As the video pointed out, only about half of government officials in Hong Kong are directly elected by the population. For the remainder, there is little pressure or incentive to get anything done in this regard.
I'm not entirely sure, but he may have taken exception to the following from your piece:
>Of course, you and I know that the latter is just a general form of the former, but somebody whose educational attainments have qualified them to sit behind a desk stamping passports doesn’t.
... as opposed to how you are compassionately honest and direct with people who can ruin your life-as-you-know-it based on which brand of bigotry pill they ingested that morning? (Clearly, this applies to many other aspects of life, not just international travel!)
Sure, insulting people behind their back is unethical. So is the treatment OP was subjected to.
It's not hard to be honest with people when I don't look down on them because they're not as educated as I am...
If an officer is being disrespectful and you dislike him, that's fine. If he's being disrespectful and you immediately think "Look at this idiot, if only he knew what kind of degrees I had" you've likely got a problem.
Yup, making it tortuously elegant doesn't somehow un-make it a put-down. Just because you have more formal education than someone, doesn't entitle you to look down on them.
I wish I had screencapped it, but at one point I found myself in the middle of the screen, watching four swarm-like quadrants of fellow ships (top-left, top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right) all moving in relative unison. Anytime a swarm started to get close to me, I would inch away for a few seconds before the swarm turned back. I was able to stay in this middle, peaceful area for an extremely long time before random stray fire eventually finished me off.
I worked on a Node-based multiplayer Snake game for a while last summer, and was really excited to see this post. I was hoping the code would be public so I could see how he handled the sync issues. Took me a few minutes to figure it out... disappointment of the week.
If anyone is curious or wants to hack on something like this, you could check out my (unpolished) code: https://github.com/roblourens/nodesnake . My first crack at both Node and a multiplayer real-time game.
Edit - and the game is still live at http://aws.roblourens.com/ but looks like it may be a little buggy yet - I wish I'd known something like this was going to be on the front page of HN, I would have taken another look at this project and tried to have a polished demo!
I do want to build a real one. However, I was going to build in command lag as part of the game. Weapons would be player "aimed," but they would be beam weapons that would activate if there were a weapons "lock" and if the ship were pointed in the right direction. There would also be missiles and area effect weapons. The point is to design a game based on dodging and positional tactics.
Note: The link will eventually die (since it's a really early iteration I quickly published when I saw this HN thread; you can't even shoot anyone else) when I take it back down. Uses ImpactJS, NodeJS, and Socket.IO.
edit: Controls: arrow keys = move;
edit 2: I'll probably be open sourcing the game (at least the non ImpactJS parts) once it's more production ready.
Here's a good screenshot I got after playing for 10 minutes. This tended to happen to me about every 1-2 minutes. Either those are some incredibly synchronized humans or it's just an April fool's joke.
Yes. Another way to see this is that few (perhaps even none at all) other ships are constantly firing at maximum rate. If this were multiplayer, that'd be what most people would be doing.
It's easy to get this to happen. Just stay motionless until you have the attention of 3 or 4 ships. Then book it in a straight line. Suddenly, it zooms out and the ships start behaving like schools of fish.
Pro tip: if you're getting such non-random behavior, just clear your seb.ly cookie and you can play normally again. I'm guessing the more you play, the higher chance of non-random behavior there is, so that players gradually realize it's a hoax.
It would be interesting to see a Kickstarter project devoted to this. It would need to get big fast (Friday deadline to submit an offer), and would need both the $440,000 minimum to purchase the village and ample money on top of that for renovation. It might be a hard sell for people who have no desire or ability to relocate to the village, but I am sure smarter folk than I could think of some sort of angle to generate attention to the project. Perhaps?
And what would you offer to Kickstarter supporters? A week for free in a dead village? A brick from the 13th century church ?
If people left the place there's a clear reason for that. Money is not going to bring back interest in a long-dead location. Unless you make it like a new Las Vegas.
For 1000 dollars a month you would probably get a much better deal in many places around the world, like in South East Asia. You'd get better weather there, too, and decent internet access. Not sure about the visa situation, though, but for sure getting a work visa in France is not easy and takes time.
Admittedly I know nothing of the regulations surrounding such a proposal, but what of some sort of revenue sharing? Donating to the project guarantees you a share in the village's revenue, where your cut is relative to your investment size? I fully understand how crazy of an idea this must sound.
>Interestingly enough, Jobs himself was also considered for knighthood by the Queen of the United Kingdom, but the proposal was blocked by a former Prime Minister because Jobs declined to speak at a Labour Party conference.
That's fascinating to me. As an American who has never paid much attention to British knighthood, I am not knowledgeable about the process for selecting whom becomes a British knight. Could someone with the requisite knowledge perhaps elucidate on whether or not ostensibly petty politics get in the way of these things with regularity?
It seems absolutely absurd that someone who is being considered for knighthood could be denied of that because of something as minuscule as declining to speak at a party conference.
Couldn't agree more with this comment - even better the genii behind The Thick If It have a new HBO series which I imagine will have an interesting take on US politics: Veep http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veep_(TV_series)
For a time you could simply buy your way to a knighthood. At least for the last 50 years they've been an almost entirely political construction, recommended by the government and rubber stamped by the queen.
The Victoria Cross and George cross however, are earnt on merit alone.
A lot of people have a say on the list of people to be honoured, but the Prime Minister is the most influential of the lot. Technically speaking the monarch could overrule any objection (afaik the process is not defined by any specific law or regulation, just built on convention), in practice it rarely ever happened with Elizabeth II. It will be interesting to see how this, like many other conventions established under her rule, will morph once we go back to having a male King who will be more popular than the political establishment, something that hasn't happened for a very long time.
She wasn't necessarily so when she "took office" and formed her views on what her role had to be. At various stages, up to the 80s, a large segment of the population would have happily done away with the monarchy, which is unthinkable today. In a way, her constitutional profile as a weak ruler was a way to sneak the institution past turbulent times.
The next ruler will probably find himself, from the very beginning, more popular than powerful. The temptation to wrestle back some power from an unpopular political class will be strong, and there are very little safeguards. This wouldn't necessary be a bad thing: the UK system values pragmatism over principles, maybe restoring some royal privileges could be useful to get us out of the current ideological rut.
I suspect that's because, for better or worse, a lot of people in the UK do as well. Personally, I'm always torn on the House of Lords. In principle, as an institution, the Lords is an anachronistic affront to democracy that obviously has no mandate and no place in legitimate government for the 21st century. Pragmatically, I can't help noticing that the elected representatives in the House of Commons often seem incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery or showing any empathy whatsoever for their constituents, while the Lords actually has a fairly respectable track record for getting in the way of bad legislation. I would much prefer a second chamber (or entirely new system) where everyone with any kind of power to act on behalf of the people also had a democratic mandate, but until such a system comes along, I suspect as a practical measure we're actually better off with the Lords than without.
Have you considered the that maybe one of the reasons the House of Lords works (and I believe most people are of the view it at least sort of does) is because they ARE unelected, and thus don't have to pander to any interest other than their own humanity?
Given the state of politics in the west, perhaps leaders in society should be appointed in a similar way to jury service.
I think there is potential in having a second chamber where the people making decisions serve a long term in office (possibly until they choose to retire) unless they are actively recalled. As you say, that puts them above the need to make decisions based on the worst kind of reactionary politics, as often happens to those serving for terms of only a few years who always have one eye on the re-election campaign fund.
On the other hand, I think getting into such office in the first place should be about more than buttering up the current PM. Rather like the US Supreme Court, if all you have to do to reach such high office is receive the assent of someone who may themselves be on the way out politically by the time they appoint you, there is a very real danger that too many bad apples get in and then can't readily be removed.
I've often mused idly over the jury service for politicians idea. For a while, I wondered what would happen if we ran a staged process where randomly selected citizens were invited to join the second chamber for one term of office, lasting quite a while (say 6 years), with a new intake every other year so you never have a chamber full of people who haven't figured out how things work yet. The difficulty I always run into is that like jury service, it probably has to be compulsory rather than an invitation if you're going to get a reasonably representative group, but unlike jury service it is clearly not reasonable to require people to give up several years of their lives for public service. And you can't really do it on shorter terms of say one year, because then the administration of the day can just wait out a hostile second chamber and hope for better luck next time before steamrollering through all the bad legislation it really wants in one favourable year.
I'm optimistic enough to believe that as technology increasingly eliminates most kinds of material scarcity, and human network effects & education continue to eliminate violence, then the question would be, well, really, why wouldn't you want to be in public service?
> Technically speaking the monarch could overrule any objection (afaik the process is not defined by any specific law or regulation, just built on convention)
The UK doesn't really have a constitution in the sense that the US, France, Germany, etc. have a constitution. Power changes all the time, and has gradually gotten more democratic over the last 200 years.
In theory, all power is from the Queen/King, which they give out to Parliament. In theory
In practice Parliament has the power, and if the Queen/King over steps their bounds it's either sorted out by war (Parliament vs. the Monarch (English Civil War in 1640s)), or Parliament kicks out the Monarch and gets someone else in (Glorious Revolution of 1688 when they got rid of the Catholic King and invited the Prodestant Willian of Orange in).
He's not popular with some people for what might be an abuse of power.[1] He's had a reputation of intervening in architecture projects that don't fit his ideal vision (ie. they're not traditional, Georgian style), leading to them being cancelled outright even at the late stages of planning.
See also Edward VII -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_vii -- Queen Victoria's oldest surviving male offspring, he had to wait 59 years for the throne. Reigned for nine years, then died.
Given the Windsor family medical history, Elizabeth II could well make it past her centenary. In which Charles will not get to place his bum on the throne until he's in his late seventies or eighties.
I'm fairly sure you have to either have British citizenship or citizenship in one of the Commonwealth nations to be knighted. Otherwise you receive an honorary knighthood. Also some Commonwealth nations don't allow their citizens to receive honours, for example Canada.
It has to be honorary for U.S. citizens because of the Constitution of the United States's Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8. A U.S. citizen cannot swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen and remain a citizen. That being said, there is a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge where the UK is concerned.
Isn't that just a restriction on people holding a political office of some kind?
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State"
America was founded as an egalitarian republic, free from the aristocratic tyranny of Europe. The purpose of that provision was to keep formal aristocracy out of America, and to keep the U.S. government from adopting similar ranks and privileges here.
I think “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them …” is where the question is coming from. Who is them in that sentence? The United States? And if that is so it seems only those in the United States holding an Office of Profit or Trust (whatever that means) are exempted. Citizenhood doesn't seem to come into play.
In fact, should he even end up a British citizen (dual-citizenship, give up his US citizenship, or whatever else), he would automatically become a full knight.
I would imagine that the Washington DC Metro area (DC, Northern Virginia, Maryland) has a reasonably sized proportion of that "(Rest of the) United States" total. The startup scene, and tech scene in general (largely thanks to defense contractors), are quite active here.
It would be helpful if you could enumerate the ways in which his/her statement was naive. It seems to be a relatively logical conclusion that being told or influenced not to say something is restrictive of innate freedom of speech, no matter how seemingly innocuous a reasoning established social or cultural norms are (ie. don't criticize the recently deceased, it's tactless).
It was naive in not seeming to grasp that there are many senses of "can't" and "freedom," and that the sentence could be either true or false depending on which you mean.
