The Tories (and occasionally others) are currently banging on about the dangers of a Labour “supermajority” without defining what it is.
Of course there is no such thing as a “supermajority” in the House of Commons – a vote passes (or fails) when it gets more votes in favour. Whether that vote gets a majority of one or 100 is irrelevant.
There is a danger with a huge majority though; a lesser danger than allowing the Tories to remain in government or even opposition. But a danger never the less.
A huge majority allows a government to pass laws with less risk than would otherwise be the case. Every so often we head of MP “rebellions” when MPs of the government’s party vote against that government’s wishes.
When a government wishes to pass a law that is on the extremes, they are more likely to encounter a rebellion. And a rebellion was more likely to succeed if the majority is slim.
Thus with an overwhelming majority, the government has a better chance of getting more extremist legislation through and into law.
The funny thing is that this post is not about window tiling but about conventional tiling window managers that to a great extent are “do it yourself” window managers. That is they kind of expect you to do a lot of configuration yourself.
This is not about specific tiling window managers even though I use Awesome and Hyprland.
Tiling vs Floating
In the earliest days of gooeys, windows tended to be tiled so that they didn’t overlap; if you added a new window to the screen, the existing windows would shrink to make room for the new window.
So-called (at least in tiling window managers) “floating” windows were hailed as a brilliant new feature where windows were independent and could overlap. Cool right?
And this is certainly the way that most conventional gooeys work – from Windows, MacOS, and even Linux, they all support floating windows by default. On the other hand, tiling window managers support tiling by default (most will support floating windows as well).
So why would you want to go back to the dawn of gooeys? And it is not just us weird geeks running minimalist window managers looking at tiling – many mainstream desktop environment have tiling features.
It maximises screen real-estate by automatically sizing windows so the whole desktop is covered. I can remember carefully dragging windows to resize them to maximise their size with conventional ‘floating’ window managers. Something that now happens automatically.
Customisation
So tiling can be done with conventional desktop environments – some of which allow support for tiling. KDE has Bismouth; GNOME has the Tiling Assistant, and even Windows has options. Now a tiling window manager does treat tiling as a first class feature, that’s not really why those who prefer them like them.
No, it’s the minimalism and customisation.
Most desktop environments carry with them lots of bonus features – which is fine for most. But if you don’t need those features and/or want to do things in a different way, then a full desktop environment isn’t what you want.
And tiling window managers tend to be minimalistic; even to the extent that some do not include a status bar requiring an optional status bar to be installed. The default configuration (if any) tends to be minimalistic requiring lots of tinkering to get the most out of it.
Which is a positive feature for tinkerers if a negative feature for those who just want to be up and running. But tinkering whilst it takes time, does tend to product a more productive environment – for example my Hyprland configuration includes a custom key binding to grab IP addresses and URLs from a highlighted section of the screen (and optionally “defangs” safely specified dangerous URLs which give you a hint about what I do).
Sure, it looks likely that the Tories will lose the election and quite possibly at a scale even worse than the 1906 election. Much as I like the idea, the likelihood of them being forced into third place is perhaps rather remote.
The key to the Tories’ failure is their Brexit-induced lurch to the right – both in terms of economic policy and in terms of “cultural” policy. They’re not only lurched to the right, but looking at their lack of popularity have doubled-down and gone further right.
The problem (without regard to the stupid viciousness of right-wing policies) is that not every Tory voter is happy with the far right lurch. The Tory supporters always used to be a collection of folk varying from those just right of centre all the way through to goose-stepping full on fascists. The ones closer to the centre than fitting in with the crew with the smart uniform fetish, are currently homeless.
This can best be seen amongst the young where support amongst the 18-24 aged folk is as low as 1%.
The funny thing is that the worse their defeat, the more likely they are to start fixing things. They actually need to be forced into third place. Anything less and they will likely carry on the same path they’re currently on. Which in the end may very well result in them being placed third at the next election; or worse (especially if proportional representation is brought in).
And even if the result is bad enough to spend a long time reconsidering and rebuilding, if they let the extreme right-wingers (of whatever kind) and corrupt spivs retain control, then they won’t get anywhere near power ever again.
No, they need to return to the centre. Rebuild support amongst traditional conservatives who amongst other things respect honesty and probity. Those conservatives (lower case “c”) will go somewhere – either a reconstituted Tory party or a new party.
But death? Well it is possible, but there have been previous incidents of parties being reduced to what the Tories will likely be reduced to – the Liberal party for example. Whilst the modern Liberal Democrats isn’t the same party as the old Liberals, the later did last into the modern era (well, the 1980s).
So if anything being beaten into third place next week, may actually be the best outcome for the Tory party. At least if they mend their ways.
Given the amount of noise and flames that have arisen over this debate, it seems kind of unnecessary to describe the debate, but might as well. If you were a woman, what would you rather encounter whilst lost in the woods? A man or a bear?
If you ignore all the emotions involved and think about it logically with statistics, you may well come down on the side of picking a man.
There’s a study “out there” which shows that for every 1,000 women, “only” 4.7 will be attacked (and it’s 9.5 for men) – see https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf. There is plenty of evidence that women are far more likely to be attacked by a man they know rather than a stranger – See :-
We are very poor at judging risk – we (women and older men – which I’m rapidly becoming) tend to stay in at night not because we’re likely to be attacked but because we fear being attacked. And fear doesn’t respect logic.
So women widely choosing the bear shows :-
On average women are no better at judging risk than men. Well that’s a no-brainer – people are still people.
Women fear strange men. It’s irrelevant if statistically they’re safer walking around late at night than sat in their own home, they still fear men.
To a greater or lesser extent (and perhaps unintentionally), they may be picking the bear to make the point about men doing something about violence against women.
It’s a great way of making that last point; perhaps even better for being statistically the wrong choice. We should be doing more to stop violence against women.
But I would go on to say we shouldn’t stop there; we should be doing more to stop violence against all people. And indeed any sentient creatures.
So on Friday my workstation blew up … which goes some way to explaining why this server has been down for much of the weekend (it’s a container on my workstation). The operating system boot drive magically went read-only – which as some of us know is a clear indication that an SSD is on its last legs. Or a few steps beyond.
So I re-installed on a new drive, and for various reasons I chose Ubuntu Server again. An upgrade which made things a bit more interesting.
Now whilst I know that most servers are installed in ways other than interactively, but the interactive experience is bloody awful.
For a start, if the text console is a ridiculous large size – perhaps $COLUMNS is greater than 160, then change the bloody console font. It may be a rare case that someone is installing Ubuntu server on a screen where the resolution is so high, but it can (and in my case does) make the text far too small to read.
And secondly, do something about the logical volume manager creation; I wanted to create a logical volume with a name other than “ubuntu-vg” (the old drive was still readable and creating two VGs with the same name struck me as a dumb idea). The default method didn’t seem to offer a way to rename the VG; the custom method kept giving me an installation error.
The later could possibly be my mistake – I was reduced to using a magnifying glass.
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