SootySootySoot [any]

Oldest trick in the book, why make this speech such a public and formal affair?

The trap has been laid, all we need now is a smug Netanyahu waltzing in feeling safe

Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism

What are we? Chopped liver?

As people don’t seem to realise. It’s a known trick that when you ask people to draw bicycle from memory, the vast majority won’t do it correctly. Even (to some degree) including cyclists.

Though it was originally just a weird fun thing an artist discovered, it has been touted as a neurological trick that demonstrates the difference between the brain being able to recognise something and actually knowing what it looks like.

That does seem ludicrously high. The first result when I look for an equivalent setup here in the UK on Amazon is about 600 dollars for an ostensibly 800W kit. US needs slightly different electronics specs but that’s not a huge thing, and surely even the biggest import fees to the US wouldn’t be 900 dollars??? Is this like a chinese trade restriction thing

Wait, I didn’t realise all the main parties are refusing to contest it now, that’s a change from this morning.

He didn’t get a majority last time, 46% on a 58% turnout. Maybe there is the slightest chance?

The Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and Restore Britain have all confirmed that they will not contest the by-election

It’ll obviously never happen, but you are left to wonder if Reform would just collapse out of sheer embarrassment if Binface did win.

I get nine fully-paid sick days, which is unusually high in the UK (the standard is 0). SSP in the UK is basically nothing (and until last month WAS nothing for the first week), so people typically have no choice if they want to eat food and live in their home. Is German statutory sick pay meaningfully higher?

To be honest if I was actually off work when I genuinely should be, it probably would average about 15 days a year.

in this context downplaying the severity of the drop people actually experienced

Well… no, it isn’t downplaying it. It’s representing it perfectly. That’s quite literally the point.

When graphs aren’t zero-based, you immediately make a bad intellectual assumption as well as an ‘emotional’ reaction to the size of the graph. That immediate bad assumption poisons the way you think. We can’t eliminate that ‘emotional’ reaction, but we can (and do) standardise it and we consequently learn to gauge appropriately… only so long as people keep to that standard.

The only time you shouldn’t zero-base a graph is when the change is too small to reasonably decipher without enlarging the scale. I’ll die on that hill. If you do it for any other reason, you are just engaging in misleading emotional manipulation. There’s a place for emotional appeal, but by means of making you misunderstand reality isn’t it.

I very much disagree. There are extremely few cases where a y-axis shouldn’t start at zero. Anything that reasonably can be shown that way, should be, because the alternative just fucks with the monkey brain too much.

I live safely in my VPN bubble for now. I have 0% doubt it’ll be made illegal sooner or later.

Great, those are obviously unsafe on the freeway for a thousand reasons, so let’s just whack those on dedicated roads. And since only those buses go on the roads, they could be steel wheels on steel road for extraordinarily better efficiency, and obviously steel is pricey so we’ll just limit the road to two ‘rail’ like lengths. Dedicated lines can be electrified for more efficiency, build some dedicated bus board/alight platforms, a bit of signalling to prevent crashes and avoid building excessive rail, extensible for varying passenger numbers, and BAM, perfect project.