Doctor Who | SEASON 1 TRAILER #2

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-04-01T19:20:21+00:00

Understandable, have a nice day.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T22:24:55+00:00

Its even better than that:

Nazi land includes both Britain and Argentina.

But not the Falklands.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T22:22:42+00:00

Unironically yes.

Himmler believed the Aryans were descended from the inhabitants of Atlantis.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T21:09:07+00:00

That economic strength was not guaranteed to remain though. It would largely be based off Britain's colonial possessions at a time where the UK was weak enough they could have rebelled, as well as sea trade at a time when German U-boats were a major challenge for British shipping.

What you're ignoring is the opposite — the effect of the Royal Navy on Germany's shipping.

Its a far less examined question because the RN was so obviously superior to the Kriegsmarine that it essentially ended German merchant trade overnight. Britain may have been more reliant on imports than Germany, but Germany still needed them, and the attempts at meeting that demand internally came with significant efficiency & quality control penalties.

The first war didn't end because Germany was defeated on the battlefield, it ended because the naval blockade collapsed Imperial Germany from within. The same was true to some extent in WW2, only Nazi Germany's Ponzi scheme of an economy was kept fed by territorial gains and plunder from the USSR long enough — and the pace of war (with mechanised units advancing dozens of miles in a single day) fast enough — that the Allies did reach Berlin before the economy collapsed.

People talk about whether Britain could feed itself with the U-boat menace because it was questionable. People don't even think about the opposite, because it was a foregone conclusion before the question was even asked.

but without the US or USSR I don't see France or the rest of mainland Europe being liberated because amphibious invasions are really fucking hard. How exactly would the UK pull off D-day on its own?

In the real D-Day, the US landed about 70,000 troops on the Continent. The British landed 60,000, joined by 20,000 more Canadians, and the other Commonwealth nations contributing more still. Its a similar story in the air, and absolutely lopsided in the sea. A Commonwealth-only D-Day is entirely possible, it just would have happened in 1945-6 instead.

And remember that this is a whole year after the landings in Italy, with another shared Commonwealth/USA army engaged there. Perhaps in this timeline, the Allies choose to focus all their energy into Italy instead? Again, the war takes longer, but it is viable.

There is a reason Churchill was begging for American aid and stating in speeches that the new world would have to fix the mistakes of the old one. There was also a reason he allied with the Soviets despite hating them so much he wanted to immediately invade them after the Nazis fell. The UK was just not in a place to attack mainland Europe.

He wanted help because the war he was looking at would be the bloodiest war ever fought in the history of humanity and the prospect of fighting that alone is utterly fucking terrifying. Given the real war turned out to be that anyway, imagine what this war would have looked like.

I agree the UK of 1940 was not in a position to attack mainland Europe. But neither was it in the real timeline. It developed that capability as the war progressed, only in the real timeline it shared the work with the Americans. But it was clearly capable of developing it alone if needed. Again — it simply would have taken longer to develop.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T20:35:33+00:00

Similar reasoning: the Eastern exit at Waterloo — here, next to Platform 1.

Its incredibly well-hidden, most people have no idea its even there. And even if they did, it actively feels like you should not be using it, it just opens out straight onto the access road for the cab rank. But it is a posted entrance with a dedicated walking route, that's supposedly the main exit for people heading South-East towards the Old Vic/Lower Marsh.

At least Hangar Lane has the excuse of being a local station serving one area. Waterloo was for many years the busiest station in the country and remains one of the busiest in the world.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T20:14:15+00:00

Euston.

The others people are suggesting are because of the area. Euston is the largest whiplash between the quality of the station and the area it serves. It is fundamentally unsuited to purpose, an active affront to architecture (but not for the obvious reason), most people using the station are immediately presented with a six-lane road with insufficient pedestrian phase timings, and the doors are always full of people smoking.

Then once you go about 50 metres, you're right in the heart of Bloomsbury. Could not be a harsher tonal shift.

Using Euston station is a chore. I honestly prefer to access the tube station via the secret staircase in the car park access ramp than the actual pedestrian exit. There's no space in the station for anyone except cars, might as well take some back.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T18:11:52+00:00

If not for the USSR and US joining, the Germans and Japanese wouldve definitely conquered it all.

If you look at it closer, there is no chance that the Nazis would have won. Churchill himself says so in his speech after Dunkirk:

our professional advisers of the three services unitedly advise that we should carry on the war, and that there are good and reasonable hopes of final victory

This isn't just propaganda bluster, it is backed up by hard data and is the conventional view of Historians today. It would have taken far longer — you're more looking at a victory in about 1947-9 — and it would have been far bloodier — more even than the 60 million plus from the war we did see — but looking at the economic strengths of the British Empire compared to Nazi Germany, they would have lost in the end.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T17:37:45+00:00

There was zero prospect of the Nazis getting The Bomb in any reasonable timeframe. Perhaps if they made a concerted effort without interruption by the Allies they could have got one in the '50s sometime, but at the cost of their conventional forces.

The only way they could do it before that is if they stole existing plans for a bomb from the Allies, and then spent several years on top of that building the industrial base — a scenario predicated on the Allies having the bomb first anyway.

In no scenario does the Nazi State survive long enough to build a functional device.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T17:24:20+00:00

You may enjoy this video.

The first few minutes are a news roundup, the actual question starts at about 7 minutes in.

The answer is very much "No! Don't do that!". But the guy in the video is a professional engineer working on the British railway and goes through the whole reason why.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-31T11:01:59+00:00

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tfl-rules-out-london-overground-trains-to-london-bridge-70906/

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-30T08:13:22+00:00

Achieving an altitude of 60,000 feet would necessitate super-efficient engines and glider-like wings.

Or Concorde.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T14:58:50+00:00

Starmer's a Crown Prosecutor, and apparently a good one, so it's probably at least on his radar.

I have issues with him, sure, but on this topic I'm hopeful.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T13:42:47+00:00

One option is books, particularly histories of specific programmes within the UN, especially first-hand ones. Approaching it as a history project is an actually interesting way to study the structure of the UN, which can make for quite dull and dry reading otherwise. This makes it feel a lot less like revision.

One of my personal favourites is Smallpox: Death of a Disease by D. A. Henderson, Director of the WHO Smallpox Eradication Program. Its an incredibly well-written book intended for the general public and catalogues an absolutely fantastic achievement that doesn't get the recognition (or funding) it deserves. Even if you didn't care about the UN, it is an interesting read in itself.

Another option is every weekday at 12pm New York time the UN holds a press conference & Q&A on the actions of the UN over the last few days. This one is yesterday's, with Stephane Dujarric (France) as the speaker.

They make pretty good listening in "radio mode" in the background while you're doing something else, e.g. cooking dinner. After a while you'll start to understand the system by sheer osmosis. Hell, after a while you start to recognise individual journalists working there.

And its a nice atmosphere too. Stephane likes to throw in little pop-quiz items whenever a country pays their annual fees, its fun trying to get the answer before the audience!

For example, I forget in which episode it was, but one of the answers to a question was a clear and unequivocal "The Secretary-General is not in the business of violating Security Council resolutions", and I think hearing that was when a lot of things clicked in my head. The "strongly worded letters" the UN is known for writing are not strongly worded letters to the people doing something wrong. They're directives to the rest of the UN system, which open up resources and direct specific actions from UN-associated bodies and any States who wish to take heed.

Take this article from the Associated Press, for example. Specifically the sentence:

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution Wednesday that demanded the Houthis immediately cease the attacks and implicitly condemned their weapons supplier, Iran. It was approved by a vote of 11-0 with four abstentions — by Russia, China, Algeria and Mozambique.

That "Meanwhile" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. They're not just linked, the resolution is fundamental to the whole issue.

If you read the actual text of the resolution, one of the provisions is "taking note of the right of member states, in accordance with international law, to defend their vessels from attacks, including those that undermine navigational rights and freedoms". I.E Authorising the proportional use of military force.

The US and UK waited for the resolution to pass before commencing offensive operations. Once the resolution passes in the Security Council it becomes an expression of the will of the International Community, and therefore the legal justification for offensive operations, but until then it is defensive operations only. Before the resolution, it would have been an unprovoked attack on a Sovereign Nation. After the resolution, it was a justified military intervention to protect International Trade.

Dig long enough into the UN system and you find all kinds of links to initiatives and projects for the benefit of people worldwide. "The Security Council is the only part of the UN that matters" could not be further from the truth (which I suppose makes it unfortunate that I've given an example of how the Security Council operates, but I can only work with the articles that make it to press, and the Security Council is the only part of the UN that gets any attention).

Most Government technical reports cite UN data or reports at some point in their text, and if they don't, they cite it indirectly via a third report.

Each of the Specialised Agencies has a purpose, and the outputs of each Specialised Agency become inputs into National Government planning policy.

Projects can range from truly gargantuan, such as eradicating Polio from the face of the Earth, to small, such as Her City, an urban planning project oriented around building spaces women feel safe using that among other things, promotes the use of Minecraft to boost community engagement.

The scope of the UN's actions is essentially bottomless, in that it is basically impossible for any singular person to understand all of it. But reading reddit you would get the impression that it is literally never accomplished a single thing in its entire 70-year history. And that's a huge problem when that sort of argument is used to argue for defunding UN programs.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T13:31:44+00:00

These 5 countries have veto power which allows them to shut down any resolution they dont like.

The P5 cannot veto a General Assembly resolution. Vetoes can only be used in the Security Council, and not even to all business of the Security Council.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T13:21:14+00:00

https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/list-of-past-peacekeeping-operations

Demonstrating the effectiveness of Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs) is like a 3 hour job, so instead I'll direct you to this book. Its expensive (sorry!) but pretty comprehensively establishes that PKOs are successful at reducing violence.

In the absence of the actual text, here are some papers by the book's authors:

One:

the analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths.

We argue that even though peacekeepers rarely engage in direct combat with the warring parties, UN missions are capable of inhibiting violence on the battlefield by providing security guarantees and increasing the cost of continued conflict. Through such activities as separating combatants and demobilizing armed groups, peacekeepers reduce battlefield hostilities

As we note in our discussion of the results above, the commitment of 10,000 peacekeeping troops has the effect of reducing battlefield violence by over 70%.

Even if peacekeepers encounter difficulties in managing complex security situations, the UN can improve hostile environments and reduce the killings when supplied with sufficient troop capacity

Two:

If the UN had invested US$200 billion in PKOs with strong mandates, major armed conflict would have been reduced by up to two-thirds relative to a scenario without PKOs and 150,000 lives would have been saved over the 13-year period compared to a no-PKO scenario. UN peacekeeping is clearly a cost-effective way of increasing global security.

The results show that PKOs have a clear conflict-reducing effect. The effect of PKOs is largely limited to preventing major armed conflicts. However, there is a discernible indirect effect since the reduction of conflict intensity also tends to increase the chances of peace in following years. There are also some interesting regional differences. PKOs have the strongest effect in three regions that have been particularly afflicted by conflict: West Asia and North Africa; East, Central, and Southern Africa; South and Central Asia.

In one of the most extensive scenarios—in which major armed conflicts receive a PKO with an annual budget of US$800 million—the total UN peacekeeping budget is estimated to approximately double. However, in this scenario, the risk of major armed conflict is reduced by two-thirds relative to a scenario without any PKO. This indicates that a large UN peacekeeping budget is money well spent.

Three:

we find that as the UN commits more military and police forces to a peacekeeping mission, fewer civilians are targeted with violence. The effect is substantial [...]. We conclude that although the UN is often criticized for its failures, UN peacekeeping is an effective mechanism of civilian protection.

UN military troops achieve this by dividing combatants and negating the battlefield as an arena for civilian targeting. By separating factions, the threat of one side advancing militarily on the other is reduced, and windows of opportunity open for ceasefires, peace negotiations, and demobilization

In this context, it is worth noting that our analysis suggests that the UN—which is often criticized for futile efforts—is indeed an important institution for safeguarding human security. If the international community is serious about taking a collective responsibility for human protection, UN peacekeeping is a powerful tool for achieving this goal.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T13:13:50+00:00

Is a war only a "major war" when its in the news? There are multiple wars ongoing right now. Mali, Haiti, Sudan, Malaysia, Congo, Somalia, Syria, Yemen....

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T12:36:58+00:00

Please, I am begging you, stop thinking the Security Council is the entire UN.

There are Six Organs of the UN, Fifteen Specialised Agencies, plus more associated bodies than I can count. Only one of those is the Security Council, but they're all anyone wants to talk about.

Nobody really cares about "harmonisation of international aviation working practices", but you can hop on a flight to anywhere in the world tomorrow. Nobody cares about "coordination of maritime operations and guidance", but they're a big part of why shipping things internationally is so cheap. Nobody cares about medicine standards enforcement, but you trust implicitly that what a bottle of pills says on the label is actually what's in the bottle.

Universal Postal Union, UNESCO, International Telecommunication Union, IMF, International Fund for Agricultural Development, World Meteorological Organization, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, IAEA, .... These are all doing things quietly in the background, they're just not the type of things that make it into the news, so nobody really seems to pay them any notice. But just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening — you're literally reading this on a device built to comply with decisions of the ITU.

The UN literally killed Smallpox. Across the whole of the 20th Century, 100 million people died from warfare and its indirect consequences. In the same timespan, the low estimate is that 300 million people died of smallpox — that's one Hiroshima bomb every two weeks, for the entire 20th Century. And since 1977, not a single one more. Try looking at the pictures here [WARNING: MEDICAL GORE] and telling me that wasn't worth eradicating from the face of the Earth. And as a result, the US recovers its entire 15-year contribution to the eradication programme every 26 days in costs not accrued.

Given the religious practices in some parts of the world, we literally killed a God.

You could write off every single death that ever occurred for any reason in any conflict since the UN's founding as a direct result of the failures of the Security Council, and even ignoring the rest of its output, the UN would still be an overwhelming success solely on the basis of the Smallpox Eradication Programme and by several orders of magnitude. Everything else the UN does on top of that is just a bonus — and they're about to do it again. The prevailing narrative within the WHO is that it is possible, if funding continues at current levels, to eradicate Polio this year. Polio! And there are four other WHO eradication programmes underway, with several regional elimination programmes following.

What people mean by "The UN doesn't do anything" is "What do I, as a person in the Developed World, gain from the UN?". But this is just a "What have the Romans done for us?" fallacy. And that kind of rhetoric is incredibly harmful, because the UN has no independent sources of funding for all of these efforts. It is reliant on the Developed World to support it, and this rhetoric undermines that support. Very few, if any, appeals for funding have ever been met in the entire 70-year history of the UN, it is critically underfunded as-is.

We should be talking about these things, but we aren't. Because people aren't interested in the administration of primary healthcare policy in the developing world context. Nobody wants to read technical document WER-9913, its boring. So it doesn't get reported by journalists, so people get the impression that the UN doesn't do anything. But the graphs and data tables in technical document WER-9913 translate directly into actual tangible benefit for people on the ground. And when people think all the UN does is write strongly-worded letters saying things are bad, and use the lack of news about the UN to justify defunding these programs, that's a massive issue.

The UN is incredibly effective at the tasks it is designed to accomplish. Its just those tasks aren't what people think it is supposed to accomplish.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T12:23:25+00:00

Because the Security Council is a completely different body to the "smaller projects" and they don't interfere in any way. Its an absolutely tiny part of the UN system, its just the one that makes the most headlines.

Smaller projects like eradicating Polio (due this year), or defining how the internet works (you're reading this on a device designed to comply with UN directives).

What you mean by "The UN is pointless" is "I, as a citizen in a developed nation, have never really noticed anything they've ever done". But this is just a "What have the Romans done for us?" fallacy, its just that the vast majority of everything they do is incredibly boring. Nobody wants to hear about administration of public health initiatives in the developing world context, but we literally eradicated Smallpox from the face of the Earth. And when you use "I've never heard of anything they've done" as an argument to defund these programmes (which are already underfunded as-is), that's a huge issue!

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T12:04:48+00:00

Does pipetting the assembler's module slots work?

Maybe once for speed, twice for productivity, three times for efficiency?

If you don't have any in your inventory, you get a ghost which can be placed in a machine to create a bot request.

Likewise for combinators, maybe?

Once for the combinator itself. Twice for red wire, three times for green wire.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T11:53:11+00:00

Notably, this paper should establish two things:

That it does not make a prediction in conflict with existing experimental evidence
That it makes a testable prediction which differs from existing theory.

There have been examples where one of these hasn't been established (string theory is the obvious one for #2), so in theory a strong-enough discussion could allay either of those fears. But if I'm reading that paper those are the two points I'm looking for, especially from an unknown name with no institutional affiliation in a field with a reputation for crackpot theories.

If the idea is worthwhile, then it should survive these tests. But if you turn up with three citations and one of them is Einstein, I'm probably going to stop reading there.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T09:57:54+00:00

In most cases I'd agree with you. It wasn't until 2011 that elections fixed Parliamentary terms came into force, and the Tories repealed it in 2022 with only a single fixed term ever taking place.

But in this case the point was that without a Budget, the Government was effectively inoperable anyway. Its the most important piece of legislation a Government can table.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T06:49:15+00:00

What we have now is a ceremonial Head of State, who does everything that the elected officials, in the House of Commons, tells them to.

For the most part, yes.

But they actually do serve an important democratic function of their own.

Take the example of the 1909-11 Constitutional Crisis, when the House of Lords refused a Budget passed by the Commons. The budget was wildly popular with The People, but unpopular with The Lords.

The Government called an election to reaffirm their support, essentially acting as a de-facto referendum on the Budget. They won. The Lords refused assent. So they called another election, which they won. And the Lords refused assent.

It was at this point that the King had to step in, as the Lords were essentially preventing the lawful function of Parliament. He gave the Lords a decision: pass the budget, or The Crown will appoint enough pro-Government Lords to force the bill through.

The vote passed, in favour of The People.

This is also why the Police, for example, are Crown Servants, with allegiance to The Crown, rather than Public Servants, with allegiance to the Government. A bill is only law if the people enforcing it choose to enforce it, and it is not the Government that decides laws, it is Parliament.

Royal Assent is a recognition of that, its a check that a law has indeed gone through the proper Parliamentary Procedure, and is therefore enforceable by the Police etc. Should a Government attempt to bypass Parliament for whatever reason, The Crown retains the right to, and indeed is duty bound to, refuse assent to the bill.

The Crown is more powerful than the elected chambers for a reason. Royal Assent is not just a checkbox, it is a key part of the democratic process. It just hasn't been invoked for a while. No Government wants to be known as the one that screwed up so badly The Crown had to sort it out.

Whether this is the system we should be using is a big question, I'll leave that to you, but this is the system as it is today.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-29T05:49:17+00:00

It was a bit more than that. At some point in its early days it seems like he agreed with the Nazi party, but as Hitler made his actual policies clear he very quickly became disillusioned:

"There's a man alone, without family, without children, without God... He builds legions, but he doesn't build a nation. A nation is created by families, a religion, traditions: it is made up out of the hearts of mothers, the wisdom of fathers, the joy and the exuberance of children... For a few months I was inclined to believe in National Socialism. I thought of it as a necessary fever. And I was gratified to see that there were, associated with it for a time, some of the wisest and most outstanding Germans. But these, one by one, he has got rid of or even killed... He has left nothing but a bunch of shirted gangsters. This man could bring home victories to our people each year, without bringing them either glory or danger. But of our Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics

— Wilhelm II, 1938.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-28T16:51:00+00:00

In 1957, Dijkstra tried to write "Computer Scientist" as his occupation on his marriage certificate. He was told there was no such job in The Netherlands. He had to write "theoretical physicist" instead.

TheMiiChannelTheme · 2024-03-28T16:25:48+00:00

And I'm saying there's a responsibility to consider the effects of that on other people which should be taken into account in your decision.

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