You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.

So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.

Oh, “Roman salute” was the excuse. Where they’re silent is if asked which notable groups of people in the 20th century used the “Roman salute”. Strangely, they go even quieter if you give them the hint that they were based in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century.

I don’t disagree with your point at all, but I don’t think the divorce thing is separate from feminism. Women became financially independent because of feminism, and felt emboldened and worthwhile enough to leave abusive situations because of feminism.

It’s perhaps fairer to say that we can, at least partially, credit feminism with these things. It didn’t magically do it in the way that misogynists would like to think, but it’s definitely not unrelated.

This is such an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.

And this is because 99% of our press is explicitly right-wing and has a somewhat fuzzy relationship with truth.

Thanks, Murdoch!

Also “LGB drop the T”. Once all the trans people are in camps, who do you think they’re coming for next, LGBs?

It’s not just that. Employers think you’re “getting away” with…something…if you can manage to be productive while having something which advantages you.

For one example, several firms - including Microsoft - have conducted experiments where they move an office to a 4 day, 32 hour week while paying people the same. They unfailingly found that productivity either stayed the same or went up. So, at the end of the experiment they…went back to a 5 day week. Because otherwise people are just getting an extra day off, aren’t they? When they “should” be working.

Even if productivity went up and it was better for the company and for the workers, it was still ultimately seen as a bad thing because the workers were better off.

Another example: at a previous job I had we got an hour’s break over the course of the day. 15 minutes 2 hours after start, 30 minutes 4 hours after start, and another 15 minutes 6 hours after start. On a Friday, however, the workday was 7 hours rather than 8. This meant that an hour before leaving people would have a 15 minute break, and then it wasn’t worth actually starting anything because before you’d have a chance to get into it you’d be getting ready to go home. So the workers went to management and said “let’s work through the last break on a Friday and go home 15 minutes early instead”. Management agreed, productivity went up, and everybody was happy at getting off an extra 15 minutes early.

Then the old upper manager was fired and a new one took their place, and this arrangement was deemed to be “getting away with it”. Taking a final break & going home later was mandated. Suddenly none of the management who had agreed it had anything to do with the initial decision and they’d always thought it was a bad idea.

So the workers were unhappy because they had a longer workday, less work got done because everybody was unproductive after break, and the company was getting less value for money becuse they were paying people the same amount for less work. But they thought it was a better situation because people were physically in the building for an extra 15 minutes, and therefore not “getting away with it”.

There’s very often a mindset in management that employees are naughty children, and that strict rules must be good just because they’re rules, rather than because they actually lead to better outcomes for the company.

You probably haven’t. Spiders can trap air with the hair on their skin and can survive a trip down the drain. They’ll probably climb back up again once it’s dry.

Yup. I don’t like having spiders in the house. Know what i like having in the house less? Flies. So the spiders stay.

Un-Named-Tomato-Y-Thing-With-Mince-Pasta-And-Pesto-ius

I don’t have a problem with the idea of a digital ID. I’ve been saying for years that it’s ridiculous that any time you want to do something even vaguely official you have to take a gas bill with you to prove your address.

What I worry about is the implementation. It seems like it’s going to be a government app that stores everything. What company is going to develop that? Where’s the data going to be stored and how? What vulnerabilities does it have, and how has this been tested? Is biometric data going to be stored anywhere? etc.

If they were to let me store my ID in my phone’s built-in wallet, then I’m happy. I know the security and I’m content that my data is safe and recoverable.

But it doesn’t seem like that’s something that will be possible. So I’m going to object strongly.

I was brought in as a contractor for a week at a private school once here in the UK. The food was okay but on the nicer/posher end of „nothing special“. But what did strike me was that between two periods one of the girls felt peckish so just wandered in to the kitchen and made herself cheese on toast. Nobody treated that like it was anything unusual.

Kinda looks like if she & Emma Watson had a baby. And then that baby became a haunted waxwork.

The channel‘s called Some More News

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham.

The broader point, though, is that the scenario of The Lord of the Flies has actually happened. We’ve had a small group of kids trapped on an island for an extended period of time and what happened is that they built a peaceful and harmonious society, which included spending time and resources caring for one of their number who broke their leg.