@rob me too! Last week and lost the whole hog. Luckily, a mate had brought me a new (very small, mind) coffee plunger with a sweet bean. I had just come home and fancied a good brew. So, rob it calmed me down. We have merlo coffee here? And if you purchase a large tin of it (as I did about 3 months ago) they give you a free coffee AND a $5 voucher…[Read more]

@lionheart564

Ah I see Thane16 tried to recall your name/handle -for some excellent points you offered for his 1st of 2 incredibly difficult philosophy assignments. I’m his  mother hen, sometimes known as “muvverphucker” when things get tough! So thank you.

I understand your point about surnames. I have to admit it wasn’t my original concern: I…[Read more]

@lionheart564 that’s fine if it’s consistent. It’s the whole ‘Eccelson, Tennant, Smith, Capaldi, Jodie’ thing over here that grates.

Still lovin this series!

As someone who has a love/hate relationship with tech in general and Amazon in particular (and don’t get me started on voice menu robots that you have to wade through when you call a business… which is where I begin conversing like a mariner, singing (badly) bleep you bleepity bleeping robots to the Hallelujah chorus,…[Read more]

@LionHeart564

The system didn’t kill Kira – the terrorist did.

The terrorist who had hacked the system.

Work by definition is to through labor, physical or mental, to gain something you want or you need, it is a mean to an end

Work isn’t only a means to an end. Something like 80% of marriages are between people who meet through work.

@lionheart564 I think this episode was very much about alienation. we see two people apparently in charge of ten thousand manual workers who don’t quite trust each other, or the system, which was set up before the requirement to employ 10% humans, is more or less self running and running the humans as well.

This system, though incredibly…[Read more]

@lionheart564 Doula was the word I was looking for. Google searches work much better when you have the foggiest idea how a word is spelt, it took me longer than I’m proud of to find it.

@lionheart564 I was actually thinking of you when I pointed out this episode had a black person (a woman too!) owning an android designed to look like a white man, in the context of what we were talking about before.Robot ownership is linked to slave ownership, the word robot even comes from a word for slave.

The medic who died was not presenting…[Read more]

@idiotsavon  @LionHeart564

Even if the nuances escape those of us not indigenous to Africa, there tend to be obvious differences in build and facial features between people from West African Countries and those from East and North East Africa.

Fun fact, which you may already be aware of: modern studies of DNA show that there is a much more…[Read more]

@lionheart564

I will be deeply disappointed if I don’t count as a barbarian 😉

@idiotsavon

Yes, for all her bubbly persona, she is significantly more cautious and considered that her three forebears.

@lionheart564

Are you by any chance composing in something else (Word, say) and then copying and pasting? That often brings a lot of bad formatting with it. The best way around it is to click the “Text” tab in the Reply box, which will show you any garbage that has cropped up.

Thanks for the comments on my query (Chinese whispers is both a…[Read more]

Posting this in the pub, as it has nought to do with Arachnids…

@lionheart564 @miapatrick

True story: In my 20’s I spent a couple of years living in Cameroon near the Chad border. Overwhelmingly, anybody there who wasn’t from Cameroon or Chad would either be white European/American/Canadian, or Chinese.
I am stereotypically white European in…[Read more]

@lionheart564 trying to formulate a comment along the lines of ‘so we all look the same to you?’ that makes it clear I’m making a joke 😉 … sometimes europeans are bad at telling the difference between facial characteristics of, say, Korean and Chinese people in a similar way. The racial difference in that episode would be registered by…[Read more]

@lionheart564 yes I keep double posting, though my links seem to be working.

@lionheart564 yes Chinese civilisation, and Japanese, were more comprehendible to Europeans than African, the kind of literary and artistic culture was more recognisable. (To the extent than when, say, the Benin Bronzes were found in Benin, europeans were convinced they derived from a different culture.)

The concept of different races did exist…[Read more]

@lionheart564

Cool.

So is there an idiomatic meaning/ translation that captures the way the message gets garbled?

@lionheart564

I understand what you are saying about communism -and I agree. What I wrote next embodied what I believe to be important elements of society which if delivered by profit-focussed competitive markets, won’t happen. This might assist you in your thinking:

…our taxes pay for the very issues we use to determine the signs and signals…

[Read more]

@LionHeart564   @Miapatrick

Discussion of whether health care is better provided by the private sector or by a socialised system such as the NHS, funded by taxation and free at the point of service, is particularly complicated when it comes to comparing China and the UK. On one level it is, as you say, a matter of scale. The UK is geographically…[Read more]

@lionheart564

Out of interest is there a Chinese equivalent of what we call “Chinese Whispers” (ie a message gets more and more garbled as it is passed along)?

@lionheart564 yes scale makes a difference. Not that I think it’s impossible, but the initial circumstances were so different.

And thank you. To be honest, he won’t, but he copes. I’m sorry about your family member, cancer on its own is bad enough luck.