I had the same thing happen with Compare The Market in the UK. I used two unique email addresses with them on two different domains and the same day both started receiving spam. I reported it to them and they don't care, because how do you prove it?
Microsoft has always seemed to be a little chaotic and buggy in everything it did, but it was always dominant and assertive. Recently it seems like they might be about to do the impossible and throw away that market position - their cloud is imploding, they all but gave up on their AI goals, apparently the Windows UI is designed now by employees who use Macs so never use their own dog food, and while I don't believe all the people saying they'll move the Linux, I'm wondering what it takes for a few large businesses to make to the macbook Neo. At this point it's mostly 365 holding people in, and that's cross compatible
We use Teams at work and when you choose the icon it takes you to a screen that has a large icon of a door with a rope in front of it. From there you get to choose Teams on web or Teams the app. The point of the door is to tell you that Teams classic is no longer available, which is a huge part of the visual hierarchy. It's very strange - Teams classic was phased out long ago, but they still tell you this, and the negative connotation of a door with a rope in front of it resides in your mind as you move forward. This is one of the many operating quirks one sees from day to day.
My consoles (Xbox and switch) are terrible at the basic thing like updates. My steam deck on the other hand does update all the time but I never notice and haven't ever picked it up off the dock and been stopped from playing a game because it needed to update something. I think they'll start eating everones lunch if they keep making it easier to use and if their 2026 products are good.
The main issue is an ability to rebuild literally any part of the system from sources. A few changes here and there allow cheaters to bypass anticheat protection in a significant amount of ways
A lot of laws head this way. Sweeping chances but not enforced so people ignore it, then later there's nothing stopping the government going back 7 years after select individuals. Just because it wasn't ever enforced doesn't mean it isn't illegal. An example is disguised employment laws for contractors in the UK (IR35)
Why would this affect feminism? If they want to fight for equal rights to conscription nobody is stopping them, and if they don't nobody is going to force them to. These gotchas don't really have any reflection on reality.
I am wondering if the affected men will demand preferential treatment as a consequence of service. Women currently benefit from disproportionate employment in the social safety net, affirmative action in German government hiring, etc. I would imagine that this would be essentially offensive to the men who are required to stay in the country, or face (potential future) conscription. I suspect the demands of European governments will increase as countries continue to age.
I would define feminism as the belief that on balance and in aggregate, there is a difference in the fairness that society accords to the genders and it's in favor of men.
The risk to feminism would be that this becomes so blatantly and obviously not true that no one can take it seriously. I don't think the continued draft of men would impact this because it's not a change to the status quo, and it isn't changing opinion in Ukraine.
Musk taking over Twitter took a lot of the spotlight off of Dorsey, as though it wasn't already a toxic plaxe. He got a second chance in the public eye to be the visionary that's "one of us" and he's doing his best to blow it
If these laws come in in their current form, it might be worth archiving ISOs like 9front because I'm sure at least one project will just close its doors
This is why I disagree with the idea that we should keep increasing funding to the NHS. The argument always seems to come to a false dichotomy of "either this or the American system" as though other systems don't exist, and as though the NHS isn't top heavy with bureaucrats and questionable contracts
The truth is that the NHS is very bad not due to funding, but for structural reasons.
The fact I can't even see a GP I'm not registered with (not even an option to pay extra) is ridiculous. You have absolutely no control over your health at all.
With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.
> With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.
In the US this isn't how it works. You can't see whoever you want unless you have a really, really good plan. Otherwise, you need referrals. And lots of specialists won't see you without a referral anyway.
And, the wait is often on the order of months. I know that's something people complain about in the UK but I assure you, it happens that way in the US too even though we're paying 10x as much.
I know private in the UK is quite good. What you need to understand is that the only reason it's any good at all is because of the NHS. It has to remain competitive. If you go full private, then it very quickly decays.
A specialist also requires a referral in the UK. There are also much more medicines which are prescription-only than in the US.
That's why in practice we have all these (private) services to get easy GP appointments via phone, video or even online forms. While everyone knows those appointments can't realistically do any real medical work, they serve to give you prescriptions and referrals.
It's just a gatekeeping mechanism, that you can more easily bypass if you have money. The more you pay, the more they care about your user experience and how streamlined it is.
That was my thinking... even for specialists, I can generally get into a new one within a few weeks.
My SO is on state Medicaid (cancer) and does experience the kinds of waits mentioned above... so I guess it does follow similarly for government/state backed healthcare, where I'm mostly out of pocket.
But even when I had relatively typical coverage, I didn't have issues getting into a doctor more often than not. I think getting my sleep study was the longest wait I had for anything, they were months backed up with appointments... but my kidney and retina specialists were somewhat easy to get started with.
You can absolutely see a GP you’re not registered with if you are travelling and need to. I have done it multiple times. I have been offered it same or next day after calling 111.
While away from home, my son (5 yo) cut his finger and was in need of disinfectant and a bandage (steri strips).
Pharmacy was useless, no medical skills or knowledge of their own products. Asked me to figure out myself what I needed and put it on my son myself.
Local GP surgery sent us away: no registration, no visit. Me saying this was an emergency just made them suggest A&E.
A&E is where we ended up, and while that definitely works, going to the emergency services of a large hospital for every little thing is not only a waste of my time but also of resources. It seems however to be the NHS way: whenever the littlest of troubles arise, just go to the hospital, or even call an ambulance.
Sorry for being too American to understand, but why would you need to talk to any medical professional to put a bandaid on your kid? Is this about NHS being paying for the bandaid? About medical expertise to apply a bandaid?
Not all disinfectants are child safe, and the wound was serious enough to require steri-strips (an alternative to sutures) -- it was not a matter of a bandaid.
You would have been best served by a Minor Injury Unit but not every town has one, so A&e is not excessive. The great majority of people going there do not need the full capabilities of it (resuscitation etc).
Getting a minor wound bandaged up is not what A&E is meant for, it's for life-threatening injuries.
Going to A&E and waiting there also means you're losing 4 to 6 hours.
111 you just get some robot asking you a never-ending list of inane questions before someone tells you to either self-care at home or go to A&E.
A pharmacist should be able to administer the supplies they sell, particularly wound dressing and care. It's a requirement in some other European countries like France (where pharmacists are doctors), but in the UK the reality is that most are unable to do so.
111 do a lot more than that, they will get you a GP visit even if the GP claims to not have slots, and they will get medical professionals to come to you.
If it was in hours, I'm surprised they didn't get a nurse appointment for the cut.
If only there were some system where the incentives could freely flow through and permeate every level of the sector. Where those organisations that provide sub-standard care die and those that excel receive outsized funding...
Unfortunately, a system with these qualities doesn't exist in practice. You just end up with the same too-big-to-fail macro organization minimizing their point-of-care labor spend and maximizing their management spend either way.
As someone who largely worked at startups and smaller companies before joining the NHS it genuinely confused me how no one would ever say no to anything when I first started working there.
The projects I worked on were genuinely absurd... My team alone spent millions on things that literally wouldn't have made any difference to the quality of healthcare in the UK.
Apparently we were given a budget and we had to find a way to spend it otherwise it would be cut. At any normal company we should have all immediately have been made redundant.
The rate of increase of healthcare funding for the UK is 2,000% higher than France's rate of healthcare funding increases from between 2010 and 2019, according to World Bank data.
The UK healthcare system is uniquely incompetent, administratively bloated and drives very suboptimal value for money.
UK citizens appear to be in a collective delusion about the NHS that allows them to continue ineptly bumbling through mediocrity while perpetually fleecing more tax money to line the pockets of administrators.
Meanwhile actual frontline workers in the NHS are completely ripped off in salary. Nurses get paid peanuts, while even neurosurgeons earn less than 1/6th of their American counterparts.
To plug the gap by skilled healthcare workers bailing over these horrific conditions, the UK has been importing people to fill these gaps, often with severely lower competence (usually because of completely faked qualifications or outright fraud [1]).
reply