Apropos of nothing at all, apparently the oldest known recorded joke is about Sumerian newlyweds and anal sex. Plus ça change... (View Post)

Yes. Putting social care inside local council budgets & emergency care inside the NHS has led to exactly this outcome. The government can crow all it likes about how it protected NHS funding, but… (View Post)

If you run a queuing system at 95% of max capacity, small variances in load can lead to wildly different queuing times. Unless you have a lot of slack in the system you end up randomly getting stuck … (View Post)

Brookes is very good indeed for some subjects. Not qualified to opine on architecture, but since Oxford University doesn’t do architecture I guess the Brookes dept gets to call themselves whatever th… (View Post)

Not all PR systems entrench party control over MPs. The problem is that the party power structures have a huge vested interest in making sure that any variant of PR we do get does entrench party inte… (View Post)