MouldyCat
@MouldyCat@feddit.uk
- Comment on Horrified children look on as lollipop man in his 70s struck by car on school crossing 1 week ago:
Unlike in the US, where they carry a gun, and are authorised to use deadly force if anyone attempts to inconvenience car drivers by crossing the road.
- Comment on Horrified children look on as lollipop man in his 70s struck by car on school crossing 1 week ago:
A lemon tree, my dear Sherlock.
- Comment on Horrified children look on as lollipop man in his 70s struck by car on school crossing 1 week ago:
Couldn’t find much more info about the crash than is this article. The driver was charged with driving dangerously while under the influence of illegal drugs (two separate charges). I was initially curious to know how serious it really was, given that a 70 year old chap was hit and was left with a “suspected broken leg”. Just seemed anomalous is all.
Older folk are known for having bones as brittle as chipsticks, so how did he get away with only a suspected fracture? I’m no expert but that must mean the fracture was not dislocated, as that surely would be immediately beyond suspicion. Even with greater pedestrian survivability these days thanks to better car design, this would seem a lot.
What I did find from the few articles out there about this does indicate it was indeed a really serious crash, as the road was closed off for about an hour. The police language used also seems more consistent with a high speed incident rather than a low speed nudge into the lollipop man. So how did he get away so lightly?
I did find one extra detail - two vehicles were involved. Yet only one person has been charged. I’m thinking that what might have happened is our kindly lollipop-wielding friend walked onto the crossing to allow kids to cross, and one car duly came to a stop, but then the drugged-up participant in the proceedings who was too preoccupied snorting lines off the dashboard to notice, walloped into the back of the first car at speed, shunting it forward into said lollipop geezer.
Well it’s all I could think of that would explain it all.
- Comment on KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing 3 weeks ago:
ya … I might have been trolling a little bit 😁
- Comment on I'm right and the other vegans are wrong 3 weeks ago:
You are smart enough to suffer
Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don’t even think it’s possible to have a “primitive consciousness”, or a “sophisticated consciousness”. A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn’t exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or… you just don’t - not even blackness.
Let’s say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I’m assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.
You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you’d been resting on. “Woah what a weird dream” you’d think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.
- Comment on I'm right and the other vegans are wrong 3 weeks ago:
Gay space communist here. I’m not vegan, not even vegetarian - I do however only eat vegetarian at home, and most of the time vegan, but I’ll eat non-vegetarian food when visiting carnivorous friends or even in restaurants, if the veggie options are unappealing.
Honey is something I stopped buying after hearing from vegans about the cruelty in its production - from what I recall, and I did also watch a video or two of the process, queen bees routinely have their legs pulled off to trigger a hive to be built, and while I don’t know if bees are conscious, I know I would never pull the legs off an insect, so I can no longer in good conscience put a pot of honey in my basket as I walk around a supermarket.
Similar logic should also apply to cheese and ice cream, the non-vegan items that I still buy a lot of, but I did try giving up these items for a couple of months, and man I’m sorry baby calves but I just love those things too much.
- Comment on KytyPS5 (PS5 Emulator) can now run GTA V at 60fps for few minutes before crashing 3 weeks ago:
Beats me. If the USSR had won the Cold War and taken over the world, we’d all have way better games consoles AND they’d be given out for free to everyone who asked.
- Comment on Police seize £200k Lamborghini under tightened antisocial driving laws 3 weeks ago:
I’d be on your side if I went out of my way to be an asshole.
I sympathise with your unease - it doesn’t seem ideal to allow the police such wide discretionary power, but we don’t live in the ideal world and the fact is there are plenty of arseholes who are not as gracious and accommodating to their local communities as you would be, if you were to choose to be one. These people *do* go out of their way to be arseholes, it’s how they show off to their mates. They deliberately push things as far as they can and they are a fucking nightmare to have as neighbours.
Back in the day, the police would have a quiet word with their fathers at the gentlemen’s club who would then threaten to cut them off - or, if they were working class oiks, they’d shove them in the back of the black Maria, beat them black and blue and drop them off outside town without their shoes.
Something needs to be done. Maybe that means allowing loud brash vehicles to be seized merely after a few complaints are made by the community that the police reasonably believe to be well-founded.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 1 month ago:
mmm yeah the messy real world in which we live, the one that has no built-in justice or fairness, in fact the only unchanging law is that the strong have dominion over the weak. That real world, yes. It seems you are acquainted with it.
We are not masters of it. We are very much at its mercy just like all the other creatures on the planet. Care and thoughtfulness is needed when attempting to design and implement public systems that deliver justice and fairness and are sustainable over the long-term.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 1 month ago:
yes sorry, I didn’t mean to say you did. I was just saying that a practical solution could be to make water and energy cost more the more of it you use. Right now, there is a tendency for the opposite to happen, mainly for companies, where they are offered better prices per unit the more they use.
I also know people who are somewhat cavalier with their own water and energy use, while others who are less well off are scrimping and saving in order to keep bills low. It seems fine to me that the former are charged double per unit (say). It subsidises the usage of less well-off people and at the same time encourages people to be more economical.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 1 month ago:
Why “reasonable”?
Because we live in the real world unfortunately, so compromises are necessary if you want sustainable long-term solutions. Regarding water, desalination has come a long way in the last few years, but extracting drinkable water from the sea is still very energy intensive and it still makes far more sense to collect rain and spring water.
You also mentioned food and energy, and right now these things take human labour to produce and deliver, which ultimately means you’re going to have to pay those workers. The government’s supply of money is limited, and it would not be cheap to nationalise water companies, farms, supermarkets and energy companies in order to allow domestic users free access to those resources.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 1 month ago:
Making all domestic usage free sounds great but we do have to encourage reasonable water use. (And energy use.)
Getting rid of the standing charge is an important first step IMO. At the moment it effectively means people with low water usage are subsidising those who use lots of water.
I’d like to see pricing that gets more expensive the more you use. So if you only use what you need for your particular household, you pay a very low price per unit, if not entirely free, and the price per unit keeps increasing the more a household uses per person.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 1 month ago:
pumps are cheap enough but they probably increase the chance of blockage due to hair and so on. if you could get it using just gravity it would prob be better from a minimum maintenance viewpoint.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 1 month ago:
I also looked at this recently as I thought that soap would be harmful to plants and/or microbes and the Royal Horticultural Society has done some investigation of their own into the use of greywater, and their advice is “plants can be watered with shower, bath, kitchen and washing machine water (from rinse cycles)”, finding that “soil and potting composts are effective at filtering out” the soap/detergent.
I’m just echoing what @Denjin@feddit.uk with the RHS link, and I didn’t read the articles he linked but it wouldn’t surprise me if the RHS guidance is the source of those.
- Comment on Shopworker sacked for tackling suspected bacon thief 3 months ago:
mate people selling stolen food (and any other goods) at a lower price than the producers themselves has been a thing since forever, it doesn’t say anything about anything.
- Comment on 'A significant moment': UK's latest floating solar farm powers up at Cheshire quarry 3 months ago:
tldr: it’s a private installation which produces power for its owners, Bathgate Silica Sand. It is a 400kW floating photovoltaic (FPV) array of 650 floating solar panels on North Arclid Lake, an artificial lake at the Arclid Quarry in Cheshire.
- Comment on Nearly 500 seriously injured in e-scooter collisions in Great Britain last year 4 months ago:
I’ve driven a little around Portugal, and their roads were the worst I’ve ever driven on. Not just potholes, but the roads were often wonky and/or not flat (think like undulations like waves as you’re driving along), missing road markings etc. The quality drop was really noticeable when you drove from Spain into Portugal. It was about 8 years ago so it’s possible they’ve really got their act together since then, but I’m skeptical about how reliable their data is if Portugal is listed as the country with the 5th best roads in the world…
- Comment on Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve 6 months ago:
stop it in physical games as well
I think the connection to physical cards is pretty weak really - the crucial difference being that if you want to get some physical cards, you go out and buy them (or stay in and buy them I guess). You start with nothing except some cash, and you end up with some random cards, which may or may not be valuable.
Loot boxes in F2P games are not like that - you play a free game, have fun and then end up with this “loot box” without having done anything to ask for it. It’s just there in your inventory, and it stays there until you fork over some cash and see what’s inside.
It’s way more of a temptation than physical cards that you won’t encounter until you buy them.
- Comment on The Anatomy of an Impossible Port: Bringing Dead Cells to the R36S 6 months ago:
yes indeed - I had a go at decompilation a little while (wanted to get a mod working on linux) and while it was hella geeky fun, it was very slow and I could tell I didn’t really have a hope of achieving my goal. I can really see how an LLM could turbo-charge that process.
- Comment on The Anatomy of an Impossible Port: Bringing Dead Cells to the R36S 6 months ago:
there’s nothing in this article that makes me think it’s LLM generated, no idea what that guy was on about. It’s very well written and readable, which I don’t think LLM can really achieve, not that I’ve ever seen anyway. And it wasn’t easy but I did manage to find a minor typo - “All my thanks to bmdhacks for keeping me informed through
and ofevery step he took” 😁 - Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 8 months ago:
my point was that currently the government is very sensitive about antisemitism and less sensitive about islamophobia
Your “point” makes no sense given that Islam also carries out male circumcision. In fact, the vast majority of non-medical male circumcisions in the UK are carried out by Muslim parents.
Does this change your view? Now you know this, do you now think that the government will actually implement a male circumcision ban after all?
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 8 months ago:
sensitivity towards Judaism at the moment
Judaism and (some of?) its daughter religions - Islam also carries out this practice, and if anything Islam is even more protected by the state.
As many know, Islam also carries out FGM, which is indisputably worse for the victim than male circumcision. Now, there is already a specific criminal offence for FGM, strengthened by the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. This makes it illegal to perform FGM in the UK or to take a UK national or permanent resident abroad for FGM.
In over 20 years, only a handful of cases have been brought to trial. The first successful conviction for FGM in the UK did not happen until 2019, and even now there are typically less than 10 prosecutions per year. There are thousands of cases identified every year, (but it’s not often clear how many of those are recent).
My point is that while this suggested new law is welcome, it is unlikely to result in any significant reduction in religious child mutilation.
- Comment on Why does every commercial depiction of honey involve one of this things? Literally nobody has ever seen one of these in real life 9 months ago:
I think you got that backwards - the caveman is the one scared of the microwave and its spooky woo-woo magic that damages the water’s aura
- Comment on Patients clogging up A&E with hiccups, sore throats and niggles 9 months ago:
ah so you were already paying to visit a GP? How much is that then?
- Comment on Glamour UK has perfect response to JK Rowling’s complaint about its trans cover 10 months ago:
“Better luck next year Jo x.”
Saved you a click!
- Comment on Cardiff is set to become the first city in the UK to introduce higher parking charges for SUVs 11 months ago:
I just slammed my balls in the rear door of my Range Rover a couple of times. Am I good now?
- Comment on Only one in 50 bike thefts result in a charge, shocking figures reveal 11 months ago:
Better than Worcester police then. I had my bike nicked from a bike rack by a park & ride’s mini bus station. The guy working there spent a little while shuttling through the video and found crystal clear footage of the rapscallion arriving on a worse bike, messing around by my bike for a minute or two (cutting the lock), then riding off with it. You couldn’t hope for better evidence of the crime, and if he was known to police - he certainly acted like he’d done this sort of thing before - it would’ve been easy to identify him. The cops didn’t even bother to go in and see it.
After several weeks, I got a call from our trusty boys in blue about it. Ah great, I thought naively, they haven’t forgotten, just backlogged. But it quickly became obvious, from his leading questions, that the copper was actually hoping to catch me out as an insurance fraudster and had no intention of doing jack-shit to actually get the thing back. I lost it a bit with him and I think he did end up feeling kind of bad - although not bad enough to send someone round to view the footage of course.
- Comment on An academic was aghast when her partner was accused of IRA activity. After his trial, he confessed 11 months ago:
This does sound like it might be a very interesting book. I am intrigued to find out more about Mary’s point of view. She says she almost dumped him when he came clean, not because of his direct support for the IRA but because of the deception:
“I know Michael isn’t a terrible person, he’s a very good person,” she said. “He just didn’t put me first, and I don’t know whether I see that as betrayal. He didn’t intend it.”
It seems there’s a wider question about when is it acceptable to keep secrets from a person you’re in a relationship with. It doesn’t seem like he was deceitful about his political leanings, just about details of his direct involvement. That kind of seems very forgivable, although given the circumstances I can see why she contemplated ending it at the time.
- Comment on Would you pay $100 for a movie? Criterion and the 'second golden age' of physical media 1 year ago:
best method I found to watch old movies
especially as many public libraries loan out DVDs.
- Comment on More than 40% of private renters ration energy use to afford bills, study finds 1 year ago:
this is a really weird headline, with the use of “ration” like that.
Who doesn’t “ration” i.e. restrict their energy use? i have always done this - I turn off lights in rooms when no one is in there, I turn off heating when I’m out of the house, I don’t turn heating on until it’s really cold and I’m maxed out on jumpers and woolly underpants. It’s not just to save money - aren’t we all supposed to be restricting our energy use, what with climate change and all that?
So the article isn’t really about people having to restrict their energy use when before they didn’t, it’s really about a survey done by Citizens Advice to highlight the hardships renters endure thanks to poorly maintained and insulated houses. It seems that Citizens Advice were the ones who chose the word “ration” and to put the focus on people reducing their energy use to save money, but I don’t understand what makes them think that will make their survey results more powerful.
Something straightforward like, “Latest price hikes unfairly hit poor people in badly maintained rental housing” would seem to me to be much better.
