Ask Lemmy

Here in Romania, it's a pretty big deal. It's a public holiday, so a lot of people have the day off. This year, for example, because it falls on a Thursday, the government decided to make 2 May a day off as well, creating a four-day weekend. Barbecues with family and friends are the national pastime on 1 May. Spending time outdoors in open spaces ("la iarbă verde" - literally "to the green grass") such as woods, meadows, beaches, parks, etc., barbecuing and having picnics is also a staple. This year, I'm going with my girlfriend and her parents to Italy and Switzerland (Lake Como and Lugano) - which also means we'll be voting for president abroad (4 May - first round of the presidential elections).

As the title says I’m looking for advice from people that have legal experience.

I bought a used car in November 2023 and from the start it had issues. Come February 2024 I can’t drive it anymore as I’m putting coolant in several times in a journey and after a couple of repairs it’s determined it needs a new head gasket. They refuse to pay for it at the finance company so I go to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The FOS rules in my favour and orders them to refund and compensate me and remove the car from my drive.

I’ve had my refund but the car is still on my drive 4 weeks later and the finance company says they’re chasing Zuto to remove the vehicle.

Last week I sent a letter stating if not removed but X date then the rate would be £20 a day for storage. They didn’t respond.

I called again and told them I need this sorting as I will move the car to the street where it will likely be towed for no tax or insurance, but I don’t believe I am legally allowed to do this.

My question is what are my options, and will I be able to get the storage fee of £20 a day from them.

Thanks.

I just noticed that I do .

And I'm not saying that the original is bad. You have to have a good song to have a good cover in my opinion. But sometimes the cover artist just understands the mission and takes what the original song did and expands on that a hundred times over.

What're some of your guys's favorites?

I'd like to get into 3D printed fashion accessories and furniture idk

I use Ubuntu btw. Poweroff could use more write cycles on the SSD because it has to read everything at startup, but suspend has to keep supplying power to the RAM

I've been thinking lately about why, in debates (usually) about highly emotional topics, so many people seem unable to acknowledge even minor wrongdoings or mistakes from "their" side, even when doing so wouldn't necessarily undermine their broader position.

I'm not here to rehash any particular political event or take sides - I'm more interested in the psychological mechanisms behind this behavior.

For example, it feels like many people bind their identity to a cause so tightly that admitting any fault feels like a betrayal of the whole. I've also noticed that criticism toward one side is often immediately interpreted as support for the "other" side, leading to tribal reactions rather than nuanced thinking.

I'd love to hear thoughts on the psychological underpinnings of this. Why do you think it's so hard for people to "give an inch" even when it wouldn't really cost them anything in principle?

Could be work or school.

Not counting non-fiction. Are there any novels, poems, movies etc. that have realigned or punched holes in your political leanings, rather than reinforced them?

Vote in comments, or comment if your colour is not represented (poor person's poll until Lemmy adds polls officially)

If you have any experience in this field, please include so in your reply. I've seen over time a lot of criticism over the peer review process and how journals hyper-exploit academics simply because the journals are able to monetize scarcity/exclusivity. I saw another post on it today and I thought, "what if this was federated?"

I was looking around and I see that there are writing portions of the process, such as pubpub or manubot that essentially use git and markdown - but that's not the main point as that's on the before end. What about on the review process?

Let's say there's software that's federated and can be run by anyone from individuals to universities and consortiums. When a user or team is ready to publish, they can "submit their work" for publishing, which would federate out as works pending publication.

This part's a different issue: how to handle reputation for who can review, but I think there are ways to do that and that's beyond the scope of this post as I imagine it could get pretty complicated and would require feedback from people actually in the industry.

The reviewers can submit comments and reviews back to the author via federation, but this time the process can be open instead of behind closed doors. The authors revise, comment, etc. At some point a determination is made that this work is "published."

This seems like a feasible premise. Just brainstorming, you would get history, open reviews, no one asking $1,000 to submit a publication that they then make bank on while you get scraps or nothing.

I could see a reputation system within a given field and/or overall, with certain users being "review board" or "reviewers" on their instance. There could also be additional reputation if, say, a group of universities creates consortiums for different fields and then that consortium "publishes" a work. There'd have to be additional process to block people from spamming works that aren't ready or whatever, but that's not really the point for now.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? At first thought, it seems like there are ways to allow federation of research papers and peer review and to put a dent in the grip of technical journals.

Running bamboo is notoriously fast spreading and difficult to remove. What keeps its population balanced in the wild, and prevents it from crowding out the competition? I tried googling, but was inundated with gardening advice, horror stories, and assault / offensive gardening (some of the latter two presumably covering the same incident from both sides). My google-fu failed, I couldn't really find any info about natural population controls of running bamboo in the thicket of tall tales and gardening advice.

For me it's calculating. Too many people put math into their search engines and not their calculator.

I'm GenX, a child of the cold war. "Tradecraft" is what spooks and spies do. It's espionage and poisoning enemy agents and infiltration and shit.

So what the fuck?

An example that I can think of is Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), which requires a relatively short online course (for a fee, of course) and entails teaching basic english to kids from non english countries online. I've usually known of older and elderly people doing this but I don't think that's a requirement or anything lol. As far as know, the only requirements are high school English and the teaching English course.

Are there any other of these sorts of online jobs that maybe require a short course, and at least potentially bring in enough to pay for the groceries?