Skua

I recorded a little bit of music. It’s not an actual full song or anything, it’s just an idea I had that I turned into about 90 seconds of music, but I was stuck in a bit of a rut so it feels good to have made something

Nice one! What’s the first song you want to learn?

I don’t think this is what they are directly aiming for with this specific one, but this general idea of a large field of reflectors and a central receiver can be built to store heat for a while. That lets you use solar power overnight

This sort of solar power generally doesn’t compete successfully with regular solar panels in cost, and obviously it can’t just be set up on a bunch of random roofs like panels can. Still, it’s potentially a very useful technology if someone does work out how to make it a bit cheaper or more efficient, and it still generates clean power in the process too

I’ve not heard of that one before, but I can see the reasoning behind it. Is there a name for the system that I can look up?

There are versions of PR that mitigate this issue. Mixed-member PR sacrifices a little bit of precision in the proportionality, but limits the seats assigned to party lists to only some additional ones used to balance out the un-proportionality of the results. Most of the elected body is not from party lists.

Nah that’s clearly the same cat, one is just closer to the camera

Yes, he is. It’s that you can usually expect FPTP elections to produce a winner from one of the two dominant parties. Since your vote does not count for anything if your candidate didn’t win in UK elections, you can use this information to instead pick your favourite of the two candidates that are likely to win and maximise your chances of seeing your preferred of the two win, as opposed to voting third party and achieving nothing. You don’t need to know how quickly a two party system entrenches itself for this to be useful. You just need to know if it already has and which parties are the dominant ones in your constituency.

It almost certainly does, but we still mustn’t be complacent. Instead we should aim for that stretch goal of knocking them below the Lib Dems. If nothing else it’d be really funny

Ahh, I hadn’t interpreted the comment that way. I thought that Jackthelad was suggesting Farage was being unfairly maligned by the article. My apologies if I got that wrong

I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her

Maybe read the article and find out

That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses

Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control

I don’t know, though I would be interested to read. Taagepera and Grofman’s 1985 work examined the elections of western Europe, the Anglosphere, and a couple of others across 1945-1980. They found that of the seven single-winner sytems, only France had a reliable third party (and of course, France does not use regular FPTP), and of the 15 multi-winner systems only Austria and Ireland did not have at least three. That is, of course, only correlation, and the authors have some other interesting points about major political issues within a country, but they do come down in favour of Duverger’s approach.

Some of the papers I’ve read on it have mentioned that particularly young democracies (such as Nigeria after re-establishing democracy in the late 90s, and I think the paper using that example was from the 2010s) do not appear to have settled into this pattern. On the other hand, in an older system like the UK, we see examples like the 1922 general election. The Liberals performed very badly in the prior election, Labour outperformed them in 1922, and the Liberals have never risen above third place since.

If Duverger’s law is completely off base, why do you think that the UK has such a strong two party donination? No party outside the top two has won a general election for a century, and prior to that it was the same story with one of the top two swapped out.

To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around

Since there is a finite number of FPTP electoral systems, we can indeed test to disprove it by seeing how many of them are dominated by two parties. However woolly the wording “tend to” may be, if no FPTP systems were dominated by two parties then it’d be untrue. So that just leaves the question of what proportion should count for “tends to”. In my opinion, that’d be more than half at a minimum, but there will be different positions on that

The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her

Nobody, including Duverger, thinks that it’s an ironclad thing. That’s actually discussed in the link. It does appear to be a pretty accurate predictor of the behaviour of British elections though. The fact that there’s even an outside possibility that the Conservatives might not be one of the two biggest parties after this election is noteworthy.

I’m not sure I understand why you’re calling it a tautology. It doesn’t seem to fit any of the definitions I know of that word. It doesn’t fit the formal logic one since there are clearly imaginable scenarios in which it isn’t true (a parliamentary system in which more than two parties consistently emerge as the largest), and it doesn’t fit the literary one because it’s not a repeat of the same thing twice. Could you explain what you mean here?

Their stuff looks really tasty honestly. Might have to stop by next time I’m there