Safari introduced private browsing in 2005.

Granted, Chrome eventually innovated by coming up with a catchier name.

In the USA, you say?

“Oh no”.

Anyway…

As an employer (and thus an evil capitalist pigdog etc.) I’ve always applied the rule of the thumb that “twice the holiday duration as notice” is polite to the employer and your colleagues who will cover for you - so two days notice for a day off, two weeks notice for a week off, a month’s notice for two weeks off, etc.

“Polite” does not mean “mandatory” of course - circumstances can dictate that sometimes you have to break the rule of thumb and that’s fine.

Damn. Less than 4 weeks/year would be illegal here (it’s also mandatory that an employee can take at least 2 weeks of that as a continuous single block, if they wish.) Employers are also not permitted to buy holiday allowance back (except when an employee leaves) and must roll any unused over year on year - which means employers are strongly motivated to have their staff actually take their holidays.

“Here” is, obviously, not the US…

The important thing is this: can you still deliver lectures to the rest of the world on the Importance of Freedom Of Speech, and the fact that only Yanks have it because Elon can worship Hitler on the Internet?

And the answer is, yes. Yes you can, and always will. So the actual reality isn’t really important. Because all you actually learned from 1984 is that of the government tells you that you have freedom of speech, and also tells you that Eastasia and Eurasia don’t, That’s Good Enough For You and you’re The Free-est People In The World.

I don’t buy the Epstein files distraction, because it’s pretty clear the US public don’t give a shit. What would the Epstein files even prove?

You could release an authentic video of Trump fucking an 8 year old and then throwing the lifeless body down a laundry chute and most Yanks would just shrug and say “whaddaguy”. Hell, if the kid was an immigrant’s, his ratings would probably go up.

There is nothing in the Epstein files that could possibly touch Trump. It’s all already priced in and you elected him anyway.

This is not correct; they haven’t been convicted of anything yet.

They’re out on the equivalent of bail awaiting trial. That they are not wearing ankle tags or the like and are allowed to travel was thanks to pressure from the US Government, though.

Ukraine is not a European country then?

I tell you who is crying a fucking river - fucking yanks like you who think putting a bumper sticker on their car is “protest”. I’ve spent time in Ukraine, I’ve had Ryssian soldiers - supported by YOUR president - try to lynch me as a NATO spy. I know what it’s like to wake up to a rocket hitting the building next door to the one you are sleeping in, and I know what is like to drive gingerly around the wreckage of a car that’s been hit by a drone and will never forget how car parts and body parts seem to almost meld together in the wreckage.

So with literally ALL due respect - go fuck yourself.

Yeah, blame the victims, go ahead.

Sort. Your. Own. Shithole. Country. Out.

I feel like you should sort your own fucking house out before worrying about anyone else’s.

The days of Yanks getting a free pass to lecture everyone else are long gone.

No idea why the downvotes here.

I mean, someone up there just unironically called someone else a “class traitor”.

This is not a crowd that’s hanging straight on its hinges.

A brigade of yanks with “you just can’t understand how many solar systems fit in Texas, though” is incoming…

Thank you! I see it has a Linux version, so I will genuinely check that out - as soon as I get home. (As I write I’m waiting to board the first of 13 hours or so of flights - that’s why I happened to be checking out gaming reviews yesterday ;-). I’m hoping the 7th Guest remake will keep me sane…)

Genuinely, thank you both for the suggestions. I’m just wary of falling down the YouTube rabbithole - I refuse to even log-in to the damned site - so if I start watching one of them it’s going to have to be one I can remember the name of to search ;-).

(I thought Facebook was a bad idea from the get-go and never signed up, quit Instagram when FB bought them, quit Twitter when that asshole bought them… Lemmy and (sorry to say) Reddit are literally my only social media, and I question both of them fairly regularly. I do not claim to be normal ;-).)

The only reason I make an exception for Yahtzee is that having had a Steam account since Half-Life 2, Steam nevertheless remains comically bad at recommending games I’d be remotely interested in. Yahtzee’s reviews I often don’t agree with, but they do at least give me a hint of things I should check out.

Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I’m bored, to watch Yahtzee’s reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I’ve not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.

I thought “sounds curious, maybe I’ll search for some full reviews of that to see what it’s like”…

Ho. Lee. Hell.

There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.

On the bright side, my “never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos” commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I’m old enough that this shit wasn’t ubiquitous when I was impressionable.

Be fair though, “saving from a GUI app” is not exactly Linux’s strong point either.

Click “save”; wonder which badly written save dialog this app is going to use; is it the one with the save button at the top? Or the bottom? Will it actually appear, or will it pop up below the window for Reasons, making you think the dammed thing has crashed? Maybe it’s one with a list of favourite locations in the left maybe it’s not… Maybe they’re actually my favourite locations, or maybe it’s an entirely different set of the developer’s. If I’m lucky, there’s a way to navigate to my home directory without going all the eay to the root and working up from there, more than likely not…

Best of all, it’s one of those Save dialogues that thinks it’s smart to enumerate the entire goddamned filesystem, network mounts and all, before it will respond to any input at all, leading to the window manager eventually fretting that maybe the application has crashed… Or perhaps it’s one of those ones related to Dolphin that thinks it understands WebDAV mounts better than davfs, except that it actually doesn’t and you end up saving to a temporary directory just so you can move the file where you actually wanted it from the commandline…

aaaaaargh

Don’t get me wrong, I use Linux on all my machines and have been a Unix user since NetBSD 0.8 (33 years, fml…) But clicking “save” or “open” is one of those things that has me shaking my head thinking “how can it STILL be this bad” every time.

😘

Oh Christ. You’re that guy.

Yes, yes, everybody only uses Didi. Please, just use Didi. Nobody wants to share public transport with the “freewheeling extrovert” gobshite… Just use Didi.

State school.

(Or you might hear “comprehensives”, but they’re just a subset of the state school system.)

ETA:

State school, or just school: what almost everyone goes to

Private school: fee-paying non-state schools

Public school: prestigious high fee-paying non-state secondary schools. “Public school” is the Ivy League of private schools, essentially.

Well no, not really. If they’ve turned their savings into a house, and they still have a house, and they could still move house if they wanted, they’ve lost nothing if the notional value of that house goes down.

(Just as most people don’t actually get any richer when the notional value of their house goes up - once you have a house you tend to always need a house; selling up to move into rented accomodation is something you do in distress, not a sign the housing market has played you a blinder. That means the only way anyone tends to realise that supposed value is - you guessed it - by getting into debt by borrowing against it.

Speculators and landlords of course - they benefit. But “won’t someone think of the parasites” is not a desperately compelling point of view.)

The value of housing is something to obsess over in countries where everybody is up to the eyeballs in debt secured on it. Where that is not the case, it’s far less important (and as it is essentially just the entry fee for independence, ideally it’s low, not high.) A fear of house prices ever actually going down, because of what that would mean to mortgage holders, is the reason the UK has a major housing crisis that it can’t do anything about (for example.)