Rhyming slang isn’t really supposed to be funny, rather obfuscatory. It’s almost like a cipher, so that anyone not in the know doesn’t understand. That’s a theory, anyway.

I made a robot which is delighted about the idea of overthrowing capitalism and will enthusiastically explain how to take down your government.

That’s a pretty extreme reaction, it’s just a shop.

I would advise not doing that in Ireland. Anyway, yes, p*** has a comparable if not so extreme or long history as the n-word in the UK.

Not especially surprising, given how difficult it is to get any form of healthcare for trans kids. The change has actually quite limited scope.

My whole org is down for the count. 100k+ employees got a free day off (at least those fortunate enough not to be in IT support lol)

Depends on the size of screen, surely.

Stealing from an individual is deplorable. I can understand why someone might want to respond aggressively (although to be clear I still don’t think it’s justified) if someone steals medication from an old lady… But from a shop?

Well I’m not surprised to see that Neom is going wrong in both stupid and horrifying ways. This particular part will make it hard to be too smug about it with the Saudi fanboys though… This is just sad.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean they would be able to entirely make a new habitat habitable for them. You can’t dump a beaver in the Sahara and expect it to survive. Even if they did, like I said the impact on the preexisting ecosystem also needs to be managed or you just trade one problem for another.

You don’t have to do this in Botswana because the elephants are already in Botswana…

The last time elephants naturally lived in Europe was thousands of years ago. The climate was very different and there wasn’t the same level of human occupation. Yes the vegetation and landscape would need to change, and I’m not sure why on earth you think the elephants would do it?? There aren’t a lot of elephant ecologists as far as I’m aware. Plus the effects of releasing elephants would go beyond the effects on the elephants themselves, there would need to be management of other species that may be impacted by moving elephants in to avoid other damage to the ecosystem.

My point is the elephants already live in Botswana, releasing them into Europe without a managed environment wouldn’t necessarily be good for the elephants.

Very true! Although to be fair there are many conservation-focused nature preserved in Europe where a variety of animals live. Outside of their natural habitat some degree of human intervention is necessary to keep them alive so perhaps just having elephants roaming the Czech countryside isn’t practical… Or perhaps I don’t know what I’m talking about and they’d love it!

The Europeans of today do not have any way to influence what the Europeans of the past did.

I still can’t believe that Israel’s actual currency is called the “shekel”, it really sounds like something a sci fi author would make up.

Could the lib dems or greens serve as the opposition for once? Having a green opposition to a labour government might be a nice change to drive things in the right direction. I realise this is somewhat a pipe dream

Must be one of those new Microsoft AI laptops.

Scraping through stuff without really learning. I’m in my final year of a BSc, but I also work full time so I don’t have a lot of time to study. I can basically skim read the material and, idk how, but even without really knowing it I can apply it to exams/coursework etc. I will have to do serious revision in the future once I’m not working on exams, but I’m confident I’ll get 85-95% without actually knowing what the hell I’m doing. Part of it is I’m able to very very quicky read and apply unfamiliar formulae, concepts, etc, so I can use the written material very effectively in open book exams. I’d probably struggle a lot in a closed book situation, but fortunately my courses are all either coursework led or open book.

I looked it up, the real number across Europe is between 1 and 1.2%. Source here, although this only considers those of African descent, not sure how that affects the final total.

Your point remains valid if you consider only one cohort of national leaders. 44 countries in Europe, it seems reasonable that none would be black if only 1% of the population of Europe is black. But there isn’t just one cohort of leaders to consider… There’s another cohort every, 4-5 years or so. Even going back only to the beginning of the century that’s over 200, suddenly it seems like we should have had at least one. Obviously demographics have changed over time, but nonetheless it remains significant that there has never been one.

That is why he was elected. The point is not that we should elect the wrong people just to sort out the demographics ffs.

Let’s say that black people make up 5% of the European population - idk if this is true but the exact number is not important - and they make up 0% of the national leaders. This is unusual, we should expect that at least some of the black people have the “merits” needed to be elected, right? So either 1) they don’t for some reason or 2) they do but they don’t get elected for another reason.

Either of those points towards systemic issues. 1 suggests there might be biases in education, or cultural reasons that black people aren’t politically engaged. 2 suggests that the political industry is systematically racist in some way. Those are the problems that need to be solved… The demographics will naturally sort themselves out in a fairer society.

Sometimes so called “affirmative action” or “positive discrimination” is needed when 2 is the issue, because the good candidates exist but they are discriminated against by systems that are not easy to fix directly. Part of the reason is that diverse organisations are less likely to be institutionally racist (or sexist, homophobic, etc), so actually manually correcting the diversity repairs the root problem in the long run. Politics isn’t really the place for this, obviously, but I wanted to mention it because it doesn’t (when done well) mean that we aren’t choosing candidates for some position on their merits - we are, in fact, making it more likely that candidates will be fairly selected for their merits.