Given how irresponsibly they use their legislating time, I'm all in favour of them being there as little as possible. (This seems to apply to all legislatures, everywhere)

I'll take it as a form of taxation so long as you're prepared to stomach the introduction of other randomly allocated taxes to plug other budget holes.

so that rather than individuals being expected to bear the loss of however much work time, by having to take time off without pay, we shift it to requiring employers to bear the cost by paying someone who isn't working?

Why is it perfectly normal for public funds to pay the judge, the balliff, the clerk, the chap who maintains the building, etc., but everyone suddenly baulks at using them to pay jurors?

Thankyou for putting this bit in. The judge's problem is foremost that the juror had not been able to retain an open mind before the end of the evidence.
This is why everyone arguing for jurors to be punished for this sort of thing are wrong - the problem is that they were unable to do the job properly and it's grossly unjust to force someone to do a job, and then punish them for not being any good at it.

Actually, we should probably be glad that the electronics revolution has done this for us - we can now more readily detect the incompetent jurors when they tweets about it and weed them out before they make their decision.

actually, the Association of Chief Police Officers guideline for the threshold for enforcement is +10% +2. But this is is the 'you absolutely should be ticketing people above this speed' limit, not the 'you should not issue tickets below this speed' limit. Safety Camera Partnerships can, and do, set the cameras dead-on the limit without notice to anyone.

And everyone hates receiving... You've spent $20 to give them $20, but you've tied their hands about where they can spend it. There's nothing more infuriating than a giftcard for a store which doesn't sell anything you want.

(upshot: give cash)

Virgin are saddled with crazy debt because the various companies which Virgin is made up of had to collectively dig up almost every residential road in Britain, plus everywhere else they needed to lay fibre (can't sling fibre on telegraph poles). That's not profligacy, that's the cost of entry to the national-telecommunications-provider market. And that's why we're unlikely to see any more real competition any time soon.

Interestingly, NTL's debt, in 2001, was larger than the GDP of Panama (and a substantial list of other countries). debt, list of GDPs

Are these fully contested cases?

Now THAT I remember:

Now, this is absolutely true. High-school maths & physics homework, one just sat down and blitzed the night before it was due in. There was never any expectation of independent study, and we wouldn't have known what do it if there had been.

I remember two sections of independent study in history, which both consisted of reading a portion of a book, and regurgitating the information.

Once one runs into degree-level physics problems though, it's like a brick wall. With spikes on it.
No idea what the answer is, no idea how to approach finding out, and a hideously expensive texbook (which you'd had to shell out £50 of your own money on) which was completely incomprehensible - the worked problems seemed to be coming from the direction of "we invented these problems, so let's just run that process backwards and show you the way to solve this particular one". All my tutor could ever say was "sometimes you just need to struggle away at the problem until you get it", which is little help to someone who has spent 30 minutes staring at the question, and staring at a blank sheet of paper, and not having the faintest idea where to start.

I saw a similar comment in the introduction to my main physics text when I was re-reading it recently. (Though they recommended 2.5 hours for every hour in lectures.) On closer inspection one finds that they were recommending ~75-hour working weeks. Which can be in terms of anything up to 11 consecutive weeks. Clearly insane. Although I haven't yet figured out how to do things any better.

dangle it over the humanities graduates with him in the unemployment queue?

I didn't see the current adminstration scrambling to get the law amended when it looked like this would go through. I didn't see them shaming congress into changing the law when explaining that they were pulling the plug.

For something which they allegedly had no choice about they've done a remarkable job of making it look like petulant spite on the part of the present administration.

I meant subject in a grammatical sense.

Unfortunately, your sentence doesn't have a subject, so I'm not sure who you think may have broken the law. But if the self-service doohickeys have caused the store to sell him more paracetamol than it should have, isn't that the store's problem? It seems highly doubtful that it entitles the store manager to prevent the customer leaving, and deprive them of goods which are now theirs.