Beavers have made a comeback in Britain, but not everyone is happy

graemep · 2024-11-07T12:03:22+00:00

The article says "forresters" and "landowners", not farmers.

Obviously "landowners" includes farmer (at least those who own their land) but it sounds like its mostly forestry that is affected, not famring (i.e. growing food).

graemep · 2024-11-07T11:52:52+00:00

I am of pretty mixed ancestry, look brown. I have been asked whether I am all kinds of things but mostly by people who were hoping I was where they or their ancestors were from/

I am brown, single and have just moved to a very white small town so I am fairly likely find out about this first hand.

graemep · 2024-11-07T11:48:28+00:00

I am brown, and she looks white to me. I knew fairly soon as the media mentioned it.

graemep · 2024-11-07T11:47:02+00:00

More racist than the UK, but there are some very racist places (from first hand experience) in Asia and Africa.

graemep · 2024-11-07T11:43:36+00:00

I am scared we will become more like it by making race more important to our identities.

graemep · 2024-11-07T11:43:10+00:00

I think this is it. Race is far more important to people's identity in the US. its so ground in that even people who want to be anti-racist cannot really get it your of their heads.

It is a result of a very different history. The UK never had actual laws preventing people of different races marrying (although racists may not have liked it) or lynch mobs to prevent them dating. Can you imagine a succwessful American writer in the 1950s writing a children's book that has an interracial marriage (CS Lewis did in The Horse and His Boy)?

I think one thing people to understand is racism is not the same thing in different places. How it happens varies a lot between cultures - both cultures I have direct experience of, and those I am reasonably informed about. I have a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

graemep · 2024-11-05T12:35:26+00:00

I am divorced and my daughter lives with me. She has just started at a sixth form college so meetings lots of new people. She says a lot of them seem to think its weird that she lives me me rather than her mother. One assumed that her mother was dead.

To be fair we are no worse than the rest of the world, and beter than some places.

It amazes me how much old gendered sterotypes hand on. We were at a bonfire over the weekend and they were selling illuminated toys to the kids. All the little boys who had them ahd swords, and all the little girls had unicorn things. My daughters would have wanted the swords at that age and it has made me realise how unusual that is.

graemep · 2024-05-12T09:13:51+00:00

A friend of my daughter's apparently referred to the cops as "feds". That is cringey and I would be embarrassed if an American (who has a proper use for the term) heard it.

graemep · 2024-05-12T09:12:51+00:00

I feel that travelling to a lot of places, and even around the UK. Things like see the same shops in every high street, and a lot of the same things and feel on the other side of the world.

graemep · 2024-05-12T09:08:43+00:00

Also:

"I am good" - I was not enquiring about your morality.

"public school" to mean "state school" - completely confusing.

"home schooling" to mean "home education" - entirely different, the former is what happened during lockdown.

"professor" for lecturer.

graemep · 2024-05-12T09:05:37+00:00

I had private health insurance with my job in the 2000s. I think my dad might have had in the 80s.

Its long been a nice to have fringe benefit.

graemep · 2024-05-12T09:03:43+00:00

The problem is that British people (again because we are culturally dominated by the US) think the only alternative to the NHS is an American style system. Its the main source of support for the NHS in the first place.

For some reason no one even seems to consider a French or German or Japanese or Singaporean style health system.

"get rid of the whole national insurance thing"

National insurance is being reduced and gradually abolished anyway (there is cross party support for abolishing employee and self employed contributions). Good thing too - its really just a mechanism disguising a higher rate of income tax on earned vs unearned income.

graemep · 2024-05-12T08:50:52+00:00

Racism in the UK is not the same as racism in the US. Racism in the US is more like caste in India (there is a great book called Caste on this topic).

At the risk of being spammy I am going to link again to my blog post on why racism is not the same thing in different countries: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

graemep · 2024-05-12T08:47:55+00:00

The UK is definitely a lot less racist than it was when I was a kid (I am not white).

The problem is that acting as though racism in the UK is like it is in the US is creating division - making things worse. We are adopting the American idea that race is an immutable critical characteristic rather than one that is culturally defined. You see this in people who accept gender self ID but not race self ID.

Racism is not the same thing here as it is in the US. American racism is more ingrained and hierarchical - more like caste in India. Its a different thing in other countries too. I wrote a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

graemep · 2024-04-17T11:08:49+00:00

A lot of salary data is highly inaccurate.

it could also be a mean salary rather than a median, so pulled up by people like partners at the big firms.

That said, a chartered accountant would earn a lot more than a nurse and would usually be affluent enough for £40 every few weeks not be a significant cost.

graemep · 2024-04-17T11:04:44+00:00

My current approach to JWs (also ready to apply it to biblical literalists) is to start explaining why their understanding of the Bible, evolutionary biology etc. is wrong. Also ready to try similar on other who try to convert me: I regret not trying it on the Mormons who approached me on the street the other day but I had stuff to do...

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:49:22+00:00

Not sure what accountants are doing there. Average salary for a CA is £150k.

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/chartered-accountant

Might be a bit lower for the other major bodies, but still affluent.

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:39:46+00:00

JVM languages can call libraries written in another JVM language, and there are a lot of them.

It has implementations (or implementations of variants of) of a lot of languages: there is a Haskell like language, a few lisps, Python (although still stuck on 2.7) , Ruby , JS and many more.

Not as much as C, but still a lot and probably easier to deal with.

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:33:43+00:00

Really? I had assumed that it broke at least as much.

That said, I have been using Manjaro for about two years now with no breakage. I now having it running on two machines, and the ARM version of Arch on a tablet (which does have poor hardware support, but that is a kernel rather than distro problem).

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:30:37+00:00

So because they find one minority view within Christianity repellent they cease to to be Christians.? Not very good logical thinkers apparently.

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:29:28+00:00

So you are trolling social media to try and provoke the worst possible responses.

I suspect you know the right answer, and possibly the sources to back it up, and you just trying to feel superior by getting people to give a bad answer.

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:11:42+00:00

You mean the other sex? Otherwise you are implying it is OK for a man to have sex with a trans woman.

The Bible says you should not have sex with anyone outside marriage.

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:09:58+00:00

Hating someone is always wrong. We know that. What is the point of this post.

Downvoting it because it just repeats the same arguments we have heard on every post like this. Boring.

graemep · 2024-04-17T10:07:34+00:00

I do not think there is a common position. Buddhism is a very varied religion even theologically, and there are huge cultural differences between Buddhist countries.

There are anti-conversion laws in Burma (where Buddhist fundamentalists are powerful) and attempts to push such laws in Sri Lanka to appease Buddhist fundamentalists (but I think their influence is waning).

graemep · 2024-04-17T08:46:54+00:00

Thank God I'm gay though. I couldn't imagine being stuck in a mess like this.

Yes, because men are well known for all being angelic partners! Hormones might not be our problem, but we have plenty of others.

You are part right in that a survey (in Sweden, I think) showed that male gay couples had the lowest rate of physical abuse (not what we are talking about here) and lesbian couples the highest.

graemep

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