This is called the “relative privation fallacy” - where it’s stated or implied that action shouldn’t be taken on one issue because larger issues also exist. It’s like suggesting that the police shouldn’t try to catch pickpockets because unsolved murders exist.
The truth is that it’s possible for organisations to work on multiple fronts at once and that making rules around food labelling doesn’t imply that “the world is[…] burning” isn’t also something that’s being worked on.
I think that can be accomplished by rules like, say, having to have the words “plant-based” clearly visible next to the word “burger” in a legible font at an equivalent size. And if it contains any actual meat, then it has to say something like “40% real meat” in an equally visible place in an equally legible way.
At the moment what happens here in the UK is that you get things advertised as “mlk” or “scheese”. There’s no standardised language, and it’s actually harder to work out what it is you’re looking at. I imagine it’d be similar if people have to start selling “brgers” and “bergurs”. Might even lead to more chance of a mix-up for people who can’t read well.
A specific logo would be good, too. Separate, easily distinguishable logos for vegan, vegetarian, and containing meat. At the moment there’s no emblem which tells you something contains meat, and there’s no standardisation on vegan/vegetarian logos, which means that both are a “V” which is either green or in the negative space of something green, and which can be in any font. This isn’t optimal for quickly and easily informing people about the contents of what they’re buying.
So, again, it’s helpful but nowhere near as helpful as it could be - not least for the fact that there are plenty of manufacturers who have veggie/vegan products who don’t label that fact at all. Presumably for fear that the vocal minority who say they won’t eat anything which doesn’t contain meat might not buy their products. But if everything had such labelling, then that would just make it commonplace and people would get used to seeing these labels on their bread/pasta/whatever.
That’s a 90-ish minute video by evolutionary biologist Forrest Valkai goes over the science of sex and gender. The TL/DW version is that the quote here is exactly right. Sex is fuzzy and before you could even start to say something like that it’s binary you first need to establish which of the many sex markers you’re going to use and why you’re excluding the other ones, gender is a social construct which is not the same as sex, and any modern biology textbook above a high-school level will say exactly that. Not implicitly, but explicitly.
If it’s the kind of thing you’re interested in and you’ve got 90 minutes to spare you could do worse than listen to a scientist lay it out.
I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, but I’m not going to argue.
Here’s a fun fact, though…people in the US pay more in taxes towards healthcare than we do here in the UK. And then they have to pay on top of that.
It’s almost as if having an entire for-profit industry acting as middle-men doesn’t lead to the best value for money.
Despite less than half of the USA’s total healthcare expenditure coming from government expenditure or compulsory insurance schemes, it still spends more per person on these financing schemes than the UK- £3,111 in the USA in 2014, compared with £2,210 in the UK.
That’s fair. It’s not like the whole thing around Northern Ireland and Britain isn’t without its complications and controversies, to understate it massively. But that applies just as much to saying that people from Northern Ireland aren’t British as much as it does to saying they *are *.
Assuming “British” is being used colloquially, as it often is, to describe someone or something from the UK, then there are Irish accents in the UK. The island of Ireland contains Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. People from Northern Ireland have Irish accents. Try telling Nadine Coyle she doesn’t have an Irish accent.
That’s Roku’s Basilisk
“The fact that people think those photographs exist hurts the president. It would be much better if people didn’t think they exist”
“Do they exist?”
“I’m not going to answer that! I’m under oath!”
I forget what it’s called, but there’s a measure of what people need to live. But it includes a likely more than bare necessities. So included, for example, is having one 5-day holiday in the UK and going out to a restaurant once every 3 months. Not exactly extravagant, but accounting for one or two things that make life worth living beyond the way that these kinds of things often just count you as okay if you’re not actively starving.
This year, in order to maintain that lifestyle as a single person with no kids, the average person would need to be earning £35,000 a year. That’s higher than the median income. Minimum wage is less than £20,000.
Couple that with public services all having gone to shit and it’s no wonder people feel like they do.
Want to stop Farage, Keir? Make people feel like they can afford a decent quality of life. Rather than trying to out-bastard him on immigrants and trans people. Make people feel like they’re doing okay and the hatred against those groups will mostly disappear all by itself and Farage will have no power. But if people feel insecure, that’s when the door is open for finger-pointing and cries of “it’s THEM who are taking your money”, which is the only trick Farage has got.
And Doyle got the inspiration for Holmes from watching doctors diagnose patients
Get the emulator BbebEm: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/
Developed for Windows, but ported to a bunch of other systems and OSes.
Then go to the BBC Micro Games Archive. There are a tonne of games to download, but I’m going to recommend 2, both of which are still incredibly fun to this day.
The first is Citadel, which is a puzzle platformer. Would probably be called a Metroidvania today, as the formula is exploring a labyrinth of screens to find keys, objects, and solve puzzles, but it was actually released a year before either Metroid or Castlevania.
The second is Chuckie Egg. This is a much more straight-forward “one screen is one level” platformer where you have to dodge enemies and collect objects before a timer runs out. Where this stands out from the pack is the physics. Your character is really bouncy when jumping against walls and platforms, which allows you to fling yourself around the stage in a way that’s really fun.
And, if you’ve never played it, I recommend last year’s UFO50 on Steam. The concept is that some game designers found a forgotten 80s console from forgotten studio UFO Games along with 50 cartridges and ported them over. So what you get for £15 is 50 8-bit games, all of which have some modern ideas but which could conceivably have been released in the 80s. It’s incredible value for money, and there’s even a kind of meta-narrative as you watch the studio’s games get more sophisticated over time (for example, the first release doesn’t have any background music) and characters return. And, of course, there’s a huge variety of styles and genres.
It’s not made before the 90s, but if you’re after that feel rather than necessarily specifically games which were actually made then, then UFO 50 is very much worth your money and time. You’ll honestly marvel at how ridiculously underpriced it is.
As a last note, if you are at all interested in archaeology, then Elite Dangerous is basically a modern port of the original BBC Micro game. If you’ve played the former and boot up the latter, you might be surprised how little has actually changed and how much they stretched computing technology to fit that entire game into 8 bits and 16Mb of RAM.
But it really all you’re after is strictly just games made before the 90s which still play well, then try Citadel and Chuckie Egg. The emulator & ROMs are all free.