I do this on my intranet with home assistant, looks like I flew just under the radar

Just wanted to say I’m loving these posts, thanks for writing them

I think you mean lods of emone?

https://youtu.be/ULeDlxa3gyc

I remember that the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK was a lab accident, procedure failed and a lot of bovine were culled and some people died in truly horific ways.

I don’t understand why it’s so political to say that it’s likely that covid may have had a similar start. It happens, it’s terrible, it’s not helpful when you’re directly fighting it to focus your energy on blame but if this was a lab leak, shouldn’t we now be focused on tightening regulations on bio-experimentaion in order to reduce the risk of this occurring again? Global treaties on how to approach such research, share procedure to keep everyone safe.

I’ve made my peace with this. I cried a bit playing through thr anniversary edition and reflected on what could’ve been. I think I’m ok with there never being anything more, I would welcome a book or a comic though.

I thoroughly enjoyed black mesa but I don’t think it improved the game. I think it’s a pretty unbalanced experience with a lot of the original atmosphere replaced with pretty textures. I also think the xen levels were extremely unfaithful to the original and devoid of a lot of the original meaning, but again visually stunning.

I don’t think it’s a controversial take to say that people who are struggling are easy prey for extremist ideology. I can happily link a handful of articles that describe why those in lower economic positions tend to be easily swayed to populist right wing ideas. And I absolutely do see them as victims, I see most people as victims in some way shape or form. After WW2 we had an extremely wide distribution of wealth, the lower classes had homes and some core assets, the middle class had one or more homes and some luxuries, and the upper class had additional land and the best of the best. Over time the ability to get even meager assets has become harder and harder, to the point where the lower class has almost no assets to speak of, and what little the middle class has left is draining directly to the ultra-wealthy. We are all victims of circumstance in this manor, and the system is failing to address this.

I strongly disagree with the focus on individualism, especially when we’re dealing with large groups of people. On a case by case basis, sure, at the end of the day someone may make a conscious choice to engage with something, but to only hyper-focus on that while disregarding the view from only a few steps back? That’s the naive bit. I can find their views reprehensible and look at their choices with disdain, but I don’t think that should be the end of the analysis.

I do not advocate for violent rioting, but to say it doesn’t encourage people to listen to you I think is just wrong. Look back through history, the Civil Rights movement was nonviolent at its core but the presence of the Black Panther Party utilized armed self-defence to keep the police at bay, the threat of violence was the deterrent. The stonewall riots where queer individuals resisting police brutality sparked the birth of the pride movement, it was only the retaliation against the arrests and beatings the police performed that allowed for gay rights to no longer be ignored. The Suffragette movement in the UK set fire to post boxes and sabotaged local businesses. Even more blatant examples like the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa led by Nelson Mandela, although again like the Civil Rights movement was at its core non-violent, they didn’t renounce any of the violence until negotiations were well underway.

So violence is absolutely a tool in a huge number of successful political movements. This is why I think we should be careful about dismissing it, and rather than just shunning them, forcing them deeper into their hatred, we should unify against a common target that would benefit all, and that is the ultra-wealthy that keep us divided on these lines. If we can’t unite on common ground, then I don’t think we’ll ever see change, we’ll just be kept in a state of hating each other as our quality of living slowly deteriorates.

That’s an extremely bad faith interpretation of what I said. It’s the exact opposite of what I’m saying, and I’m unsure if this is an elaborate troll/gotcha, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant no ill-will.

My entire point is that focusing on the symptom, in this case the the rioting and the racism, is short sighted and is prone to create reactionary takes that dismiss the concerns that lie beneath. That dismissal will only further antagonize and drive people further towards populist movements, and I don’t think that’s the smart thing to do. We should not be driving people towards these movements, but rather offering them a tangible and real way to alleviate the root cause of their discontent, catch it before a populist preys upon it.

“A riot is the language of the unheard” - Martin Luther King Jr

I’d advocate for getting one. Last year 70% of my gaming was on the deck, it really has shifted my attitude towards gaming.

I think it’s a mistake to handwave general anger and discontent from citizens and to put the entire blame on the symptom.

Where are all the far right groups being organised? Is it in the wealthier areas where people are able to live? Or is it in the regions that are being hardest hit by austerity? Right wing groups latch onto anger that people have due to their quality of live deteriorating. They divert the anger towards their own populist agenda, and people will fall for it as it feels tangible and achievable, even if it won’t do a god damn thing. Crumbling infrastructure? Must be the migrants who are also using that infrastructure. Oh the building was sold off to a foreign investment firm? Oh the employees who maintained that infrastructure are now paying exorbitant rates for housing? Nah, that’s far too complex of a problem to tackle.

Wealth inequality will continue to grow, and the government isn’t doing anything to truly tackle it. To think that anti-immigration sentiment exists entirely in a vacuum is naive and I think extremely dangerous, as you risk alienating those who are being hit hardest by this inequality. This will only get worse, and you can’t bury your head in the sand forever.

Don’t worry scro’

Lamenting the raising of prices is absolutely fair, but every industry goes through this. I cycle a lot, and there’s a strong base of people that are deeply upset at the cost of the bikes the pros are using. It used to be that almost anyone could buy the model bike that won the Tour de France, where they’d go for £1,200-1,500, full spec and all. Now Pogačar’s Colnago V4Rs cost $8,215 for the base model, likely closer to $12,000 for a fully spec’d version. I just think that this is happening everywhere as things get more and more optimized. You have to dig deeper and deeper to eek out those gains.

Think of the sheer amount of time, effort, and hardware that goes into AI features and such. Upscaling and frame generation need a lot of data to be processed to make it viable, and the cost of the cards will have to offset this research cost.

The only thing that maybe leans towards it being somewhat greed driven was the audio edits they made in their presentation, but again, I still just don’t think that’s enough to say “this is greed” or not. Is selling at a profit at all “greedy”?

I can’t find anything about the cost for them to produce each unit, ya got some inside info you wanna share?

Yeah, the Toro Rosso livery was the only interesting thing to come out of the entire show

There was, but now I’m getting older and more tired

How do you even deal with wage compression? It feels like it’s ingrained socially at this point, people just seem willing to accept that pay because there’s no alternative. I know that for public sector jobs it’s a tricky balancing act where the government can’t increase a salary for roles in 1 Civil Service grade as it may disincentivise workers in another role at the same grade. That probably hasn’t helped when highly skilled roles that require decades of experience are tiered similarly to a role that may only take 6 months of training, where that high skill role wage is being constrained by that lower skill role. Perhaps that’s had a wider effect of bringing the perceived value down? I haven’t spent any time really thinking about this though, if you have any resources on this, I’d love to give them a read/watch.

Also sorry if my comments felt like I was implying young people are lazy, that wasn’t what I was getting at at all. I think the apathy that young people feel is absolutely valid, and even workers who are in their late 50’s who have been hit by redundancy are feeling this apathy intensely as they may not see any opportunities that allows them to provide for their families due to the general outlook of things.

I don’t have that many answers, but I’ll give it a go.

I think we need to come down extremely hard on landlords, potentially crippling their income stream. They chose an investment, and all investments carry risk, the risk in this case is that too many people can’t afford housing, and the government has to step in and heavily regulate those who profiteer off of basic shelter. This would apply to anyone with rental properties, second homes, long term investment opportunities, ect.

Along side that, a shakeup to planning permission. Fuck NIMBYism, sorry but you don’t get a say when people are paying 80% of their income on the bare essentials. From the top down, mandate construction of new housing in an aggressive manor. After Thatcher absolutely fucked us by forcing the local councils to sell off their council houses with the start of austerity, we’ve been at a ludicrous deficit. I think the figure I was reading is we need to be building about 400,000 houses a year and then in 5 years time, we’ll get “close” to fixing the lack of supply that we’re faced with now

Where does this money come from for that? I dunno, I would guess borrowing like we have done. It’s risky as hell, but it’s better than the current risk where we borrow against our rise in GDP, just hoping we outpace the loan rate without any long term plan to reduce the cost of living. Failing that, a wealth tax could maybe be possible? In the tune of 0.5% or so. That would generate an insane amount of revenue, but it would risk foreign investors looking unfavorably towards the UK. It would look risky for their assets, so foreign investment may fall in a dangerous way, maybe this isn’t the best plan? I just have no idea, it’s not my area of knowledge.

I think the above could be enough to trigger an actual wealth transfer. By dramatically reducing the cost of living, people will actually have disposable income. Income that can go into buying things. Say you work selling clothing, your customers suddenly having 50% more of their paycheques to spend is like the ideal situation, now they actually have the funds to buy your wares. With that higher income, well now you can hire more staff, you can pay your staff more also. You’re not having to work to such a fine margin as economically your customers aren’t as screwed just trying to survive.

I have no idea if this is all viable to be clear, I hope that I’ve come to some solid conclusions and ideas here, I’d love to hear pushback on all of that as well as I’m sure I’ve made some wack assumptions.

I want workers to earn more, but can you really regulate the economy into being better like this?

The cost of living is insane, but the relative pay per hour of a worker competed to anywhere in Europe is already pretty high. Our current minimum wage is 25% higher than Germany, 28% higher than France, 81% for Spain, and 318% compared to somewhere lile the Czech Republic. Our economy is already stalled out, It’s already prohibitively expensive to run a company in the UK, and I don’t think making employees cost more will stimulate the economy.

Also if minimum wage rises aggressively then I think all that will happen is we’ll get a wage spiral upwards and companies will hire fewer and fewer peoeple. We saw a bit of this as we were coming out of covid as a reaction to inflation at the time. The concern is if wages do inflate quicjly, then that drivea prices higher, which results in people demanding higher wages, ect.

Tackling the actual living costs, housing, utility, food, I think that’s the only way to go about this. Anything like a minimum wage increase just rolls the snowball down the road, and it will 100% be bigger when you reach it again.

I was similar but stopped watching the wan show when every episode became a product showcase for their merch. Real shame, I feel Luke’s a weight keeping Linus somewhat grounded.