• porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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        6 days ago

        I wasn’t trying to rank them

        There must be 1000s of people that lead a state that aren’t there (given ~200 countries). What makes this guy’s presence so special? Or, perhaps, his presence is also out of place

        • fonix232@fedia.io
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          6 days ago

          California is 2/3 the size of the UK.

          Farage is an MP of a constituency of 75 thousand, and won the election for that position with 21225 votes. He’s not a minister, he’s not an appointed leader of anything, he’s not even the leader (or any official part) of the official opposition in the UK parliament. Hell he’s not even doing a passable job at being an MP given he’s missed like, 70+% of parliamentary meetings, and hasn’t held any significant surgeries in his constituency either. He’s the literal definition of paid for doing nothing politician, shuffling around Fasc-a-Lago hoping to earn some favours by having his nose so far up Trump’s ass he could diagnose the tangerine tyrant’s appendix…

            • ErmahgherdDavid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              6 days ago

              Drop in session/office hours type deal for constituents. Our mps can help citizens (usually by writing strongly worded letters) with small civil matters like planning/building regulations, issues with county council (local government) and so on. It’s also an opportunity for people to lobby their mp about national concerns too.

          • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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            5 days ago

            California is 2/3 the size of the UK.

            In population, that’s true.

            In terms of GDP, California’s is a bit over $4 trillion, while the UK’s is $3.6 trillion. And in land area, California is 1.6 times larger than the UK.

            • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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              5 days ago

              Yeah, my pedantic unnecessary retort was going to point out the GDP thing but then note that there’s some interesting commentary around saying “size” when five Canadian provinces are larger. But mostly that was me still being annoyed at the Davos soundbites

            • fonix232@fedia.io
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              5 days ago

              Well, politicians are supposed to represent their electorate, which happens to be people, not land, or profits.

              Though given the recent years’ heavily publicised American approach to elections, I’m surprised you guys haven’t made the change to “land votes” or “money votes”, given the former seems to be what most of Americans believe to be true (especially when looking at election maps), plus the latter seems to be true anyway…

          • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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            6 days ago

            My grammar is admittedly pretty farm boy, so I thought I’d check. This might be saying the sentence was fine. But either way what your suggesting is nothing like how I hear people speak

            Some authorities prescribe that restrictive relative clauses (where the relative clause is part of the identification of the noun phrase) should only use that as the introductory pronoun, and non-restrictive relative clauses should only use which or who/whom as the introductory pronoun. In practice, either pronoun is commonly used to introduce a restrictive relative clause, including in edited prose. In contrast, it is not usual in edited written English to use that to introduce a non-restrictive relative clause, though there are occasional rare attestations.

            https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/that

            I saw at least one typo there and figured I’d leave it for you

      • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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        5 days ago

        That’s pretty funny. Both that I didn’t get his name right (I’ll put it down to him being irritating in a way I block things out); and that I got three comments effectively pointing out that California has a GDP higher than most countries without pointing out the name was wrong.