BREXIT

To bring this into the realm of computing, the site crashed under load regularly yesterday.

It is interesting to follow the results at:

https://odileeds.org/projects/petitions/241584

And into the realm of stats: look at the shape of the curve. It’s pretty clear that the rate of progress is determined by the capacity of the system, with the supply of intending signatories continuously sufficient to max it out. They put on extra capacity for a while in the middle of the night after one crash – and still the signatures kept on coming. It’s back to the old rate again now, but far too linear to be believably due to the supply of intending signatories.

Bullshit removed.

Took several hours for the confirmation email yesterday. It’ll definitely make a huge difference :^)

Things’ll get interesting if the count gets over 17 million :-o

The capacity of the system seems to be limited in such a way that that will happen on about March 29th.

Things’ll get interesting if the count gets over 17 million :-o

Over 17 million and it’s interesting, over 18 million and I insist that I want my country back.

The capacity of the system seems to be limited in such a way that that will happen on about March 29th

Haven’t the euronegotiators pointed out to May that not leaving is an option, or is it the BBC that slipped that into the news reports?

Coming on to 3.8M now. One of them me. Confirmation email came immediately.

I like the way it’s been waiting for a debate date and government response. I believe Mayhem did respond, with the same old bollocks she’s trotted out so many times even the EU has given up listening.

Thing is, we’re stuck. Nobody wants a second referendum, it’s too unpredictable with a still large number of people dumb enough to support Brexit even though it’s quite obviously a seriously bad idea. There’s no point having an election as the Tories are the assholes that started this mess, and Labour is such a ridiculous mess that the w*nker-in-chief would rather meet with known terrorist organisations than have a discussion with Chuka Umunna because Umunna isn’t, apparently, a real party leader… As if Corbyn is.

There’s no precedent or desire to rescind article 50 because the shouty Tories would lose it (remember, it’s quite clear that the ERG has more influence than the Brexit minister and quite possibly Mayhem herself), even though it’s what is desperately needed – to cancel article 50, step back from the fray, and figure out what the hell the government can agree on before wasting anymore of everybody else’s time. You know, like they should have done in the beginning.

Will May’s abysmal deal get through on its third attempt (if the speaker allows it)? It seemed unlikely and then May decided to blame everybody else for the mess that Brexit has become. But then, isn’t that basically the mentality that gave us Brexit in the first place? Forty years of blaming “those Europeans” for every leadership failure in British politics? Sure, the EU isn’t perfect, but it gave workers and citizens rights rather than giving us straight cucumbers, so it is generally doing something useful. Something the government is likely to undo the first moment it can.

So no referendum, no election, no undoing A50, and May seems to think she’s the protagonist/hero in this story rather than understanding that she’s a megalomaniacal sociopathic bitch who is utterly unable to understand that “no means no”.

So where do we go from here?

PS: My hat off to Brighton Pavilion, Cambridge, and Bristol West. Conspicuous dark red patches on the map (outside of London).

Coming on to 3.8M now

Well lets do the maths then 17.2M in a real vote v 3.8M and unvalidated social media ones.

My hat off to Brighton Pavilion, Cambridge, and Bristol West. Conspicuous dark red patches on the map (outside of London).

Yeah the only part of the country that matters and thats why we ended up in the situation we have today as those who run the country of what ever political slant can’t see beyond North of Watford.

The vote basically was hijacked by those who wanted Brexit by appealing to the disenfranchised and they turned it in to a vote more on the lines of what they were not getting rather than about the EU.

So where do we go from here?

Well one thing could be the looney right wake up and smell the coffee and think we better vote for May’s deal or else.

The other course could be we end up having a series of votes and it’s passed back to us and we vote to stay in as the ballot paper this time has three option , stay /leave with May’s deal/leave with no deal and the leave vote gets split and a even smaller minority of people get their way. Still democracy is great isn’t it if you are on the winning side.

Sometimes you shouldn’t ask the question if you think you will not like the answer and Cameron has a lot to answer for and in the meantime 3 years have been wasted and no real attention paid to what should be done to help those in real need in the country.

If more people got off their backsides and voiced their opinions at the actual vote 3 years ago then I along with 16.8M others may not now be in this situation but apathy rules and we have really set up a nice sxxx storm where a lack of respect for each other is now the norm and particularly those not of UK heritage are game for those with hate and bile running in their veins.

I think one thing we all will agree on is the sooner it is sorted the better and then we can get on with repairing the divisions for all oursakes.

unvalidated social media ones

No. This is a UK Government petition site, and it’s validated as well as anything on the internet can possibly be. You have to have a valid email address and a valid UK postcode, and they check where both the initial request and the email response come from. The results of these checks appear on the json file linked from the petition website, so that, for instance, we can see how many of the responses come from each constituency, and for those that come from other countries, which country.

the ballot paper this time has three option , stay /leave with May’s deal/leave with no deal and the leave vote gets split

Of course it would also be possible to have a transferable vote, so that you have a first and second choice. Then if no option gets over 50% first choices, whichever option gets fewest votes has its votes distributed to the other two options, according to the second choice. The indications are that Remain will get over 50% on the first round, but if not, who knows how it’ll fall?

No. This is a UK Government petition site, and it’s validated as well as anything on the internet can possibly be

Clive the point is that it is unvalidated against the criteria of those who could vote in the referendum so statistically it is a different data set.

Now we can argue all day long about who should have been given the vote but it was a validated one.

Of course it would also be possible to have a transferable vote,

Yes we could and as you go on to illustrate it can do it both ways but equally you could argue it should only have two questions on it, leave with this deal or leave with no deal, as we have made a decision to leave.

As I said sometimes if you are not going to like the answer then don’t ask the question.

as we have made a decision to leave

In a referendum that the courts would have thrown out as invalid due to irregularities in the way it was conducted, and the behaviour of the protagonists, had it been legally binding. But the referendum wasn’t legally binding, so they couldn’t throw it out as invalid in law because it wasn’t valid in law in the first place.

That’s what the court itself said.

Clive,

It wasn’t legally binding but all the documents made clear we will do what you the people, we allow to vote, want.

Both sides in the arguement told their own set of untruths and in every election there are bending of rules like it or not and thats just a fact.

History will judge this time with some very interesting comments I am sure but what is clear is that there are some very big forces in play here that are trying to break up the modern status.

Lets just say we get another vote and it says stay do you think that will be the end of the matter because I don’t as we will then have the counter arguement for another one dragging up this and that.

Sometimes we all have to comprimise and move on as that is the only way that things heal as I’m sure we don’t decades of this.

The sad fact is this whole episode is a sad lesson in how you can exploit division to deflect things away from the very real issues we should be sorting and confronting.

This is a UK Government petition site, and it’s validated as well as anything on the internet can possibly be

I find this faith in the robustness of the website quite amusing, when big IT companies that make the Internet their business are still being hacked and manipulated on a regular basis. It’s not like it wasn’t compromised before either.

It wasn’t legally binding but all the documents made clear we will do what you the people, we allow to vote, want.

documents? There was that stupid mailshot that Cameron put out, but that carries as much weight as the usual general election pledges that are mostly forgotten once in power.
What matters is the acts of parliament supporting those sorts of things. There was no act of parliament for the mailshot. There was one for the referendum, that made it quite clear that it was both advisory and non-binding.
It is all irrelevant anyway, as we’ve had an election since – previous actions and promises do not need to bind a new government.

History will judge this time with some very interesting comments

Oh yeah… It’ll be called “the folly of parliament” or “how democracy is an illusion”.

what is clear is that there are some very big forces in play here that are trying to break up the modern status.

All the more reason we should do everything we can to thwart the plans that would make us all weaker.

I find this faith in the robustness of the website quite amusing,

It’s clearly not very robust – it keeps crashing, and the rate of signings clearly is determined by the capacity of the website, not by the number of people attempting to sign. However, the json file you can download from petition site is easily read, and the pattern is consistent with the majority of the signatures being genuine, and not consistent at all with what you’d expect if it was being hacked in any massive way – not to mention the fact that the main hackers would be trying to minimize the size of this petition, not maximize it.

My point in mentioning that it’s a government website is that it’s NOT an unvalidated social media website, as Doug suggested.

and not consistent at all with what you’d expect if it was being hacked in any massive way

That is entirely consistent with what I would expect if it was being hacked in any massive way. Hackers are a clever lot.

not to mention the fact that the main hackers would be trying to minimize the size of this petition, not maximize it

Interesting assumption. That depends on which side of the fence you sit doesn’t it? I would agree that hackers in favour of Brexit would be obvious about the hacking and make it look like it was an unreliable petition or try to minimise it. But those not in favour of Brexit would want exactly the result we are seeing. Lots of genuine looking signatures.

TBH, I suspect most of the signatures are genuine. I’m just a bit tired of assumptions, trusting what we want to see and dismissing everything we don’t agree with as stupid or dumb. This is what got us into this mess rather than asking sensible questions. And that goes for nearly everyone IMO. Hardly anybody is blameless in this debacle regardless of how they voted because neither campaign was helpful or honest.

My point in mentioning that it’s a government website is that it’s NOT an unvalidated social media website, as Doug suggested.

Clive, read my words again and my other statement:
– v 3.8M and unvalidated social media ones.
– unvalidated against the criteria of those who could vote in the referendum so statistically it is a different data set.

I agree I could have been clearer in regard of the identification of the site but it is a pure on line one, to me a social media site in a very wide sense, and thus has a very different set of people who look at it and would bother to use and thus it represents a different dataset not least because it is not against the original one.

True it could be that it represents a picture of feelings now by a politically active set of people but thats what got us in the mess in the first place that those politically active people ignored the views of those who live life in a different environment and perhaps voted based on other things.

Anyway as the saying goes we are argueing amongst friends and as Richard points out we all come with our own assumptions.

No. This is a UK Government petition site, and it’s validated as well as anything on the internet can possibly be. You have to have a valid email address and a valid UK postcode, and they check where both the initial request and the email response come from. The results of these checks appear on the json file linked from the petition website, so that, for instance, we can see how many of the responses come from each constituency, and for those that come from other countries, which country.

You used a lot of words to describe something completely NOT validated. At all.

And yes, it is possible to do properly authenticated and authorized stuff over the internet. You just need the right tools. An online petition with a few sanity checks is not the right tool.

Anyway, you should be very proud about the hardware and software that handles that online petition stuff. Last time I watched one in Germany closely, it completely broke down before reaching 100000 votes and it took days before it was up again just to break down again a few hours later.

unvalidated against the criteria of those who could vote in the referendum so statistically it is a different data set.

What he means, Clive, is that the eligible voters have not been fiddled to exclude those who are statistically most likely to vote in favour of the EU.

Doug – one could say with the oldies dying off and the mid-teens that got screwed the last time around passing 18, even holding a second referendum now with the exact same criteria would result in a different data set. I’m quite sure the hardcore Brexiteers have already thought of every possible excuse to dismiss any second referendum should it not come out in their favour.

to me a social media site in a very wide sense,

I disagree. It has a very restricted set of user interactions – that of creating petitions, and that of voting for them, plus there’s no form of commentary, counter argument, or discussion other than that created by the petition author and the government response if it receives one.
I would not qualify it as “social media” any more than doing your tax online would make HMRC a social media site. “User doing something on the internet” does not automatically equal “social media”.

but thats what got us in the mess in the first place that those politically active people ignored the views

No, we got in this mess in the first place because a bunch of dishonest idiots lied about many things while appearing to be a common Joe. Think how many times you saw Farage with a pint in his hand. Now think how many times you saw Cameron doing that. So these people, they promised unicorns. They painted pictures of huge amounts of cash being given away to foreigners (because all that open borders trade stuff is complicated so let’s skip over that). They played on the innate distrust of Johnny Foreigner that is inherent in a lot of English mentality. They even came out and told a lot of outright lies that were regurgitated and embellished by media sources well known for manufacturing outrage.

And the other side? I heard, one day, Leave stating outright that Turkey was going to join the EU. Meanwhile somebody from Remain gave a long and tedious lecture using phrases like quantitative easing. The entire thing was dismissed in two words – Project Fear.

The thing that got us in this mess is a mixture of confirmation bias (people who don’t trust foreigners being given reasons why foreigners are bad) and the fact that the UK has highly partisan press. There’s no way in hell a reader of The Express or The Daily Mail would ever have been told anything that resembles truth.

and perhaps voted based on other things.

I think there’s a lot in common with the gilets jaunes in France. The little guy is sick and tired of the elite screwing them.
Try Googling for how much Rees-Mogg has already made out of the Brexit chaos. The elite has manufactured a way to screw the little guy even harder while making it seem like they were sticking it to the man and disposing of Cameron.

Yes, things need to change. Yes, Westminster needs to look beyond the London Orbital and realise that oop north is a place and not just that bit between them and those annoying Scottish loonies. However, I don’t believe that manipulating a group of people to shoot themselves in the foot has ever been productive.

You used a lot of words to describe something completely NOT validated. At all.

It is validated in so far as it’s a real email address, and potentially verifying the IP address matches the country where the user claims to be. It’s very basic verification, but it’s better than a simple button that anybody could click on multiple times.
[aside – to prove a point about a bad user interface to something, I forget what, it was a long time ago, I positioned the mouse over a button and placed a screwdriver on the mouse button and a book on top of that; click refresh click refresh click refresh…]

with a few sanity checks is not the right tool.

It appears to be more than the current government has. :-/

with a few sanity checks is not the right tool.

It appears to be more than the current government has. :-/

I think you’ll find the people in power have a are a lot of tools.
The biggest problem is there’s spanners on both sides of the box.

The biggest problem is there’s spanners on both sides of the box.

And they’re going to screw you!

Sorry – unable to resist!

I’m quite sure the hardcore Brexiteers have already thought of every possible excuse to dismiss any second referendum should it not come out in their favour.

Well the more hardcore Remain supporters will have supplied justification for that in many people’s minds by their constant refusal (justified or not) to accept the outcome of the first referendum. Best of three?

Rick said:

Doug – one could say with the oldies dying off and the mid-teens that got screwed the last time around passing 18, even holding a second referendum now with the exact same criteria would result in a different data set.

It could as if my son’s school is anything to go by then unless they follow the “indoctrinated” guidelines then they are deemed not a good pupil.

Yes there is a lot of good in there like inclusivity and teaching of other cultures and beliefs but the straight jacketing of those who challange is not.

Young minds are there to be moulded and every day we get closer to moulding those minds like a modern Eastern block country.

As the Borg say you will be assimulated.

Rees-Mogg has done very nicely out of gaming both camps and shielded his complanies by relocating to Ireland so much for supporting good old GB.

As the saying goes “Do as I say not as I do”