United Kingdom (Bristol.)

Used to be pretty decent, but now the NHS is chronically overbooked and underfunded. Ambulances can take hours to come.

Only way to get a GP appointment is to literally call my practice at 8AM on the dot, wait in the queue and hope you’re lucky to have your call answered before all the appointments are gone. There is no online booking system, and if you call at any other time, they won’t be able to book you in advance unless you’re willing to wait months.

My dad (80 years old) has had to go to hospital a few times in the past few years for various reasons, and the longest he’s had to wait to be admitted into a ward was 13 hours. He had a hip replacement operation two years ago where he was on an 18 month waiting list.

If you want a suggestion for a bad movie, try watching FDR: American Badass Only managed to make it about half an hour in before we had to switch it off.

Don’t let the trailer fool you. The actual film is dogshit.

I used to do a monthly one with two close friends of mine. Let’s just call them Poppy and Sam (not their real names.)

Unfortunately, Sam pretty much disavowed our group last year. He had a falling-out with Poppy because she raised concerns about how he was spending his inheritance money. Sam had made some friends at his local pub and was buying them pints all the time. Apparently Poppy telling him that he can’t buy friends struck a nerve with him and he very vocally excommunicated us. My reaction to being cut off was one of frustration and bewilderment.

For some very important context, Sam has physical and mental health struggles, which I won’t go into. He had a particualrly bad month which broke him emotionally and decided there and then that he had no intentions of outliving his cats. That was three years prior to our falling-out.

Poppy did reach out to me two days ago and she wants to do another film night with me and reconnect like old times. We’re gonna meet up on Friday.

I used to participate in r/theredpill. It’s an ideology that got increasingly toxic over the years.

The part that truly made me ditch the manosphere was meeting a lady on a dating app who mentioned to me that RooshV was doing a rally near her town and that it had her fearing for her life. For the record, that was an incel/redpill influencer who was an advocate for legalizing spousal rape.

Depends on what changed. Axis victory would have hinged on three possible outcomes:

• The United States staying out of the conflict (no Pearl Harbour assault, no German u-boat attacks on American vessels, and Hitler & Mussolini not declaring war on the USA in response to the US declaration of war on Japan.)
• Operation Barbarossa not happening.
• British defeat or withdrawal from the war.

In a scenario where the Japanese never attacked Pearl Harbour and never dragged the USA into the conflict, Hitler may have been able to eventually conquer Britain, turn his efforts towards Operation Barbarossa and take control of the entire European continent, along with parts of Asia. The Holocaust would likely have still happened, as the Final Solution was put in place six months prior to the Battle of Stalingrad, which turned the tide of the war in our current timeline.

Lack of US involvement leads to a scenario where nuclear weapons would not have been invented until much later, as Germany had not actually been working on weapons of mass destruction, and the Manhattan Project would never have occurred. World War III would likely have been fought between the Nazis/Japanese and Soviets, while the US would have remained isolationist.

A scenario where Operation Barbarossa never happens (neither Hitler nor Stalin attack each other) may be different. Hitler consolidates his European gains, never attacks the Soviet Union and focuses his efforts purely on the United States and Africa, securing many wins without his armies being stretched so thin. In that scenario, Jews are likely exiled to penal colonies established in Africa or the Middle East, from lands conquered from the British. The Holocaust may happen further down the line, but some historians think it was the unique wartime conditions on the Eastern Front that led to the Final Solution being considered - Nazi Germany actually tried resettling Jews in other lands prior to WW2.

British withdrawal (Hitler negotiating peace with Churchill) or defeat (Nazi Germany winning the Battle for Britain) may have led to Operation Barbarossa happening sooner, and with the Soviet Union not so far along in their industralization efforts, they would have likely lost Stalingrad, Petrograd and possibly Moscow. It either would have been a long and bloody war of attrition or a swift Soviet loss.

I’m not against polyamory, but I find it never works out when somebody decides to open up a previously monogamous relationship.

A (former) close friend of mine got engaged a few years back, and then his fiancé brought a third into the relationship and they became a throuple. That relationship lasted maybe another year or two, until she called off the engagement several days after his mother passed away, and left him for the other guy while he was grieving.

Found out sometime later that the third she brought into their relationship was actually her cousin, so there was definitely some Sweet Home Alabama crap going on.

Another friend of mine tried to commit suicide recently after getting dumped. Her relationship with her boyfriend of ~2 years had been rocky to say the least. They broke up, got back together, etc quite a few times, but the most recent breakup was after he brought a third into the relationship, then allegedly found out she was texting a guy and dumped her on the spot.

On Reddit, yes. To the point where I’ve actually had to self-censor a lot of my comments and tip-toe around certain topics to avoid my comments being nuked from orbit by Automoderator.

Lemmy? Not really.

Lemmy is full of tankies and Linux nerds. It’s a different kind of toxic to what you’d experience over on Reddit.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was pretty damn good.

Another big problem is that we’ve been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, “just learn to code” is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody’s jobs.

What they don’t understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.

I bring this up because I think there’s a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.

I’m not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project and I had to teach myself HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL because my sixth form was shit and was only teaching us Visual Basic 6 when the IDE/language had been obsolete for nearly a decade) and I have never personally posted on StackOverflow. In fact, the only StackExchange site I’ve ever been part of was EpicAdvice, a short-lived offshoot that was for World of Warcraft specific questions. But I do have a sibling with a computer science and software engineering background which is how I became aware of the site in the first place.

This isn’t my personal criticism of the site, it’s me echoing the sentiment of the many who have complained about the community across the web.

Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.

ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site’s coffin because it’s now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn’t “use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic.”

So they’re wilfully ignoring the EU’s Digital Markets Act and a US court-ordered injunction that prevents them from punishing developers for trying to circumvent the use of the App Store for in-app purchases, after one of their execs was caught lying under oath and potentially facing criminal repercussions.

I’m not the biggest fan of Epic Games, but I really want to see this backfire spectacularly. Apple’s business practices are so bad that it makes me want to see Tim Sweeney kick Tim Cook’s ass in court.

Aren’t there ways to treat the asbestos and prevent the fibers from becoming airborne and posing a serious risk?

Look at it this way, I paid £3,290 per year in tuition fees to attend university back when I went. The price of tuition has since nearly trebled to over £9k.

If I paid £9k per year for online courses and was denied the student experience of actually attending a university campus (as many teenagers who went to uni during COVID had to), I’d be fucking livid!

Again, depends on why. If there’s documented evidence that you were fired for say… refusing to ignore safety laws.

Novelty/troll accounts. I’ve seen a lot of them pop up on Reddit over the years. The most infamous one I remember was one called Gradual_****** (yes, the n-word) that would type out ordinary replies that would gradually switch to ebonics.

Reasons that are fine to mention: Last job was temporary, I was made redundant.

Reasons that aren’t fine to mention: I quit due to overwhelming stress, I was fired for capability/gross misconduct reasons (unless it was an unfair dismissal which you successfully challenged in court and have the documentation to back it up.)

Ever since Spez took over, Reddit have been incredibly heavy-handed when it comes to enforcing their rules against inciting or glorifying violence, even if such a comment is directed towards people that are objectively hated, like nazis, pedophiles and child murderers. To that I’m not even remotely surprised that you got banned.

Even posting that Nazis deserve to be punched in the face can get you a permanent ban from Reddit… You know… the people who over 80 years ago were responsible for gassing 6 million Jews, 6 million Russian POWs and thousands of homosexuals and political dissidents.

Spez has gone so far beyond being a mere cuck. He’s a goddamn cuckasauras.