“before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it”

It’s a Christian tradition - four candles, one for each Sunday before Christmas. There’s often an extra one in the centre for Christmas day too.

Every week an extra candle is lit. Today, using the conventional method, three candles would be lit.

Seriously - I’ve never known a party to go so out of its way to annoy its own voter base as this current government.

They’re haemorrhaging votes to the left in the hope of appealing to who? Tony Robinson supporters?

I’m going to go against the grain here and say “kinda”.

But porn isn’t the driver, it was a facet of the actual reason - accessibility and cost.

Betamax was, by any metric, the superior system.

VHS, however, was cheaper to produce, and cheaper to buy the recording equipment.

JVC had an open licencing strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce VHS-compatible equipment. Sony had a closed licencing strategy to maximise revenue.

So in this new world, where small movie studios could now record directly to magnetic tape and small companies could duplicate and distribute copies for very little cost, which format would you pick? The cheapest one.

The ready availability of porn was a factor for VHS’s success, but so was the ready availability of cheaply made horror films, martial arts films and other niche genres (niche by 1970s/1980s standards).

Wait, do the refs in American football really have hats with their uniforms?

I’d like to think this innovative new take on justice is completely unrelated to the Government’s intention to do away with juries.

Imagine a world where you can be arrested, tried in complete secret, then sentenced based on evidence that you yourself are not allowed to see.

Bleak stuff.

The snek!

Ha, you caught me, I was indeed a Reddit refugee. A little less enthusiastic about the MOASS these days, but I liked my old name, so kept it 🙂

I feel lucky that I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.

I think there’s a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.

Also, I’m lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.

Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.

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“I have approximate knowledge of many things”

Ok, I think I’ve worked out what the issue is here.

First of all, let’s go back to where Owen Jones starts off.

The term chav refers to a specific subset of young people who spend a disproportionate amount of their money on fashionable clothes and hang around being a nuisance to other people.

He also argues that the term is used by right-wing media outlets as a broader generalisation of working-class people as a whole, to further push their arguments.

These two things can be true at the same time.

But I’d definitely agree it’s not a slur. It’s just lazy journalism presenting a caricature of the working-class because it’s easier for their deranged arguments.

The majority of people are born into working class families, but only a few become chavs.

It’s a sad reflection on the country that the right-wing media is able to get away with presenting absolute rubbish with abandon, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of people consume this media without realising that they’re being told lies and half-truths.

But that’s what the problem is. It’s not that the term itself is bad, it’s that bad people use the image it conjures to caricature the working class in general.

“Chav” doesn’t mean “working class” in the same way that “penguin” doesn’t mean “bird”.

Heck, some of the chavs I know wouldn’t know work if it hit them.

Chavs are a tiny subset of working class people, in the same way that penguins are a tiny subset of birds.

I live in a northern mill town. Most of my very large extended family are working class (it’d probably be a bit disingenuous for me to claim that I still am, though). They would look at you like you were an idiot if you tried to convince them that chav means them.

Chavs are the kids who hang around with expensive trainers and caps, who have absolutely no qualms about being a nuisance to other people.

They represent a tiny proportion of the working class, and any criticism of them is specifically targeted at them.

Shoes. Absolutely hate wearing shoes.

I wear trainers with my suit. In my younger days I used to make training software for the military, so would end up in various barracks every now and then for setup. After clocking the trainers, my escorts would usually diplomatically explain to me that I won’t be allowed in the mess hall for dinner unless I’d also brought some shoes with me.

I get why the military has these rules (it’s part of the whole thing), but have never understood why other people and places value shoes so much.

I wish. Cursive is an absolute antipattern that only makes handwriting more difficult to read. There is a massive drop in legibility once children start to write joined up when compared to the year before.

I realise that it was a solution to the problems that old dip ink pens posed, but now everyone uses biros there’s really no need.

I realise things move slowly (I’m in my forties and had to use fountain pens for schoolwork, ballpoints were banned), but cursive is truly a relic of a bygone age, kept alive only by government mandate.

EDIT: I’ve just checked to see if it was still the case and it turns out that this year the UK government has released a revised Writing Framework. There is no longer a requirement for teaching cursive in primary school, and it actively advises teaching using pre-cursive letter forms.

Exactly this. My youngest (now 12) was taught letters in exactly this shape. It’s called “pre-cursive”, and is intended to ease the transition into writing joined up.

I didn’t get it, so looked to see if the answer was on other sites. Full credit to Tisha Bell on Facebook.

“if you notice, around a certain time, there stopped being villains and became more about breaking generational traumas, and believing in yourself”

I tried to find out what you were referring to - was it the rude person in the vegan thread? If you look, they were pretty heavily rebutted and downvoted by the other users.

The mods uphold the community guidelines, ideally without overreach. If someone’s out of line, but not technically breaking any rules, the other users are usually good at putting people straight.

This. Dirt cheap material cost, no additional machining costs.

The Bee Network is the biggest quality of life improvement for me personally.

In the bad old days, the buses were contracted to a company called First. The service was both unreliable and expensive.

I’m lucky enough to live in a place on the outskirts of Greater Manchester that isn’t too densely populated. Unfortunately that means it was also not profitable for First, so we had one bus an hour - the absolute minimum required to fulfil the contract. Except that wasn’t the reality - frequently the busses would be cancelled (with no way of would-be passengers knowing), so you could be waiting for two hours or more.

The fares were extortionate - it was actually cheaper for me to drive to work.

The buses themselves were antiquated piles of scrap that rattled as the vibrations of the engine violently shook the whole frame.

With the Bee Network, the buses are nice, clean and run on time. They can be tracked by app. The fares are capped at £2. They are more frequent and more reliable.

This probably all sounds stupid to anyone from London or anywhere else with competent people running their transport services, but the change has been like night and day.

I really hope this doesn’t happen.

Not because I don’t think he’ll be any good as PM, but because he’s already brilliant as Mayor of Manchester. It sounds absurd, but Andy Burnham has made so many improvements to the quality of life for us Manchester folk, I don’t want to entertain the thought of losing him.