my_hat_stinks

Driving dangerously is generally illegal everywhere else. As someone not in the US, the first time I heard that ridiculous law exists I thought it was a joke. Especially when I found out it was just a scheme to save fuel at the expense of every other road user and especially pedestrians. Insanity.

You’re upset that people aren’t risking lives to save you a few seconds. You’re not exactly the good guy here.

This is validation seeking, not a legitimate question.

The vast majority of people do speak English in some form, but England isn’t exclusively English either. Nearly 1 in 10 people resident in England and Wales didn’t list English or Welsh as their main language in a 2021 census.

Depending on how you count you can get 12 or more indigenous languages in the UK, at least 7 of which are commonly recognised (English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, Scots Gealic, Cornish, BSL). Scotland has 4 official languages, Wales has 2, Northern Ireland’s official language is Irish and notably not English, and England has no official language. Then there’s the non-indigenous languages like Polish and Punjabi, there’s enough speakers using those are their main language to be notable.

Easy; don’t give credit to billionaires for things they’ve only made worse. I’m not sure why you need my help to not spread misinformation?

No, I’m arguing against direct quotes from you. Unless you yourself are a strawman.

Post about it on the internet built upon tech enabled by the said class

Built by academics to share research, expanded by hobbyists and enthusiasts, and taken over by megacorps. Not “enabled” by billionaires.

, from devices sold to us by the said class

Technically true, but only in that billionaires own the workers.

, in our homes with comforts the existence of which wouldn’t be possible without the said class.

Untrue. People can live in comfort without the existence of billionaires.

Then go to work using infrastructure and means we wouldn’t have without the said class,

Untrue. This is what your taxes pay for. Transit infrastructure exists without billionaires. Even in the US, notoriously a horrible place to travel, public transit infrastructure was good until billionaires lobbied against good infrastructure so they could sell more cars. Car infrastructure costs you more than public transit.

likely doing work we wouldn’t have without the said class.

Possibly true in very specific cases where your work provides value only to billionaires. If your work provides value in any other way (eg providing services or goods), this is likely not true.

Perhaps go buy some food the likes of which we couldn’t dream of having access to without the said class.

I am fully certain you don’t really believe good food only exists because of billionaires. Has there ever been a civilization of any kind which hasn’t had chefs of some description?

Maybe indulge in a hobby - a leisurely distraction, the kind that only exists because the said class engineered a world where you have time and resources to waste on frivolity, while they decide what those resources are.

Hobbies have always existed. You have time and resources to spare because of unions, not billionaires.

You credited all of these things to billionaires. None of these things exist because of billionaires.

There is no paradox. Thing exists. Billionaire takes over thing. Billionaire ruins thing. Billionaire did not cause thing to exist.

You said these things “wouldn’t be possible” and “wouldn’t exist” without billionaires. This is objectively untrue. Without billionaires these things would be significantly better. I specifically pointed out your mention of infrastructure because that one’s so blatantly obvious unless you’ve only ever experienced car-centric infrastructure.

Are you not aware of how, for example, car lobbies destroyed public infrastructure in an attempt to make everything car dependant to sell more cars? Claiming any of these things only exist because of billionaires is absurd. They take over and destroy.

I think the issue you’re having is that you’re treating them as categories and subcategories, like most things it’s never that clean. It makes much more sense if you treat them as unordered tags. Arcade isn’t a subcategory of tennis.

Say for instance you had a multiplayer racing simulator game, you could categorise that as multiplayer > racing > sim, but if you have a similar singleplayer game you have single player > racing > sim so clearly those aren’t just subcategories of single/multiplayer.
You could try sim > racing > multiplayer, but what about your city building sims? Now it’s your middle category that didn’t work right.

If they’re independent tags sim, racing, multiplayer you can change any one of them independently. If any one tag changes that changes how the game is played.

Yes, but only if they’ve moved in together

The 50s were 70 years ago, things that were new and interesting then are not new and interesting now. It’s unremarkable to you because you have 70 years of people building on top of it.

It’s also potatoes.

A couple of years back I was at a wedding and ended up talking to a cop, they were telling us as if it was a good thing how they send out helicopters to catch people underage drinking in parks. Completely absurd and far more of a nuisance than people having a drink.

They also bragged about how their dog handler sicced a dog on a suspect and just let them get mauled, then everyone pretended they didn’t see anything happen. Straight-up gloating about police brutality. The job just does not attract well-adjusted people.

I think Santa might have overreacted, they just wanted to be able to insure their heath!

According to this article freefall speed is anywhere from 120mph to 200mph for a human depending on position, that’s roughly 190-320km/h. The radius of Earth is 6,371 km so you’d be traveling one Earth every 40-60 hours. In 80 years you’d cover between 133 and 224 million kilometers (82-139 million miles), traveling an entire Earth 28 to 47 million times. Interestingly this is still only roughly 10% the radius of the solar system, but it would get you to the moon and back 173 - 291 times. Space is big.

With the parachute open obviously you’re a little slower, this article says 16-32 km/h. That’s close enough we can just divide the other estimates by 10, so you’d travel about 13-22 million km (8-14 million miles) or 1% the radius of the solar system.

There’s a very good chance these numbers are a bit off, rough calculations that I didn’t bother to double-check.

I had to contact Spotify support recently because they pushed an update which broke their Linux client, had to go through a “live chat” with a useless bot before being put through to a human. That human dumped the error and explanation I gave them into an LLM and just pasted that output to pretend they knew what was happening, then spent an hour ignoring that entirely and asking nonesense questions supposedly to identify the issue which was already clearly identified. Their only recommendation was to post on the community forums (wtf?), unsurprisingly nearly a week later it’s still broken. Last time I had to post on the community forums was two years ago for a regression bug raised two years before then, no attempt has been made to fix that one either but at least that doesn’t literally prevent you from using the service.

Not quite as bad as when I spent months calling my energy company because they tried to fraudulently charge over £2,000 (I forget the exact numbers) to my account after I called about a nonsense bill (turns out they were trying to get me to pay my neighbor’s bill?). They made absolutely no attempt to fix that. Unsurprisingly everything was fixed instantly when they took long enough that I could escalate to a legal issue. They didn’t get fined nearly enough for that one, they’re definitely stealing from other people in the same way.

Before that it was Microsoft, there was some issue with my Windows installation and their solution was to wipe my entire drive including all my data.

In my experience customer service lines aren’t there to help you, they’re there to piss you off as much as possible so you stop using their product or service. I have honestly no idea why companies choose to pay for that but it does explain why they’re happy to use LLMs; they could not care less about actually helping customers.

I suppose I should bring up some positive stories about customer service lines but there really isn’t that many. When I was young Steam support once helped me regain access to an account I’d locked myself out of, that was nice. From what I’ve heard Steam support isn’t great any more either though.

Most people think they’re middle class and it’s easy to punch down, that’s really all there is to it.

When I was young I remember asking my parents “are we rich or poor?” and I was told we were middle class, it stands out because at the time I didn’t know what that meant. Looking back we were absolutely working class. We were in one of the worst parts of the city and literally just the corner was a street well known for gang violence and crime. The one time I called the cops after being attacked there when they arrived they made sure they were parked in view of security cameras and even called to have sure the cameras were on then and working. Also the only “help” they have was telling me to do it because it wasn’t worth the effort.
We were only slightly better off than everyone else living there, we actually owned our home when many of them were in council housing.

Fly’s graveyard?

You have to pay for health insurance? When I heard US residents had to get insurance through their work I assumed employers would actually provide the insurance, not just give you the chance to pay for it yourself… We have free healthcare here and my employer still for some reason provides us with free health and dental insurance.

You guys need a revolution. You’re getting charged more because that’s what you as a country allow them to do.

Brine pools, it’s much saltier water which doesn’t mix with the water around it.

The employer must offer a minimum of 28 days for full time workers but bank holidays and other company shutdowns can count towards that. It’s a bit more flexible that way, it means it doesn’t matter which public holidays (if any) your company observes everyone gets the same minimum time off. It also allows situations like my company where our only UK office is in Scotland but UK employees still follow English holidays instead.