Sorry, I don’t hate the Brits, I just think UKans are being ridiculous to expect us to care. The onus is not on foreigners to have an opinion – much less weigh on – domestic issues such as Scottish Independance or Irish unification. Even if I wanted to have an opinion, I’m more than likely to eat my own foot.

Scotland and NI are nowhere near unique in their having a federalized governance and internal struggle for independence. However until independence happens, Scotland and NI are part of the UK and you can’t be mad at maps of Europe for reflecting that fact.

I support a sovereign Ukraine but a 1980 map of Europe would have it as a non-sovereign Soviet Republic and that’s not a contradiction.

Also very ironic that you would talk about “made up people” to a Belgian. I don’t even talk the same language or receive the same TV channels as my compatriots 50 km over. We’ve mastered having a national identity built on not having a national identity.

Also applies to the three regions of Belgium, FWIW. Even your ID card and passport will be slightly different depending on where you get it.

And don’t you start grandstanding about what you think that should mean for us, because regardless of what you say your outside understanding will be incomplete and your opinions will be ignorant.

The UK has a unique history that has led its constituent nations to conceptualize strong cultural and political identities - which is far from unusual. The only unusual thing is that Brits keeps pretending that the UK is somehow Special™ and foreigners should give any more of a shit about its subnational divisions than you do about US states or German States or Canadian Provinces.

Quite typical of the Brits to get pissy about you saying the truth.

They went all over the world drawing arbitrary lines separating or forcing peoples together, but try to get them to understand that the world considers the UK to be a singular entity and they blow a fucking fuse over the semantics. And they’re not even correct about the semantics!

The entitlement some British people feel over foreigners giving a shit for their internal politics is frankly outrageous.

Same, and I’m not well-versed into the neurology of it all but I think it’s something way worse than the symptoms of ADHD.

Five seconds is well within my attention span. I forget everything the minute I open a door or open a new tab, but this ain’t that. I can watch something in silence, my brain distracts itself, that’s kind of the whole problem. This though? This is about promising an impending dopamine hit to a restless junkie who was about to scroll down for a quicker hit.

No, scratch that. This is about the video editor constructing a strawman of that restless junkie, pandering to that, followed by a (proto-)fascist algorithm eeking out every last bit of video retention from its users for maximum profit. Even if 95 % of users don’t actually need the countdown to keep watching, and the 5 % remaining really should not be using that app for their mental well-being, the algorithm will mercilessly incentivize creators to put in the countdown.

Since legislating algorithmic attention-hoarding doesn’t sem likely to hit the political docket anytime soon, the only winning move is not to play.

My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.

Only a valid argument when the media does not spend a significant chunk of time developing an heterosexual romantic plotline with a different set of characters that is not integral to the plot.

Which is the vast majority of media. Hollywood cannot help but shove straight love interests into absolutely every man-woman character pair they see without any regards for plot relevance.

It’s so pervasive that when it doesn’t happen (e.g. Mad Max: Fury Road) it’s as much a marked point of pride as if they had a gay romance.

When a straight character does it, it’s “building a deeper emotional connection with the audience”.
When a gay character does it it’s “pandering”, a “political statement”, “unnecessary”, “irrelevant to the plot”, and “something that should have been left for the audience to read between the lines”.

Some americans unironically believe that piece of parchment to be almighty, self-evident, irreproachable, and universally revered.

Unfortunately those in power have transferred that belief to Trump. That’s all it took to abolish the rule of law.

True of corpo software as well, FWIW.

Corporate ghouls will buy a successful company and stuff the “leadership” with an even mix of hapless morons and toxic careerists, then wonder why the successful products aren’t selling anymore.

Or so I heard, dear $currentEmployer whose corporate values I definitely share.

Feminine is what the Académie settled on, months after everyone settled on Masculine.

That institution holds some normative power with other institutions (e.g. some media outlets) but has utterly failed to impose its outdated and reactionary outlook to anyone but other reactionaries. They’re constantly coming out with revisions for words that reached common parlance years earlier.

So common usage is Le covid. If someone used the feminine I’d have to assume they unironically use the word “Wokisme”, because only these kinds of people actually think that the Académie is worth listening to.

• Dick (bite) = Feminine
• Cunt (con) = Masculine

My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.

That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).

So… Cotton/Linen/Wool? The technology is fine, its only downside in most applications is simply cost. Cotton clothes are more comfortable, less stinky, less polluting, and won’t fuse with your skin and disfigure you for life if they accidentally catch on fire. On top of not making microplastics soup every wash cycle.

If we cared to actually solve the problem of plastics in fast fashion we could ban them, with some exceptions for sportswear and shoes where synthetics have some actually useful uses. Hell, we could even make it an easy transition by gradually pulling back the allowable synthetic content for x years.

But it would directly kneecap Shein and H&M’s business model so we have to weigh all the pros against that.

Tell me you live in NA without telling me you live in NA.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary, and not only does daylight last less than 8 hours but thanks to the coastal climate it’s not abnormal to only get single digit hours of sunlight per month (5/7th of which are when we’re stuck in an office). Rest of the time is either rainy or cloudy, neither of which is useful to find stray UVB. London has basically the same climate.

In the winter it’s not even useful to commute by bicycle, because it’s dark outside both ways. What the fuck do you want from me doctorman. I’ll be gobbling up those supplements because my Vitamin D deficiency is the least surprising outcome of working an office job in Belgium in winter.

Comparing US statistics to Dutch ones makes no sense. Their roads are several times more deadly than European ones regardless of vehicle.

Furthermore not all of their states have mandatory helmets (!) whereas over here it’s rare to see someone missing something other than pants. Except scooters, scooter riders are under the impression that they don’t ride a motorcycle and that flip-flops are appropriate apparel.

Then there’s a lot you can do as a motorcyclist to mitigate risk. Riding safely is one (not everyone seems capable of that, there’s quite a spread in riding behaviors, but also an obvious bias in which ones you’ll remember seeing on your commute). A strict no-alcohol policy is another, and not riding at night on weekends. You can also wear extra safety gear such as a high-vis airbag.

Also licensing requirements. Oh and American motorcycles don’t have to be equipped with ABS. They be crazy over there.

All three of your examples were known to cause ill effects for centuries. The ancient Romans knew the asbestos mines were killing their slaves. Their overuse during the 20th century was not due to ignorance but corporate lobbying and political complacency.

The lobbyist play is to fund counter-studies to sow FUD even though the scientific consensus that [X Bad] is well established, because it gives an easy out for bought out politicians. However the tatoo lobby is certainly not one that I expect to be have the pull to fund FUD scientific studies to delay legislation, and if they are doing that it should be pretty easy to point to.

On top of the other point.

Capitalism is uninterested in your healthcare policy. That’s your country’s failure, not capitalism’s, for once. Market pressures did not invent a gaggle of middle men siphoning the money between patients and care providers. That’s a result of government failures that ossified into a corrupt system benefiting a select few, a scheme which is not unique to capitalism and is actually reminding me of soviet bureaucracy.

The distinction is not purely academic, because correctly pointing out that you’re not fighting capitalism but corrupt bureaucracy makes reform a much easier sell, which is why healthcare reform is a transpartisan issue until donors and lobbyists get involved.

Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.

That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

In my local experience, these are actually just profoundly incompetent. Hanlon’s razor.

They tailgate because they are actually incapable of maintaining a following distance (you know the kind, when the road is empty they alternate between mashing the gas and driving well under the speed limit, and somehow if you’re a passenger they’re totally unaware that they are doing it even if they are not distracted, how it is possible to be this bad at gauging speed and distance I do not understand but these people do exist).

Then as their malfunctioning brain randomly processes that they want to go faster, they overtake, and since the lane is clear they mash the gas.

Then when they are done and they merge back, their brain performs a hard reset and they somehow drive slower than before they passed you. They do not notice. You pass them, and they are not looking distracted; the only explanation is that their brain is doing the simpsons-monkey-cymbals.gif.

1. Buy more dishes so you can go longer between washes
2. Buy a half-height dishwasher. They exist, I owned one that lived on the floor of my bathroom.

I live alone and I fill up my full size dishwashers every few days. If you don’t eat ordered/preprocessed food you can also just chuck pots and pans in the bottom rack.

Dishwashers use a lot less water than hand-washing. Even if there’s a little bit of room left, it’s still a net positive. There’s no reason for anyone to hand-wash unless they live in a tiny NYC broom closet or exclusively eat take-out in disposable containers.

I read people complained that ME1’s character creator was ass. I guess it must have gotten that reputation by being kind of ass for making a dude, because my Shep was a badass bitch. Voice actress was on top of things too. She’s by far the most memorable custom character I played.

Until ME3 where they yassified her from a 40-something war veteran to a glossy-skinned 25 year old lifestyle vlogger. Interestingly that made me - a cis man - feel viscerally connected to the injunction to look a certain way for the male gaze, and I got so fucking mad at bioware during that intro cinematic.

The punishment must fit the crime. Minimum sentence in Canada for a DUI is apparently 1000 rupees and 12 months driving prohibition. That punishment makes sense for the crime of negligently operating heavy machinery that can and does kill thousands every year. Not for operating light low-power electric vehicles where killing a third-party is only a remote (though real) possibility. That minimum sentence being applied equally is not just when the danger posed to society is so unequal. I would also expect a truck driver to have a higher minimum sentence for the same reasons.

On top of the justice concerns, if the punishment is the same for everyone, a drunk college dickhead who would have ridden a bicycle home (still a reprehensible crime mind you) might decide to drive their car instead if they feel like they’re less likely to get caught and it would be punished the same anyway. Especially as cases like this get media attention.

That’s the pitfall with blind and strict rules, if I know I’ll be getting expelled from school for getting punched by a bully, then I’m incentivized to cave their face in before the grown-ups get here.