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As someone from a working class background, I find your use of the term "lower class" problematic. It suggests you somehow perceive me and my ancestors as beneath you, or that we have less inherent worth as human beings. We prefer the term "working class". I find it strange that you're so keen to tell others that using inclusive language is a non-issue, yet you yourself are perpetuating stereotypes by using exclusionary and hurtful language.

I used worked for a relatively well known type foundry. Font licensing still has a hangover, pretty much all foundries license by user number or organisation size. Having designed and/or mastered quite a few families, my opinion is the sense of worth most designers attach to their own work is usually severely inflated, and pricing tends to reflect that.

Cutting type used to require a huge amount of skill of course, but it is relatively easy to design well drawn type with modern software these days. It takes time to draw multiple weights and styles, but it's certainly not as skillful as most would assume. The number of new "foundries" that have popped up over the past few years is telling.

The amount organisations used to pay for custom type jobs was insane, given how much work it actually was to deliver them. The value attached to the aesthetic of the particular designer being hired is also debatable in my experience, very rarely did clients reject or amend what they were presented with. I've also drawn fonts that have been attributed to other designers, and nobody seems to notice.

I think things are changing slowly as the market becomes more saturated, but licensing like this is outdated in my opinion.

If you prefer JS, that's perfectly valid. But it's worth noting you can adopt TS incrementally, you absolutely do not need to define a type for every little variable. You could pretty much write an entire project in the same way and just use types for the most complex part.

As someone that's been using Vue since pre v1, I think Vue 3 with TS is a massive upgrade.

I make what I consider OK money in the UK, but the US is on a totally different level. I can only assume we're undervalued here!

If "girls" was defined in the dictionary as "a group of people", then no, I wouldn't care, not in the slightest. I wouldn't try to convince others that the dictionary was wrong, or that some definition I subscribe to is somehow more accurate.

The team I'm currently working with are exclusively of Indian heritage, I'm white. They often talk about Bollywood films, what they did for Diwali, etc. Should this make me feel awkward or excluded?

I don't really care if the company I work for is overwhelmingly anything. I usually manage to find some common ground with any person on an individual level. I don't really consider what the identify as, or what social grouping they've been deemed to belong to, as having any significance.

I can't say I agree with your reasoning of why some people think this type of thing is an issue. Also, your screenshot—I’ll assume unintentionally—has the plural definition hidden.

google: define guys -> https://i.imgur.com/b6PJRsa.png

“people of either sex.”

The name William has no commonly accepted or used meaning apart from as an identifier. I have no problem calling anyone by whatever identifier they choose, so long as they aren't asking me to apply an incorrect definition to that word.

The OED defines "guys" as a word used to refer to a group of people (male, female, or mixed). So if you ask me to not use a word because you refuse to accept its definition, that's very different to asking me to not use a word that is purely an identifier.

Many otherwise intelligent people have been convinced that the mere sight of things that could be interpreted as offensive are somehow etched into your subconscious permanently and will inevitably accumulate, resulting in some kind of indirect expression or even permanent state of hatred or bigotry.

I don't know where you're from but where I live "guys" is a completely neutral term for any group of humans. My wife used it today on a call to three other females.

You make half a million Euros a year as a software engineer?

Good for you for making the effort. I mean that honestly. You're right that free range is a complete bullshit term.

Cruelty free eggs is unfortunately also a difficult one as far as I can tell. I can only speak for the UK but here it seems a lot of eggs are marketed along those lines, but they neglect to inform you that the male chicks are still either put in shredding machines or gassed to death. It I could find a supplier that sexed embryos prior to hatching I'd likely start eating eggs again.

Right, and until they solve all those problems and implement these efficiencies, a very easy way to make an impact on an individual level right now, is to not eat meat. But I understand it's easier still to just propose solutions that offset the responsibility.

The EU are actively trying to make it more difficult for consumers to identify vegan alternatives (amendment 171). Governments are not going to make laws that significantly increase meat prices, we are nowhere near that kind of policymaking.

Certainly left-leaning. I've heard Stephen Bush (their political correspondent) is quite reliable on Labour issues, but I don't read it much these days. It went right down in my estimation in terms of journalistic integrity after the Roger Scruton debacle.

Out of interest, why did you want a different answer? Do you think "diversity hires" don't exist? Whether they do or don't, it doesn't have any bearing on the "diverse" people being hired on the basis of their technical or professional abilities.

The Spectator is usually classified as centre-right. Amongst my peers ("creative" millennials in London) that makes it a bit of a non-starter, unfortunately.

I think it's a mostly respectable magazine with a high degree of journalistic integrity (e.g. the recent High Court case). They have some fantastic contributors. Like any publication there are some that are a bit "out there" for my tastes, Delingpole comes to mind, but they pale in comparison to some of the opinion pieces the Guardian publishes. But because of its mild association with the word "right", I know many of my peers would be unpalatable.

> I have had the conversation of the horrors of meat production many times at the dinner table with a spectrum of people, and nobody changed their habits.

For what it's worth. I had a conversation at the dinner table about the ethics of eating meat with another meat eater. We both decided there and then stop, this was almost a decade ago and neither of us have eaten meat since. It does happen.

Absolutely. My best paying clients are both the most reasonable and flexible. These are generally well established businesses or big cultural organisations (fintech and museums mostly), and the people I work with are professionals.

My most difficult clients are always smaller design studios and artists who invariably have small budgets and tight deadlines, obviously don't bother to read contracts and are often late with payment.

It basically boils down to how much the customer values your work. In this case I think the bureaucrats egos have got the better of them.

> Even if EU is 100% in the wrong, do they need to spend half their air-time covering a dispute between AstraZeneca and the EU, arguing how the EU is unreasonable and pretty much the monster that tries to steal the vaccines from the UK people?

Sounds reasonable. The EU are threatening to block exports of vaccines. It's a huge story over here because people are rightly concerned, especially given the huge number of deaths we've bad, and it's incredibly relevant because it's our first major of contention with the EU after the transition period.

If you want to place the blame for increasing divisions, maybe try starting with the organisation who are threatening a trade war during a global pandemic.

Great to see. The Raphael court has always been my favourite single room in the V&A, I always make time for it whenever I visit. The scale of the cartoons is brilliant, you feel very small looking up at a five metre wide tapestry in such a cavernous space. It's especially nice on the rare occasions you find yourself alone in that room, which has happened more than one would expect in central London museum.

The V&A is really wonderful, I've missed it this year. One of the best kept "secrets" is the top floor, which houses a huge ceramics collection and is a haven in what can be a very busy museum. Often there are only a handful of people up there. There's a small lift you can take: pass through the Raphael court, up the stairs, on your left.

Hopefully I'll find myself there in the not too distant future.

NativeScript unfortunately just can't compare with React Native in my experience. I've been a Vue dev/consultant for several years, I wanted to love NativeScript, but every single time I try to build something with it (last attempt was about 2 weeks ago) I come across a missing feature and end up begrudgingly switching to React Native.

I try to avoid Adobe like the plague these days. It's not always easy, but thankfully it's getting easier.

As nobody has mentioned them yet, I would highly recommend Affinity products as alternatives to Adobe software. Coupled with Sketch, I've been able to avoid Adobe products for 2+ years now.

Affinity have replacements for Photoshop (Photo), InDesign (Publisher) and Illustrator (Designer), currently on sale for not too far off the cost of a single month of Adobe CC. They might not have 100% feature parity, but they're really very good.

Which direct access shelters in the UK cost money?

The other comment gives a good overview, I'll try to elaborate a bit.

I worked for a few independent studios that a lot of design students would think were up there in terms of reputation. We did work for cultural institutions, museums, galleries, architects, artists, fashion brands, etc. The kind of thing you dream of doing as a design student.

The pay at these "cool" studios is generally awful. £25k after 5 years kind of thing. One guy who was at a studio I worked for before me was on £16k. Factoring in the long hours, that works out to well below minimum wage. This is in London, btw. I did get to sit on a chair that cost more than my monthly salary though. I know the directors of these companies make very good money.

Generally they all have a huge list of previous employees. They hire graduates on low salaries because you get to do "cool" work, these are almost exclusively young people with parents that can subsidize their living expenses whilst they start out. They last one to two years, rinse and repeat.The graduate to job ratio is depressing, we used to get tens of applications a day, it's very easy to find replacements.

Unpaid internships are normal, although some pay minimum wage. I had a job throughout university and blew all my savings doing an unpaid three month internship after graduating. It was stupid but also got me a job (on £18k, as a "freelancer" to save the employer money), it's basically impossible to get a foot in the door without working for free for a while. This obviously leads to an industry with very little diversity, most people simply can't afford it.

There is a lot of pandering to artists and curators and talk of "giving shape to contemporary visual culture" that everyone knows is complete bullshit. The art and design world is full of the most egotistical people imaginable, and graphic designers are on the bottom rung generally speaking. We worked with one curator who literally refused to speak to anyone below director level. As in to your face, would just completely blank you, it was bizarre.

The only viable option if you want to have a career is to run your own studio, but again that is very difficult unless you have the money and connections.

In the end I decided it wasn't worth it, I'd rather have a pension and a family one day, it's not worth giving that stuff up to design books or typefaces for artists or curators that don't even know your name.

I still really love design, and I do know a lot of nice people who still do it, but the industry is not great!

I was raised in a similar way, and I have mixed feelings because I essentially ended up taking the path of least resistance. There was no pressure to do anything in particular, so I cruised through school doing as little work as necessary. I took exams in maths, physics and chemistry (because I found those subjects easy) and got very good grades but ended up going to design/art school because I thought it would be "fun" to be a graphic designer.

Then I slowly discovered how awful the graphic design industry is, and made a transition into tech. I taught myself to code at a youngish age so I have no idea why I never considered it as a career.

With hindsight I wish I'd had some pressure from my parents and gone to a "proper" university, studied something like computer science and really applied myself. I visited Cambridge after graduating and was blown away, I didn't even know what an actual university looked like.

In some ways doing what I wanted meant taking the path of least resistance (it's easy to pick the fun route), but ultimately led to disappointment career wise.

I've been using Vue since pre v1 days and donate to the project, I've probably built 50+ apps with it of varying complexity, but I'm seriously considering jumping ship to something like Svelte at some point in the near future.

Vue 3 is great and finally has the TS support I've been waiting for (minus Vuex which is still apparently two versions away from proper TS support) but the ecosystem seems to be fracturing, or at least resources being spread too thinly. We now have:

* A CLI with no official support for static bundling or SSR (the solution is basically "use Nuxt"). * There is a separate static site bundler... but it's opinionated: markdown-centered, theming system, etc. * An alternative build tool (Vite) which is amazing for development but worse than the CLI for building production apps. It essentially does less, faster. * A Vite based markdown-centered static site bundler (VitePress).

I read a comment the other day that someone had made about React that really hit home. Basically along the way the project lost sight of the people that actually just want to build actual applications. Vue is amazing, and I'm eternally grateful to the Vue team who have basically enabled me to earn a good living for a few years, but I kind of feel like Vue is heading in the wrong direction.

Rich Harris talked about "a single, officially supported way to build apps" in a talk he did recently, which is what I've been wanting someone to say for a long time. Svelte kit sounds very appealing at this point. Officially supported SSR + static bundling (or both!) without having to either choose between a third-party framework-on-a-framework, a "markdown-centered" bundler, or having to write another custom SSR implementation.

I agree that banning people from platforms for no reason isn't cool. But what do people honestly expect from Facebook? Running ads in the first place is contemptible. Basing basically your entire business model on running Facebook ads is stupid in the extreme. If you're greedy enough to run your business like that, you reap what you sow.

A business that creates garbage content with a business model that almost exclusively relies on another garbage company's ad platform.

I have very little sympathy for companies that run ads in the first place. This just seems like good news to me.

Hey, sorry, I didn't see this.

I'm afraid I don't have any good secrets to share on that front. Online purchases I've made mostly through sellers on Discogs. Some are better than others. I'm in the UK and most sellers who stock Congolese records seem to be based in France, postage can be a pain sometimes. afro7.net has some interesting 7" records from time to time.

I've been trying to get back out to Africa for a while, but plans have been put on hold. Haven't made it to Congo or DRC yet, but hoping to at least make it back to Nairobi later in the year. Melodica in Nairobi sell online but I haven't bought anything from them before.

The UK has consistently been ranked one of the least racist countries in Europe, both pre and post referendum.

Do you know what stokes division? Demonstrably false narratives and accusing vast swathes of people who hold myriad views on an immensely complicated subject of racism. Whatever makes you feel better, I suppose.

Depends how you look at it. The European Parliament is ethnically pretty homogeneous, for example.

The figures are hard to come by because the EU don't record ethnicity AFAIK, but in 2017 there were approximately 17 non-white MEPs out of a total 751. I think 8 of those were from the UK. Given the amount of times I've been called racist for voting to leave the EU, I always find that figure quite hilarious.