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Who owns Parliament?

whoownsengland.org

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Re: Who owns Parliament?

#171

Post by shirro »

plonk wrote: post #22
Angostura wrote: post #15

We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers

Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?

As an Australian we solved this by having root's resources swapped out and hosted on storage paid for and hosted in the UK.

We have another privileged account called gg which inherits all of root's privileges. Given that the root account may be transferred in the not too distant future there is increasing interest in making gg the new root. As to why we need such a privileged account in the first place to host garden parties and cut ribbons, gg provides a supervisor process that can kill deadlocked governments and respawn them.

It seems a bit silly but at least our government isn't based on VMS.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#172

Post by seoaeu »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #143

I'm constantly surprised that grown adults can believe modern "democracies" are actual democracies. How many election cycles do you need to go through before you realise a change of government is largely ceremonial, with only a few slight tweaks of policy? Much of the true power in a western democracy is not elected. Civil service, the judicial system, the media, big business. Being a prime minister can largely be se…

> Is this an emperors new clothes thing? A cultural taboo to point it out?

If you believe in some broadly unpopular view, there's always the possibility that you're just wrong. In the US we saw substantial shifts in policies over the last three presidential administrations, shifts that had real-life impacts on countless people. And while I can't speak directly to the health of the UK's democracy, I suspect that you may be exaggerating the degree that the different parties agree with each-other.

> Am I the annoying guy pointing out that wrestling is fake when people are trying to enjoy the show?

Probably closer to the annoying guy who suggests giving up when your team is faced with a hard problem.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#173

Post by refurb »

seoaeu wrote: post #170
refurb wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true in many places beyond the UK. The US has similar laws where if you meet the requirements of ownership and nobody contests it for X years, you can claim it.

Adverse possession dates back to all the way to the Code of Hammurabi . Arguably, it is a necessary part of property ownership itself because otherwise you could never know whether you (or the person you bought it from) owned a specific piece of land at all. Someone could always come by with an old deed and say that it belonged to them.

Land title systems are really interesting.

You are correct that under the deed system, proof is held by the owner through a link of subsequent deeds. Some countries still use this system. When I bought a house you could see ownership going all the way back to the establishment by the British Crown, then the provincial government, then the township, then the city, then the developer and then 5 different owners. All of that is captured and maintained as records (either by the owner exclusively or a land registry).

Other's have moved to a central registry. Basically the registry owned by the government is the sole "source of truth" about land ownership. If ownership is not registered, then it's not recognized. If there are any errors (say a fraudulent purchase that actually get included in the system), it's covered through title insurance.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#174

Post by function_seven »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #143

I'm constantly surprised that grown adults can believe modern "democracies" are actual democracies. How many election cycles do you need to go through before you realise a change of government is largely ceremonial, with only a few slight tweaks of policy? Much of the true power in a western democracy is not elected. Civil service, the judicial system, the media, big business. Being a prime minister can largely be se…

I promise I'm not going to argue about abortion, but it's the most obvious example I can see here.

If the "ceremonial" change in government that happened in the US in 2016 had gone the other way, we would 100% guaranteed not see the Roe v. Wade ruling being overturned. It will be a judicial action that reverses this policy, but it required the election of Trump to happen. This is not a slight tweak. The count of the votes in that election resulted in real policy differences. Nothing ceremonial about it.

This isn't kayfabe. Ask a UK fisherman how real the impact of the 2016 Brexit vote was. My the thinnest of margins, a non-binding referendum gave an elected government what they needed to make dramatic changes in policy. No tweaking here.

Of course I won't pretend that all power rests in the hands of "The People." Yes, civil servants, judges, and media barons all have vast amounts of power to agitate for war, ban e-cigarettes, or legislate from the bench.

But the people do have one lever, and I'm glad our culture considers poo-poohing it a taboo.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#175

Post by shirro »

SulphurSmell wrote: post #39
Angostura wrote: post #15

We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers

Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?

The AU/CA/NZ servers were based on the UK server image and the GECOS field of root still says "Queen Victoria, heirs or successors" but is otherwise disabled. The servers are all run by separate orgs in independent data centres and have diverged substantially from the original image. Possibly root may still have physical access to the UK server but the threat is considered minimal.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#176

Post by stormbrew »

dsr_ wrote: post #86
stormbrew wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically we have a different monarch that is occupied by the same person (she is “the queen of the uk and the queen of Canada”, not really “queen of the uk and Canada”) and has the same rules of succession (implemented in a Canadian bill that must be updated in sync with the British equivalent when it changes). So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.

I suggest that in the next bill, rather than updating the Crown to rest in Charles's CNAME, you acknowledge that the Crown is perpetually Elizabeth II. That way you never have to change Birthday celebrations, or anything else related.

We don't really update it for each new monarch, it's just a set of rules. They were last changed fairly recently, to remove male primogeniture in case Prince William had a daughter as his first child (though he didn't). Every single Commonwealth country had to pass its own individual bill amending the Act of Succession, and it finished in 2015[1]. It's pretty unlikely they'll change again any time soon, the only thing that's still up for much debate is the requirement that the person sitting on the throne isn't Catholic.

It'd be a hell of a scandal if these laws got out of sync, and yet it would be one of the stupidest scandals in history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#177

Post by labster »

dTal wrote: post #160
Lio wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been there, done that already. The British have tried that before. We called it the Interregnum[1]. It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser so the fix was a restoration plus tweaks to limit powers. You’ll note this all happening well before others decided to repeat the experiment. The system has been ticking along at some definition of “fine”[2] ever since. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_I…

The monarchy would love for you to believe they're only a ceremonial head of state. It makes their sinister and self-serving wielding of power much easier. In fact the Queen routinely gets laws changed in her favor, and the details of the process by which this happens are not widely known. The monarchy is a vast and private rent-seeking apparatus that exists to perpetuate the interests of its family members and their…

As an American, we don’t have anything like you corrupt aristocracy and class system. But we do have a corrupt billionaire class and systemic racism, so actually it’s the same thing after all. Instead of Eton, Harvard and Yale are the schools of the upper crust; it’s virtually impossible to be on the Supreme Court unless you attended one of those universities.

And instead of a queen, we have Kardashians and Elon (blessings and peace be upon him), who also seem to attract worship for things other people do. It’s almost like human nature tends to reproduce the same problems no matter the system of government.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#178

Post by shirro »

Teever wrote: post #26
plonk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?

Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.

Rebooting is old school. People are like, look we rebooted our Windows in 1777 why are you still using that outdated Constitutional Monarchy stuff? Don't you realise we gave up monarchs hundreds of years ago? Meanwhile we have been live patching and running pacman daily and have installed packages for metric, proportional voting(not everywhere), gun control, universal healthcare and plastic bank notes.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#179

Post by closewith »

annyeonghada wrote: post #60
kcartlidge wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't care about that. I also don't care about how dutiful the Queen is and what she's sacrificed to the role - though to be clear I do believe both those things at a personal level. It doesn't matter what incidental good it accomplishes if it goes against the fundamental principles of equality.

Equality is not "a fundamental principle", this is a modern conception of how society should be run while fundamental principles are absolute and eternal. Even going back to only 100 years ago the idea that "we are all equal" would have sounded ridiculous. As an example, we could take the accounts about the role of schools in various educational systems in Europe: it was widespread belief that the function of such in…

> The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

From the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 106 years ago.

> Even going back to only 100 years ago the idea that "we are all equal" would have sounded ridiculous.

Re: Who owns Parliament?

#180

Post by lambertsimnel »

exdsq wrote: post #145
simonh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US constitution is a handful of pages, and only a few lines actually specify how the government should function on a day to day basis. If they forgot everything but the constitution and worked out everything else again from scratch, the result would likely be completely unrecognisable. Furthermore there's an argument to be made that the UK system of government is considerably more modern that that of the US. Afte…

That’s true of the US but ignores the fact only 3 countries in the world don’t have written constitutions - the UK, New Zealand, and Israel. I’m not being sarcastic when I say a lot of this is managed in the form of strange old traditions that, if stopped, would render the country fairly useless till they’re all codified somewhere.

Don't Canada and Sweden also lack written constitutions?
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