pauldrye
@pauldrye@lemm.ee
- Comment on Who's fastest, Sonic or The Flash? 5 weeks ago:
Whoever the writer thinks should be faster, so as to serve the needs of the story being told.
- Comment on When people in constitutional monarchies pledge loyalty to the monarch, is it actually for real, or just symbolic / a pro-forma thing? 1 month ago:
No, they do – it’s just not a codified constitution like almost all other countries have.
Proponents of the idea believe that a constitution that has evolved bit by bit across a bunch of different charters and through unwritten agreements and customs is stronger that one that’s done all in one shot. You’ll see the unflattering metaphor that “a tree is stronger than a weed”, which seems a bit unfair but it’s reasonable point – if not one that’s beyond argument or anything.
Commonwealth countries are politically conservative, small “c” and not big “C”, as the general attitude is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, even if it’s objectively kind of stupid”. There was a good reason for every one of the decisions that led to today, don’t &^%$ with it, just in case.
- Comment on When people in constitutional monarchies pledge loyalty to the monarch, is it actually for real, or just symbolic / a pro-forma thing? 1 month ago:
The key word in “constitutional monarchy” is “constitutional”, not “monarchy”. The monarch must follow the parliament’s requests, and not doing so is unconstitutional. Parliament is sovereign, at least in all of the countries that derive their monarchy from the UK’s.
Outside of the UK there wouldn’t be a fight anyway: in all the Commonwealth countries (except the ones that have since gone fully republican), the monarch has a representative called “the governor general” who is selected by the Parliament and recommended to the monarch at which point see above. The monarch has to take the advice of who is to be their governor-general. Issues basically never get to the monarch for them to mess anything up. The loyal-to-his-country deputy gets first crack at everything the monarch does in theory and has no reason to go against Parliament. If somehow the g-g or the king did speak out, it’d be a legal mess but practically everyone would ignore them. Practically we’d either get ourselves a new monarch or just say to hell with it and become a republic.
To answer your specific question then, yes, it’s pro forma. The monarch’s role is to be the embodiment of all legislative, judicial, and executive power, in a fairly close analog to what the American Constitution is. But the Constitution can’t exercise any of those powers and the monarch can’t either. It’s just a historical oddity that they can walk and talk, unlike a piece of paper.
- Comment on What was your favorite shareware game? 1 month ago:
Commander Keen is probably the one that I liked the most that is also well known.
My personal favorite was Bass Class, which is weird because I’ve zero interest in real-life fishing, then or now.
- Comment on When this post is 3 hours old, lemm.ee will go offline for some brief database maintenance 1 month ago:
Yes, eventually?
- Comment on What's the tallest pyramid we'd be able to build? Can we reach space? 2 months ago:
Yes, but it doesn’t matter enough. The Square-cube law means that the mass being supported goes up faster than the area of the layer doing the supporting does. So each additional brick on the bottom still ends up carrying more weight as the pyramid gets taller.
- Comment on What's the tallest pyramid we'd be able to build? Can we reach space? 2 months ago:
Depends on the compressive strength of the material. Sooner or later the weight of the pyramid above the base exceeds the base’s ability to support it. Considering that a mountain is basically a stone pyramid, Everest has to be in the neighbourhood of how tall you could go – call it 10-12 kilometers high. Other materials would do better.
- Comment on The English word "four" has 4 letters. Are there any other numbers where the English name for them has that many letters? 2 months ago:
It’s the only one in English unless you allow things like “The absolute value of -20”.