Iz 🌟

BIRDBRAIN! looks like most of the artist names I recognise are in semi 2 but plenty that looks intriguing across both

My gaming hardware is my custom-built PC with a 4070 Super. Don't really do any gaming on anything else in this house.

I'm good with blaming Bray for everything, all the other semi voters can be innocent. :) I had nothing 48 hours before the deadline, I just chose to lock in.

I'm happy with either, a fresh format in either direction is quite exciting. Semis are fun though so I cast a vote for that.

Eh, I don't have too many faves among the #1s of 2001; I'd probably put Because I Got High in my top 5 of the year, it's very fun. nice to see another one of these though!

been out of the picking game for a bit, but decided to go with my first k-pop track in an age

Seen limited experiences from what they actually do with GDPR, but the lack of confirmation on data deletion is worrying to me, and I believe the worry about them being American is that the Patriot Act supersedes it, and should the data be physically stored in the US, and not a European datacenter, then that also loses protection. Maybe a breach in either fashion is unlikely but it is actually worth standing up for and saying 'no, data collection has gone too far'. This would be less of a problem if they deleted it as soon as they saw it and didn't say 'we might keep it for 3 years', or they didn't use ID or face scans, or they didn't have numerous clauses about what they might use the ID for for their purposes, even if it's just training data, preferably all of those. It's an effective monopoly of insecurity should you wish to continue to use the services as you always have, as an adult, who shouldn't need to verify because parents can't restrict their kids properly and that's my principle objection.

Doing 'if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear' in the big 2025 is certainly a choice. The internet requires anonymity to function for good because of the persistence of data, and allowing anonymity is an essential tool against government surveillance. Governments should be obligated to protect our rights to privacy if we so choose and that right is essential for the proper human rights of freedom of thought and expression, otherwise known as free speech. The company I've looked into most is Persona, as that's the one that's verifying on Reddit, and I have come away basically convinced that I should not put my ID in there. Their privacy policy states that they either destroy it after completion of verification OR keep it for up to three years for AI training purposes, depending on their interactions with the customer, and that latter use, because they're an American company, is outside of GDPR. They've also been breached with their services for LinkedIn multiple times. I may be misinterpreting that but I do not trust that. Similarly looking into some of the other companies that are being used isn't much better. I completely expect that anyone with the desire could reconstruct a complete picture of my online activities, even if I don't use my real name on most sites I use regularly, so actually by contrast to the suggestion of 'live and let live' I'm very very careful with what further data I share with any websites, and this is far more than I am ever willing to share.

? Can you not see a pretty clear difference between restrictive marketing data (that even the most privacy-concerned have the ability to opt out of by engaging in very limited ways) and submitting scans of highly sensitive identification data to companies who then could keep it in one of their databases as long as they please, directly attaching you and only you to their services? Saying it's about porn downplays this huge privacy breach as more and more decidedly non-porn websites start mandating it just to be sure they aren't serving minors anything that a censor might deem unsuitable.

I've seen a lot about the Spotify news today but not seen any sign of it actually on the platform yet. It seems somewhat ridiculous, apparently it's about music videos? This might be where the act falls down or has to be changed because once it starts hitting services normal people use for really obviously unobjectionable stuff you then start to get the average person who only uses big sites for basic services to start thinking 'hey, isn't this a bit much'. Not all of us are so cavalier about giving up our data and privacy, and many people are anonymous (to varying degrees) when using sites for a reason, largely so that doesn't happen. That's another thing this act is aiming to do, make it more and more inconvenient and eventually just straight up impossible, to be anonymous online, tying everything you say and type to you, forever. An authoritarian government's dream, and people who go along with this are clearly very happy to be controlled.

And yet the legislation is not right at all. Unknown private companies are holding sensitive data that is now a massive cybersecurity risk. Face scans and ID scans getting leaked would be disastrous - for a current example, see the Tea app leak. Though government providers holding that kind of data is not good either, you want some sort of private tokenisation system administered by the government, separated from any of your own personal data. That would be fine if implemented correctly. I've also yet to see an argument for why this was a necessary implementation over the previous system of parental controls. ISPs turn on content filtering by default and an account owner (an adult) has to turn it off. Every device can be configured with parental controls. Parents have the ability to control what their children see on the internet (for the most part), and if they are seeing adult content, then the parents have not used these restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does, this forces all adults into either giving away their data, or blocked from seeing anything the government deems harmful, which is a deeply illiberal path that we do not want to be going down.

I don't think anyone seriously advocates for equality of outcome. The problem is that equality of opportunity is not equal in most societies, everyone's initial economic situation, or racial/ethnic background, or gender, or LGBTQ expression if applicable, or personality, or health status, people don't have the same opportunities. Liberal and centrist parties tend to rationalise this with surface-level attempts to fix it, without tackling the underlying culture or preconceived biases that exist. They're also susceptible to pressure from the right to expel groups from their 'everyone's equal' mantra, like trans people or Palestinians, whose political existence becomes inconvenient for them to defend, which is the reason the left defends those two groups, not because they particularly will always be the main aim of the left's thrust but because the left recognises them as the thin end of the wedge and that they are recognised as easy targets for the right. The aim of popular front left parties is generally to cement a coalition of everyone no matter their background and work to correct economic inequalities through tax draw and therefore wealth redistribution (at which point everyone calls me a dirty commie), and correct social inequalities by enforcing equality laws and aid those whose qualities make it harder for them to fit in I suppose. My vision to work towards as a left party would be reducing the inequality of both there in order that the laws it passes have society at large as the principal beneficiary. Rich people can still be rich, they are just using more of their money to ensure that they are enriching the most desperate to an acceptable standard. Rich people benefit from this too, no one enjoys a society with poverty.

Horrendous act horrendously implemented. Third-party companies, all of them different, all with long privacy policies about what they'll do with one's data, many of which do not leave me confident that they will delete it or otherwise not make use of it - I see it as enough of a risk that I am not putting my ID in any of these. I submit it to companies associated with banks because there are financial checks and security, this is somewhat more risky and I am not going to be the person with their ID leaked from one of these, even if that ID was just me making sure I wouldn't be blocked from random-ass subreddits, because of the implication. Having lived with censorship that requires VPNs to circumvent, one of the best things about leaving China was having access to a free internet again, and now that (is in part, it is for now, nowhere near as restrictive) is no longer the case. Though its aim, stopping minors from seeing porn, is laudable. Which makes it worse. as the worst part is the stupidly wide-ranging scope of the act that means that sites ranging from Wikipedia to forums like our own could potentially be liable for minors seeing user-generated adult content*. I know some forums shut down over it because the consequences could financially ruin them, and they're not in a position to implement age checks such that they'd be cleared. Hopefully that at least is toned down but the discourse around this is not going to be good because any naysayers against it could very easily be cast as porn-obsessed. This is the sort of thing Lib Dems should be against and it's depressing that none of the major parties in the UK seem to be, I've seen some Reform figures speak out against it but I think that won't last long with reality if they're called upon to defend it, their base is the sort of hang-the-pedos ban-everything puritans that is just fine with this. (Seen limited success with google image driving licenses, it doesn't work for all of those but where it does and these 3rd party companies are telling the truth about deleting the data, no harm no foul for an adult privately verifying themselves, but VPN is by far the safer method anyway) *thus more than ever, there is zero adult content on here and mods will remove and ban with extreme prejudice.

Labour campaigner on the doorstep: Who are you voting for? Me: I'm voting for Your Party Labour campaigner: Wonderful, thank you! Who's on came first in Islington North? Your Party For many reasons, no. For The Many is a decent suggestion I've seen but a bit too long. I'd quite like something with People in the name to seize back populism from the right (People's Party in isolation sounds good, though as I suspected before looking it up, it is a name in part already seized by an obscure neo-Nazi party, though that one, the British People's Party, has been dead for 12 years). I'm just glad Britain is one step closer to being a real European political nation.

I mean I would be somewhat sympathetic to that argument if some of our most successful politicians in recent years weren't Teflon Farage and Boris, who said whatever and got through by virtue of being a big political beast (which Corbyn is, his statements still get news articles written about them), or saying Corbyn & Sultana are scoring own goals when their competition is this Labour government. also yeah, Sultana's been building a name for herself as the Corbyn successor for the last 5 years, in the Labour party until the Starmer faction made it impossible for her. At the Labour leadership election in 2020 I would have loved her to step up but was aware that she was still a little too green, now she's got the experience and the time to state her positions. Corbyn's age was the factor that I was concerned about with a popular front left, by launching it with Sultana, this sets her up clearly as the torch carrier and in the ideal scenario, she can spend the rest of the parliament becoming a household name and taking over from Jezza, she has the rare skill among left politicians in this country to get her statements front and centre, even if she isn't perfect (and sometimes that is ideal, more talk about you). Of course, yes, this could easily fizzle out without the proper support, but this is exactly the sort of danger that Labour strategists should have feared by 'crushing the left', and there is a clear world where the Labour government continues to get more unpopular and most of their natural support flows to a party without any of their baggage - like what has literally just happened on the right.

Depends. Labour are tanking nearly all their constituencies as hard as possible in order to look like the sensibles. If Corbyn and Zarah follow the Reform playbook of getting their name in the news however possible, they steal Reform's lunch on the time for a change lot and could be the popular left choice with the traditional centre left party obliterated. That's been the trajectory of the left in France after all. I see no reason they would be a single issue party at all either. I'm confident economic justice would be a key part of their platform as well as being in the right morally.

So so far the sign-up numbers (now over 400,000) are just those who have signed up for a mailing address. It's a good start, and it shows momentum for later to do deals with the Greens (who lose half of their raison d'etre with this) and ensure there is minimum left-splitting. Likely if this party showed any signs of being socially conservative it'd lose its support instantly, the target has to be the socially liberal cohort appalled at Labour's moves to the right. Countering those who see Palestine and trans rights as irrelevant by showing them as clear moral virtues of a party where all others are immoral on the issue, for one. Doesn't have to be the focus over economics but it needs to be a necessary part.

I like that Liam just provided the correct arguments for voting at 16 (their future which they have a stake in and getting them interested in politics) and didn't properly refute them, just shrugged them off and said afterwards that there is no logic for allowing them the vote. Though what can you expect from someone criticising it as "one of them ideas for the ‘progressives’", he's clearly made up his mind and the debate doesn't matter. I'd expand on getting them interested in politics at an young age, because it's the same argument for wanting more young people in politics like this Reform lad, make them feel like they have a stake earlier and they participate, and the best age to do that is the first age where we start allowing adult things - not all of them - but some. That age is 16, not 18. We want more young people in general voting, I would be suspicious of the motives of anyone who didn't, and research shows that if people do not vote at the first time of asking, they are much less likely to vote in the future - if we ensure that most people are in some form of education or training when the first opportunity comes up to vote, they can then be encouraged to go through with it.

I mean, it is good that young people get positions in the political process (and anyone with any consistency would have that belief alongside votes for 16-year olds but I digress, pointing out hypocrisy is far less important than the impact of any policy) In this specific case the more egregious thing is him being voted leader, that is likely beyond what his experience level should allow for, giving he's managing important council budgets for an entire unitary authority, also not the best place to showcase age-specific ideas given how hamstrung most councils are with their spending. Suspect most likely outcome is that he tries to break things, then finds out why they were done that way and reverts - Kent Council have been going through that process too.

A bit of reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic today as Cleverly returns to the front bench, and a bunch of other irrelevant shadow appointments happen not that they will ever be in government as things stand. Might be so Jenrick doesn't look like the only possible leader when the inevitable happens.

Yeah, the first season of the anime, which chronicles notable events in Japanese racehorsing around 1998-1999, introduces El Condor Pasa as a new force to be reckoned with before showing her going to France - and because of this they even anime-fy the Prix d'Arc de Triomphe winner in that race (though for licensing reasons they don't use the winners' name, Montjeu is called Broye instead), for the purposes of the plot. Haven't done an El Condor Pasa career myself yet but I'd be interested to see how that works and if they allow you to run a special European race, as pretty much all of the available races are Japanese ones.

Nice! I completed all the goals on a 'speed good ignore all others' Sakura Bakushin run but then got destroyed by the URA final qualifiers, that's hard. Did unexpectedly pull the Kitasan Black SSR support card most of social media is obsessing over last night so that might help future runs.

Have to imagine that he'll find some way to get out of it as a default assumption when it comes to Trump, the current strategy appears to be ordering Bondi to release the court documents, and then as there exists no official "Epstein client list" (should such a document exist it has likely been destroyed or obtained by someone implicated in it, if not Trump), he will declare exoneration and his supporters will be back to following him on the matter. Obviously his uncharacteristic response that you could certainly describe as panicked, plus his known association with Epstein that is far more apparent than many members of the deep state commonly said to have associations, it is the sort of thing that would easily bring down any president that has not amassed a cult around him. But it is interesting that there appear to be cracks showing among some of the Maga faithful, something we haven't seen really for a few years.

Also also this has come with a good set of unambiguously good voting reform policies that are, well, my bare minimum UK voting reform list completed. I don't know if they're going to be the same Bill as voting for 16-yr-olds but perhaps a trap for opposition as they have been announced together. Those being, as I mentioned earlier, voting ID being expanded to UK-issued bank cards, which makes the chances of voters not having any ID to vote with much lower of course, great for democracy and helping to reverse the glaring issue of voting ID disenfranchising voters to crack the infinitesimally small nut of alleged voter fraud. And as I did not mention earlier, further restrictions on foreign donors, to get around foreign billionaires interfering in our democracy like say, making a donation to the British office of Xwitter. Good set of changes to strengthen democracy against threats, somewhat incremental but that's Starmer's Labour, it's incremental in the right direction and I'll take it.

Definitely! One of the benefits of this should be that it allows schools a meaningful opportunity to include this in say, a PSHE lesson about your first vote and thereby actively educate people about the vote while in school - if it's something abstract that is beyond the point schools have a duty of care to people it can be overlooked. Hope that education boards can find a space for that, probably a good number of current 16-year-olds think they shouldn't be given the vote because of how they presume their peers are informed on politics. As it stands, most of those that use the opportunity to vote I would imagine would be the well informed young people who are probably better informed on the issues than plenty of adults tbqfh. That's who this is for and this is what I want governments to be doing, expanding the franchise to everyone who has a stake in our society, and these young people will have more of a stake in the next parliamentary term than many pensioners. (oh and PLEASE let Reform or the Tories put reversing this in their manifesto, nothing will motivate the young more)