xor

Alright, wrap it up boys, we’ve been made

It makes it difficult to use the pavement, especially for elderly people and people with disabilities, costs the council a bunch of time and money to repair, and doing the repairs often require killing off the tree

I think the best example of how deeply ingrained classism is in the UK is the video of now ex-Prime-Minister Rishi Sunak as a young man:

I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class… well, not working class.

I think people often don’t immediately see how stark the class divide is in the UK, especially tourists, because the UK has a relatively large middle class especially around touristy areas. But the difference between Kensington and, say, Middlesbrough is stark

I like him, so we’re up to America + this one guy

When in doubt, double down with more slurs, I guess?

Technically, it’s basically equivalent to “oh my god”, but the Vietnamese phrase Oi Troi Oi is outstanding

As a more serious aside to the above, it is generally worth paying a bit of attention to which instance other users you interact with. There’s obviously no blanket statement you can make about the users of particular instances, but there are definitely certain instances that are more appealing to… certain groups of users.

lemmy.ml in particular has a bit of a reputation for having tankies on it, but there’s lots of very interesting and reasonable people there (or here, I suppose, given this is an ml community), also.

I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.

I think that’s largely for the same reason; their legal obligations to ensure they don’t facilitate illegal stuff means that the risk of working with companies that do e.g. amateur porn makes the potential consequences (financial processing ban, i.e. effectively the entire company being shut down) massively outweigh the potential benefits.

So you’re right that PH’s legal liability was part of the reasoning, but that pressure largely came from payment processors, for whom the legal consequences are more severe.

Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.

Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue

b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

“Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.

Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷

Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works

In the British monarchy, the monarch (“the Crown”) and the person who is the current monarch are considered distinct “people” with their own separate possessions (i.e. King Charles as the Crown owns property separately to Charles Windsor the private citizen).

So these oaths are meant to be pledging loyalty to the Crown, in its role as the embodiment of the British state, as opposed to the king personally.

The commons library is a treasure trove of information about the UK’s fascinating and complex constitution, I’d strongly recommend giving it a read if you’re interested in this sort of stuff!

Commons Library: the Crown and the constitution

In particular, I’d recommend checking out The United Kingdom constitution – a mapping exercise, which is a document intended to be a reasonably thorough summary of the UK’s constitution and where it comes from. It’s ~300 pages so I wouldn’t recommend reading the whole thing, but it’s great as a reference for the parts you find interesting.

I mean, I don’t disagree that there’s similarities especially wrt to nationalism etc, but I also think those things are far more widespread than the UK and US.

Germany for example has had the AfD emerge as a major party with a big rise in nationalism, Italy has Brothers of Italy in power, who were an explicitly fascist party until very recently, and Italy has a long history of nationalism. China and Russia are extremely right-wing, propagandised, xenophobic, nationalist, surveillance capitalist and deregulatory (moreso wrt Russia), but it would be very silly to claim that makes them America-like.

I’m just stating how I see it from the perspective of a person actually from Britain - not sure what you’re referring to wrt UK/me personally(?) having a superiority complex about it, in fact I’d argue self-deprecating, anti-British attitudes are an integral part of British culture in a way that is a direct inverse of US nationalist fervour.

I just think “the UK is America lite” is a very reductive way to look at a country that is highly culturally and politically distinct from the US. Whether that’s the NHS (the first ever single-payer national health system), which the US has no equivalent of, the importance placed on the separation of church and state, or the far stronger regulatory frameworks that have frequently been a preventative factor that have repeatedly caused trade deals with America to fail (eg the whole bleached chicken thing).

I don’t think the US would leave the EU given they’re not in it xD

I wonder how differently the last US election would have played out if Murdoch had died before campaign season

Going to have a big party when he finally goes and joins Reagan in hell

Uh, no, not really.

The British attitudes to work, social systems and regulatory standards are more closely aligned with the EU than the US, even post-brexit.

We are very diplomatically aligned with the US as a result of our historical/cultural overlap and trading relationship, though.

No, public companies and cooperatives are completely different things

The investors is not who they’re talking about sharing profits with

Coup! Coup! Coup! Coup! ✊

Now you too can be supreme leader