• 9 Posts
  • 112 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 15th, 2023
  • LerajetoUnited Kingdom@feddit.uk•More SEND pupils could go to mainstream schools as support shake-up is consideredEnglish
    10•7 days ago

    Like @icerunner_origin@startrek.website I speak from experience when I say this is nothing to do with whats best for kids and all about cutting costs. Forcing kids who need an EHCP into mainstream schools and/or denying them specialist support will help no one - not the pupils, not the staff and not the school.

    But its SOP for this red tory government - they’ve already said they’re going to target disabled people claiming PIP and now they’re going to target disabled people in education.

    You might think this is because the disabled population have an outlandishly large amount of money allocated to them and its fair that they are targeted. They don’t. The reason the disabled are always the first targeted by any ruler is because that ruler knows that the general population don;t give two shits what happens to disabled people.

    There’ll be no protests from society about this in the way we would see if this was an environmental issue or a race issue or a gender issue so for a politician this is a win-win.

  • LerajetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Shared from MeFi: "What the size of your book collection says about you"English
    5•9 days ago

    I love the aesthetics of hardback books, a beautiful Victorian-era library looks (and smells!) great but my own library is all ebooks. I don’t have the space for over 2k physical books and as I get older and my eyesight worsens, the ability to adjust font size, line-height, borders, contrast etc becomes invaluable.

    I won’t buy from Amazon at all, ever. I prefer to buy DRM free but if its not possible to buy DRM free then I buy a paperback copy from a local indie bookstore if possible which I immediately donate to a library or hospital or prison or whatever and, ahem, ‘source’ a DRM-free version from elsewhere. I do it this way because DRM is cancer but I also want to support small and/or new authors so buying and passing on a print copy is good for everyone and having a DRM free copy is good for me.

    As for subject matter, both fiction and non-fiction but more fiction than non. I like historical novels like the Aubrey/Maturin series, or the Shardlake series, Madeline Miller’s greek retellings, Hilary Mantel’s stuff, fantasy/sci-f- like Ursula K Leguinn, NK Jemisin, Margaret Attwood, Robin Hobb, Lois McMaster Bujold, Susannah Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Horror/Thrillers by writers like Peter Straub, Catriona Ward, Shirley Jackson. Non-fiction books tend to be popular science that are ‘popular’ enough I can grasp what they’re on about but ‘science’ enough they’re not just dumbed down crap.

  • LerajetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What do you think Elon Musk is actually doing?English
    6•28 days ago

    As others have said, money is most of it.

    But I also remember that what seems to have prompted his last few years of total unhinged behaviour was his daughter turning her back on him. That seemed to be the point of no return for him.

    So there is part of me that thinks he wants to have access to and control over data. The whole nazi salute wasn’t about money, it was about ideology and I think controlling data will allow him to go after communities of people as part his ideology.

  • LerajetoUnited Kingdom@feddit.uk•Too many young people find doing a day's work 'stressful', says Liz KendallEnglish
    9•1 month ago

    So Liz Kendall thinks its odd that in a country where there are no jobs for life anymore, no real job security at all, zero-hour contracts and the bullshit of the ‘gig economy’ are rife, minimum wage is far below what the ever increasing cost of living can afford to pay for, where contracts (where they exist at all) can be redrawn at a moments notice to suit the whim of the employer and where the right to take strike action is pretty much gone has led to a stressed out, exhausted work-force? Or a reluctance to join it?

    And then, couple that with the wait times now measured in years to access NHS mental health support and which largely constitutes being offered 4 hours of generic counseling and/or being told to download a fucking app she wonders whats going on and why so many people are so mentally unwell?

    Meanwhile MP’s get subsidised food, booze, accommodation costs and vote themselves a pay rise every time its raised in parliament.

    You’re taking the fucking piss Liz.

  • LerajetoLinux@lemmy.world•Question from a total beginnerEnglish
    27•2 months ago

    The great thing about a lot of very good Linux distros is that you can run them from whats called a ‘live USB’ meaning you download the ISO of the distro you like the look of, put it on a USB drive, then reboot your PC and boot to the USB you just created (you might need to alter your BIOS boot order). There’s a full guide here. The point here is to give the distro a try without putting anything on your harddrive so Windows is safe. If you like it, most distros will let you dual boot so you can have Windows and your linux distro on one machine.

    In terms of the right distro a lot depends on what you’ll be using the PC for. For a really good, stable general purpose distro I think Mint is perfect.

  • LerajetoUnited Kingdom@feddit.uk•An information dark age is upon us. I’m logging offEnglish
    6•2 months ago

    Its a good point but my own take on it is that you can’t be the resistance in an environment they totally control. There are plenty of places to organise away from the billionaires control.

    I walked away from all Meta platforms under my own name recently as I choose not to have my participation used as tacit endorsement, data collection or ad-money generators for them. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped participating in organising resistance, just that I choose not to do that in a place they have absolute power in.