I got the impression from the summary that “broadly welcomed” may include opinions like “there’s a lot of work to do on the implementation front, but this sounds like a step in the right direction”, as is common when there’s a big and complex problem. Unions are used to being given loads of assurances at the beginning when policies are declared, and then gradually over time, the concessions in a bill get eroded. “Broadly welcomed” could mean that 27 of the unions have sentiments that are roughly 65% positive on this, and 1 of them (the quoted one) is 60% negative. In this case, maybe including a quote from the mostly negative union also captures some of the sentiments of the 35% negatives from the main bulk. If this is the only quote included, it is weird, but I imagine the full article has more perspectives.

Edit: Reading the full article deepened this impression — apparently this is a big enough endeavour that it’s expected to be on the drawing board for at least 2 years? Another union (TUC) said that “this bill highlights Labour’s commitment to upgrade rights and protections for millions” — language like “highlights Labour’s commitment” is fairly fluffy, which suggests to me an angle of “starting this early in your elected window bodes well for your intentions, hopefully we can keep this up for long enough that we get a practical change”

In addition, the union who gave the negative quote are a small businesses union, and whilst I’m definitely on the side of the workers over businesses, I also think it’s important to recognise that legislation like this tends to put a disproportionate burden on small businesses compared to the mega-corporations (who can lobby more and also absorb impacts easier).

This announcement is good news, but Starmer has moved the goalposts on past promises so many times that any optimism I might feel is tempered by a “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Time will tell, I suppose. !Remindme 2 years (this is a joke, I don’t think Lemmy has a RemindMe bot)

There’s a reason one of the difficulties is story only.

That is something I appreciated about the game, it makes it clear that lower difficulties are valid ways to pay the game

Oh yeah, I really wish I had played on a higher difficulty for this reason. Especially because one of the most immersive and thematically cool parts of the game for me was the main story section near the end of act 1 where you have to make a blade oil to fight a >!werewolf!< . (Vague wording to minimise spoilers in my main comment.) I really liked this because it made me reflect on what it means to be a Witcher — how the knowledge might be more important than the mutations and the magic.

An additional point to the prepping is that being open-world means that you can potentially go to areas or take on challenges far beyond the “intended” level. On lower difficulties, I didn’t feel sufficiently punished for being audacious in that way, and I think the potential for punishment is part of the fun of the audacity. Especially when getting destroyed like this isn’t the game “fuck you for even trying”, but rather a “try exploring some more, find some new recipes and come back later (or just read the bestiary and find out that you already have the item you need)”

I don’t think I’ve personally played any games with that, but I think it can be a problem? I get the sense that it may vary game by game, but as I say, I have no direct experience or knowledge

I don’t know how gaming on Mac works, but since I switched my home rig to Linux a couple of years ago, I have not once had a problem with installing a new game that doesn’t have native Linux support^[1]. I wonder whether developers have learned that they can rely on Proton for their Linux support (for better or worse).

[1]: there was a point when Baldur’s Gate 3 stopped working after a big update, but I fixed it by switching to Proton-GE, a forked version of Proton. https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I’ve never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it’s because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.

“In Sweden, having drugs in the bloodstream is punishable with prison”

Oh wow, I didn’t know that

What do you expect her to do instead?

What’s your favourite scent/scent note? (Either scent to work with if you make perfumes, or just something you personally enjoy for your own use)

I have a Catholic friend who says she treats her body like a temple — full of red wine and guilt

I can’t help but wonder whether some people are aiming to scapegoat her. Like, this is a huge trial, with many defendants (I’m unsure whether anyone else besides her was sentenced to death at the first trial), but maybe pinning more stuff on her will make others (who may be more culpable for some of the charges than she is) less likely to get the death penalty.

This is incredible in ways I can’t articulate

“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.

What do you have on it? I’ve considered setting one up, but I’m not sure what I’d put on it yet, and I don’t want to do the thing where I make something I never use.

It’s not the most robust analogy, but I actually really like your comparison to painting restoration; to do it well, one must understand the techniques and materials used in the original (even stuff below the visible surface).

Not a lawyer, but I think the original work is still copyrighted, and that restoration wouldn’t (or certainly shouldn’t) constitute a new artwork. Though now I’m wondering about that terrible Jesus painting restoration from a few years back — it’s certainly different from the original, and whilst it might not seem reasonable to call it a new piece of “art”, it’s certainly inspired a great many people(to make memes)

I think many people who are responsible for pushing the campaign forward would agree it’s a much bigger issue. It’s just that the bigger issue is big enough that there are multiple fronts one could fight on, and this is a politically useful opportunity to push forward. A victory from this campaign will be unlikely to lead to the larger developments without more of a fight, because achieving the general rule will take a few instances of arguing the specific case.

For now, I’m excited to see where this leads, even if the answer might be “nowhere”

I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that’s only possible if you talk him down in the first game.

I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall’s “Suicide Mission” makes what could’ve been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.

I read the book “A Libertarian Walked into a Bear” and I found the range of Libertarian attitudes interesting — there was at least one Libertarian in the book who explicitly identified as communist.

As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in “1st world countries”, poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won’t help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.

I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we’re not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn’t offer productive ways forward.