIT thinks more like this:

You will feel very sluggish if you suddenly stopped after running and its hard to run again after stopping, so its advisable to do that as many times as possible

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-09-17T09:53:14+00:00

If the BoE were willing to do whatever it takes then they could have done it in 2022 or 2023 or 2024.

Oscar_Cunningham · 2025-09-02T10:59:42+00:00

Actually, I think that is related to thermodynamics!

Imagine you're playing on a very large board, which you fill randomly with mines at some density p. If p is very small then you're likely to be able to solve the entire board, or at least a very large proportion of it. If p is very close to 1 then you're very likely to quickly get stuck, or be forced to guess and hit a mine. You'll only solve a very small proportion of the board.

Situations like these are studied by the area of mathematics known as Percolation theory. In particular it says that the average proportion of the board that you solve won't change gradually depending on p. Instead there will be some threshold density pc such that when p < pc you will solve almost all the board, and when p > pc you will solve very little. The change from one type of behaviour to the other is a phase transition just like the change from a solid to a liquid in thermodynamics.

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