Society/Culture Is the SRP too negative?

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It's a question that concerns as much the reality the SRP reflects as it does the nature of the SRP itself.

Do we only ever look at the crises, the negatives, the downsides? Is the glass always half empty? Is there no reason for optimisim? Is improvement always too hard, a step forward too far away? Is it as our conservative friends would have it, impossible without a loss of something; identity or soul?

Are we catastrophists or realists? Are we merely observing the things others ignore, or are we blinding ourselves to potential new dawns?

Post your views. Standard board rules apply.
 
It's a question that concerns as much the reality the SRP reflects as it does the nature of the SRP itself.

Do we only ever look at the crises, the negatives, the downsides? Is the glass always half empty? Is there no reason for optimisim? Is improvement always too hard, a step forward too far away? Is it as our conservative friends would have it, impossible without a loss of something; identity or soul?

Are we catastrophists or realists? Are we merely observing the things others ignore, or are we blinding ourselves to potential new dawns?

Post your views. Standard board rules apply.
I think the serious nature of so many topics on this board lends itself to more tense discussions, and hypotheticals about worse case scenarios etc.

But there is still plenty of laughter and jokes.

There is a small contingent of far right/Maga/cooker type poster who will always complain and act like this is a terrible place. But they stay because of what it offers. Or until their mask slips all the way off and they are banned.
Interestingly the ones who always complain about this board while posting in it, also smugly call out people who take issue with Twitter.

I'd say that in terms of online forums for political discourse this is a lot less negative than most.
And the positives from seeing interesting discussions and exchanges between knowledgeable posters is worth it.
 

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The SRP is an echo chamber bubble curated by people who seldom have views that match anything in the real world with regular people...
A lot super agressive opinion usually from a place of complete ignorance. Along with a heap of totally hypocritical ones.
 
Yes the attack on the status quo as being evil (capitalism, liberalism, democracy) simply because it wasnt perfect despite the considerable improvements in income, leisure time, reduced violence rates, health, reduced chore time, reduced discrimination, increased tolerance and life expectancy is totally way too negative. And its leading to support for systems/ideologies (on both the left and right) that will far more negatively impact those variables. I fear in 10-20 years time we will look back with misery and anger at how we let these systems fall.
 
It's a question that concerns as much the reality the SRP reflects as it does the nature of the SRP itself.

Do we only ever look at the crises, the negatives, the downsides? Is the glass always half empty? Is there no reason for optimisim? Is improvement always too hard, a step forward too far away? Is it as our conservative friends would have it, impossible without a loss of something; identity or soul?

Are we catastrophists or realists? Are we merely observing the things others ignore, or are we blinding ourselves to potential new dawns?

Post your views. Standard board rules apply.
I think you'll need to be far more specific.
 
The SRP is an echo chamber bubble curated by people who seldom have views that match anything in the real world with regular people...
BF in general has walked itself into corner.
Used to be genuinely funny,2024 not so much.
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Less eyeballs

Wouldn't say it's too negative,you could easily dial it up.
 
My mother always taught me there 3 things you shouldn’t discuss in public - religion, politics and sex. She’s seen relationships end between friends and family because those topics people can have very strong opinions about. Not suprising the SRP has a negative vibe even if both sides of the political spectrum want what they believe will make the world a better place.

Anyone post on OCAU? They got rid of their SRP similar board a few years back to save mods time. It will always be negative.
 
It seems quite biased towards one side of politics. Not just the views of the majority of regular posters but there is not even an attempt to have who is doing the moderation be politically balanced.

You need to call out lies, disinformation and bigotry, so you can’t really just do bothsidesism.

Give examples of disinformation from the left which has been given a free pass v disinformation on the right being treated too harshly.

End of the day, the right wing looks to represent the top 1% and basically try and dupe the rest of the population into voting voting for them by creating culture wars.
 
When the world is about to experience catastrophic climate change, why should there be optimism? We're collectively sleepwalking towards disaster. And even outside of that, we're experiencing severe issues with housing affordability and massive price increases to the cost of basic goods and materials. Why would that engender optimism?

No, I'd say the world is f**ked and that reflects upon everything else. Positive developments exist, they're just nowhere near as influential, and they're concentrated more in countries like China and India that are rapidly rising out of poverty. They're not that common in the West, who seem to continually create multiple problems for themselves (mostly through the excesses of capitalism and consumerism) but fail to take responsibility for them and instead blame everything on China, India or non-white immigrants.
 
When the world is about to experience catastrophic climate change, why should there be optimism? We're collectively sleepwalking towards disaster. And even outside of that, we're experiencing severe issues with housing affordability and massive price increases to the cost of basic goods and materials. Why would that engender optimism?

No, I'd say the world is f**ked and that reflects upon everything else. Positive developments exist, they're just nowhere near as influential, and they're concentrated more in countries like China and India that are rapidly rising out of poverty. They're not that common in the West, who seem to continually create multiple problems for themselves (mostly through the excesses of capitalism and consumerism) but fail to take responsibility for them and instead blame everything on China, India or non-white immigrants.
Fmd this continues, when exactly is this happening? Been wrong on it for 40 years

Renewables are coming, you can come out from under the bed

Though I do agree the west is well and truly stuffed. Education/health standards slipping, priorities warped. We deserve everything we have coming.
 
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When the world is about to experience catastrophic climate change, why should there be optimism? We're collectively sleepwalking towards disaster. And even outside of that, we're experiencing severe issues with housing affordability and massive price increases to the cost of basic goods and materials. Why would that engender optimism?

No, I'd say the world is f**ked and that reflects upon everything else. Positive developments exist, they're just nowhere near as influential, and they're concentrated more in countries like China and India that are rapidly rising out of poverty. They're not that common in the West, who seem to continually create multiple problems for themselves (mostly through the excesses of capitalism and consumerism) but fail to take responsibility for them and instead blame everything on China, India or non-white immigrants.
The problem I have with this is, we are all of 30-50 years away from the generation in which the modern internet has more than always existed, but its effects have been studied. Contemporary studies into child development - I had eyes on them a few years ago, I'll see if I can dredge them up - have demonstrated children are learning source verification at much earlier ages than they used to; the propaganda techniques used by modern media will not work on this generation, which means less people voting against their own interests.

We also have had world changing, 'the world is ****ed' before. We have demonstrated how quickly things can change when people work together towards solving an environmental catastrophe (the Ozone layer) and we have just gone through a century of rapid social, economic and technological advancement, the most rapid ever. And that rate is only going to increase.

There was always going to be a recalibration. Time never stands still.

I question why, after the century of back to the wall innovation and home runs, people's view of the world is so desultory. There has never been more opportunity for people to showcase new ideas; never been more minds contributing; never been better education worldwide.

The view that things are ****ed has never resonated with me. Things are what they have always been: good, and bad. Why is it that we are so incapable of looking at the good?
Fmd this continues, when exactly is this happening? Been wrong on it for 40 years

Renewables are coming, you can come out from under the bed

Though I do agree the west is well and truly stuffed. Education/health standards slipping, priorities warped. We deserve everything we have coming.
This is - ironically - closer to how I feel about things, even if I view the West as not nearly as ****ed.

Old money and influence will not go into that good night quietly.
 

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Fmd this continues, when exactly is this happening? Been wrong on it for 40 years

Renewables are coming, you can come out from under the bed

Though I do agree the west is well and truly stuffed. Education/health standards slipping, priorities warped. We deserve everything we have coming.

I think we are in for a bumpy road and things have certainly gotten worse over the past 40 years. In Australia we have largely been fine so far, aside from a rise in some extreme weather events. We are a wealthy country with lots of room to move, so will not be the worse effected.

In the meantime I think we will not have a mass extinction event but there is going to be a fair lot of problems before we stop emissions from increasing temperatures.

There are also a lot of other issues around the world which can lead to fighting over resources, leading to more wars etc.

I’m not a doomer who thinks doing anything is futile, but I can certainly see issues on the horizon.

I’d love the worst not to come to pass, but I don’t think that is going to just magically happen with the status quo.
 
The view that things are ****ed has never resonated with me. Things are what they have always been: good, and bad. Why is it that we are so incapable of looking at the good?
You might want to consider that most conflict revolves around notions of what good and bad actually are.

I could even point to stories about firefighters climbing trees to save cats, and a dispute would arise over whether or not saving a cat from a tree is actually a good thing.

The overall "tone" of a forum is subject to much the same conditions.
 
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Well...

Would you consider Sisyphus to be happy?
I feel like I'm paraphrasing Camus, so here's me not taking the credit for someone else's ideas.

It depends.

How does Sisyphus feel about the labour granted to him? His sin in life was pride and violation of the guest right, and so was given a task unending. There's a multitude of thoughts one could have towards a continuously reseting task; I've known people who are more than content to do menial jobs as long as they're compensated fairly for it (in their own views; a bloke who worked in a meat processing plant for 30 years in Geelong to put his kids through private schools and own his home, despite him being a newspaper editor before he fled Croatia. Seriously, that place - using scientific management principles on conveyor belt lines - was my own personal hell while I worked there, and here was this bloke who washed it off the second he left) and people who couldn't stand it.

Does he find meaning in that labour? Can he find pride in denying the gods a victory by engaging the boulder over and over?

The short answer is that if he's unable to find meaning in an endless task, he's unlikely to be very happy with it. If he can, he can absolutely be happy with his labour.
 
In the meantime I think we will not have a mass extinction event but there is going to be a fair lot of problems before we stop emissions from increasing temperatures.

I’m not a doomer who thinks doing anything is futile, but I can certainly see issues on the horizon.

I’d love the worst not to come to pass, but I don’t think that is going to just magically happen with the status quo.
It’s hard not to be a doomer when you consider that evil has always existed in our world. Civilisation accepts evil is a part of humanity because we make laws, have police enforce those laws, and then have court rooms and prisons for these people.

The world has survived evil humans for thousands of years, but now the technological genie is out of the bottle. For millennia the evil have only had rocks and sharp sticks. Then swords and armour. Then they got access to guns, and then missiles, and the natural progression is it’s only a matter of time before an international arms dealer sells a nuclear weapon(s) to an evil group that has the finances to purchase it.

Most people visualise a bomb being dropped from the sky. Terrorists only need a truck and drive into a few cities and detonate on the ground. I fear this scenario is more likely than AI being sentient and killling off the human race.
 
The problem I have with this is, we are all of 30-50 years away from the generation in which the modern internet has more than always existed, but its effects have been studied. Contemporary studies into child development - I had eyes on them a few years ago, I'll see if I can dredge them up - have demonstrated children are learning source verification at much earlier ages than they used to; the propaganda techniques used by modern media will not work on this generation, which means less people voting against their own interests.
Maybe. Even if it is the case, there's going to be at least another decade where boomers and Gen X still hold a lot of the voting power, and there are of course plenty of gullible fools amongst the younger generations too.

Every generation also eventually gets brainwashed by neoliberalism in some form or another. That's happened a lot slower with millenials and even more so with Gen Z, but it's still happening, perhaps especially when boomers start dying off en masse and a lot of large inheritances start getting parcelled out.

So maybe there's room for hope there, but plenty of risks too. And I fear change will happen far too late to do much about climate change before it really starts to bite.

We also have had world changing, 'the world is ****ed' before. We have demonstrated how quickly things can change when people work together towards solving an environmental catastrophe (the Ozone layer) and we have just gone through a century of rapid social, economic and technological advancement, the most rapid ever. And that rate is only going to increase.
Things have changed massively since that era. Back then, hard right figures like Margaret Thatcher actually gave a shit about the environment, and companies were willing to play ball with things like the emissions cap and trade scheme that eventually got rid of acid rain as a serious problem.

In the 15-20 years after that, companies realised they didn't have to do that in future if they simply bought one or both of the major political parties through donations, and flooded the media with just enough misinformation and lies to make enough gullible fools question whether a grand conspiracy of scientists across the world were making up a doomsday scenario for the sake of earning slightly higher research grants.

And now we've entered the age of post-truth politics where a lot of people simply believe what makes them feel good, and the truth is routinely ignored.

Across most of the West right now there's a massive backlash over immigration (mostly from non-white countries). While there are reasonable arguments about the number of immigrants it's best for a country to take in each year, this issue has become a great conduit for post-truth politics. People are often paying no attention to the facts and blaming immigrants (chiefly Muslim ones) for every problem that exists, even when the facts show there are multiple causes or a different culprit altogether. The Southport child murder saga in the UK is a good example of this, or closer to home, the insistence some people have on solely blaming immigration for the housing crisis rather than accepting there are also serious problems with the incentives given to housing investors, supply side issues in the construction industry and a repeated failure of government to invest in public housing and other infrastructure.

I question why, after the century of back to the wall innovation and home runs, people's view of the world is so desultory. There has never been more opportunity for people to showcase new ideas; never been more minds contributing; never been better education worldwide.
What use is innovation if the average person isn't reaping much of the benefits? If it simply accrues to higher and higher corporate profits and rewards shareholders and CEOs rather than consumers? This is the big worry with automation and AI. Yes, in theory it can lead to lower prices, but is that happening in practice?

Let's take a local example. Has Colesworths switching to self checkouts made supermarket prices lower for everyone, or simply allowed them to increase their profits by reducing costs? The investigations over the past year into their price gouging would suggest it's the latter.

To a degree there's a parallel to be drawn here to skilled immigration. There's a undeniable economic benefit to skilled immigrants arriving to address our skills shortages and plug vacancies that are otherwise hard to fill. But the benefit isn't being seen by ordinary people. It's accruing to corporations with a slim amount of it being paid in tax, yet that tax is often not used on building infrastructure to cater for the increases in population. So I get why ordinary people are pissed off about immigration to an extent. If they simply see more strain on local infrastructure and little direct benefit, why wouldn't they be annoyed?

I think there needs to be a government intervention to ensure the benefits of technological change are spreading to all of society and not simply concentrated in higher corporate profits. I don't know how that will work, but the alternative is to become more and more like the US, where corporations rule over a giant underclass.

The view that things are ****ed has never resonated with me. Things are what they have always been: good, and bad. Why is it that we are so incapable of looking at the good?
Because people keep comparing the present to the past. The past 20 years have been a time of massive change, both technologically and economically. And if inequality has risen in that time, inflation has been significant, basics like housing have become more unaffordable, and the technological advances have been accompanied by negatives like smartphone addiction and vaping, it's very easy for people to feel pessimistic about it.

Oh, and the big one, which was the first thing I said to you: the world is about to experience severe climate change and we're not doing anywhere near enough to address it.
 
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Maybe. Even if it is the case, there's going to be at least another decade where boomers and Gen X still hold a lot of the voting power, and there are of course plenty of gullible fools amongst the younger generations too.

Every generation also eventually gets brainwashed by neoliberalism in some form or another. That's happened a lot slower with millenials and even more so with Gen Z, but it's still happening, perhaps especially when boomers start dying off en masse and a lot of large inheritances start getting parcelled out.

So maybe there's room for hope there, but plenty of risks too. And I fear change will happen far too late to do much about climate change before it really starts to bite.
I suppose I have more faith in those yet to come than you do.
Things have changed massively since that era. Back then, hard right figures like Margaret Thatcher actually gave a shit about the environment, and companies were willing to play ball with things like the emissions cap and trade scheme that eventually got rid of acid rain as a serious problem.

In the 15-20 years after that, companies realised they didn't have to do that in future if they simply bought one or both of the major political parties through donations, and flooded the media with just enough misinformation and lies to make enough gullible fools question whether a grand conspiracy of scientists across the world were making up a doomsday scenario for the sake of earning slightly higher research grants.
I genuinely think we're all of 20-30 years away from a hard recontextualisation of the worker-employer power dynamic. Since WW2's wide advancing of pro-worker policies as a sop to the working classes, business has slowly been trying to wind back each change against their interests. It's taken this long, but people are slowly coming around to the position that they might have to do something about it.
And now we've entered the age of post-truth politics where a lot of people simply believe what makes them feel good, and the truth is routinely ignored.
Except this is what I mean when I say that we're only a little bit away from millenials being the major voting bloc, and those younger that that taking over. This generation aren't as susceptible to fake news/misinfo as those that didn't grow up before the internet; they'll make other mistakes, but not those ones.
Across most of the West right now there's a massive backlash over immigration (mostly from non-white countries). While there are reasonable arguments about the number of immigrants it's best for a country to take in each year, this issue has become a great conduit for post-truth politics. People are often paying no attention to the facts and blaming immigrants (chiefly Muslim ones) for every problem that exists, even when the facts show there are multiple causes or a different culprit altogether. The Southport child murder saga in the UK is a good example of this, or closer to home, the insistence some people have on solely blaming immigration for the housing crisis rather than accepting there are also serious problems with the incentives given to housing investors, supply side issues in the construction industry and a repeated failure of government to invest in public housing and other infrastructure.
This is a problem, but it's also completely based on how propaganda works now.
What use is innovation if the average person isn't reaping much of the benefits?
Okay. Here is where I draw the line.

Are you telling me your life is less convenient than it used to be? You have more or less access to food, technology, ideas, content, education than you used to? Is this true worldwide? Is this true of the underprivileged?

There have never been more people people in the world, JB, but there's been an awful rush of improvement since WW2. We don't ignore the opinions of brown people or women as much.

I don't believe in trickle down, but to ignore the benefits improvements in tech has had on our lives - both in the west, but also elsewhere in the world - is genuinely to be looking at only the negatives.
Let's take a local example. Has Colesworths switching to self checkouts made supermarket prices lower for everyone, or simply allowed them to increase their profits by reducing costs? The investigations over the past year into their price gouging would suggest it's the latter.
That, I think, is part of the problem: we on this forum are so fixated on the micro that we lose focus on the macro.

The consequences of this technology isn't just self serve checkouts, it's much larger than that. Easier access to your money, the ability to pay for things online, simpler communication and replacement of components and essentials for your life.

It's not perfect. There's still a massive reliance on the developing world to keep our prices low, and there's still multinationals taking wild advantage of poor people. But better is still a worthy goal.
To a degree there's a parallel to be drawn here to skilled immigration. There's a undeniable economic benefit to skilled immigrants arriving to address our skills shortages and plug vacancies that are otherwise hard to fill. But the benefit isn't being seen by ordinary people. It's accruing to corporations with a slim amount of it being paid in tax, yet that tax is often not used on building infrastructure to cater for the increases in population. So I get why ordinary people are pissed off about immigration to an extent. If they simply see more strain on local infrastructure and little direct benefit, why wouldn't they be annoyed?
I'm not saying they have no right to be grumpy, nor that there is no place on this forum for criticism. It's just that there's little else on here.
I think there needs to be a government intervention to ensure the benefits of technological change are spreading to all of society and not simply concentrated in higher corporate profits. I don't know how that will work, but the alternative is to become more and more like the US, where corporations rule over a giant underclass.
I think I've addressed this above.
Because people keep comparing the present to the past.
And they're really silly to do it. As the superfunds say, past performance is no predictor of future performance.
The past 20 years have been a time of massive change, both technologically and economically. And if inequality has risen in that time, inflation has been significant, basics like housing have become more unaffordable, and the technological advances have been accompanied by negatives like smartphone addiction and vaping, it's very easy for people to feel pessimistic about it.
That's not untrue, but we're yet to truly find a level or for technological development to slow. When it does - and it will - it will find an equilibrium point, because that has essentially been true of every technological development throughout history.

Governments have found themselves unable or lobbied to prevent them from adjusting, but that merely slows things down rather than preventing it happening.
Oh, and the big one, which was the first thing I said to you: the world is about to experience severe climate change and we're not doing anywhere near enough to address it.
I agree.
 
Maybe. Even if it is the case, there's going to be at least another decade where boomers and Gen X still hold a lot of the voting power, and there are of course plenty of gullible fools amongst the younger generations too.

Every generation also eventually gets brainwashed by neoliberalism in some form or another. That's happened a lot slower with millenials and even more so with Gen Z, but it's still happening, perhaps especially when boomers start dying off en masse and a lot of large inheritances start getting parcelled out.

So maybe there's room for hope there, but plenty of risks too. And I fear change will happen far too late to do much about climate change before it really starts to bite.


Things have changed massively since that era. Back then, hard right figures like Margaret Thatcher actually gave a shit about the environment, and companies were willing to play ball with things like the emissions cap and trade scheme that eventually got rid of acid rain as a serious problem.

In the 15-20 years after that, companies realised they didn't have to do that in future if they simply bought one or both of the major political parties through donations, and flooded the media with just enough misinformation and lies to make enough gullible fools question whether a grand conspiracy of scientists across the world were making up a doomsday scenario for the sake of earning slightly higher research grants.

And now we've entered the age of post-truth politics where a lot of people simply believe what makes them feel good, and the truth is routinely ignored.

Across most of the West right now there's a massive backlash over immigration (mostly from non-white countries). While there are reasonable arguments about the number of immigrants it's best for a country to take in each year, this issue has become a great conduit for post-truth politics. People are often paying no attention to the facts and blaming immigrants (chiefly Muslim ones) for every problem that exists, even when the facts show there are multiple causes or a different culprit altogether. The Southport child murder saga in the UK is a good example of this, or closer to home, the insistence some people have on solely blaming immigration for the housing crisis rather than accepting there are also serious problems with the incentives given to housing investors, supply side issues in the construction industry and a repeated failure of government to invest in public housing and other infrastructure.


What use is innovation if the average person isn't reaping much of the benefits? If it simply accrues to higher and higher corporate profits and rewards shareholders and CEOs rather than consumers? This is the big worry with automation and AI. Yes, in theory it can lead to lower prices, but is that happening in practice?

Let's take a local example. Has Colesworths switching to self checkouts made supermarket prices lower for everyone, or simply allowed them to increase their profits by reducing costs? The investigations over the past year into their price gouging would suggest it's the latter.

To a degree there's a parallel to be drawn here to skilled immigration. There's a undeniable economic benefit to skilled immigrants arriving to address our skills shortages and plug vacancies that are otherwise hard to fill. But the benefit isn't being seen by ordinary people. It's accruing to corporations with a slim amount of it being paid in tax, yet that tax is often not used on building infrastructure to cater for the increases in population. So I get why ordinary people are pissed off about immigration to an extent. If they simply see more strain on local infrastructure and little direct benefit, why wouldn't they be annoyed?

I think there needs to be a government intervention to ensure the benefits of technological change are spreading to all of society and not simply concentrated in higher corporate profits. I don't know how that will work, but the alternative is to become more and more like the US, where corporations rule over a giant underclass.


Because people keep comparing the present to the past. The past 20 years have been a time of massive change, both technologically and economically. And if inequality has risen in that time, inflation has been significant, basics like housing have become more unaffordable, and the technological advances have been accompanied by negatives like smartphone addiction and vaping, it's very easy for people to feel pessimistic about it.

Oh, and the big one, which was the first thing I said to you: the world is about to experience severe climate change and we're not doing anywhere near enough to address it.
Post made a fair bit of sense until the end. Genuinely cult like, Jesus is coming type stuff tbh
 
Apologies Gethelred , wasn't sure if this deserved it's own thread or not, or where to put it.

For an antithesis to the premise of negativity, how about some positive stuff for once.........?

For relevance it does have political view points around the subject.

Just viewed this story on 60 minutes about the homeless world cup and the positive impact it is having on 1000's of lives.

Being the big softy that I am, I welled up watching this and the potential it has for those who are doing tougher than anyone else.

These people don't get to choose between fuel for getting to work or putting 2 minute noodles on the table for their kids, they got zip.

Without further ado.


And this guy is the saviour of all these people


If this inspires you please consider donating to these organizations on this page


And yes I donate to backpack for beds.......... as well as MSWA (my cousin has ms).

Thanks.
 
Post made a fair bit of sense until the end. Genuinely cult like, Jesus is coming type stuff tbh
This is kind of interesting; 'The end is nigh' right? but what if they're correct? There's a lot of science to back this stuff.

If you go through the IPCC papers they rely on a magical future technology that will remove carbon from the air at scale. What if that isn't possible? A general understanding of thermodynamics would suggest it's not and can't be, at least in the timeframe required

Every year we pollute more, the biosphere collapses more, and tech stagnates at boundaries from physics.

It's pretty clear climate has phase changed in the last few years, what if we are cooked?

I kind of hate the there's still hope news articles, we can change etc
As an analogy; when your fire alarm goes off do you leave the house because your ears hurt, or do you check to see if the ovens on? At some point you have to accept it's beyond saving but I'd bet you'd still call 000
 

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