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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Because they mostly have no clue that measles is a potentially fatal illness, with potential severe lifelong complications including some which require 24/7/365 full nursing care.

    They think of it as a mild rash with mild flu-y symptoms for a week or two.

    They also have no idea it is so very contagious.

    So though the measles vaccine has an amazing safety & efficacy record, whether singly or as part of the combined MMR, with endless research turfing up no link to autism whatsoever, and carrying only a negligible risk of vaccine injury (none as severe as the complications of measles), those who reject it do so not only out of totally false beliefs about the vaccine, but also out of fully wild misconceptions about the risk of measles.

    Though now the anti-vaxx movement has become such a big thing for a while, they’re all egging each other on with the help of ideological pundits. This combines to create a group highly distrustful of public health organisations and all medical advice on the matter, who are much more resistant to accepting correct information than their vaccine-shy counterparts ever were in the past. It also seems to be true that scary conspiracy theories are comforting to them in a world where serious infections can just catch a person, where autism isn’t something one can simply opt out of - they want simple answers, and everything which debunks that simple wilful ignorance is a threat to their sense of security.









  • Have always loved Dixon.

    Reminds me of being a very small child, in that cusp between everything being strange and inscrutable, and the unshakeable confidence that everything sometime would be solved.

    Though the friezes my toddler self gazed upon baffled and sleepless were much simpler, as a preteen pretending with protractors simpler again being mostly transparent, now blank and pitiless, there’s all the plainlitoccult puzzlement of youth

    no wonder my brow so furrows




  • Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

    Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

    I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

    Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.



  • Yup.

    DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

    Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

    No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

    It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.



  • Here, we’ve yet to get around to abolishing hereditary peerages in the House of Lords.

    Current government intends to get that done.

    Until then, though there have been lifetime appointees to the HoL for a while, and the hereditary system somewhat eased in other respects, it means if the right seeds are believed to have got into your mother’s womb prior to your conception, you don’t merely inherit whatever land and titles your ancestors arrayed about themselves, you bag a seat in the upper house of a bicameral legislature until you pop your clogs, whereupon your heir slides in.

    Unlikely to be similar for the hereditary Monarch as Head of State, nor as Head of the Established Church, though there may be some movement on the Spiritual Lords (about 2/3rds of the Anglican bishops & archbishops also get a seat in the House of Lords).





  • To the UK they are emigrants.

    Expat is a casual term referring to someone whose employer sent them overseas on a posting. Diplomats are the most obvious example, but companies will use the same employment structure.

    Different jurisdictions have different official terminology for this type of migrant worker, but their legal status in the host country is typically different to that of other categories of migrant worker in the same country, they are usually paid & taxed in their home country, and employed under the regulations of their home country (though in some instances, a host country may extend protections or impose obligations over them).

    The confusion arises because when the UK had an Empire, huge numbers were sent abroad to run it, whether for companies like the East India Company, or as civil servants or on military postings, and so the British now think of “people who live abroad” as “expats” because that’s the word the older generations always heard, and then continued to use long after this ceased to be the predominant vehicle for of British to be living outside the UK.

    The word is absolutely couched in a colonial past, but those using the term to describe other types of British people overseas are not generally doing so out of some sense of white supremacy or British exceptionalism, but plain old lack of awareness.