As it happens, it’s about 10 C (50 F) near me and raining, and I did actually think about using my leaf blower for a very specific purpose: blowing the leaves clear of the road gutters.

I saw outside my window that the autumn leaves formed a dam in the gutter, impounding an amount of water which started diverting onto the asphalt and the sidewalk. From what little I know about road construction, water intrusion is the greater enemy so I didn’t want to let the small pond sit there.

In the end, I just picked the leaves up by hand to remove the obstruction. But if I had a lot more streetfront, leaf blower would be the first tool to come to mind. But it would take no more than 10 minutes total.

TIL. Straight onto my watch list. Thanks!

I don’t have much to add about the pronunciation question, but every time that Alexandre Dumas is mentioned, I feel compelled to recommend The Count of Monte Cristo, a work which I would describe as the mid-1800s rough equivalent to a shonen manga’s plotline. The novel starts in 1810s southern France, just after the Napoleonic era, detailing the luck, misfortune, and events that befall Edmond Dantes, a young and intelligent sailor of modest means.

Admittedly, the unabridged book is quite a long read, with some print editions exceeding 1200 pages. The 117 chapters may be intimidating, but IMO it’s a worthwhile read. It’s also available in the public domain in the USA, so Project Gutenberg has an eBook of it from the 1888 English translation, retaining much of the “antique” translations, for added intrigue.

I’m only a passive yet very interested observer of aviation but am also a fairly avid cyclist. I think the equivalent analog for bikes is that it’s much easier to track a straight line when doing 50 kph than at 5 kph. Just like airspeed is needed for rudder surfaces to work, cyclists need speed to maintain horizontal balance and manoruverability.

I’m assuming your question pertains to a window failure while still on the airport grounds prior to takeoff. If instead you meant a window failure while at cruise, I would suggest this Mentour Pilot video about Southwest Flight 1380 where an engine defect threw shrapnel at one of the cabin windows, smashing it open with disastrous effects.

Supposing the window failed prior to opening the jet bridge to allow passengers to board, it probably would have been noticed by the flight crew – ie the pilots, cabin staff – while doing their preflight preparations and checks, or by the ground crew, while loading baggage or food/supplies. Once notified, the boarding process would be delayed as the pilots assess whether the flight can continue – definitely not – and then the captain would use their authority to reject the aircraft for that flight, calling in the maintenance team and the airline so they can take the next steps. Practically speaking, this flight will be either heavily delayed or outright cancelled.

If instead the window failed after closing the doors and the aircraft has started taxiing to the runway, then there are some complications. With everyone seated for taxiing, passengers are not supposed to start walking around to notify the cabin crew. But the cabin crew may already be walking the aisles to check for stowed trays, seatbelts for takeoff, baggage obstructions, etc. So if they see a smashed window, that’s an obvious sign that the cabin is not secured for takeoff. At the end of the cabin checks, the cabin crew would normally telephone the pilots to convey a secure cabin. Here, they would explain the situation and the pilots would contact ground control to return back to the terminal.

But supposing the window broke after the cabin was declared secure, and the aircraft is about to line up onto the runway. In this case, everyone including the cabin crew are sat down, so a passenger who sees the window can’t really get the cabin crew’s attention by pressing the overhead button. Barring some sort of additional malfunction that the pilots could notice – like a major engine malfunction – this aircraft might actually take off.

When taxiing, the pilots have a number of things to do, and so the “sterile cockpit” rule means that no non-operational chitchat is allowed, to allow them to focus. Mentour Pilot has other videos on what happens when the rule is violated. Likewise, the cabin crew are trained to not disturb the pilots unless something absolutely flight endangering is happening, at least for the first few thousand feet of takeoff climb.

The theory is as follows: if an aircraft is on the ground and stationary, it is safe. If the aircraft is at cruising altitude and cruising speed, it is safe. But if it’s at low altitude (<1000 ft; 330 m), then it’s very easy for the flight to go sour. Hence, once an aircraft has reached a certain point in taxiing, it will basically want to take off. And we still have the problem that the pilots don’t even know the window broke.

So the aircraft rolls down the runway and takes off. Crisis? Not really. The plane will climb quickly up to some 3000-5000 ft, at which point the plane is configured for a steady climb to cruise. This is when the pressurization system would engage, since cabins need to keep the pressure to a breathable level. Although the system may also have noticed that the cabin pressure stayed the same as the outside air pressure for the entire climb. That’s a clear sign of a cabin air leak, and the system would indicate to the pilots of a pressurization failure.

This is the first indicator for the pilots, although at this stage in the flight, the cabin crew may also phone the pilots since they start walking around earlier than 10,000 ft altitude. A pressurization failure or broken window means the pilots must halt their climb and remain below 10,000 ft, which is the upper limit for human breathing without supplemental oxygen. The pilots would radio to ATC and request a return to the airport, or another nearby airport if need be. A pan-pan or mayday could be declared, depending on the captain’s assessment of the situation, or to obtain priority over any other aircraft wanting to land.

The last scenario before the Flight 1380 scenario is if the window broke just as the aircraft was passing 10,000 ft altitude, so there was no earlier indication of a cabin leak. In this case, there will indeed be a cabin depressurization, although it won’t be as severe as at cruise altitude. Some aircraft will automatically drop the oxygen masks, and the pilots will don their own masks, now cognizant that a full-blown emergency is underway. This is handled the same way: bring the aircraft down to a breathable altitude and call ATC. The oxygen masks are good for some 20 minutes, which is well more than enough time to return to a lower altitude and make a plan.

TL;DR: the entirety of Mentour Pilot’s YouTube back catalog truly sheds light on how the aviation industry keeps people safe. I highly recommend.

I’m going to address the question in two halves: what is the point of moderation overall, and what legal consequences exist when moderation (or the lack thereof) go awry?

Mike Masnick of TechDirt has written extensively about why moderation must exist for any large-scale, publicly-available web platform, most notably in this article describing the “moderation learning curve”. That article goes through the “evolution” of a supposed “anything goes!” platform that is compelled – by economic forces, public sentiment, existing laws on CSAM, and more – to do moderation. But even the very act of drawing a line in the sand will always be objectionable to someone somewhere, so it’ll always be a thankless job. Even harder is applying a moderation policy consistently and even-handedly.

But we’re getting a bit too philosophical. Why does a platform – from the largest like Facebook to the smallest Lemmy community of four people – do moderation? A few answers:

• If stated community rules are regularly violated, those rules cease to have any authority
• If users are not comfortable in a community, they will leave
• If posters do not feel welcome to post, they will leave
• If mods don’t take action on illegal or unpermitted content, they themselves might be removed/replaced by the server owner
• If the server owner knowingly hosts illegal content or fails to adequate perform minimal screening, their ISP/CDN might drop them as a customer
• If other platforms or venues exist for removed content, then it’s not really a negative impact on the “marketplace of ideas”
• If moderation removes content that the user-base liked, then those users are free to follow the content to another platform; there are no hostages taken on Lemmy
• Radicalization can still form online just like it can form at the local library by reading Wage Labour And Capital in print

For the legal aspect, I can only write from a USA perspective; IANAL. Broadly speaking, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides that: 1) a web provider that hosts content authored/submitted by another person will not share in any civil liability incurred by that person, and 2) no web provider will have civil liability for their moderation decisions made in good faith. Together, this means only the original author of some defamatory post can be sued for that defamation, not the platform. And if the platform removes that defamatory post as part of moderation, the original author does not have a right to sue the platform. In short, this provides a lot of protection from civil lawsuits if they do moderate, or if they don’t. But if they don’t, the practical issues from earlier will still arise.

But federal law imposes additional obligations for web providers, with civil or criminal penalties if not properly dealt with, for specific types of content. Examples include content that enables sex trafficking, or is CSAM. Sex trafficking was specifically carved out from Section 230, and CSAM is a possession crime: its mere presence on a hard disk, however acquired, is unlawful.

Putting this all together, a Lemmy mod that deletes a post is performing moderation. They might do so because the post is irrelevant to the users or violates some rule. Whether the mods leave the post up or take it down, the broad civil immunity of Section 230 means the platform can’t be sued for it, nor can the post’s author sue the platform. So the post remaining in the modlog does not pose any new legal vulnerability. Rather, removing the post proves the value of having mods, so that other users don’t even have to see it. Post removal intentionally curtails any complicity with a deleted post, as few will find the modlogs to be desirable reading. Those that really want that content can find it online with enough effort anyway.

The exception to leaving content in the modlog is if it might be CSAM or otherwise illegal content. In that case, the mods can scrub it from even the modlog and anywhere on the platform. This complexity is why anyone hosting a Fediverse instance hosting other people’s content is advised to follow guides on how to do so. Here’s another one.

TL;DR: the mods have a job to do, everyone wants a healthy community, and the law has only a small – but exceedingly important – handful of obligations.

Thanks for pointing this out. I offered State Farm as an example because they’re the largest auto insurer in the USA, but with just that example, I can see why someone might get the impression that mutual == bad. I happen to be a happy State Farm customer, but I’m aware this isn’t universal.

I’ve added Amica and Liberty Mutual USA as additional examples to address this.

Health insurance at its core is very simple. … But in the USA…

I wrote this lengthy post a few months ago about why the American health insurance system is not efficient in comparison to the auto insurance system:

So to answer your question directly, the costs for healthcare in the USA continue to spiral so far out of control that it causes distortions in the health insurance market, to everyone’s detriment. Specific issues such as open-enrollment periods, employer subsidies, and incomprehensible coverage levels all stem from – and are attempts to reduce – costs.

The auto industry has examples of “mutual insurance” companies, where the company at-large is partly or wholly owned by the policyholders (eg State Farm, Amica, Liberty Mutual USA). And that mostly achieves the objectives you’ve described for a non-profit automobile insurance pool. Sadly, this just doesn’t work in the USA for health insurance, for the aforementioned bottom-line reason.

Hospitals and doctors go through intense negotiations with insurers to come to an agreement on reimbursement rates, but the reality is that neither has sufficient actuarial data to price based on what can be borne by the market. So they just pass their costs on, whatever those may be, and insurers either accept it into their calculations, or drop the provider.

When prices for service are opaque, how can any insurance company – even the most benevolent – properly price their policies? To stay in business would require always overestimating than underestimating. The extra revenue becomes either profit or float. But this float can’t even be beneficially used or paid out, in case the next quarter has more expensive claims to pay. Which brings us full circle to opaque pricing.

In this environment, the only remaining prudent thing for a benevolent health insurance company to do is to hold huge reserves. But that is not competitive against profit-seeking insurance companies that can undercut the benevolent company, who had tied one hand behind their back. Benevolent companies rarely survive.

There are a number of rights which are curtailed when in custody – whether pre-trial or as part of a sentence – but even under the appalling incarceration standards in the USA, the right to free speech is not something which is substantially limited while in custody, barring some very particular circumstances.

A defendant in jail awaiting trial has not, by definition, been convicted of any wrongdoing. So for pre-trial detention – where the purpose is to assure that the defendant won’t skip court – the only cognizable reason to curtail the defendant’s speech (either by mail, phone, or in-person) would be for jailhouse security reasons, as noted by various court rulings. The ACLU has litigated cases where prisons – ie post-conviction detention – violation the prisoners’ rights, so no doubt that pre-trial defendants in a jail would preserve more rights.

An example where free speech continued even while serving a sentence is when the Menendez Brothers gave a phone interview from a California prison, as part of a new documentary on the 1989 murders they were convicted of, now under scrutiny.

On the flip side, there are times when a defendant must have some speech curtailed prior to trial, even if they’re not in jail. Sam Bankman-Fried comes to mind, who was ordered pre-trial to not communicate with employees of his exchange (unless all lawyers are present) as the judge agreed with prosecutors that he could try to manipulate them into lying to the feds. At the time, he wasn’t in jail, but rather was at home under house arrest.

What would be outrageous in that case was if the order on Bankman-Fried was more sweeping, such as being restricted from talking about his own case, for which he has a First Amendment right to do so. Only when his speech would unduly influence potential witnesses, potential jurors, or threaten the judicial process, is when the judge could impose additional controls on his speech.

Appropriately, the First Amendment rights must be jealously guarded, even for people we might not agree with, precisely because it also protects people we do agree with.

If Mangione wishes to recite the entirety of his manifesto from memory over the phone to a live TV audience, he probably can do so. The government would have a hard time claiming that the manifesto’s mere recitation is somehow an incitement to violence or threatens the judges, jurors, lawyers, or the public.

Oh man, I forgot about that! Guess I have to go rewatch it now.

It’s a joke referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER

and use their fiduciary duty as a legal basis to compel patronage of their services

Do you mean a hacker should find a company’s tech vulnerability and then either: a) inform the company that a vulnerability exists and they should pay $XYZ to learn what it is, or b) inform the company that a vulnerability is known and it will be disclosed unless $XYZ is paid, or c) simply inform the company of the vulnerability and hope that they’ll pay the hacker to consult on how to fix it?

Scenario A is generally permissible, if such a vulnerability does exist. Things like NDAs and contracts can be agreed before the hacker describes the vulnerability, to legally protect the company in case the hacker was bluffing. That said, even without contracts, falsely claiming that a vulnerability exists or that the hacker knows what it is – when they infact don’t – would be fraud in most jurisdictions.

Scenario B is blackmail, and is illegal. [shocked Pikachu face]

Scenario C is possible, although there’s no guarantee that the company is looking for consulting. Although if the hacker’s speciality is both how to identify and patch such specific vulnerabilities, this may be more likely.

That said, taking a step back, are you sure you meant to reference the fiduciary duty that corporate directors owe to their shareholders? This is not the same as the business judgement rule, where directors must act with reasonable prudence in the company’s best interest. The latter rule exists because there may be multiple tactics to fully honor the fiduciary duty, and it would be inequitable to allow suits against directors just because they decided to achieve the objective in different ways. There is no singularly correct way to run a company.

Neither the fiduciary duty nor the business judgement rule penalize a director just because a business challenge arises, such as a data breach. Rather, the fiduciary duty is violated when a director hides info from the shareholders, or does not follow explicit instructions from the shareholders, for example. And the business judgment rule will not protect a director that is working in bad faith or takes unreasonable risks with the company’s assets.

Declining to hire a hacker as a consultant is a reasonable course of action. It would be a strange – but not impossible – instruction for the shareholders to order the management a priori to “never negotiate with terrorists” but absent such a hyper-specific command, there wouldn’t be a violation of the director’s duty of obedience.

Hackers are thus not guaranteed an income stream here. Although I would argue perhaps companies should be required to honor some equivalent to the maritime Law Of Salvage, where the hacker is guaranteed a cut for helping, however that may be defined. Limiting such a law to only data breaches would make sense, since losing other people’s data has cascading effects, whereas just losing money is borne solely by the company.

The short answer is that starting or incorporating is the easy part, and the hard part is guiding the seedling of an idea through a array of hazards, any of which can quickly sink the plan.

For clarity, I will use the term “organization” to broadly refer to a group of people and resources dedicated toward a goal, which includes what you described as profit-sharing companies and co-ops, as well as the predominant business structures like for-profit corporations (ie INC, LLC) or non-profits charities, plus groups that use those structures in non-conventional ways, like 501©(4) “social welfare organizations” that incorporate for flexibility but constrain their operations to what is within their remit (eg DSA, NRA). Although it might seem that I’m focusing on tax-exemption by referencing the American IRS tax code, this is more a short-hand to refer to organizations voluntarily constraining themselves by their own terms, in contrast to even narrower types of entities which are constrained by law. The latter might include a Limited Liability Partnership, which in California is only granted for a union of lawyers, architects, or accountants.

As for why I’ve expended a whole paragraph to describe the different ways that organizations can form themselves, it’s because the formation often has little to do with the intent of the organization, the current or future size of the endeavor, or whether they’re likely to make it off the ground. Any and every organization enters this world as a small, tender operation, and neatly falls into what the US Small Business Administration (SBA)'s Office of Advocacy would describe to as a “small business”. This includes any prospective co-op or even a one-person venture, and unfortunately the odds are heavily stacked against small businesses.

Since co-ops and profit-sharing companies would play in the same capitalist environment, I think it’s fair to equate these organizations with “small businesses” at large, for the purpose of this analysis. From that SBA document, only two-thirds (67.6%) of new businesses last longer than 2 years, and less than half (48.9%) make it past 5 years. And of the businesses led by minorities – specifically women, veterans, Black, Hispanic, and Asian descendants – their percentages were even lower.

When you think about it, a successful organization requires 1) genuinely visionary leaders, as well as 2) the staff to carry out the objective, plus 3) resources to enable the organization, plus 4) a measure of luck. Much like in a game of Settlers of Catan, it is rare to hold all the requisites at once, let alone at the very start of the game. Whereas conventional stories of capitalist success generally focus on a genius or lucky young upstart that upends the business world through shrewd business acumen – thus providing their organization with the first requisite – I think the co-op and profit-sharing models start with having the second requisite, usually forming the initial group of dedicated employees.

And I don’t disagree that there are lots of community-minded individuals that are able and willing to come together towards a common cause. But the crux of an organization is that it, er, organizes people and resources in an efficient manner for that common pursuit. I am of the opinion that true leaders with the necessary impassioned drive and ability to inspire and rouse their organization’s staff are far and few between. And that’s even before considering their core competencies in addressing organizational crises, their handling of public relations, and their personal and business roles in the socioeconomic environment.

We need only look at the conventional business world to see where corporate leaders absolutely drop the ball and pull the organization downward, be it Boeing’s various CEOs following the MD merger, to convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals, and more. But while there are a lot of really awful leaders taking their organizations down with them, there must also be run-of-the-mill leaders who do actual leadership, whether for manufacturing, charities, food banks, actual banks or credit unions, and more. The problem then for requisite #1 is a matter of incentive: for those leading successful capitalist organizations with nation-wide scope, what would attract them to help lead a smaller organization to provide daycare and pre-K at the local level? If there is a genuine shortage of qualified leaders, then capitalist incentives would mean they seek out bigger operations to use their skills, not smaller ones.

That, of course, just means that communities need to be producing more people that are qualified to be leaders (requisite #1), in addition to forming the communities that will become the staff of those organizations (requisite #2). I will not dwell on the third and fourth requisites, as it’s fairly obvious that even with good leaders and good people, if the means of production aren’t present, there’s not much to be done.

As a closing food-for-thought, much of what I’ve discussed above is very American-centric, as our notions of organization are both democratic yet republican in nature. That is, we want to enable the masses to participate (requisite #2), but we also expect leadership to be singular individuals (requisite #1). This does work, and certainly dates back the eras of kingdoms and empires – have you thought of the Roman Empire today? – but it may be worth exploring leadership that is also democratized.

Switzerland comes to mind, as their Federal Council – the closest equivalent to the US President or a company chief executive – is actually seven people, whom all serve as the collective head of state and head of government for the country. Note that this is not equivalent to a company Board of Directors, which is more analogous to the Federal Assembly of Switzerland, which is the parliament with legislative powers to set policy. Furthermore, this is not to be confused with direct democracy, which the Swiss also do, by way of referendums.

It’s possible that rather than needing to develop more skilled leaders, an alternative is to assemble a small, core group of individuals who together have enough skills to competently lead a co-operative organization. This would certainly be more tractable, although I haven’t given enough consideration as to how this would work, and whether there are any existing models to look at. It might or might not mirror the qualities needed from existing, successful co-ops and profit-sharing companies, with REI and WinCo Foods coming to mind.

This is a shorter answer than I typically would write, but any sort of exercise program should be atuned to your specific circumstances, since if it’s not practical to execute upon it, then it’s not going to sustainably achieve its objectives.

As for me personally, I wrote my program based on a friend’s five-day-per-week program, which splits the days into: arm day, back/shoulders day, chest day, leg day, and core day. I specifically do not want to be overworking certain muscle groups without adequate rest. Each day takes no more than 60-70 minutes, including warm ups.

Might I suggest posing in c/gym or c/homegym for advice on how to tune your current program; there shouldn’t be a need for a full rip-and-replace.

I’m sure there’s probably some sort of mdadm invocation to shrink an existing RAID1 mirror pair, but in the absence of that, one option is to create the mirror pair you want on your 2.5" SSDs, and then shrink-and-clone the filesystem from the NVMe mirror to the 2.5" SSDs, using something like Gparted.

In that way, you end up with the mdadm pair that you wanted, and the filesystem is correctly sized. You can even clone the UUIDs for the filesystem so fstab entries won’t have to be changed.

I don’t have a complete answer, but the mechanization of warfare should have a lot to do with it. Things like the semi-automatic pistol – they would have called it an “automatic” pistol during that era – the modern hand grenade, the airplane for reconnaissance (although lighter-than-air balloons might have been used? IDK), and other weapons wouldn’t have really appeared for the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

Or did you mean the Spanish-American War (1898)? I think the same logic still stands, especially since train networks would have been more fully developed by the turn of the century.

Ah, the Darien Scheme. How to basically go all-in on the New World colonialism thing but fail miserably.

For people unfamiliar, here’s a 3 minute video mentioning the topic in the context of 17th Century Scotland, leading to the merger with England: https://youtu.be/ld1GJ0zvsas

For other examples of countries-in-countries, we can look to Switzerland, Germany, and the USA. A casual observation of all three are that their first-level political subdivision is known as a “state” and not “province” or “territory”.

Swiss history – which I admit I’m not that clear on – shows that the modern sovereign state formed as a loose confederation of smaller kingdoms unifying together. Indeed, the foundational document of the modern Swiss Confederation in 1848 directly drew inspiration from the USA Constitution of 1789. However, they made some modifications, such as having a 7-person Federal Council, which together fulfill the role akin to the American President. That is, the role of Head of State and also Head of Government (aka a Prime Minister). This style of executive governance hews more closely to the rich Swiss traditional of direct democracy, rather than that of a purely representative republic.

Germany, specifically the successor state of West Germany post-WW2, and then the unified state of Germany post reunification, is a federal republic. A republic to restore the functions of the earlier Weimar Republic, and a federation of states because of USA influence in drafting the Basic Law – Germany’s Constitution – following WW2. But unlike the USA federal system, the German system would mimic the parliamentary system of Westminster, being that of the United Kingdom. So while governmental power is distributed amongst the several states and the federation, the governance would be through indirect election of the Prime Minister. The idea is that by dividing power this way, no mustached fellow with fascist ideas could take control of the organs of power again.

Finally, examining the oldest continually-operating example, the USA currently is composed of a strong federal entity and 50 US States that wield all remaining power not reserved to the federal government. But initially, this is not what the American Founding Fathers had in mind at all. The late 1700s envisioned the original 13 colonies of the early United States of America to be independent countries that confederated for common causes, like defense and foreign policy. The precursor to the US Constitution – the Articles of Confederation (1777) – tried this, but problems quickly arose because each State had their own currency, debt levels, legal systems, and often undermined each other to advance their own position, such as favoring in-state citizens in lawsuits filed by out-of-state citizens. This made trade difficult and the federal government had little power to do anything about this.

Even with the revised US Constitution document, the whole weak federal government thing continued until the 1860s during the American Civil War, with the aftermath being a federal government that fully asserted its powers under the US Constitution. Any notion of US States being country-like would have fully evaporated by then, especially during Reconstruction when the Guarantee Clause was used to install military governance in the defeated southern states until reintegration into the Union. Such a thing would be impossible for a modern country/sovereign state.

Fun fact: the Guarantee Clause is why a US State cannot convert itself into a hereditary monarchy. The Constitution does not allow for a Monarchy of South Carolina, and we’re probably all better off for it anyway. Although if the role was an elected position – like with the Co-Prince of Andorra – then that might be permissible.

To that end, the modern US State is still a sovereign entity, in that certain things are wholly within their domain and not of the federal government’s. But US States are still beholden to the US Constitution, use the same money as the Union, and must honor interstate commerce and contracts from in- and out-of-state, as well as judicial rulings from the federal court system. But this dual sovereignty system post 1860s continues to evolve, with some states encroaching on federal authority, such as with border control.

Aspects of these three example countries find their way into most of the modern governments of Western countries, so hopefully this was a useful explainer.

I’ll take a cursory stab, but other references exist for the minutiae of how these things came to be.

Britain == United Kingdom

Great Britain == an island wholly within the UK

United Kingdom: a sovereign state (eg USA, Germany) composed of the constituent countries of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, plus a few overseas territories.

Briton: a British citizen, or someone tracing their ancestry to the UK constituent countries

The short answer for why a country (UK) can have countries (eg Scotland) in it is because the notion of sovereign states (the modern definition of countries) only came into existence in the 18th century or so.

Canada, formerly the Dominion of Canada, formed from the British North American holdings plus the French parts that the British bought (ie Quebec). Granted self governance in the 1860s, independence in the 1930s, and finally full “patriation” in the 1980s to remove all vestiges of the UK from Canadian laws. However, the independent Monarchy of Canada remains, and just happens to coincidentally follow the exact same selection rules as the British Monarch. So the King of Canada will be the same person as the King of the United Kingdom, even though the Government of Canada is no longer controlled by the Government of the United Kingdom. In both sovereign states, the King is a figurehead from where authority and governmental legitimacy emanates, and the current King of Canada continues the tradition since Queen Elizabeth II that the Monarch’s appointed Governor-General of Canada shall represent the Monarch in all Canadian matters, meaning the Monarch will not directly involve themselves. In fact, it’s frowned upon for politicians to involve the Monarch directly, except to kindly ask for a new Governor-General (see 1975 Australia).

Why still keep the Monarchy of Canada? The voters haven’t chosen otherwise, to pursue a republic or any other form of government. The same applies in Australia, although it’s slightly more complicated as each Australian State derives their state-level authority from the Australian Monarch, whereas Canadian provinces exist as a part of the singular Canadian confederation; each Australian State would have to sever their connection to the Monarch, or could do so piece-meal. Nevertheless, with the Monarch delegating power within each of his “realms” to the respective Governor-General, becoming a republic is a matter of passing bills in the parliamentary system. Barbados did exactly this in 2022, replacing Queen Elizabeth II with a republic. Countries formerly part of the British Empire (circa 1930) usually join The Commonwealth of Nations, which just means they’d like to keep trading with each other but without the whole colonialism thing.

The end of the British Empire was basically slow-going, since once some parts (eg Canada) received a measure of devolved powers (like having their own parliament), the door was swung open for other parts to demand the same. Post WW2, with the status of the UK greatly diminished in deference to the USA and USSR, overseas colonies became expensive and untenable. Plus, one of the basic tenets of the United Nations – put in place to avoid yet another world war – was the right to self determination. So the colonies had to go free.

Ironically, the Scottish Parliament was not restored until 1998, having legally stopped existing with the Acts of Union 1707 that merged England and Scotland into the United Kingdom, with a single parliament but otherwise separate institutions and laws. To this day, the English Parliament has not been restored, and thus England affairs are directed by the UK Parliament at large.

The British Isles includes both the Island of Great Britain (where Wales, Scotland, and England are) plus the Island of Ireland (where the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland are), and a few smaller islands. So yes, every part of Great Britain is a part of the UK sovereign state, but the UK also includes the Isle of Mann and the upper part of the Island of Ireland, and some others.

In all circumstances, “Ireland” means the Republic of Ireland; that republic is almost never called “southern Ireland”. The whole history of British colonialism in Ireland is long, sordid, and full of misery, culminating with The Troubles of the 1960s and still causing concern post-Brexit due to the EU border basically dividing the Island of Ireland.

TL;DR: everything about British history is messy. Even their former colonies have messy history, despite some being at most a few hundred years old.

I’m glad you enjoyed reading it. This was basically an invitation to brain-dump my thoughts from this past week, in light of Bluesky’s recent record user-counts, and also because I just finished reading the recently-published book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, a multi-faceted chronicle of how and why it happened and who knew what and when. Check your local library if they already have it.

I also follow Mike Masnick on Mastodon via Bluesky bridging, and listen to his podcast on the topic of Trust & Safety. He’s also the one who coined the term Streisand Effect, which I think makes him fairly well qualified to write banger articles like Speedrunning The Moderation Curve, which are examples of unintended consequences running amok.