@pauldrye@spacey.space : Unbuilt crewed space projects, phantom islands, alternate history, Muppets, Atomic Age design, weird-looking galaxies, temporary moons of Earth, languages, cartography, the Ediacaran biota, old cutaway diagrams. Canadian with malice aforethought. Baggage Books on DriveThruRPG.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • The EU already has a land border in the Americas. French Guiana is part of the union and it touches Brazil and Suriname. So the gate is already open to work it from the south up instead of the north down.

    I read somewhere – great source, I know – that the existing rule is that the country has to be in Europe, though, not that it has a border. Otherwise Malta, Ireland, and Cyprus would not qualify, and the UK too back when they were in.

    Oddly enough, the Canadian/Danish border is a questionable one for this purpose anyway – Hans Island (where the border is) is part of Greenland and Greenland is not in the EU. It left in 1985 and is now one of the “Overseas countries and territories” that have special rights in relation to the EU but are not actually in it.





  • Paul Drye@lemm.eetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    No, they do – it’s just not a codified constitution like almost all other countries have.

    Uncodified constitution

    Proponents of the idea believe that a constitution that has evolved bit by bit over a long period of time and across a bunch of different charters and unwritten agreements/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.


  • Paul Drye@lemm.eetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months 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 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.



  • Paul Drye@lemm.eetoBuy Canadian@lemmy.caCanadian Candy?
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    2 months ago

    Ganong makes Chicken Bones, which are a cinnamon candy. They’re mostly chocolate, though: Pal-o-Mine chocolate bars, Delecto Peanut Clusters, and they’re introducing a new one they bought out from an American manufacture: Sixlets, which look like chocolate M&M’s from the pictures and their website.

    Prana makes a bunch of nut snacks like salted cashews and almonds.


  • In the case of velocity, all neutrinos move at essentially the speed of light (they have the slightest amount of mass which slows them down, each of the three types of neutrino a different mass compared to the other two but still very, very, extremely low masses). Only neutrinos less than 2 eV are noticeably slower than light, and that’s quite a low energy. The almost-exactly-light-speed has been confirmed by, among other methods, comparing bursts of neutrinos from supernovas and other intense sources to the photons coming from the same sources.

    The photons move at the speed of light by definition and MeV and GeV energy neutrinos show up in detectors at the exact same time down to as close as we’ve been able to measure it (roughly one part in a billion, I think it is).