That’s such an interesting statement.

Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.

Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.

The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.

The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).

All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.

During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.

Trust in authoritative figures (for example, actual Journalists) was burned for political gains by mainstream parties and their billionaire owners (and by “owners” I mean of both the Media and the Parties) since at least the 80s - the essence of Neoliberalist propaganda was to use convoluted half-truths, purposeful misinterpretation and information flow control (mainly cherry-picking) to deceive people into supporting that which wasn’t actually good for most of them in the medium and long term (who can forget things like “trickle down”?) and the increasing disconnect between what people were told and what they saw happen and felt, ground away the trust people had in those autoritative sources of information (and in lots of other things: trust in experts as autoritative sources of information and interpretation in their own expert areas was also ground away quite likely due to how that Neoliberal propaganda also made heavy use of technocratic speaking “experts” - notice how even the trust on medical doctors for health-related things, such as mask wearing during COVID, was clearly lacking).

Almost everybody can be deceived about things they have no expertise on, but at some point in the past at least many if not most of those people were in some way anchored to objective-reality (-ish) by trustworthy sources of information and interpretation, and that’s not the case anymore because that trust was sistematically abused during at least 4 decades.

In the US both the Democrats and the Republicans were doing it with gusto, so the rise of populists like Trump is really just the reaping of a crop which both those parties sowed.

All this to say that blaming humans for being human rather than everybody that took and takes advantage of that, is at best naive and at worst being a bit of an useful idiot (for still falling for the swindle of excusing the very politicians who put us were we are now).

I use “New” or even “Neue” to distinguish the Nazis that claim to represent Jews and are genocidal towards Arabs, from the Nazis who claimed to represent Arians and were genocidal towards Jews (and Roma, though “curiously” here in the West almost nobody mentions those).

Because the etnicity targetted by one group of Nazis is the “dominant” etnicity of the other, if I don’t do this some people confuse my anti-Zionist point with being pro-Zionist, especially given that the Zionists themselves will use Nazi as a form of slander against people who criticize them.

Pour encourager les autres

It’s not as if Israel or its leaders have to fear suffering any kind of consequences from France on this, whose posture has been nothing more than mild talkie-talkie and who even refuse to abide by an Arrest Warrant from the ICC on Netanyahu (a very obvious wink-and-nod from Macron to the New Nazis in Israel).

With mainly Collaborator politicians in the various governments in Europe (notable exceptions being those in Spain and the Republic Of Ireland), it’s open season for Mossad to murder Europeans in Europe at will.

That’s an absolutelly natural consequence from in practice condoning and even protecting Nazis going full-on Genocidal and they lose all fear of consequences.

The very same people whose Election Campaign Strategy was “Not voting for us is the same as voting for a guy who will round up Transexuals and put them in concentration camps whilst turning America into the Fourth Reich” rather than, you know, actually having a list of measures to make life better for most people, have continued with the hyperbolic alarmism so as to keep their supporters enraged against the “other” lest they stop, think, and figure out that the Democrat Leaders could have done way more than they did to appeal to voters and hence have a large slice, maybe even most, of the blame for Trump getting elected again.

The reality is that people mostly have to wait and see, since there are a lot of ways to stop or at least undermine the most autocratic Republican tendencies, plus the most intelligent Republicans (i.e. the sociopaths at the top of the party doing it for their own personal upside maximization rather than the “true believer” useful idiots) are well aware that the system only works as well as it does (i.e. from their point of view, only produces maximum wealth for their wealthy patrons and hence they themselves) if people in general think they live in a Democracy and their vote counts.

Also keep in mind that the factions of the real power in American - the Wealthy - will carry on fighting for themselves as they’ve always been doing, no matter what the façade which is the Theatre of Politics looks like (they’re apolitical and buy, bully or swindle people on both sides of the aisle).

America is an experiment in seeing how far the squeezing machine can be made to squeeze the masses without breaking, but none of the real power of the land is interested in it actually breaking and stopping delivering them maximum wealth increases, and as a country which doesn’t have enough natural resources for the wealthy to extract maximum wealth without most of the population going along with it, they too are not interested in letting it get to the same kind of situation as for example Russia. Absolutelly, their process doesn’t deal well with systemic problems of the Tragedy Of The Commons kind - hence things like Housing Inflation starting to asphixiate the rest of the Economy - but it does work for stopping direct singular actions that would mess with the interests of Wealth, such as the kind of legislation required to establish an Autocratic Regime in the US.

I’m not saying that the Wealthy will save the rest because they care, but as it so happens it’s in the best interest of the real power of the land - Money - that the machinery that keeps the rest producing wealth to enrich them does not break, so their interests are aligned which those of common people who don’t want Autocracy.

Welcome to the world of making software for random people, almost certainly made worse by she being a woman.

As others pointed out, most people do appreciate it, but they tend to be silent about it, whilst a small minority are demanding little whinny bitches (in a non-gendered way) who think they’re owed service and some are even trolls.

To those reading this, I suggest when you get something you like for free you at least give some feedback that you liked it and, if the person has some kind of sponsoring scheme going on and you really like it, consider contributing, if only to incentivise more of the same.

Those on the other side are people too and they will appreciate it.

After the Emissions Scandal and an estimated 10 thousand excess deaths a year in Europe because of diesel emissions: Fuck the European Auto Industry.

Their dragging of feet on moving to EV technology is also disgraceful.

And don’t get me started on the over-reliance on cars in most of Europe.

All in all, they’re a negative for Europe, not a positive, and if they can’t compete with the bloody Chinese, well, let the Free Market they so love for everything else do a little Constructive Destruction on them,

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.

Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers (so basically the no-name and white label brands) the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap and more of a hack than a proper converter. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.

As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the ones with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters). Unsurprisingly, dimmable LED Lamps cost more than the regular ones, though nowadays LED Lamps aren’t really expensive.

Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has since 2017 to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000h of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there is also a maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness with use after manufacturing) and rules about color quality.

The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate and I have been using LED lamps for ages (to the point that all the lamps more than paid for themselves in energy savings versus the other options back when I started)

So you might try choosing lamps with CE marks.

Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.

(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)

This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.

Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.

Isn’t that just tribalism or clubism in general?

For example, if one looks at footbal (soccer for Americans) fans, their “judgement” on the validity of faults and sanctions (or lack thereof) is entirelly dependent of whose team they support and almost invariably they side with whatever the important people of “their” team (like the coach, important players and even the club’s manager) say with zero logical analysis and if you actually bring logic into it and it goes against “their” team, the biggest fans just get angry and dismiss it all.

People with a strong emotinal bond to a “team” judge messages in that domain based on the messager and which team it favours, rather than on the contents of and supporting evidence for the message itself.

Since Psychopathy and Sociopathy are ranges rather than absolutes, it’s estimated that about 4% of humans are Psychopaths or Sociopaths and we’re talking about the what’s basically the handful of people in a universe of over 300 million who seeks and achieves positions at the top of the Power Duopoly in the US in a domain well know for it’s cut-throating and backstabbing, I would say that the odds heavily favour the explanation of them being very high on the Sociopath (or Psychopath) - so called “well adjusted Sociopaths” - spectrum than them being normal people who are “relaxed about personally enabling the murder of tens of thousands of children”.

The image of a Sociopaths or Psychopath who actively seeks to inflict horrible pain on others for their own pleasure is incredibly atypical and Hollywoodesque - being high on those scales just means having no empathy for others, including their suffering or joy, and the result is that a Sociopath or Psychopath simply does that which they think is better for themselves and they can get away with (they care about the consequences for themselves, not for others), with absolutely no consideration for how that makes others feel, hence harm or even death of others is fine since that has the same emotional resonance for them as breaking an inanimate object.

Fossil Fuels are decreasing as a percentage of the overall energy supply that powers so much of the Economy and Industrial and Agricultural production in Western Economies are a small fraction of the total (less than 20% together).

Nowadays it’s not about the West making things with pillaged resources from the Global South, it’s all Financialization and the Ultra-Wealthy extracting the last leftover wealth from everybody, everything and everywhere like the endgame in a Monopoly Game.

Oil by itself is not enough justification, IMHO.

Besides, Israel is being the very opposite of a force for stability in the region, which isn’t going to help the Petro-Dollar.

(If you go check the Gold markets, it’s never been this high, something which possibly signals increasing distrust in the US Dollar and other main currencies)

You can chose to dip you hands in the blood of thousands of dead children by activelly rewarding a candidate who is enabling their murder, or you can chose not to.

Given the lack of Democracy in the American system, that means that you either participate hence end up with blood on your hands no matter which of the two electable candidates you vote for or do not participate.The choices of others who do participate are irrelevant for that decision.

Justifying your choice of supporting a enabler of child murder candidate because others might chose the candidate you dislike the most and hence makes you fear for yourself, is not the high moral standpoint you seem to think it is.

Absolutely, it’s a though choice. However this preaching you and those like you are doing about “Not voting is a vote for Trump” is not done from the top of a Moral High Horse, it’s from the top of the pile of the bloody bones of tens of thousands of murdered children which is still growing, and driven by at best selfish self-preservation not any kind of selfless moral principle.

So spare us the bullshit.

The slaughter of innocent children makes no difference to sociopaths.

If there is one thing this Genocide on its way to Holocaust has shown us. is that the Democrat Party leadership are without a doubt sociopaths of the worst kind: a normal person with the power they have would not be actively helping it by sending the Neue Nazis the very weapons which they know are being used to massacre children.

There really is no other possible conclusion: no normal person would go “yeah but our campaign contributions from the AIPAC are more important than tens of thousands of dead children” or “yeah but the profits of the MIC shareholders are more important than tens of thousands of dead children”.

It’s called Stockholm Syndrome: people without options often end up genuinelly believing that the guy who tortures them only twice a week rather than daily is “deep down a good guy” and even “is our friend”.

Yeah, but unlike Biden who is a Fascist-just-not-at-home-(yet), she’s an actual Leftie, which comes with the whole “Nobody deserves to be murdered because of their race (even if they’re non-White Muslims and the killers are White Jews)” mindset.