Assault is already a generic crime. But random assaults whilst serious are just a form of crime that hurts the country a bit but not a lot (individuals might get badly hurt, but a low level of assaults is just a nuisance from a societal level).

But hate crime is different, hate crimes beget hate crimes, and even a low level can grow rapidly, and once you have a racial/religious/whatever conflict you’re stuck with that for a few generations, so hate crimes are incredibly dangerous for society, so get stomped on very hard.

That’s the theory anyway.

Yeah, that matches my understanding.

Depends on your specific denomination of pro-life. I think some consider even the morning after pill to be a form of abortion.

But yeah, for everyone else it’s a definite win, including the less extremist pro-life crowd.

Tldr: a very hard change to hate, but of course the most hateful people will manage to somehow.

In this country our sewage and drainage are largely combined in the same sewers (we built the system before anyone had the idea of separating them, and now can’t afford to fix it), so hard to believe it could cause any problems, probably just improved the flavour of the broth a little

Serious answer: the actually wealthy are too good at tax dodging, so taxing them is rarely effective, plus they can scare governments by threatening to fly their private jets to some other country if they were actually threatened with effective taxation.

I’ve heard it claimed that the only effective way to run a wealth tax is to do a single massive one off tax with no warning or lead time, that way the cockroaches wealthy can’t run and hide in the woodwork quickly enough.

Words to live by

Is this actual terrorism or just supporting a group that blew up a parked military plane again?

Stealing human remains is illegal, but selling (correctly sourced) human remains is legal.

I think their point is that it’s very hard to prove bones are illegally sourced, meaning they can only prosecute if they’re able to prove the bones were sourced illegally.

If instead it was always illegal to sell human remains (presumably with exceptions for medical/educational purposes), that might make policing them somewhat easier.

An alternate strategy might be to require strict tracking for human remains - you can sell a skull but it must have a certificate listing the full chain back to its original owner (presumably deceased). Failure to retain that chain of custody gets you in legal hot water regardless of how you obtained it. Possibly with a little extra security to prevent duplicate use of legitimate certification. (eg each sale is logged with a trusted 3rd party so you can’t keep claiming that every skull you sell is the same guy until one of them gets inspected, forcing you to find a new legitimate doner to act as cover).

Technically it’s nothing to do with Palestine itself, you can protest that fine.

The issue is the group Palestine action, which the gov declared a terror group because they wrecked some military planes, and we have a law forbidding the support for declared terror groups.

An overreaching dumb law applied badly as a way to overreach even further. I admit this is not much better than arresting Palestine protestors directly, it’s a pretty thin cover…

Fair point, after some googling I see I was significantly overestimating ais impact despite your comment previous comment, my bad.

It currently is negligible. Depending on how long this hype train lasts it may stop being negligible. Coal is on the decline. Private jets and careless billionaires are growing problems, but not as fast as ai. All need handling one way or another.

Realpolitik perspective defeating the nazis still feels like a good long term investment for Britain (though admittedly at enormous cost). We lost our empire, but we prevented a pan Europe empire forming right next to us. A united Europe with an expansionist bent would be the biggest threat to Britain I can imagine. Even if they left us alone for a while they’d surpass in capability once they had a chance to rebuild from the war, and at some point they’d start pushing their weight around, and we’d lose our empire then presumably they’d gobble us up on their way to a squabble with the US or something.

We won ww2 to keep Europe separated.

From the same perspective, brexit was a real blunder: a united Europe and we’re sat on the sidelines waiting to see what they do next? And now the Russians are forcing them to arm up and work together, we’ve practically recreated the lose scenario of ww2, admittedly with less nazis (which I admit is a pretty major win).

Edit to repeat: this is the realpolitik perspective, my real view is that the empire loss was a win for the world in general, the Nazis were a threat to humanity in general and that the EU is a really good neighbour to have, but it’s fun to look at things from the Machiavellian perspective occasionally.

Right, but to be fair Britain had no access to the nazi leaderships’ private writings at the time, and really couldn’t be sure if they felt that way, and we can’t be sure the nazis might have changed their minds in the face of a meeker and weaker British response.

So overall, I think perhaps the British response was pretty close to forced out, despite the theoretical full knowledge scenario of coexistence.

Criminals are famously environmentally conscious, and never have any spare cash for a pricy car as a mode of transport. Of course.

Sure, that’s absolutely true, but the games that have done well recently have found ways to properly take advantage of an “easy” market. I suspect the lesson is just that this particular market is well suited to smaller and simpler games but with quick turnaround, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, if anything it means small games companies can shoot for big wins, which can only be a good thing.

Oh for sure, I was being tongue in cheek. I do think they should make a system for returning things stolen that would be appreciated more where they came from (I’m fine with guarantees of quality preservation and public display, but I think that’s as far as can be justified). We really can’t justify keeping things that we couldn’t buy today because they mean more than money to the people we stole them from.

To be fair, I’m sure there’s some British things in the British museum, I assume those could be kept.

I really think we need to distinguish between terrorism in the sense of “are they going to keep blowing people up?” and “terrorism” in the sense of “are my taxes going to go up because of this?” I feel like the word is being stretched for the second example…

Yeah, “I don’t like this proposed change to the law because it has an effect” is not the compelling narrative they seem to think it is.

Sounds like they need to speed up the test, if it takes 10 years then they won’t be babies anymore by the time they get results.