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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I noticed today searching that the date search no longer seems to work right. There are some terms that only appeared since 2020 and up until my recent attempts those terms produced no results on DDG when date constrained but now produce terms in articles clearly after that date. I don’t know if this is some personalisation nonsense or always pulling but results if the constraints don’t match or what but its seriously problematic and means I can’t trust the date constraints anymore.








  • The law comes in two parts, the actual written bit that says what it is and the enforcement. Most people consider the first part what is necessary and lobby hard for it but really the most important bit in a practical sense is how it gets applied and enforced, without which the law is worthless. In many countries one way to defang laws is simply underfund the legal system or quangos that do the enforcement, another is putting someone in charge at the attornies office who de-prioritises those cases. The law as written isn’t worth the paper/bytes its written on unless there is a plan for enforcement that doesn’t involve every poor person using the rich mans legal system against giant corporations with infinite defence money.







  • There is nothing seasonal about Covid, we get a wave every time it mutates sufficiently. Initially that was about five waves a year in 2022 but the past year it’s been two to three. The lulls however still have substantial constant infection usually in the region of 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 while the peaks of waves can be 1 in 10. Now the gaps between waves have more people infected than the peaks of infections in 2020 and 2021.

    The risk of Long Covid hasn’t changed much, there are still substantial deaths every year. It’s all bad news really, no treatments on the horizon to solve it just declining life expectancy and health the more we catch and spread it.



  • When I look at how much Nigel Farage has been platformed in the UK the press helped manufacture the consent for Brexit and the big far right swing that is coming with it. What were quite isolated social media views have become very mainstream and on the TV all the time. Society is now quite open about a lot of far right talking points. Social media is a part of the media landscape but it didn’t make the far right figures popular that was all the traditional presses doing.

    Even now they cover and platform Nigel Farage about 100x as much as they do any Green candidate, and yet the Greens hold more MP and council seats. Same with the Lib Dems who are bigger than Reform and yet the press is constantly platforming Reform. Its hard to look at traditional media and see anything but a big swing to the right in the last decade and they have led every step of the way.