I love the calico fluffinas

I miss the minutes when this term was just used unironically and hadn’t yet become a magat slur.

Show zero tolerance for others speaking in favor of it. You don’t have to win every argument. You have to let them know that their “political beliefs” are fighting words and they’re going to get a fight whenever they try to speak them.

Yep, convenience of plopping the phone down really is 100% of it for me. Especially with Apple’s magnets setup, it’s a one-hand, one-second operation, and then the phone is standing at attention on its cradle stand. The thought of having a dangling cable on my desk and picking it up and fiddling to plug it in then laying the phone flat seems like something from 10 years ago. I’ve even forgotten once or twice what kind of port my phone has.

“Source of all problems?” If you exaggerate it right in your question and then ask if it’s exaggerated, of course the answer will be yes.

“It’s just a tool” yes and when people say “social media” they mean the whole combination of the tools and how they are getting used. The whole “it’s just a tool” argument isn’t worth much. Yes, it is, and now that it’s been let loose in the world, we see how it is being used.

A match is “just a tool” but in a forest that’s dripping with gasoline, you can see how that tool will do exactly one job.

Elon held an all hands at the company to announce “I’m back in charge” and the financial press are reporting that “the markets rewarded it.” Meaning the stock went up. Which makes me want to puke.

A 14yo was the first to fire at Marshalls at Ruby Ridge.

Forgive him for what? I recall there was drama around this show but I legit couldn’t understand what actually happened.

I’d rather do that than arm people with assault rifles so they can live in remote rural areas where herds of feral pigs are an issue. Yes this is an actual argument people make in favor of keeping assault rifles legal. “What if I need to stop a stampede of 80 feral hogs? This is a weekly occurrence on my property.”

Frankly, if feral hogs have you running scared, it’s not your property, it’s theirs.

Yeah OP needs to define what “slow” means to them. You could say that a one-week delayed effect is slow. Or you could say that it’s only slow if it takes months of exposure.

I’ve never seen anyone even think twice about the Tears of Lys or The Strangler. And after Milk of the Poppy, it’s established that we may expect some similarity to reality in this world.

This. This. This.

Everyone should watch this. Even people who know about rank choice voting.

Reality

That Hardiman version is the only kind I understand, where it’s basically a freestanding robot that a human gets inside.

Others if the variety that you strap on worry me. Elderly people have weaker bones and cartilage. Having something apply force to the skeleton itself to do work seems dangerous.

Forgive me but I wanted to nitpick all those examples

Cantonese is not a dialect of Madarin. It’s a distinct language, just a smaller one.

Standard Arabic is not actually spoken anywhere, and is primarily a written form. Egyptian pronunciations ARE commonly taught, not only because Egypt is big but because, with Egypt’s large entertainment sector, they have exported their pronunciations around the world in TV and movies.

British English is taught largely as a colonial legacy, not because England predates the US and Australia in history and is therefore considered “standard.”

While all of these secondary examples are flawed, IMO, I believe you’re actually right about Castilian Spanish. It’s simply more of an individual case than part of a common pattern.

This is why Darmok is peak sci-fi. It discusses what happens when species can’t communicate with one another. It even works within the in-show explanation of the universal translator: the Tamarians don’t just use different vocabulary and syntax. They have an entirely different language model.

Yeah I tried a lot of different clients and landed on this one for the long haul. It has held up well in the months since then.

Most of us have. There are just entrenched centers where the history goes very deep.

I see you’ve fallen into thinking that as long as we don’t talk about race, there’s no racism. And that actively trying to do something about racism draws attention to it, and is therefore racist.

The whole “I don’t see race” thing is empty. You can claim you don’t see race and so you don’t want to hear about it, while black people systematically get turned down for mortgages and have their houses appraised for less.

Maybe you don’t “see race” but society as a whole still does and you can see it in the numbers. Pointing that out and asking what we can do about it is not racism! That is not what racism ever was.

I would say that “not seeing race” is all well and good but you shouldn’t try to say that because you don’t think you see race, no one does, and therefore everyone should never mention it again. Do you see how that’s several leaps of logic thrown into one? And it makes you look like you’re desperate to bury any talk of the subject, which might be, you know… racist?

I agree the end state we would all like is one where no one sees race. But there’s no use pretending we are there when we aren’t.

Yep. Interestingly, conservatives disagree on this. They’ll say that black people have absolutely nothing to complain about post Civil Rights Act of 1964. They think that once the law changed, everything else is just a matter of personal merit and fortune. They only recognize institutional racism. They seem to think either that personal and cultural racism doesn’t exist, or (more likely) that that is a personal choice which no one has any business complaining about.