AV, incarnate via Optional Preference Voting, is a very important and positive potential change to the way the UK is governed. So I’m going to bug you all about it; feel free to ask questions by email.
tl;dr: You should vote Yes to AV because AV is fundamentally a better way of producing a parliament that reflects the country’s opinions than FPTP, which only works well with two candidates. AV produces more representative, engaging governance by removing the need for tactical voting.
Since I bought an iPod Touch in 2007, stashed away at the back of my mind has been an intention to make this site better on small screens. Finally, over the past week I’ve done this, partly to get a bit more of an idea about responsive design.
As we’ve created ever more devices able to access the “full web”—rather than the constraints of basic HTML or, god forbid, WAP—it’s become more and more obvious that designing for the typical desktop browser creates a decidedly sub-optimal experience for those on other devices, in particular phones with their dramatically smaller screens. This site has been fairly unpleasant to use on a phone for a long time.
Ars Technica reports the results of a study into students’ feelings on the morality of downloading music from p2p vs stealing a CD from a shop under the headline, Students: shoplifting CDs worse than downloading music via P2P.
Overall, the sample agreed that shoplifting a CD was morally wrong, they were socially influenced not to do it, and they felt a high obligation to obey the law. Comparatively, the students ranked downloading music from the Internet as much less severe on nearly every scale—their respect for the music industry was largely the same as the shoplifting scenario, but the rankings indicated that students feel significantly less deterred from stealing online, that it’s not as morally wrong, there’s virtually no social influence not to, and they feel no obligation to obey the law.
The government is asking us to trust them; I am generally inclined to do so on issues related to terrorism, but this isn’t acceptable. Not only is this a slippery slope, but we may have already slid down it: there may very well be an innocent man rotting away in prison.
The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all
Over the last fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.
While I fault him for looking the other way whilst fighting for the other side, at least George Monbiot has the guts to admit he was wrong.