If you're concerned about rising tax in the UK (many of us are more concerned by the decline in public sector spending in health & education, of course), then this chart from Dan Neidle illustrates the impact of the continuing freeze on income tax thresholds - a classic bit of stealth taxation from the Tories.

This is not to say other rises are insignificant, but the continuing increase of tax on middle-earners income, could have been, but hasn't been reversed by Labour...

#tax #politics

My Royal Institution lecture about soil biodiversity is now live on the RI's YouTube channel!

What an incredible privilege to speak in the historic Faraday Lecture Theatre, and to such a wonderfully engaged and packed crowd too.

Watch the video to learn about the creatures that keep our planet running: Springtails that leap faster than an eye blink, slime moulds that recreated Tokyo’s rail network, armoured mites that have gone without males for around 100 million years, and the colony of tardigrades on the Moon.

Along the way, we bust some earthworm myths, look at how European earthworms are invading North America, and learn how soil life is inspiring new materials and robots.

Thanks again to the Royal Institution for inviting me to speak, as part of my recent book tour for 'The World Beneath our Feet: The Hidden Life of Soil and Why it Matters to us All' (out now!).

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUQtwwgU3r4

#SoilBiodiversity #ScienceCommunication #SciComm #Soil #Science

#NAZA documentary on #Gaza killings becomes one of year’s most watched
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/nov/11/naza-documentary-on-gaza-killings-becomes-one-of-years-most-watched

piefed.social (the instance, not PieFed the software) applies a block and sends a custom private message to new users by using a plugin: https://codeberg.org/wjs018/piefed_onboarding

@spectra Can also just play and record. I suck at taking time off work and streaming feels too much like work.

RE: https://mastodon.art/@artbyailbhe/117597506193081877

Wow my interests converge in weird ways sometimes. I was already panicked by the fourth word. Then realized this was not an infosec post.

If you're having a bad day, take a moment to look at this baby red panda in a bucket. Or if you're having a good day. Or a just okay day. Any type of day is an appropriate day to look at a baby red panda in a bucket.
#RedPandas #RedPanda

@aral Israel has as much a right to exist as Yugoslavia, the USSR, East Germany, Rhodesia, pre-partition India and a number of other colonial projects.

Fuck all.

Countries have always been a legal fiction that only exist as long as people uphold that fiction.

The European Commission introduces the Digital Fairness Act, which aims to curb addictive design features and manipulative "dark patterns" or face large fines (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-11/eu-targets-social-media-addiction-and-online-dark-patterns
http://www.techmeme.com/261111/p15#a261111p15

@mpe enjoy...

@Perrin42 our audhd kid was gobbling 1000-page fantasy bricks at that age and was quite aware of all that stuff, but one to approach with caution. if the kid understands dark-level YA, then sure

Gonna try to play more Old Skies today.. is @spectra stable enough these days to try streaming? Met Fia's voice actress at AdentureX and feel less bad for hating her so much.

Israel's ongoing big side war:
31,000 buildings in southern Lebanon destroyed so far this year, 333,000 people displaced. Not very newsworthy in Europe; I guess because it doesn't affect our fossil fuel supply.
https://aje.news/y3fgub#update-5106057

Went out at lunch time for a couple of pints, forgetting I had a driving lesson booked. Did the lesson anyway cause I didn't want to admit it to the instructor. Figured he had pedals and what was the worst that could happen? Nothing as it happens.

Welcome!

Also, tbh if you make a new community for something you want to see, and post to it maybe once every couple days, your people will eventually find it.

It takes a bit of upfront work to prime the pump, but eventually you’ll find a steady little stream of posts just start to appear.

It almost feels like it’s addressed to you when it happens, like oh! Someone posted in my community! And it’s something new to me! It’s a real treat.

cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/37870004

reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bluesoulyerim/117597376552464489

More like everybody in #Indonesia are so, SO poor and unemployed these days they'd take the first job with decent penny offered to them.

Some TNI soldiers I've met were actually wondering aloud to me if they should join the recruitment because they heard (presumably from their friends) the pay is so much better than their salary. Some desert their jobs, and from some accounts the army didn't even bother too hard to look for them because it's so easy to recruit one these days.

prabodoh sucks!

Listening to the latest @appstories episode, I discovered that @viticci is pretty good at guessing angles with Duometry! 😄

Thanks for the shout-out, @johnvoorhees

Duometry:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/duometry/id6814650592

@davey_cakes yeah it's pretty dark and not a young kids' film from the sound of it. older ones, sure