z spellings are pretty English, fwiw. The s thing only came in pretty belatedly, from the French. Z spellings are still very common in academic writing; OUP requires it in their style guide. There’s no defence of defense though.

Right but this is an easy win for Starmer. Something very unpopular you can scrap, that is costly, that even if you’re a bigot you can recognise isn’t working, etc. That’s something you can instantly do to create the impression you’re very different to the previous party. And the impression, per your comment, is impactful. It really doesn’t say much one way or the other about more important policies (e.g. like the Tory cuts that he said pre-election he would not axe).

I mean, the FPTP system is fucked – that aside… For your stat to be right, wouldn’t you have to calculate it also in terms of the number of constituents to a given constituency? E.g., Constituency A has 10 constituents, Constituency B has 15 constituents, and Constituency C has 100 constituents; both A + B have a non-Lab/Cons party in first or second place; C has Lab first and Cons second. In that scenario, it wouldn’t be true that “most people” live in a constituency where Lab or Cons are not both 1st or 2nd (where A-C is exhaustive).

I don’t know how that would extrapolate to the real constituencies with their varying population/electorate figures. Certainly, it’s a very uneven and strange system at present, which allows for all sorts of gerrymandering. But only given the sum of 20 constituencies (per your calculation) where Lab/Cons are not the top two, I don’t think you can infer the situation for most people.

In any case: fuck this system, PR soon please.

There’s a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I’m unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not “solve the problem” – how do we really know? At the very least, you’d think that demonetising helps to some extent, because if it’s not profitable to spread certain racist ideas, that’s simply less of an incentive. On the other hand, plenty of people on this thread are suggesting it does help address the problem, pointing to Reddit and other cases – but I don’t think anyone really has a grip on the empirical relationship between banning/demonetising, shifting ideologues to darker corners of the internet and what impact their ideas ultimately have. And you’d think the relationship wouldn’t be straightforward either – there might be some general patterns but it could vary according to so many contingent and contextual factors.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is literally only a problem in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, folks are totally fine using messaging apps. WhatsApp is pretty popular worldwide, and there are regional favorites too. But, the point is, it’s only in the States that people seem to be against this idea. The answer for why is very much up for debate, but the conversation is, at this point, just getting exhausting.

Can confirm, as a Brit. We probably would have a sardonic explanation for why only people in the States are against using other messengers too…

But loans are temporal. That’s all that is happening – you’re renting out software (akin to digital library borrowing), in some sense, not buying a product.

The problem is how to do it otherwise and maintain enough income to ensure continued active development for future updates.

I don’t have a solution to it, and subscriptions aren’t ideal, but that’s the problem at least.

Yeah I think this presents a genuine problem for the active development of apps for smaller developers, for sure.

Right but OP isn’t talking about Stremio/Torrentio without Real Debrid, and neither is the guy in the comment chain you were replying to. I’m not sure you’ve a good grip on what Debrid services are by saying “just another Netflix”; it reads like you’re imposing your grievance about Stremio onto a thread that mentions it but does not recommend the use case you specifically object to.

The app “Island” sort of does this already.

That’s a fair criticism, but worth noting that if you’re plugging in an RD API then the vast majority of the time you’re not torrenting at all (and never on your network). You’re downloading from the cache. One person, one time has to request a torrent file to that cache. Which has likely always happened before you’re making any requests, unless it’s something very niche indeed.