It's the 10% chance they are worried about. Reform is very much the Farage party, and him losing to a bin in their heartland would be catastrophic; he would go from being the presumptive next Prime Minister to a national joke.
Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.
Even if Farage wins, but with a reduced majority, in an election where the alternatives are fringe or novelty candidates, it will be hard for his dignity to recover.
His birth name, and I believe still his legal name, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But he is "commonly known as" Boris Johnson, so that's what can go on the ballot paper, although his full name must still go on the registration documents. Count Binface is in the same situation.
Since he gave up his US citizenship in 2016, I don't think he's subject to a jurisdiction where "legal name" is a meaningful notion. Ultimately, this means his first name is whatever he says it is (provided that he isn't lying): you'd have to ask him. Supposing that his answer changes depending on the social context, then both "Alexander" and "Boris" would be valid answers for "what is this person's first name?".
Count Binface is in a different situation, because "Count Binface" is a stage name, which he (presumably) doesn't go as in his real life. However, stage names are still considered legal enough to go on your UK passport. Ultimately, whether he would be allowed to write "Count Binface" as his name on the registration documents would depend on what the Electoral Commission decides. I had a look last week, but couldn't find their rules.
>Ultimately, whether he would be allowed to write "Count Binface" as his name on the registration documents would depend on what the Electoral Commission decides. I had a look last week, but couldn't find their rules.
One can stand for election using any name that one is "commonly known by".
It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.
Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.
It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.
This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.
Over the past couple of years, my parents have had several multi-day outages with their phone line. Each time, we contacted Sky, who contacted Openreach and they eventually fixed things, but then it would stop working again months later.
I guess they're just not maintaining that infrastructure like they used to.
Finally my parents succumbed and now their phone is plugged into their router.
Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.
They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.
There are multiple options, including internet from mobile phone providers and satellite internet. The affordability and speeds are good enough that it's not a major problem.
That said, there are devices that depend on the old phone network that need to be replaced, such as alarm systems for vulnerable people, but the risk of vulnerable people that can't switch to VoIP services is fairly low, especially as this switchover has been known about for a long time.
Is she using a wheel dial? Otherwise, the user interface is almost the same for wall phones and cell phones for seniors. Except that you have to press the dial button for it to dial.
>We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.
Is it really or is one just more profitable because you can charge more for IP than analog? I came here to ask this because it genuinely feels like a way to remove cheaper alternatives.
I'd rather have USPS or some quasi-government org take over some of these 'obsolete' systems than for them to just disappear altogether. There needs to be a rock bottom, bare bones option to keep prices down. We need to have more competition, not less--there are only a handful of true options for cellular or local internet. This seems to just be a way to cut off legacy infrastructure that was working fine to force people to buy into more modern (i.e. expensive) options.
I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..."
I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.
For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate).
It seems like you disqualify everything that doesn’t talk back (LLMs then?). By my account a stone is dormant quantum consciousness and living systems merely animate this. Awareness and sense of self are manifestations of biotechnology.
What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.
Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.
Even if Farage wins, but with a reduced majority, in an election where the alternatives are fringe or novelty candidates, it will be hard for his dignity to recover.