clara

yeah people i talk to don't seem to get what's coming. like, they haven't had the misfortune of a medical emergency in their life, and so they've never actually experienced how bad the service provision is getting. but not just for healthcare, it's for every service.

me personally? i'm saving up that money for sure. not for the next emergency, oh goodness no. i'm going to use that savings pot to leave this island for good. ideally before i get my next medical emergency. selfish? yep, you bet! 🙂

but, i am fundamentally sick of living in a place where we pay all this money and get little service to show for it. for me, one of these two options is fine:

1. somewhere where i pay low tax and rightfully get poor service.
2. somewhere where i pay high tax and get premium quality of service.

one or the other i am fine with, preferably option 2. but what we have in the uk is the downside of both of these options.

bit of a tangent i know, but...

rather than national or local governments fix any of this, they've instead embarked on massive campaigns to massage the statistics, through changing the measuring sticks used to assess service quality across the board, and in doing so, hide all the problems. this extends to water standards, and unemployment statistics, and cancer waiting times, etc etc.

don't even get me started about the filthy liars who do the passenger rail statistics 💩

yep, checks out. i'm an idiot. 🙂

POST ARCHIVED TO PREVENT LINK ROT MFERS, FUTURE HOG CRANKERS MIGHT WANNA KNOW

FOR SCREEN READERS, THIS POST IS OF A COOL SKELETON HOLDING A BONE SCYTHE ON A BACKGROUND OF LIGHTNING AND THUNDER. THE SKELETON SAYS:

OH, DID MY POST OFFEND YOU? if so, then I am genuinely sorry, and would be happy to take any suggestions as to how I can be more sensitive in the future. That is, if you want to impart any. I know I'm not a great person, but I'm trying to be better.

this would be good content for !THE_PACK@lemmy.world

i'm stealing it 😈

yes, most of us, basically all of eurasia, and anyone descended from eurasia that now lives abroad

a long winded way of saying "everyone but africans"

you're right, and i think that the thing that is being called out in the screenshot is not the money making per se, but the doom loop that everyone is forced to experience when trying to perform any basic information lookup using the internet in 2023. it goes something like this.

1. google "enshittification" to find that neat article you read a few months ago to post in a lemmy comment
2. first three or four results aren't what you wanted, so keep scrolling.
3. click the result you want (beginning of doom loop)
4. "we value your privacy - so please click all the individual opt-outs, because GDPR didn't say we can't harass you with opt-outs to beat you into submission"
5. "subcribe to our newsletter! we definitely won't leak this email to a third party"
6. "do you want to enable desktop notifications for this site?"
7. "this page would like to know your location (so we can serve you geo-targeted adverts)"
8. "get full access to our platform for ~~xxx~~ yyy price!" despite fake discounting being illegal in many countries
9. scroll down to start reading the first paragraph.
10. "...this is your 1st of 3 free articles this month. to receive 10 free articles a month, please register today!"
11. after dismissing all of this, you then scroll 2 paragraphs in, and find out actually, this wasn't the article you needed.
12. press back on your browser a few times to wade back through all the privacy spam
13. scroll 2 more results down on google, maybe this next one was it?
14. goto 3. (you now repeat the doom loop)

this doom loop has to stop. yes, people and businesses need to make money under the current economic system we live in. but it doesn't have to be like this.

but you know something? we all know where this is going.

some ""visionary"" san fran tech bro startup will have the "genius" idea of offering an interface between journo websites and customers, by offering a one-stop subscription shop. pay the tech bros once, they grant you access to all sites.

not unlike how uber operates as an interface between taxi drivers and customers, or how airbnb offers an interface between short term lets and customers, or how amazon offers an interface between cheap plastic vendors and customers, or how netflix operates as an interface between media content and customers, or how...

...the wheel turns.

yeah this is exactly the point lol. 😅

it's so hard to escape out of the walled ecosystems because so much of our content is already written in these places, and so even if fediverse grows exponentially, it will still take at least a decade of content creation for "free/libre" content to outpace the old silos.

but we have to start now, to get to that future.

this comment is aimed at those future "just passing through" visitors, who are still on the fence with regards to the fediverse.

any internet power user will know, and be able to tell you that the internet feels wrong as of late. everything that you try to use is slightly broken for some reason. why is it becoming harder to use basic services that we took for granted 5 years ago?

unfortunately, the internet is changing once again, and it's time to pick a side.

you can side with big corpo, stay in their walled ecosystems, and embrace enshittification.

or, you can side with the fediverse, break out of your silo, and take control of your own means of content participation.

the choice is yours.

if you like following concepts or "things" (reddit-style), then try here: https://join-lemmy.org/

or, if you prefer following individuals or "trends" (twitter-style), then try here: https://joinmastodon.org/

i went down a rabbit hole last night about this, and found that there still isn't good support for alt text tagging on lemmy.

closest i found for emojis is something like this: 👋

at the end of the previous sentence, i included an emoji of a hand waving goodbye, and i have attempted to tag it using markdown. but, my suspicion is that it tries to read the alt text as a link, and it therefore doesn't work.

this is apparently the best lemmy can do for emojis. i think that is not good enough, and this needs to be improved by the developers

thank you for providing me with a teachable moment about accessibility.

i will do my best to keep readability in mind for the future. <3

they don't read out at all? oh no! i would have thought that it would at least print words like "upside down smile" or "heart".

i will try my best to use them as an enhancement only then, like, to maybe only emphasize a statement instead of including them mid-text.

example 1) i am happy with this 🙂

versus

example 2) i am 🙂 with this.

in example 1, i have included a "smile" emoji at the end of the statement. in example 2, i replaced the word "happy" with a "smile" emoji.

if example 2 causes grief, then i will try my best to never write like that again.

that's very fair, i didn't consider the impact of what i said as i was writing it, i only wished to contextualise the decision making process behind the domain, (which was done in a time crunch). for my poor writing style in this regard, i am sorry.

likewise, no reason you should know this, but for what it's worth, i will state that i am autistic, and i am extremely bad with these types of political considerations when writing, talking, or anything really. you would think i would be more aware of the circumstances that others face given my difficulties but, well, that's the thing with my conditon, isn't it 😅. this is why i haven't opted to help out in a mod/admin capacity, because i know that i would botch the communications side (from past experience)

i understand where you are coming from, and i hope you can likewise do this with me ❤️

lastly, i will state that i am not trying to win anyone over with the post, i merely wished to answer the "how and why the name was purchased" part of your question. as you have said, i am happy to slow down and continue with the current system, now that we are saved, and that no major overhaul is needed just yet. the decisions taken were taken specifically because we would have been out of time, had we not been saved by today's events. were they good decisions? that's another question 🙂

side question for you: how do emojis work on screen readers? i am someone who likes to include emojis in posts to directly convey my thinking, but i had never considered that they might read out strangely.

we are saved \o/