• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • “Better economy” is vague and nebulous, it’s my belief that if someone tells you that’s why they voted they way they did they either didn’t care enough to actually look into their candidates’ policies or they’re trying to hide the real reason they voted. And it’s very unlikely if their primary concern is the economy they wouldn’t bother looking into economic policy beforehand. If that’s what they truly voted for they’d have specific concrete talking points instead, eg changes to some specific tax or changes in funding for some specific type of business.

    The same goes for candidates with a platform of “better economy”. Is it a better economy if everyone still struggles as they do now but the people at the top get infinitely richer? Is it a better economy if all big businesses fail but more people now have enough to live healthily and safely? “The economy” is too broad, it means nothing. Specific policy or it’s all bullshit.



  • This is true for all public holidays in the UK, there’s a (usually) fixed number of public holidays but the dates are flexible.

    They’re also included in the minimum 28 days paid time off too, meaning if you’re a full time worker and have to work on a bank holiday your employer is legally required to offer an extra day off somewhere else instead, either a fixed date or added to your holiday allowance. Conversely, the “extra” day off you get when a monarch keels over may be subtracted from your holiday allowance for the year. This is also why my employer is allowed to follow English bank holidays despite having next to no presence in England; the number is fixed but the dates are not.













  • A little ham-fisted, sure, but if you think it’s irrelevant you evidently didn’t take any time to actually think about it (you did also reply instantly, so I’ll take that over you lacking reading comprehension).

    I’ll simplify.

    Digital piracy is illegal copying of unlicenced content.
    Alice creates content.
    Alice licences the content to Bob.
    Bob decides to distribute the content with advertisements from Charlie.
    You download the content.
    Charlie does not pay Bob.
    You did not breach any licences.
    You did not pirate the content.

    And just to further clarify, Alice is the person who made a video, Bob is Youtube, Charlie is an advertiser. Your argument is not an ad is piracy if “the advertisement company [hasn’t] paid the content creator.” The advertiser pays the distribution company, and the relationship between those two companies is irrelevant. The advertiser failing to pay does not retroactively turn you into a pirate.

    The whole argument is pointless in the first place, it’s irrelevant whether or not you consider ad blocking to be technically piracy. A sensible adblock argument would be around the ethics of manipulation versus payment, or security versus whatever it is advertisers want. Arguing semantics doesn’t matter.




  • Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

    There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).




  • There’s a lot of replies here about why US citizens are in the situation they are but not how to fix it, which was the question you asked. You have two political parties in a first past the post system with largely similar corporate focussed policies, people primarily vote against a party rather than for one that represents them. If you really want to change things you’ll need to overhaul your voting system to break up your two party system and encourage competition from parties that actually represent what people want.

    Unfortunately there is no safe and easy way to do this; it means the two parties in power giving up that power which they will not do willingly. You’ll need large scale consistent and actually disruptive protests, ie not just meeting up for a day then returning to life as nornal, but the US has a history of responding to protests the same way they do everything; with violence.

    So more practically, you can contact your representative at the appropriate level of government and hope they don’t completely ignore you this time.