Best of luck, guys.

I know that doing things that can eliminate a political opposition are incredibly ethically sensitive, but it’s demonstrably the correct choice here. I just wish that it wasn’t a choice that had to be made. How are these far right parties getting so many votes? Where have we failed?

Boris Johnson robbed my country blind; his party’s Austerity sold off and destroyed our public infrastructure and services to such a terrible degree that it’s unlikely the UK will recover within my lifetime if at all, and that’s BEFORE you get into the truly devastating consequences imposed on us by Brexit, or the fact his verbatim orders to handle covid were “Let the bodies pile high in the streets!”. All to line the pockets of him and his billionaire shitbag friends.

…So it is with some regret that I say: I can’t argue with this statement.

Boris Johnson has a similar fascination, you see. This guy wants to be Winston Churchill sooooooooo badly. You would not believe how hard BJ wishes he could be a modern Churchill. It was an open secret that the russian government had some pretty solid influence over Boris, a lot of rumours about them having dirt on his father in particular- and many reasonable and well-founded theories that Boris pushed Brexit through at the behest of Putin. But Boris Johnson saw the war in Ukraine start and he changed overnight. He certainly didn’t give up any of his vices or become a better person, god no, not at all. But he had stars in his eyes at the prospect of going down in history as a big and strong and heroic wartime leader studied in history books, and for that reason, he absolutely jumped at the prospect of helping Ukraine. Zero hesitation.

What I’m saying is that I genuinely believe Ukraine represents Boris Johnson’s lifelong dreams as a human being. And for that reason even if Boris is a terrible person who is certainly prone to bias, he has every intention of supporting Ukraine as much as he can- hence his willingness to speak against someone that he was previously very close with.

Even as a dedicated pokemon fan that hasn’t played Palworld (the butchering mechanics don’t really appeal to me)…

I really hope Nintendo loses this, and loses it HARD. I think that some actual competition would be really healthy for the pokemon franchise, giving them an actual impetus to make sure their games are high-quality and well-supported and don’t pursue serious anti-consumer practices.

Godspeed, Palworld. Counting on you.

Yeah, checks out. I’m just a UK guy, but when the Tories were all having a media circus about “Oh inflation is done now, we’ve stopped inflation, the cost of living crisis is done!”, I mean… no amount of lying to my face is going to stop me going to the shops and wanting to scream when I see the price of Everything has jumped up by 20% again.

I can’t imagine that’s any different at all in China. You just can’t really hide something as objective as the cost of a bar of chocolate.

Now that’s really interesting! I wonder where I can go to see this stuff…

I don’t rightfully know, but my heart says “The hotwheels logo”

It’s pretty modern if you mean popular, although the idea itself is REALLY old.

Rather than going into specific examples because there are a lot of them (especially in gaming and TV), I’d like to say my piece on cliches.

Basically, cliches come to exist because the cliche trope is a really good idea.

“The Butler did it” as a murder mystery trope is a fantastic idea because some people with too much money will use the protection money affords them to mistreat their employees, providing a great motive you can build on to create a great story with relatable morals and characters. It sets up a character with perfect motives, means and a reasonable position of trust to avoid suspicion.

Similarly, “Hell good, Heaven bad” is a fantastic trope because it lets you step back and analyse things like the negative impacts of religion and how authorities (and the bible) will portray themselves as good regardless of their actual actions. Plus of course there were periods of time where people were told doing virtually anything that didn’t fit into an extremely narrow worldview meant you were going to hell. You know, stuff like basketball and Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, the problem with cliches is when someone sees a popular idea that’s also a very good idea, but doesn’t understand why it was a good idea. As a result, when they use the idea, it rings hollow at absolute best, and that kind of terrible execution of something that’s already known and popular tends to be especially disappointing. I think the best example is The Hunger Games, which absolutely defined young adult dystopian fiction for years because it showed how the media industry mistreats its workers, and Alleigant, which used a lot of ideas from Hunger Games (and some other things) without actually understanding the ideas.

(TLDR: Hunger Games has a love triangle as a prominent plot element, but the actual reason is that it’s perpetuated by the media pretty much on pain of death for Katniss so that she can entertain the viewers. By contrast, Alleigant also has a love triangle but the triangle IS the plot element and the author bends over backwards to make it happen despite the fact none of the characters really feel like they’re suitable for it)

Anyways, cliches aren’t bad but you need to know how, why, and when to use them in order to actually fulfil their potential, and the heaven-hell one you’ve mentioned above is no exception.

Gonna say it, this REALLY feels like a case of the news cherry-picking what parts of a protest they show. Between the unreasonable viewpoint that’s directly adjacent to a very sensible and popular viewpoint and the fact we KNOW the media have a very vested interest in trying to push pro-genocide narratives (such as anti-Israel protests being pro-terrorist)…

Yeah, even someone as gullible as me? I’m not buying this.

Adblock my beloved

Oh cute

…Wait, that wasn’t a basic standard lesson? Isn’t an unsecured phone transmission basically a death sentence if if gets picked up since it tells people exactly where to fire artillery at?

Nice! I know there’s still much further to go before justice is done, but this is a step in the right direction, and I can appreciate it for that.

I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me

Well. That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?

She does have the distinct advantage of being under the retirement age. We’ll have to see what her policies are and how she performs in debates, though.

Thank fuck for that. With any luck the better conditions will even give them the power to push back on management if management demands something stupid be added to a game.

In an industry as notoriously dreadful as game development, every bit of quality of life counts.

OK, checking out the article, actually it seems totally innocent on the maintenance side of things- there was a turbine blade fracture during flight. Turbines are generally very reliable but it’s a gargantuan pain in the ass to test those blades because they’re crystalline structures, so a fracture goes from nanoscopic to taking out the whole blade all at once. I wouldn’t expect maintainers to catch that.

The criminal part is actually way more interesting and concerning.

Civilian aircraft are built to be safe. I mean REALLY safe. Every system has a redundant (backup) system you can switch to if that system goes down and a way to isolate a damaged system. Planes can fly on only one working engine, or even safely glide down to the ground if they have no engines. We literally blow some engines up in their final stages of testing to make sure they can’t blow up hard enough to take the wing out. Regulations demand it.

So that’s why this is a criminal case. Because after that engine blade came loose and hit the wing, it ruptured a fuel line…

In an aircraft that was designed in compliance with regulations, while this would still be be cause to turn around and land the plane, it shouldn’t actually be a safety problem at all. Just isolate the damaged system and switch to the redundant one. And they didn’t have the ability to do that. Meaning that their aircraft design itself is likely out of compliance with regulations and doesn’t meet the minimum safety requirements to have civilians on it. Which is… honesty way weirder, because who the hell signed off on this thing if it had a design issue like this?

Yup, most engine manufacture is undertaken by specialists. As a good example, Rolls-Royce is an airplane engine company that sometimes makes cars as publicity stunts.

HOWEVER.

It’s not just about who makes engines. Aircraft are meant to last a good 30 years in service and you can’t just ask some schmuck to clean it for $7.50 an hour and call that maintenance. Maintenance is extremely skilled work that tends to be operating under horrible time crunches, especially if a part is suspect and needs to have a plane partially taken apart so it can be changed for a fresh one- a plane that might be due to fly again tomorrow. Maintenance that needs that sort of knowledge tends to have some involvement with the parent company who built the planes, or is even contract work for them.

Boeing is rather notorious for being willing to put the schedule before safety- we’ve seen that in a lot of other accidents. I would absolutely believe that a Boeing manager skimped on engine maintenance because someone in the chain of command said “Get that plane out of the maintenance hangar today or you’re fired, and damn the safety regulations.”

But, that’s just my industry knowledge. The actual circumstances could be way different, so let’s go read the article.

Hmm. It WOULD be nice to have more people here…

Maybe we could challenge Pawb.social to some kind of fun little contest? Art contest, maybe?

Excellent news. Even if he made a few too many vital blunders in debates to be the PM, he’s a really good leftist politician and he absolutely deserves that seat.

They haven’t gone overboard with THIS one, because they already went way the fuck overboard years ago and never got back on board

Man I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and make my next machine a linux one