Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org

@freemo Yeah, your kneecaps. ;-)

@freemo Dunno about communism with extra steps. Doesn't sound very communist. Isn't it the definition of a protection racket, pretty much? Though I guess with a protection racket you pick a larger number of people who haven't paid up. Still.

@drandrewv2 Ugh, CFS sucks. Had a CFS case I handled a while back, wasn't good. Good luck Jenny!

@drandrewv2 Speaking as someone who has had a very sick child, I am in fact immoral enough to do this. My principles do not get my child his/her required medicine before the pharmacies all close, nor keep them out of A&E if that deadline is missed.

Just wow. Our treatment of refugees is so inhumane that Medecins Sans Frontieres (better known for providing medical care in refugee camps near war zones) has felt compelled to spend resources to set up shop in Essex. What a shameful indictment of the UK's inhumanity towards people in need.

#refugees #migration #ukpolitics #uk #msf #MedecinsSansFrontieres

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/08/medecins-sans-frontieres-treating-refugees-home-office?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

@drandrewv2 Every time I see these enormous numbers wasted or thrown to cronies by corrupt Tories I think about the scrabbling around for crumbs we used to have to do and the things that got cut or didn't happen. The difference is literally multiple orders of magnitude, but why should anyone be accountable for it? 🙄

@pluralistic On the one hand, delivery drivers not doing their job is a pain. On the other, they might do their job if the delivery firms hired enough that they had sensible length job lists. This happens because they don't have time for anything else.

@cstross Every time I think seriously about teleportation I think about Ilium by Dan Simmons, and to a lesser extent your own Glasshouse.

If teleportation booths work by destroying the original and building a copy somewhere else, it's not teleportation, it's a fax machine. And what wakes up at the other end is not the same person who got euthanised at the sending end.

@tallpaul I don't understand. The work of updating the charts remains necessary and relevant, so they'll still have to keep the actual data up to date. Doing as Ordnance Survey have done and providing a print-on-demand service for paper charts is surely much easier and more profitable than the work required to safely move everyone to digital-only?

@freemo @kilroy_was_here I don't think it's correct to say that living standards in 1975 were achieved by compromising workplace safety (and by extension that any loss since then is because more is being spent on safety). Safety standards at the time were what was believed to be acceptable, it's not that people were cutting corners to save money, and even if they had been workplace safety isn't generally as expensive as all that.

Any erosion of median living standards since the 70s is likely to be a result of massively widening inequality between the top and the bottom. For instance in the UK in 1979 the top 10% took home 21% of the total net income, in 2009/10 it was 31%. This rise was largely at the expense of the bottom 30%. (figures from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/more-unequal-country). The top 10% have a 50% pay rise over that period, the bottom 10% have a 75% cut. Similarly, from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/pse-research/going-backwards-1983-2012, the percentage of people lacking three or more "necessities" in the UK has more than doubled between 1983 and 2012.

Similarly in the US the share of aggregate income from 1970 to 2018 being taken home by the "upper tier" income group rose from 29 to 48%. The "middle tier" income group fell from 62 to 43%. Share of aggregate family wealth for the upper tier rose to a whopping 79% from 1983-2016, to just 4% for the lower tier (both stats https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/).

The rules got changed, a lot of regulations that served a very good purpose got done away with, and the richest in society got the benefit. It's nothing to do with spending money to make workplaces safer.