Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@social.cleverlibre.org
Retired software engineer & woodworker.
Anglo-francophone.
Detest tories. Subscribe to green, leftish radical politics but not to any particular political party!.
Love the EU and all it stands for, moreover, I spent the last 10 years of my career working at an EU agency.
Enthusiastic photographer, especially wildlife and most especially butterflies.
Slightly knowledgeable gardener.
Atheist; loathe almost all religions and pity the people deluded enough to follow them. I make exceptions for Buddhism as it isn't really a religion in the strictest sense of the word as it doesn't postulate the existence of any god, and Jainism which is the epitome of peace.
For anyone who is interested, my header photo is of the most stupendous sunset I have ever seen. On the right is the waterfront of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the left is Thailand and in the middle, acting as the border between the two countries is the mighty Mekong river.
Joined Nov 2022
Holy shit - I think I may be rather an outlier, in that case!
Is this in or out of holy wedlock? 🙄😆😇 --- RT @YouGov Among Britons who have had sex, the median number of sexual partners is 4 This figure is hig...
Paul Brownjohn
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Interesting - correlation is not equal to causation BUT this definitely merits further investigation
Paul Brownjohn
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@firehorsemia @QasimRashid @kcarruthers
The practice of medicating women who live in horrific conditions continues to this day.
The FLDS, a fundamentalist Mormon cult, keeps most of its women on tranquilizers to prevent them from objecting when their sons are abandoned out of town & daughters are "married" off to men older than their grandfathers. Human trafficking is pervasive in this cult.
Paul Brownjohn
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The upward redistribution of wealth over the past 40 years has shifted $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans.
The greatest trick of all is trickle-down economics.
Paul Brownjohn
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"Hello," Thomas said. He then paused and his face turned a dirty fiery red. "Wait, you're that prick who tried to fix his party and ended up breaking the UK." And Cuntamity Cameron never worked on the island of sodor ever again.
It must be one of the most misused French words that has migrated to the English language.
The word "chef" in French actually means "manager", "head", "boss", "guv'nor". So "chef de cuisine" simply means the manager of the kitchen, the cook in charge of the kitchen. The French word for someone who cooks food for a living, in a restaurant or hotel is "cuisinier" or "cuisinière" not "chef".
Paul Brownjohn
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Ironic that most of the Mastodon client activity is supporting by far the most restrictive OS -- Apple's iOS, the linchpin to the dominance of the technology industry's most control-freakish company.
Even the Mozilla-backed app falls into this category, which is a shame.
This from the Guardian:
"Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City, University of London and author of Feeding Britain, said: “Our supply chains are creaking and we are seeing a forerunner of what could be a huge crisis. There has been a total failure by the government to develop a proper food strategy.
He said it is “absurd” to be increasingly relying on fresh produce grown more than 1,000 miles away in places such as north Africa while UK production is being wound down.
It is not just food that is at risk in complex supply chains. Pharmacists, who rely on drugs from China and India, report that some patients are now forced to go from chemist to chemist to try to find one that can fill their prescriptions. There have been shortages of cold and flu medicines, from Lemsip to Night Nurse, over the winter."
Personally, I would point out that shortages of Lemsip, Night Nurse and the like are of no real significance - no one is going to die for the want of Lemsip, FFS. Shortages of some antibiotics are clearly rather more serious, however, so long as there are alternatives, not life threatening but the moment we run out of the full range of broad spectrum antibiotics then people will die as a result!
Paul Brownjohn
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Question for some #actuallyautistic friends.
I'm self diagnosed. I'm 42 years old and self diagnosed last year after taking some online tests.
I highly suspect that my oldest daughter is also on the spectrum.
I'm told that getting an official diagnosis would be expensive (I've heard as high as $1,500). I'm also extremely mistrustful of therapists, as I saw five since 2010 and none of them could tell I was autistic despite some very obvious signs (they also did fuck all for my depression and anxiety).
Are there any benefits to having my kid diagnosed? I feel like if I was diagnosed when I was a kid it wouldn't have mattered much. I might have made some choices that effected me economically (like not joining the military, which would have put me on a different career path) but otherwise my mental health would have stayed the same.
A change in medication and the adoption of permanent blood sugar monitoring via a stick on gadget under my arm has meant that my morning routine of:
have bath
weigh myself naked after bath
test blood sugar with a finger prick
enter data in an Excel sheet that I created for the purpose
take small mountain of pills
The disruption of moving from daily finger prick to permanent monitoring meant that I forget to weigh myself and record it in the spreadsheet for nearly a month.
My weight had been rising inexorably as the long acting insulin that I have just started taking, tends to promote weight gain (not at all helpful if you are a type II diabetic as weight is a major factor in the disease. I finally remembered to weigh myself this morning and was pleasantly surprised to find that far from putting on weight, I have actually lost more than a kilo (= 2.2 lbs). This is I suspect due to me cutting back on alcohol, to almost nothing; I wasn't a heavy drinker but the odd tinnie here and there does add up to a LOT of calories.
Prof Roy Taylor who recently made some groundbreaking discoveries the field of diabetes, describes alcohol as "liquid fat" and my experience certainly bears that out!
Paul Brownjohn
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The actual price of the average house in the UK in the early 1960s was about 3000 GBP and UK family income was about 2000 GBP, an easy 2 to 3 ratio!, whereas today your average UK family only makes 32,000 against a 300,000 house price (like in the USA, your prices have spiked from about 200,000 two years ago, unfortunately, your wages have not gone up
Paul Brownjohn
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@DavidPenington @EugeneMcParland
"Don't exit Russia by selling your business to others to operate."
As if the top people at Heineken ever had the intention to do so.
They did exactly the opposite and expanded their business in Russia, abusing the situation for profit.
This is a company led by unscrupulous people, sponsoring Putins terrorist actions. You should avoid drinking their #bloedBier and their other products.
See https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heineken_(brouwerij)#Lijst_van_merknamen_in_bezit_van_Heineken_NV
Well I have just been to our local branch of Aldi (in Luxembourg) and they only had 4 varieties of tomatoes on display and I had the last pack of one of the varieties so now they are down to 3!
I blame Brexit!
Paul Brownjohn
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Poll: Should the #SNP elect an #AntiAbortion #AntiGayMarriage #ChristianFundamentalist as its new leader?
(Please boost for wider view. 2nd try at this poll - previous one mysteriously vanished.)
I'm looking to book a holiday in Costa Rica for the middle of the year. The cheapest flights are all via US airports. Given that I have been told by experienced travellers to avoid at any price, US airports (their ratings on sites that rate airports are also absolutely the bottom of the pits that considering the USA is NOT a 3rd world country), how much extra should I be prepared to pay to avoid flights via the USA?
Retired software engineer & woodworker.
Anglo-francophone.
Detest tories. Subscribe to green, leftish radical politics but not to any particular political party!.
Love the EU and all it stands for, moreover, I spent the last 10 years of my career working at an EU agency.
Enthusiastic photographer, especially wildlife and most especially butterflies.
Slightly knowledgeable gardener.
Atheist; loathe almost all religions and pity the people deluded enough to follow them. I make exceptions for Buddhism as it isn't really a religion in the strictest sense of the word as it doesn't postulate the existence of any god, and Jainism which is the epitome of peace.
For anyone who is interested, my header photo is of the most stupendous sunset I have ever seen. On the right is the waterfront of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the left is Thailand and in the middle, acting as the border between the two countries is the mighty Mekong river.
Joined Nov 2022
