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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • Oh I see your playing the legacy monopoly where house prices sort of match the money paid out by the bank…you need to index property and utilities to inflation but you don’t adjust any of the money paid out by the bank to the players.

    Aka Millennial monopoly.

    The game is over much faster, unless you introduce a gig economy payment system. Then it really drags on.


  • And that’s what we do IRL too, a bunch of people aren’t playing by the rules, creating false hope through windfall lotteries, so it’s taking longer to get to the part where we flip the board in frustration and destroy the bank… Behead the mega rich and seize the means of production.




  • It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.

    I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.

    I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.





  • I understand it now!

    The window looks over the sink area where you would wash your hands after ensuring you are dressed and decent upon leaving the private stall.

    The idea is by having the window in the wash area, students will be hyperconscious that this is not a private space, and they will be mindful to move into the truly private stall before starting their private business.

    I think it’s purely to avoid the following example;

    The number of times I’ve stepped into a public restroom because I needed to fix something privately - my stockings are rolling down, a bandaid on my upper thigh needs replacing, my bra strap is coming loose. These are things that are private but not as private as using the toilet, so often I’ll just fix these things up while I’m at the sink area, I don’t need a stall.

    But if someone walks in while I’m fixing my stockings, well they didn’t consent to seeing so much of my upper thigh when they turned the corner, and while I personally don’t care that they saw me, I can see how a teenage girl might be deeply upset if this happened because she absent mindedly forgot that the sink area is not truly private.

    Spooky I think it’s to constahtkt remind the students that onky the stalls are truly private.

    It’s a misguided, and potentially harmful way to do this though…


  • The discourse around this is very confusing, especially as a non American who has never been in an American school bathroom.

    What you’re describing sounds like a normal public toilet set up in my country

    There’s a hallway or doorway into an open space with mirrors sinks and hand dryers, sometimes that hallway has a door to it, but often it’s just an open door frame. Sometimes they’ll put a 90 degree turn in the hall to obscure looking straight in, but not always.

    Behind the sinks are private stalls. At more expensive locations they’ll have semiambulant stalls, some will even have their own sink inside the stall so that the full access toilet and wash room can be available to those who can’t ambulate.

    (full access toilets and wash rooms are entirely seperate from the sink and stalls)

    The sink area is often still segregated by gender at older establishments, but anyone walking past could glimpse in and see /shock fully dressed people washing their hands!



  • Yup, at my highschool by week 5 they’d be swapping all the gender signs on the bathrooms because the girls were wrecking the mirrors and the boys would bust the doors, and they only had the budget to fix each once so they’d rotate who used which bathrooms to even out the type of damage so even though boys were constantly smashing the doors the first door wouldn’t come off the hinge until the end of first term (versus within the first week, which was the damage rate before faculty started the sign swap system).

    There was one year where in Term 4 we had a row of porta-pottys because some one’s dad owned a shitter company and that was cheaper than fixing the real bathrooms.

    I don’t know why those degenerates were breaking the bathrooms knowing they’d be stuck pissing with the normal door… Why they couldn’t just set fire to the grass behind the woodshop like normal delinquents. Grass grows back for free.

    I work at a community education centre now, and the soap dispensers appear to be what everyone likes destroying these days.

    We can’t afford to replace them so we currently have bottles of hand soap tied to the taps with string that I replace every other day.

    Also I’ve had to put signs up reminding teenagers that poo particles from flushing will land on every surface in a bathroom, so stop kissing the mirrors.


  • They so often did though, how many massive fires broke out in London before the great fire finally convinced them to stop building overlapping thatched rooves.

    Even during The Plague of Justinian scholars wrote about what was essentially ancient social distancing practices, 2000 years ago later we still can’t do it properly.

    How many times did they have to put up with rat plagues and stinking open cess pits, followed by a big town clean up, and then nothing change in infrastructure or waste management practices, only to do the whole clean up again …until the Great Stink got to close enough to the windows of parliament that those in power decided maybe they should address the root problem instead of applying bandaids every few years.

    (I don’t have a history degree so I’m pulling these details out of the memory depths of my dusty documentary viewings, and I’m probably wrong.)




  • I teach IT to seniors and in the last ~3 years the types of digital trouble my students find themselves in has shifted.

    We used to spend a lot of lessons talking about phishing scams, link safety, URL verification, etc. Our pop up sessions would involve lots of calling banks to get cards cancelled after mistakes were made.

    But now my lessons are on “oh, that one is a real Toll text, you should have paid that, I know they used to send them in the mail and this text looks like a scam, but that’s how they do it now, and you really do owe that money to the police, that’s why you’re getting phone calls from the police, it’s not a spoofing scam, you missed a real toll notice, I’m so sorry, it was buried in your spam folder”

    Older people got the memo about scams and they got block happy, now they ignore real notices.

    I’ve done the same thing, I was getting texts for parking fines and permit renewals and I don’t have a lisence because I’m visually impaired so obviously a scam.

    Only I forgot that when I was 16 grandma gave me her old car, I was like “the fuck do I do with this” so I gave the keys to my little brother and moved out.

    15 years later, turns out the car has been in my name the whole time, which makes sense, I don’t remember signing anything about the car ever. My brother had no idea his permit was even expired because they were sending the text to the owner contactvia the car rego, not the drivers contact details my brother provided, and because I’d been ignoring the texts it took a while to iron out with the council, especially because my brother and “my” car are not just in another state, but another territory.


  • Not quite, the parents created an Uber Ride and Uber Eats accounts several years ago, agreeing to the ToS at that time.

    Several months ago, uber updated the tos and pushed it out to users as a pop up agreement.

    The daughter was monitoring the phone to watch the driver and pizza on the map when the pop up blocked the app, the daughter, being a minority who wanted her to pizza just hit “accept” to go back to the app to watch get pizza.

    Several months later, the parents hooked an uber ride, where the driver crashes and injured the parent’s.

    Uber is claiming that because the daughter agreed to the ToS, the new ToS is valid.

    The parents only ever had the opportunity to read the original ToS, which also has a similar arbitration clause, which is why the lawyer is saying the daughters pizza situation was mooting. But the two ToS are different because one is an updated version of the other.


  • Heck half the time my screen reading software glitches out on ToS pages, so I just have to assume I’m selling my soul but hopefully not much else and click accept because it’s not like I’m going to find someone to sit and read it out to me, that would take hours!

    And yet for every other contract I have ever signed in my entire life, I have a legal right to ask for it in an accessible form before I sign it. As a visually impaired person, uber is present in my life.

    I hated it, it was the most inaccessible app for such a purpose, and the drivers really did not understand I can’t see what they see. I like just calling the depot, talking to a human, and booking a cab… But you can’t do that now either because when you call you wait on hold for 20 minutes while the automated message tells you about the taxi app.

    So now unfortunately, uber is easier to book than a taxi, I don’t know if the ToS in the taxi app has any harmful stuff about arbitration because again, I’ve never been able to get a screen reader to read out the ToS properly on any app!

    I feel like such a boomer, but I am really feeling more and more isolated as every service Abdi connection I’ve built my life around is moving online into a digital visual space faster than the affordable assustive technology can keep up with.

    I’m expected to read something on a screen when I physically can not, uber and similar apps, including the app my local state government brought in during covid that now holds much only transit ID to show transit staff I’m blind (to get l transport assistance at train stations) all do this.

    Once you open the wallet section of the app, for fraud prevention they disabled third party screen readers from reading anything on the app.

    I have to open my app, then ask the other person to look through my wallet for me to find the card because I can’t, it’s such a privacy violation.


  • That’s a windfall payment and one less mouth to feed in the long run. Morbid, Yes, it’s not the best long term solution but anything you can do to survive true poverty never is.

    What’s to say losing your job doesn’t have 3 of you dying from exposure in your car a week after you’re evicted?

    If you haven’t lived the trauma of life and death poverty, I’m glad, but I don’t think it’s something that can be fully explained.

    Trauma changes the way your brain processes risk, people living in chronic poverty don’t have the same risk assessment framework as you.


  • This is a good point about cultural export, majority of modern content use American, and the majority of childhood content at least for me was Canadian.

    I’m often surprised how little I know of the UK compared to the USA when I think of how much is imported to Australia from the UK …including my family.

    Thank you so much for giving me your guesses at state names, we did make it easy for you with just a bunch of cardinal directions.

    You are bang on with 6 states, and almost bang on with their names.

    The place you’ve dubbed “Northern Australia” is the “Northern Territory” and is not a state, the state you are missing is South Australia.

    We have two major territories, Northern Territory as mentioned, but then similar to the USA, our national capital is not located within a state.

    Our capital city is in “The Australian Capital Territory”, or just “the ACT”

    We are super creative with the names. Hence why we named 2 after the Queen (then stupidly named the capital city of Victoria “Melbourne” instead of “Batmania”, which was totally an option on the table!) but also America can’t talk, how many important places have you named after Washington and Columbus?

    Tasmania is indeed ours, ours lonely Island state. Not so fun fact, Tasmanian Devils are endangered because they keeps biting each other’s faces off and giving each other contagious facial cancer.

    There’s another internal territory no one really talks about, Jarvis Bay, it was formed mostly so the ACT could have access to a port without needing to use a state’s port.

    We have 7 external territories, the main ones being the island territories of Norfolk, Cocos, and Christmas Islands.