• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Mostly in times of economic growth and very positive sentiment. It’s the antidote to the catch-22 that you can’t get a particular job without the experience but can’t get the experience without the job.

    Simply put ‘fake it until’ applies when you can put experience you don’t (quite) have on a CV; get the job and acquire the experience before it is ever tested in any meaningful way. That only really happens in a period of rapid economic expansion (whether that be in your (their) business, sector, or country wide). In such cases no-one really knows what they’re doing.

    I don’t have much experience of celeb or influencer culture FITYMI - finding someones parked Lamborghini or private plane and dancing in front of it for a TikTok pretending that is yours.


  • That’s an amazing set of references to throw my way. Thank-you. I’ll read through them in a while. My assertion was based on talking to real people: I’m only just not-Russian myself.

    I don’t really think you’ve captured communism: Cuba isn’t. China has been moving away from communism for decades. Russia rejected the Communists for the Bolsheviks shortly after the revolution. There’s a huge difference between socialism and communism.

    The West is in somewhat of a hard time. There’s a left shift going on since my golden days (as Gen X). Young people (Gen Z) rightly feel hard done by and the social mobility seems to have been damaged. It feels like the sodding seventies again here in Blighty ( I hadn’t even become a teenager when they ended but remember the mood and despair. Candles lighting the supermarket visits. Dead bodies of the unburied and the rats).




  • The West has lost the ‘war on drugs’, whatever that means.

    The only way out is to regulate (and therefore tax) them. Cannabis is the gateway drug (pun intended).

    I’m old and tried something mild ish when I young. It didn’t really do much for me so I never went down that path. I don’t even drink more than a unit a fortnight, usually I’m driving and I only drink socially. Just don’t fancy it much anymore.

    As far as I’m concerned, the benefits of living today are mainly being funneled to an elite. Taxes were mostly levied on companies and have become taxes levied on the individual, with companies not really paying tax at all. People are struggling to hold it together. Drugs represent escapism pending some kind of revolution.

    I’m one of ‘Thatcher’s children’ - A Gen X watching young people today giving up. If you had told me last century that I would have written such a thing today, I would have punched you.

    I believe that the move left of the politics of today represents the population asking for help.





  • The Tories have gone out of their way to make working beneficial for people other than those actually doing the working. Some offshore toting moron called Dave decided that austerity was the way to go. So we did.

    (Less than) Curiously, the law of unintended consequences kicked in: people are not working because it doesn’t do them any good. They’re so pissed off and downhearted that they’re not even fucking - the birth rate is well below replacement level.

    Everything I see around me reminds me of 1970s Britain when we were forced to join the EU because the country was bankrupt. They’re even advertising those chairs that are suspended from the ceiling, and everything is coloured brown again. “Abigail’s Party” will be coming to Netflix next week.

    I write as one of Thatcher’s children who loved the 1980s.

    I currently advocate Anarchy (using the formal definition of anarchy not what you imagine it is), or our mate Guido with a decent level of follow through.





  • We haven’t seen this ‘them and us’ financial divide for a century or more.

    In those times generations of families lived together. Until there’s another reset to allow the middle classes to thrive again, this is the new normal.

    That said, the middle classes have been being silly and trying to keep up with each other and bankrupting themselves. Houses are at very high prices because people will pay higher prices: both parties in a relationship working and paying someone else, school or nanny, or child care to parent their kids. A divorced couple or a high proportion of singles needs double the number of houses as a couple. Leasing brand new cars. Eating out or takeaway every night … bigger and bigger government. It all costs.

    Add in stupid net zero emissions policy for tiny nations like the UK, rather than tackle the real polluting nations and you’ve got kids living at home looking after elderly parents until they die and they can have a house to themselves.

    The number of children per household many nations have is already well below replacement rate. So at least you won’t be battling for mum and dad’s house with your sibling. Look on the bright side! 😁



  • All of the remaining Reddit, after a search engine for Lemmy appears. I’m financially contributing to Lenny, in a meagre way it must be said, and to a post-charging Reddit app. I’d really really miss both of them if they/either disappeared: the shared wisdom is almost never available anywhere else. 😁

    I always try Reddit first for every query and then Lemmy. Lemmy is a wonderful resource but needs a way to have its results indexed in the well known engines or a dedicated engine of its own. May https://www.search-lemmy.com/ return soon.

    Thank-you to everyone who made Lemmy possible. There’s no way that Encyclopedia Britannica was going to cut it. 😁