The same thing applies in the US doesn't it? There has essentially only been two political parties (three if you squint hard enough) for nearly the entire existence of the country?
The US constitution is very similar, except in two important regards: amendments require two thirds majority votes in both houses and ratification by 75% of the states.
We don't have the state mechanism. You could argue the four nations could serve a similar purpose, though there's a debate about how democratic that is when England makes up something like 85% of the UK population (and doesn't have its own legislature).
To "fall foul", i.e. be required to add highly effective age assurance, there's a number of tests you have to pass
One of the tests is:
> Are there a significant number of children using the service or is the service likely to attract a significant number of children.
I'd guess that HN would be in scope for the act overall - they provide user-to-user functionality and have a lot of users in the UK. Either they answer no to the questions above, or they answer yes and should have performed a risk assessment where they look at things like what kind of content is allowed, how the site is moderated, how do users contact each other etc etc.
> Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center.
This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than the passengers disembark.
That's what turning around a train means. The point is that a train at a terminal station is "occupying" a disproportionately long section of track, and as a result you need a multi-tracking and a ridiculous number of platforms to allow storage of trains to handle enough trains... while a through-running station can achieve the same capacity with just two tracks and 2-4 platforms.
Huh, I never thought of that as the reason for the small number of long-distance platforms in, for example, Berlin Hauptbahnhof (all through-running) compared to some other big-city stations that are terminal.
There are several solutions to turning around at a terminal. Sometimes there's a turnaround loop. Grand Central has two, one on each level. Older systems would detach the engine, rotate it on a turntable, and reattach it at the other end of the train. Double-ended trains are far more common today, since control from either end was solved long ago.
Is there a reason you couldn't build new light rail trains to a higher level of crashworthiness than they are currently? I don't know the full details, but that's how tram-trains in Sheffield, UK were allowed access to the main railway network.
Unfortunately no. The main difference is mass - US trains are vastly heavier than anything in the UK so by the time you make a tram crashworthy it isn't a tram any longer.
That said, I believe the FRA did allow lighter designs such as the Siemens FLIRT for commuter lines so the rules are definitely less onerous.
After a couple train crashes the FRA mandated PTC signalling everywhere, and in a world in which trains come to an automatic stop unless explicitly authorized to operate in the next segment, the old buff strength rules are not as important.
Also, the old buff strength rules were not great at keeping people alive. 25 people died in the Chatsworth train collision that led to the PTC mandate, which compares poorly to a similar crash between two trains in Germany which killed 12. There is a reason why buff strength has not been the criteria for automobiles for decades.
This is a ludicrous take. I was on vacation last week and read three books, albeit not weighty novels. I can't remember when I read as few as 10 novels per year. I'm not a CEO, but reading is also far from my only hobby.
To be clear first: The parent is being a little unreasonable.
However.
There's no need to resort to insults, nor to use a single person as an example, which doesn't make sense, regardless of whether it's their "only hobby".
Average novel reading speed is an impossible metric. E.g. WPM measurements are irrelevant to long-form reading, are irrelevant to literary reading, and don't account for processing, tangential thought, or re-reading, which are of course highly variable. And "reading time" (the subset of free time conducive to literary reading) is also basically impossible to quantify broadly. It's also difficult to categorize people by how much they are trying to read. Some people are only a little interested, some not at all. Further, this is one of those fields where the super-humans aren't actually that rare, so you get a situation where the average person reads 8 books per year despite half of all people reading half a book per year (made up numbers).
Point of all that being, "novels a year" is one of the most culturally acceptable brags, because there is no "expected" value for people broadly. It's a hidden value, so we can say things like "yeah, I read 12 books a year, not a lot I know", and people generally won't roll their eyes at risk of appearing stupid.
Look at how many people on otherwise-rational HN are saying "I used to read 30 novels a year," "I used to read a novel a week," as if that means it must be easy to accomplish in Western work and life culture. We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.
I think it's an easy thing to do, and we shouldn't. It's not classy.
> We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.
I'm not sure we're doing that. That's certainly not my intention. I know and respect many people who read zero books per year.
I think what we're doing is showing surprise that reading ten books per year is seen as a flex or is worth lying about very publicly, and demonstrating (albeit unscientifically) that it's not that unusual.
You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.
Strong is relative. The regional differences in my generation (40) and younger mostly come from accent and not from the vocabulary, whereas for my parents and grandparents it would be both.
There is still local vocabulary: nesh, mardy, cob, duck being obvious answers, but more of it is dying out: tuffee, sile, causie.
For perspective, the family - currently headed by the 12th duke, were estimated to be worth £910 million in 2024. They are not out of the top echelon, and are now structured much better for avoiding inheritance tax, which is also at a lower rate now.
