Personally I like the idea of a second house that is able to act as the house of review, thanks to its members having longer terms than the lower house. That’s a quality we have in Australia federally, but not in my home state of Queensland which is unicameral. It’s also something New Zealand lacks with its unicameral legislature (elected via MMP).

What if the new elected upper house worked similarly to the Australian Senate? Our House of Representatives is the same as your House of Commons (except that it uses IRV instead of the undemocratic FPTP) with single-winner districts. But the Senate uses a proportional system (STV) electing 6 Senators per state for twice the amount of time an MP is elected for. So they’re relatively less concerned about the day-to-day shifting polls than MPs are, and you get a result that’s much more representative of what the people actually want.

In the UK context, it might be easier to sell PR in an entirely new house than it would be to update how the Commons is elected.

And currently the house of Lords is a bunch of old geezers that don’t know anything about anything

Look, I’m not British and frankly do think the Lords is silly. But I can name three members of the House of Lords, and 2 of them at least demonstrably deserve to be there on political merit, whether or not you agree with how they vote. I have no idea what the ratio is across the whole of the Lords, but at least not all of them “don’t know anything about anything”.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer the Australian model where Senators are elected with a proportional system and serve for terms twice as long as lower house MPs. And the Canadian model of “lifetime” (subject to retirement age) appointments also has merit. It’s just that not ever single Lord is completely undeserving.

The three Lords that I’m familiar with, fwiw, are David Cameron, David Willetts, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I don’t even think that’s remotely true.

I’ve seen two cases that actually directly impacted my ability to use Firefox. I can only presume there are many more. Those being supporting the column-span CSS property (available since 2010 in other browsers with vendor prefix, and early 2016 without, while being late 2019 for FF) and supporting iPad OS’s multi-window functionality (introduced mid 2019, Firefox has had it for just a handful of months now). I have first hand experience telling me very directly that this is true.

There’s also been a lot of talk about Firefox’s lack of support for PWAs. I’ve not experienced that myself to be able to comment more than to say I’ve noted others have complaints.

The point is that with open source you can effectively leech off of Google for now, while still retaining the flexibility to nope out and do your own thing at any point you decide.

Considering just how severely behind they are already (as I mentioned in my other comment, they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards or operating system features), I see anything they can do to reduce how much they need to maintain independently as a good thing. In an ideal world where they had all the funding and development power they could want I might say sticking with the completely independent Firefox would be great. But that just isn’t where they’re at today.

They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works. If it changes in a way that breaks things for you, don’t pull that change. At that point, if the change is drastic enough to require it, you can turn that soft fork into a hard fork and hope that Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. join you; something that would significantly hamper Google’s ability to maintain their dominance of the browser engine market. That’s a choice that they simply don’t have today when being based on Firefox and Gecko means using an inferior browser platform.

Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium. Primarily: use the Blink browser engine and V8 JS engine, with only the changes to those that they deem absolutely necessary, and maintain a privacy-forward Chromium-based browser. Maybe try and enlist the help of Brave, Vivaldi, and other browsers that are currently Chromium but which prefer more privacy than Google offers.

It’s not zero effort, and especially as Google continues to develop Chromium with assumptions like the removal of Manifest V2 it might take some effort to maintain, but it cannot possibly be as much effort as maintaining an entire browser.

Okay but they often don’t give users what they want

You should see the state of Firefox on iPad OS. I started using it earlier this year after they finally rolled out support for multiple windows—a feature Safari added in 2019 and Chrome had only a few months later.

Nice that they finally have this feature, but the browser itself is nearly unusable. It stutters constantly and freezes, locks up, or force reloads with some regularity. In a way that Chrome and Edge (and I assume Safari, though I have never really used that) never do.

Or on desktop OSes, a website I frequented around 2016–2018 used the column-span CSS property, which Firefox didn’t get around to implementing until December 2019.

It’s been very clear for some time that, whether it’s because they stretch themselves too thin or some other reason, Mozilla has been failing to continue to deliver an excellent product for their users.

A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.

Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.

Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.

I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar…?

They’ve got options.

• never build in forced server components to begin with
• patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
• give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
• open source the whole thing

And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.

CCTV produced an article asking “six shocking questions” about “US doping scandals.”

Hilarious, considering they had a known doper on their swimming team at the Olympics who was banned in 2014 and then banned again after destroying testing samples in 2018. Not sus at all…

To add to @sunbeam60@lemmy.one’s comment, the whole thing: from her becoming PM to resigning, lasted just 50 days. The shortest PM in British history by far, beating the previous record of George Canning of 119 days in 1827.

And her premiership would have been even shorter, except that the Queen died on her watch, which put a complete pause on British politics for a time.

Though I’m not British, I have an interest in your education system because I went to a school that taught, up until year 11, the British education system. Years 10 and 11 were IGCSE, which is an international variant of the GCSE.

But in years 12 and 13 I took the International Baccalaureate. Which I have a lot of praise for in general, but particularly in regards to this aspect. One of the core components of IB that everyone has to take is Theory of Knowledge. It’s essentially an introduction to epistemology, including learning about logical arguments…and logical fallacies. It’s one of the most broadly useful things you can learn, and I think it should be in every high school curriculum.

I think it’s pretty obvious how this is political. Far, far more than the other recent thread about lateness, anyway.

The amount of free time people have is a result of the economic situation we live in, where people are expected or required to work a certain amount of hours in order to be able to afford basic necessities, and some people end up needing to work even more than others because the kind of work they do is not valued enough. That’s politics.

You said exactly what I was thinking.

I came into this ready to agree with OP. In fact I wanted to add an additional point about how neurodiverse conditions can make it difficult for some people to keep track of things and arrive on time.

But the idea that other people should put their schedules on hold? Nah, sorry. You lost me there, OP.

On my desktop I’ve currently got 4 windows with 101, 103, 17, and 191 tabs. Think it’s about 60 on my phone, and currently only about 30 on my tablet.

Overshadowed? What was it overshadowed by?