Fellow Dvorak. It’s great for typos on touchscreens. Too many times I’ve mistyped whole and all.

Nope, no big heat sources. Just south facing and high up with terrible air flow. Doesn’t help that everyone on our street is turning their lawns into patios and chopping down the trees. Next time we get a heat wave (I think we’re due another soon), I’ll measure the temp difference between my room, the hall and the next door room which faces north. It’s probably only a degree or two, but it feels so much worse.

I had that problem at first, but it wasn’t too hard to adapt.

I guess I’m just a jammy dodger, I’ve never seen one!

As a Dvorak user, shift+ins, ctrl+del and ctrl+ins are my friends.

I’ve started taking photos of wherever I’ve put something important away for “safety”, because I always end up forgetting otherwise. I have a special folder in my gallery for this.

For some reason I read is as gambling too and didn’t notice till I read your comment. Weird.

I’ve been using em dashes for years. I learnt the alt code for them, because using hyphens for dashes looks awful (before that I’d do the double hyphen for an em dash). Also, like me, I notice you put spaces around the em dashes, which is apparently incorrect, but also according to me is the right way to do it.

We don’t have that brand here, so whenever people would quote that slogan online, I thought it seemed kind of sinister, like a quote from a horror film/game. I was so disappointed to find out it’s just a snack brand :(

I’ve never got one of those! And I’m just using my browser’s built in ad blocker. Are they still doing it?

Here in the UK, I used to read about Americans having free local calls in the computing mags. We had to pay local rate for our dial up. We had to wait till weekends and evenings to get off peak call rates. Freeserve was the first ISP here that gave no subscription charges for dial up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve

They later brought in something called Freeserve Hometime, which iirc was freephone dial up during off peak. I renamed the icon to Freeserve Downtime, because we used to get connection issues. No one in my family thought it was funny.

“Sorry, got d/c’d” “Gotta go, my mum wants to use the phone”

Good times. I miss old school Internet.

There’s only so much that can do. I have the silver windscreen things on my windows, foil, white paper. Close the windows and curtains when it starts getting warmer outside than inside. Keep my bedroom door open to encourage air from the cooler part of the house to flow. Maybe it makes a difference, it’s hard to tell. All I know is, even with the door open, the moment I step from the hallway into my room, it goes from mild to hot and stuffy. I’ve tried putting the fan in the doorway facing into my room to help suck the cooler air in, it makes little difference. A spray bottle and fan blowing directly on me is the only way to keep cool. Then in the evening, if we’re lucky, all windows open.

I have a second floor (3rd floor to the Americans) bedroom facing almost directly south.

Also I heard, I think it was on a documentary some years ago, it takes about 2 weeks for the body to fully adjust to big changes in temperature, and we rarely get two weeks of consistency, so we can never adapt. I’ll have to go look up if this is true.

Like when companies boast about how their clothing range is made from recycled plastic bottles. Yes, congrats, you’ve taken big bits of plastic, and now turned them into microplastic fibres that will make their way into the water system every time you wash them. Bravo.

I wonder if they think of themselves as good Christians?

In the UK, the slogan was “the stronger soaker upper”. Also it got changed to Plenty, maybe because of the chocolate claiming trademark infringement?

Living in London all my life, we grew up in a car-less household and my dad would do nearly all of the food shopping for our family of 6 himself (7 for a while when my uncle lived with us while he was studying), carrying it all home on the bus. I am still car-free and can get my shopping home using the bus or my bike on the way home from work. If you can’t do that in your city, then that’s the fault of your city’s planners. It’s a failure of providing good public transport.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, wasn’t Change UK supposed to do that too?

With the rise of Reform, splitting the left vote even more might lead to a Farridge led government next time. I wonder why they didn’t join the Greens instead.

If you were fleeing war or persecution, would you not prefer to go to a country where you could speak the language and/or had family? Being able to speak the language would also mean you can start working as soon as your claim is processed. Yes, if I was fleeing war, I would want to go to the first safe place. But after safety, the next thing is being able to actually get on with your life and provide for yourself and family.

For instance I can’t speak Turkish, I find it a very hard language to learn. So if I could choose between settling there and going somewhere like France, Portugal or Spain where I have some proficiency in the languages, I would try to get there, because I’d be able to get into work a lot quicker and become part of a community if my application got approved. And even more so if I knew people there. It’s not a case of being greedy or picky, these people are still humans who need to get on with their lives.

But how is any of this the fault of immigrants? My dad wants to kick me out. If I tell the council I’m being made homeless, I will get sent to a hostel in Luton. According to my tory-loving colleague, this is the fault of asylum seekers.

The actual truth is this is the fault of Thatcher and successive governments selling off council homes. Rich foreign scalpers buy up property and sit on it until it makes them money. There are thousands of empty residential properties gathering dust so they can build up in value for these wealthy scalpers. Flats where £200k can buy you a 25% share of a studio is what’s shown as affordable housing in London. Housing has become a commodity for the rich to trade and profit off, rather than a human need. I’m working class, on a little above minimum wage and soon losing my job again (because of the council, not immigrants. First job I lost was because of Philip Green and his wife being greedy pigs).

Tell me how immigrants are making my life worse, but the wealthy get a pass. Immigrants are keeping a lot of businesses going (just see the Brexit farm debacle).

So you can look for the easy scapegoat if you want, or you can actually look at what’s causing these issues. As People vs Elon showed in their poster, they tell you to blame immigrants so you don’t blame billionaires.

Please do explain for us unenlightened plebs.