On the one hand I'm delighted that we'll soon be free of this god-awful government, and have a probably-still-crap-but-way-less-bad Labour government instead.
On the other hand the Tories are only dipping further in the polls, and more time might clarify tactical voting options for seats with no clear challengers - so the later the election the worse their likely result. And they deserve oblivion.
I believe that only the U.S. and Australia permit pharmaceutical ads on television. I don't care what they do Down Under in this regard, but these endless repetitive disgusting med ads should be banned from U.S. television just as cigarette ads were many decades ago.
@lauren I think OTC is legal most places, we have adverts for things like ibuprofen or antacids here in the UK but not the prescription med ads you all have.
@noelreports I'm not on it, my interest in it waned when Masto took off (to the extent it has) and I never did the follow up to get an early invite even though I'd been on the waiting list for ages.
I guess I thought Twitter had already got pretty bad long before Musk took over so something involving Dorsey wasn't that appealing.
Will probably give it a whirl if it has a decent public launch but I expect it'll look pretty bad vs here or how Twitter was.
The fediverse is def no pre-musk twitter because it's damn near impossible to find on the ground accounts regarding what's going on in Israel/Palestine.
@BlackAzizAnansi yeah. I think Masto has a potential beyond anything Twitter had but it's definitely not achieving what that site did at its peak.
The relative difficulty of finding breaking news and the individuals who know what they're on about when it happens is a big part of that.
Personally I'd argue Twitter went off the boil a long time before Musk though, that was "just" out of the frying pan and into the fire. Part of why I'm not mad on BlueSky.
Russia's new high school geography textbooks have relabeled North and South America as "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Latin America." https://t.me/eschulmann/5917?single
@kevinrothrock I've got my scepticism about where they've marked the burghs but I'm sure the Anglo-Saxons in North America are glad to have so much distance from the Danes.
Hopefully it'll be a long time before they need to raise the third and fight off the raiders, shieldwall to shieldwall. Praise Wodin.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that the Hungarian government plans to switch the Paks Nuclear Power Plant from Russian to French nuclear fuel in the future.
Recommended follow list for Ukraine war on Mastodon
Here are my recommendations for coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Only accounts active recently and you can easily import them from a file. They are split into two different lists by type.
Ukraine: OSINT & war updates
This list mostly has accounts posting quickly about daily events of the war and doing open source intelligence.
The import file relies on the List import feature recently added to Mastodon. I have noticed the list import results in a few accounts sometimes ending up in their separate list by the same name so you may have to fix that manually afterwards if this happens on your instance. If many people are on an older Mastodon version and want it I can also post a follows file that will work for those.
Import instructions:
Sign into your instance on the web
go to settings (Gear icon)
Choose Import and Export -> Import
For import type choose "Lists" (could also be "Translation missing: en.imports.types.lists" if there is an issue with the localization).
Select "merge" to only add to your current follows/lists so nothing you have gets deleted
@73ms cheers for this. Ukraine coverage (solely from accounts I know) and polling/election stuff are the two big topics where I still need to go to the other place for, via Nitter.
Having more Fedi options is very welcome! Especially accounts that post the same on both platforms or primarily here.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace has resigned. Sky news reports that probably today Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will introduce Wallace's successors.
I know Wallace made a really daft comment once, and he doesn't have a great rep outside defence, but he was genuinely good and well respected in that role.