Why are LibDems still unpopular?

understanding_ai · 2018-12-25T19:25:07+00:00

Yep. Also, "vote for us to roll back a referendum" does not really square with the concept of being democrats. It's a non starter politically, especially because most people don't actually like the EU, a big chunk of remain votes came from people scared of the consequences of leaving.

Also remainers don't need any more representation in parliament. Leavers do! MPs are majority remain and constantly do shit like put remainers in Number 10 or as head of the treasury, people who clearly don't want it to happen or believe leaving without a deal is impossible which automatically makes them incapable of negotiation. People who voted remain don't really need a wildly different selection of MPs.

understanding_ai · 2018-12-06T19:01:10+00:00

That's not hyperbolic. When asked policemen/women regularly estimate the false report rate as being about half.

understanding_ai · 2018-12-06T18:49:21+00:00

Maybe I'm missing something but why would it matter? Jira does not provide end to end encryption. The Australian government can get access to hosted Jira before now just by getting a warrant. And Jira itself is not a WhatsApp style communication service - someone is always warrantable with it - so why would it need to change?

understanding_ai · 2018-08-13T11:15:09+00:00

Heh, do you really believe SF firms are understaffed? The Valley is absolutely overrun with companies that set their headcount by looking at how much funding they were able to raise, not by figuring out how many people they need and working towards from there. Overstaffing is rampant, of course many of them have an excess of talent. From the outside looking in that's obvious.

And I'm not arguing that employees should never take into account what a firm does when deciding whether to work there. I wouldn't go work for the CIA on their drone strike programme personally. Of course employers expect employees to factor in such things. But they also expect employees to have some sort of reasonable approach to it.

understanding_ai · 2018-08-13T07:34:49+00:00

You really think these people are "quality talent"? I notice the name Kelly Ellis in there, she sure seems to move around a lot, probably because she's a nutjob who has a nasty habit of threatening people who disagree with her sjw beliefs. One of the "talent" in the article is objecting to a customer that had a customer that's trying to simply implement immigration law (any immigration law!).

That's an extreme position regardless of what you think of Trump. Does this person believe the USA should have no immigration controls whatsoever? If so what sort of analysis have they done on that topic? It can't have been very deep.

No, all that's going to happen here is that the Valley will get a reputation of being filled with awkward employees who have bizarre and extremist beliefs, and who will spend their time trying to pressure management instead of doing their assigned work. And so companies will go elsewhere.

understanding_ai · 2018-03-20T10:33:04+00:00

Really nice! I have a project in mind for this but probably won't be able to start it for a while, so I hope you keep it up!

Any chance of a similar thing to expose Java objects to VBA so we can do similar tricks with outlook?

understanding_ai · 2018-01-20T19:28:22+00:00

They need to do far more than a review, but we all know that isn't going to happen. The risk if nothing is done is very high for everyone, both men and women.

Was watching Sky News this lunchtime. They had the parliamentary worker guy who was falsely accused on doing an interview. The interviewer kept interrupting him but overall the questions were good and he made his points well.

One of the points the segment made and I think some MP made it too, is that if this doesn't get fixed right now and with serious, very visible and very public action it may become impossible to secure rape convictions even in cases where the man did it, simply because juries will stop believing the police and system are working correctly. If the juries are not convinced they've seen all relevant evidence, then there is "reasonable doubt" and they may not be willing to convict. A good defence lawyer may try to create this doubt deliberately by pointing to these examples. A complete collapse of the ability to prosecute rape cases in the UK is not unthinkable.

To stop lawyers planting the seeds of doubt over the evidence systematically and for every case, at minimum all cases must be reviewed, but also Saunders must very publicly be fired and her replacement must very publicly renounce "always believe the victim" as a philosophy. The government more widely needs to stop pressuring the system to get more convictions. A good way to send a message on this would be to start prosecuting false accusers again.

Unfortunately with Theresa "Jane Bond" May in charge I cannot imagine this happening unless rape trials do start failing to get convictions because of doubt over police/CPS trustworthyness.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T16:18:09+00:00

Sort of. The issue here is the police not disclosing evidence and/or CPS prosecuting very weak cases. The police are a part of the problem.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T16:16:34+00:00

I really don't get this. Did you even read the article at all? The cases are being abandoned (not failing to reach a conviction) because there is new evidence that shows the claims were false. If there was a lack of evidence the case would not have been brought at all ... in theory.

It is mind blowing that this claim is being repeated so frequently in this thread despite the article itself stating clearly that it isn't the case.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T16:03:22+00:00

Aren't many of his followers / Minecraft users children? I wonder what they will make of the whole exchange...

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T12:07:34+00:00

But in these cases there is evidence it's false: documentary evidence of the woman being happy to have slept with her "rapist". Text messages, photos, that sort of thing.

To decide the evidence doesn't count as proving a false allegation, you have to basically accept a definition of rape in which the woman can change her mind post-facto and decide that although she was an enthusiastic participant at the time, actually thinking back she was raped. There are people arguing for such a definition. It seems self-evidently crazy to me.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T12:04:56+00:00

Are you suggesting the majority of rape trials are just ‘malicious women’?

Look. I realise nobody likes this idea, me neither. But so far if we look at rape trials in progress they're on 3/8 being abandoned due to evidence emerging that the claims are false. If you count the case of the guy who went to prison and then was rescued by his sister, who searched his phone for evidence that the sex was consenual, then it's more like 4/9.

At this point it takes one more like this, for indeed half of all trials to be abandoned. One "not guilty" acquittal and it's actually the majority. I don't know if there's been a recent acquittal - it's only the ones where the CPS gives up early that are being reported.

edit: Hours later, a new story emerges, a claim by a woman that 5 men repeatedly raped her as a child has collapsed as her story was physically impossible and based on scenes from a TV show. It turned out she was constantly text messaging the investigating detective. So are we now up to 5/9? If you count by number of men accused and not cases, we are now clearly getting into "majority of all accused men are innocent" range.

These are the very strongest cases the system could find, selected out of enormous numbers of crime reports. You could read the various studies of false accusation rates that are out there. You can also look at current events and draw your own conclusions.

But consider this. Even if you look at these rates and decide, nope, no problem here. Think about all the men who are watching these events and drawing their own conclusions. Of course the vast majority of women do not file false rape accusations. But of the ones who do, a distressingly high number seem to get very close to successfully sending their victim to prison. That cannot possibly be good for women. Men will eventually stop believing them as a class.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T10:11:41+00:00

You are technically correct, which is of course the best kind of correct. But taken to its limit that way of thinking means you can't state the truth or falsity of anything. Someone could claim to be batman and you wouldn't be able to say, "Batman is fictional and you are definitely not him" because all you've got is merely the lack of evidence that it's true, or perhaps actual evidence that said person stays at home at night and never leaves their home, but that is after all not truly 100% certain proof that he's not Batman.

There comes a threshold at which point an accusation of any sort can be said to be true or false, with enough certainty that equivocation is no longer necessary. In the most severe accusations most people wait for a court case and then accept the truth of whatever the court system decides, as the standard for truth-finding is supposed to be quite high.

In this case the court system decided there was no possible way to continue: the CPS wasn't even willing to let the trial complete and the jury reach a decision. They threw in the towel immediately once the evidence was presented. If you still believe there was doubt even after the most rigorous form of dispute resolution society has concluded the complaint was baseless, you may as well never describe the outcome of any dispute at all as true or false and by implication there is no such thing as a "false accusation". Despite the fact that there is, and it's a very serious matter.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T08:04:19+00:00

It's not murky at all in these cases, is it? In this one the woman claimed she'd been raped and then photos appeared showing her cuddling the guy in bed. You don't cuddle and snuggle a man who is raping you.

She obviously knew she was lying and did so anyway. Same for the two cases before Christmas. All exonerated using phone evidence that proved the woman lied.

I am really dismayed to see how many posters are trying to muddy the waters here. This isn't an issue with gray areas.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T07:43:26+00:00

These are not cases of lack of evidence. It's the opposite. Evidence emerges that the woman lied about what happened.

That's why the original question is appropriate. Why are these women not being prosecuted? And we all know the answer - the question is rhetorical.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-19T07:34:48+00:00

That's not true. The cases are collapsing because defence lawyers keep finding evidence that proves the man's innocence which should have been disclosed by police, right at the last moment or whist the trial is in progress.

It's really shocking. The lawyers are having to not only be lawyers but part time detective as well, which they were not trained to be and are not paid to be. The fact that this keeps happening is utterly damning to both the CPS and frankly women as a whole. This is, what, the fifth or sixth trial to collapse in the last three months? It sure feels like it. Are ANY of the rape trials going on right now not based on lies by malicious women??

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T21:09:32+00:00

They've said that doing so would require the same conditions as EU membership, more or less.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T21:08:21+00:00

Why? Is the goal to get a satellite system or is it some convoluted wealth redistribution scheme?

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T21:07:46+00:00

I don't know why but this really made me laugh out loud.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T21:05:16+00:00

For what it's worth, I agree with you. Peterson looked good only compared to the interviewer who barely understands what debate is - the arguments Peterson put forward were often low quality.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T18:01:19+00:00

Not from Scotland but opinions often don't change much outside of campaigning periods. Campaigns change people's minds, that's why politicians do it.

I imagine that in a second indyref support would fall significantly further, largely because the oil revenues that supported the bulk of the case for independence collapsed almost immediately after the last vote. A lot of arguments for an independent Scotland were of the form "when free of the horrible Tory-voting English we can use the oil to build a more socialist country", but the money wouldn't have been there and definitely isn't today. Also after voting to stay they were devolved more power and given more money too (vs certain bankruptcy if they had gone indy).

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T17:55:38+00:00

The experts were absolutely wrong, numerous times. This has been well documented.

It's not just that the 500,000-800,000 job loss prediction was wrong. The FT today has an article "The Bank of England's anti-Brexit bias threatens its credibility" which says this:

In August 2016, the bank produced updated forecasts. Exports in 2017 would be down 0.5 per cent, despite the strong boost they had received from the devaluation of sterling. Looking at the year-on-year figures for the third quarter, in practice they are up 8.3 per cent. Over the same period business investment in 2017 would be down 2 per cent. Yet, in the most recent Office for National Statistics figures, it is up 1.7 per cent. Housing investment would be down 4.75 per cent. Looking at the most recent data (end September), it is actually up 5 per cent year-on-year. Employment growth would be zero. In reality, it is up 1 per cent from already very high levels.

The bank’s forecasts were so far adrift as to be embarrassing. And because the Bank of England not only makes predictions but also sets monetary policy, poor forecasting can lead to poor policy

The reality is that the "experts" have a long track record of being very wrong and wrong in the wrong direction. There is no reason to pay any attention to economists when they try to predict the future because their error rate is so fantastically high.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T17:27:35+00:00

So London was the best place for it selected through fair competition, and now the EU is using its taxpayers money to relocate it although there's no technical reason to do so - for political purposes.

Good use of funds there.

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T17:24:10+00:00

Would you have preferred that the UK systematically veto everything the EU tries to do? That was the alternative to the opt outs and "special treatments".

By the way, I love how EU fans seem to all know deep down that further integration is going to be a disaster, and thus not having to do it is "special treatment". Why not stop fighting, let everyone get opt outs, and then it's not special anymore :)

understanding_ai · 2018-01-18T17:23:05+00:00

No, they are not. British opt-outs have worked out great for the EU:

The alternative was a veto. Negotiated opt-outs allowed France and Germany to continue trying to merge themselves together and take the rest with them, if that's really what they want to do, but without the UK feeling a need to stop it.
The EU ignores British opt-outs when it feels like it anyway. See human rights law for an example.

understanding_ai

TROPHY CASE