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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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    1. almost every major political party in the UK has an anti-immigration stance, so they certainly do act like it’s an issue
    2. despite media scaremongering about immigration, there’s no credible evidence that immigration in the UK has negative social or economic consequences overall
    3. the lovely people behind reform UK previously campaigned for us to leave the EU in order to reduce immigration, and not only did it not reduce immigration but it was also a multi-year political shitshow (and it tanked the economy, and it pulled us out of the EU human rights convention, and it fucked up supply chains, and it decimated arts and science funding, etc etc)

    to be honest I’m kind of amazed that UK voters would fall for the same obvious grift twice






  • when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

    I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys



  • crypto is just our current financial system but worse. more risk, more volatility, faster consolidation of wealth, slower transactions, and less actual utility. more than a decade on, there are only a very small handful of things you can actually buy with bitcoin, let alone any other cryptocurrency. what problem does that solve?

    i do at least admire the utopianism of it - i’m not exactly going to bat for our current banking system - but if you see crypto in 2024 as anything other than a failed experiment at best then you’re just delusional, it has completely failed to solve any of the problems it set out to solve and it has verifiably made the world a worse place


  • the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

    modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

    in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be


  • damn, this right-wing think tank did a lot of research on iq. it sure would be a shame if iq turned out to be a useless and arbitrary metric that completely fails to represent human intelligence

    edit: a few sections in we get an attempt to disprove the Flynn effect using a handful of barely-relevant cherrypicked studies and some questionable back of the envelope maths. I am sensing a distinct lack of academic rigor in this article. I certainly felt like I was getting stupider while reading it

    edit 2: ironically enough, the second section ends with a bizarre and mostly unsourced word salad on literacy and numeracy rates. according to the article’s own metrics, these rates are increasing, but the author somehow manages to draw the opposite conclusion and then sneaks a bit of the blame on ‘low-skilled immigrants’

    edit 3: I noticed that a lot of the citations in the article come from a single author: Michael A Woodley, so I looked him up and discovered that he is a eugenicist (and a cryptozoologist) who has written multiple papers in the subject of race and intelligence despite his PhD being in a completely unrelated field.




  • Hopefully I’m not too late to say this: I would strongly caution against buying a Fairphone. My mum got a new Fairphone 3 in early 2021. Earlier this year, just after the phone went out of warranty, the USB-C port stopped working. The replacement bottom module was out of stock, it’s been out of stock for months, and the forums are full of people complaining that it’s been mostly out of stock since 2021. Fairphone claimed that they would have stock back by the end of August, and as of today, that is not true. This phone was supposed to have spare parts available through to 2025.