The irony is that, on a technicality, the hereditary peers were the only members of the Lords who had to win an election to get their seats.
> Under the reforms of the House of Lords Act 1999, the majority of hereditary peers lost the right to sit as members of the House of Lords, the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Section 2 of the Act, however, provides an exception from this general exclusion of membership for up to 92 hereditary peers: 90 to be elected by the House, as well as the holders of two royal offices, the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, who sit as ex officio members.
Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time. It's a historical oddity of questionable usefulness. Meanwhile the house of commons can wipe out any civil liberty with a majority of 50% plus one vote. It is remarkable how a system that seems so unstable and prone to abuses of power has served the longest continuously running democracy for so long.
> Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time
There is an informal understanding that the government gives a certain number of life peerages to the opposition and minor parties, subject to the government being able to veto individual appointments they find objectionable. So it literally isn’t true that everyone gets one by being friends with the PM-although it certainly helps
Some parties reject their entitlement-the only reason why there are no SNP life peers, is the SNP has a longstanding policy to refuse to appoint any. There are currently 76 LibDem peers, 6 DUP, 3 UUP, 2 Green and 2 Plaid Cymru. SNP would very quickly get some too if they ever changed their mind about refusing the offer. The Northern Ireland nationalist parties (Sinn Fein and SDLP) likewise have a policy against nominating life peers.
So the correction is “friends of the PM, and a few other key politicians”. Still a club of people who represent no one. And more problematic, are accountable to no one.
As Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution: "An ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered."
Absent ideological capture, it is perhaps one of the best forms of government ever created due to its pragmatic nature and its Lindyness is proof.
50% + 1 is called democracy. Civil liberties are more liable to be swept away by minorities that come to power. In the US, the republicans often do this because they have minority popular support but a disproportionate representation in government. So the key is to make sure that it's 50% + 1 but also representative of the real population.
The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
All other democracies have safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. Whether it is representativity by state in the US or in the EU, a constitution requiring a large consensus to change in the US, or the senate being elected by the elected officials of small cities in France, it is not true that democracy is just 50% + 1 vote.
Worth noting that the distinction between democracy and republic that you're clearly advocating here is a usage particular to Americans. It doesn't have much currency elsewhere.
Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark etc all have safeguards the dilute the power of 50% + 1, and yet they are clearly not republics, being monarchies.
Political scientists tend to talk more of 'liberal democracy' (whether republican or monarchical) v 'electoral autocracy' etc. This depends on the classical use of the term 'liberal' of course, which is another word that Americans tend to use differently from everyone else.
> The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
Alexis de Tocqueville would disagree - he believed that intermediate institutions (churches, professions, elites, etc) blunt the power of the state before it reaches average people. A society without intermediate institutions is one where you have an all-powerful state on the one hand, and a largely un-coordinated mass of average people on the other. He thought this was the highway to democratic despotism. (Worth noticing that totalitarian governments focus a lot of their energy on destroying alternative centres of power such as these.)
Incremental. If you want a major change, the M6 MBP is rumoured to launch towards the end of the year. It's expected to bring a new design and an OLED touchscreen.
IME, they definitely nerf models. gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 through AI Studio was amazing at release and steadily degraded. The quality started tanking around the time they hid CoT.
> Claude was used to do things their guidelines prohibit (facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance)
There's Claude Gov models for this:
> U.S. national security customers may choose to use our AI systems for a wide range of applications from strategic planning and operational support to intelligence analysis and threat assessment. Claude Gov models deliver enhanced performance for critical government needs and specialized tasks. This includes:
> * Improved handling of classified materials, as the models refuse less when engaging with classified information
> * Greater understanding of documents and information within the intelligence and defense contexts
> * Enhanced proficiency in languages and dialects critical to national security operations
> * Improved understanding and interpretation of complex cybersecurity data for intelligence analysis
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
Fair point, outside my rose coloured memories of Windows 2000, it was likely never a beacon of stability. This is all purely subjective, but in my, frankly not always very reliable memory, I still have the distinct feeling that what has changed is the "in version progression" for lack of a better term.
A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.
8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.
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