frog 🐸

Having flicked through a few spots in the video, and being British, my conclusion is this:

Britain has got some major problems, many of which there is a lack of political will to fix, to the point that I could identify the general subject of many sections of this video just by the title on the timestamps. But the video is still pretty rubbish and overly sensationalised, with some of the opinions presented (smoking bans being bad, switching to an American style insurance-based healthcare being a good idea) are just straight up idiotic.

True, if it’s somewhere nice, maybe everybody should protest.

I’d love to know the stats on the demographics of the pro-Palestinian protestors. Exactly how many American citizens is Trump proposing randomly dumping in another country because he doesn’t like what they’re saying?

I disagree. Neoliberalism turbo-charged all of the problems with capitalism, by encouraging the “everyone out for themselves, dog eat dog world” mentality.

A good economy serves the needs of the people. As soon as you have a situation where people are effectively ground into paste to feed the economy, it’s not a good economy.

Yep. An awful lot has to go badly wrong in an economy before rich people start feeling it, and that’s the only point they start caring.

Hence why I said “it appears to be due to Biden’s mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism”. He didn’t create the situation and he’s tried to combat it, but there is so much more he could have done, given that the underlying problem is neoliberalism.

People will stop believing a country is in recession when it starts to feel like they can actually afford to do the things they want to do, like live in a home and eat food once in a while. They are incorrect to believe that it’s a recession causing their current dire circumstances, but they’re entirely correct to believe that something is amiss when they’re just barely keeping themselves alive. It appears to be due to Biden’s mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism, which is how things have been mismanaged for the last 40 years or so.

Railways and public transport are grouped under infrastructure because even if climate change was not an issue, public transport is infrastructure that’s good for people and the economy. There’s plenty of statistics to support the idea that good public transport infrastructure has a wide range of benefits, including improved economic growth, that pre-dates climate change by decades, and will still be the case long after climate change is fixed. The Victorians didn’t build railway lines all over Europe because trains are better for the climate than cars. :)

It probably helped that Susan Hall is deranged, and the UK as a whole prefers its politicians as close to the centre as possible, rejecting extremes on both ends.

Just to play Devil’s advocate here… The US takes that approach to guns inside its own borders, expecting that asking nicely is enough to stop people shooting up schools. So it would be kinda hypocritical for the US to hold Israel to different standards. Guns are America’s real religion.

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?

Well, they did specify that the facial recognition software was there to activate the purchasing interface, rather than to advertise the machine’s contents, so I’m not inclined to cut them some slack if the real motivation was to show adverts to people when they’re claiming it needs to recognise faces because otherwise no one can purchase anything. (Why can’t the purchase interface be activated all the time, rather than requiring sight of a face? Do they think someone other than human beings is going to try to buy something? Is there a widespread problem with squirrels and pigeons buying from vending machines, which requires machines to know when it’s a person trying to buy something?)

Exactly. Vending machines have never needed complex ways of detecting when a customer is ready to buy something, because there’s really no need for anything beyond having a button available for customers to communicate to the machine “I’d like to buy something”. What it sounds like to me is they’re using the facial recognition technology to track the demographics of who buys what and how often. Do men like X snack more than Y? Do women buy more in the morning or afternoon? Stuff like that.

The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

This sounds like an excuse to me. I’m a university student in the UK. Our vending machines use a very effective means of letting the machine know we’re ready to buy something without using any facial recognition software at all. What we do, right, is press the letter and number buttons that match up to what we want to buy. The machine says how much money the item costs, and then we tap our bank/credit cards to the contactless card reader, just like we would in any other shop. Then the machine dispenses the item.

It’s really, really clever how they’ve invented this way for us to purchase afternoon snacks to help us cope with how annoying our classmates are, and we don’t even have to have our faces scanned! Truly the kind of innovative technology you’d expect to find in a university.

The mass application boom is so annoying.

Speaking for the UK, this is a requirement to receive unemployment benefits. You have to prove you’re actively seeking a job for a minimum of 35 hours per week, and you’re not considered to be “looking hard enough” if you’re not applying for every single job that you could realistically travel to, no matter how unsuitable you are for the job. If there’s a hospital 5 minutes walk from your house that are recruiting a surgeon, someone on unemployment would be expected to apply despite having zero suitable qualifications. If they don’t, they get sanctioned, which means they don’t receive enough social security to pay their rent and/or food and/or power.

That image haunts me. I can only assume this paper got through peer review because the reviewers saw that image and went mad, like all those who have witnessed eldritch monstrosities.

That doesn’t mean that the parents’ concerns about how so much isolation would impact their childrens’ mental, emotional, social and academic development weren’t valid, though. In fact, it’s pretty obvious at this point that many children were adversely affected, many in ways that will impact them for the rest of their lives. It is definitely not a given that the people that joined Moms for Liberty because they were worried about their children being so isolated during critical stages of development are also Covid deniers and bigots.

That was not known at the time, though. What was known was that children were at a much lower risk of dying (and of getting seriously ill), and there were plenty of parents who had very valid concerns about the impact on their children. What we’re going to see over the next 20-30 years is an awful lot of children growing up with severely stunted social and emotional development, which was a much more foreseeable outcome of Covid restrictions in schools than long Covid.

I’m not saying having restrictions was right or wrong. There was probably an ideal balance in there somewhere, but given the situation, it would have been a damned miracle if anyone had figured out what it was. What I’m saying is that the parents with entirely valid concerns about how the restrictions affected their childrens’ development were not necessarily Covid deniers, and are certainly not necessarily bigots.