> The King of England isn't in charge of the UK though. The power largely rests in Andy Burnham.
Yes and no...
Firstly there's not been a King of England since 1707, he's king of the United Kingdom (and fourteen other places) and secondly it really depends who you ask. On paper sovereignty flows from the 'Crown in Parliament', many powers are actually the King's and are now vested in other parts of the state. Since the 19th century these powers tend to be used 'on the advice of the Prime Minister / Cabinet'. In theory the King could go against this advice, but Parliament ritually reminds [1] the King's representative what happened the last time a king got too uppity and the courts can still rule on the limits of these powers. There's one view which says the people are fundamentally sovereign (very relevant during Charles I's trial for treason), but while this might be true in practice the orthodox view is that sovereignty comes from the 'King-in-Parliament', a composite body of the King, House of Commons, and House of Lords acting in concert.
The point is that when Andy Burnham exercises his power in many cases he's in a sense doing 'su king' by virtue of his role as PM rather than acting in his own right. The PM role is weird as well, traditionally (and in my opinion correctly) the PM is merely the first among equals in a collectively responsible Cabinet, the term 'Prime Minister' actually started life as an insult. Of course since the late 20th century the role has become increasingly presidential, but this seems true in Westminster-style systems generally.
To be fair TV detector vans actually did exist in the early days of TV, there were just barely any of them because they were expensive and they were just as effective as psychological tactic. The idea was that old televisions would radiate the local oscillator frequency used in the superheterodyne circuit strongly enough it was detectable from the street, where it could be direction-found from the van outside. Ringway Manchester has a decent video on the subject.
This wouldn't work nowadays for obvious reasons, but they still pretend the vans are a thing as far as I know.
Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd blame the EU and wring their hands saying there was nothing to be done, while in the background gold-plating the legislation far beyond what the EU was even asking for. This also made it easy for populists to point to many absurd examples of the EU being comically bureaucratic, when a lot of the more nonsensical ones were literally domestic additions. When the referendum happened, the consequences were obvious to everyone.
While no Brexiteer myself, I personally would want to see the European Parliament get a lot more powers and influence before I threw my wholehearted support behind rejoining. Half the problem with the EU is that it's seen as not particularly democratic as a place for legislation to originate, and giving the elected organ more power (including the power to propose legislation in its own right, and dismiss legislation proposed by the Commission with much more prejudice) would go a long way to addressing that I think. The Parliament needs to be more, well, parliamentary in how it functions.
I can't speak for every country, but I feel the irresistible force of datacentre construction will eventually get mired in the the immovable objects of British NIMBYism and high electricity prices.
I've seen more local opposition to datacentres than anything else, and the fact we have discretionary planning (which can't be abolished for political reasons, despite it amounting to putting economic sanctions on ourselves) means there's a lot of stakeholder vetos in the system.
To be honest I have showdead on and while I see the things you see, I also see a lot of blatant AI slop getting killed off too. I'm sure most people on here are at least somewhat attuned to Claude's 'voice' by now.
If a LLM-voice comment has [dead] next to it, either the account was already banned in its entirety or HN's LLM text detector marked the comment auto-dead due to suspected LLM writing. If the comment has [flagged] [dead] next to it, the comment was killed by human flagging. You can see both kinds of comment if you browse https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
If you have enough karma to flag comments you can also flag them directly from the noobcomments feed, which is useful to help manage the abusive users who keep re-registering new accounts.
Point taken, I probably file a lot of that away under "generic HN spam" (or maybe I've gotten so good at skimming Claude output that my eyes glaze over automatically now in response :P)
> the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line
The US absolutely could coerce the rest of the West in the short term, but everything that's happened in the last decade calls the long-term future of Atlanticism into serious question and such action would accelerate this process I think. If coordination came as an order from Uncle Sam, it would be seen not as a legitimate act of ensuring collective safety but as mere technological imperialism on America's part.
The cross-border system fed from the Elan Valley in the UK is like this, Wales is famously very rainy due to its hills and the Victorians exploited this by damming the Elan Valley and gravity-feeding the water from the Cambrian Mountains all the way to Birmingham which was a rapidly growing industrial centre. There's no pumps, it was all calculated to drop 170 feet over 73 miles!
It's a really stunning place to visit as well, mid Wales in general is so pretty and the dams themselves are ornamented in a way nobody would bother with today. Of course the Victorians got away with things that would be unthinkable now, when Liverpool did the same approach of flooding Welsh valleys to water English cities in the mid 20th century it was very controversial because the scheme flooded a majority Welsh-speaking village and the language was in a fairly steep decline then; nowadays there's a lot more protections for Welsh.
I made this post and it died on its arse initially, didn't even get an upvote. The second chance pool meant that it turned into a useful discussion about a pretty niche element of frontend development.
Yes and no...
Firstly there's not been a King of England since 1707, he's king of the United Kingdom (and fourteen other places) and secondly it really depends who you ask. On paper sovereignty flows from the 'Crown in Parliament', many powers are actually the King's and are now vested in other parts of the state. Since the 19th century these powers tend to be used 'on the advice of the Prime Minister / Cabinet'. In theory the King could go against this advice, but Parliament ritually reminds [1] the King's representative what happened the last time a king got too uppity and the courts can still rule on the limits of these powers. There's one view which says the people are fundamentally sovereign (very relevant during Charles I's trial for treason), but while this might be true in practice the orthodox view is that sovereignty comes from the 'King-in-Parliament', a composite body of the King, House of Commons, and House of Lords acting in concert.
The point is that when Andy Burnham exercises his power in many cases he's in a sense doing 'su king' by virtue of his role as PM rather than acting in his own right. The PM role is weird as well, traditionally (and in my opinion correctly) the PM is merely the first among equals in a collectively responsible Cabinet, the term 'Prime Minister' actually started life as an insult. Of course since the late 20th century the role has become increasingly presidential, but this seems true in Westminster-style systems generally.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rod#State_Opening_of_Par...
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