This region is by far the most heavily subsidised in the UK in reality, which is confirmed by the number of expensive infrastructure projects there such as this one.
London is effectively kept going by these infrastructure projects and so many UK government agencies and businesses being headquartered there. Even the monarchy plays a role, as a massive gravy train mostly based there. All that money keeps other businesses in London going. Every time someone pays UK taxes in any form they are supporting jobs and physical facilities based there. The BBC is another one. People throughout the UK are forced to pay a licence fee that is mostly used to produce content in and about London.
This is part of a repeating pattern. London took massive amounts of resources such as coal, metals and manufactured goods from other parts of the UK which are now in poverty. The North Sea Oil boom of the 1980s, was used to prop up the London stock market, and only a fraction of that money stayed within Scotland which was suffering industrial decline at the time. (Aberdeen has surprisingly little to show for the oil boom and is now a city in heavy decline.)
Vast majority of the civil service is outside of London these days, I suspect disproportionally so.
BBC similarly, spends the vast majority of it's money outside London. If you were from anywhere near Manchester, Glasgow or Liverpool you'd know that perfectly well.
I'm afraid governments have actually done genuine work to try and reduce dependence on London to not very much avail. Network effects rule again, why is twitter (X) bigger and more popular than blusky or whatever?
The new rules cover any kind of illegal content that can appear online, but the Act includes a list of specific offences that you should consider. These are:
terrorism
child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) offences, including
grooming
image-based child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
CSAM URLs
hate
harassment, stalking, threats and abuse
controlling or coercive behaviour
intimate image abuse
extreme pornography
sexual exploitation of adults
human trafficking
unlawful immigration
fraud and financial offences
proceeds of crime
drugs and psychoactive substances
firearms, knives and other weapons
encouraging or assisting suicide
foreign interference
animal cruelty
> Something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on: disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.
This probably worries platforms that need to moderate content. Sure, perhaps 80% of the cases are clear cut, but it’s the 20% that get missed and turn into criminal liability that would be the most concerning. Not to mention a post from one year ago can become criminal if someone suddenly decides it was motivated by one of these factors.
Further, prejudices in terms of language do change often. As bad actors get censored based on certain language, they will evolve to use other words/phrases to mean the same thing. The government is far more likely to be aware of these (and be able to prosecute them) than some random forum owner.
It's important to understand that the act we're talking about does not make owners simply liable for stuff that happens on their sites, nor does it require them to stop everything. It's about what the risks are of these things happening, and what you do about that.
In fact, if you have had a place that people can report abuse and it's just not really happening much then you can say you're low risk for that. That's in some of the examples.
> Not to mention a post from one year ago can become criminal if someone suddenly decides it was motivated by one of these factors.
Just want to add that I couldn't find any references to gender identity in the linked Wikipedia article as well as the article on hate incidents in the UK.
which is an umbrella term for everything that the government does not like right now, and does not mind jailing you for. In other words, it's their way to kill the freedom of expression.
From that list I don't see HN being affected, although I read somewhere that a report button on user generated content was required to comply for smaller sites.
I think it's hard to make the case for anything other than a pretty tiny group or organisation that that you can get away without having some reporting and moderation process.
I don't think you need a report button but a known way of reporting things by your users is likely going to be required if you have a load of user generated stuff that's not moderated by default.
I might be falling for what I've read second-hand but isn't one of the issues that it doesn't matter where the forum is based, if you've got significant UK users it can apply to your forum hosted wherever. You've got to block UK users.
A forum that merely has good moderation is not automatically compliant with the act. It requires not just doing things, but paperwork that shows that you are doing things. The effort to do this well enough to be sure you will be in compliance is far beyond what is reasonable to ask of hobbyists.
Dark matter is just made up bs if you replace "magic" for dark whenever its mentioned its the same difference - theres no tangable evidence it exists at all.
It represents a discrepancy between our models and observations of the universe, which imply there is a lot of unaccounted-for non-interactive mass out there.
Dark matter generally is less a theory and more a question: Where is all this mass? Does it really exist? What can explain it? What is missing from or wrong with our understanding of physics that explains our observations?
If you want to complain about a specific theory of dark matter like lambda-CDM or challenge our understanding of gravity or whatever, it'd be more correct to name the actual theory.
One can use multiple different instruments to corroborate our own senses that matter does indeed exist, whereas the explicitly inferred properties of dark matter / energy make it impossible to detect. That honestly seems more religious than anything.
Yes... we can claim that the gravitational effects are what let us 'observe' it, but this is like the former view of geocentrism and then using various orbital corrections to make things work. That is to say, one can choose almost any axiom and then fit predictive models to work around it, but it doesn't mean that the axiom itself is more accurate, and indeed we should always be looking to vet our axioms anyway.
In a world run by sociopaths - whistleblowing is a trap to catch the people who could if instead of reporting the issues, they organised together and then could stop you...
I've yet to see any whistleblowing case not end badly.
Some (many?) of those folks did suffer discrimination and even outright persecution from their employers, and horrible financial strain before the eventual payout, but their cases eventually ended up quite well for them.
one case that consoles me is that harry markopolous, the quant who blew the whistle on madoff and his feeder funds-of-funds, despite rigorously not being listened to and almost being railroaded by an SEC coverup, at least got some sort of payout for his pain and suffering that went on for years. I cannot recommend his book enough.
By her own admission she is supporting herself financially from “having bought crypto at the right time.” I’m guessing the vast majority of whistleblowers have that kind of financial cushion to risk it all like this.
Source:
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/25/facebook-whistl...
The reviewing isn't problem it's mostly because you have to become that asshole that everyone hates - developers who produce bad code also are the worst at taking feedback...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...