I mentioned the smell merely as a way of showing that smoke fumes linger inside in a way they dont outside.

A) other than a few joints in my 20s I’ve never smoked, dont be an arse and make assumptions about people you dont know.

B) I really dont care that smokers often stink, I dont live with any. My point was that their cancer causing fumes dont linger outside for me to breathe in so I dont care that they are doing it to themselves. The opposite is true inside where they are affecting me, so I’m glad that’s banned.

Its incredibly subjective that smoke dissipates far faster outside where there is significant airflow than inside closed rooms?

Yes your clothes might smell if you’ve been smoking outside, but if you walk away from the spot there isn’t any smoke hanging around for other people to breathe in. That is the difference when it comes to health effects from second hand smoke.

Inside is very different to outside where smoke doesnt accumulate. You can instantly smell someone had a ciggarette inside even hours later, outside you cant tell (once the person has left) even a few seconds later.

Often as different benefits have different qualifying conditions. But the larger point against means testing (IMO) is that universal benefits are far less likely to be attacked and devalued over time. If something is just given to a small section of society, often a relatively powerless one, it is easy for politicians on the right to scrap that benefit or daemonize those who receive it. On the other hand universal benefits (like this one) see huge pushback when politicians try to take them away.

The better path forward is to make benefits universal, but make them taxable income and raise higher rates of income tax, that way most of the money given to higher earners naturally flows back to the treasury.

misconduct in public office

This seems to be the key bit

“The words “acting as such” plainly mean acting in the discharge of the duties of the office… Misconduct in public office bites on breaches of duties, which constituted the offence itself… the offence will only be made out if the manner in which the specific powers or duties of the office are discharged brings the misconduct within its ambit. Consequently, at the time of the alleged misconduct the individual must be acting as, not simply whilst, a public official… No authority was shown to us suggesting that the offence can be or has been equated to bringing an office into disrepute or misusing a platform outside the scope of the office.”

I imagine its fairly hard to make the case they were acting as MPs while making the bets instead of merely acting while being MPs. The gambling offences seem much more likely to stick.

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I’m not sure I’d call a Thatcherite Tory who was Portillo’s PPS definitely on the side of public good.

Why is everyone in this thread constantly putting meaningless @ mentions at the top of their replies?

I was responding to your general statement that python is slow and so there is no point in making it faster, I agree that removing the GIL wont do much to improve the execution speed for programs making heavy use of numpy or things calling outside it.

That’s a bit suss too tbh. Did the C++ version use an existing library like Eigen too or did they implement everything from scratch?

It was written entirely from scratch which is kind of my point, a well writen python program can outperform a naive c implementation and is vastly simpler to create.

If you have the expertise and are willing to put in the effort you likely can squeze that extra bit of performance out by dropping to a lower level language, but for certain workloads you can get good performance out of python if you know what you are doing so calling it extremely slow and saying you have to move to another language if you care about performance is missleading.

Numpy is written in C.

Python is written in C too, what’s your point? I’ve seen this argument a few times and I find it bizarre that “easily able to incorporate highly optimised Fortran and C numerical routines” is somehow portrayed as a point against python.

Numpy is a defacto extension to the python standard that adds first class support for single type multi-dimensional arrays and functions for working on them. It is implemented in a mixture of python and c (about 60% python according to github) , interfaces with python’s c-api and links in specialist libraries for operations. You could write the same statement for parts of the python std-lib, is that also not python?

Its hard to not understate just how much simpler development is in numpy compared to c++, in this example here the new python version was less than 50 lines and was developed in an afternoon, the c++ version was closing in on 1000 lines over 6 files.

Nope, if you’re working on large arrays of data you can get significant speed ups using well optimised BLAS functions that are vectorised (numpy) which beats out simply written c++ operating on each array element in turn. There’s also Numba which uses LLVM to jit compile a subset of python to get compiled performance, though I didnt go to that in this case.

You could link the BLAS libraries to c++ but its significantly more work than just importing numpy from python.

Python can be extremely slow, it doesn’t have to be. I recently re-wrote a stats program at work and got a ~500x speedup over the original python and a 10x speed up over the c++ rewrite of that. If you know how python works and avoid the performance foot-guns like nested loops you can often (though not always) get good performance.

No, the MPs didnt put anyone else forwards to the membership. So instead of going something like 8-5-3-2 candidates by mp vote then those two going to the members it just started at 1 with no other candidate gettign enough support, so there was no need for a membership vote.

The Tory party is generally significantly less democratic than the other major parties, as is fitting for the politcial wing of wealth.

FWIW point 5 doesnt work. The current tory leadership selection method is that the MPs keep narrowing down the selection untill they get to 2 candidates then the members choose between those two. So if the MPs dont want her the members wont get a chance to vote for her.

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In first past the post elections “a majority of X” means the winner got X more votes than the second place. Words can have multiple ways of being used.

Starmer tried to court Murdoch hard, but apparently Murdoch holds a grudge that it was Starmer as DPP who prosecuted the phone hacking crimes and got Andy Coulson convicted and has refused to have anything to do with him.

Absolutely, I just find it silly that some people say the Tories will pull out something like the Bacon sadwich at the last moment and turn things around.

I just dont see it. All the indicators are showing a siesmic labour victory and have been for a long time. Not just voting intention but “who do you want as a prime minister” “who do you trust on the economy/NHS/cost of living”, local elections, by-elections, a fractured right wing vote, poor recent economic performance, an extremely bad campaign by Sunak highlighting the worst aspects of the tories.

I just dont see how all that doesnt result in a huge Labour victory, the tories have even shifted their campaigning message to “dont let labour win too big and give them a blank cheque to do whatever they like”