Usually in the form of asking questions:

1. “Does this task take 5 minutes to do and do you have 5 minutes to spare?”

If the answer is yes, then just do it. It has helped me keep things tidy a bit better rather than spending a full day cleaning up everything. Now, if tasks get left, rather than a full day cleaning & tidying it’s only an hour or so.

My space being tidier has brought me some much needed stress relief.

2. “Do you need this item right now? Can it wait until the end of the month when you get paid?”

Struggling with impulse purchases so this question has helped me stop spending as recklessly though I do relapse sometimes but nowhere near as bad as I was.

3. “Got paid? Great! Have you money-potted your paycheck?”

Further aiding my financial responsibility efforts, every time I get paid I use my bank’s money-pot feature to portion it out to make sure rent, bills, phone, food, transport, subscriptions, activities, etc. are budgeted appropriately. The rest is stuffed into savings to resist the temptation to spend it.

4. “What would a healthy and active person do?”

To lose weight and improve my fitness, everytime I want to get something unhealthy for lunch or dinner I ask “would someone who’s trying to lose weight eat that?” or “would a healthy person chose that fizzy drink or have water instead?”. On my way home from work I go to the gym and on the days when I don’t feel like it I ask “Would someone who’s active skip going to the gym? Sure they would if they’re feeling unwell and sick, are you feeling ill and sick? Ok you’re tired, but can you at least do 5 minutes on the treadmill?” because I don’t want to be breaking that habit that has been going really well for the last 8 months.

Honestly at the moment my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster so I’ve not been asking myself these questions and been slipping on the good habits recently, speaking of which…

5. “Did you keep the habits up? No, that’s ok you stumbled a bit there. Now what small changes can you make to make the good ones easier to do and the bad ones harder to do?”

At the end of the day, I’ll take the path of least resistance so I’ve got to make sure that path is the one that will lead me to the outcomes I want. I’ll be having a think about these this weekend because I am determined to get back on track, so I’m going to sit myself down and work through it like a friend would.

Which leads me to the final question:

6. “Would a friend talk/act that way to you?”

I struggle with self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Some days I really feel like I just have no value and the self-loathing is immense so when I get overly critical and verbally/physically beat myself up I try to hold onto a moment of calm and ask that question to myself. I don’t need to answer it because I know the answer and just need a moment to just breathe and chill to try and break the negative thought spiral.

So I just went and watched that specific scene because you do raise some good points here.

If the computers know he woke up why release him instead of just killing him?

It looks like the machine that releases him is a different one from the usual Sentinels we see elsewhere in the films so I assume it’s just there to monitor the humans in the pods. It is probably programmed to just dispose of humans into the sewer that either wake up due to technical issues or that die in the pod by yanking their neck using the grabby arm and unscrewing the neural spike. Flushing the live/dead body down is just the last step in it’s process because even if they wake up alive in the pod, once they’re flushed down they aren’t going to be fed nutrients to keep them alive and these vat grown humans barely use their muscles so they can’t swim well and will most likely drown quickly. Why bother wasting energy making sure they’re dead when they most likely will die anyway?

If they did know he did woke up, and didn’t kill him because he’s the one… Wouldn’t the crew find it unusual how easy it was to get him?

I don’t think the machines knew he was The One at that stage because he was yet to perform any of the feats that the “prophecy” laid out. I don’t think I could explain the whole prophecy thing they go over in the third film well enough but from the sounds of it, until Neo can see the Matrix for what it truly is the machines don’t know if he’s the one or not so until he gets shit by Agent Smith and comes back to life to the machines he’s just another human that broke free and being a bit of a pest like the rest of them.

I agree that they’d try to help if they could but I think we’d have to assume that getting someone plugged back into the Matrix permanently would carry a much greater risk for the crew required to carry out this operation than is acceptable.

I think this assumption is reasonable because:

1. When Neo leaves the matrix, within a minute of “waking up” a machine quickly arrives to unscrew his neural connection and flush him down the waste disposal at the back of the pod he was “asleep” in. So we can assume that there’s constant monitoring of the pods and lots of machines to quickly dispose of humans that wake up.

2. The humans want to stay as far away from the machines as possible, hence why they use a dish to broadcast a signal from a hidden portion of the world outside of Zion so they can jack into the Matrix remotely and disconnect when they need to move to avoid detection. Getting inside of one of these human pod farms likely would be a nigh-on impossible task as can be seen when A. Neo and Trinity fly into the heart of machine territory in the 3rd film and B. Morpheus and the crew wait until after Neo gets flushed out into what most of the time is a corpse sewer to fish him out.

3. During the whole explanation of the matrix from Morpheus we can see that as soon as a human is grown enough to be picked they’re moved into one of these pods. So even if they somehow manage to sneak into one of these facilities without being detected by one of the innumerable monitoring machines they’d either need to A. Time it perfectly between a dead person being flushed out before the pod is repopulated with a new young person from the farms. Or B. Swap Cypher in when someone else wants to come out, when they state in the film that spending enough time in the Matrix to extract someone is already a risky operation.

4. They might not be rule tyrants but Zion clearly has a leadership hierarchy and risking a whole crew and a ship which has information on how to find and get into Zion in it’s systems would likely be a completely unacceptable risk to Zion management who already don’t like Morpheus’ recklessness for chasing the prophecy by freeing Neo in his 20s when they normally only free people when they’re younger.

I agree that poorly implemented price controls would be a bad idea because without proper considerations you end up with bread queues for crops or what we have currently for the energy market where the government is forced to cover losses from unsellable wind power because the energy companies don’t want to turn off the gas baseline so they can charge the highest electric rate possible.

Trying to wrangle market forces is nigh on impossible which is why the most effective ways to incentivise and deincentivise economic activity is through tax-breaks and raising taxes respectively.

An example would be a land tax and a brown-field rebate. You want to stop property developers from buying up land just to sit on it waiting for the value to increase so that more housing and infrastructure can be built so you implement a land tax to stop them from sitting on said land and do something useful with it. At the same time you don’t want them to be paving over an easy to develop on green space when a brown-field site would be much more preferable so you give them some rebate money to cover additional clean up costs before development work can begin.

We already have effective economic tools before us to leverage the speed that a free market can move at by giving them a very clear preferred direction by influencing profitability indirectly.

So I don’t see how opening a chain of stores that provides basic essentials that would compete on the open market is akin to price controls or the fall out from it.

Large chain supermarkets like Tesco, ASDA, and Aldi put enormous pressure on farmers to reduce the purchase price per tonne by leveraging their huge market share. If you don’t want to agree to sell to Tesco at the price they negotiate, fine, but you’ll struggle to shift that volume that Tesco would buy to other suppliers.

This is why owner-operator farmers, despite being wealthy in terms of land can see little income financially from the sale of their crops and produce. This is also why they’re slowly selling off land for housing development or selling the whole farm to a larger international farming conglomerate who can compete on the same scale of supermarket chains like Tesco.

This is not good for food security, which is going to come under further strain from climate change as yield prediction will become increasingly harder.

So why not create a nationalised retainer that can buy these goods for a better price per tonne for the farmers and sell them at or slightly below market rate to the consumer because they’re not beholden to increasing supermarket shareholder value quarter on quarter?

With that massive financial pressure gone all they have to do is price goods to cover the costs of buying produce, distribution, and all the usual overheads (wages, etc.).

This way the corporately operated supermarkets either have to compete on price and offer better deals to farmers or find a different way to add value.

It’s the same logic behind Great British Energy just with food security rather than energy security.

• Supermarket bosses and shareholder greed.

I’m with Zack who wants to do what Mandini is proposing: start a Nationally owned supermarket chain.

British farmers get paid fairly and consumers get lower prices.

Sorry to quibble but that line was delivered by Goldfinger not Dr. No.

Nope they’re just wind socks that blow in the direction of public opinion and private interests.

Anyone who wants an animal as a pet that is more of handful than a goldfish, hamster, or rabbit needs to pay for a license to own it.

I have known too many people that own a dog(s) that they can’t take care of properly due to work or other life circumstances.

The fee will go to the local authority to offset the cleaning of dog shit they have to do. The fines still remain in place.

I’m trying to think of other irresponsible actions from other types of pet owners, but I can’t think of any.

Please comment below or I ammend my proposal to being dog-owners only.

Honestly, I support this.

Pubs are constantly getting squeezed out by competition from supermarkets and whilst I’m not a big drinker or even a regular at a pub, it’s a part of British culture that should be preserved.

HOWEVER, if we’re talking about legal reforms to preserve pub culture, there’s many other issues that need addressing.

Examples include: Brewery-owned pubs being one of the worst types of franchise business for squeezing “owners” out of every last penny and having a ridiculous amount of control on how the pub is run even if the Landlord/lady has other ideas about how it should be run.

The power of brewerys over the pubs they control needs to be weakened.

It’s fairly easy to convert a pub into a single residencey and little to no planning permission is required. It’s impossible to return a former pub back to being a pub even if the community consents. Given that pub is short for “Public House” when more of these were vital parts of the community, said community should have first right-to-buy dibs to keep it going for the community.

Freehouses should have lower rates and brewerys should not be allowed to pressure freehouses into dropping that status in exchange for not paying exorbitant prices for produce.

Weatherspoons and StoneGate need to be broken up and the Franchise model needs replacing with a Cooperative model.

And as a last example, repealing the ban on gambling games and replacing it with more sensible regulation. E.g. games cannot allow the house to take a cut of winnings, must be organised by a regular patron, limited to a single night of the week, with a simple one page from registering with the gambling association so the appropriate authorities are aware, and a limit on the monetary value per round.

That last one is two fold:

1. Small friendly bets on card games in pubs is less likely to drain gambling-prone people’s income than a betting shop and comes with an inbuilt support network.

2. Smaller “don’t-take-the-piss” events and clubs with a light touch of regulation is much better for keeping the peace and not causing social problems than letting large corporate betting shops swallow the high street whole along with desperate and addicted people’s money to a tax haven.

Fusion 360.

Blender is not suitable for me because from what I’ve read it’s good for sculpture work but not good for dimensional accuracy.

There is Free cad but last time I looked at it, it was very far behind in terms of features. But as soon as that can do STL mesh to editable object conversion I’ll switch.

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I wouldn’t mind an AI powered clippy I could run locally (or at least a server easy enough to rent) that I control where it connects to and gives out data.

Honestly, not having to work to survive, food, clothes, shelter all taken care of and given my level of education I could actually help some fellow inmates learn.

Even with the possibility of being killed in there, at least then it’s a way out other than suicide.

I’m getting real close to wishing for that.

Since I’m also in a country that hasn’t got the death penalty, I could take out one of these cunts who horde riches as well.

What does Lemmy think? Should I set my quietly miserable future on fire to do some good in the world?

Yes, correct I do. Engineer brain working in dBs constantly.

I agree with this 100%.

Capitalism is exceptional at finding ways to provide value when there is a new market. The issue comes when capital gets accumulated and concentrated in the hands of a few.

We’ve seen it dozens of times throughout history where a healthy merchant class with lots of opportunity for upwards mobility ends up in an oligarchy as the market becomes saturated then monopolies, duopolies, and cabals (guilds) form.

The state needs to use the “P” and “L” in PESTEL forces (Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) that businesses (from single to large multinational) to identify new markets that need investment.

An examples would be new clean renewable electricity and one way of giving preferrence to this green energy by minimally taxing profts on this energy sold in the national market or international market via grid-interconnect networks (“Gridternets” if you will) with a clear plan to increase the tax to a normalised amount slowly overtime as the green share of the market approaches 100%.

It also has to be used to more aggressively dissuade markets that are more harmful than good now. An example of this is dirty power.

Coal, Oil, and Gas have done wonders for increasing people’s quality of life because they unlocked a new energy density previously unattainable. Now we have alternatives that are by every metric better; more efficient and less polluting.

Therefore, these industries need to be taxed out of existence by using a logarithmic energy carbon tax that keeps increasing year on year. Corruption needs to be rooted out like a weed as much as possible using a politically independent organ of the state to keep it healthy.

Then there’s markets that are stagnant in some state of capture: crumbling infrastructure, food retailer hypermarkets, etc. Windfall suprise taxes on incumbents and grants / zero interest loans for new competitors would reignight competition in those markets and the additional tax revenue can be used to fix the crumbling infrastructure these markets rely on.

And finally, I’d like to see a strong preference for co-operatives where ownership in a free market is much more evenly distributed by making them the least taxed commercial entities with businesses that have a higher concentration of ownership are taxed more through some sort of profit tax multiplier.

It’s much harder for a business to act in a pure profit motive to the detriment of society if the employees have more ownership as it allows morality to be expressed through political power within this business. These employees also then benefit from the profit share as well which gives stability and upward mobility in exchange for their labour.

There, that’s three proposals that could help towards decarbonisation, investing in underfunded infrastructure, and reducing inequality.

I am not a policy expert and there’s bound to be problems with each of those proposals that I haven’t thought of, but we have so much more to gain by working cooperatively together to build a system that aims to better humanity as a whole by using the best tools correctly and safety.

Until we reach an energy density which unlocks technology that enables things like a resourceless economy (a la Star Trek luxury space communism), we’re stuck with the tools of money and capital as the ways to transfer value.

I personally can’t wait for the day where “reputation” rather than money becomes the currency of society, I am willing to work with the tools we have right now to build that future, and I have faith that others are willing to build it with me.

Hey, no kink shaming!

What happens between two (or more) consenting adults that isn’t causing harm to others is none of your business.

Don’t like it? Don’t do it or watch it or play games themed around it.

And don’t be a sad individual who is only able to get joy from shitting on things others like. Because that life only ends in you dying miserable and alone, with nobody to mourn your passing and the last time your name is spoken being by the priest who rushes through a form-letter eulogy to get you sent off to the beyond as quick as possible.

Cool, now do the same for Water Company executives that shit all over our nature as well.

Here is a LaserPig video with a timestamp for the section on Paul.

Which will be met with the response “but I’m not an ‘immigrant’ why should I have to carry this ID card?!”

‘I’m not an immigrant’ is their code for “I’m white”.

As much as xenophobic cunts fantasise the idea of stricter border controls and US-ICE style raids, they’re also the same cunts that complain about long queues at airport security and HATE it when an authority figure questions them or forces them to do something.

They keep trying this every few years.

This ain’t going to work unless it’s sold to the public like Estonia’s X-Road:

Complete digitisation of government, using the NHS, passport application, driving, taxes, etc. to reduce cost overheads and speed up government services. It needs to be a properly implemented super app with best industry security practices. I’d even go so far as to make it open source and have UK developers who log contributions to the project get a tax rebate according to hours/lines contributed as a sort of payment.

Plus it would help sell UK digital services abroad by developing and advertising a local talent pool.

Getting the UK public to be on board with just a digital ID isn’t going to fly. Why when your driving licence/learners license or passport is already being used as an ID that people carry around, and then you have your NHS number, your national insurance number, and even a gov.uk account.

What the point of adding another one?!