I wonder how many manufacturers can currently manage that.

Not bad. Did the Ride London 60 on Sunday, pondering whether I should try the 100 next year. It went ok

However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

There’s a huge amount of incoming spam, much of it, I suspect posted by bots. I’ve also seen account posting ‘news’ from sites that are clearly AI generated

To be honest, it feels much more likely to see posts on the Fediverse with many upvotes, few or no comments

Yeh. I’m pretty comfortable with this broad mix.

I don’t think my grumpiness level has particularly changed since I emerged from my grumpy teenage phase.

Absolutely. Unless they’re actually evil. Which I’m sure they aren’t. But they could be.

You should definitely spend time trawling through Oxfam shops for books, if this annoys you.

Thanks for the smile this morning 🙂

Running your own VPN in that situation is a good use-case agreed - assuming you trust yourself :)

You’re hiding your traffic route from your mobile operator and giving it instead to your vpn company who swear they are honest

The technology is magnifying the flaws in capitalism

That sounds as if the register for .ar should be out of a job

Yes, that is mildly infuriating. Someone deliberately going to additional trouble to increase the a kind of microplastics in the environment and make it harder for the poor folks in the recycling plants.

Get over yourself

The way marriage is set up presently, it is made for the needs of a majority, but there are many outliers.

Firstly, of course many people cohabit very happily for a lifetime, there’s no requirement to get married. They settle their affairs with bespoke agreements property contracts and wills. It works fine for them - it’s just a bit more complex than the standard package that marriage presents , but not a real problem.

Don’t want marriage, but quite fancy the tax benefits? In the UK you can opt for a Civil Partnerships which handles most of the outliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_partnership_in_the_United_Kingdom

Bottom line -for people who want to get married, there’s marriage. For people who want to formally merge most of their financial affairs and tax obligations, there is civil partnership, for everyone else, there are bespoke legal and financial arrangements and contracts.

No compulsion, no loss of autonomy (other than mutually agreed) and certainly no slavery.

Good, eh?

So, your actual problem is the legal expense and legal hassles involved in divorce?

Many/most of these are to do with the painful untangling of shared resources and responsibilities that come from sharing a life and resources. Marriage simplifies many things for two people - ‘we own this thing together’ becomes much simpler with marriage. The legal process of negotiating whether 20 or 40 or 50% of the house belongs to partner A is what tends to cause the pain.

How does gay marriage fit into your claims of misogyny? I have at least 3 sets of gay friends who, after decades of waiting were delighted to make formal public promises to each other.

A relationship is work.

Absolutely. And it’s an oath is just a commitment to work at it, and not just throw up hands at the earliest opportunity

There is no right to the rest of someone’s life on either side should they change their mind or evolve in different directions;

It’s not a “a right to another’s life” it’s a commitment to a shared life. And yes, that commitment can not work out, which is why divorce is now thankfully pretty easy.

that is slavery

Not using any common definition of the word, no.

I have no right to stop them. This is true equality and freedom. It is a fundamental human right.

See, divorce - above. Some marriages don’t work out, or are abusive. That doesn’t mean there’s no value in marriage.

I think you are getting downvoted because you framed it in terms of ‘entitled to get a wife’. It it is usually similarly beneficial/problematic for both partners. I have a work colleague from India who is probably going to have a marriage arranged for him in the next year. It’s not something he particularly wants, but it’s traditional so he’ll probably go through with it. It doesn’t really feel like he is benefitting from the patriarchy 🙂

The first scenario is called ‘forced marriage’ in English law and is illegal. Arranged marriage is consensual