No, it’s not.

Labour canvasser asked why I wasn’t voting that way at the last GE. I said, “I’m a socialist - honestly, would you*?” and he seemed within a heartbeat of agreeing. The local crowd seemed pretty depressed about chasing the Overton window back then [although obviously they will make sympathetic noises towards anyone they’re talking to, that’s part of the job].

[* This isn’t risking a Reform storm - FPTP and I’m in a solidly Labour ward, but they still bothered to knock on doors, which was eye-opening in itself]

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He rode to power on the back of not being from the party behind the least popular government in fucking ages (after 14 years of disaster). He made lots of promises to appeal to the essentially left-wing party that he’s the leader of. In any case, he wound up with a landslide parliamentary majority off the back of around a third of the actual vote.

Since then he’s put Wes Streeting in charge of the NHS and McSweeney in charge of strategy, and has chased the racist vote that’s stoked up by Nige “Brexit” Farage.

So he’s triangulating right to chase the votes of people who can’t stand him and will never vote for him, and in the space of a month has lost 34 approval points from actual Labour voters to wind up with a net -5 approval or something like that.

What’s odd is that I know people who’ve met him and worked with him personally, and they are all largely of the belief that he’s a man of deep principle. Which just goes to show his talent, because he’s hiding it incredibly well at the moment.

Okay.

Definitely a poor opinion then.

My concern isn’t for my own vote. It’s for everyone; there’s a pervading notion that voting is either irrelevant, useless, or a balancing act to find the least-worst option.

I don’t recognise the “listless wandering” you describe. It’s poetic but doesn’t reflect what’s actually going on here: people aren’t looking for entertainment; they are worried how they’re going to pay the bills. It would frankly be a relative utopia to have the privilege to not care about politics and what it’s doing to people.

I’d say “democratic” rather than “consumerist”; that’s a really odd choice of term (and a poor one I think). I live in a ward that’s solidly single-party in an FPTP system. Whether I vote or not is strictly irrelevant and always will be. There is no incentive for my representative to be anything other than a party cypher.

I’d rather see a PR system in place (STV by preference, but we’d probably end up with AMS so that party sinecures are still possible). For single-seat wards, I’d sooner have ranked-choice, because at the moment people have to thread a needle in order to attempt to stave off the headbanger candidates.

Mandatory voting I’d be less keen on unless it came with a “reopen nominations” but the issue with that is that that option would win by a landslide.

A solution to “people feel disempowered” isn’t “force them to express an opinion”. If turnout is low then give the lie to “my vote doesn’t matter”.

Choice-ranking systems aren’t hard to explain: “put these people in the order you prefer them”.

The anti-AV campaign had Cameron reading out an algorithm for the vote counting process in a dull voice and trying to establish: “yes well I went to Eton and although I am very clever I find this difficult”. The AV referendum failed in large part because it was a LibDem thing and people wanted to give Clegg a shoeing for going back on his election pledges. (That Clegg got outplayed by Cameron tells you everything you need to know about what a useless chancer he is.)

Just wish the Labour party in the UK would learn from this rather than triangulating with Farage’s fucking racist bullshit.

The use of the metric fucksystem is just icing on the cake.

As someone watching from the other side of the world - is this another election victory that can be chalked up to Trump?

I dunno. The temporary flyover near Temple Meads came down after 40 years and that’s looking a lot nicer.

Like most towns that go on forever, there are some nice corners: PRSC for instance.

You sound angry. Take a breath and grow up.

How is that checker configured?

It might be doing something like this:

import student_module
student_module.main()

and because you’re already invoking main as the module is imported, it’s getting stuck the second time around. Maybe add some indicative print at the entrypoint to your main function.

Another reply in here has supplied the standard idiom for making a module executable:

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

Joshu wants nothing on his pizza.

The answer to all your “okay I was wrong, but…” questions is “no”.

According to Baroness Falkner on R4 this morning, they can use their considerable lobbying power to advocate for “third spaces.” She actually said that about trans people, not intersex, but I presume her response would have been the same.

But in the meantime, going anywhere (or doing any sport) is probably off the cards. But thank goodness we have “clarity”, right?

Did it? I thought that was Britain, in 1941.

(Edited to say: May 1940 - that was earlier than I’d thought.)

That’s a lot of toilets.