benji

We’re still so far away from this technology being viable for everyday use, aren’t we?

Nice try bot, but Rishi Sunak isn’t the leader of the Labour Party or Reform UK. He’s also what you might call the opposite of a socialist. I think the last two paragraphs you generated are about the other candidates.

I just came here from the post about the pineapple-sized hailstone found in Texas. WTF?

Where does that figure even come from?

Deliverance.

And Dan Aykroyd getting sucked off by a ghost.

I still think it’s crazy that, as a researcher who has to read a lot of PDFs, I can barely find any usable alternatives to Acrobat that have basic annotation features. This is especially true for Android platforms, where I do most of my reading.

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I wonder if Somerton’s writer has offered any kind of response yet. It was suggested he may have been left in the dark about all of this.

War. War never changes

Slight rant coming up. This is what I’ve learned from my friends who work(ed) as vets and how they experience(d) the profession.

You spend your whole young adult life working towards a profession strongly tied to your identity, which is usually focused on wanting to care for animals. We’re talking 6 years of university study in the UK, preceded by several years of work experience alongside school to get on the course. The drop-off rates for mental health reasons are insanely high. I observed ~1/3 leave before graduating and among those who did, the final exams almost broke them (2nd year is pretty bad too).

Then you graduate and benefit somewhat from the high demand vets are currently in by mostly having your choice of practice. Interestingly though, your salary isn’t anywhere near as high as what most clients expect. Large franchises that buy out smaller vet practices, benefiting from economies of scale, pay your salary. You could work for a smaller practice, but few of them offer a full hospital service where you get to do more than just give vaccines/boosters.

Said franchises are often backed by venture capital and have investors that include large (pet) food corporations (nestle). Their idea of good business is to persistently harass your managers for performance milestones and, depending on how pliable those managers are, they pass that pressure onto you. These companies also hire a whole retinue of middle management staff to push these KPIs. They are frequently less qualified than you and know nothing about veterinary care. We’re talking regional directors, applications and transfer coordinators, and presumably whoever manages them and many more besides. Bearing in mind that the work you do as a vet also pays their salary. Between that and the expensive equipment, you can see why vets don’t earn much despite the huge turnover the industry must make.

On the other side of that pressure is dealing with the general public who are justifiably disgruntled at the huge expense their little animal has incurred them. Many (often insured) understand that you don’t set the prices as a junior vet. Many others call you money grabbing or worse (much worse). That’s not getting into the deluge of conspiracy theories around pet ownership that you need to constantly battle, as well as the literal shit, condoms, sanitary towels and God knows what else you need to extract from Snowy this week.

The hours are appalling. There is generally no paid overtime, but if an animal is about to die you can’t just clock off. If something does die unexpectedly, you might get threatened with legal action. The amount of second-guessing and what-ifs alongside self-flaggelation I’ve seen my friends go through is really sad. The expected deaths and euthanasia aren’t much easier though, because you see the heartbreak it causes the owners. My friends have offered consolation and emotional support to humans almost as much as they have medical care for animals.

There isn’t much recognition for the hard work you do and little to no vertical progression in your career. Once you’re a clinical vet that’s pretty much it, unless you open your own practice at some point or direct one of the ones that have already been bought out. You mostly get your sense of self worth from feeling that you’ve made a difference for the animal, but that’s not what your KPIs measure. Owners will blame you for not being able to afford the expense of treating their pet, while your boss tells you you haven’t been bringing in enough business. When you’ve spent your life working towards something that turned out to be a complete fantasy and is openly despised by so many, is it that surprising to consider suicide as an option?

I’ve left out a lot and this is necessarily anecdotal. There are good bosses, rewarding cases, wholesome workplaces, and grateful and well-insured owners. But I’ve also left out a lot of the bad, so do yourself a favour and don’t become a vet. Do it as a job if you have to, but don’t make it your identity.

There’s a lot of hate here that I can empathise with and I’m trying to not take calls for her to commit suicide or be murdered/ tortured in prison literally. It’s difficult to express hate verbally without reference to physical violence that underscores it. There’s sentiment here that life in prison isn’t enough and I tend to agree, but not in a way I’ve seen talked about here or anywhere else.

Letby should be imprisoned for life, no question. But that shouldn’t stop us asking more questions about what happened here. Do we treat Letby’s murders as isolated, unique cases and expect them to never be repeated? Lock her away and continue business as usual? It’s possible that things aren’t so simple and we need to look into how somebody like Letby got away with so much for so long and maybe also why she began doing something quite so horrific.

Mental illness is an unfortunate reality to come to grips with because we are steadily recognising that it is caused by relationships an affected person has with their environment. That means there is a share of responsibility in all of us and the systems/ institutions we have built to make sure this does not happen again and that we identify it before it’s too late.

It’s entirely likely that Letby will turn to self harm, or other extreme outcomes of poor mental health. We can’t ask anyone to sympathise with her after what she has done, but we can hope to treat mental illness better in the future and offer help to those who need it, before it’s too late. And I don’t mean too late in the sense of killing people, because that’s not what all mentally ill people do.

Does anyone have figures on subscription hikes to other fediverse systems? Mastodon is probably the best like-for-like switch for casual birdsite fans, but I wonder if there’s also an emerging desire for something a little different.

The clicks, even with an adblocker, are still worth something, right? Especially if they’re tied to an account.

I think the distinction you make is important. Until fairly recently, not carrying ID was a British thing. Even if you still had it. It used to be an anti-totalitarian point of pride to not be required to present ID on demand. In Germany, carrying a form of identification is a legal requirement from age 16. Of course, anyone who drives in the UK still has a form of picture ID and increasing ease of travel makes passports more common. When mainland Europe is so close, why not holiday there? Whereas the US is so vast and varied that you needn’t pass border control. But this perceived freedom has been shifting in terms of everyday experience.

I don’t think anyone younger than 30 has ever not been carded at Tesco to do their grocery shopping, unless they’ve never had a drop of alcohol or needed an aspirin. I’ve been carded for buying a barbecue brush at Wilko (RIP). You see signs in shops that say that you can expect to be carded if you’re younger than 25. The point is, what was once seen as the government infringing on your rights in a totalitarian way is now expected from supermarkets. So you carry ID. And it’s not just at the shops. What X is doing isn’t anything Twitter wasn’t already. You couldn’t get an account on the birdsite without providing a telephone nr. In the UK, you get a SIM card contract by providing ID. Yes, people can get around that, but it’s so complicated that I would be surprised if that many have.

Clearly Twitter means enough to people for them to be willing to sign over so much, even when decent alternatives exist. I still think it has a lot to do with content, user numbers and wanting to be on the most popular stream. But it might also be that our perception of privacy is changing, as it has before.

The power of the panopticon lies not in being able to see and punish all deviant activity, but to encourage self-correction in all potential deviants who must always assume they are being watched.