mistakoala

Blackpool's season for many overnight accommodation businesses has gone from April-November to just school holidays and major events.

The annual accounts/report must make for tragi-comical reading.

Partly. Other resorts have managed to reinvent themselves, but the perception I have is that our local tourism trade took things for granted, didn't innovate and assumed there'd still be millions of overnight visitors to cash in on.

It's a very parochial place and despite all our problems and examples like this popping up periodically, as a town we still seem to maintain a collective belief that it's a great place to live/visit and "everywhere has its problems", with Blackpool just being hard done to.

In the UK our last government imposed an Internet tax, but at a flat monthly rate. Fortunately, it was scrapped.

So, like Sky Broadband in the UK, then?

I'm sort of glad he didn't win (I know - aren't I a terrible person?), if that was his high-handed attitude and dismissal of a tool that lets designers make sites... by hand.

What I dislike is the braiding of tech with identity politics issues by people who are unaccommodating, and hostile in their language and behaviour, if not their motives. Here, I feel that SJW is an apt description for people whose interests are primarily identity politics. It's not a term that I apply universally.

Sons made her point in a thoughtful way. She was not hostile (explicitly or implicitly). If there are issues regarding identity politics and tech, I'd rather hear about it from people like her. The pity is (in an awkwardly expressed way), because of her position, she doesn't necessarily want a platform from which to say things on these matters because she doesn't frame her experience in terms of gender (and that seems to carry through into the comments).

I'm glad I read on for an interesting and original viewpoint.

More Susan Sons' and fewer Adria Richards', please. The former have meaningful and constructive contributions to make while the latter just make political hay for their own self-interest. As a learner, the perception of an increased emphasis on identity politics is off-putting to me. Not because I secretly want to have a career and interest in tech to further my patriarchal tendencies, but because it's shifting attention away from the interesting stuff - the stuff that makes tech fun and interesting in the first place.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that activists use it as an instrument of storytelling their agenda. It's even worse when it masquerades as 'quality' journalism, dressed up in broadsheet (or more to the point, Berliner format) and verbiage.

I feel that there is just too much of the wrong motivation behind 'journalism'.