I don’t see a problem with applying “modern” morality to people of the past. There’s nothing wrong with saying, for instance, “people in 1950 were widely homophobic”, or “pedophilia was rampant in medieval society”. Just because people back then wouldn’t have even identified homophobia or pedophilia as anything out of the ordinary doesn’t mean they are morally excused.

Someone who doesn’t know any better is still acting immorally even if they are oblivious or in complete denial about it. The victims of those “old fashioned” ideas suffered just as much anguish and trauma as they do today, and the people of the time knew that and simply accepted it.

The suits in government who authorised this torture and the men on the ground who carried it out knew full well that it caused real distress and suffering, and they simply didn’t care, or they decided that the economic and political advantage to their own countries justified it.

I’d be on your side if I went out of my way to be an asshole.

I sympathise with your unease - it doesn’t seem ideal to allow the police such wide discretionary power, but we don’t live in the ideal world and the fact is there are plenty of arseholes who are not as gracious and accommodating to their local communities as you would be, if you were to choose to be one. These people *do* go out of their way to be arseholes, it’s how they show off to their mates. They deliberately push things as far as they can and they are a fucking nightmare to have as neighbours.

Back in the day, the police would have a quiet word with their fathers at the gentlemen’s club who would then threaten to cut them off - or, if they were working class oiks, they’d shove them in the back of the black Maria, beat them black and blue and drop them off outside town without their shoes.

Something needs to be done though. Maybe that means allowing loud brash vehicles to be seized merely after a few complaints are made by the community that the police reasonably believe to be well-founded.

yes but whose evidence and facts?

Was it Andy Burnham by any chance?

Terrifying video

my god you weren’t exaggerating, that is absolutely horrific

I think you misread that - I don’t think the wiki says that, and the CPI’s own site says “100 is very clean and 0 is highly corrupt”

actually I apologise and take that back, you are in fact correct - I now see that there’s two different numbers: firstly the CPI score, which for the US in 2025 is 64/100 - this is the one where “100 is very clean and 0 is highly corrupt”. Secondly there’s the ranking, which is how a country’s score places it in relation to the other 182 countries under consideration - a lower ranking means public services are more transparent than other countries. In 2025, the US was ranked at place 29.

In 2024, its score was 65, so there hasn’t been a big drop since Trump returned to the White House.

you threaten me or try to blackmail me first thing I would do is [blah blah blah]

This is just you daydreaming from the safety of your comfy armchair. Unless you’ve actually been personally harassed and threatened by agents of the state who can do pretty much whatever they want in pursuit of their goals, you can’t honestly say how you’d react.

Nice cherry picking, the next paragraph of the wiki says:

This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience.[citation needed] When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery-slope fallacy.

You think your assessment that humans are a scourge on the planet is objective and clear, but you miss your own anthropocentric blindspots. Like it or not, your stance is not unique, on the contrary many humans also question the direction our species is going.

The withering criticism of human activity by yourself and the many others like you is simply evidence that humans are *not* wantonly devouring the planet with no thought for the future, unlike the cricket plagues you liken us to.

Whether that is sufficient to save our society remains to be seen of course.

You are using your human value system to declare humans unworthy. This is a human thing to do. No other creatures reflect on the impact their existence has on the environment. Viruses don’t. Crickets don’t. Not even the planet itself, nor the entire universe, cares whether humans even exist or how they carry out their lives.

It’s only humans who have evolved a brain capable of making such assessments and using that to inform their behaviour. Can we use this power to rise above the bloody law of nature? Can we create a world that is fair and just, even in an uncaring universe built on the cold unbreakable laws of physics?

You probably acknowledge that you’re using your human value system to judge the performance of humanity as a whole. We have evolved to have these concepts of good and evil because they help our tribe to grow and flourish - and you can’t deny that the human tribe has grown and flourished. So your values - including your ability for introspection and self-criticism - are a successful evolutionary adaptation which has helped your species grow and to dominate the world. So I want to thank you for being a successful organism. Well done.

mmm yeah the messy real world in which we live, the one that has no built-in justice or fairness, in fact the only unchanging law is that the strong have dominion over the weak. That real world, yes. It seems you are acquainted with it.

We are not masters of it. We are very much at its mercy just like all the other creatures on the planet. Care and thoughtfulness is needed when attempting to design and implement public systems that deliver justice and fairness and are sustainable over the long-term.

yes sorry, I didn’t mean to say you did. I was just saying that a practical solution could be to make water and energy cost more the more of it you use. Right now, there is a tendency for the opposite to happen, mainly for companies, where they are offered better prices per unit the more they use.

I also know people who are somewhat cavalier with their own water and energy use, while others who are less well off are scrimping and saving in order to keep bills low. It seems fine to me that the former are charged double per unit (say). It subsidises the usage of less well-off people and at the same time encourages people to be more economical.

Why “reasonable”?

Because we live in the real world unfortunately, so compromises are necessary if you want sustainable long-term solutions. Regarding water, desalination has come a long way in the last few years, but extracting drinkable water from the sea is still very energy intensive and it still makes far more sense to collect rain and spring water.

You also mentioned food and energy, and right now these things take human labour to produce and deliver, which ultimately means you’re going to have to pay those workers. The government’s supply of money is limited, and it would not be cheap to nationalise water companies, farms, supermarkets and energy companies in order to allow domestic users free access to those resources.

Making all domestic usage free sounds great but we do have to encourage reasonable water use. (And energy use.)

Getting rid of the standing charge is an important first step IMO. At the moment it effectively means people with low water usage are subsidising those who use lots of water.

I’d like to see pricing that gets more expensive the more you use. So if you only use what you need for your particular household, you pay a very low price per unit, if not entirely free, and the price per unit keeps increasing the more a household uses per person.

pumps are cheap enough but they probably increase the chance of blockage due to hair and so on. if you could get it using just gravity it would prob be better from a minimum maintenance viewpoint.

I also looked at this recently as I thought that soap would be harmful to plants and/or microbes and the Royal Horticultural Society has done some investigation of their own into the use of greywater, and their advice is “plants can be watered with shower, bath, kitchen and washing machine water (from rinse cycles)”, finding that “soil and potting composts are effective at filtering out” the soap/detergent.

I’m just echoing @Denjin@feddit.uk with the RHS link, and I didn’t read the articles he linked but it wouldn’t surprise me if the RHS guidance is the source of those.

deleted by creator

seems to work without the “L” at the end - https://www.fosslinux.com/42630/best-cpu-stress-test-performance-benchmark-linux-tools.htm

by broomstick I hope