Vashti

Kindles are great devices and they’re subsidised, so they’re cheap. It’s perfectly possible to use them on e.g. permanent airplane mode. You don’t even have to buy books from Amazon, if you use Calibre.

That said I’ll be going Kobo next time because I love buttons.

So are Irish conditions different from conditions over the sea in Wales, or…?

From what I can tell, the secret is rubber boots.

Linehan being attached to something isn’t a plus these days…

I promise you, we had massive generational debt all the time I was growing up in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and when my mother was growing up in the 50s and 60s. We had way better public services then than we have today. Whether or not the government is making debt repayments has no bearing on public services—that’s all about the attitude of the government, and a government that wants to privatise everything and destroy the public trust will always find some pretext to do so, such as the triple lock being the biggest votewinner in the land.

Seems like only yesterday I was co-admining my first public server in 1996.

Fun times.

It depends on the period of time they’re paid over, doesn’t it? Generational debts like these are repaid over, well, generations. It’s not going to be something we notice, and the UK aren’t the only country involved.

Plus, if that’s what you think, I don’t think you can have seen the state of the UK’s roads, hospitals and railways.

Just cook the chicken and eat it. You won’t notice the feathers.

Good news - your government will spend as little as it can possibly get away with on those things whether you pay slavery reparations or not!

This always seems such a strange argument to me, as if governments are just screaming to spend money on roads, hospitals etc. They spend it on pet projects and tax cuts for their voterbase.

I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.

The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We’ve still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.

So yeah, we owe those people’s descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I’m not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.

As a counterpoint, I’d like to mention that people often scream “reading incomprehension” when actually, what they wrote was ambiguous or unclear.

Not saying you do this, just that I see this far more often than I see people misreading anything.

The word you’re probably thinking of is kichigai. But there are oceans of words that you can’t use on TV in Japan as I understand it, and there have been since the 70s.

m*nko begs to differ.

This reminds me of the not-very-edifying-at-all moment when “joey” became a universal term of abuse in UK playgrounds.

So like am I the only one[tm] who felt like time did pass, actually, while I was under? It was like being deeply asleep.

It’s so weird to me that you’re all put under for wisdom teeth. I’ve had three out with local and nobody even suggested I might need a general.

Isn’t it because they paralyse you and your lungs stop working?

I don’t remember a damn thing. One moment there was a mask over my face and I was being asked to count backwards from ten (I think I got to about 8?), the next I woke up very bleary with a sore throat.

For a long time I thought I woke in a large room with three rows of cots. It wasn’t until some years afterwards that I realised I never saw the room I awoke in.

I didn’t feel high at any point, but then I have ADHD and even being shot full of morphine by a paramedic (the previous week) didn’t get me high. I wuz robbed.

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Actually, now you come to mention it…