Now I’ve got a week off to gather myself a bit, but I’ve been bat-signalled back to my native trade union: home with my fellow nerds, and among the shades of my literal ancestors… and at SUCH a time for union-building & intelligence!
I have been a published writer since I was 17, and never in all those years have I encountered worse editorial suggestions than the automated ones generated by Microsoft Office365.
Yes, buy better if you can. Waste less if you can. Buy less as a consequence.
But watch where you point your sanctimony.
Patrick Grant is gunning for the businesses taking advantage, but risks a ricochet onto people who really don’t have as much choice as some moralists imagine.
If you only have £20 to buy shoes, you have no choice but to buy something cheap, even if it’s almost disposable.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and <i>would still have wet feet.</i>"
Unite (the union) is lobbying Labour to row back on pledge of no new North Sea oil & gas licenses…
Genuinely interested to hear what people think of this…
I trained in climate science, and now work for a union (formerly and soon to be back in an energy sector union), so I have very strong and possibly conflicting views on the subject!
@drandrewv2 The bottom line is, it has to happen. The alternative is either unacceptable or it's a fatalistic "We're all screwed anyway so why should we sacrifice?"
That being the case, the people who we're asking to make the sacrifice (the oil and gas industry workers) deserve support from the rest of us. I don't know what shape that takes, but we definitely owe it to them.
@Jethrotombs@drandrewv2 I was looking for that too, thank you! Was bizarre to me that the BBC mentioned his lawyers were crowdfunding but didn't provide a link.
@drandrewv2@Jethrotombs Yeah, I wondered if it might be that. Kind of felt like it was a relevant link to something mentioned in the story though and therefore reporting it was apolitical.
(I'm aware that the government doesn't think this way and therefore the BBC can't either. ;-) )
4 years ago, an exec for a top PPE producer testified to Congress that in Jan 2020 (as fear of covid began to spread) his firm offered to ramp up production to make 1.7 million N95 masks available to the public per week.
@rbreich I'm no Trump fan, but in this instance I'd offer up us in the UK as a counterexample. We said yes to everyone who was mates with a Tory MP offering to sell us PPE (and ignored those who weren't) and literally ended up with the guy who ran the health secretary's local pub getting a giant government contract. Billions of pounds spent on PPE that was unusable and simply burned.
Needed to take opportunities, yes. But also to have a process that worked.
@GeePawHill I (mostly) got past the fear of presenting when I realised that almost by definition I know more about what I'm giving the talk about than anyone else in the room, and the people that's not true of are mostly on my side.
I guess there are presentations where that's not the case, but I haven't had to give any of those and I figure if I do I'll still know enough about the subject to argue about it. ;-)
So, here’s some personal and professional news… I’m going to be leaving my job pretty soon. 😬
It’s a bit of a wrench, because this job has been a big and exciting thing, for lots of reasons. But, you know, I have been having a shit of a time with the old #CFS and #POTS lately, and…
@cstross Are they playing us for fools if the whole time we're shouting that it's a scam that was never meant to work? It's not like that hasn't been obvious from the beginning. That surely makes it less of a con and more of an armed robbery...
My PC has just told me that it can't run Windows 11, but that Windows 10 will be out of support from October 2025. I have news for you Microsoft, I don't have a spare £1k (or even half that) for a new gaming rig just because you don't like mine. It'll be Linux for me if you force me.
@theron29 Well, it's quite a long way away, maybe they'll change it if they realise they're forcing a lot of customers to try the competition. I'd be on Linux anyway if it was better for gaming, so it could well be time to try it again.