inefficient_electron
Looks like Dichen Lachman
Yeah, these have saved us on a lot of issues I feel. It’s simply a much more representative system than what the Americans do and it helps keep a lot of fringe ideologies at the fringes, where they usually belong.
Minor correction, we have preferential voting not proportional.
I run a plant nursery and in my field it does work this way. When plants varieties are bred they can be protected like other IP, lasting 20 years to give the breeder a chance to realise the benefits of their work. This is conditional though, the protection is only valid as long as growers/the public have reasonable access to the variety. If this is not met the protection can be revoked and it becomes public domain again, so anybody can commercially propagate the variety. Glossing over a few details, but this is true here in Australia at least.
Yep. It’s a bit hard to fathom today, but in the Middle Ages few people had the ability to read and write, mostly either learned monks and clergy, or those wealthy enough to be taught by them. With such a small pool of people, it’s comparatively easy to influence the prevailing spelling through the actions of a few.
Debt used to be spelled dette or simply det. We spell it with a useless silent “b” today because meddlers decided to bring it back to its Latin roots of debitum. This happened in French as well, even though neither language ever pronounced the “b” and had no business adding it. The same happened with words like doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. French was sensible enough to reverse this through modern spelling reform, but I think English is stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Fantastic! I’ve been arguing for something like this for years. Hopefully this catches on around the country.
Our towns and cities are largely lacking the medium density mixed use neighbourhoods that make it nice to cycle. We can fix it, but it’s going to take time.