yay! 🥳

ok, here’s the context. (click here)

the source of this file, regrettably, is the daily mail. broken clocks and all that. i will link the “article” that the video file was from, but you will need a hazmat suit going in, for both the cookies/trackers and low quality writing

here’s that source now. (click here)

for posters below saying they couldn’t find this, i understand it. we all get different search results, it’s possible you all got hugboxed and were unable to find the clip as a result

also, i don’t care to discuss the topic, i only wanted to link the source, because you were all struggling with it. i like finding sources :)

have a nice day 🥰

i’ll be honest, unless you’re at the west coast of ireland, probably give this one a miss. :(

i mean, i really dont want to be that poster, but he’s not being arrested for blocking with a scooter, he’s being arrested for protesting

there’s a separate discussion to be had about arresting protesters, but the way they’re trying to spin this as “they oppressed a disabled person for being disabled” is honestly insulting to the agency of disabled people that choose to protest, and whom accept the risk of consequences for doing so

in my mind, you can’t be both trying to normalize disability, and then also weaponizing it when it suits you for an opinion piece after being arrested. in particular, i take offense to the line in the article: “Now prosecuting disabled people to (sic) acting ‘socially responsibly’”, as if that’s magically a step too far?

a “fairer” title here would have been something like “activist prosecuted for deftly showcasing how climate risks disproportionately affect disabled people”. although, it wouldn’t have been as attention grabby, and so none of us would be reading it…

yep, you’re entirely right. for your area, it’s more effective to run wells for each person. the frustrating part being that, it implies that the city has been designed so, so badly, that individuals can’t actually share resources, without the per capita price going up if they do so.

even without depopulation, that’s a huge governmental failure. if individuals are having to run all their own utility setups and infrastructure, is that even a “city”? it sounds more like rural living but it’s all vaguely connected. presumably as a result of this low density, you have higher ongoing costs elsewhere? i.e commutes to work, cost of food, etc

if not, then it could be one of those taxpayer-subsidised things, where it feels cheaper for each resident, but the reality is that someone else is paying for it. i’m not good at wording what i mean in this case, but i will pass you to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI) to show it instead, he does a better job of explaining what i’m talking about

anyhow… that’s crazy! it’s entirely the thing i’m worried about seeing replicated large scale as a result of a reduction in population

i do get where you’re coming from, population density was less than it was. as a consequence, people had less access to resources. i would argue as a result of this, they also had less quality of life. the reason that urbanization has been a trend over the past 150 years that shows no sign of stopping, is because population urbanization is a multiplier on the effectiveness of quality of life, because it makes the cost to maintain higher quality of life cheaper per unit of life.¹

for example, yes, you can supply a neighbourhood with individual wells, granted. but surely it would be cheaper for your community to build one massive well, and then everyone in the neighbourhood can collect the water at the well? the community could all pay their share to maintain the well, and then the per unit cost of the well would be cheaper to build and maintain.

whilst you’re at it, since there’s only one well, you can put in a really fancy pump and purifier system. a really high quality rig, with low cost to run. that way, you only need to maintain 1 efficient pump and purifier, rather than 20 or 30 less efficient ones that would cost more fuel to run as an aggregate. the unit cost per person of the pump and purifier setup would be cheaper to run and maintain.

if you wanna go really bougie, you could all chip in to collectively install pipes to every house so that your local community doesn’t have to walk to the well. if you build slightly more pipes than you need, this would act as insurance so that if one pipe breaks, you don’t all lose supply, and the water could flow round… other pipes… and… …wait this just sounds like a municipal supply but with extra steps…

i know i’m being facetious, but the reality is that it is just not measurably cheaper to live out in isolated pockets, through supplying individual infrastructure on a per person basis.² economies of scale dictates this relationship.³ it’s inescapable.⁴. it’s inevitable.⁵ by all means, if it’s the only option someone has to provide utilities for themself, they should use it. but let’s not pretend that it’s more expensive to group up, live closer, and share the cost burden through communal resources.

i will trust you are aware of “economies of scale”, but i have linked a video here for those who are not aware, and also don’t want to read papers like a total nerd. ☝️🤓

[1]. (??? what would the units for quality of life per capita be i wonder? joy/kg? lol)

[2]. “The results indicate that cost savings can be achieved by increases in the scale of production…”, from “Productivity growth, economies of scale and scope in the water and sewerage industry: The Chilean case”, by Molinos-Senante and Maziotis, accessible at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8162666/

[3]. “…more spread out settlement (“Dispersion”) leads to diseconomies in distribution…”, from “Economies of scale, distribution costs and density effects in urban water supply: a spatial analysis of the role of infrastructure in urban agglomeration”, by Hugh B., accessible at https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/285/

[4]. “…agglomeration economies make firms and workers more productive in dense urban environments than in other locations.”, from “The economics of urban density”, by Duranton and Pupa, accssible at https://diegopuga.org/research.html#density

[5]. “Econometric analysis of the data from the Big Mac price survey revealed a significant positive effect of being in a rural area on the increase in prices.”, from “Identifying the size and geographic scope of short-term rural cost-of-living increases in the United States”, by Díaz-Dapena, Loveridge & Paredes, accessible at “https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00168-023-01244-z”

sure, i’ll try to explain briefly

“infrastructure”, i.e utilities, transport, bureacracy etc is built to support a fixed population within a city. when the population increases, you have to build more infrastructure to support this new population. this part is easy, you expand your cities at their edges, extend the utilities, and set up satellite bureacracy offices if needed

the tricky part is when you lose population. the correct move would be to demolish this infrastructure and scale back. trouble is, not only would this be wasteful, but it would also leave gaps in cities, since population decline doesn’t happen uniformly from a city edge. where exactly, do you demolish the infrastructure?

it would be nice if we live in a theoretical world where, as population decreases, the cities magically shrink at their edges, and suburban residents move closer in to fill the gaps. this is not how populations deplete from an area though (example: detroit, 1950 - 2020)

you will struggle to convince a suburban homeowner at the edge, to sell up and move to one of the gaps left behind by population loss. if we stop short of rewriting laws to force this population transfer, the end result is that you are left with a “swiss cheese” city. houses and settlements will be spread so thinly that becomes impossible for city goverments to provide “infrastructure” without providing it at a loss. your local goverment will then take debt and bankrupt, the infrastructure will collapse through lack of maintenance, and then the remaining population suffers big time

i want to note that i am not using this as an argument to support population growth. i am only stating the big, big problem that needs to be tackled somehow, concerning population loss. some big-brains are going to have to work this problem through, fast!

side note: interestingly, most NA cities are spread out and sprawled so much that they are suffering unaffordable infrastructure bills already, despite not suffering the effects of population loss. goodness knows how these places will fare when population loss actually hits…

this was a really good read, thank you for sharing

deleted by creator

if you mean this literally? then until the 28th of january, 2025

and before some of you pipe up and say “nuh uh, by convention elections are held on thursdays/held in summer/held whenever”, like, when has this government cared about convention 😅

the conservatives have zero reason to call it early. dont be surprised if it goes all the way to the legal limit

my headcanon on this is delayed leap-day bugs from february 29th, only showing up just now

request: can we get this open collective page link included in the feddit.uk sidebar?

currently, it says: “Contribution link coming soon to a wallet near you”

nice! i am now all paid up. feels gooood 🙂

thank you both for your hard work ❤️

and absolutely, don’t feel guilty at all for repaying both of your personal costs from the budget. the point of open collective is so that we can see that you are making payments within reason. in my opinion, that includes compensating yourself for the personal expenses prior to today, so that it retroactively restores the funding back to being equitable

if you could give us a rough idea of what that personal expense was, i’d appreciate that

yeah it’s pretty messy

there was an original condition called “autism” which referred to the stereotypical, ““low functioning”” case where someone has intellectual disabilities and the rest

then a ““high functioning”” variant was labelled, where the intellectual disability was missing, called “asperger’s syndrome”

then more and more inbetween cases started being labelled like rett syndrome, CDD, PDD-NOS, and so they had to say “fuck it, it’s all “autism spectrum disorder” now”

over time, “autism” has become shorthand for ASD. to avoid confusion, the OG autism sometimes gets described as “classic autism”

honestly it’s all a big mess

i will be truthful, i had lost complete confidence in the instance after seeing the crashes back in december. i had moved to using lemmy anonymously since then, to “wait and see” if i had to setup an account elsewhere.

seeing this though? full confidence restored. 👍

i am glad there is now more than one single point of failure. i hope that this adventure becomes a valuable lesson to other instances that have just one admin running everything. if you’re reading this, and your instance has one admin - you need to fix that, yesterday!

once you have an OpenCollective or something like it setup, i will be able to contribute. make sure to let us know when a fresh donation link is up (because i don’t trust the old ko-fi link in the sidebar)

thank you so much for your hard work. ❤️

it’s tempting to think digitization is forever, but we’ve already lost so much of the internet to link rot and server shutdowns in just 30 years. paper is actually longer lasting than digital, lol

they changed it to first-past-the-post??!!

what the fuck

you’re entirely right. allistic is silly. i think it’s slightly worse than silly though. i have two takes on this.

my first take is that you shouldn’t slur people.

my second is that if you’re gonna slur someone anyway, don’t be a chicken; just slur them. hiding behind “allistic” is a little bit like hiding behind “youths”, or “fruity”, or “welfare scroungers”, or “special”, or when people do that thing where they go “…she… oh sorry i mean he” (and vice-versa). it’s either a dogwhistle, or dogwhislte-adjacent. we all know what the speaker is implying when they uses these terms. you’re just slurring someone without the confidence necessary to do so.

this is why i unironically use normie (on the internet). sometimes i want to be rude about it, y’know? am in the wrong to slur like this? yes, absolutely. whilst i might use normie in the context of venting, it still doesn’t make it right. but at least i’m not being a coward about my position by hiding behind “allistic”

sometimes, especially when i’m chatting amongst autistics, it’s easier to casually write “when normies do x it upsets me, how about you?” instead of writing formal prose like “Oh I must say! These dastardly Neurotypicals have a particular behaviour pattern that troubles my mind… Do tell me how you bear the burden of such travesties.”.

doing the formal thing is tiring, and sometimes i don’t want to be the better person. 😎👍

paywall bypass: https://archive.is/Yh25x

yeah i can see what’s happened here, rishi has been forced to say “fuck it” and align with one of the factions.

if you have a choice of a faction to align with, you should pick the one that is closer to the center of the overton window, to maximize future vote gain under FPTP.

if suella didn’t force her own sacking to then try and force a no-confidence vote to seize leadership (or otherwise secure cabinet control for the NatC faction), then… why did she write that opinion piece otherwise? she didn’t have to write it.