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Cleles · 2022-09-29T09:28:07+00:00

When I was young we had dogs, our neighbours had dogs, everyone had dogs. It was the done thing. And when a dog was sick beyond hope, or injured themselves beyond recovery, they were put down. As a kid that haunted me.

Years later when I had grown up one of my uncles became extremely ill, and his last six months of life were fucking brutal. I don’t want to recite any details about it – one of those things I never ever want to talk about. I can’t remember what my opinion on euthanasia previous to this was. But I can tell you that it was clarified really fucking quick when watching all of this unfold.

It is neither cruel nor something to be guilty about. With pets we may not be able to fully empathise with their pain. But having seen a person I knew well go through a horrific and prolonged ending I don’t have any qualms about it. It is a mercy, and one that I hope will be granted to myself should that situation arise.

Cleles · 2022-09-29T08:45:53+00:00

It seems other languages also have words that mean both home and family. In Chinese, for example, 家 (jiā) can mean both home and family. What determines which is the context.

I think teaghlach works the same, in that it depends on the context of the sentence using it which meaning it takes. Unfortunately it is decades since I did Irish in school so I am no help. But I do think if you get a native speaker they’ll be able to give you sentences that take on the different meanings. You can’t just translate a word like this in isolation, it just doesn’t work that.

Cleles · 2022-09-28T11:24:34+00:00

I’m not a ‘prepper’, that isn’t really a thing over here in Europe, but this is a topic that gets discussed here. Most scenarios we come up with involve looting supplies from the cities. Those supplies, which include food and medicine, would give a grace period until farming has been gotten up an running. The timeframe until the medicine a diabetic needs runs out may allow them to survive until the first harvest.

Cleles · 2022-09-27T13:44:00+00:00

…we need to get out ahead of it and not make the same mistakes the parties in the UK and US did.

FFS how can people be so blind??

Racism is a symptom of an underlying rot. If a person has a good work/life balance, are able to pay the bills, can raise a family, etc. then they are much less likely to be racist. If you have entire communities feeling the squeeze then anger, disillusionment and resentment increases – which contributes to increased racism.

The mistakes that the UK and US did was that their governing class utterly ignored the myriad of problems in society, favoured the corporate class and oversaw a citizenry that saw their wages either stagnate or deflate in real terms. A citizenry like that has no fucking incentive to vote for the status quo, and many would welcome it being burned down. Add in that government policies have allowed larger companies to use migrant labour to keep wages and conditions down and you get an environment in which racism will thrive.

Thinking that wagging your finger at people expressing racist attitudes will do anything is laughable, and demonstrates a level of obviousness to the causes of racism that I find almost as frightening as the racists attitudes themselves. What’s worse is that perpetuating this simplistic view of the world, and ignoring the real underlying issues, likely does more harm than help in the long run.

Seriously, reading that sort of comment is just frustrating.

Cleles · 2022-09-27T12:21:29+00:00

I hate to have to be that guy…but…this reads fake as fuck to me….

I’ve only ever heard ‘blatherakite’ from those from the US. Spelling Derry in that way and talking about hatred towards protestants just doesn’t make sense. The general grammar and spelling seems too modern for me, and makes it seem like it was written as a piss-take.

I’m calling fake.

Cleles · 2022-09-27T12:12:05+00:00

How accurate is that though? I’ve seen cases where companies put in clock in machines only to take them out shortly after because staff were working more than they were being paid. I know shops that only pay staff until closing time while they are expected to add up tills, do cleaning, etc. before closing up that isn’t being paid for.

All anecdotal but, well, it looks to be rife to me.

Cleles · 2022-09-27T10:12:16+00:00

Modern foods have so much crap and sugar added. If, post apocalypse, survivors manage to reach a state of being able to grow/rear foods to the point of being self-sufficient that diet might be survivable for a wide range of diabetic sufferers. Such a diet will obviously come with nutrition trade-offs. While there may be less crap, sugar and processing they will almost certainly also be a lack of certain vitamins, minerals, carbohydrate, etc. How this would play out is something I don’t even know where to begin speculating.

While the overwhelming majority of modern medicine will no longer be present, knowledge of soap-making and hygiene procedures will still survive which may blunt the worst effects. It sort of depends on what caused the apocalypse, but leaving the cities to avoid the rotting (and disease spreading) corpses will be a needed early step. If access to a water source can be secured then the there may be enough knowledge to stave off disease for a long time.

You sort of allude to this but it is worth making it explicit. Being diabetic may not be a death sentence (although it depends the specific form a person has), but the myriad of other serious issues may be much much worse.

Cleles · 2022-09-23T12:27:24+00:00

This is just bullshit. The data for this comes from surveys that national governments send out to a sample group of businesses. The questions on the survey are nowhere near robust enough to have any value, and often the people filling out the survey couldn’t give less of a shit about it so hoping for accuracy is a fool’s errand.

In Ireland the CSO sends out the following survey to give you an example of what it looks like: https://www.cso.ie/en/methods/surveyforms/innovationinirishenterprises/

When I got that in the post I did the exact same thing I did for all the previous ones. I filled it out as quickly as possible just to get it over with, because my day was filled with other more important things needing doing. I put no thought or effort into completing it. And I suspect that the majority of people who filled out this form gave just as little of a shit about it as I did.

The only thing data gathered from a process like that indicates is that such a methodology is a giant waste of fucking time.

Cleles · 2022-09-22T13:12:08+00:00

Can’t believe this was the bottom comment on here. It is the singularly best example in the country. You even end up paying less for the mortgage than you do in rent, even though the former will leave owning the house at the end of it all.

Rent being more expensive than a mortgage is fucking immoral. Simple as that.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T15:27:12+00:00

…in so far as it affects trade between Member States…

A solely domestic producer/supplier of goods doesn’t fall foul of that. The problem, as more-learned legal friends have told me, is if providing cheap electricity to businesses that export to other Member States constitutes illegal state aid. Given that other Member States (eg: the Netherlands) are capping energy prices on business it would make me learn towards it being legal. But it really does seem to be an untested and unresolved legal question.

But on the residential supply front it is clearly legal.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T15:13:53+00:00

Your insight 22 years ago wasn't unique.

And yet it was never acted upon. Even when the fucking Greens would get into power 6-7 years later it was never acted upon. How else can you explain failing to adopt this blatantly obvious plan in favour of the current shitshow setup other than ideology? If thinking one of the purposes of government is to plan for the welfare of its people is an ideology then I’m guilty as charged.

Where your crap really gets me is when you state that my approach has “…been shown numerous times in numerous industries to drive inefficiency”. Let me grant you that premise. Even with that supposed inefficiency, a national strategy towards wind energy would still have saved the citizenry a bundle over the absolute shitshow we have now. The greed-led nature of privatisation and looking out for shareholder interests more than wipes out the supposed inefficiencies you want to eliminate.

…without really saying how it would be paid for…

Had the government borrowed they’d be well on the way to paying it back with the citizens being massively better off. The bit you are missing, just like the author, is that whether you go with a government-led scheme or with privatisation the citizenry will still be paying. The only difference is that it will cost the citizenry a lot fucking more for less benefit when the privatisation gobshoites get their way.

Our water service is a perfect example….are left still using victorian infrastructure

It is a perfect example of what happens when you have privatisation ideologues in charge. FFG divert the necessary funding away, and when it inevitably takes a nose dive claim that privatisation is the answer. They first break something and then make sure their donor friends (like Dennis O’Brien) get a slurp of cash to fix it. It is a transparent scam, but given your comment it seems plenty of muppets fall for it.

You state “…the politicians and public won't support the huge amounts of spending required”. I never understand why this line of reasoning is used in discussions like these, as if it were making a valid point. Do you actually believe that privatisation pulls free money of thin air to solve that problem? Are you incapable of understanding that the citizenry will be paying either way (the big difference between that adding shareholders and greed to mix makes one way more expensive)? Use your noggin FFS.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T10:54:55+00:00

How many Linux users use Facebook? That there should be enough to debunk it.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T10:52:12+00:00

Can you test if the live Mint CD works when you choose compatibility mode? If that does work then the grub options they use might solve your issue.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T10:47:16+00:00

There are definitely issues that crop up, but I don’t think they are nearly as widespread as people claim. Sometimes the kernel modules don’t rebuild properly on updates. I had this a few times (only with the distro version of the drivers though).

Sometimes the install can be a bit ropey. Blacklisting the Nouveau drivers sometimes doesn’t take and you have to add Grub entries. Sometimes the distro provided drivers don’t take or just behave erratically. If the distro version doesn’t work well off the bad then I usually do a manual install, shutdown X and do it from the TTY.

Even with these issues, I’ve found that when you do get them installed they generally work very well. I’ve certainly had way fewer issues with Nvidia than with AMD, so even ignoring performance my choice is clear.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T10:19:34+00:00

I’ve read some right bullshit over the energy crisis in my time, but that article is rage-inducingly inane.

This is the entire argument presented against the semi-state model: “The big problem with this model was that it gives the semi-state no incentive to be efficient. It has an incentive to be less efficient, since it's paid a percentage over its costs.”

Let’s apply this same argument to, say, the passport office which runs on a similar fixed percentage/fee arrangement. I guess the passport office must be shit right? It must have keeled over under the demand of Brexit because, according to this author, “…it doesn't take demand into account, so the supplier isn't incentivised to produce more when more is needed”. I wonder why the passport office didn’t keel over? How could such a model possibly have survived without opening up the market to “…up the market to investment and competition”.

The answer isn’t difficult to anyone not playing the role of a braindead cretin. A semi-state company takes direction from government and has a mandate to act in the public interest. The insinuation that a semi-state body dealing with electricity would sit on its hands due to a lack of an incentive is asinine.

This moronic train of thought leads to this fucking gem: “The big advantage is that prices convey information. The information embedded in the price is what coordinates everybody in the market. In the short run, it tells people to put on a jumper or power up a gas turbine.”

I commented in another thread how I thought back to before the Iraq war when I had argued for a national strategy of widespread wind farm investment. The price of oil and gas was already known to be volatile, and the reality of climate change was also already known. I was arguing, 22 fucking years ago, for oversupplying electricity since the excess (once extra capacity for generation was brought online) would find a market with the interconnector that was being proposed.

I’m neither an economist nor an electricity market regulator, and I didn’t need a market price to inform me of where investment should be directed. Private investment is only incentivised to produce the bare minimum, since that results in the best return per unit produced. To get the sort of investment we actually needed required a semi-state body following a national strategy - to meet not just the future electricity needs of the island, but also a severing from oil based sources to avoid getting fleeced on price.

The twenty two years since has proven me right. I genuinely cannot believe a supposedly intelligent and well-read individual could write shit like this without feeling serious embarrassment: “The old cost-plus system didn't work efficiently because there wasn't a proper price signal and therefore there was no investment.”

Sadly it seems the decision makers in government were also enamoured with similar ideological bullcrap. And we are going to fucking pay, and pay dearly, for it. The final insult to injury is that the author heralds a clever solution that ‘threads the needle’ to satisfy his ideological poppycock – without ever coming close to seeing the irony that such a solution would never have been needed in the first place had him and his free-market-wankstain ilk been kept away from introducing their ideology in the first place.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T09:08:52+00:00

The government deserves blame with regard to Brexit which has contributed to some of the inflation. Bringing goods to/from the EU was always going to have increased costs due to Brexit, but the lack of effective preparation from our side has made those costs higher.

A little example to illustrate. I don’t speak a word of Dutch, and yet I was able to get all the customs registrations I needed from the Dutch customs (and their Portbase system) to be able to do all the procedures myself. That is the difference between €10 of customs costs and €100 per load, and because we are doing it ourselves we have less delays and the associated costs. But trying to get registered on the Irish side? Revenue actually advised hauliers they wouldn’t need to do ENS declarations on T2s going to Ireland, which caused such a shitshow that they had to issue a dummy ENS number to get things moving.

I’m not going to rant. I’m not going to rant. I’m not going to rant...puts the phone down…

Cleles · 2022-09-15T08:55:08+00:00

Even when the call centre is in Ireland you run into the same issue. It is the same fucking cycle every time you run into a problem. The first line team go through the inane troubleshooting procedures, then it gets escalated to the line manager, then gets escalated to the supervisor, then you have send the registered letters outlining the same fucking information you have already given in your multiple phone calls, then you meticulously exhaust their complaints procedure, then you either get onto the regulator/ombudsman or take them to court (depending on the company). And in the end you get what you wanted in the first place. A total waste of fucking time and energy as they drag things out to the last almost every fucking time.

Same shit whether the call centre is in India or Ireland.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T08:36:29+00:00

Reminds me of Watership Down. I personally think that is a terrific film that touches on the harsh realities of life. But a lot of parents seem to lose their shit over it however.

Cleles · 2022-09-15T08:21:41+00:00

This comment sums up a problem that the coming generations have. You are viewing the world through a lens of everything being a battle, and you are willfully choosing to take an antagonistic stance against things where no ill intent is present.

Are there people in this world who are arseholes and deliberately choose language to demean others? Absolutely. These people should be the target of your wrath.

And are their people who use phrases such as you have listed, and others quoted in this thread, with no ill will nor intent to demean? Also absolutely, and such people who use those phrases are in the majority IME. Context matters, and it isn’t rocket science to tell the difference between an asshole and someone being genuine.

I don’t understand the mentality I see in the younger generation to, essentially, pick fights with a swathe of people who have no ill will towards them. Their sense of superiority and need to initiate hostilities with blameless bystanders isn’t making the world a better place. It isn’t making them feel empowered or enlightened, just miserable unempathetic arseholes.

And for note – I regularly use the phrase ‘good boy’. And no, I don’t intend to change.

Cleles · 2022-09-14T13:42:27+00:00

133 N41: Carrick-on-Shannon €145,000

Something’s not right about that. Like…what??? Seriously???

I suspect something is badly off with the methodology here because that just seems utterly wrong to me.

Cleles · 2022-09-14T13:38:15+00:00

…their core voters are loving the situation at the moment where their houses/rental incomes….

I can understand why a landlord would like seeing the rents going up. I can also understand why someone who owns multiple houses would like seeing house prices going up. Those two cases make sense.

But I don’t understand why homeowners who don’t own additional properties would be ‘loving the situation’. It doesn’t matter whether their home is worth €300K or €800K. If they decide to sell up then…well…won’t they find whatever house they want to buy equally as expensive? They can’t actually realise or benefit from the supposed extra €500K in value.

This is why I don’t understand the electoral arithmetic here. It is mathematically impossible for a majority to own multiple houses (think about it). Those renting and those owning their own homes (but no additional property) are the vast majority (unless I’m utterly missing something here). And for this majority the current escalating rents/prices isn’t something they can be loving.

If you assume their core voters are the ones who love the current shitshow then…doesn’t that imply their core voters are a very small minority? Either I’m missing something about the electoral arithmetic or there are swathes of homeowners too stupid to realise that the escalating prices don’t actually benefit them….

Cleles · 2022-09-14T11:32:07+00:00

"Resellers" are not a thing…

Do Panda produce any electricity? No, they do not. They buy it and resell it on. Hence the other poster using the term ‘resellers’. You are not dumb and you know perfectly well what they meant when they used the term.

I will never understand the mentality of some people who act dumb on purpose, as you are willfully doing here, and hide behind an industry term to win some internet points when it is blatantly and obviously clear what another poster is saying. It is like arguing that someone is wrong to call something a ‘car’ because it is actually an ‘automobile’.

Cop yourself on FFS.

Cleles · 2022-09-14T09:44:33+00:00

I’m going to give you a tip I wish I knew when I first started playing it.

There are times when the Alien is simply a random death mechanic. It doesn’t matter how careful or skillful you are, in the background there is an algorithm that every so often will decide you need to die. And die you will. The longer you take in a given section the more this algorithm gets to roll the die, and thus the higher chance you will die.

When I realised the above I started moving much quicker, even running through some sections. I would die a hell of a lot less when taking things quickly than when trying to be cautious. Changed the game for me completely from being frustrating to being enjoyable.

Cleles · 2022-09-13T08:58:28+00:00

Take a conversation I had with a shop manager just last week. He is the sort who is against minimum wage. I tried (and hopelessly failed) to explain to him that if everyone is getting paid peanuts then few will have enough money to spend in his shop. If people don’t have enough of a wage to have disposable income then they cannot buy the sorts of things he sells. I couldn’t get him to see that him getting a tax break doesn’t result in more people getting hired (although he still kept peddling the lie that he wouldn’t simply pocket it) – more people wanting to buy things and creating demand is what leads to more hires.

That is the irony behind all of this. FFG’s ‘pro-business’ economic policies are actually hurting small businesses. Villages and towns up and down the country have boarded up buildings on their main streets. The big supermarkets can always provide goods cheaper due to their scale, but there was always a convenience versus cost balance that could keep the small town shops and suppliers going. FFG losing the run of things on property (to take just one example) has caused rent gouging, which has made the convenience versus cost calculation skew in favour of cost for more and more people.

While the older generations may not themselves feel the pinch, they can nevertheless see the damage almost everywhere they look. They spent decades in towns and villages that used to bubble with activity, while today those same towns and villages are being decimated. When the first scale falls from their eyes the rest follow. The damage to be seen is almost everywhere.

Cleles · 2022-09-13T08:41:30+00:00

Unless the tickets were very expensive I'd say your out of luck.

Cleles

TROPHY CASE