I need people to understand that a private healthcare sector cannot provide a ‘buffer service’ for a public one. The reason is very simple; both sectors hire from the same small pool of qualified personnel, so any capacity gained by one is capacity lost from the other. The only sense in which additional capacity can be added is in infrastructure; beds, rooms, and equipment. But in practice, a lot of private health infrastructure is effectively just timeshared public health infrastructure, and what remains would be more effectively utilised if simply made part of the public sector.

The current approach is effectively the most expensive possible approach to alleviating the pressure on the NHS, save for getting rid of it altogether. But I guess the better alternatives aren’t acceptable, especially not to ministers and MPs who are paid tens of thousands by the sector that would be under threat by such measures.

‘Collectivizing power from the wealthy’ also known as… democracy? Is the anti-communist just saying the quiet part out loud here?

At the same time, when you are repeatedly exposed to the single most contagion-ridden work environment in the country outside of actual medical facilities, and you can point at stats like 56% increase in sickness rates, you would have to be actively dry humping the letter of the law to not just go ‘well… yeah that’s fair’.

I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.

I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.

Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.

Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.

Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.

I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through ‘official channels’ of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

It’s the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

Thing to keep in mind on this is that it’s a national regulatory decision based on an EU regulatory decision, and it is expected to be just the first of several more like it to come from it. Meaning, it is likely to spread and it is likely to escalate over time. And even if it’s just an added cost of doing business, it does impact the financial viability of Facebook surveillance-capitalistic model.

Most such tactics are explicitly illegal in the UK, unfortunately. Basically, the legal framework for labour strikes in the UK is set up to maximise inconvenience to the public and minimise the tools (and effectiveness of those tools) available to the workers and their unions.

The technical challenges are vast, is the long and short of it. But it’s high time there’s a good discussion over how it should (or might) work, at least the kinds of properties such a system should have.

• Self hosting of federated credentials should be possible, but not required
• ‘Backwards tracking’ of federated credentials should only be possible with limited requests (e.g. ‘verify author of post’) and approval of the credential owner
• All data on the credentials instance should be properly encrypted
• All data on credentials instance should be fully and easily portable to other instances via common protocols

There are several issues involved here, beyond just ‘mere’ technology, that need addressing. Personally I think a good start might be to engage with public libraries here. They already keep simple identity records (library cards) and have public service purpose well-aligned with the concepts of the federation and public distribution of information and knowledge.

The purpose and function of the police and the courts is the protection of capital from the people. Some cases illustrate this more clearly than others. This is one of them.

Daily Wire? Really?