Yes. Absolutely. I would happily pay more tax for this. 1% is a very tiny amount.

The trains in this country are shockingly abysmal and they cost an arm and a leg, despite being the absolute basic requirement for a functional modern economy.

As someone only on basic rate of tax and fairly low income struggling to make ends meet, I would still happily pay taxes for this, both in addition and especially instead of the BBC for it to spew far right hatred or endless consultantocracies and other assorted privatized money funnels like what’s become of the NHS (especially GPs), alongside council, DWP and TV loicence enforcement goons with their endless investigations, cutting triple lock, cutting winter fuel allowance and other ways boomers drain the economy.

I think there are better ways though - like taxing the top 1%, much higher carbon/road/infrastructure taxes on car people (only fair because of their increased personal pollution, infrastructure use, space occupation and damage to the environment and people).

Even this 1% tax doesn’t need to be flat, it can be scaled with income brackets, with each step being another extra 1%, as long as the math checks out.

Even moreso - Land value tax, and shifting council tax to property owners instead of tenants/residents and second home tax and property for investment tax, ramping it up to as high as it’ll go to fund property buybacks for councils, then charging rents without profit margins baked in to make trains more affordable.

But if it’s what it takes to get anything done in the current political climate dominated by the far-right, tributes to some random pro-gun grifter influencer being shot in another country flooded with guns and Sir seat warmer as PM cowtowing to the demands of pub-dwelling gammon flagshaggers, sell-your-govt-to-palantir-as-an-ideology party of ReformUK, Farage and his oligarch sponsors from the Kremlin to the White House and other various dodgy American govcorp and MIC-adjacent glowing lobby groups then that would have to be it.

G7 Economy everyone.

Yeah, but with Farage as PM I do wonder how much longer the current devolution arrangement will even last for.

sigh

This country sucks.

That’s not really even close to what I asked.

Just gonna repost my comment from the thread on the Technology community yesterday for suggestions and discussion: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21273053

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8 to be imported inside the Docker, then more elbow grease to actually make the playlist semi-accurate.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization and my credit card access for payments until I signed into the right Google account again, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally anywhere, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with some automation through Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it in dogshit quality, look up album/artist on Rutracker, pray that it’s there when a lot of the time it is not, filter out albums/songs I don’t want from the discography torrent and add it to my qbittorrent-nox on server, mount the NFS share on my main windows PC with my music staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the finalized folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don’t like the song and delete it from the playlist, never to be heard again.

It’s way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can’t even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen to when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren’t worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that’s frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves, eagerly falling for whatever corposlop becomes available.

Felt like I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn’t worked for me to move off of it long-term. I’d love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Some ideas of mine:

1. Musicbrainz metadata is awful. Half the time the cover art is someone’s photo of some shitty Japanese vinyl with stickers. Pull covers off YT or Spotify. In fact - pull all metadata off Spotify via scraping, with Musicbrainz volunteer metadata serving only as intermediary to connect the audio to the musicbrainz id which should connect to a Spotify option and potentially a fallback option if somehow the music isn’t on Spotify.

2. There should be an intelligent playlist creator of some sort where I can give it my Spotify account export data and it can go off song titles and albums in the playlists within to create playlists in navidrome by finding matches in my library and automatically downloading missing ones and it should be at least 99% accurate (most “Spotify playlist downloader” type websites are 99% inaccurate for instance).

3. Navidrome or one of it’s clients should have a plugin to get suggestions at the bottom of playlists like Spotify via last.fm and play music instantly directly from Spotify/YTM, with a button to add a song to your playlist, when you do so, it automatically downloads it, copies metadata off Spotify, and adds it to whatever playlist you added it to.

All that should hopefully ease the pain and make it so you can discover, listen and add to your library without so many barriers.

Yeah I remember being out with work colleagues IRL at a pub and there was some friends or a company, it was absolutely rammed as well, some guy kept talking to me because I think he was a friend of a colleague, and he kept buying me drinks, but I straight up didn’t realize he was even talking to me most of the time because of how packed it was, and at work it was tradition for people to take turns to buy rounds for everyone so I thought I was getting drinks on someone from work 💀

If I even understood that this person was trying to probably approach, my reaction would’ve been “literally who” because I never even knew him before, but also, that’s true for 99% of men.

I feel like it’s clear from this seemingly widespread psychological tendency of distrusting strangers that if there’s a kernel of truth to the pseudoscience that is evolutionary psychology it’s that perhaps we as a species were meant to have a much smaller social circle where we’d know everyone intimately and pick a mate over the course of a long time knowing them or at least knowing about them in our little tribe, transitioning from friends to eventually dating etc. that way also if someone was abusive you’d know just because you’d probably know and possibly be even friends with all their exes, the unknown risk is just kinda not there.

Obviously in a global urban world with the sheer amount of people you’d be lucky to even see the same person more than once, all behavior is effectively inconsequential like in an open world video game because other people might as well despawn as soon as you turn the corner. Dating apps are kind of a market solution to this, but obviously corpos have totally misaligned incentives because men to them are the customer who they need to make pay, with promise of women being the product, and men need to be kept on the app as much as possible and thus single to make them the most money, so it’s just fucked.

Actual answer.

27 yo elder here. Found my ‘the one’ on OkCupid back in the day, just prior to its enshittification by matchgroup. Just for the record this is a transbian relationship so idk how if at all it would apply to cishet relationships.

Every prior long term relationship with both men and women and all dates I’ve been on also came from there or otherwise online like social media or forums.

Approaching IRL does suck because most of the time you come off as a total creep intruding on someone just trying to exist, and dating apps at least have a safety net that being there is in and of itself a signal of some intention to date, like you know it won’t be inappropriate,

To be fair, that does suck for men, but I’m also unsure whether IRL would be the better strategy, I’m bi myself and not sure if I’d respond positively if approached IRL, in fact I’d probably think it’s gonna be some sort of scam or crime about to occur I’d be the victim of.

Haven’t heard of those

Kill The Poor

Honestly I’m not sure I’d know Immich used Postgres if it didn’t outright say so

Nah chill out and stop projecting, I definitely believe in CFS, Fibro, ME and ADHD and to some extent the bundle of symptoms that are speculated to occur as a result of post-viral fatigue commonly dubbed “Long Covid”, though I think there isn’t concrete evidence towards that characterization of it - which emerged on Twitter from a hashtag, not from established scientific or medical sources, and as of yet we don’t know for sure if it’s connected to covid.

What I don’t believe is that I don’t think everyone who thinks they have these disorders - actually has them - which is fact, and I’d like to see you try and prove that misdiagnoses, especially unprofessional self-misdiagnoses literally don’t happen.

This is all irrelevant to my original question anyway, you’ve still yet to provide a single explanation for why the study links increased mortality to Covid-19. Are there increasing deaths again? Why? Is it direct? Indirect? Why did they omit this highly important fact?

Key part being 19, because it started in 2019, and ended in the first half of 2020 because we have this thing called a vaccine.

What is it doing in 2025 still?

Is it mortality caused directly by the virus - as in, people are dying from it now, and if so - why would that start happening again? Stronger variant? More vax hesitance? More misinfo? More conspiratorial lunatics like you lot making up disorders to drink horse dewormer for or whatever you rigtoid loons got yourselves into these days instead of organizing to improve their material conditions?

Actually I’m pretty sure I got a good idea for what could be a big factor just based on this conversation and it’s not a stronger new variant.

No def not, most people I know and myself would be killed under any religious moral system because their entire existence is sin because that’s what’s written, but they’re some of the kindest, most humanist and sane people I’ve met, they just aren’t religious because most religions would want them dead.

Often they have individual moral frameworks that are some variation of the marxism-adjacent maximization of happiness/minimization of suffering or nietzchean fulfillment of potential.

I also have no problem calling it sinful either if it’s a useful shorthand tbf, it’s just words after all.

Morally wrong yes, sinful no.

Frankly if someone used a religious framework to justify why something is good/bad it’s safe to say a lot of people will take away from it the exact opposite.

Removed by mod

But what I couldn’t find in this study is WHY they think this increase in mortality is due to covid.

I am not claiming they are wrong. I am not casting doubt. I am not anyone or in any position to do that.

I am simply missing an explanation, an explanation that I feel should be front and centre, in bold red text, maybe wordart, for how something relatively minor from 5 years ago is causing anything at all 5 years later. I may be wrong but I think that’s called a thesis, and either I’m blind or I couldn’t find it.

To me, yes it is very unintuitive because the pandemic is grossly outdone by virtually everything that’s happened since and during. If there is an increase in insert bad thing here, a fairly benign virus from 5 years ago wouldn’t even be in my top 10 guesses for it.

And yes, maybe I’m very deluded, but if you can’t explain it to an idiot like me who’s trying to understand and genuinely align themselves with truth and knowledge derived via the scientific method, then what hope is there for communicating this stuff to the rest of society to benefit from, when many aren’t so willing, and would happily equate data driven analysis and findings with the subjective opinion of their uncle that he obtained through “doing his own research”?

All the guidance from like, schools, where they’re taught stuff? Hopefully not that it’s “sinful” but the realities of gambling instead.

Is it really linked to the pandemic though? I don’t mean to be conspiratorial, I’ll happily believe it if someone can explain, but frankly the pandemic seems to me like a very small drop in a huge bucket of problems the world has that would exacerbate mortality.

Some factors I would easily think have much more impact than covid would be higher wealth inequality leading to widespread poverty, higher crime, vaccine and more general healthcare hesitancy, crumbling public services and rising cost of private alternatives, increased homelessness and stress caused by housing insecurity due to extremely high costs and jobs being few and far between while low paid and highly insecure as layoffs never seem to end and good luck finding one of you’re not already working, and all that at least intuitively to me can far more easily kill people than a virus with flu symptoms that largely stopped 5 years ago.

Obviously way back during the pandemic it’s understandable there were some excess deaths directly caused by the virus for people who were already one foot there who also ended up getting the virus, but in retrospect the whole thing wasn’t even that big a deal, sat at home for like a month in April and that was it, most people either didn’t have it at all or didn’t even know they had it, and seemed to enjoy the excitement and the change of pace to working from home and the accompanying lower transport cost, now how would this fairly benign event still cause much of anything, let alone excess mortality?

Uncle Ruckus is a white supremacist who claims to be white and has internalized racism towards blacks folks.

My post was partly in jest, because OP talked about being silently judged for their characteristics, so I drew up an increasingly absurd and unhinged list that judges everyone by clearly nonsensical characteristics.

To make sure it’s very clearly a joke I made sure to be discriminatory towards every ethnicity and just to make it beyond obvious what I was doing was satire, I included myself in the list, but again discriminated only based on certain clothes, just in case the absurd scenario of me not talking to a hypothetical clone of myself wasn’t absurd enough on its own.

Honestly, I don’t know how much more obvious it could be. Maybe you need some media literacy, or failing that at least a sense of humor.

This was also posted in the hope that OP realizes how weird it would be for his fears to be true and help them get over their social anxiety.