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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

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  • There’s a mile of difference between saying “consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games” and “we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)”.

    The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it’s reasonable even if you or I personally don’t want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don’t want that. So it’s a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.










  • It had two buildings. Is that difficult to understand or what? Historically they were separate schools built close together. (Probably a boys and girls school but I don’t remember)

    Each had a main part that was a single corridor on 4 floors with classrooms off it. There were extra bits that weren’t part of the main corridor, too, which weren’t as tall, and the main part also wasn’t all classrooms; in one building the bottom floor was, I think, just toilets and changing rooms, then admin offices, and only then were there classrooms, but I can’t remember for sure. In the other building there were 3 complete floors of classrooms and I think one half floor, with the rest of the bottommost floor occupied by a gym.






  • Absolutely true that this isn’t covered enough - the cuts were massive. They’ve also only been topped up by increases to regressive council tax, so it’s yet another way the Tories are worsening inequality through tax.

    But the important question at the end - what the next, presumably Labour, government will do about it - seems unanswerable. It’s not just that Labour are now allergic to saying they’ll spend money. It’s also that paying debt interest is now a significant expense due to higher interest rates and our economy is barely growing, so taking on government debt no longer makes financial sense.

    The Tories have done the opposite of fixing the roof while the sun was shining - they neither reduced public sector debt nor did they reinforce our services by investing cheap money into them. Now we’re left with the consequences and I don’t see how anyone can fix it.




  • Thanks for the SciHub link, but it doesn’t say what you’re saying it does. It says that a particular kind of upbringing predicts a discrepancy between self-reported sexuality and a measure of “implicit sexuality.” They further found a relationship between self-reported straightness and homophobia when “implicit sexuality” was measured as “more gay”.

    Leaving aside the fact that (in my quick read-through, at least) although there was a lot of effort given to validating that this measure measured something, there was little effort given to validating that it measured sexuality, this correlation does not allow one to conclude that “those who profess anti-gay views are likely to be gay themselves” which is the distillation of what was expressed above. Let us start from someone who professes those views. The research means that, if you know this detail of their upbringing and if you know that they explicitly identify as straight (not the same thing as public identification) then you can predict (with clear statistical significance, but still quite low correlation) that that person scores highly on this measure of “implicit homosexuality”.

    If you check the summary table you can actually just read off the correlation coefficient between homophobic views and the measure of implicit homosexuality and see that it’s not statistically significant.

    And I do think that the measure of implicit sexuality, though clearly interesting and measuring something is equally clearly not a measure of “are you gay regardless of what you say about yourself.” It’s reasonable to believe we can use it to estimate homosexuality, but it’s like measuring distance with a ruler where all the markings have been scraped off. So even if a study like this did have a correlation with its measure, you then would have to mute the strength of that correlation by the strength of correlation between the measure and the underlying reality we’re interested in.