American rail experience: there's a rail line that goes where I want to get to, but the branch lines are all freight lines only these days, so I'll have to pack myself into a crate or take multiple buses.
Yeah. I went to Madrid last month. I went by train, because I feel sufficiently strongly that it's the right thing to do, but the difference in price between the train journey and flying was not funny.
I have To travel regularly to Copenhagen. Bed to office chair is about 6 hrs by plane and 18 hrs overnight by train or driving, and a lot more expensive.
@Sasha And that's the tragedy. You want to do the right thing, but the people who are supposed to be managing our infrastructure aren't interested in facilitating that.
@FeralRobots imo interrail/eurail are pretty fantastic for exploring Europe.
A couple of weeks ago I needed to get to Vienna from Nice, so I took some trains down to the Cinque Terre, explored those for the day and then took a night train from La Spezia to Vienna. I could have flown direct with WizzAir instead and it would have been quicker, a lot simpler and a little cheaper, but much less memorable.
On the other hand: while direct trains can be nice, it's often just as good to have frequent trains with timed connections. gruene.social/@jon/11271632597…
This is somehow right and wrong simultaneously. Sure, some routes we need are missing. *But* for example I’d prefer a Frankfurt-Paris every hour than a Paris-Berlin once a day…
@StrangeNoises There were a group of American and British journalists who went on a tour in the mid-1920s and they set the station clocks forward so their trains appeared to have arrived exactly on time and several of them wrote that their trains always arrived on time in their stories writing up how great Fascist Italy was.
@FeralRobots For touring around on holiday, they're fine, especially because you can get an Interrail/Eurail pass and tickets become much cheaper then. But if you just want to travel from A to B, flying is a lot cheaper.
@StrangeNoises I can't find the source for that story, but I can find several saying that the Italian railway was organised under Mussolini to have the diretissima (fast expresses; the Florence-Rome line is still called that to this day) having priority over local and commuter trains that normal people used so tourists found the service good and locals didn't.
Europe is full of centre right and centre left parties who, rather than oppose far right scapegoating of minorities, have adopted a position of, “those guys are right, don’t vote for them”.
@InkySchwartz The people, united, will never be defeated. Hence why such an incredible amount of resources is used to ensure that this unity is as far away as possible. @argv_minus_one @drbjork @goatsarah
@pettter @argv_minus_one @drbjork For instance, I'm no fan of Spain's Podemos but you read their story and the dirty war waged on them (basicly through a far right judiciary and sell out mass media), man, you'll see it all. The party onced rocked the scene, so the establishment for a brief period worried, pulled the strings and dealt with them. Now they're on their way to irrelevance. They did their part with lots of mistakes but no way they'd've lost so much base just on their own.
Similar story with Syriza in Greece, but then with the EU central bank and various EU big state governments. They deliberately crashed the greek economy into the ground to 'teach them a lesson', presumably the lesson was 'don't you fucking dare elect a leftist government'. @argv_minus_one @drbjork @goatsarah
@kikebenlloch Wait a few years and you have honest-to-god Nazis doing marches and getting the third highest vote share in the parliament. @argv_minus_one @drbjork @goatsarah
@pettter @argv_minus_one @drbjork Exactly, I didn't bring up the example of Greece (now on their way to 6 work-day weeks) on purpose because my knwoledge of it is limited, but your description fits my recollections from the time, how the chessboard was properly shaken by the powers that be. You cannot beat them at their game, the amount of resources at their disposal is huge.
@pettter @argv_minus_one @drbjork I think so. It's a process with its steps. You don't get full nazi massacres on day one. But are we slowly having the post-WW2 welfare societies eroded towards rampant fascism? Well...
@kikebenlloch No this is describing the literal situation in Greece, though they've since lost political relevance, since the state took belated, but firm, action. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_D…
The IT Crowd New Emergency Number! Ever thought 999 was too difficult to remember? Well try this...Subscribe to the Official YouTube Channel http://www.bit.l...
@Sarah Brown @Saxicola ✅ 🏴🇪🇺 The underground has a different announcement these days. It’s not “something that doesn’t look right” but now “something that looks unusual”.
I still have to resist using it to complain about bad graphic design
Currently at Nantes airport having cleared passport control. We were worried given the unorthodox nature of our entry to France that our exit might cause issues.
Thankfully it did not. I think having an EU residency card helps a lot.
yeah, they're basically not allowed to forbid you entry if you're a Schengen country resident. So unless they're actually gonna arrest you, you're fine.
If you arrive at a port where your last port is in the same country or another Schengen country, do you just ignore border stuff, or are you supposed to turn up and at least make a note of your presence?
So it turns out that if you have your own sailboat, you can rock up at Cherbourg Marina and as long as it’s after 6, nobody knows or cares because immigration have gone home to watch the football or some shit.
Illegal border crossing is something you get to do if you’re middle class, apparently.
Yup. You know that Calais trip I tooted about. Customs rarely turned up on our return. Shed loads of yachts and boats and if they can be bothered, one bloke appeared to watch us come ashore.
Good morning from a pre-dawn Gosport Marina where we are about to commence “Operation Oui Oui Baguette”: taking our boat, Scarlet, across the English Channel as the first part of our trip to Portugal. This is the second longest leg of the entire journey, and the first time I will have ever personally sailed out of the sight of land.
Note, that relies on AIS signals being relayed to the internet. Commercial AIS is powerful enough to be picked up by satellite, but ours isn’t, so there will likely be a dead-zone in the middle where we don’t seem to update.
It’s going to take about 14 hours to make the crossing. There is no wind, so we will be using our engine.
Don’t be afraid Sarah. IF they arrive, put the motor in reverse and the rudder max to port or starboard and speed up. That’s quite dangerous for them and they are intellectual mammals so they will choose their battles. This is my theory.
O, really? i didn’t know. So I stop advising and hope with you they choose another area to bother sailors. Stay safe and above all, enjoy this voyage!🥳
Research reveals toxic PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ accumulate in testes
New research has found for the first time that PFAS “forever chemicals” accumulate in the testes, and the exposure probably affects children’s health.
The toxic chemicals can damage sperm during a sensitive developmental period, potentially leading to liver disease and higher cholesterol, especially in male offspring, the paper, which looked at the chemicals in mice, noted.
“We’ve always been concerned with maternal environmental health effects because women gestate the babies … but this research is really saying there is a paternal contribution to offspring health and development,” Pilsner added.
PFAS alters sperm DNA methylation, which is a process that turns genes on and off, Pilsner said. The methylation patterns can be inherited at fertilization and influence early-life development as well as offspring health later in life.
@petealexharris I’m not a fan of debate so I agree with you. But if someone is coming at you with rhetoric built on falsehood and the trickery of political debate then an effective response is needed, not caving and running away
I think you've put your finger right on it - TERFs are indeed just conservatives of that extreme kind.
I don't really think their views have anything to do with gametes or safe spaces or any of the things they say they're about, because they make no sense in relation to those things.
What I think does explain their views is that conservatives fear any change to a status quo they're invested in - and a certain kind of (generally older) feminist is also invested - I mean intellectually and emotionally - in a neat division of the sexes. They've made that division part of their 'feminist' identity, so they mistake the emergence of cracks in that neat binary as an attack on their own way of being in the world. For them, it's personal.
@christineburns Yes. You stick to a clear statement of your position and don't allow yourself to get derailed.
If your position was highly dubious this wouldn't fly of course. But for example "people have the right to live as their true selves and it isn't within the legitimate authority of the state to say whether they are allowed to" is a good starting point.
Being trans is not a sexual preference, but I can see how this is confusing for you because OMG, you are so obviously a chaser.
Ok, I've just thrown in a new vocabulary word and I'm going to explain it and how it relates to sexuality.
Only 1% of people are trans, but a much larger number of cis people are sometimes attracted to trans people. Looking at pictures of Elliot Page, it's not hard to see why a large number of people would feel a little flutter if he flirted with them.
Other people are specifically into the transness of the people they fancy. Buck Angel's fan base like him because he's a muscle mary, but also because he's trans. And this is part of the beautiful diversity of human sexuality. Fancying trans people is a completely normal for a straight person, for a bi person or for a lesbian or a gay man or for anybody else.
Some people, however, get weird about it. Maybe it's because they feel bad about themselves. Maybe it's because they want to dehumanise people they fancy. They get fucking creepy and weird. Those people, who fetishise random trans people and who see all trans people as inherently sexual and sexualised, we call chasers.
And some of what they do is like to find random married trans women on the internet and "just ask questions" about their sexuality.
We see you, Paul.
However, hope is not lost for you. Go find a dating app and treat trans women like they're people (or at least as much as you treat any women like they're people) and you'll get a lot further.
Anglophone feminism in general has an ideology problem. I learned this while living in France during a formative part of my life. (My twenties.) Having grown up in the 70s, battered by the angry, often hypocritical feminism that was prominent in the States during that era, I had a visceral aversion to the word "feminism".
So when I found myself in a nation of ideologically introspective feminists I had no idea such a thing could exist, and was astonished to find they actually shared some of my resentment of the American movement. I spent much of my time there listening to women and seeking conversations with overt feminists; hell, just finding myself in a place where a man _can_ talk about these things with women was exhilarating. I was completely converted. Frankly, they saved my life. I shudder to think what I might have become in the Internet Age.
So yeah. As French feminists say: "American feminists are more American than they are feminist."
He quit replying when you quit replying because the attention stopped.
He also did not reply to me either because he was offended or because I kept bringing up trans men, which are not interesting for him. That particular genre of being annoying is almost never used against trans men.
Alas, we do also have chasers who are annoying in a completely different way.
I see that the press is once again trying to present terfism as nuanced: “we don’t want to stop trans women wearing skirts, we just don’t want them in our (SIC) spaces”.
Stop press, Joanne. They’re our fucking spaces too, because as we’ve been explaining for fucking years: trans women are women.
Trans women get breast cancer, therefore we need breast cancer screening.
Trans women get gynaecological problems, therefore we need gynaecologists.
Trans women get raped, therefore we need rape crisis counselling.
Trans women suffer disproportionate levels of domestic violence, therefore we need DV shelters.
It ends up naked, with zero personal hygiene, surrounded by empty pot noodles, hunched in front of a monitor yelling on social media about how you lost custody of the kids because of the trans.
Since getting a prescription in Portugal, I had become complacent about my HRT stock. Previously, I maintained a stockpile of between 6 and 12 months' worth. I figured this was no longer necessary, as Portugal isn't being so comprehensively weird about trans people as the UK, and also they don't officially know I'm trans.
I was shocked out of complacency last month due to a supplier shortage. The pharmacies ran out.
@Zoë O'Connell and I got within 10 days of going cold turkey.
Lesson learned. As of today, and thanks to the grey market, I have 5 months' worth, and that will soon be getting upped to 7.
In case anyone asks, there is a way trans men can stockpile too - but only if they self-inject. All they need to do is put an extra week between each injection (for example, instead of taking a Sustanon injection every 3 weeks, as prescribed, it's every 4 weeks). In terms of effect on mental health, this will barely be noticeable. Obviously, the prescriber must not be told. Over time, that extra week will translate into spare ampoules of T.
Wikipedia says the House of Lords is formally "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled". And the full list of the king's titles are quite something...
There's a lot of competition for ridiculous sounding things.
As a result of “Sir Knight Commander of the British Empire” Kier Starmer’s performative cruelty against trans women within the last day, I have voted Green.
In partnership with the Good Law Project, today (18th June 2024), TransActual alongside an anonymous trans young person acting as Second Claimant have issued court proceedings against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
Deep fat fryer is caked in sodium stearate, which should tell you terrifying things about how I clean it and deal with the problem of disposing of used cooking oil.
@Adam Portugal, having been blessed without a domestic terrorism problem, has DIY barns in which NaOH is at the milder end of what you can just plop into the self checkout. I call that section, “the bomb making aisle”. It’s quite fun.
Anyway, upshot is, I’ve got bloody kilos and kilos of the stuff.
So I have a contact that my server can’t update. The Update Contact gets added to the queue and just sits there forever, consuming CPU.
If I go into the MariaDB and delete the worker queue entry, it will be back in a few hours.
If I server block the remote contact, the problem goes away. If I remove the block it comes back.
Is this symptomatic of my database being somehow corrupt, or maybe there’s a problem with that particular remote profile that causes Friendica to fail in a way that never times out (and I’ve left it there for days. It just doesn’t go).
I have no idea how to get diagnostic output from the worker to find out what’s going on. Anyone interested in looking more at this, or should I just block the contact and move on?
@Michael Vogel Also, blocking the remote contact causes the job to disappear from the queue in a few minutes, so it looks like it's repeatedly trying something and failing, and doesn't ever seem to give up.
Reform is about to overtake the tories in the polls. This just removes the last obstacle to the media making their love affair with Farage a 24/7 on-screen thing.
The drift to the far right and subsequent implosion of the Conservative Party is going to leave a void in UK politics that seriously risks being filled by actual nazis, and competent ones at that. I fear for the future.
The Tory party going hard right as a knee-jerk response to the challenges of the modern world, and then falling apart from its own insistence on refusing to adapt to reality, is a grim foreshadowing of what is going to happen to the west in general in the face of climate change and demographic reality.
@lnr @chiffchaff There *is* (as I understand it) significant disagreement in the intersex community as to whether they want to be included. That would be my charitable interpretation.
@sparrowsion @lnr Similarly with Black communities (BIPOC as the call it in the US: we don't seem to be as organised with our acronyms as they are over the pond, even their anarchists have a brand).
That was my first thought. *Then* I saw that he'd said "antagonistic" and other folk also did comment archaeology convincing me otherwise.
@lnr Sorry for the daft answer. I'm only in the mood to snark and eat too much ice cream at the moment.
That was the gap between my replies. I've been to Tesco and back and bought a big tub of Häagen-Dazs "Strawberries and Cream", and I need to eat it all tonight because the way the week's going, it will probably want to invade Poland, tomorrow morning, if I don't.
@chiffchaff @sparrowsion @lnr One problem with the term BIPOC over here is that the people yelling about the rights of British "Indigenous" people aren't quite in the same part of the political spectrum.
@mobbsy @sparrowsion @lnr Quite. "People of Colour" doesn't seem to have caught on over here, either. Maybe it's because it's got the kind of contorted grammar that comes with HR and train announcements. I'm happy to take direction on this, of course.
I'm mainly impressed by America's ability to turn everything into a noun with a badge and a day and a song and a flag and a page in a book of etiquette.
Okay, they then seem to mainly throw their creation into the basement and forget about it, but that *machine* which turns problems into product is quite awe-inspiring.
Speaking of the Chinese, how about some of these flags being made on home turf for once. The Chinese benefit from all of these gatherings. Peeps in the community could benefit greatly if this were so.
Thank you for purchasing item packaged in cardboard. For your convenience, it has a resealable flap, stuck down with glue, which is guaranteed to be far stronger than the cardboard it’s stuck to.
Anna Harrold has hit back at online trolls who called her ‘disgusting’ and a ‘disgrace’ after she won the women’s half marathon at the Great West Run in Exeter
Prime example of statistics at work, more cis women gonna be hurt by gender policing rules cos as you say trans women better at keeping head down (or avoiding sports).
That article could have been SO much better written about how this is the impact of shitty transphobic gender policing.
@Catherine is Tired @Sarah Brown Notionally because she would have had the advantage (citation needed) of a "male puberty" (citation needed) and stronger bones (citation needed) and deprived a "real" woman (citation needed) of a win.
Cetacean needed - maybe we can persuade the orcas that terfs are more fun than rudders.
@sparrowsion @pseudomonas Probably all male trees so there's no fruit for people to eat. So the air will be full of pollen. Can we leave Badenoch there to suffer horrible hay-feaver and go to the pub with the transwoman?
Not sure I'd want to be in those woods in the first place.
Trans women over TERFs every time. My earliest experience of single-sex spaces online as a baby cis bi woman was TERFs gender policing other women and they were unsurprisingly biphobic and like 14yr old mean girls. I didn't like it age 17 before I knew many trans folks, I'm certainly not liking it now I'm 40+, know hundreds of trans folks and have zero fucks left to give for bullshit and hate.
The irony of the TERF brain worm trust going on about “female homosexuals” (god help us all if TERFs ever master the ability to sound like a normal human being) is that cis lesbians are pretty much the least transphobic demographic and entirely sick of TERFs’ bullshit.
People often ask what it's like to be trans, because it seems to be a very hard thing to imagine.
A friend, sadly no longer with us, once put it absolutely perfectly to me, when she said, "It shouldn't matter what sex you are while you're cleaning the oven, but it does."
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •And here’s how the experience by rail currently starts:
From Faro: take a bus to Seville. Book a hotel.
Faro is connected to the European rail network, but there are no tickets available to any other country.
Miguel Arroz reshared this.
Ian Douglas Scott
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Adam Jacobs 🇺🇦
Unknown parent • • •Sasha
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Sasha • •like this
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Oliver Blanthorn
Unknown parent • • •@FeralRobots imo interrail/eurail are pretty fantastic for exploring Europe.
A couple of weeks ago I needed to get to Vienna from Nice, so I took some trains down to the Cinque Terre, explored those for the day and then took a night train from La Spezia to Vienna. I could have flown direct with WizzAir instead and it would have been quicker, a lot simpler and a little cheaper, but much less memorable.
Anders Norén
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •On the other hand: while direct trains can be nice, it's often just as good to have frequent trains with timed connections. gruene.social/@jon/11271632597…
Jon Worth
2024-07-02 10:04:01
Richard Gadsden
Unknown parent • • •Richard Gadsden
Unknown parent • • •Richard Gadsden
Unknown parent • • •