frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

My personal, anecdotal experience is that the best charities to donate to are the ones that clearly communicate what their goals are, can demonstrate the good their work does, and are transparent about how they spend their money. I find it tends to be smaller charities that are more effective at this, because their narrower focus means they can explain what they do more succinctly. A charity that says "we rescue all the orphaned seal pups in this geographic area, and it costs £X to rescue, rehabilitate and release one seal" is much clearer about where your money goes than "we help alleviate poverty" without any explanation of who's being helped when, where, or how (if at all. Far too many charities just spend donations on advertising for donations.)

Don't get caught up in promises of vague, non-specific goals. While it might seem like "ending poverty" or "world peace" are the best things to donate to, these are often rather abstract goals that may not even be achievable. The "small stuff" is less grand, less eye-catching, but it's actually these small acts of good, often on a local level, that will actually make the world a better place. Do consider your local charities, the ones who are working directly in your community: that might be your local food bank, hospice care for the dying, wildlife rescue, habitat restoration, keeping the library open, etc. Look for the charities where you can clearly say "yes, the place I live in will be better, and the people in my community will be happier, if this charity succeeds in their goal."

A lot of people will say "don't donate to animals/environment when there are so many humans that need help", and I would urge you not to listen to them. A charity that spends all of your donation on helping hedgehogs or cleaning up litter is doing more good than a charity that says it's helping children in poverty but is actually spending almost everything on advertising. A good charity will be able to demonstrate the positive impact it's having on the world, regardless of whether it's helping children, adults, animals, or the environment.

I stand by my belief that victim blaming isn't helpful, and it's not laziness. A lot of people don't have extensive knowledge of technology and are too ground down by working multiple low-paid jobs just to afford food and rent to spend time searching for the best internet browser. People cannot make rational choices when they're exhausted and afraid.

In both cases, people have to both know that other options exist and know where to find them, because they're not available as a default option. People don't actively research browsers and choose one from an ad company. They use the browser their device comes with. Likewise, with ebooks, they buy a device to read ebooks on and then use the ebook shop the device points them towards (most obvious example, if they've bought a Kindle, they're going to use Amazon's shop that is accessible from the Kindle). Choosing the alternative option requires knowing the other options exist and then devoting the time to finding and using them. The good options in both cases greater time investment.

I'd count having to learn how to use a more technologically complex option as being more time-intensive, personally. Anyone can learn to use a more complicated option, but they need the time and mental resources to learn how to do it. And yeah, as you say, a lot of things are legitimately technical skills, and even reasonably tech-savvy individuals can end up out of their depth in some of the more complicated spaces in the internet. Recently I've been switching some things I use over to open source alternatives, and the number of options that look like they're better than the convenient proprietary ones but which come with no or utterly arcane instructions for how to use them (or even just install them) is very high. I'm pretty sure I could figure it out for myself if I had enough time, because I'm very much in the "poke buttons to see what happens" camp when it comes to tech. But I genuinely just don't have the time, and in the absence of more user-friendly good options, the bad options that have a shallower learning curve are more accessible.

If we had made the right choice instead of convenience, we wouldn’t be paying so much to rent seekers.

The right choices are generally more expensive (in terms of up-front costs, even if they're less expensive in the long run) and/or require more time investment, both of which are lacking for the poor. The appeal of convenience is that a decision can be made quickly, allowing the person to mentally tick off that problem as dealt with and move on to other problems. The rent seekers want people to be poor, in precarious living situations, so that they're less capable of making good decisions. It's not helpful to blame the victims of a system that's rigged against them.

The quickest and simplest way of doing it is to simply regulate for all assets to be valued/revalued and tax paid appropriately any time it changes ownership, and "changes of ownership" is given a definition that includes a corporation giving it to the CEO, a CEO moving it to a trust or holding company, etc. It would do away with the bullshit "our CEO doesn't get paid" when really he got millions in stock options instead. The stock options changed hands, therefore they have to be professionally and independently valued, and then taxed.

If you ever get a chance to use the train heading into the south west (the Paddington to Penzance route), I recommend it for one solid reason: the view on the Exeter to Newton Abbott stretch is absolutely phenomenal. It's worth seeing at least once. :)

I think public transport can end up in a vicious circle. It gets cut so it's less convenient, so less people use it, which leads to companies and governments saying "well nobody is using this, why are we spending money on it?" so it gets cut further, so fewer people use it, and so on. They miss the fact that they need to spend more on it so it's more convenient.

Our PM is definitely not surviving the next election (which will be happening in 10 months maximum, and there are pervasive rumours it'll be scheduled for 9 weeks time, to coincide with local government elections). I've been watching the polls closely for the last year or so, and both Sunak's personal ratings and that of the Conservative party are abysmal. The main opposition party, Labour, are not terribly inspirational right now, but their ties to the unions (including both rail unions) are pretty strong, and one of their policies (that they haven't yet U-turned on, AFAIK) is taking the rail companies back into public ownership as the contracts expire.

I actually think even the Conservatives would struggle to abolish the railways, anyway, even if they win the next election. Far too many of the elderly they need to vote for them rely on public transport, as do a lot of the middle and upper middle professional workers in the south east.

The railways in the UK are definitely better around the cities. Both the overground and underground trains in London are incredible, and getting to cities in the south east and around the midlands is decently quick. But it slows right down the more rural you get, where it's no faster than going by car and is significantly more expensive. If I drove from here to London (about 250 miles), in my car it'd be about a half a tank of fuel (£35-£40). Doing the same journey by train takes the same time, but costs double. I do it anyway, because the thought of driving on the M25 fills me with dread, but the train is often a hellish experience. Better enforcement of rules would help (noisy people not permitted in the quiet car, children not permitted to run rampant, etc).

Brit here. They didn't rip out our rail system, they just privatised it. Due to the overwhelming need for shareholder profits and dividends, all the money the newly privatised rail companies made went into paying shareholders rather than investment in infrastructure. Meanwhile, the buses are technically local government funded, but run by private companies, who cut routes that aren't profitable. In rural areas, this is most of them - my village gets a bus once every 90 minutes now, which is not often enough to encourage usage when a car allows you to drive into the town, do your shopping, and then be home again in less time than that.

You know what was actually gamechanging last year? My village got it's own grocery shop! It is now possible to walk to a shop to buy food! And I think that is ultimately going to be the solution to reducing reliance on cars: set up services in the places people live, then they won't need to use a car as often. The 15-minute city principle works in rural areas too!

I don’t know if the default Windows photo viewer itself does any of the editing stuff anymore.

It does, and it's also available on Windows 10. Pretty sure I also have it on my Windows 11 laptop. I use it fairly regularly when all I'm doing is simple stuff like rotating or cropping, because it's quicker than opening Photoshop.

In Windows, the built-in Photos program(?) does most of what you want. Literally go to the folder where the images are, right click, choose "Open with" and then "Photos". It'll open the image in a very, very simple image viewer, where you can move back and forth between images in the same folder, and it has options for rotating, cropping, editing brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. The only thing missing is a mirror image option.

I use Photos pretty regularly, if all I need to do is crop or rotate an image, because its integration into Windows means it's significantly faster than opening a proper image editor. It's also really good for reviewing a whole batch of photos, as again its integration into Windows means you can delete an unwanted image within Photos and it'll remove it from the folder as well.

It's not open source, so maybe not quite what you're looking for, but it's definitely completely free and already part of Windows.

Republicans don't think those are birthrights either, because they don't care about anyone after they've been born. They wouldn't care about foetuses either if they had to be fed and housed.

'Is money a birthright now?'

If it's not, then logically a 100% inheritance tax must be imposed. After all, nobody is entitled to money just for being born, right?

If I run into a problem, there is no way I will be creating an account on Discord to get help. It might not be worth the time and effort. A searchable forum is good enough.

I use Discord, but I actually agree with this. It's a really good platform for small groups of people to communicate with each other - for example, we have one for my class at university, which allows us to keep in contact about assignments, projects, deadlines, etc. What I don't want to do is join a Discord server for every single game or piece of software I need help with. It's just not a great platform for having hundreds or thousands of people trying to get help, often asking the same questions over and over, while the community regulars are chatting about their personal lives.

Searchable forums, website-based FAQs and help files, or any other option that makes help accessible without having to download new software or sign up for new accounts, are the most suitable options for making help available.

I read the article. Apparently it only really works with hard water - that's water with a high concentration of calcium carbonate. At high temperatures, the calcium carbonate becomes a solid, trapping the microplastics inside it, which is then removed from the water with a regular filter.

I don't even have that problem, since the computers around my house use various versions of Windows. So it's not like a lack of OS-native drivers is the issue. It's just not a very good printer.

My experience is generally that the drivers and software for HP is better, but the hardware and value for money is better with Brother. That said, I also have to give a thumbs up to the third party ink supplier I've been using for the HP printer (which I bought because I needed colour printing for the pre-degree course I did last year), who replaced all of my cartridges free of charge after a firmware update snuck in even with auto-update turned off.

Personally I was rather disappointed with my Brother laser printer. Hardware wise, sure, it's still going after a long time and is still on its first toner cartridge. Software wise, I can't recommend it. Will not print without first running a printer troubleshooting process on the computer. At least I have a workaround that works 90% of the time, but a printer that will only wake from deep sleep mode when the troubleshooter forces it to isn't a printer I'd recommend.

Not that I have any better suggestions. Every printer I've ever owned has sucked in at least one way. For some reason no manufacturer has ever succeeded in creating a printer that isn't evil.

I'll second the suggestion of Secretlab. Pretty sure mine was in the £400ish price range, and it's really nice for gaming.

Go part of the way through purchasing one, and then close the tab. Within a day or two you'll probably have a discount coupon. It's my favourite trick for buying expensive stuff.

If he's living in it as well, it could just as easily become a death trap for him.

He thinks he knows how to build a colony on Mars better than anyone. He hasn't considered that maybe there are good reasons why it hasn't been done yet. His first colony will be a death trap.