Best Of

Happy Halloween everyone.

Had a great time Trick or Treating with our little Eleven and Enid.

Lovely community spirit, everyone out and about was well dressed and mannered.

Now observing our traditional annual way of saying goodbye to Halloween and welcoming Christmas by watching Nightmare Before Christmas.

Pause

You have a child called "Eleven"?

There are stranger things to call a child than Eleven surely?

Is that the benchmark - not quite the strangest name we could call our child?

Should we turn that benchmark upside down?

I like the entirely non-binary nature of simply naming your kids by birth order.

We personally went binary. And obviously, taking our queue from indices, started at zero.

So, they're zero, one, one-zero, one-one, one-zero-zero and one-zero-one.

For the record, it isn't confusing at all.

variable bit length. That is confusing

We debated having a fixed length, but felt that would either be wasteful or -worse- we'd run out of address space and need to start over. There was also the question about whether we should use signed, or unsigned.

And my wife wanted to add a parity bit, so that we'd be able to catch people out who got our kids names wrong.

Why would it need to be signed? Are you going to have less than zero kids?

It's overflow you have to watch out for.

If you're calling your kids numbers, you just need to watch out they aren't irrational.

Question (with apologies if this has already been discussed)

Why is Starmer refusing to instigate the removal of Andrew Windsor from the Succession? Does anyone really think it would be a bad idea? In purely political terms this seems like a clear win for Starmer and he would almost certainly even have the support of the King. But he apparently is resisting doing it. I find that surprising.

Apparently the King is resisting it because it would require all the Commonwealth realms to follow suit.

There's a fear some of the realms would use the legislation to become republics.

The King is also worried about parliament in the future choosing who should succeed to the monarchy.

Starmer doesn't want to get into a row with the King, and both are working on the assumption that the eighth in line will never be King.

If it is OK with the moderators, a post about an election: Yesterday I voted. Which meant that I sat down at my dining room table with two official guides and marked an optical ballot. This year the guide from Washington state is just 24 pages long. The guide from King County is 114 pages. (Fortunately I could ignore most of it, since it covered local elections all over the county, as well as legislative elections in other districts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_County,_Washington )

In order: I voted on a constitutional amendment to the state constitution,
a special tax for emergency services in the county,
a state senator,
a state representative,
the county executive,
three commissioners for the Port of Seattle,
four positions on the Kirkland city council,
a municipal court judge,
two directors for the Lake Washington school district, and
three commissioners for a Public Hospital district

And then signed and dated the ballot, and took it over to the local post office, and deposited it.

The county will begin counting ballots next Tuesday, and we will have partial results by that evening.

Reminder: Ballots are legal in Washington, as long as they are postmarked by election day, or deposited in one of the drop boxes before 8 PM Tuesday. So the election offices will not have all the ballots by Tuesday.

More later.

In case TSE is wondering, "I am an f*cking idiot" in Dutch is:

Ik ben een verdomde idioot.

Is that Single Dutch or Double Dutch? As an inveterate lawyer TSE must surely be conversant with the latter.

I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'

In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.

In all police states, the police is tiny relative to the population.

Fear does most of the work.

The KGB* peaked at about 200k actual spies (bigger numbers include border guards and volunteer spies) - for a population of 286 million

RSHA (Germany) was 50k for 280 million (peak population conquered)

The OVRA (Italy) was 50k for 70 million (peak population conquered in WWII)

*under a multiplicity of names

Fine KGB joke:

Two men are in a train carriage. One leans forward and says to the other, 'Do you want to hear some jokes about the KGB?'

'Before you go on,' said the other, 'I think you should know I'm a very senior officer in the KGB, holding the rank of colonel.'

'That's not a problem,' said the first man. 'I'll tell them very slowly and I'll even explain them to you.'