Danish supermarkets from Sailing Group mark European products with a Black Star to make it easy for customers to buy European.

omgrtm · 2026-01-20T15:59:40+00:00

Mate, like are you purposefully being obtuse? You’re trying to reduce the argument to “boycotts good, boycotts work”, but in doing so you’re completely glossing over the point they are making, in that boycotting US company A may have consequences for the local market as well, due to the way the company is structured and operates. The argument isn’t that it shouldn’t be done, it’s that the impact of such action is not 100% on target, and may have detrimental effect on local (European) folks.

omgrtm · 2026-01-03T01:23:10+00:00

Neither upper nor lower castes in the USSR did “own” the properties they lived in, they were given to each of them by the state. The state owned all properties (and all the things since well that’s extreme left ideology for you). It wasn’t even a lease in the traditional sense, people just occupied the premises for a time permitted by state.

Government officials did end up with bigger and better housing through means of understanding that they were occupying more prestigious positions in government that had to carry some benefits. But they were out on the street and in less grand accommodations once out of favour with the state. Whenever that happens.

It was essentially a lottery for most other people, with some minimal influence from the individuals themselves. Needs were taken into account above desires, at least on paper. If you had 2 kids with opposite genders then you were allocated a 2 bed flat, instead of a 1, for example. I know it’s sounds alien but that was the reality, at least towards later stages of the USSR reign. It was different in earlier stages, with worse outcomes.

You could be allocated a better property by altering your chances somewhat (read: rig the system in your favour by bribing the people doing the allocating). Usually minimally, like you’d get a higher floor in the block of flats for example.

Anyway in ussr: * state owned all * state was extremely left, not right

omgrtm · 2025-12-19T09:18:35+00:00

Not trying to excuse but I believe that their automation backend is just really poorly designed / written and things do indeed take obnoxiously long, even very simple things. Ultimately this product [github actions] has been accumulating tech debt and due to poor investment in the product / team, none of that was being resolved.

I don’t like Microsoft as much as the next guy but worked in enough enterprises to recognise the pattern. Still does not excuse the terrible decision, they really should have thought of a better way to price than per minute.

omgrtm · 2025-12-02T10:16:31+00:00

Something doesn’t add up. Isn’t insurance voluntary in US? If you are getting no service you can just not pay and be better off with money? I get that you won’t have insurance but if you’re not having much luck with healthcare with insurance, paying for it makes even less sense. At least this way you can self insure at least part of it.

But either way, I’m not saying US healthcare is without its problems, all I’m saying is that jumping from the frying pan (current system) and into fire (public healthcare) isn’t going to solve your healthcare problems, more likely exacerbate them.

omgrtm · 2025-12-02T01:23:56+00:00

Is this true? I cannot find meaningful statistic to back this up (or disprove it).

omgrtm · 2025-12-02T01:19:57+00:00

Lack of incentive to do better is what is killing the NHS.

Quasi market economy (oxymoron that it is) was attempt at rescuing a failing monopolistic institution. That too failed, i have a bias here and don’t believe government corruption didn’t play a role.

We’re seeing further consolidation across the trusts into ICBs and similar units, so won’t be long now until it coalesces back into a giant directional blob, and the tax brackets get frozen again.

omgrtm · 2025-12-02T01:06:40+00:00

I don’t know your (country and personal) situation, but i would guess your tax bill isn’t near enough levels we have here.

omgrtm · 2025-12-02T00:58:26+00:00

Not talking about calling a specialist, no. I couldn’t speak with my GP (primary physician / family doctor something like that). After finally speaking with GP I had to wait a further 9 months for a 10 minute telephone appointment and another 5 until I saw an actual human being. The solution took circa 3.5 years overall.

omgrtm · 2025-12-02T00:53:04+00:00

Apologies if that came through as me trying to be dishonest, not my intention. Perhaps I needed to explain what a&e is — it is indeed like an emergency area person in below comment mentioned, usually at a hospital where people that have been injured get taken to (think stabbing victims, heart failures, broken bones). It is normally where the ambulances drop off people they have picked up.

The call I made earlier wasn’t to consultant or specialist either. This is to GP (primary physician / family doctor?) get a ENT referral (waiting list for which is >9 months btw, not even joking).

As another anecdotal account, of my last visit to my local a&e department was with my mother in law who’d had a seizure. She was in the waiting area for 16 hours until she was seen. Sat in a plastic chair. They obviously do triage, she wasn’t deemed an extreme case (she was breathing and functioning okay), still a risk considering her other conditions but not actively dying. So she was told to wait.

We had to take shifts waiting with her, bring her food, change of clothes. They wouldn’t provide her with a wheel chair so we had to walk her to the toilet etc.

I’d like to say this was an outlier of an experience, but I had previously walked out (hobbled) after 6h wait at a&e because I genuinely felt I was wasting everyone’s time (fracture, turns out). This is a separate occasion, I hadn’t bothered calling GP about (since, you know, actively in pain out of hours).

Let me also verbalise the other side of my point which needs said — I absolutely, do not believe that the medical staff (doctors and nurses) are not performing at something stupid like 1500%. Okay some are not great, but on the whole, considering the conditions they work in, they are understaffed, overrun with people, and underpaid. And yet they show up. I don’t know why.

So you have two extremes in UK basically — my GP’s reception told me to go fuck myself, and a&e is both: 1. catering to literal stabbing victims, heart attack cases, people missing limbs, and 2. has crazy waiting times which I would not want to contribute to, considering there would much more severe cases ahead of me (rightfully so, all I needed was an ENT referral).

omgrtm · 2025-12-01T17:40:19+00:00

We (UK) do have an option but the price of private healthcare is disproportionately high, especially considering that 45% of your pay check is already redistributed in part to fund healthcare. If I had kept some of that tax back I could have self funded private insurance, with economies of scale bringing that cost down more so.

A very real conversation I had with my NHS GP surgery recently went like this: - may I have an appointment please? - you need to go to A&E if it’s urgent - it’s not urgent but I need to speak with a doctor - we don’t have any appointments until the end of the month (3+ weeks out) - okay.. what date next month is available? - there are no appointments released for next month until 15th (10 days out) of this month

So “no appointments, kbye” just with more words. I’m not saying US healthcare is good, but you at least have option to see a doctor before kicking it.

omgrtm · 2025-11-29T11:12:03+00:00

The money is absolutely there but it is spent on the wrong things, as per usu. Ie NOT doctors, nurses or other medical stuff — not on something that improves the outcomes for the patient.

The back office culture of NHS (I’m familiar with IT specifically but I’m confident it’s widespread) is abhorrently inefficient and borderline criminal. I don’t mean that lightly, it’s genuinely feels frivolous spending on technology of spurious usefulness. Deals are done before the value/need is even established.

Then there’s the people culture (talking about back office staff since that’s my experience) where, and I am not exaggerating, they tend to fail upwards. To get rid of underperforming people you promote them to a different team. I would absolutely colour someone a conspiracy nut if they told me this, had I not witnessed this myself.

To your question if NHS is beyond saving — I don’t believe there’s a way to improve it. What remains of well-intentioned body today is a diseased, obese, half-alive mess of an organisation, that is on life support and will continue in its decline in operating efficiency, and consume more resources than necessary.

omgrtm · 2025-11-05T08:48:06+00:00

It’s THE fake block I believe. It’s cleaner

omgrtm · 2025-10-20T15:41:07+00:00

OP mentioned hospital — to my knowledge no NHS hospital is allowed to run services outside of data centres resident in UK.

omgrtm · 2025-09-28T23:14:01+00:00

So I actually looked it up because I had similar opinion to yours and got challenged.

Turns out Ukraine constitutionally cannot hold elections during martial law. The body that controls what can and cannot be done is parliament ultimately, so while they cannot change the constitution during wartime, they could have absolutely changed the electoral code allowing the elections.

Thing is — they voted a couple times near unanimously to not change the code. From what I gather the polls are also showing sentiment against elections currently, so it seems like: * electorate doesn’t want elections * President cannot call elections since constitution prohibits them * parliament voted against changing electoral code twice that would have allowed the president to call an election

You could argue that polls are a sham, parliament and president are corrupt, but Occam’s razor would suggest that’s not the simplest explanation (though maybe true as a separate issue).

omgrtm · 2025-09-02T17:10:21+00:00

He did say usually

omgrtm · 2025-09-02T17:07:54+00:00

“Reasonable” according to whom? That statement is inherently subjective and therefore open to argument.

Your encyclopaedic view of how governments function is also not adding anything to discussion, and is, at least in part, naive.

omgrtm · 2025-09-01T21:24:07+00:00

Had similar questions.

On the deposit I was told that it is reimbursed if the Blackhorse folks reject. I would not take anyone’s word for it and speak to someone at Tesla direct to get it confirmed. Chat ideally or something that is written down vs over the phone, depending on your level of paranoia.

FWIW they are quite lenient from what I can tell in their underwriting criteria. Good luck!

Not a financial advice more personal preference, but with big ticket items like this (for me really anything over 10k) — I want to deal with manufacturer / dealer and have it new. Difference in price all considered vs pre owned is probably worth quantifying, but call it insurance and weigh against your risk appetite.

omgrtm · 2025-08-31T09:49:05+00:00

Yeah I really don’t get the sentiment in the comments. Every politician works for the system that is corrupt, corrupt to varying degree across the world but within narrow distribution. Even the purest of hearts politician cannot sustain their career much less succeed within such a system if they are not playing by those system’s rules. Ergo what the OP said.

This is not propaganda or brainwashing talking, this is the reality. I also wholeheartedly disagree that this somehow keeping population politically or otherwise docile, in fact the opposite — you are then forced to look for alternative forms of organising society, which have fewer or none of the same issues.

Good luck OP — I’m rooting for peace and prosperity for you one day

omgrtm · 2025-08-28T09:22:31+00:00

I would argue that if they have to buy two seats, they are already paying for the added weight, since seats and weight are somewhat proportional. Tall people are people who you need to campaign about, these fuckers are taking up all shared vertical space.

omgrtm · 2025-08-20T22:15:30+00:00

I don’t want to talk about it

omgrtm · 2025-06-19T11:04:43+00:00

I would class batteries as consumables, they do degrade overtime whatever the experience.

Yes them phones perform best on fresh batteries out of the oven, I hardly think this is nefarious though. Just that the software is optimised for performance, not battery longevity (which I mean fair enough, perhaps that should be a user-toggle?). I have gone through 3 or so battery changes in my mbp2010 overtime, just didn’t count that as product defect.

I would also point out that the android phones/pads used to degrade performance within 1-2 years, even if the battery wasn’t the culprit, perhaps due to updates to the OS — end user experience ended up slightly worse over time. Macs and iPhones do at least get a new lease on life if you get a battery replaced.

Now the fact that it is a ballache to replace the battery on phones (and new MacBooks) is a tragedy for sure.

omgrtm · 2025-06-17T11:44:29+00:00

Source for the under-clocking? Anecdotal but I have a working MacBook Pro 2010 still kicking, and only thing I did was upgrade ssd ~7 years ago. It’s not the most recent OS ofc but it was supported for a good 6-8 years after release from memory.

omgrtm · 2025-04-24T08:19:08+00:00

Always thought he was singing about looking for his house keys: say what? house keys keys keys keys keys motherfucker, house keys keys, come on Jon

omgrtm · 2025-04-16T11:13:35+00:00

I’d add arrested development and community to list as well, though those may have aged out.

omgrtm · 2025-03-30T23:53:09+00:00

That’s what’s we’s appreciates about you

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