Blake [he/him] @ Blake @feddit.uk

Posts

3

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704

Joined

2 yr. ago

Either employees should be allowed to wear personal accessories to express themselves, or they should not. How do you define what is and is not political?

Everyone knows they’re being sarcastic, but we also live in a world where it’s a crime punishable by death to be LGBTQ+, where mentioning the topic in public is a crime and there are US politicians who have literally called for genocide against LGBTQ+ people, so it’s just a shitty thing to say.

What would you have China do?

Stop investing in fossil fuels, for fuck’s sake.

China is still spending shitloads of money and time on extracting coal, building coal power plants, etc.

Western countries should be doing much more and should also be helping developing countries bear the cost of transitioning to renewables far more than they currently are.

Yeah, are you going to actually mention what you’re referring to, or continue to broadly gesture at concepts in the hopes that someone will fill in the blanks for you?

Are you intentionally not mentioning that you’re talking about semiconductors because you know I will immediately point out that Chinese manufactures way more semiconductors than the US?

What is your definition of “globalisation working”? Are we still talking about preventing war? If a country is only prevented from going to war because one nation has it over a barrel, that’s not really peace, it’s imperialism.

Sending love and energy your way, I remember a conversation I had with a disability assessor on Reddit and I just kept telling them, “no, you’re scum, I don’t give a shit about anything you have to say” and they just kept going on and on about how it helped disabled people to have someone to keep away the “””fake disabled””” people. It is fucking disgusting. Should be totally illegal to reject a PIP application until they’ve had an interview with like the disabled person, at least one of their doctors, and a person or two from each “sphere” (work/school/personal life) who knows the disabled person and their struggles. And then if an application is rejected but accepted after an appeal that should be a sackable offence.

I’d far rather have 9/10 people on disability payment not need it than have the 1/10 who needs it go without it. It’s better than spending the money on some bullshit fake government contract that they award to their wife’s business that they set up 15 minutes ago.

That’s good of your dad to do that. I got help from an advocate when I was having problems getting the help I needed from the NHS, and even having someone who could do little things like looking into how to get treatment plan organised by your GP etc. really helps relieve some of the pressure. When you’re disabled and working it’s like having at least three full-time jobs - caring for yourself, trying to figure out how to get help and actually getting it, and working all at the same time. I honestly can’t imagine how much harder it is to have kids to look after on top of all that. You can’t just say, “fuck it I can’t be bothered making dinner today” when you’ve got kids :/

It’s okay, I feel your pain, and I really sympathise. I know exactly how overwhelming and soul destroying all this shit is. I created a community on feddit.uk called !disability, and you’re welcome to post as many rants as you like there as you like. It’s really quiet at the moment but the option is there if you want it, and I’m currently stuck in hospital with nothing much to do besides reading and commenting on the internet :p

I applied for PIP and I was denied. The whole process was so horrible, stressful, dehumanising and difficult that I couldn’t bear going through the whole appeals process - I am really lucky to be in the position of being able to work despite my disability, but a lot of my money is spent to compensate for or to somehow mitigate my disability - money spent on mobility aids, adaptations, additional transport costs, time out of work for appointments, and so on.

I’m also lucky enough to live in Scotland and I applied for the Scottish alternative to PIP (SADP) the day it was available for me to apply, and I qualified for the maximum amount available due to my level of disability. Which still isn’t much, by the way, and probably doesn’t really cover all of my disability related costs, but again, I am really lucky to have it.

There wasn’t any change in my health between applications, it’s just that the PIP process is literally designed to find any excuse to reject your application.

I’m doubtful that DWP really want to improve the process, I think they like it just the way it is. Probably all they want is to be able to farm the criticism out to third parties.

They may as well score some points for doing this now that the organisation is imploding anyways, I suppose.

The original article contains 38 words, the summary contains 38 words. Saved 0%.

Well, it’s the thought that counts, TLDR bot!

I remember having to hunt high and low for the dune 2 manual to find out how heavy an Atreides airfield is because that’s what anti-piracy measures were back then.

Also it was much more of a crapshoot whether or not a game would work at all. Some games just completely refused to be played outside of specific hardware, especially when it came to video cards. Stupid messages like “sorry, you must have a GeForce 2300 or newer to play” that literally checked if your video card name started with some specific string…

Similar kind of thing with sound cards. Most games had a couple options for sound: if you have a sound card that contains the magic words “sound blaster” you got to enjoy nice sounds! Otherwise hope you like some kinda shitty half-attempt at MIDI sound.

And every game ever came with an EULA, if it wasn’t in the game it was in the manual or in some readme. It’s just as meaningless now as it was back then.

Then when CDs came out, sometimes they’d get scuffed and become impossible to install, so you’d have to end up buying a game twice because your cousin got a hold of it.

Things haven’t changed that much. There’s still a lot of shitty games, with a few that are great. It’s more like micro transaction or “free-to-play” games instead of shovelware now for the most part it seems though.

Everyone remembers the classics and forgets the duds!

The “labour” party campaigning on a conservative policy. This is great stuff. Can’t wait for the headfirst rush towards far-right ideology that will happen when people realise that voting labour didn’t make things better. \s

who on Earth is going to offer me an actual progressive alternative to vote for

No one is. You cannot vote for a progressive future. The changes that we need to make to our society have to happen outside of the polling booth.

Facebook is able to track you quite successfully almost everywhere unless you block them using an anti-Facebook blocklist with a decent ad-blocker such as ublock origin. At the very least, everywhere you see a “share on Facebook” or a “like” button, you’re being tracked by Facebook

Mozilla, sadly, isn’t really that trustworthy anymore. A VPN is not really helpful when it comes to ensuring privacy - a VPN hides your IP address from sites you connect to, but cookies, browser fingerprint, login accounts, etc. are much more useful than your IP address because your IP address is likely shared with other users, potentially many others. And additionally, you’re trusting the VPN provider with far, far more than you really should. It would be pretty straight forward for some VPN provider to steal your login details for basically any website if they wanted to do so.

For emails, disposable email address providers exist and if you use Bitwarden password manager (highly recommended!) then you can use them to generate username/password combinations for any website you like.

User agent has quite a few things included, such as browser and operating system, so if you use a different browser, you’ll have a different user agent. The trouble with user agent is that some techniques used to try and make it more anonymous ironically make it easier to track. There’s not really a good option. Although it’s definitely worth getting a user agent switching plugin to disguise yourself as Google bot so you can bypass paywalls

Some of these are good suggestions, others not so much - unfortunately this area is rife for lots of issues such as undisclosed (or underdisclosed) sponsorship, creating content specifically to further the agendas of think tanks, and just straight up disinformation. There’s lots of criticisms of CGPGrey and Kurzgesagt for example. Just in case you weren’t aware

Yeah, for me the issue with GMOs is less with the concepts of genetic engineering and more with the legal rights. Should be impossible to copyright or patent a fucking plant, and if that means that big corporations don’t want to do it anymore then that’s absolutely fine.

No one would be so inhumane as to do a study where you mistreat a lot of dogs to see the effects.

Of course they would, and they have, and they do, animal testing on dogs is pretty common. I am absolutely opposed to it, of course, but if someone could have made some money out of it, they would have done it.

Additionally, even the RSPCA when arguing against breed restrictions accidentally reveal quite a damning statistic - of the pit bull puppies they raised, they deemed that around 70% of them were affectionate and non-aggressive enough to be suitable as family pets. That means 30% of them weren’t. I wonder what percentage of golden retriever puppies the RSPCA could raise to be suitable family pets

I really wish I could just say that this is good news, but the tragic reality is that it’s still way too slow. Stop investing in fossil fuels, for fuck’s sake.

Data were gathered via owner report using an online survey […] advertised online (via Facebook and relevant dog/breed specific groups, Twitter, pet fora, via the UK Kennel Club”

Such science, very wow