Notices by Christine Burns MBE 🏳️‍⚧️📚⧖ (christineburns@mastodon.green), page 5

@ChrisMayLA6 I’m unmoved. I haven’t carried cash on me since March 2020 and it’s reached the point now where the idea of assigning value to little slips of paper and metal discs seems a bit strange. For budgeting I use computer ledgers and know not only where I stand to the penny but also how that position will change over months ahead. Cash would mean forever counting and trying to remember which bills are about to arrive. This wouldn’t have mattered when I worked and had an inherent..

@ChrisMayLA6 ..positive cash flow — one can afford to be imprecise in those circumstances — but in retirement I’m juggling a cash flow that can sometimes look deceptively comfortable but which I project will be uncomfortably tight in the next breath.

With Zuckerberg the warning signs were there when he set up a site using women’s photos without consent and invited all the guys to rate them. Maybe that should’ve been enough.

@goatsarah That was the shocking part I’d never heard about before. His videos are so thorough.

@goatsarah Killed (in effect) by Boeing management’s self serving decisions.

Thousands signing statement of support for ongoing inclusion of trans women in women’s football - Sports Media LGBT+

https://sportsmedialgbt.com/let-trans-women-play-football-v-transphobia-homophobia-statement-support

@goatsarah We need more billionaire trans people to buy the always biddable politicians.

They’re not well are they. They’ve not really been well since the enlightenment but the last fifty years have pushed the poor dears over the edge.

It’s all very well for us to fret about the degradation likely to result from using hallucinating LLMs to replace humans to write and summarise stuff but we shouldn’t forget that the AI matrices are in fact excellent analogues for the fault-and-prejudice prone acts of more humans than we hitherto realised. It turns out humans are fatally flawed at the population level. Crowds lack wisdom and make really poor decisions. And that will be the undoing of the species.

@goatsarah You’ve not given location to frame this. Are you judging British tat, Portuguese tat, French tat or what? Is it all unitat?

This was actually published in 2022 but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. The Lemkin Institute classifies the ‘Gender Critical’ movement’s ideology as genocidal. Unfortunately centrists are still well and truly hooked on trying to ‘both sides’ GCs and their victims, as though there’s a happy compromise to be found with eradicators.

https://www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-new-page/statement-on-the-genocidal-nature-of-the-gender-critical-movement%E2%80%99s-ideology-and-practice

Florida Introduces Bill to Ban 'Weather Modification' - Newsweek

They believe in ‘Chemtrails’ so, of course, they’ve passed a law to stop them. Maybe the can impound all the aircraft going in and out of Miami Airport?

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-bill-ban-weather-modification-chemtrails-conspiracy-theory-1994060

I have to say that I’m taken aback by the Swift and smooth execution of the UK’s Puberty Blocker Ban, robbing all future trans people of the better, happier life they could have had without a disfiguring and often irreversible puberty in the wrong sex. Commission a travesty of a ‘study’ to say PBs are bad. ‘Respond’ to the dubious contestable findings with a ban that has no precedent. Enjoy zero awkward questions from a complicit press…

All I can say is that cisgender people should look on the almost flawless delivery of this outcome and be afraid over what has been tested and perfected here. This won’t be the last outing for the strategy. Watch out oral contraception. Watch out morning after pills. Watch out HRT. Nothing is safe from a banning strategy that doesn’t even need evidence of harm.

@cstross @pdcawley @ChrisMayLA6 Charlie, don’t get me wrong. I knew why lone practitioners had to go. However it’s a part of why not everything can be a 15-20 minute walk away unless you’re designing housing developments with several thousand homes to support a local health centre. It underlines why reliable and affordable public transport is an essential.

@ChrisMayLA6 In reality, because we haven’t gone for such strict zoning as the US, a lot of Britons already live in places where basic needs can be met within a short walk. Whether a rural village or an established city suburb, there are little pockets of shops, GP surgeries and schools inside a mile (a 20 minute walk). The problem is almost exclusively the new build estates on greenfield sites, where two cars are a family necessity to do anything. That planning failure is the problem.

@ChrisMayLA6 That’s a problem indeed for some, not helped because traditional corner and village stores have been pushed out of business by the giants, who are only interested in opening 7/11 type stores where there’s a big enough catchment. Single handed GPs have also gone away. But if we’re looking at population wide effects could I ask whether anyone knows what proportion of UK live in that kind of situation vs cities/suburbs and larger villages?

@CherylMorgan @Antiqueight @JulietEMcKenna Be quiet or I’ll read you my poetry.

@CherylMorgan @JulietEMcKenna For some reason I’ve fallen into a frame where I regularly feel that Thursday is Friday.

@ChrisMayLA6 Most of the renewables we have came online in the last ten years and we would have come further but for Tory policy. We’re living now with a temporary hiatus caused by them. It’s estimated we need roughly three times the amount of wind and solar and, at that point, gas will only be used on those occasions we get a high pressure system stuck over the country. The good part is how quickly that growth can be built if we stay serious about it.