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@ianbetteridge@social.vivaldi.net Reminds me that we recently passed the 10 year anniversary of the Brexit referendum with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, almost as if its supporters don’t want to be reminded of it.
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James T Monkey
@teamonkey@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Game designer. Inept astrophotographer. Boring in ways you couldn’t possibly imagine.
@teamonkey.bsky.social
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Joined February 03, 2017
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@2legged@mastodon.ie @ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk @christineburns@mastodon.green Reform, Restore, Recycle
Replying to
@openrightsgroup@social.openrightsgroup.org You should link to the public consultation.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-the-online-world-a-national-consultation
A car has been parked outside my house for a few weeks. I suspect it’s abandoned so went to report it to the police, but got stuck when the web form asked “have you asked your neighbours if it belongs to them?”
So now I need to speak to the police AND my neighbours.
Replying to
@cstross@wandering.shop @anon_opin@mastodon.social
I recommend r/GoodNewsUK on Reddit. The aim is to try to post only objectively good news (there’s an ongoing discussion about what counts) as a tonic to… literally everywhere else.
A lot of it ends up being boring government press releases and investment news, sure, but it makes you realise how many small-but-good things are actually happening which never make the news.
It has genuinely been a boon to my mental health; you can’t often say that about Reddit.
Wow!
🐴 Horsle 🐴
09 May 2026
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://cabletwo.net/horsle
Useful tactical voting site for tomorrow’s vote. Vote tactically or vote with your heart, but do vote.
An expensive year for me. Paid the deposit on a solar panel + battery setup for the house and then pretty much instantly the hybrid battery in the car failed.
On the bright side, I’m now joining the EV club!
Test-drove a few EVs on the weekend and my word they’ve got good in the past few years.
Listening to yesterday’s (April 21st) edition of The Rest is Science and it has a really great discussion about why you can’t use logic and facts to change people’s minds. Really worth a listen.
Replying to
@codinghorror@infosec.exchange I am hugely confused by that page because if you keep scrolling down you get different news articles with completely opposite spins on the same story.
Replying to
@DJGummikuh@mastodon.social @Kerplunk@mastodon.scot @openrightsgroup@social.openrightsgroup.org The Tories voted in favour of the Lords’ amendments, which is a blanket Australia-style ban for under-16s, including restrictions on VPNs. Labour’s objections were that a blanket ban would just send kids underground and block them from critical information that they have a right to access, but their solution is vaguely-worded ad-hoc powers.
I think that’s better on balance but hard to say, and still bad. Many Labour members abstained.
Replying to
@mcc@mastodon.social @diffrentcolours@tech.lgbt @guyjantic@infosec.exchange True. I meant Alternative Vote (aka Instant Runoff Voting), which was commonly called ‘AV’ during the UK referendum.
Replying to
@mcc@mastodon.social @diffrentcolours@tech.lgbt @guyjantic@infosec.exchange I mean, UK has already successfully used STV for decades, e.g. Scottish elections, but crucially not for UK Parliament 🤷
At the time of the referendum, there was a coalition govt of Lib Dems who wanted full PR (eg STV) and Tories who wanted to keep FPTP. AV was chosen as a compromise but it was misinformised that AV benefited the Tories. Most people who didn’t want FPTP didn’t want Tories. People who didn’t understand saw it as an unfair system compared to FPTP.
Replying to
@mcc@mastodon.social @diffrentcolours@tech.lgbt @guyjantic@infosec.exchange My feeling is that ranking all the choices in order is simpler for people to understand, and more likely to seem fair. Everyone knows how to rank things in order. The math isn’t really important.
Approval Voting is another one that makes intuitive sense to people. Easy sell.
But having a vote, and then “having another vote if you lose” seems inherently unfair and open to misinformation, IRV encourages that, even if it’s more similar to the above than not.
Replying to
@diffrentcolours@tech.lgbt @guyjantic@infosec.exchange @mcc@mastodon.social Choosing AV as an alternative to FPTP was a deliberate move to see it fail.
I think the problem is appealing to the ‘one person one vote’ crowd. Approval voting makes sense in these terms (everyone says yes or no to each candidate), as does ranked voting (everyone lists their preferences in order), as does PR (if 10% of people want a party, that’s the proportion of seats they get) - all fair in layman’s terms.
But AV is weird, unintuitive, hard to explain.
Replying to
@diffrentcolours@tech.lgbt @guyjantic@infosec.exchange @mcc@mastodon.social Sure, but even back then there was a ton of misinformation. 2/3rds voted against AV over FPTP, so it’s not that easy.
You have to put your explanation up against “why is it fair that you get another vote if your first one loses” and I don’t think that’s easy to explain, but it’s very easy to campaign off.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-12934509
That plus the “FPTP protects us from extremists” angle which I still hear today despite everything suggesting the opposite is true.
