solar-ice

Largely because the Tories are also willing to be fairly openly xenophobic, which is very popular with a large portion of the public. "Making sure the poors don't take more than they deserve" is another one of their popular policies.

The more-well-off also think Tory policies will get them a house and security. In practice, the UK housing market is completely fucked and gets more so every year, but... it doesn't stop people believing it.

Basically the health of the NHS is about the tenth thing on some people's minds when voting, until they get cancer or break an arm, at which point they start complaining about it.

Supporting the party which consistently underfunds a British institution, and sells off parts of it to their mates, in order to protect Britishness. Sums up Tory politics nicely, really.

Indeed; the reason people exonerate it is that the Tories have been threatening the population with a dismantling and privatisation of the NHS for over a decade now, and that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. A primary reason it doesn't is the Tories crippling it.

In the context of the thread you're in, are you trying to argue that men have no emotional attachment to family or childhood, or that they have no impact on the people around them?

Slack was everywhere, years before Discord was in common use. Discord, really, was just Slack for gamers - but more importantly, it was a replacement for Teamspeak and self-hosted forums.

If we come at this from a perspective of "people deserve to have a home where they are safe", rather than from an economic perspective, the moral question is why on earth we decided to allow and protect private landlords who have an interest in exactly the opposite.

gov.uk serves all of the UK - including the person who lives in the middle of the mobile dead spot, and the person who can't even get consistently working ADSL. 4G/5G doesn't cover the UK by a very long way, and there's plenty of the UK who cannot afford anything but the cheapest smartphone.

It's much less common in the UK than the US to buy a smartphone on credit - cheap phones with cheap pre-paid plans are normal - so low-end models with very slow chips are more common. The sort of thing where even scrolling through your contact menu will induce lag.

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk is not gov.uk.

Of course, NemID isn't actually a Government website, despite being used by the Government. Similar situation as Sweden's BankID.

The C bits of the kernel aren't even written closely to any C specification - they are written to, essentially, "what gcc does and is likely to keep doing". They also use a number of gcc extensions which are underspecified compared to C itself.

I'm not sure this is a real concern for the Linux kernel devs.

Ehh. Being kicked out of your home is being removed, even if it's perfectly legal. Fixed-term rental contracts are nearly entirely immoral imo.

And while an accurate depiction of how this affects the people who were barely hanging on in the first place, there is a later step, where people who /have/ been renting all their lives in one area find themselves unable to continue to pay rent. You're not necessarily a homeowner if you're not at constant risk of homelessness.

I've seen this while squatting; our neighbours were people who had lived in the same community for 70 years, and their option once the landlord had decided to tear the building down and replace it with "luxury apartments" was far away from everyone they had known all their lives. There were several similar stories in the area.

And when the rent for the neighbour gets raised double because you started attracting people willing to pay double to move there...?

That's... a list of things I already have installed, the Lua executable aside. This is a pretty normal-looking dependency list for native C software. Are you perhaps not used to building C software?

You don't. Gentrifying a place pretty inherently means removing at least some of the people who live there. Why would the people of a small town go for that? Unless you're planning on subsidising the existing residents' lives forever as rent goes up.

If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.

It... really depends on which bits of Europe you're talking about. The bits where corruption is endemic and the money never actually winds up going to help anyone? Sure, certain policies are floundering there. The state pension systems? Yeah, people are a bit miffed about mismanagement there.

But like... very few people sitting here arguing that e.g. a right to decent healthcare isn't a thing we want; that education shouldn't be accessible to as many people as possible; that we shouldn't provide public services such as libraries, parks, and sports centres for all; and in a bunch of places there's a general feeling that the pendulum swung way too far against welfare, in the bid to force people to work, that it's now not helpful for the people it was meant to help.

It appears the person you're replying to lives in Germany; so do I. The parties (e.g. the FDP) here which would like to tear down what Germany has built have a minority of the votes compared to those which have social democratic or broadly neutral policies.

To ask uncomfortable questions is, inherently, to make someone uncomfortable talking to you. It’s in the definition. If you ask uncomfortable questions repeatedly, people will avoid talking to you. This is normal human behaviour.

If you make people talk to you despite being uncomfortable - for example, because you are their manager - they will find a job where they are comfortable.

Potentially your business runs on destroying people. I don’t think that’s a reasonable way we want to run society.

The way /normal/ companies handle this is things like agile retrospectives - what went wrong, how can we fix it. Did we have enough people? How did /management/ fail /the people doing the work/?

If I answer “we would need X more people to get this done tomorrow instead of next week”, does that actually change anything, or do you just respond some nonsense about how you can’t afford that and we should just work harder? Basically: are /you/ willing to make sacrifices for /me/, or is it a one way street?

If your mechanism for getting things done faster is to make your employees uncomfortable talking to you, yes.

The assumption/trick here is that you are experienced enough that you can make a guess as to how much money the company thinks they will save by contracting you, and you bill them appropriately, without actually telling them what you're doing.

I write video streaming software in Rust. Rust helps us make sure we've got concurrency correct, has a very solid type system to help us make sure we've got general application properties correct, and seriously reduces the space where we have to go looking for segfaults and suchlike (primarily third-party C libraries and bindings to them).

Part of the issue (in countries where you're not liable to be shot or accused by the police of running a cult or what-have-you) is that worker co-ops do not generally have access to significant capital or loans from VCs and banks which are scared of them, so cannot usually spend outside their means to grow - while companies that mesh well with current financialised society can.

As a result, co-ops need to grow differently and often compete differently; you can't afford to pay 50 people right out the gate to build Starcraft 3 to sell in 2 years' time. You need to be making money from day 1, and you can't compete directly with companies that have access to capital or you lose immediately.

There do exist co-ops in the video game industry - Motion Twin, behind Dead Cells, is one.

What I mean is that putting together a webapp without learning about something /other/ than how to put a <pick-a-technology> app together in the process isn't going to have anyone interested in hiring you.

If in the process you learned about something you could actually go up and do an interesting lightning talk about, that'd be worth it. Maybe you learned something about a specific industry and the challenges that developing something for it has that other industries don't have - maybe you accidentally spent weeks/months deep-diving into the technical details of HTTP/3 or some browser API and worked out you could do something that nobody has done before outside of Google.

I wish I could say I had the same experience. I don't know what to say. My experience of applying for jobs that were well within my skillset, where I had projects showing off my non-industry-specific skills, was... either silence or being chucked out of the pipeline after the first interview or two, repeatedly. I'm not the only one.

Maybe this works if you live in a tech hub where there's venture capital to spend on masses of junior devs?

In my experience, the companies that are developing these things are either about 5 developers and can barely keep the lights on for them - so aren't hiring - or have standardised their employment procedures so much that they probably won't hire you unless you hit every point on the job listing (including experience in arbitrary tech that only they and 3 other companies use) and can talk about your personal SWOT analysis and a bunch of other stuff that is more about signalling a specific cultural background than ensuring you're able to do your job and learn quickly. If you have that cultural background, cool, if not...

I could not get hired through most companies' cold interview processes - not "we make internal widgets in C#" companies, not "we're changing the world" companies. The most competent devs I know can't get hired that way. The only way that it's worked in my experience is to get someone internal to the company to champion me.

No, people aren't hiring junior devs, and haven't been for a long while. What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

And even then you have to hustle. Get yourself tickets to conferences (if you've built stuff, many niche conferences have free/subsidised tickets for open-source devs) and talk to people who are hiring - not the people who have the booths, but the people in the audience.

The idea that most people can just apply to jobs cold and eventually get one is essentially a lie, ime.

Indeed. A country which fails to follow its own law on privacy would likely be considered a country which does not have appropriate law on privacy.

I've got a sleek option because lugging around a brick is a miserable experience. There's a qualitative difference between the XPS 13 that I can whip out on the train, and a desktop replacement laptop that is heavy and big enough to be a bother and barely fits in my backpack.

Power isn't really an issue - I'm never far from an outlet, and I could carry an external battery in a backpack pocket if it really bothered me.

Scarier is that Google controls Chrome/Blink and will continue to push "features" that make the web better for Google, not better for users. Mozilla are one of very, very few organisations that are in a position to push back against this at standards bodies - and for all the flak they get, they regularly do.

Sure, and US can pass a law saying that safety regulations of Airbus planes made in France are not sufficient either. Americans just don’t like flying in unsafe planes!

If you cannot see the difference between this and the GDPR, I have no idea why we're talking. The GDPR is some pretty reasonable law, for the most part - if we had carve-outs for Americans who don't have to adhere to it, it would be entirely pointless.

The US is very welcome to end this by repealing their spy law.

However, the exact same argument applies to any EU company with any internet connection, and directly applies to any EU company with infrastructure in the US. EU companies could, in principle, transfer data to the US intentionally or by accident.

Yes, this might be a reasonable argument. You'd be in a bad place as an EU company trying to operate in the US right now. Perhaps the US should quit passing spy law and we can go back to cooperating.

Generally speaking, we look at the legal system in the country and decide whether it is /legal/ for the state to do such a thing, and whether there are appropriate safeguards to prevent it from doing so. Yes, they could change the law - and at that point it would become illegal for companies in that country to do business in the EU.

Usually most countries are smart enough not to damage themselves economically by preventing their companies from selling to a large, reasonably rich union.