Carspotting in France: Peugeot 304

Carspotting in France - Lotus 7

Carspotting in France: A mint Renault 15

   
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Carspotting_in_France_A_mint_R.zip (7790 KB)

Photographic Evidence That Your Childhood May Have Been Seriously Lacking - Star Wars - io9

"This ad from 1984 is wonderful for the following reasons:

1.) The surreal collage of all the Star Wars vehicles against the white picket fence.
2.) The happy dog, silently saluting Sith hegemony with his tongue.
3.) The kid on the speeder bike swing, holding on for dear life in the absence of adult supervision.
4.) Evidence of a gender-neutral Stormtrooper regiment."

A democratic voting system, it's not that difficult!

How are the recent election results democratic? Answer: They're not. 

If we look at the recent results we can see why both the Conservatives and especially Labour don't want to change the current system (despite David Cameron bleating on about wanting to change everything)

Conservatives 36% of the vote, 49% of the seats
Labour 29% of the vote, 41% of the seats
Lib Dems 23% of the vote, 9% of the seats
Others 12% of the vote, 1% of the seats

The Problem

House of Commons voting consists of one person (seat), one vote.  This means that influence is based on geographic distribution of votes rather than the number of votes.

The main objections to changing the electoral system are usually threefold, but all a load of rubbish:

1) You can't "sack your goverment" (tm) David Cameron
This is blatantly untrue.  I live in a Labour stronghold so it makes no difference what I do because they'll still win.  The current system gives me NO ability to sack the government

2) You need strong stable government, and only first past the post gives this. 
Again blatantly wrong.  We managed with a coalition government World War II and Germany and Scandinavian countries routinely manage with coalition governments without complete meltdown.  It could be argued that a consensus government has allowed Germany to have the strongest economy in Europe while ours lays in tatters.

3) A coalition was a disaster in the 70s
This is factually true, but often overlooked is the majority governments in the 70s were also disasters.  In fact the 70s were pretty much a disaster all round.

My solution

1) Keep the current regional constituencies and candidates
2) Instead of 626 votes, each House of Commons vote should have 10000 "voting points"
3) Assign the "voting points" to each MP, in proportion to the number of votes they receive (nationally not regionally)

Under this system in the 2010 election, the Conservatives would get 3500 voting points between their 307 MPs, Labour 2900 voting points for their 258 MPs, Lib Dems 2300 voting points between their 57 MPs, Scottish Nationals 170 voting points for their 6 MPs etc.

While I don't believe this is democratic (it still penalises the smaller parties and independent candidates), no change would need to be made to election procedures.

Most importantly their influence in the Commons would reflect the amount of votes they received across the country.  Fair and Democratic; problem solved!

Now there's a far bigger problem... how to convince the "big two" to change it...


Here ends a party policital blog by the Bleedin' Obvious Policies party.  Thank you for reading.

Roger Ebert: Why I Hate 3-D Movies

This is a great article discussing the use of the new 3D technology in cinemas.

Everyone I talk to has pretty much the same reaction to 3D: Avatar was great!!!!! Everything is a bit.... meh.

The best example is probably Clash of the Titans. Converted (badly) to 3D during post production, nearly everyone who saw it thought it was an ok popcorn flick, made less ok by the 3D effects.

Of the films I've seen at the cinema since Avatar, all have been in 2D and all have been great (MicMacs, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Shutter Island). Who needs 3D eh?

Read the full article here:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/237110/page/1