I'm sure that's a large part of the reason the US army is all volunteer, but there are other benefits as well. Armies seems to go through cycles over the centuries where sometimes mass conscripts are best and sometimes small professional armies are best. We're currently in a "small, professional armies" part of the cycle, and I honestly doubt the US Army would have much use for draftees.
The US army's doctrine is very costly per soldier and requires infantry with a high degree of skill and coordination, you can't just slap rifles into peoples' hands and expect them to carry it out.
Last night, New Zealand ended its COVID protection framework aka the "Traffic Light System". Mask mandates are now removed, expect for medical facilities. The few remaining vaccine mandates will end in 2 weeks.
The only noteworthy public heath measure still in force is the requirement to isolate at home for 7 days if you test positive for COVID.
The British monarchy serves a valuable purpose. It is a storehouse of reverence for the Monarch, reverence that otherwise generally defaults to the practical leader of the nation. When I look at the absurd moral convulsions that republics have over their Presidents, etc, and compare it to how Canada or the UK treat their Prime Ministers (not quite as reverently as janitors, but janitors in the civil service actually clean things) I can’t help but think that the Constitutional monarch nations have the better system.
In fairness, I don't know how much of that is having a monarch, and how much of that is having a directly elected Head of State. I don't think Germany has this problem with its President.
You don't need to leave to Commonwealth to drop the monarchy, most Commonwealth countries don't have the King as head of state. I mean, India in in the Commonwealth.
As to why most of these countries don't change, the main reason is there's no need to. The King isn't in charge in any meaningful sense, so there really isn't a problem to solve. And constitutional change isn't something most governments do, unless there's a major problem that needs solving.
The Maori King made a statement regarding the Queen's death:
Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII has received with sadness the news of the death of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth, together with the late Prince Philip, visited Turangawaewae Marae on several occasions and enjoyed a close relationship with the late Queen Te Arikinui Te Atairangikaahu. Queen Elizabeth personally signed into law the Waikato Raupatu Settlement Act 1995 - the only New Zealand legislation given Royal Assent in person by the Queen. This act is significant in the life and history of our nation and is held in the highest regard by the Kiingitanga as honouring a Queen-to-Queen relationship.
Kiingi Tuheitia and Makau Ariki Atawhai send their aroha and respect to the Royal Family now gathering in Balmoral. "The Whare Ariki of Te Wherowhero send their aroha at this time to the Royal House of Windsor. We pray for the late Queen and for King Charles."
He poo, he poo. He poo ka riro i a Maatangireia, i a Rangiaatea, i a Te Tumu o Rehua. Ko te poo ki a koe!"
It's the end of an era for sure. My country (and probably yours as well) didn't actually attain their modern constitutional structures until after the Queen was crowned, so in an important sense she's the only monarch we've had.
I played a little Sunless sea, but I found the game hard to get into and too unsettling to really enjoy it.
I'm currently playing Per Aspera, which is about playing an AI charged with colonising and terraforming Mars. It's a base builder but it has a story mode that is interesting so far.
I played an interesting game this week called The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante. Its a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of game about the life of a man in a harsh fantasy world where class boundaries are strictly enforced. Brante is one of the few people in this world in a position to change their social status and you play him from birth through to death, and the choices you make affect his development, family and the world around him. It took me about 8 hours to finish and it was an interesting change of pace.
Honestly, probably not many. Drug development isn't a labour-intensive process. Equally, New Zealand's food mills were still running during Level 4. Everyone staying home isn't necessary, you just have to reduce movement enough that the virus can't spread quickly enough.
Our food is a mix of domestic and foreign, but note that we never stopped freight coming in (or moving around the country), it got to a point where special freight-only flights were being sent here because there weren't enough passengers for the amount of air freight we needed.
We didn't develop our own vaccine, we went with Pfizer, though vaccine development would have been considered and essential activity so even under Alert Level 4 it would have continued if we were doing any.
This is why it took seven weeks to suppress COVID to the point where a full lockdown wasn't needed - people were still leaving their homes, so transmission continued, just at a much lower rate (the R value got as low as 0.5 during Alert Level 4, meaning cases would halve every 2 weeks or so).
I'm pretty certain I do understand what a country-wide isolation strategy looks like, since I lived through one. It's true that not everyone can stay home, the plan was that of a large enough fraction do stay home (expect for essential activity like buying food or medicine) the chains of transmission can be cut back enough that the disease can't propagate. To be clear, this doesn't work with Omicron (it didn't work terribly well with Delta without vaccines), but original COVID could be eliminated using this approach.
If more than a handful of countries has taken this approach in the first place, we could have prevented COVID from mutating too far by denying it opportunities to spread, but apparently expecting
basic responsibility from most the rest of the world is too much to ask.
Isolation worked well against original COVID (though expecting the majority of people to not act like insane idiots is apparently too much to ask), and our original vaccine seemed to be sufficient for Delta (New Zealand was on the brink of conquering it, even with minimal restrictions at the start of the year). But Omicron is a different beast. We need better vaccines, both more up to date and able to handle greater diversity of variants so we can actually get ahead of the mutations, that means we need our regulatory agencies to work faster to approve vaccines and make sure the research efforts are well-funded.
The trouble of course is that there is nothing to be done about fuel prices, even if we got a bunch of extra crude from somewhere, refining capacity is really tight right now. Eventually capacity will build up, but no matter how many executive orders Biden issues, you won't be able to make an oil refinery out of them.
While I take your point, I also find the criticisms of your position persuasive as well (Chip's in particular). I'd like to propose a synthesis position.
The efficacy and meaningfulness of politics in the US right now depends heavily on what you're trying to do, particularly which branches of government you need to achieve your aims. If what you want can be done with the President or the Supreme Court then politics is very much live. As Chip points out that because the Republicans were able to win the 2016 election, they got to swing the Supreme Court in their favour and have made significant political gains as a result.
However, I suspect a lot of what interests (or perhaps interested) you in politics are the sorts of high-level regulatory and economic reform that neither an Executive Order nor a Supreme Court decision can implement. No, you need legislation and if you're looking to get the legislature to do anything for you, I can completely understand why you would conclude that politics has become utterly non-functional.
In my opinion, the largest flaw in US politics is Congress - its structure renders it divided and inert, this leads the other branches to accrue more power (the Presidency especially). And I don't see this ending soon, indeed if the recent set of Supreme Court cases we could see a crisis of legitimacy where the Supreme Court loses power, which would leave the Presidency as the only functioning branch of government. This would leave the US one short step from dictatorship.
In many fields, AI is starting to be better at certain kinds of problem-solving than we are. There is real potential in this, and a fair bit of danger as well.
You make a good point, to extend a little, the idea that "cameras can't be racist" needs a little interrogation.
A lot of people think of racism as being exclusively about hatred, fear or other forms of emotional antipathy. Since cameras (or more properly, the computer system the camera is running) can't hate people, they can't be racist, right?
But the problem is that a lot of racism, as you note, is implicit bias and that kind of bias isn't hatred, it's a misfiring of our pattern recognition systems. And neural networks AI systems are explicitly modelled after human neural architecture - they lean the same way we do. So it shouldn't be surprising that these pattern recognition systems can fail in the same way ours do. Basically, if a human can learn to be racist then a machine that learns like a human can learn to be racist too.
On “Tiffany Cabán, Council Member of Queens, releases Public Safety Resources poster for Small Business”
That was a good thread.
On “The Looming Double Failure of Putin’s Mobilization”
I'm sure that's a large part of the reason the US army is all volunteer, but there are other benefits as well. Armies seems to go through cycles over the centuries where sometimes mass conscripts are best and sometimes small professional armies are best. We're currently in a "small, professional armies" part of the cycle, and I honestly doubt the US Army would have much use for draftees.
The US army's doctrine is very costly per soldier and requires infantry with a high degree of skill and coordination, you can't just slap rifles into peoples' hands and expect them to carry it out.
On “Extra! Extra! The Ten Second News Links We’ve Overlooked!”
Last night, New Zealand ended its COVID protection framework aka the "Traffic Light System". Mask mandates are now removed, expect for medical facilities. The few remaining vaccine mandates will end in 2 weeks.
The only noteworthy public heath measure still in force is the requirement to isolate at home for 7 days if you test positive for COVID.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/129854755/covid19-traffic-light-system-masks-scrapped-from-midnight-monday
On “God Save The King: Queen Elizabeth II Dead at 96”
In fairness, I don't know how much of that is having a monarch, and how much of that is having a directly elected Head of State. I don't think Germany has this problem with its President.
"
You don't need to leave to Commonwealth to drop the monarchy, most Commonwealth countries don't have the King as head of state. I mean, India in in the Commonwealth.
As to why most of these countries don't change, the main reason is there's no need to. The King isn't in charge in any meaningful sense, so there really isn't a problem to solve. And constitutional change isn't something most governments do, unless there's a major problem that needs solving.
"
The Maori King made a statement regarding the Queen's death:
https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/09/09/kiingitanga-offers-respects-to-queen-elizabeth-ii/
On “Extra! Extra! The Ten Second News Links We’ve Overlooked!”
It's the end of an era for sure. My country (and probably yours as well) didn't actually attain their modern constitutional structures until after the Queen was crowned, so in an important sense she's the only monarch we've had.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Sunless Sea”
I played a little Sunless sea, but I found the game hard to get into and too unsettling to really enjoy it.
I'm currently playing Per Aspera, which is about playing an AI charged with colonising and terraforming Mars. It's a base builder but it has a story mode that is interesting so far.
On “Extra! Extra! The Ten Second News Links We’ve Overlooked!”
Congratulations on your promotion.
On “Reports: FBI Executes Search Warrant On Mar-A-Lago”
The Commonwealth Games has been on and there's a historical bullying scandal with a National MP, so it hasn't been front-and-centre in our news, but what we have been getting is fairly straightforward. Here's a sample: https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/us-canada/300657426/donald-trump-says-fbi-conducted-search-at-his-maralago-estate
"
A republic, if you can keep it.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Playing with Craiyon”
I played an interesting game this week called The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante. Its a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of game about the life of a man in a harsh fantasy world where class boundaries are strictly enforced. Brante is one of the few people in this world in a position to change their social status and you play him from birth through to death, and the choices you make affect his development, family and the world around him. It took me about 8 hours to finish and it was an interesting change of pace.
On “Thursday Throughput: BA5 Edition”
Honestly, probably not many. Drug development isn't a labour-intensive process. Equally, New Zealand's food mills were still running during Level 4. Everyone staying home isn't necessary, you just have to reduce movement enough that the virus can't spread quickly enough.
"
Our food is a mix of domestic and foreign, but note that we never stopped freight coming in (or moving around the country), it got to a point where special freight-only flights were being sent here because there weren't enough passengers for the amount of air freight we needed.
We didn't develop our own vaccine, we went with Pfizer, though vaccine development would have been considered and essential activity so even under Alert Level 4 it would have continued if we were doing any.
This is why it took seven weeks to suppress COVID to the point where a full lockdown wasn't needed - people were still leaving their homes, so transmission continued, just at a much lower rate (the R value got as low as 0.5 during Alert Level 4, meaning cases would halve every 2 weeks or so).
"
@kazzy
I'm pretty certain I do understand what a country-wide isolation strategy looks like, since I lived through one. It's true that not everyone can stay home, the plan was that of a large enough fraction do stay home (expect for essential activity like buying food or medicine) the chains of transmission can be cut back enough that the disease can't propagate. To be clear, this doesn't work with Omicron (it didn't work terribly well with Delta without vaccines), but original COVID could be eliminated using this approach.
If more than a handful of countries has taken this approach in the first place, we could have prevented COVID from mutating too far by denying it opportunities to spread, but apparently expecting
basic responsibility from most the rest of the world is too much to ask.
"
Isolation worked well against original COVID (though expecting the majority of people to not act like insane idiots is apparently too much to ask), and our original vaccine seemed to be sufficient for Delta (New Zealand was on the brink of conquering it, even with minimal restrictions at the start of the year). But Omicron is a different beast. We need better vaccines, both more up to date and able to handle greater diversity of variants so we can actually get ahead of the mutations, that means we need our regulatory agencies to work faster to approve vaccines and make sure the research efforts are well-funded.
On “President Biden Executive Order on Abortion: Read It For Yourself”
Policy making takes time. Honestly a 2-month turnaround strikes me as blisteringly fast.
On “New York Times Reports that Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Donald Trump, is detailing what she witnessed during the Capitol attack at the Jan. 6 hearing, including the former president trying to steer his limo to the Capitol”
The trouble of course is that there is nothing to be done about fuel prices, even if we got a bunch of extra crude from somewhere, refining capacity is really tight right now. Eventually capacity will build up, but no matter how many executive orders Biden issues, you won't be able to make an oil refinery out of them.
On “I’ve Had My Fill: Of Limited Faith or Interest in Contemporary Politics”
While I take your point, I also find the criticisms of your position persuasive as well (Chip's in particular). I'd like to propose a synthesis position.
The efficacy and meaningfulness of politics in the US right now depends heavily on what you're trying to do, particularly which branches of government you need to achieve your aims. If what you want can be done with the President or the Supreme Court then politics is very much live. As Chip points out that because the Republicans were able to win the 2016 election, they got to swing the Supreme Court in their favour and have made significant political gains as a result.
However, I suspect a lot of what interests (or perhaps interested) you in politics are the sorts of high-level regulatory and economic reform that neither an Executive Order nor a Supreme Court decision can implement. No, you need legislation and if you're looking to get the legislature to do anything for you, I can completely understand why you would conclude that politics has become utterly non-functional.
In my opinion, the largest flaw in US politics is Congress - its structure renders it divided and inert, this leads the other branches to accrue more power (the Presidency especially). And I don't see this ending soon, indeed if the recent set of Supreme Court cases we could see a crisis of legitimacy where the Supreme Court loses power, which would leave the Presidency as the only functioning branch of government. This would leave the US one short step from dictatorship.
On “Socialism is Anti-Choice and Anti-Life”
Given that trump increased tariffs on baby formula, I'm not sure I'd describe the Republican position as "free trade".
On “A CEO Named Mister”
In many fields, AI is starting to be better at certain kinds of problem-solving than we are. There is real potential in this, and a fair bit of danger as well.
"
You make a good point, to extend a little, the idea that "cameras can't be racist" needs a little interrogation.
A lot of people think of racism as being exclusively about hatred, fear or other forms of emotional antipathy. Since cameras (or more properly, the computer system the camera is running) can't hate people, they can't be racist, right?
But the problem is that a lot of racism, as you note, is implicit bias and that kind of bias isn't hatred, it's a misfiring of our pattern recognition systems. And neural networks AI systems are explicitly modelled after human neural architecture - they lean the same way we do. So it shouldn't be surprising that these pattern recognition systems can fail in the same way ours do. Basically, if a human can learn to be racist then a machine that learns like a human can learn to be racist too.
On “The Pro-Life Movement Must Embrace Continuing Moral and Practical Obligations”
It's people who can get pregnant. These are all normal English words used in their conventional way.
On “Elon Musk Buys Twitter”
Nice
On “Kevin McCarthy Under Fire”
I'm on record on the site as saying the Presidential systems as a whole have failed, but abolishing Primaries would certainly help.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.