i’ll be honest, unless you’re at the west coast of ireland, probably give this one a miss. :(

my headcanon on this is delayed leap-day bugs from february 29th, only showing up just now

it’s tempting to think digitization is forever, but we’ve already lost so much of the internet to link rot and server shutdowns in just 30 years. paper is actually longer lasting than digital, lol

yeah people i talk to don’t seem to get what’s coming. like, they haven’t had the misfortune of a medical emergency in their life, and so they’ve never actually experienced how bad the service provision is getting. but not just for healthcare, it’s for every service.

me personally? i’m saving up that money for sure. not for the next emergency, oh goodness no. i’m going to use that savings pot to leave this island for good. ideally before i get my next medical emergency. selfish? yep, you bet! 🙂

but, i am fundamentally sick of living in a place where we pay all this money and get little service to show for it. for me, one of these two options is fine:

1. somewhere where i pay low tax and rightfully get poor service.
2. somewhere where i pay high tax and get premium quality of service.

one or the other i am fine with, preferably option 2. but what we have in the uk is the downside of both of these options.

bit of a tangent i know, but…

rather than national or local governments fix any of this, they’ve instead embarked on massive campaigns to massage the statistics, through changing the measuring sticks used to assess service quality across the board, and in doing so, hide all the problems. this extends to water standards, and unemployment statistics, and cancer waiting times, etc etc.

don’t even get me started about the filthy liars who do the passenger rail statistics 💩

real world link rot, lol

it’s simple. asking people to do the right thing (i.e slowdown), out of the kindness of their hearts, is laughable.

if you build the street in such a way that driving above it’s design limits is impossible, then people wont do it. surprisingly, the threat of their car being damaged or totaled will force compliance with the intended speed limit. if this was done correctly on a large scale, speed limit posts wouldn’t even be required - the street layout would naturally dictate the speeds you can drive at.

for UK streets, this can be retrofitted with chicanes, curb extensions, raised pedestrian crossings, etc. increasing the amount that a driver has to think to drive down a street, automatically makes them slower. oh, and none of those stupid painted chicanes and bumps either, you think anyone cares about those? lol. actually build the damned curb extensions

i got searching, and i understand your concern, there’s a lot of chatter in EU countries about doing this too

however - it looks like it’s all chatter. i managed to find the specific proposal from the EU that people seem worried about, but it hasn’t got out of council yet. seeing major countries like italy and germany coming out against an E2EE ban, means that i have confidence this proposal wont get past a qualified majority vote. (germany + italy = 31% eu pop, qmv pop threshold of 35% to reject)

on the other hand, we have the UK, which has already demonstrated that, when presented with a seriously stupid choice, it has the capacity to actually take that bad choice. the Online Safety Bill is real, it’s in UK parliament now, will likely pass, and it will start hurting us by the end of this year

it’s this second reason really, that the UK has the capacity to pull the trigger on dumb issues, that has put me on the path to leaving. it’s not so much “EU good”, rather it’s “UK bad”. this encryption thing is icing on the cake for me, but it’s not the root cause.

same. where you thinking to bail out to? my top 2 picks are netherlands and norway atm. got any ideas?

it’s frustrating to see rules on technology being decided by people not qualified in the field.

then, i stop and think about it further.

i realise that these same donkeys also legislate on healthcare, energy, water, education, _{police, transport, environment, ᶜᵘˡᵗᵘʳᵉ ⁱⁿᶠʳᵃˢᵗʳᵘᶜᵗᵘʳᵉ ˢᵖᵒʳᵗˢ ᵉᵗᶜ…}

from the tinder algorithm’s perspective, it “wants” to select for babies that will grow up and use the app when they are older too

the implication of this, is that algorithms now have actual influence on the natural selection of humans. small influence of course, but, unsettling to think about for too long.

oh no, i’m old enough to remember when this cat was a cool post, and not a cool statue 😥

california is the largest “sub-national” economy in the world. if california was a country, it would have the fifth largest economy. bigger than the uk, or bigger than india.

if i had to guess, the answer is “success breeds jealousy”

oh is it that bad there? fair enough :)

if you ever go to a place that has strange rules and laws, it’s because of people like this

like, yes, okay, there’s no rule that said you couldn’t attend a public event in a gimp suit. it doesn’t mean that he had to, did he? 🙄

i think it’s obvious he’s exploiting the freedom provided to dress in a gimp suit, which freedom you would use to attend a fetish/like-minded event or convention, to then attend something vanilla, where people are definitely not consenting or opting-in to the behaviour.

sure, it’s legal. but it’s fuckin weird, in the same way that attending in a furry costume would be weird. buying a yard ticket too? he knew what he was doing. if you can afford a fetish suit, you can afford a seat.

i will say that the moral “think of the children” arguments don’t have any weight in this scenario, because you’re taking those kids to a shakespeare play, lol. i could understand being morally outraged if this loser turned up to wacky warehouse 😄

the issue put bluntly, is that in federation, your data cannot be 100% safe. even if this instance is secure and perfectly private, if this instance is then federated, that federated data can then be copied and have anything done with it, or to it.

or, to phrase it in a way that opened my eyes to this, quoting from someone else a month ago, “what makes you think you’re in control of your data on any instance?”

oh perfect, thanks!

hi, i’m stuck on rules 9 and 11, because i cannot both have today’s wordle answer, and also have it multiply to equal 35 in roman numerals. what do i do?

…but think about our commercial property values! The Line™ would go down! nooooo! 📉