Youtube comments of Laurence Fraser (@laurencefraser).

  1. I'd argue, at least to some extent, that it's less a matter of "fitting in" and more a matter of "not clashing" (or at lest, it should be). Which sounds like the same thing from the other direction, but isn't really.
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  2.  @Titamiva  those weren't actually Wars though. Media hyperbole there.
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  3. There's a reason so many countries these days ensure that their central bank is part of the government rather than a privately owned entity. The sensible ones then ensure that the elected politicians have as little capacity as possible to tamper with the the central bank's ability to actually do its job.
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  4. For all that a decent amount of French entered English with the Norman invasion, the vast bulk of it (and of the Latin you'll find there also, that part that hadn't already entered long since via the church, or Roman influence on the Germanic peoples) showed up in later centuries when French was the language of the nobility from one end of Europe to the other, and thus a 'prestige' language that people used to show off how fancy they were (as well as being quite useful if one was traveling). Likewise much of the Latin comes from scientific endevours, where a combination of the prominence of religious institutions in early scientific advancement and the need for a common language (and it's nature as a mostly 'dead' language offering quite a lot of advantages in this role) saw it become another prestige language, showing off one's education and (pretense to) intellect. I can't help but imagine that the result would be less the loss of long, complicated words that are clearly thought of as French or Latin in origin today, and more the loss of the simple, basic ones people don't think about much, such as 'beef' and the like.
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  5. I've always heard them called 'less lethal' rather than 'less than lethal'. There's a fairly significant difference in meaning between the two.
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  6. Amusingly, the reverse would probably have a bigger effect: he has more subscribers than they do!
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  7. Turns out that the reality is that the royal family owns a Lot of land and business in a private capacity independent of being the monarch... and give basically the entire revenue from most of it to the government in exchange for the government managing the upkeep. this income vastly exceeds Everything royal related that the British government actually funds, and Also the amount that the government would collect in regular taxes from those properties and businesses. Basically, it is acceptable that the royal family is government funded because a substantial portion of the government is royal family funded.
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  8. As an extra bonus (assuming my recollection is correct), most kanji apparently have two readings, one based on what they were used to mean in chinese (that is, the Japanese word for the thing) when Japan adopted them, and one based on what they sounded like to Japanese speakers when introduced (which, of course, has a completely different meaning). In most cases the pronunciation of both has drifted over time (as it will in any language). Or something like that.
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  9. "unprecedented quality"... Let's just pretend the quality hasn't been going Down for years...
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  10. Depends what you're measduring the efficiency of. Land-usage wise it's pretty bad (though it doesn't look too bad in most cases when you consider how the alternatives usually go), but in terms of customer throughput wise it's actually pretty good.
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  11. that is pretty much what they've been doing, yes.
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  12. Frankly, anything that makes a big deal about traditional Japanese metalworking is questionable. Traditional Japanese metalworking was all about getting a slightly above average, at Best, quality iron/steel out of absolutely shit tier ore. They did this largely by (near enough to) perfecting techniques that in Europe were displaced by easier, more efficient methods that gave better results but required either better ore or that one first figure out Other technology... that required better iron to begin with. Traditional Japanese metalworking is, to my recollection, Very good at getting decent quality out of scrap metal... but that used to be a job people did profesionally in its own right in Europe, and they were also pretty darn good at it. Basically, there was a time period when Japan was exceptionally technologically advanced relative to the rest of the world... it was basically the mid to late 1900s. Now, you can Usually count on something fancy that was actually made in Japan to have had uncommonly high Quality Control applied to it, ensuring absolutely everything was done Exactly Correctly (for whatever value of 'correctly' was applicable). But you will pay through the Nose for that, and you're paying for the trained expert to have followed the stated method perfectly, not for the method in question to be anything exceptional. Importantly, the things that applies to are generally NOT mass produced in factories! So, yeah, things like this might not automatically a scam, but they're also usually not worth the money.
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  13. ... Yeah, they have a bad history of Propaganda regarding over taxing. Initially: no tax. American colonists raid French colonies, which triggers a war between France and Britain. it's long, global, and Expensive. Britain attempts to defray part of this cost by way of a one time levy on the colonists in their American colonies: Part of the cost of Only those troops garrisoned in the colonies to defend them, and Only the cost incurred During the war. Remember, there is NO OTHER TAXATION of the colonists at the time, their administration and security (among other things) are Entirely paid for by the regular tax payer back in Britain. The colonists, as a group (well, the wealthy ones who have the ability to get involved in the decision making and would bear the brunt of the costs, anyway) Refuse to pay this levy. This is, by most definitions at the time, Open Revolt. The standard solution to open revolt by basically every country is to send in the troops and put down said revolt... ideally by way of just showing up and arresting people, but that almost never works and the backup plan is bullets, bayonets, and fire. Britain (it should be noted, that when I say Britain here, I mean the Elected Parliament, the King had nothing to do with any of this decision making until later on, and very little even then) looks at that and realises it's a dumb idea. The whole point of the exercise is that they're short on cash. Sending in soldiers is Expensive, the very expense they're trying to cover. So instead, the institute a Stamp Duty. This amounts to 'you can't import or export anything without an official stamp on it, and we charge you for the stamp'. This has two advantages: the colonists can't just not pay it, and it can be used as a punitive measure instead of sending in the troops. Note that the stamp duty was still the only tax the colonists had to pay, was still less than the taxes paid by people back in Britain, was very low compared to those paid by citizens of any other European Empire, and still only mounted to reducing how much the British Taxpayer was Subsidising the colonies, because to my understanding it still didn't cover the administration and defence of the colonies, let alone any infrastructure projects and the like. Also note that at this point NO ONE has said anything about representation, At All. This is the point where the population of the British colonies in American start splitting into 'loyalist' 'revolutionary' and 'don't care'. About equally. And the revolutionaries start stirring up riots and engaging in assassinations of administrative officials and loyalists. Much is made about being taxed to pay for foreign wars... expect the war the colonists were taxed to pay for was one they started. Sure, the British 'won' (and, if I'm not getting my wars muddled up, gained France's Canadian colonies out of it), and the American theatre ended up being basically a sideshow in the actual fighting, but foreign it was not. I'll admit, I'm less clear on the specifics of this part, but somewhere along the way Benjamin Franklin and others are sent to Parliament to negotiate on the matter of taxes and independence and such. This is a fundamentally doomed prospect for several reasons. One: The revolutionaries spend the entire time gearing up for a shooting war, and commit to (and start) it Before Franklin's Party Returned From Britain. Two: The revolutionary's position wasn't 'no taxation without representation'. It was "no taxation. Period." The entire reason this came up was because the colonists Were Not Taxed while costing the government a fair bit to maintain (all the more so when they start wars with peer global super power!) prior to this series of events, and the colonists were British citizens, so parliament wasn't having any of that nonsense. Somewhere during this diplomatic mission is when the concept of representation comes up... in the form of a journal entry or letter by one of the members of the American group... which notes that they're never going to have any success in convincing parliament to see things their way unless they first have at least one representative of their own In parliament to act on their behalf. (frankly, even if they had their own MP, it wouldn't have worked because, again, their entire position began and ended with 'no taxes! at all! ever!'.) As for the king, his entire contribution to the issue was that, at some point, he received a letter from the colonists complaining about the taxes. This being the first he'd heard of the matter, he went and asked is relevant advisors... The heads of the government departments responsible for taxation and the colonies. You know, the ones responsible for the entire tax issue coming up in the first place. Who, of course, tell him it's a minor issue that is all under control and almost resolved (They weren't even being in any way dishonest. At the time, from their point of view, it was true!), leading to the king writing a letter back to the colonists that... perhaps wasn't the best thought out in terms of tone, but it basically amounted to 'thank you for communicating your concern, The matter is being resolved, also refusing to pay your taxes or engaging in armed uprisings are acts of rebellion of the sort that would obligate me to send soldiers to deal with the matter, so don't do that.' ... ... That was literally all he did. The rest was all the elected parliament (ministers and such being chosen from among the members of parliament) Oh, and as an added bonus: After the American colonies gained their independence, they now had to pay for their Own administration and defence, Without heavy subsidization by the British tax payer... and with most of the loyalist colonists having buggered off to Canada, when they hadn't been killed (shrinking their potential tax base). Taxes, consequently, went WAY, WAY up... and never came back down again. That's right, those terrible taxes imposed upon the colonists under the British... were less than any tax ever levied by the independent American government since. Which is to say, No, the American Colonists were NOT over taxed under the British. Extra bonus: If representation had actually been the goal (it was Never Mentioned prior to recruitment propaganda, remember), it could have been attained with hilarious ease: All the colonists had to do was say 'yeah, we'll pay the same (ish) taxes as people back in Britain for the same (ish) benefits... starting with our own MPs, of course'. But again, representation wasn't the point. It was very much about not paying taxes. Specifically, it was about RICH and Powerful people not paying taxes. (and, you'll note, ceasing control of the governmental body that actually did the taxing has done a spectacular job of allowing them to either not pay taxes, or funnel the taxes back into their own pockets, ever since.) Basically, A small number of particularly wealthy businessmen and land holders ruining everything for everyone else (and lying about it in the media)to line their pockets... ... ... it's almost like nothing's changed!
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  14. @Tattle Boad you... Ahhh... Might want to think through the implications if that statement a little.
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  15.  @CityBeautiful  Often, when you get a comment like this, it's because part of the/a border is disputed, and you used a map that either predates the dispute, or that shows it as if it had been resolved one way or the other. When that is the case, the complaint is, pretty much without fail, from someone living in the country on the side of the dispute the map does not favour. Not helped by google maps delivering each side of the dispute a map which corresponds to what their government says the map Should be, and everyone else a map either indicating that the area is disputed, a border based on something like the current points at which border guards will stop you when you try to cross, the pre-dispute border, or something else entirely (and being unreliable about which they use). Given that this individual didn't say what was wrong with the map, and the phrasing, I'd assume​ the above to be the case, then ignore it and move on, as swapping the map (or anything of that nature) will just get the same complaint from the other side.
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  16. A combination of natural caution in the face of the unfamiliar and constant fear-mongering in the media (as that sort of thing sells best, more than due to any actual political agenda). Normally somewhat mitigated by at least limited exposure to such people in day to day life, which living in a gated community prevents.
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  17. on the other hand, stripping out carparks for bus lanes when the bus doesn't actually stop anywhere near that spot without doing anything to actually improve the road for pedestrians and cyclists (though, to be fair, in the specific example the footpath and crossings weren't too bad for pedestrians) IS fairly likely to have a negative impact if not compensated for in some fashion. Simple fact is that most of the time people don't have all the data, and some of what they do have is misleading junk data (due to propaganda). Also, some people are just idiots, though that's a lesser factor.
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  18. The idea of 'freedom of the press' litterally came about in opposition to the habit of certain european rulers of allowing only works they aproved of to be printed, or only their own people to opperate printing presses, and actively confiscating presses from people they disagreed with or disaproved of. The idea that 'journalists' (who worked for newspapers who had their own printing presses) were 'the press' is a much newer one. By analogy, it absolutely SHOULD apply to web hosting, websites and such. Television and radio broadcast is a little more debatable due to technical matters introducing pracitical issues on that front.
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  19. Properly speaking, if you'd not given him any legitimate reason to think you were carrying anything illegal or doing anything nefarious, that would be said cop doing his job exactly as he is supposed to. Or possibly just ignoring you and your bag entirely, I suppose. No real way to know which unless someone tried to nick the thing anyway.
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  20.  @DoctorWhat210  Charles does have his good points to go with the less pleasing aspects, for all that many like to ignore them. Has some rather impressive achievements to his name, actually.
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  21.  @matthiasbecker5064  it actually makes a Huge difference to the shoulders and wrists (and thus most of the pain and injury in the arm). The fully split ones connected by a cable so you can actually position them properly for your body rather than some ficticious average anyway. rearanging the keys to be ortholinier (that is, the rows are lined up rather than staggered) also makes a huge difference to finger and wrist strain even without changing what position any individual key occupies. (it also takes between single digit hours and single digit days to get used to the difference, with the biggest one being x and c being displaced enough that one ends up hitting the wrong one a lot.)
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  22. It certainly beats the idiocy that is American parking minimums.
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  23.  @shorewall  well, sure, if you're one if the wealthy twits responsible for most of the screwups (not the current one, obviously, but that doesn't change the reaction) that's Exactly What Happens! If you're actually poor (or even middle class) eveyone just tells you you should have been more responsible, no matter how responsible you actually were and regardless of how much or little influence you had over any part of the process. And sure, some poor people Are in that state due to their own actions and foolishness. At least as many are not, and most of the western world is set up such that it is Very hard to get out of that hole once you're in it. Some places make it much harder than others. (Most make it so there's a point at which the hole can't get deeper, but not before it's too deep to get out) Then there's the shear number of Poverty problems that get treated as Race problems, functionally making them harder to fix as resources get miss allocated, even as actual race problems get labled Poverty problems and those discriminated against are just told they need to be more "responsible" rather than anything getting fixed.
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  24. Honestly, English spelling would be vastly improved by the simple addition of a method of indicating the location of the primary stress in the word. A substantial chunk of the confusing nature of English spelling comes from the system assuming you somehow magically already know that, and thus only disambiguates vowel readings when the stress pattern actually permits more than one reading of that character in that position. It wouldn't solve all the issues, but it would be a huge improvement.
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  25.  @prjndigo  ... I mean, it would justify some regulation regarding acceptable throttle design and necessary safety features. Flat out banning such things? Not so much.
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  26. Nevermind innocent until proven guilty, half the time this nonsense is "guilty even once proven innocent". Nonsense like this, among its Other problems, massively undermines the credibility of women who actually Are being/have been harased and/or abused when they attempt to seek redress through legitimate means.
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  27.  @akoubek3  ... If you pay even the slightest Scrap of attention to how your government works you'd realise this is utter nonsense. Just voting Republican would get you exactly the same crap, now with half the services gone and the prices on the other half on a rocket to the moon, if anything changed at all. The corruption is entrenched at the bureaucratic level, and endemic among the elected officials regardless of party as well because the US political system is set up in a rather idiotic way that basically requires that this be so in order to function. ... There's a Reason no one else ever actually copied the US's governmental model, you know?
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  28.  @crazyboydakota  depends on how you position the trees and utilities relative to each other (and what sort of trees you use). It's absolutely a consideration, but it's not universily a problem.
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  29. ... or tossed it in the fire (which would likely have had downsides of its own, admittedly)
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  30.  @orksy2935  Sounded an awful lot like he supports them about the same way I support NZ Labour: I don't particularly like them, I disagree with them about a lot of stuff, and they do some very stupid things that I'm very opposed to... They do sometimes get Some things right, and the alternatives are all vastly worse.
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  31. Of course, that's only a good thing if it's because everyone else is just that competent. If it's because you're actually a moron... Not so much...
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  32.  @kristoffer3000  The silliest bit is that there's at least as much evidence that Russia has the same problem. Makes the whole argument a bit silly.
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  33. CEOs seem to mostly come in two flavous: 1: Started the business themselves. They have NO idea what they're doing, some of them are awful human beings but they're generally at least mostly commited to at least Trying to make the business actually successful. If you're lucky this is part of a long term plan to make money off the business. If you're unlucky it's part of a long term plan to make the business super valuable and then sell out to a larger business. 2: Rich businessman with a degree in business and probably a rich family as well. They are highly trained specialists! ... in schoozing, stock market manipulation, maybe a bit of marketing as a secondary skill, scaming shareholders, and finding ways to gut everything that makes a business funciton without Quite completely imploding it before their contract runs out while making the 'profit' number go ever up even as the 'income' number stalls out and starts to decline. ... Sometimes you get one who understands the idea of listening to their technical experts well enough to dodge the implosion path, if their shareholders will let them. Half the problem is that somewhere along the way 'making a profit for the shareholders' went from 'nice bonus side effect of doing well, which we use to reward those who helped us succeed, mostly in the form of dividends' to 'the single and absolute obligation of the corporation, everything else be damned, primarily by driving up the share price so they can sell it at a higher value' (never mind that this is wildly encouraging of all sorts of dodgy market manipulation nonsense and practices that destroy the business and its ability to provide the service or product that Should be the actual point in its existence, and certainly the only value it provides society as a whole, in the process).
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  34.  @samuelthecamel  Interestingly enough, for much of its history, most of those imigrants were from various German speaking countries. Though it did absorb very large French and Spanish speaking populations by way of various wars and purchases leading to control of the land they'd settled on in the Americas (they weren't really immigrants, at that point). And, of course, in more recent times the immigrants have been form other places (mostly Asia (including the Middle East) and Mexico, to my understanding).
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  35. Treating the suburbs as "not part of the city" seems to be a Weird American Thing, incidentally. Though deciding they're rural rather than their own thing is a new one to me....
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  36. Pirating, in the sense of intellectual property infringement, isn't stealing Regardless. Illegal? Sure. Unethical? Varies. Theft? No.
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  37. 'Based on a true story' also generally means 'some people with the same names as some of the characters lived in roughly the right area at roughly the right time... probably.' Some manage more accuracy than that, but it's as likely to be by lucky accident as by design when that happens.
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  38.  @RogerS1978  Ahh, but are you actually denied treatment, or is it that the system has been allowed to rot due to mismanagement and so struggles to effectively provide said treatment?
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  39. @JimAllen-Persona Just... pay no attention to the cost of mobile data... after all, that's what the companies making the things do!
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  40. Realistically, no one sane is ok with that. Willing to put themselves in a situation where it might happen, sure. Ok with it? no.
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  41.  @mikeoconnell4108  not surprising, really, The axis, if pushed, could invade Switzerland from all sides, while the allies had to get through the Germans and Italians first to even try. Somewhat understandably, this affected the decision making process.
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  42.  @adrianamendesporcellato  basically the translation algorithm has its own 'native' language in translates into and out of, rather than translating between every combination of other languages. It Attempts to optimize this "native" language to be the best possible language for translating into and out of, rather than for actually communicating with. So calling it a universal language is sort of true, but also kind of misleading. If a language were an electronic device, this "universal language" would be closer to a USB connection than an electronic device suited for every task. (Admittedly, my analogy is kind of terrible there). That's my understanding at least, knowing, as I do, a bit about language and very little indeed about Google's algorithms beyond that they basically exist to let Google avoid taking the blame for it's stuff ups.
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  43. Well, to a point. there are reasons why there is 'international law' on the matter. Also, techically speaking, anything that happens on a ship flying a given country's flag is, at least for the most part, covered by the laws of that country. (and we're talking 'officially, according to the documentation' not 'physically has the relevant bit of cloth at the top of a mast at the time'.) So this is essentialy on the order of 'it's not a crime if there aren't any witnesses' ... which isn't entirely incorrect in some regards, but is also very likely to end poorly if acted on.
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  44. ... this is why regulation is a Good thing... When the regulators aren't corrupt, anyway.
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  45.  @ingold1470  it wasn't the only one. These nations were all exemplifying extreme manifestations of concepts that were arguably virtues, and this getting the benefits of such to extents that are all but unattainable otherwise, which Is praiseworthy... But at the same time, in so doing they greatly neglected, or outright rejected, the others... With all the inevitable, and often contemptible and/or reprehensible downsides and problems that come from doing so
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  46.  @seigeengine  or even "which is the same number in metres". heh.
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  47. Amusingly, the trench lines ended out of rifle range of the swiss border, because swiss troops On said border would shoot any soldier from either side who got closer than that.
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  48.  @qurqo  That's not quite true. Depends on the type of work, the type of boss, the type of system, the geography and transport systems, and the type of employee. The right combination and productivity skyrockets when people can work from home, the wrong combination and it tanks. Noteworthy is that work from home systems often expose employees who weren't doing anything productive at work either, and incompitent managers who were actually making things worse rather than better... But it is worth noting that there are psychological aspects to the whole thing too. Some people work better in a more relaxed environment without other people distracting them, which could mean working from home, depending on their family situation and the way the office is organized, or it could very much mean NOT working at home for a different combination of those same factors. Likewise, some people require that very distinct separation of space between the two to focus on the relevant tasks, others can manage with as little as putting on different music in the background and be good. A functional work from home system can reduce how much productivity is lost if people take time off work due to certain illnesses and events, where they can't come in to the office or work a full day, but still have the time and ability to get Some work done to regular standards (compaired to forcing sick people to come in and work a full day as usual, which produces distinctly substandard work and is very likely to infect other employees and further tank productivity). And on and on the list goes. Very much a case of 'applied correctly to the right use cases this is very beneficial, applied badly and/or to the wrong use cases it is quite harmful'... much like a truely staggering number of other things, really.
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  49. the bayoneted rifle wasn't so much a sword-gun as it was the ability to turn your gun into a spear at need. it was Incredibly useful when guns were single shot and cavalry was still a threat. Sticking small knives on pistols has also been done in a reasonably useful manner a few times. Never great, certainly not on the battlefield, but occasionally useful. longsword with a gun in it? They got made. They... weren't great. Basically a sword that you Could fire a couple of really crappy pistol shots out of if you really needed to (there's basically no situation where you wouldn't be better off with an actual pistol, mind you, even at the relevant tech level). Mostly just compromised the hilt of the sword to varying degrees, in practice, at least to my recollection.
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  50.  @korosuke1788  the Chinese Government considered the British Empire a vassal for quite some time, entirely on the basis that they were neither part of China itself nor attacking China, but still showed up from time to time, regardless of British opinion on the matter, or reality, so that's not saying much.
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  51. Like MANY parts of the US's system of running a country, it's a case of a perfectly reasonable thing being made very badly many years ago and people just continuing to make up justifications for why it was, is, and always will be perfect and better than anyone else rather than actually Fixing It.
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  52. Well, when you account for the fact that quite a few of them are merely new Derivative Forms, rather than Entirely new words, nor new, contextually clear, usages for existing words, and then you realise that all of them are spread out over 40-ish works so the audience isn't running into them all at once... And then, yes, all the words where they're new in the sense that it's the first time they appear in texts that survived long enough for anyone to make record of them rather than the first time they were ever used at all mitigates the issue still further. Also, a large part of how incomprehensible so many people today find Shakespere (though certainly not the Entirity of it!) has more to do with their poor skills in Present Day English, even before getting into compensating for a couple of centuries of linguistic drift. ... That and the fact that it's all written in Script format, intended to be read aloud and Heard, not to mention written largely as poetry which further doubles down on that, so trying to understand it just from silently reading the text, rather than properly Performing it, is something of a struggle.
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  53.  @Christopher-N  Don't know about concert flutes, but there are definitely electric recorders (and isn't that a gloriously ambiguous term in English?)
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  54.  @YSLRD  you say that as though the two are mutually exclusive.
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  55.  @juststeve5542  English did, in fact, throw away gender entirely a Very long time ago. What it did Not throw away was the practice of marking the Sex on the noun for things that have one, and in some cases (humans and livestock mostly) the Age as well/instead. This happened centuries ago. The entire claim that English marks gender in any way (except in so far as gender is used as an euphemism for sex) is entirely false, propaganda put about by the ignorant in an attempt to support (or, more likely, be seen to be supporting) transgender individuals... Which mostly succeeded only in making those who actually knew what they were talking about on the matter Less sympathetic (how much varies, of course) and everyone Else more confused (and Everyone slightly more paranoid). Sort of like how removing the suffixes that indicated sex from professional titles was supposed to reduce sexism by making people not think of the jobs in question as "male by default", but in many cases either did nothing or meant that people were More likely to assume the sex based stereotypes regarding professions were true due to the lack of indication to the contrary. Regardless, it's not Gender. It is not a noun class system used for agreement, and it predates the idea that anyone should even care about gender in the sense of neural architecture/personal identity.
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  56.  @porcorosso4330  Given that we're speaking of the entire population of a fairly populous country (well, the subset that know he exists), the answer is almost certainly 'all of the above, and some other options as well'.
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  57. Side effect of also being a YouTuber of some note.
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  58.  @PiOfficial  A surprisingly large number of people do not understand the difference between 'kilo' and 'mega'... for that matter, a shockingly large number of Americans (purely due to lack of data regarding anyone else on this matter on my part) don't understand that '1 million dollars' and '1,000,000 dollars' are the same thing, and will proceed to treat 'million' as part of the Unit rather than the Number, resulting in truly nonsensical assumptions and opinions regarding taxation and the cost of doing a given thing at a given scale...
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  59. Probably because it was less divorced from reality than most "reality" television.
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  60. oh, no, They're not stupid. No, no, no. They're just incentivised to hell and gone to care only about the quarterly profit number going up at the expense of all else. That and fully aware of how stupid the majority of the general public are and entirely willing to exploit the hell out of that.
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  61.  @MissSmoozie  there are certain steps in the process where malicious DMCA requiests Should result in the individuals responsible facing perjury charges. Of course, you only get in trouble if you Knowingly sign off on false claims, so all sorts of dodges are employed there (AI (which shouldn't be able to legally file the thing as a result), two people in the proecess where one makes all the decisions and then just tells the the other 'this is so', with the second person filing the form on the basis of this, simply going out of their way to not actually confirm anything, or straight up lieing about whether or not they knew anything that would indicate an issue, or just not being in the USA and not targeting anyone big enough to get the government moving over copyright (which pretty much no one in any position of power, other than those trying to abuse it, cares about), and the legal system really has no interest in actually processing perjury charges unless your specific instance of perjury took place in a court room and also pissed off the presiding judge in the process.
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  62.  @nos8141  it is part of a somewhat famous quote that begins by listing off all the useful skills a man of that time and place should ideally gave (or at least examples of the range of skills), before making the declaration that specialization is for insects (and yes, the main point of comparison would be ants, bees, etc.). The statement is, when you consider it, actually rather absurd. After all, the ability to specialize somewhat and work together for greater benefit is a large part of what got humans where they are. Still, the basic point is sound, as over-specialization can and does cause a lot of issues.
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  63.  @jamalgibson8139  The problem with telling suburbanites to suck it up and use public transit is, of course, the main places where public transit is terrible to non-existant. Though that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem in some respects. And the solution is fixing the public transit.
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  64.  @henningerhenningstone691  English may not manage 90%, but it's a lot higher than most people think... just... most of the words are like that... in the language we nicked them from... or were like that before centuries of sound changes made it really hard to tell, or etc.
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  65. Not just China. Check out the Ottoman empire, how they dealt with the problem, and the problems that caused. Likewise England (actually, England managed to mostly eliminate the issue, wars over who was the rightful king became very rare and almost always involved other powerful parties when entire lines had died out sufficiently to leave the succession ... Murky.)
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  66. For reference, the London underground railways weren't yet 'the tube system' at the time, as they didn't yet include any of the deep level tubes from which they got that name, which were added later (after tunnel boring was a thing. All the earlier 'sub surface lines' were built using cut-and-cover: Dig a whole to where you want the bottom of your tunnel, then build a roof over it and cover it back up). Properly speaking only the actual deep level tube lines are 'the tube', at least in theory... but in practice no one actually cares about that distinction outside of contexts like this (where it's an anachronism issue), trivia quizzes and the like, and the occasional pedantic twit, so the entire tunnel system gets called 'the tube' anyway. Cut and cover construction also meant that the London underground (though not the later deep level tube lines) mostly had to conform to the streets, because diverging from the streets involved demolishing the buildings the line would pass under. Which usually wasn't exactly practical. (edit: Ahh, you mentioned some of this later).
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  67. is it really only fans? I saw helecopters and an aeroplane in there too...
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  68. Act and National love to use the legitimate complaint that the Te Parti Maori, the Greens, and Labour legitimately engage in racial discrimination against non-maori (or perhaps, more accurately, unwarrented racial discrimination in favour of Maori to the detriment of others, in the case of the latter two), which is an actual problem that actually needs solving, as a jumping off point and excuse to push all sorts of maliciously anti-citizenry goals under the guise of 'equality'. They don't actually care about racism, of course, only that it's a convenient lever to push policies that let them and their rich mates make more money and accumulate more power at the expense of the common citizen, and to divide those who would oppose such policies and turn them against one another.
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  69.  @SeanStrife  are insane.. they're not getting Less crazy, either.
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  70.  @gandalfthegrey7135  they're a thing, they're just not actually used much in global communications because the lag time is horrific compared to terrestrial copper, or even terrestrial radio broadcast. They absolutely get used when and where Needed, of course, and do have certain niche advantages. (And they're dead useful for a bunch of non-telecomunications related tasks) Consequently, most global communication between land masses does actually use the massive under sea cables, the earliest of which was laid prior to the invention of the telephone. Satellite connections mostly get used for situations where terrestrial infrastructure is unfesable or shear bandwidth is important but transmission tine somehow isn't.
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  71.  @phillip_iv_planetking6354  Interestingly, when protestantism first came about near on every sort really was decidedly heretical. The Catholic Church at the time was horribly corrupt and many powerful people abused its institutions, but its theology was largely sound. These days, in many places various protestant churches subscribe to a brand of theology with remarkably little difference from what the Catholic Church at the tine of the Reformation espoused (at least, to my limited understanding), while the Catholic church has wandered off in some slightly worrying directions on some matters. And then you get the flat out cults, where calling them heritics is rather overstating how much they have in common with actual Christianity of any stripe. But yeah, the modern american style evangelical mega church is not only heretical (even by the rather permissive standards if modern moderate protestantism), its so unrepentantly Blatant about it that its utterly astonishing that anyone goes along with their nonsense. I mean, there's hetrodoxy and then there's blatantly espousing the exact opposite of what is written in the text you're supposedly working from...
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  72. ... he started out just recording himself mixing paint. Mixing paint was his job. Wasn't doing anything weird. After they rejected his presentation, he started buying his own stuff specifically to make videos off site and off the clock. He then started adding weird things to the paint he he owned and mixed off site, off the clock, nothing to do with the business beyond whatever advertising they got out of him being an employee and buying his paint there. Customers rang the shop, asking if some of the weird things he did were (it's not clear if they were asking if the shop would fo it, or asking if it was even a sensible thing to do). All they had to do was say that the shop didn't do that and point out why when asked. Note that the people who were interested were asking Their Paintshop about Paint. Prime opportunity to build reputation, at minimum, maybe even make a sale. After all, these are would be customers who are asking you about this because they've been told you exist and know what you're talking about. Instead they fired the guy for "gross misconduct" ... Because his harmless, legal, off the clock hobby was providing advertising for their shop as a side effect. He'd have a Very solid case for wrongfully termination in many parts of the world. Too bad much of the USA has laws that are actively hostile to Improving working conditions and include the employer having the right to fire anyone for no reason at all (laughably called "right to work" laws).
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  73.  @Benj-ee3se  ehh, if you're polite and up front about why you want to know, and accept it and move on if they're not willing to tell you, I have a hard time seeing how it's rude (well, maybe if you take up their time and don't buy anything? But even then, only if that's actually getting in the way of other work they could be doing...)
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  74.  @mosef312  apparently they ran the numbers on biological immortality (that is, no one does of old age) at some point... Humans still almost never live longer than 500 years simple due to random mishaps. Probability catches up with them by then. And that's assuming the human brain can be made to actually function properly for that long, for various reasons, other wise you end up with various flavours of insanity pulling the number down.
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  75. There are a number of ways to achieve such things, ranging from Very careful placement and practice ahead of time to simply having an ear piece and someone telling them where things are, etc. Some of the things presented in the video are Very easy to explain (How can you tell someone wearing big dark glasses is looking 'right at' something? You can't. And, importantly, and the reason actually blind people tend to wear them, you can't tell that they're Not), others rather less so if you assume full blindness.
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  76. Ehh, cricket isn't complicated, it just takes forever. The trick is to ignore most of the technical terms, as they're completely useless to the spectator... It's actually pretty hopeless as a spectator sport. As a player it's not all that different from baseball or similar sports (Well, obviously there are lots of differences in rules and technique, but in terms of the general experience).
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  77. Fortunately, were I live, it's pretty rare to find outlets covered by furniture... but it's very common for them (and light switches) to be positioned with the assumption that you would put very specific furniture in very specific places, making things quite akward if you have reason to do anything that Isn't That.
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  78. I figure if Trump wins the current state of things will continue with the country burning down (mostly metaphorically) at an ever increasing rate and more and more sensible people (and certain flavours of crazy) leaving if they can afford it. If Biden wins it'll either slow the rate at which the failure is accelerating (and isn't that a fun phrase) or the whole mess will all go up at once as the loonier Trump supporters try to revolt... Which probably won't work but will make a big mess regardless. The specifics, of course, come down Entirely to who does and says what where and when.
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  79.  @snazzypazzy  I vaguely recall that clothing restriction having something to do with priestly robes being made that way, and also that, depending on the details, doing so generally made clothes harder to clean, wear out faster, or both. So there's that.
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  80. Well, the same can be said about any large organization involve humans. There are, of course, ways to deal with that to varying degrees. Rule one is never letting any one platform get so big that competitors can't exist... and if that is unavoidable, regulate the hell out of it!
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  81. For income tax in New Zealand, if you're just a regular employee with a regular job, your tax handling consists of... making sure you're signed up in the right tax bracket and then completely ignoring it until such time as your sitaution changes such that you need to change which tax bracket you're registered as being in. Oh, and if you make charitable donations, keep the reciptes, you can claim a third of it back from the government (capped at the amount of tax you paid that year) if the charity in question is registered here. (there's some fun win-win-win shenanigans there where public services are provided (mostly support for the poor or disabled, but also various community facilities and events via churches and other institutions, environmental conservation projects,a nd various other htings), people get 'free' money, and the government gets to include part of any relevant charitable donations as counting towards it's internatonal aid obligations
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  82. Cats are difficult to train... but it's not for lack of ability to learn!
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  83. @toaritok more like we pretend it Doesn't make sense because no one can be arsed to find a way to actually mark stress, among other things. Once you realise that English Digraphs are functionally their own characters (also, there are actually more of them than are usually acknowledged) and that the rules for how you read a character at the start of a syllable and at the end of a syllable are different, it becomes a lot more consistent. Even more so once you realise that written English is standardized to two main forms (with a couple of minor regional variants thereof) while pronunciation has, at Minimum, one per country if you only include "standard" dialects, but actually at least hundreds of variations.... Basically, English spelling is taught to native English speakers in an utterly nonsensical way. This isn't terribly surprising, as getting a computer to read it out correctly requires approximately 63 rules, as well as indicating which dialect you're going for and where the syllable breaks are. The stress patterns too, if you want it to get them right consistently. Note that English Used to use a diacritic (oater replaces by a hyphen to make it easier to type on typewriters) to disambiguate between a vowel on each side of a syllable break with no consonants in between and a digraph that happened to use the same characters, but has never marked the difference between s-h and sh- or - sh Point is, you have to simplify it in order to start teaching kids young enough that they get enough vocabulary down soon enough, but that means too young to really get the hows and whys of it.... But then this is never corrected even as they get older!
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  84. It generally means 'effectively might as well be blind for any task where the ability to see at least X well is significant enough that we care about it', to my understanding.
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  85. *Bad governments. Some are actually far more sensible and only increase the money supply as necessary to prevent Deflation (with all the problems That brings) due to population growth. They do, in fact, actually budget properly when it comes to their actual spending. Mind you, even the good ones don't budget the same way individuals do, in many respects, because there are so many situations where the government needs to do the exact Opposite of what is sensible for the individual, but it is still budgeted.
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  86.  @FCVP71  actual court ruling in at least one state, and I forget which one it was but the case was interesting as they ended up digging up pre revolution British law as precident: unlawful arrest is functionally kidnapping and you are not only legally within your rights to resist, but aren't liable for injury or property damage caused in the doing unless said damage or injury was intentional, excessive, and obviously unnecessary. And maybe not even then, given that precident on the matter in question in that case was that no punishment at all was levied unless deaths occurred, and even then the crime was manslaughter, never murder. The details of what was or wasn't permitted outside of property damage weren't part of the particular case, so other rulings about injury and such might apply, but Very Specifically, if wrongfully arrested there was no point prior to you being released where you were not fully within your rights to take any and every not otherwise forbidden action to escape. Further, not having actually been Arrested (because that requires that the action of arresting you be in compliance with the law), you can't legitimately be charged with (and certainly can't be found guilty of) Resisting arrest. Consult your own state's law and an actual lawyer before acting on that though, a lot of states absolutely have passed laws to the contrary (despite questionable compliance with state and/or federal constitutions in some instances and the blatantly unjust curtailment of liberty that results).
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  87. Covid was the trigger. The problem already existed, and if Covid hadn't set it off, something else would eventually (and, in fact, on a smaller scale, has before). Covid would not have caused, or been able to cause, those specifie problems, at least not to such an extent, were it not for the systemic flaws already present. Thus, the case is made, the Flaws are the actual cause. This is explained preeeeetty clearly in the video...
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  88. Don't know about aluminium, but that's absolutely what happens with plastic. Steel, on the other hand, runs into the issue that different types of steel are created by way of introducing different ratios of different impurities... Something that's just made of Iron you can just melt down and make a new iron thing out of. Steel? Not so much. At minimum you have to sort out the iron to carbon ratio... but most types of steel have a bunch of Other elements mixed in to get the various traits that make them desirable for one task or another, which you somehow have to Extract before you can make any specific type of steel out of it.
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  89.  @spk1121  most of those were around then! Telegraphs regularly used the same abriviations common in text messages, for the same reasons! They dropped out of use with the telegraph itself, mind you, so the were reinvented by a new generation for new technology, but the results overlap heavily.
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  90. Apparently it's what they call themselves, so...
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  91. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior is one of several reasons that a lot of Kiwis don't exactly have a positive opinion of France. Which is kind of amusing given that Technically (by way of integrating their former colonies that didn't get, well, decolonized, into France Proper) it's actually our Nearest Neighbour. Closer than Australia, in fact. Opinions on greenpeace are a bit more... mixed. Though I get the impression most people don't know or care much about what they do other than discouraging whaling (which we tend to take pretty seriously around here given that, among other things, the list of legal stuff Japanese whalers like to ignore includes New Zealand's Oceanic Borders. <_< )
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  92.  @alfresco8442  interstingly, that q is actually a different sound from k... the difference is subtle and English doesn't actually Care (never actually Contrasting the two) but the way the 'k' sound is formed before a 'u' in most English dialects is actually... not a 'k', at least in IPA terms. it's formed further back in the mouth. So, qu isn't quite the same as kw, it's more like, well, qw, to be honest. Again, not actually Relevant in English, but interesting.
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  93. Quite a lot of them recomend products like the Finish nonsense in the video due to brand deals. So ignore anything that recomends a Specific brand, because that's just paid advertising. Amusingly, my Dishwasher not only had words to that effect, but actually came with a sample of such stuff.... and dire warnings not to use it with anything but the basic default setting because, unlike cheap powder, it's not actually compatible with any of the other cycle options.
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  94. Well, writing it down and repetition.
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  95.  @-KillaWatt-  Difference is that organized crime is Organized. There almost certainly wasn't less crime, just more effort put into keeping it out of sight and minimizing the spill over in day to day opperations. For the average citizen, yeah, so long as the guys in charge of the organized crime know where the lines are and stay inside them (and keep their underlings inside them as well) that's great, it actually works fairly well. And then you get the times when it Doesn't go that way, the people at the top are just that bit less motivated by Long Term profitability and sustainability and a bit more interested in any number of other things that encourage less reasonable behaviour. And then it all goes to shit. Like 'much, Much worse than it would ever be if you have a compitent police force but no gangs'. Because fundamentally, organized crime gangs, at their best, do a lot of the cops' work For them, in some respects more effectively due to not having to follow those pesky laws that are intended to stop those in authority from executing some convenient, but unrelated, random so as to 'be seen to be doing something about the problem' and other similar abuses. Which has it's obvious up sides... and obvious downsides. Which, yeah, if your local legal system, politics, and police between them are sufficiently fucked (the problem, incidentally, is almost universally corruption, rather than ideological affiliation), then well behaved gangs can actually be a step up. Of course, at their Worst, such gangs are indistinguishable from terrorist organizations... and it's a Lot more common for them to be closer to the worst they can be than they are to the best they can be, simply due to a combination of their recruitment pool and how human power structures tend to work once a given organization is allowed to grow past a certain size (that size is 'fairly small, with very limited ability to project influence beyond it's members', just by the by.)
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  96. Oh, i suspect it's less that he's backstabbing the people he represents, and more that the people he represents chose a name that makes it sound like They represent a lot more people than they do. After all "logging equipment manufacturers" Are part of the logging industry. Kind of. If they use a name that's technically accurate but Sounds like it also includes, say, actual logging workers... Well, it makes them sound more legitimate... Or you could be entirely right. Neither would surprise me at this point. (And I've not looked him, or them, up to find out)
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  97.  @Beelzebubby91  you...ah... probably don't want one "like the USA" as such, given that it includes people who went to mental health professionals on the basis of 'I haven't done anything, and I want to keep it that way, please help me with that' (yes, thought crimes), or 'two children kissed and an adult pitched a fit over it', 'urinated in pulic while drunk once' and other things that really shouldn't actually put one on such a list.
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  98. This isn't quite the case (at least in most dialects). You can absolutely get "the green one I have, but..." but the rest of it will be SVO (usually). Because English absolutely can do topic fronting (Pretty sure that's what's going on with it's questions, actually), and it can leave bits out, such as "I" or "You" as the subject when context makes it obvious, at least in casual speech, or definite articles, and of course English imperatives typically leave out the subject even in more formal speech too (unless imparting heavy emphasis or differentiating instructions to one party from instructions to another party). Heck, it could even use a passive in the second part or otherwise rejigger what is being said (it's not rare to hear '... but the red one is still hiding from me', for example)... (and edit: I just realised my understanding of the specifics breaks down just far enough at this point that I can't clearly explain why reordering the second half of that sentence doesn't work, even though reordering the first half does <_<) Of course, English being English, (and humans being humans) there's almost certainly a dialect or three that absolutely does this all the time just to make things difficult :P
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  99.  @ryalloric1088  On the other hand, they also tend to avoid conjugation and declension as much as possible, including case marking and the like, to keep the individual words simple to learn and easy to understand. Without such marking, SVO is actually a fairly logical order to fall into, as the verbis a fairly clear and distinct marker indicating where the subject ends and the object begins. (actually, English settled into it's rigid SVO order at least in part due to a similar issue, where many of it's case markings (and verb forms indicating agreement with the subject) were lost due to interacting with the (norse?) spoken by the danes in the danelaw, where the markings caused problems, as the same things were marked in both langauges, but with different sounds. It's why we still have an distinct verb form for third person singular subjects: It was the only one that was indicated by the same sound in both langauges! (the specific sound used changed later, but it was the only one not filed off because it was the only one that didn't cause confusion). ... Actually, there may have been other factors in the loss of case marking, but that was definitely the origin of the odd subject-verb agreement in English, and the loss of those markings is why English is so rigid in it's word orders and favours SVO so strongly.
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  100.  @thistleskeptic  indeed. Resisting arrest is a perfectly legitimate thing to be charged with, mind you, but it does (or should) presuppose that you were actually legitimately being arrested properly for something else that you were legitimately being charged with or actually doing prior to the police attempting to arrest you. Arguably, if they arrest you for, and charge you with, resisting arrest, and Nothing Else... They're actually just flat out admitting to kidnapping. Which is, you know, a crime. There are a couple of jurisdictions in the USA that rule that way (or at least, in accordance with that logic), actually. Though there are also a lot that don't.
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  101.  @benn454  or, (more accurately in most cases, so probably also in this one) , the older germanic tongues from which both English and modern German (as well as others in northern Europe) descend.
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  102.  @andrewmedlar214  well, it'd work if you can convince the relevant authorities to pass laws against what amounts to land (in this case housing) speculation and restricting non-resident ownership. Renting a property out is fine. Doesn't really matter who owns it, so long as their rates are reasonable and they actually maintain the building properly. Intentionally pricing it out of the market so no one rents it, (which is somehow a tax dodge and is causing major problems in the New York commercial real estate sector) is Not.
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  103. Indeed. Though I'm entirely satisfied with what we did get.
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  104.  @Sparticulous  strictly speaking even suburbia doesn't Require cars... Public transit is entirely doable, just massivley less efficient than it should be. And even that issue can be reduced or eliminated if the suburbs are actually built around the idea that people will be traveling by way of walking or biking to the local train station or the like most of the time.
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  105. The best counter argument to "china will get your data" is usually "your phone was Made in china. If it was going to be compromised, it already is!"
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  106. This is also why a lot of modern games with 'loot box'/gacha mechanics dodge being labled as 'gambling' in a lot of jusridictions despite being entirely chance based and Quite Intentionally hammering all the same problematic mental triggers in the brain of the player and taking their money in the process: there's no way to 'cash out', because nothing that the player gets out of it is transferable in any way, shape, or form... Meanwhile, the fact that you CAN 'cash out' is precisely why buying physical trading cards in randomised booster packs is so much less concerning (well, that and the odds being FAR less absurd... until you get to multiple layers of 'might not even appear in a given pack' rarities, anyway)... if you don't get what you wanted, and what you got wasn't intersting enough to use anyway, you can trade what you got with someone else (or sell what you got and then buy what you wanted from someone else). Video game companies go out of their way to prevent that.
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  107. What's really fun is watching dvds translated from Japanese with the audio and subtitles both set to English. The issue is that the primary target for people who wanted to read the subtitles wasn't people who couldn't hear the English audio, it was people who would watch the thing with the Japanese audio on with English subtitles (there's a whole history here that basically amounts to the publishers of English versions of things being stupid, and large portions of the fan base also being stupid, on top of the more obvious and reasonable causes that one might expect). Consequently, the audio and subtitles would be (well, will be. This still happens, to my understanding) Independently translated from the Japanese, often by entirely different translation companies, with no attempt what so ever being made to reconcile the two beyond the natural consequence of lining up the timing with what was happening on screen. Which means that if you want to watch with English audio* but need subtitles, the results are kind of wild. *such as, say, when watching almost any anime with highschool girls in it. The Japanese audio frequently ends up being physically painful if you have certain sensory issues.
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  108.  @BilboWaggins  actual communists at the time were (mostly) right about the problems with capitalism. Their solutions were (mostly) nonsense. Noticeably, most of the western world has spent the decades since patching out (to admittedly varying degrees) the problems with capitalism as it stood when the USSR came into being. In very few matters did this involve copying the Soveit Union... On the other hand, the USA spent much of that time being a case study in how Not to do capitalism... Or democracy. Simple fact is, capitalism and communism, as ideologies, have the same fault: they take one or two tools that are very useful for solving or analyzing a very limited number of issues very well... And insist that only those tools be used for Every Issue, no matter how unsuitable. As one might surmise, this Doesn't Work.
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  109. Not that much of an issue, we already have a bunch of other words that are randomly spelled differently in the US due to nationalist nonsense, or pronounced nonsensically in Brtiain because... reasons. And that's before you get into the Actual dialects (of which the USA has plenty but Britian has an absolute excess... and then there's the rest of the English speaking world). Just mark the spelling variant the same way you do for any other word affected by that split. More importantly, which syllable is stressed strongly influences the pronunciation of the entire rest of the word, and the stress pattern is often the only difference between two closely related words (generally a noun/verb, noun/adjective, etc. pair.)
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  110.  @redherring6154  I don't know about the specifics in Australia, but there's usually some rule about needing to hand over more than half the note at once so it doesn't magically become two notes. The banks will usually take some pretty destroyed notes so long as it's identifiably a valid note, as they essentially record that that note is destroyed and remove it from circulation. Shops, not so much.
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  111. not even the ad breaks, the clips from other videos have a similar problem.
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  112.  @hikaniko7371  It was called kiwifruit because New Zealand was the first country to really grow and export it in bulk. Prior to that it was known as a 'chinese gooseberry' (in the old tradition of the English language refering to anything forigen and strange as chinese (if it's foriegn and undesirable it would be refered to as French) and only really grown in small quantities locally in various places.
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  113. You can get 'rich' with a combination of ability and luck, but not so rich that you could spend every hour of every day spending your money on random personal level crap and still have more money than you started with. To get That rich, yeah, multigenerational wealth or being some flavour of bad actor.
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  114.  @yd8104  Big tanks and not doing a million stupid things specifically to waste your ink so you have to buy more sooner, I suspect.
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  115.  @Dreyno  Monarchs consistently passing their position on to their eldest children or what ever was actually a Vast Improvement over the previous system, which was a civil war basically every time the current monarch died (which is what happens with modern dictators, if they're not just couped instead). That's why the UK had such strict inheritence laws, and in fact a monarch could not change who would inherit form Them, any change to the inheritance law would only apply to the NEXT generation. Because succession wars were Brutal, and happened at least once every generation. Strict inheritance did away with 99% of them or so.
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  116.  @littleozarksfarmstead  it doesn't exist. He's saying that Voices of the Past (or someone else) should make it, or have it made.
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  117. The fact that having to miss wages to vote is even a thing is utterly damning regarding any claims to proper democratic process.
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  118.  @OctavioGaitan  If they run through steam and don't employ dodgy anticheat, most will run on linux just fine at this point. Non-steam games are trickier.
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  119.  @MichaelS-vy1ku  at least one claim of such is apparently false. The claim is that the voter turnout is higher than the eligible voters... The lie is that the number used for the "eligible voters" part is from the Last election. The number of eligible voters This election in that state is much higher and does exceed the number of votes. No idea about the others, of course. I'd lay good odds that there has been Some tampering (fraud or other) here and there in both directions, but most accusations (again, in both directions) are Entirely fabricated bullshit. Of course, were I a gambling man (and I'm not) I'd put money on more of the actual instances being to support Trump than Biden, just from the Extensive track record of the Republican party, and particularly those close to Trump, claiming their enemies are doing whatever the latest dodgy shit they themselves have got up to may be. But I'm fully aware that the Democrat politicians and high ranking party members aren't so much less corrupt than their Republican counterparts as they are less stupid/destructive about it, so losing that bet wouldn't surprise me much either.
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  120.  @inigobantok1579  ... American internet and passenger rail infrastructure is woefully poor compared to most of the rest of the western world and large portions of its highway system and bridges are falling apart. (Also: see the Texas electrical situation). Your education system has the same problem as your health system: you spend excessively on it, but it's so poorly set up that, at least on average, you get much worse results for your money. Corruption is a large part of that.
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  121.  @bunkie2100  The circumstances that lead to the war going how it did rather than being a bunch of seperate conflicts spread out over time or superseeded by events falls on all parties. The responsibility for the particular war we Got actually Starting falls very firmly on the heads of a very small number of Austrian officials (and, to some extent, the serbian terrorists who decided the best way to advance their nationalist cause was to assasinate the guy championing a plan to increase serbian autonomy within the empire by eleviating Serbia to the same status as Hungary and Austria. It was the 'Astrohungarian Empire' after all. Said assasination victim also being the primary opponent and voice of reason preventing the warmongers in the Austrian government from actually getting their way prior to that).
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  122.  @TheRockkickass  Add your health insurance to your taxes when comparing to the taxes in most European countries, as the taxes cover some or all of what you would be paying for with your health insurance, and generally do a better job of it too. (not to say it's without it's flaws, they're just usually less absurd than the flaws in the US healthcare, and particularly health insurance, system).
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  123.  @hagoryopi2101  Correction: BAD regulation allows corporations to do BS like this to suppress competition. Good regulation cuts such nonsense off at the knees. You do run into the unfortunate issue that the US legislative system has major problems, both due to corruption and by design, that make it a Lot easier to get bad regulation implemented than good regulation, but that's not a problem inherent to regulation, that's a problem with going well over a hundred years without patching out the bugs and security flaws in your governmental system or purging the system of various malware and virus equivalents (... ok, the analogy's breaking down there. This would be the various corrupt and malicious beurocrats, politicians, lobiests, etc. Note that such a purge is best done by way of legitimate process wherever possible).
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  124.  @ferretyluv  Can be if the wind's right (no idea if that can happen in Melbourne), arguably. Particularly if you're not in the sun at the time. It's worth remember that humans have no capacity to detect the actual temperature of anything (including their own bodies), but rather detect how quickly their body gains or loses heat... so the actual air temperature doesn't have to be all that cold to Feel freezing, if conditions are such that you're loosing heat rapidly for one reason or another (which wind is very good at, especially 'lazy' winds). And, of course, that gain or loss of heat is then processed relative to whatever baseline your body is acclimatized to.
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  125.  @Konarcoffee  IF! The person you are addressing already had the relevant skillset. Otherwise, this claim is delusional nonsense.
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  126.  @alexsis1778  non-existance does tend to rather hamper one's ability to kill people.
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  127.  @krazyito  they wash the eggs. Which, yes, gets rid of any stray chicken poop or whatever from the shell, but also strips it of the very properties that protect the Inside of the egg from diseases and such. If you don't wash them, they don't need refrigerating. Also, something about pasteurization. I'm not sure if that was that the US did or did not pasteurize the eggs, but I recall it being relevant. Also, something about eggs means that once you've refrigerated them once, you then have to Keep them refrigerated until you use them. It's a non-issue if you just don't to start with though. Where I live, the eggs don't get washed (though I suspect Something is done, because they're basically never dirty*), and they don't get put in a refrigerator until they reach the one in your house (and I think that's as much to do with fridges having special egg holding compartments as anything else). *Actually, I believe this is largely a product of the environment the chickens are kept in.
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  128. I'm lead to believe that cost of living drops pretty noticeably if you get out of Auckland. Though it's still not exactly low. Still, there are a lot of places that are worse, many of which Shouldn't be, as well.
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  129.  @JohnPrepuce  ... and how's that 'non-congested roads' thing going?
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  130. If it helps any, English arguably doesn't have a Future tense, as such. We use mood and aspect to distinguish​ future events from present ones (ok, it's more complicated and messy than that, but it should be a helpful starting point for getting your head around things, maybe.)
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  131.  @mushyroom9569  Yeah, problem with that: the last big wave of mass deregulation in the USA is the main reason such nonsense is possible in the first place.
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  132.  @JoseVasquez-vj3lo  most of the time 'faster' just means 'won't slow to a crawl trying to run the newer, more bloted software that isn't actually any better than what you were using before anyway', while Strorage and RAM make more difference in terms of what you can and cannot actually run.
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  133.  @Timorio  ... To be fair, it seems a lot of American comics published in recent years would serve better as toilet paper,so that's not an inherently unreasonable position to take :p
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  134. of course, the reason oil based fuels have been the standard for so many things for so long is energy density. Even allowing for the lack of efficiency, it still fit more power into a given amount of storage space than anything else, and also more power into less Mass than anything else. The main thing that stopped EVs being competitive until recently (and still makes battery powered trucks nonsense) is that no batteries were able to beat that energy density... and the ones we have now are rather horrifically prone to exploding and/or catching fire if anything goes wrong (of course, this lead to the implementation of a lot more features to prevent this from happening, meaning in many cases they're safer than the older, less energy dense batteries... assuming they were made properly.) Of course, if you power your vehicle using overhead wires, you get to skip that issue entirely... which is why electric locomotives and EMUs (and trams, and trolley buses) have been pretty much universally superior to the alternatives basically since they existed (at the expense of the infrastructure to set them up costing more) anywhere the infrastructure for them has been implemented.
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  135.  @MrKago1  this is Not True. More specifically, it is not true of copyright or patents. A number of large businesses try to excuse extortionate practices by claiming otherwise, but the "use it or lose it" idea Only applies to trademarks. And unlike the other, Trademarks aren't about fairly rewarding creators for their work, they're about Consumer Protection. Governments just found a way to offload the cost of that on businesses by making their interests line up with the consumer's in most cases. Part of the problem with the US patent system is that it's almost impossible to actually take a patent away once its been issued, and flaws with the system (largely that it's underfunded and understaffed, along with questionable incentives that would have worked fine if that were not tye case but break down when it is) lead to patents being granted to easily. Copyright used to be something you had to register (for free, unless the local clerk charged you for his time) for a 5 year period (the vast majority of books made all the sales they ever would and went out of print in that time period), which could be extended for another 5 for a nominal fee (high enough to not bother if your book wasn't selling particularly well, low enough to barely be a blip if it was successful enough to still be in print, or Probably affordable/worth it if other factors had disrupted publication and you were still actually Trying to make it available), then I Think another 5 for a much higher fee (still worth it if the book was successful enough to still be in active publication, which would require it to either be of cultural significance/value to the public, or at the very least you were putting in All the effort marketing it, and had probably cranked out some sequels that were also doing well)... And that was it, you were done. 15 years of profit on an exceptional work you kept putting effort into, 5 for mediocre work that you hopefully at least learned something from so that your next might be more successful. Noting that in most cases, good fiction is written by good authors, who traditionally either work fast, work on several projects at once, actually have a dayjob as well, or, when writing a Huge work, break it up and release it as several volumes... With the result being functionally fair pay for the amount of work put in (relative to actual sales). ... Then Disney got involved. Now you have automatic "registration" on a copyright that lasts for the life of the author +50 years (Just "life of the author" has been tried before. It ends in assassinations), or in the case of corporations, at least 75 years. That's big enough to create an artificial cultural Dark Age (that is, a period of time for which records are so sparse that they may as well not exist when historians look back and try to figure out what was going on,, or, to put it another way. There's some light based metaphor that I don't recall that leads to the name)... At least for anything that hasn't been pirated to hell and gone. Patents just flat out last 20-30 years (i forget exactly). Even the modern, broken system still does it's main job: advances are n longer routinely lost when their inventor dies. But it's still straight up monopoly rights, and once in the hands of corporations it gets abused a Lot. (Individuals exploiting such things was a known problem with systems in place to discourage and/or correct such behaviour. Corporations, not so much. The problems scaled, the solutions didn't.) But yeah, claims that they "must" protect any but trademark? Completely bogus in the USA, and most if not all of the primarily English speaking world. And usually misleading at best elsewhere (the law will define things Much more narrowly than what the corporations want you to believe in the vast majority if cases, just as an example. When it doesn't just follow the US (arguably actually British) model.)
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  136. The "middle hemisphere" isn't that much worse than the "eastern" and "western" hemispheres (which are either completely arbritrary (and variable) regarding their edges or not actually hemispheres, if I remember rightly) Unfortunately for the person in question, 'the middle of the Earth' is a whole Other thing... what with the whole 'the earth's core is made of absurdly hot metal under extreme preasure' issue.
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  137. The fact that they're specifically "Arabic" numerals is pretty much just random trivia unless you go into certain very niche fields after highschool though, so that's not acutally That bad. The classic survey regarding banning dihydrogen monoxide seems to produce the same results no matter where you carry it out, after all.
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  138. Oh, NZ's got a bit of that too. Stomped on that one fairly hard too.
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  139. Diversity absolutely can be a strength... Provided there is also unity. When there is instead division it is a weakness just as absolute. Likewise, multiculturalism is a good thing... Because a functional and healthy process of immigration and integration produces a multicultural society simply as a result of the rolling midpoint of that process, and, as noted, diversity coupled with unity is strength. Unfortunately, if you (general sense of the word) refuse to accept that and see integration (or, for that matter, the inevitable changes to the society being integrated into as a result) as somehow evil, and try to Force multiculturalism as an End State (or force immigrants into a permanent underclass which Cannot integrate, be it due to racism or exploitation founded on greed), then the result is again division, and weakness. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of people who profit from using division as a tool to screw over others for their own gain, and setting up some group or another as "the enemy" makes it easier to hide this. Those currently at the top, and those currently at the bottom make for the easiest targets, depending on your methods, goals, and audience. This is true on both sides of the political spectrum. (It happens less in the centre mostly because those who have been radicalised are easier to manipulate, and it's harder to sound like a reasonable moderate while doing this sort of thing, but it's not unheard of there either)
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  140. well, those openings and good public transport options.
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  141. And yet, it is also hard copy, in that it is a physical object, the text printed out on paper, rather than only existing as electronic data.
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  142. He was actually right about airships failing to really compete with land or sea travel, too. Of course, then areoplanes happened. And while flying boats could out compete ships on most passenger routes, lack of infrastructure held aircraft back when competing against trains... Until the various powers in WW2 built airbases everywhere for their warplanes and then sold them off post war, at which point most were converted to airports and that was that.
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  143.  @dannylive3000  'one of', yes. Also probably the most resistant to necessary reform, which is Really showing its effects at this point. But i'd aruge that it's less a matter of strong ideals uniting people, and more a matter of scale and inertia (not to mention a political and economic system actively designed to suppress the ability of all but the wealthiest citizens from actually having any meaningful effect not in line with what the wealthy elite already want, at least in any but the most extreme circumstances) making any change, positive or negative, very difficult.
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  144.  @nnnnnn3647  No, shit urban planning, poor infrastructure, and a lack of public transit makes you a slave to the car. ICE vs EV makes not a scrap of difference to that issue. Except in so far as changing demand and usage patterns as people switch to EVs Might encourage increased spending on public transit infrastructure... (you know, the one thing that ACTUALLY allows you to NOT be a 'slave to the car'.)
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  145.  @alonsocerva2596  sadly, this is not as true as you might wish. Still, the USA is a particularly odd and extreme example.
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  146.  @ssengageisop3952  barter is what you get when a currency based system breaks. The precursor to currency was a gift (and by extension probably reputation) based system. It's been ages since I read about how that worked though.
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  147. Not that the USA has ever actually rebelled against tyranny. Taxation and abolitionism, yes. Tyranny? no.
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  148. While that um/ium in English (and other modern languages) does just mean 'element', my understanding is that it comes from the number of elements whose original common name was '(metal/stone/substance) from (place)', where (place) was the town or city that was the most well known source of the substance at the time. This was then rendered in Latin (that being the 'common tongue' of the scientific community), if it wasn't Latin already, resulting in a rather massive portion of the elements on the periodic table having that ending, and thus it being used by analogy for most newly discovered elements, even when they Weren't named for places.
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  149.  @jgr7487  true, but the subject matter isn't usually quite so... chopped up... as this series.
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  150.  @ZestyLemonSauce  happens for rich people. usually when it shouldn't.
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  151.  @Robbedem  Future Motion, as I understand it.
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  152.  @BryanHancocks  they're hydrofoils. Also racing yachts. Very much boats by every definition. When they lean at all they lean inwards, at least that I remember seeing. Though much like submarines, the current iterations only operate like a normal surface vessel in a secondary mode. In their primary mode they're At Least half aeroplane... I'm not sure if anything that can't actually carry necessary supplies and equipment for its crew to operate on it for more than 24 hours without putting in at a port deserves to be called a ship, regardless of any other factors.
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  153. I've occasionally run across users manuals for electrical product where it's been blatantly obvious that different people translated different sections, or possibly just the person doing the work was rushed for time at the end, so the first few pages are perfectly good English, or close enough, but the last few range from 'that took some effort to figure out' to 'utterly incomprehensible'. And at least 'for to opening the boot, be pressing the button' is fairly easy to figure out: to open the boot, press the button. There's the old classic of instructions that say 'do A' (turn page) 'but not before doing B'. A comedy sketch example (the pause while the page is turned sees the guy working on a car engine, I believe, do thing A... and promptly get a face full of oil or some such), but one does sometimes encounter such problems.
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  154.  @nnnnnn3647  you might want to look into these rather clever devices invented... oh, over a hundred years ago now... we call them... Railways. Or, alternatively, Also over a hundred years old now, Aeroplanes! shocking! Then there are buses, rental cars, taxies (ok, that last one's a bad option). Heck, Bicycles!
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  155.  @bazahaza  individual delivery drivers pull this with just about every carrier... the better carriers will cease employing that particular delivery person the second time they try pulling that stunt of their own intitiative. Sometimes it's because your package actually couldn't be delivered for some non-standard reason so wasn't even in the van so you would have to go pick it up anyway, and the driver's boss decided this was the least problematic way to handle that, though. Some of the worse carriers actually actively encourage such nonsense with absurd quotas and caring about the metrics over the actual results.
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  156.  @timothymatthews6458  depends on the soldier. Random peasant levies armed with warscyths, pitchforks, and the like? If their lord was poor/desperate enough to be fielding such troops, they almost certainly had little or no armour. Proper men at arms (professional soldiers) under a wealthy lord? They might be as well armoured as most knights. And there are all sorts of points in between. It came down to what the law/liege demanded and what the noble (or, occasionally, his liege) could afford. But if anyone was going to shell out for good steel for their underlings, basic helmets were pretty much the first thing they'd bother with (the only piece of armour that helps more uses mass Many Times as much steel, and requires more precise fitting, among other issues. Basic helmets can be cranked out in bulk, at least in comparison.)
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  157. Problem with automatically treating people like adults is the rather large portion of supposed adults demonstrably aren't. Not that I disagree with your point there. It's more of an implementation issue.
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  158.  @eggwhites8441  blindness can be caused by a Lot of different things, and the eye has a lot of different parts (plus there's the bits in the brain that handle the data processing). Some are actually curable in the usual sense, some you can bypass the broken bit in various ways to at least regain some degree of equivalent function, others there isn't anything to be done about it. Deafness is very similar in that regard, even if the ear is a little less complicated than the eye.
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  159. Nah, good odds there was an AI (well "AI") involved. Humans are much more expensive. Much easier to set an AI that isn't actually suitable for the job to the task, involve no humans at all in the decision making process, and then pretend that this somehow makes the results not at all your fault (hint: unless the people who made the AI for you effectively scammed you, it's your fault. If they did, it's their fault. Either way, its not the AI's fault, because AI aren't people, not even to the limited extent that businesses (it's not just corporations) are considered people (it's entirely a matter of the logistics and reliability of the law. 'Businesses count as people* for legal purposes except where otherwise specified' just causes Massively less issues than the alternatives). *or, probably more accurately 'a business counts as a person'.
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  160. Seems like the solution to this is to use laser printers (which, last I heard, don't have this issue. Yet, anyway.) for day to day documents and such that don't need to be in colour, and get any necessary colour printing done at a print shop.
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  161. On the up side, it's not red anymore.
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  162. Not sure how it compares to Japan, but (parts of) New Zealand you get cicadas shreaking all day in summer. Only a few early in the morning, but by mid afternoon they all get going and it's quite thoroughly excessive. Definitely louder than they're depicted in anime, at least if you're anywhere near them
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  163. NZ's lockdowns have not involved curfews because they haven't been Necessary. Never had enough idiots in one place at one time, so the police etc. Were able to manage without them. Still, the other restrictions are such that no one really bothered going out after sunset at the higher alert levels, as there was simply no reason to. Everything was closed and you couldn't really interact with anyone you didn't live with anyway.
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  164. If you have an actually valid problem that is not being addressed, it's not NIMBYism. If your entire complaint amounts to 'but I don't want it near my house! (usually for reasons that are either incorrect or have nothing to do with the actual project)' then, well, it's called NIMBYism for a reason!
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  165. The melting pot can absolutely work, it has many times in the past. The problem in the modern western world is the attempt to arrest the process half way through and call that 'success', when it is in fact failure. The various elements must, in fact, Melt, and thus Mix, in order for it to work. The ideal of multiculturalism as an end goal (rather than the healthy natural expression of the ongoing and desirably assimilation process) prevents this just as much as the oppresive practice of forcing those of other cultures into being an underclass, a type of 'other' used to divide the lower classes into factions that are more easily exploited, favoured by the more malicious parts of the right of the political spectrum.
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  166.  @fjusposting2103  how about an O shaped "recovery"?
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  167.  @gerardflynn7382  Genetically modified food is not, in fact, 'illegal outside the US' , nor does it contain "no nutrition whatsoever". Some places outside the USA ban or have previously banned it outright, but far more common is heavy restrictions due to various possible issues caused by interactions between the genetically modified crops and other plants etc. in that country. Also, just about every plant you eat (yes, including the 'organic' ones) has, in fact, been 'genetically modified', just by way of selective breeding/crossbreeding/cuttings rather than messing about with chemicals more directly. A fair percentage would be bordline inedible, and decidedly unpleasent, otherwise. Brusel sprouts actually tasting good now rather than legitimately being as awful as everyone made out on TV shows and such is a recent development as a result of such practices.
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  168. Where have you heard this before? Most humans. Largely because most humans are not all that smart or wise. I'd say this is ideologically agnostic, but the wise tend not to continue to subscribe to failed ideologies, making them highly unlikely to support more extreme ideologies in either direction.
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  169. And if they're specifying it's because they're not following the standard convention that everyone would assume they were using if they didn't. And if they're doing something non-standard Without specifying, then they are doing their readers/students a major disservice.
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  170. Based on previous videos? A combination of administrative corruption and rich people and big businesses playing silly buggers with the property market. Then the pandemic came along and just kinda gave it a bit of a nudge on top of that... (and no, having a mayor who happened to be a member of the other political party wouldn't have changed anything. Elections don't change the bureaucracy, for one (and electing too many officials to jobs that require specific skills actually makes the problem worse, not better).
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  171. Well, that or its some sort of promotion to try to bring in repeat customers, in which case you're kind of both.
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  172.  @BamaNick  basically just the network effect creating a natural monopoly. ... Most countries encountering natural monopolies tend to either nationalise them or impose VERY strict regulation on those operating them, so far as I've seen. The USA is strangely allergic to either. (oh, they'll happily regulate small up and commers into the GROUND on a regular basis, but reigning in the abuses of an already established near-monopoly? pffft. good luck.)
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  173. Here's a fun extra bonus: they're not actually AI. If they were Actually AI then trying to blame the AI would be equivalent to trying to blame an employee: the response would be along the lines of 'Great. Now prove malice on the part of the employee or it's still (at least partially) your fault anyway.' Really, if 'it's the AI's fault' were valid then that Should be the equivalent of 'it's microsoft excel's fault'... which is to say, suddenly it is the problem of the people who Made the 'AI' (or spreadsheet program, or whatever) that it is not fit for purpose... or it promptly gets bounced back on the basis of 'it's entirely fit for it's Intended purpose, your using it for things other than that intended purpose is entirely on you' and you're back where you started: it's the fault of the company using 'AI' for things it shouldn't be used for.
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  174.  @bluetiger2468  Or at least buy the patent off him, as buying the patent and then just Not Doing Anything With It is actually substantially more effective at suppressing a technology than killing the inventor.
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  175.  @musgrovebarry  nah, a mixture of Evil and Stupid.
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  176. I think you may have overshot the present by a few hundred years, and possibly a nuclear war and/or invention of viable interstellar travel, there...
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  177. It is worth pointing out that, if you're not going to elaborate, you Should respond to negative questions in English in the same way: Yes for the speaker's statement being correct, and no for it being incorrect. Mind you, it is generally considered better to elaborate to avoid confusion, and when you do that the yes/no element behaves differently (I forget the explaination for what's actually going on there), and the rest of what you say is the acutal answer. Of course, if you're somewhat aware of the grammar and reasonably considerate of others you also avoid asking quesitons in the negative in the first place when speaking English, because most people are sufficiently ignnorant about such matters that they will not respond in line with the above, and you will be left with no idea what they actually meant and have to ask for further clarification, restating the question and getting them to restate the answer, causing further confusion and delay, so it's best avoided in general. Not that one is taught any of this, generally. In fact, in primary school we were actively taught to ask questions in the negative and other such tricks so as to force the other party to actually give more than single word answers or the like, the idea being that it facilitated conversation (a blunt 'yes' or 'no' will cause a conversation to stall out because it leaves the other party with nothing to respond to.) ... which is great when the idea is to keep a conversation going, not so much when you want useful and actionable information so you can get on with things.
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  178.  @rossmanngroup  it does that regularly. Your video is about keyword X, so it assigns advertisements about keyword X. This Regularly results in adds for a given product or service on videos pointing out how terrible that thing is. There's a legal channel that deals primarily (though not exclusively) in copyright matters, pretty much any time there's a video about copyright trolls, the adds will be for law firms offering to engage in exactly that behaviour. Videos about the problematic gambling in EA's sports titles on certain channels are almost universally preceded by ads for the very game the video is criticising (or at least the latest EA sports title). And so on.
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  179. I have some vague recollection that Harrison Ford (I think it was?) at some point said that the only way he'd ever play Han Solo again was if it involved Han getting killed off for good. He, aahhh... didn't really like that That was the role he was most famous for, and the consequences there-of.
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  180.  @Alaois  indeed. Some of its basic points are quite correct, but it goes about making them in the most asinine and inaccurate fashion, badly undermining those points.
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  181.  @Lil-JensStudio  That's at least partially a matter of societal indoctrination. You get societies that produce greater or lesser numbers of such people. Note that China and the USA are both Really Bad on this front, as are a number of Really Poor countries of all manner of cultural and ideological natures. There's a Lot of different factors that feed into that sort of thing.
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  182.  @drderplington  well, not Just diet (genetics Do play a part), but inadequate food (in quality as well as quantity), in childhood and especially during the teenage years Will stunt one's growth, it's true. Generally groups who could afford to eat more meat more regularly would be taller than their neighbours, but groups with similar diet who (due to isolation from each other of one sort or another) don't interbreed can end up with very different average heights, for a few different reasons (that basically amount to who did and didn't get killed off without having kids, one way or another) And, of course, individuals can be outliers.
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  183. A large portion of the land used for dairy farming isn't actually suitable for it, and requires extensive irrigation as a result.
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  184.  @asmodiusjones9563  Mind you, year round indoor kitchens predate AC by... a lot... Though usually in colder climates where days hot enough for that to be a problem if your kitchen has good air flow are not all that common.
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  185.  @guycross493  which would be why such arrangements tended to use a relay system.
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  186.  @Bionickpunk  Ehh, there are people who disagree with his political positions enough to hate him, there are people who don't like his style... but the group of people who have come across him and are not either of those is Pretty Big.
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  187.  @oru_malayaleezombie7329  Well, so long as its extremism (violent action to force change where peaceful methods have failed) rather than radicalisation (thinking progressively more divorced from reality and becoming more focused on destroying the 'other' for not being sufficiently 'ideologically pure') you're probably all right. for given values of all right. ... ... The problem is that the one tends to feed into the other, so you end up with radical extremists... which is often a self solving problem in the long run, but Sucks for anyone having to deal with their nonsense until then.
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  188. To be fair, with the way party politics work out, resolving that sort of thing (beurocratic nonsense, be it caused by low level officials or highly questionable business decisions) is probably over half of a local MP's actual job.
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  189.  @thisismycoolnickname  if you mean in English, that issue would be largely because the English 'long' vowels are mostly nothing of the sort (not that english doesn't have vowels that are techically long, mind, but that's a whole other issue) , the lable is an artifact of history from before the great vowel shift, if I remember rightly.
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  190. I must unfortunately point out that the only reason they defy translation is because there is so little call for English speakers to actually use them on anything approaching a regular basis. If there were, both spelling and pronunciation would have long since changed as the word itself was aborbed into English proper (and shortly there-after you would start seeing English apply its various processes to them, verbing it, splitting it into several not-entirely-connected meanings, merging some of those with other words to cover different gramatical slots, etc.)
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  191. The key there, is that there are Qualifiers in that quote. A great enough or permanent gain in security may well be worth some small amount of liberty, if only on the basis that insufficient security can make maintaining one's liberties impossible anyway. Not that that matters, because most people will absolutely give up essential liberty for small, temporary, and often Illusionary increases in safety. But put a minor, temporary inconvenience in front of them that is necessary to preserve their very Life from a legitimate threat that isn't actively and visibly trying to stab them right this very moment and they freak out on you....
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  192. I probably would have taken the airbags over the sun roof myself (having actually negative desire for a sunroof)... but that's rendered utterly meaningless by the part where I wouldn't be buying a vehicle at all thanks to disability preventing me from driving, so I imagine that's not terribly relivant as a counterpoint. heh. I do wonder what the numbers would have looked like had you had a model with Both, and a model with neither, with appropriate pricing...
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  193.  @klabkebash  and then you go to other countries where many cities are even better even if you Don't have a car.
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  194. Nope, because that sentence is faulty. The "at" is stranded, not because it's at the end of the sentence, but because it has no valid target. 'At', in this context, requires a point on a measurable scale as a target. The sentence doesn't have such a thing. Meanwhile, 'is louder than' is incompatible with everything after 'the third one'. Replacing "is" with "runs" works better, but still requires "run at" to be replaced with something that indicates aspect and/or a temporal trait... I mean, it's got all the things in it, it just doesn't actually Work.
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  195. the older measurements are easier to make estimates with for most human scale activities... because they were pretty much all designed for precisely such tasks in the first place. the reason why there are so many different units with such bizarre conversion ratios is because they were never a single coherent system, but instead the formalization and standardization of many different systems used for many different purposes. the metric system, on the other hand, is designed primarily for ease of calculation (and the many benefits That brings) particularly in the context of science and mass production, paying only as much attention to practical day to ray use as it must in order to be usable enough to be adopted (for reference, only the multiples of 1000 are officially part of the metric system. the 10, 100, 1/10th and 1/100th units are unofficial additions adopted in various places (centimeters are super common. Centiliters, decimeters and deciliters, despite being Very useful scale units, rather less so).
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  196. Short legs,but very speedy.
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  197. That's a badly designed form. Written by someone who does not know how English grammar works... I'd give better than even odds that they were a native speaker whose particular path of education and/or hobbies did not include the few disciplines that require one actually understand how English grammar actually works...
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  198.  @MichaelButlerC  well, they're not great at traveling, as a rule.
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  199.  @adamcetinkent  See, your problem there is your willingness or not to accept a thing which exists. It is an informal register of a specific dialect. Now, it may not be apropriate or sensible to use a given register and/or dialect in a given context (and those who insist that we should not teach children how to speak a standard dialect and formal register As Well As their local dialect, the informal register they use with their ingroups, and whatever technical dialect they end up picking up from their education and employment, are best ignored (for want of willingness to put in the effort of writing multiple extra paragraphs on the matter), but that's an entirely different matter from rejecting them as valid in the correct context. The issue isn't that people can, and do, use slang or various dialects among the appropriate ingroup. It's the people who are incapable of speaking in more standard and formal registers than needed (and those who would suppress attempts to impart this skill to them) as it makes it much more difficult for them to communicate with others, and thus to actually represent their interests when those Outside their ingroup get involved. (which is to say, refusing to actually teach proper standard dialect and formal register can be just as effective a tool at suppressing a group as actually supressing their langauge/dialect/whatever. Arguably more effective if you're willing to play the long game.)
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  200. Forget modern day German and Dutch, Latin had already influenced the Germanic tongues (of which English is one) before English was even a thing. And most of the borrowings are a lot more recent than the Norman invasion, and are due to French diplomatic dominance, and Latin being adopted as the common langauge of Science (largely Because it was a mostly dead language, but also because for a long time religious institutions were the only ones really engaging in scientific persuits in anything approaching an organised fashion in most of Europe), both centuries later.
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  201.  @Ithirahad  usually, at least in my experience, it's used with a meaning closer to 'X everywhere'... which can be good or bad depending on context.
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  202.  @sessh573  to be fair, many of those things being "so bad", or at least 'a little bad but a really dumb idea' was kind of the point. (Though, yeah, some of them are just cultural differences from being thousands of years ago, and a few of them are missing a bit of context, if I recall the story correctly.)
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  203. At the time it would have seemed a reasonable proposition regardless. The USA was in a bad state and the problems with the Soviet Union (not all of which were strictly problems with communism, a number being inherited unchanged from the often only slightly modernized feudal rule under the tsars and aristocrats that came before. The Soviets fixed a few of those problems and created a number of new ones, naturally) had not yet become readily apparent. Edit: or at least, the fact that they weren't just a temporary and unavoidable result of revolution, civil war, etc. that would soon be sorted out hadn't.
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  204.  @WaffleAbuser  I mean, a US court (I think it was in Ohio? Might be misremembering) recently ruled that boneless chicken can have bones in it, and customers should, in fact, Expect it to have bones in it... (also, incidentally, because of how they went about it, the ruling ALSO means that there's no such thing as a valid warranty in the state in question.)
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  205. Oh, homelessness might be particularly noticeable in the USA, but it's not a solved problem in the rest of the world, (even ignoring the obvious places). Now, it a lot of places it requires more extreme circumstances to reach that point than seems to be the case in the USA (and support for those who have is often better), but it's still a thing which happens.
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  206. I'd say include all four streets, but stop at the centre line. (and the centre of intersections). Avoids both issues.
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  207.  @Hrudaya07  A journalist doing their job takes the side of truth, and the side of their audience (these occasionally conflict Slightly, but not in ways a sensible person cannot resolve correctly.) When they give equal weight to blatant propaganda and falsehoods from sources with vested interests and present it as being just as legitimate as well researched and provable fact, they are nit being impartial, they are being active partisans for the side(s) that are Lying. When they do so to the detriment of their audience they are failing twice over. The difference between a journalist doing their job correctly and a spy is entirely a matter of whose interests they are acting in. (On a related note: freedom of the press has nothing to do with a journalist or reporter's "right" to access information. They have no more rights and privileges than anyone else on that front. Freedom of the press refers to the right to Publish. Litteraly means that use of the Printing Press is not restricted by the government etc. (In Europe, at various times and places had done all sorts of things to restrict the use of the printing press, and punish people whose works they did not like. The idea was to avoid that.))
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  208.  @Honestcritic79  ... You don't have a monarch. By definition you're still doing just as well at the whole "Republic" thing as you ever did. Failing utterly at both proper Democracy (representative or otherwise) And good governance, sure, but until you set up a hereditary monarchy (or Maybe, at a stretch, a full-on actual Theocracy) you're still doing just fine on the "republic" front.
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  209. Oddly enough, horses and wagons were very common in Britain in a similar time period. The wagons just tended to be smaller and require less animals to pull them. The result? Perfectly compatible with most streets and roads of the time (and, of course, there were the trains...)
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  210. Also worth remembering that A: The ideologies of the parties have shifted quite a bit over the decades and B: state and party politics are such that, in many states, only one party is really Relevant, so they collect up all but the most extreme of what you'd naturally expect to be the other party's supporters and issues within the state, because that's the only way to actually get anything done on matters that are actually important (and you instead end up with the factions within that party forming the de facto Actual party-equivalents in that state).
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  211.  @GreatSageSunWukong  The freezer is at the bottom because, as a general rule, the bottom is more awkard to get at and the freezer is the part you need to get at least often (well, of the two doors, anyway.) Makes good sense from a usability/accessability stand point if you must have both in the same unit. Makes negative sense from an simplicity/efficiency stand point, of course. edit: Also what MrSheckster said above.)
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  212.  @shakirakashah8590  To be fair, most millionares don't Need to be that close to the edge (plus or minus local conditions in certain cities rendering anyone who owns land Technically a millionare, but in practice not actually a millionare unless they move WAY outside of the big cities to take advantage of land value differences), the fact that they are is usually a result of a series of moderately unwise choices regarding changes in lifestyle compaired to their actual regular, secure income at any given point leaving them with a Lot of debt, or a gambling addiction (usually gambling on the stock market rather than in cassinos, mind you). And tax evasion is entirely optional (and very dumb). Less so the expenses that can ruin less wealthy people.
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  213.  @ncls.1371  well, it probably would have gone differently, at least. Russia had Issues.
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  214.  @azuarc  Interestingly, turns out speed limits in the USA are routinely set ... I think it was 10mph lower than they should be... because no matter what the traffic engineers did, enough drivers would go at least 10mph over the set speed limit that it wasn't safe for anyone else to not do so. So they set the limits lower to compensate, so when you're going 10mph over the speed limit... you're going at what the speed limit should be. Of course, they also frequently determine what speed limits should be by measuring the speeds drivers go at without them, finding the average, and setting it just slightly lower than that. This is a bit of a problem, because what should actually happen is that the road's speed limit be set by its intended use, and then the road itself designed to encourage drivers to remain close to that speed.
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  215.  @cllewis1  Also the non-American audience.
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  216. As someone with hearing and processing issues, the accent thing can be a legitimate problem. No good reason to care if the person is Indian (or anything else for that matter) or not otherwise though.
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  217. Probably abusing the patent system.
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  218. xUdieToox like many simple things, the key requirements weren't there yet. Containers required advanced metalworking techniques which weren't developed until after ww1. You just couldn't get enough metal cheap enough to make enough to be useful before then. Further, there were a few small improvements (pallets and related bits) before the container. Not much before, mind you, bit it did help.
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  219.  @CGplay186  Of course, Russia says words to that effect about anyone and everyone who they share a border with.
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  220.  @logicalemotion  I'm pretty sure 'more likely to actually participate in the fight' and 'more likely to get killed' are interchangeable terms for the same thing.
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  221. literal fruit you'll find there is actually a difference between k and q. The q is further back in the mouth. English just doesn't have that as being distinct unless followed by a w sound (written as u). Trying to pronounce kwi as an actual k (like in kick) rather than q both feels awkward and, if you manage it, sounds different. Of course, I'm fairly sure that there are no k/q minimal pairs because of the whole qu thing, and, English spelling being what it is, there are a few exceptions, so you could make a case that q is unnecessary fairly easily, but it does have its own sound. I believe you're right about x though. Generally at least. Dialects can be weird.
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  222.  @Chewy_GarageBandDad  you're half right. Corruption is why they get away with this shit at all. On the other hand, the state being able to stomp on their nonsense is basically the only reason much worse didn't happen much sooner. The corporations and rich businesmen keep trying this shit, the public fail to stop it, it hits a tipping point and the state brings down the hammer on the latest round of destructive nonsense. When the state collapses you just end up with warlords instead. Feudalism at best. Which isn't to say there's not a Lot of room for improvement, even in nations run much less poorly than the USA. But getting rid of the state favours the wealthy, because they then defacto Become the state.
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  223.  @Schniedel69  That would be "The United Kingdom Of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Britain (when not used as a shortening of the above, of course) doesn't even include all of Scotland and Wales. Might not include all of England either, not sure on that one. Definitely doesn't include Northern Ireland. Because Britain is the Island. (and the term 'The British Isles' is sort of a mixed bag when it comes to nationalism, because it is partially derrived from the fact that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (at the time not only Northern Ireland) owned... Basically all of it... but also because it's an archapelago (not sure on the spelling there), and Britain is the largest island within said geographical feature... which so far as I know has no other name.)
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  224. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't actually change much of anything in most places unless non-resident land owners were actually the cause of local problems that couldn't be corrected otherwise.
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  225. Indeed. The spelling system/alphabet Does have room for improvement, but any attempt to make it more phonetic will promptly trip over the rather extreme variety of dialects which use it. Even just the USA has enough to cause issues, never mind Britain.
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  226. Well, shunting the express trains onto their own dedicated track would free up capacity on the regular lines (which Do stop more frequently) but... Yeah, this video is full of errors, misrepresentations, and the same basic fact being repeated back to back as if it was new information...
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  227. usually, to my understanding, there will be records of what was used prior to/at the point of contact, indicating different terms used, and then later records where the terms used have changed. At least when it comes to the Romans.
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  228.  @JAKempelly  people will drive faster on a road with no onstreet parking... if it still has the full paved space that the onstreet parking would normally occupy. Stick islands, trees, etc. in there so the actual bit of road they're driving on is narrower, they will generally slow down (occasional idiots aside).
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  229. Don't know anyone who considers him to be crazy, to be honest. Heard plenty of Other complaints about him, sure, but that one's a first.
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  230.  @margi9103  The best part is that his changes didn't acutally simplify any of the complicated broken bits, only the already simple bits (where they broke the patterns that made them more manageable to spell). It was all about nationalism, not actual improvement. And then of course they only actually stuck Highly erratically, making it even Worse.
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  231.  Dale Gribble  1st world: USA, NATO, and their allies. 2nd world: USSR (and/or China?) And their allies. 3rd world: Everyone else. Kind of hard to claim that an EU member doesn't fall into the first category, whatever their other issues.
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  232.  arnold jayeola  err... assuming you're American? Honestly most of both your enemies and your allies wish you'd just go away, and the difference between the two is how recently you bombed them and how threatened they are by your rivals (mostly China, a little bit Russia). Probably the main reason no one's actually stood up to the USA on any significant level is that you have a long history of stageing coups against democratically elected moderate government's and installing right wing dictators in countries that do, not to mention the Nuclear Weapons (and it has been Decades since anyone trusted that you wouldn't use them if it looked like you might loose a war that had consequences beyond "oh, guess we'll go home then" for you.) And that's some of your closest allies, Before Trump screwed over your diplomatic position. Other people's opinions are lower.
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  233. it also facilitates 'autumnal' rather than 'fall like'. Sometimes it's less a latin obsession and more a desire to find a word that'll actually fit the meter etc. in a poem or song or play.
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  234. I believe we ended up with 'knowledge' and 'wisdom', but neither retains the full set of possible forms if that is the case.
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  235. English does, in fact, have rules, at least as much as any language does. Unfortunately, we Also have many decades, possibly even centuries, of tradition of teaching utter nonsense instead of the actual rules of the actual language. A few decades back people who actually knew what they were talking about realised this and, having gathered enough evidence to prove it, convinced the educational systems in much of the English speaking world to basically toss the lot, keeping only a very few provable useful basics while they spent several more decades nailing down the Actual rules and, with much more difficulty, the best way to go about teaching them. From what I hear, many American schools kept right on teaching what amounted to half remembered fragments of style guides which weren't great at their intended role (One of the most popular of which is infamous for violating its own rules in the text describing them, or in text used as an example of how to correctly follow a different rule) of allowing one to pretend that one could pass for a member of the upper classes when they were published many decades before, nevermind teach children basic langauge skills in the class room. I'm not sure on the current state of the project to create an actually Useful ciriculum teaching English as it actually works, though to my understanding there has been progress made. I have a book from the time when such things came with a second copy of the same work on CD (to facilitate the use of a search engine and other useful tools) that's almost a thousand pages long that is an actual structured and accurate reference guide to, well, basically English Grammar, based on how people actually speak (at least when speaking the more standard dialects).
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  236. Observe, if you will, the existence of Wikipedia. For reasons both practical and legal it cannot be perfectly what you desire, but it's certainly making a decent go of it regardless.
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  237. You'd think asking to see the expiration date would be the First thing to do with a passport, followed by checking that the picture actually matched the person (simply because doing it in that order is quicker and easier and you need to check both anyway.)
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  238.  @topilinkala1594  It's very common to have IV rather than IIII if the numbers are made of metal, because that way you can make all the Roman numerals by casting the same shape twice and then just cutting the two shapes in different places to get all the numbers you need, where as using IIII you have to make more different metal shapes. Apparently made a huge difference, depending on how the numbers were being made.
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  239.  @Egooist.  oddly enough, if monopoly is played according to the printed rules by people who actually know how the game works... to my recollection it takes maybe half an hour, with quite a bit of that time taken up with resolving auctions. It's also very dull.
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  240.  @bfelten1  Sadly, in many countries the "English" taught actually Is american... To be fair, there's functionally two main dialects of Written English and you kind of need to pick one, and for much of the world American English is more practically useful most of the time. (Spoken English is a whole other mess).
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  241.  @Myrtlecrack  Noah Webster's entire Thing was "Not British"... It was nationalist propaganda, in essence. The British following along would have defeated the point. The real problem is arguably that even in American english his reforms only partially stuck, and not in any consistent manner, so rather than bringing the spelling more into line with the pronunciation (of a certain dialect that it would have then drifted away from again by now), and thus easier, all it acctually did was make it Less Consistent, and thus more difficult.
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  242. Sunk cost, not sunken, btw.
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  243.  @elLooto  When I was in primary school some 30 years ago a bit north of Christchurch, we were still taught the (a?) south island (or possibly more local?) dialect of Maori (Not that we were taught the language as such to any great degree, but various words and songs and such), where the 'wh' was to be said essentially as hw. Various Maori place names were 'deanglicised' when they'd never been anglicised to begin with, because they didn't match the northern dialect used as 'standard'... most of them have since had their spelling reverted. There's been a Lot of poor or questionable decisions made when it comes to the Maori language over the decades. For example, when it was banned from being spoken or taught in schools back in the day? Yeah, that wasn't racist white imperialists attemting to suppress the native language, it was racist old Maori people insisting that for the white children to learn to speak Maori was completely unacceptable. And, of course, the standard method of punishing all but the most minor infractions in schools at the time was physical punishment, and the Maori kids were far more likely to slip up and speak Maori than the white kids who'd never learned it... Whoops?
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  244.  @yingle6027  Thing is, they'd say that it was about ensrining equality in the law whether it was about that or about mining... heck, they might even believe it's about ensrining equality in the law... but also see nothing wrong in exploiting the process to attain secondary goals... such as allowing mining which really shouldn't happen if that serves their interests.
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  245.  @alligatormonday6365  I do have to wonder what high end (well, not Super high end "just throw money at it" type places) restaurants do when it comes to customers who want the sort of food they make, of the quality they produce but legitimately can't eat some of the ingredients? Like, just telling them (or worse, Not telling them!) to deal with it seems like it could go wrong all sorts of ways, and just not serving them seems suboptimal (especially if they're part of a group and not the one responsible for the situation (a company event with the sort of boss who doesn't listen to objections, say)), But I can also see how making special accomodations for such would be impractical. Personally, having a lot of such problems, I've given up on eating out entirely (no great loss, I have other issues that make getting out of the house at all difficult a lot of the time). Its surprising how many places can't even handle you asking what is in the menu items to ensure it won't make you sick, nevermind ordering things that aren't on the menu at all. Admittedly, the last time this came up was probably 15 years ago and the general awareness of such issues here Has improved since.
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  246.  @ITTechHead  then consider that NZ's system does have a level 4 as well, which is/was quite a bit more restrictive. (There's a pretty big jump between level 2 and level 3 though.)
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  247.  @josiahz21  Funny thing: supposedly the 'wizard' and his cat are based on a historic priest, and the smurfs are based on the deadly sins and various other rather concerning things of similarly unholy nature. ... ... I have no idea if that's actually true or someone just noticed some similar names and decided the overlap was funny, mind you.
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  248.  @alephnull7007  oddly, William and his lot introduced a lot less French into English than most people think... most of it comes a Lot later when French was the dominant langauge of and diplomacy in Europe. And, of course, Normandy (or whatever it was called before the Normans set up there) was Right There across the channel, so a lot of French words slipped in over time as a result of trade. Not to say that they weren't responsible for Any of it, of course. Definitely some there.
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  249. "at the end of the credits" would seem to be the problem. That's the sort of thing that needs to be front and centre for even Half the audience to actually register it <_<
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  250.  @foobarturkey  Linux is better than it used to be, and going by what I've seen since I last tried to use it, if it handles something At All usually handles it well. Still, last time I tried to use it I found myself in the weird situation where any given version supported Either my laptop's screen Or it's touch pad correctly, not both. Ended up installing Windows 8 (because I still had a CD for that) instead, which works just fine (it has plenty of its own problems, but none of the ones that actually affect me are deal breakers.) ... Of course, the reason I wanted Linux was because the thing Came with windows 10, which was Awful. (Also, this whole OS business is what caused me to give up on the shop I got the laptop from. When you pay someone who supposedly knows what they're doing to set up your computer Properly so it actually works right, you kind of expect to, at the other end, get a computer that's set up properly and actually works right, and if that's not actually possible you can reasonably expect that they'll actually tell you as much at Some Point! ... This is not what happened.)
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  251.  @Alfred5555  English, gramatically, has no gender. It Does, however, inherently mark Sex on a lot of nouns, including on a number that don't actually Have a sex, and things that aren't even alive. The reason this is not gender, in gramatical terms, is that gender is specifically an agreement system, forcing the adjectives and possibly verbs to change to match, which English doesn't do. Importantly, English doesn't actually mark gender in the sense of 'Gender Identity' either, and pretending it does is not only Really Annoying to people who care about language at all, it's also actively counterproductive to the cause of actually improving the lot of transgender people in general. Because ideological radicalisation ruins everything.
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  252. Kind of hard to achieve much with one or both houses controlled by the opposition and actively blocking things. Especially when you have to fix all the crap they broke the last time before you even have the time to do anything new. Even so, not doing anything is still a step up from the usual Republican play book of "find a functioning part of the federal government and break it."
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  253. New Zealand's borders aren't going to be fully open for some time. 14 day quarantine for people coming in from other countries (unless this whole 'ok, we Know these countries are fine, and all have sufficient protections on Their borders, so traveling between them without that delay is ok' thing pans out.) to make sure they haven't got it, longer if it turns out they have. Makes preventing it from taking hold again quite possible. Edit: closing Some borders is useless. Just closing your borders to people from China would have done nothing (most US cases came by way of Europe). You have to shut the borders Completely, to Everyone (freight's ok if properly handled, though). And doing it Properly isn't a matter of "the democrats stopped trump" that's "trump wouldn't even consider it in the first place". Because exceptions for rich people are just as bad as any other. (That's why the WHO recommend against travel bans (or whatever it was) btw. Not because the WHO is in China's pocket, but because a travel ban on one or two places is Not a Full Border Closure, and thus wasn't good enough. They never recommend against closing the borders to travelers entirely, and doing so was a Key part of the strategy of all actually successful countries.)
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  254.  @roflBeck  Nope, they do everything the same as before... and then don't give the creators their cut. Which is why no one who pays attention has ever believed that the reason for the rules that they use to demonitize things has anything to do with advertisers objecting to having their ads on certain types of content. (and when they keep making it ever harder to allow a content creator to not be associated with certain advertisers, when the connection in that direction has a MUCH bigger reputational effect than the reverse, well...)
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  255.  @LonelyKnightess  from what I've read, as is often the case, it was a mix. He did some really clever things and some really dumb things, and some of the allied commanders and units facing him handled that well and others handled it poorly. I vaguely recall a series of battles back and forth over the same bit of ground because both sides were being kind of absurd with regards to their logistics. They were quite capable of taking the place at the other end if the strip, but not of getting the logistical support to keep it before the other side could counter attack. Mind you, I came across the relevant things some years ago, now, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was misremembering.
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  256.  @berryesseen  ... For reference, the V and W sounds are so imediately and obviously different to speakers of most English dialects that the inability to make the distinction was traditionally seen as a speech imediment (or an overly pretentious affectation, depending on what was going on in the upper classes at the time), if less so than people who were unable to distinguish R from W. For added bonus points, W is decidedly non-standard in how one forms the sound. Phonetically it doesn't actually even fit on the consonant table properly, because the table has 'how is the airflow obstructed' on one axis and 'how far back, forward in the mouth is the airflow obstructed' on the other... and W (and a very small subset of globally MUCH rarer other sounds) is formed by obstructing the airflow in two places at once. Neither of which are the same point at which it is obstructed to form a V. V is the voiced form of F. F and W sounds have nothing in common, and the only thing that V and W have in common (voicing, that is, vibrating the vocal cords) they also share with B,D,G,Z,J, and several others.
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  257. For larger structures, you can build out of concrete and implement the various techniques and equipment needed to make that earthquake resistant to a sufficiently high degree and still have the price be reasonable... better hope you made it well enough to withstand the strongest earthquake that happens while people are living in it though, because if it comes down it's going very poorly for them. For smaller structures, you can achieve very high earthquake resistance with wood, if you build it properly, at a much lower price, and also build it in such a way that, in the event that an earthquake is strong enough to bring it down, it's a lot more survivable for those inside than a concrete structure would be. That said, that's the Frame. Buildings in New Zealand are generally built in line with those two bits of logic, but most houses, despite having light wood frames, will be Clad in stone blocks, and roofed in concrete or metal (and the whole frame is structured in such a way that the roofing generally won't fall Into the building, but rather end up being dumped off the side one way or another.) On the other hand hospitals and other similar large structures are basically built on giant shock absorbers (I was in one during a significant aftershock. The noise from the shingle-y ground nearby was ... Dramatic... Actual shaking in the hospital building? None, the shock absorbers soaked the whole thing. Not sure what it was like during the big earthquakes proper though). Not quite sure what they do with the middling sized structures though. Mind you, you'd be surprised how strong an earthquake a building built entirely of brick can survive if you build it right (though anyone in or around it will still have to watch out for the occasional bit of falling masionry or the like so it's still not a great idea) Of course if you Don't such a structure can rapidly disassemble itself into its component parts... (both happened during the big earthquakes in Christchurch. The railway station was a typical artifact of the Ministry of Works days: It was probably on-time-ish, it was almost certainly well over budget... it stayed up for decades after the sort of rail services it was intended for had been scrapped and withstood one of the biggest earthquakes the city, and country, has ever seen, requiring only relatively minor repairs, despite being made pretty much entirely of brick. On the otherhand the private house, which I think was built much more recently, also made entirely of brick, just completely disassembled itself. From memory the owner, who was inside at the time, was basically unharmed, but only because he was basically launched out the window early on in the process)
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  258. If I remmeber rightly, the American Football 'world cup' (or world series? whatever) was so called because originally it was played between two different organizations that gave themselves different names basically meaning 'the organization for this sport in the north american continent', and the name was a joke (no one else played the game, but they had two continents worth of teams, or something like that). Edit: ahh, that's what I get for not reading all the comments before replying. The America's Cup was originally called something else. It got renamed after no one else could win the thing for an absurdly long time (due to the competition ships having to be able to survivie sailing to the USA to compete, while the American ones could be optimized for speed without consideration for ability to survive long trips in rough seas). Once that limitation stopped being relevant, non-American teams started being able to win the cup (first Australia, then New Zealand (who proceeded to be the first to then successfully Defend it other than the Americans)).
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  259. Count Dankula is a spectacular storyteller. His political takes range from the 'understandable given his history, but still bad' to 'downright delusional'. Quoting him in support of any sensible position is very much the sort of move that gets people to tell you to stop helping.
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  260. You also have the fun issue of web design (and often also general programming) getting "worse" as hardware gets better, with the result being little or no gain for the end user, and actually something of a red queen's race where they have to keep upgrading not to have their experience Degrade. I put worse in quotes there because sometimes it's legitimately just straight up worse with no real benefit other than allowing companies to hire less skilled people to do the job of making the thing, other times there is a trade off that does actually provide indirect, or occasionally even direct, benefits as well.
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  261.  @busimagen  The difference is mostly units of measure of volume, if I recall correctly. That and possibly units of length smaller than an inch, which no one actually uses in the normal course of events. The Imperial system is basically just 'every specialised unit of measure of things relevant to a specific field, standardized such that unit X is always unit X, with people then prefering to reuse existing units rather than create new ones if the existing units were sufficient to their new task'. Over time some fell out of use as the specialty they came from was less significant, and then sometimes things were rationalized a bit when that left gaps that became an issue later. Imperial units are Very Good at the things they're intended for, and Terrible at everything else, and conversions are a pain. US customary units Started Out as British Imperial units, but then things happened. SI units (kind of sort of metric but not exactly) are intended primarily for scientific applications, and for stuations where great precision is needed, as well as to minimise, simplify, and/or eliminate conversions wherever possible. Officially only the base units and multiplying or dividing it by 1000 are actually Things in SI, but you'd be hard pressedd to find a country that uses the metric system that doesn't add additional units for practical reasons: Centimetres (1/100th of a metre) are pretty much universal, for example. Some places use decilitres (1/10th of a litres), most places will use teaspoons (5ml), tablespoons (10 or 15ml depending on country), and cups (250ml, or 1/4th of a litre, or 200ml, or 1/5th of a litre, depending on where you're talking about... good odds on one of those having it's origin in American units and the other in British, though it's quite possibly unrelated, but it's very confusing when you end up with the wrong one!) for cooking because it's just substantially more practical for things of that scale for that particular application. ... and don't be surprised if you find the occasional stray imperial unit still floating around for certain niche applications.
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  262. Nah, more like crashing on your adult kid's couch after losing most of your stuff in the settlement for a divorce you initiated. ("You" being the UK in this context)... Possibly while very drunk.
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  263.  @isaiahwelch8066  It's not the mileage tax that's biting you there. Is the insistence on building car infrastructure your cities can't even afford to maintain and forcing everyone to own a (n expensive! Seriously, look into how much you pay on licencing and maintenance, not just fuel, and interest on loans taken to acquire the vehicle!) car rather than building the much more affordable (in terms of upkeep and cost to the user. It's often cheaper to build in most places too, but the USA seems to have Problems on that front..) public transport infrastructure. Turns out, you can have freedom of movement without actually needing to own a car... if your city and country actually builds appropriate infrastructure. (consider: Most americans actually have Crap freedom of movement if they don't have a car... and the entire structure of the American economy and society makes it Very Difficult to actually go much of anywhere just... whenever you want... even if you do have a car. At least if you also want to, you know, Eat.)
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  264.  @Original-Yellow  historically, it's more the other way around: new, good ideas get proposed, more people become aware of them and agree they're good ideas... But they don't get Implemented until most of the powerful people who opposed them when first presented have died off.
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  265. This is, in fact, the entire POINT of patents... or it was supposed to be. Ensuring that the tech isn't effectively lost when those who developed it are no longer around to make/use it. Admittedly, it predates the idea that the problem might be a company going bankrupt rather than, say, the inventor Dieing, but still.
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  266.  @thesquirrel6141  not Every union. Saner parts of the world regulate both unions and corporations properly, allowing them to do their jobs effectively without going too far off the rails before being kicked back into line... The USA just seems to be allergic to regulations that haven't been undermined into uselessness by corruption. (Well, mostly corruption.) Corporations are useful. If not regulated properly they are dangerous. Unions are the same. Political parties too, for that matter. (One of the advantages of not electing the head of state: the political parties never have absolute control over the system intended to prevent them from abusing their power... Of course, you have to make sure that the Bureaucracy (or, depending on Government type, Monarch) isn't too powerful Either...)
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  267.  @namduong8437  The problem is already solved, including in parts of the USA. Most of the US just has too many corrupt officials with perverse incentives to act contrary to the public interest. It's straight up a matter of frequency and zoning. If the train/tram/whatever comes every 5 minutes (or, ideally, every 3), efficiency in terms of travel time is a non-issue (you don't even really need a schedule any more, at that point). If the city is zoned so that people live very close to bus/tram stops, and said bus/trams interchange properly with heavier rail (and in terms of fuel and maintenance, as well as persons moved per time, there is Nothing that transports passengers more efficiently than an electric train powered by overhead wires, and the only thing that beats them for Freight is massive cargo ships) at well designed stations... with the vast bulk of commercial zoning immediately around the rails stations, the efficiency problem is just Gone. Also important: Don't put parks immediately around your stations to make them look pretty! It just makes them less usable by putting them further away from everything! Instead, you put the places people actually want/need to get to/from immediately around the station, then the parks around That. You then, of course, connect the rail to the airports. ... You very quickly find that most of the shorter air routes are better served by rail too. (oh, and before anyone starts harping on about government subsidies? You know those unprofitable railways that get subsidized in Europe because they provide significant actual benefits other than profits on ticket sales? the USA does exactly the same thing for exactly the same kinds of routes. It just subsidizes airlines to fly them instead.) You never quite Completely eliminate cars, mind you, but you can reduce their viable use case to 'farmers getting to the nearest town with a station' (where they rent a secure parking and charging space) and 'a small rental fleet at the stations nearest to the places that are Legitimately too low density for public transport to serve viably' rather than 'everyone who wants to get anywhere at all ever'.
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  268. I'm not seeing many (any?) actual cons to Airport Transit in this video, just a whole lot of cons to badly implemented transit and city planning in general.
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  269. Question though: what's the difference between a gas station with a pub, and a pub with chargers for customer use in the parking lot? I mean, you've got a point, obviously, but with the change in infrastructure, the difference becomes a bit arbratrary. Also, how is one defining a Pub? Because in some times and places it's meant a full inn, or small hotel, that is licensed to sell alcohol. And/or a restaurant (which, depending on the neighborhood and thus clientele, it's perfectly reasonable to take your kids to, at least once they're old enough that one can reasonabley expect them to behave well enough not to bother the other patrons). Not necessarily something you want at a highway rest stop (unless it has much stricter licensing terms regarding who gets served how much under what circumstances, at least), but other wise quite reasonable.
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  270.  @thomascromwell6840  well, when the local area wasn't suffering from serious drought or other such issues, anyway... and there was an issue of variety too.
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  271. Indeed. Though if it could be moved about an inch or so back, so it's in line with the other things on that side, without failing again, that would solve both problems. Of course, then you need a way to compensate for the problematically unstable design (made worse by the fact that it's sitting on an almost equally unstable box), though, again, moving it back so it doesn't stick into the path more than anything else on that side of the room would reduce how often that issue causes problems. If it can't be moved back without failing though, it either needs repositioning entirely (probably with a proper mounting) or replacing, because the design is Dumb.
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  272.  Ryan Harvey  ... Do keep in mind that the US government Keeps Taxing You until you renounce your US citizenship (it is one of only two countries to do this and was part of the UN attempt to force the other to stop.) has basically bullied the banks in most nations into enforcing this... Oh, and blacklists you from reentering the country if you publicize that taxation as the reason for renouncing said citizenship so you can't visit your family etc. Oh, and the taxation in question is structured to rip you off something fierce (get 3k deposited in one bank account, then transfer it to another? You get taxed for 6k in income, because they Only check the incoming figure.), And they do not tell you this until the first time they start hassling you about non-payment.
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  273. With no connection to any known source, meaning at Least a couple of people between the origin and the known cases. Plus anyone Else any of those people might have spread it to. And remember, it takes a couple of weeks to show symptoms and is infectious for a while Before that point. Depending on the jobs and social lives of the people involved, and given the manner in which COVID-19 tends to spread, that could be single digits numbers... Or thousands of people.
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  274. For reference: TL;DR, for "Too long; Didn't Read", not TDLR for... *shrug*. Not super important, I just tend not notice stuff like that. I'd give decent odds that at the time it was 'best attempt to actually translate what the people are acutally agreeing to for those Maori who could not read the English version (which was to be the actual legal document)'. And, of course, while there were a number of Maori who could read English perfectly well by that point, the number who couldn't was still 'most of them'. Doesn't even really require any idiocy, just the limitations of translation (much more difficult than most give it credit for when the languages in question lack relevant common cultural references to work from). Following the usual practice of humanity, people (not just the British) being dicks about it came later.
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  275. It is worth keeping in mind that in most records of Other countries, "New Zealanders" are usually treated as a sub-unit of Australians (because, in practice, the military units where often arranged that way), and so would only be referred to as 'New Zealanders" when the distinction was relevant (rarely). In fact, in American records in both world wars, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and various other units were routinely simply referred to as 'British' (or 'colonial' when a distinction from actually British troops was desired... though that was often a polite euphemism for 'non-white' from someone trying to be less racist in formal documents.)
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  276. Same concept, though given that the original dragoons evolved into standard shock/melee cavalry over time, the revival of the concept in WW1 (see, among others, most of the Australian and New Zealand forces for examples) had the units designated as "mounted rifles". Of course, by ww2, most of those were replaced by motorized infantry (trucks instead of horses), and the Rest of the cavalry were converted to armoured units. Or at least, so it went in the Empire. But yeah, calling them dragoons would be anachronistic (at least in English), but not incorrect.
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  277. And, of course, the trains feed customers into those shopping centres, without which said shopping centres wouldn't generate anywhere near as much money (similar to how actually profitiable-by-ticket-sales rail lines only manage that due to all the "unprofitable" transit (rail and other) lines feeding into them). And, of course, rail systems subsidised, or straight up paid for, by taxes do actually turn a profit (if they're actually built and run half way well), just not in ticket sales. A well built and well run transportation network (rail included) generates substantial additional economic activity, and thus increased Tax Take. Generally well beyond what it costs the taxpayer to build and run the thing. The issue, of course, is that fairs high enough to make the trains profitable Directly are also generally high enough to discourage ridership and thus negatively impact the increased economic activity, and thus taxes. Of course, if the government can convince a private entity to pay the costs of the railway instead, the government Still gets that extra tax income... bad if the private entity is trying to be profitable on ticket sales alone (because, again, questionably even Possible), but if the company in question has Also figured out that the profit isn't in the tickets, but in the resulting Commerce, and can make their money that way, well, that works out Really Nicely for the government. On the other hand, selling off a perfectly functional government owned transportation network to private interests who think they're going to make money On The Tickets is a great way to cease having a functional transportation network. Freight tends to last longer than passengers, and particularly harsh company/service specific infrastrucutre regulations can slow the rot somewhat, but there are always perverse incentives to do things that make the network worse (Asset stripping once they realise there's no profit in tickets... or even as the plan from day one, being one of the big risks. Self sabotage to get out of legislated minimum levels of service is another one).
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  278.  @AITreeBranches  Oh, it's far from that tidy or universal, but I continued to be baffled by an American woman I know complaining that Frozen, a movie set in medieval fantasy scandanavia and in which to save on budget (and not highlight how out of scale most of the ships are) absolutely no ships crew or dock workers are ever shown... no black people appear. This was somehow oppressive and racist and ruined the entire movie for this white american woman. She was of the opionion that somehow the fact that the movie was animated meant there was no excuse for not including black people (... I guess because they didn't need to actually hire any ACTUAL black people in order to include them, or something?!) I can't think of any other culture that would produce this result normally. Oh, sure, plenty would complain that there weren't enough movies About black people, or the local equivalent, but complaining there were no black people in a movie about Medievan Fantasy Scandanavia?! That's an american thing. And that's before getting into 'black washing' and various other culturally destructive practices that just foster resentment rather than actually improving anything.
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  279. Both of those things could reasonably be expected to have an effect. A temporary one. In the latter case it should only affect products which are actually produced or shipped through places that are actually affected (though, of course, if everything's transported by truck, anything that affects fuel prices can hit everything pretty hard. Rather less so if it's mostly transported by rail, due to that being much more fuel efficient). But of course, any legitimate excuse for a one of/small price increse will somehow turn into a repeating/large price increase in practice.
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  280.  @geraldh.8047  There are absolutely good reasons to have such a system in place... but going by what Louis has shown us in the past, it's almost certain that those reasons had little or nothing to do with New York introducing the system, and even if that wasn't the case it would have been quickly hijacked to compensate for and/or support the corruption (among other flaws).
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  281. ​ @RicardoSantos-oz3uj  the ideal, of course, being that your off site backup is not in the cloud, but on another machine you own and control at another site you control... But that's often non-viable financially.
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  282.  @greymatter77  China has been building a lot of actually quite good new public transport in recent years. Admittedly, the big thing there has been high speed intercity rail, but that's only ever as useful as the public transport in the city it connects to, which has also been being improved (if perhaps not as fast and dramatically). Also, keep in mind, there's plenty of US cities where you'll hear stories of multi-hour commutes by car that become 20 minute train rides when a train is actually present, because the problem wasn't so much the distance as the traffic.
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  283.  @icefrost5355  yes, sadly, New Zealand does have this sort of idiot as well. One of the up sides of having a low population is that low percentages are actually still small numbers though, so they can generally be put in the same box as the Actual communists and the republicans: utterly irrelevant.
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  284. they're less complicated for the driver to deal with while also forcing them to slow down (but not stop). Super busy roundabouts (be they very small, very large, or very complicated, for differing reasons) are kind of a nightmare for pedestrians, but for medium sized roundabouts that see more middling traffic levels it actually would make sense for the result to be pretty good.
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  285. Between Britain and Japan in WW2, the main, relevant, difference is found when you look at how they came to do the things they did and what the reactions to and consequences for those involved in the more reprehensible actions were.* Once you take that into account, Britain was a vastly preferable option, between the two. Still, anyone who argues in favour of the British treatment of India after WW2 is either Very ignorant, Very stupid, rather evil, or some sufficiently undesirable combination there of.
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  286.  @seneca983  Or by increasing the supply of the desirable features to match the demand for those features, that works too.
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  287. Ehh, there were types and degrees of bad. Also, in most cases the kings in question had a Lot less practical control and influence than you imply. Incompetence is the main reason Austria doesn't quite manage to be the villain (too little success), and Heavy revisionism is required to actually paint Britain as the bad guys of the piece (though calling them the heroes would probably be going too far). On the other hand, there's a case to be made that the Ottomans were undeserving victims, given that they only entered the war because of a plot by a turkish nationalist who managed to aquire German support. (The Ottoman Government wanted nothing to do with the war)... Said Turk being perhaps the only real winner of WW1, as unlike everyone else (except maybe Conrad, sort of, given that all He seemed to want was basically "a war, any war!") , He actually got what he wanted! (Turkish nationalism, an end to the Ottoman Empire, some other related stuff).
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  288.  @Laugh1ngboy  the only debate about if it's "airborne" or not has been "how technical is the speaker being?". As I understand it, the virus is (probably) not airborne, Technically, because it can't just float around in the air of its own accord (and travel much further). On the other hand, the distinction between that and what it actually Does is, while significant for medical equipment, diagnosis, and so on, Functionally meaningless when it comes to most basic preventative measures. It's transmitted (at least primarily) via droplets. Saliva, mucus, etc. Thing is, when someone coughs, (and more so when they sneeze) they basically launch a tonne of fine droplets into the air... And those fine droplets float around a while before they drop below "easily breathed in by surrounding humans" altitude. So, the virus itself is not airborne as such, but in confined spaces and crowded places it may as well be. Again, that's my understanding.
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  289. Well... There is the fact that very large parts of the country have No One living in them (national parks, mostly), resulting in a very low average population per square km figure, 'sparsely​ populated' isn't Entirely wrong. Quite misleading though.
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  290. It's one thing when both parties actively negotiated the contract and it only applies to the actual subject of that contract. Quite another when one party had no input on the contract and it somehow applies to matters completely unrelated.
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  291.  @leslieaustin151  The fun part is that if you go back far enough, 'let' meant... I forget if it was prevent or forbid, but the opposite of 'permit or allow', anyway!
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  292.  @alexscrimpshire8761  Well, for one thing, somehow 'Let's Goooo!' has come to mean something more like 'do well' or 'you did it!' depending on context <_<
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  293.  Liberalism is a disease Lobotomies are the cure  that's not a leftist problem, that's an extremist problem. The particular flavour of stupid varies from "left" to "right" but the ignorance, idiocy, and disconnection from reality and good sense are the same. (You'll note I say good sense, not common sense. Common sense isn't common, and people will always insist that the view point they're trying to sell you on is common sense no matter how deranged it is (well, unless they're doing the whole "secret knowledge" bit.))
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  294. Used to be very common for cars to have three turn signals on each side here: front, rear, and one on the side, usually on the front doors. This was because you often couldn't See the front or rear ones from the sides because of how they were mounted. These days, the usual practice is for the front and rear lights just wrap around the corner of the vehicle so you can see them from the sides instead.
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  295. It's like that in New Zealand too, if you're not talking about sick days or manditory public holidays, you are generally expected to give the manager sufficient advance warning before taking days off so that they have time to sort out the shifts or the like, and will get in trouble if you just randomly don't turn up or call in last minute without good reason.
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  296. Having an entire days rations as a single unit, rather than individual meals, seems to be pretty common across various armies.
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  297. As always, there's room for debate regarding 'the best'. thunderf00t is undeniably very good at what he does, though.
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  298. Depends on the deisgn of the bottle. Plenty of them will just flat out bounce (though not very far) if you drop them from any half way reasonable height... provided you don't then drop a heavy thing (such as the entire rest of the case of bottles) on top of them. Now, if you start Throwing them at things, that's a whole other story...
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  299.  @agisler87  bit hard to exclude pandemics from pandemic insurance. Especially a pandemic that is specifically listed as covered.
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  300. ... now if only He'd done that instead of going into politics...
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  301. 19th century is the 1800s. In the same way your first year is the one that Ends on your first birthday. The account in this video is from the 19th century. As is the american Civil War. And depending on what you meany by "mechanised", you could be excluding anything from the american civil war on, or nothing prior to ww2.
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  302.  @S3lkie-Gutz  Pretty sure it's the same sound as the NG in English 'thing', no? English just... doesn't allow that sound in the onset of a syllable, so English speakers struggle with it when it shows up there in other languages.
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  303.  @420247paul  the "press" in "freedom of the press" specifically refers to the physical object. It is not the right of the journalist or reporter* to go anywhere and gather information regardless of the wishes of others. It protects no such thing. What it is, is the right of Any individual not to be restricted from Publishing what they have to say (at the tine it was written, the printing press was basically the only real way to do this.) Freedom of the press does Not require that they let Louis record. It Does mean that they cannot prevent him from publishing this video about how they did so. Now, whether they were actually allowed or entitled to prevent him from recording or not, due to other laws, is an entirely different matter. *Called "the press" because they worked and provided the input for newspapers who owned and ran their own printing presses and distributed the output in bulk
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  304.  @brigidfarley6347  interestingly, a number of small businesses in some parts of and industries in the USA have figured out that paying workers enough that they don't need a second job to get by Increases profitability. It's the bigger business (and multinational corporations) who want nothing to do with the idea.
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  305.  @KrintalSrim  I believe so. Some combination of the gnawing and being a pest to farmers, I suspect.
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  306.  @TheGreatIndoors1979  well... It isn't worded brilliantly, but the implied point seems to be "if you don't vote for me, you get Trump again, and if you've been paying attention you know he's actively opposed to anything that could possibly make things less shit for you". Two party system, ya know? You'd have less of this sort of thing if that got fixed. Biden and the democrats are pretty rubbish, but when your only other option is the clowns who see a Functional Government that isn't oppressing anyone as a Failure State...
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  307.  @idleray1  A depressingly large number of people subscribe to that logic, at least when it is convenient to advancing their current ideology.
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  308.  @DreitTheDarkDragon  if you were looking for where to buy such an item, you'll probably have more luck looking for 'heatpump' rather than 'AC', and also looking for people who install them rather than to buy the individual item (It's not really the sort of thing one usually installs oneself, for various reasons.)
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  309. And then there's the fun part where most of the scam land sales that caused great upset weren't actually the British Government screwing over the local Maori, they were some random european land developer and his Maori associate getting together to screw over the tribe in a get rich quick scheme exploiting the differences in understanding of land ownership, the locals (both Maori and European) pitching a fit over the result... and the British government officials having no idea how the hell to deal with the Maori model of land ownership when trying to resolve the matter sensibly (if not fairly) and so making ... questionable... decisions in an attempt to resolve things. Oh, and there's the fun of the group of Maori who decided to get in on this whole 'colonialism' game and charted a European ship to go off and conquer one of the nearby (as such things go) islands that Wasn't part of New Zealand, engaging in a little fun complete-genocide-of-the-locals of their own, even as the British (and later not-actually-the-British-as-such) government of New Zealand was generally pretty keen on Not actually engaging in genocide, for all it's other faults (for reference, I'm talking about Actual genocide here, not 'cultural' genocide, which is mostly used as a justification to NOT do things that would actually Prevent Actual Genocide in the sort of situations where things have devolved to the point where that's a legitimate concern).
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  310.  @mahamatmahamatabdoulaye893  The actual rules do have logic and are explainable. They're also over a thousand pages long if you stick to just the most common standard dialects. The problem is that what a lot of people were taught in school had no relation to said rules, but were instead a collection of fragments of old (not very good) style guides and declarations by rich and powerful twits from centuries past who had no idea what they were talking about when it came to English but were absolutely convinced that everything that made it Not Latin was somehow a flaw (well, at least if it showed up in some other dialect but not the one they grew up speaking).
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  311. Whatever one may think about him and his works otherwise, on this he is quite correct.
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  312. Unfortunately, English requires basically twice as many characters as it has, mostly vowels, if you want it's spelling to be both consistent and not horribly complex. Though a couple of accent markers (indicating primary stress and disambiguating digraphs vs syllable break between two monogaphs) would go a long way towards sorting out a lot of it. There's no saving the '-ough' cluster though.
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  313.  @n0madtv  Freedo of the Press, incidentally, is 'lack of government prevention of access to the means of publication' (an issue common in Europe when the USA was founded), NOT 'unrestrained access to information and freedom from consequences on the part of journalists and reporters'. A lot of people get confused by that one. Also, Journalists and reporters, when doing their Job Correctly, are functionally spies acting on behalf of the general public in the name of the public good. When they do it poorly, they're nothing more than propaganda mouthpieces, at best for the owner of their publication, at worst for whichever entity dropped a press release that day. (bias in favour of reality is ideal, bias in favour of a specific ideology can be compensated for, bias in favour of whoever is talking at the time (while hiding who that even Is, often enough) renders them so unreliable as to be completely useless.)
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  314.  @mymo_in_Bb  Scrapping C entirely is a bad idea indeed, yes. But there's a solid argument for using it only where we currently use ch, and then actually writing z rather than s where z is meant and s rather than c when s is meant. Whether it's actually worth the effort or not is a different story, of course. As for G... well, it's worse and more easily solved, as half the time it's g as it shoudl be, and the other half it is j... though I'm sure this would then occasionally cause ambiguity with j, given it is sometimes read as y... quite a bit less though (mostly in foreign words that have resisted anglicisation for lack of common use). Q is an interesting one. It actually makes a different sound from k... but that there is no k/q minimal pair in English (save for foreign proper nouns). English speakers mostly can't actually pronounce a k sound in the places where we write q... but also can't pronunce a q sound in the places where we write k (again, mostly)... but also mostly can't tell the difference between the two sounds (which have different IPA characters, mind you), and don't enounciate the distinction particularly well. Which is to say there's a perfectly reasonable argument regarding why Q is there... but also an argument at least as solid that it's existence is pointless and we should get rid of it. As always, the main issue is less the change itself, and more that the prople proposing it don't know about and/or understand the knock on effects and have thus put no effort into handling the consequences there-of. (sort of like the various ideologically corrupted twits who keep insisting on trying to force changes to how others speak in the (incorrect) belief that it will somehow advance the cause of their ideology... but can't be arsed to understand how the language actually works Before their change and consequently just cause problems for everyone that mostly serve to create opposition to their goals where none previously existed).
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  315. Pretty sure it's referring to more practical things like food and somewhere to sleep (as opposed to actually helping commit the crimes). So... Arguably if they were staying in hotels he owned? (And he knew their plans or gave them some sort of discount or something.)
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  316.  @_Ekaros  indeed. There's no way they're actually doing all the necessary things to make it work, but if they Were then this (or at least something very similar) would actually be viable. Unlike a lot of the others Louis has shown us which were barely even trying to pretend they'd found a loophole, let alone a solution.
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  317. The America of that time was rather different to the America of today, as well, mind you.
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  318. Meanwhile, in the South Island of New Zealand: Trains come once a day. Twice (once each direction) if you live in the one small town that isn't at the End of a line and still actually has a functioning station. If you live in Christchurch you actually have a choice about which train you catch: west on the scenic route to the west coast (used by tourists and people planing to go tramping in the mountains, mostly) or north on the scenic route to the ferry terminal in Picton (used by tourists, people visiting relatives in the capital with a bit of spare cash to throw at doing something a bit novel, and the occasional day-tripper). The North island, on the other hand, still has functional commuter trains. More and larger cities, and the private interests that bought the network when it was privatised didn't get around to ruining them (unlike everything else) before they collapsed entirely and the whole thing got renationalised. No where near Japan's rail system (good Or bad) but I'm lead to believe they generally stay on schedule fairly well and run often enough to be useful.
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  319.  @jimmy8445  four times, at least, arguably five. And that's just England. The Celts (even if they were the first humans there, it's still colonisation), Romans, Anglosaxons, Danes/Norse, and the Normans (sort of, if your definition of colonization doesn't exclude them and you count the various mercenaries from all over the show as 'Normans').
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  320.  @wodmarach  Not teaching juxtapose first is not unique to the US.
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  321.  @firefly618  Hollywood did the same thing for decades: actors (and others) would get promised much of their pay as a profit based arrangement of some sort, but no film would ever be profitable, because it wouldn't be a project on the studio's books. They'd create a seperate company for the movie, charge it absurd rates for the use of anything and everything the studio provided (price often determined after the fact specifically to eat any profits), and then, the company now going ot of business and the studio being its main/only creditor, reclaim all its assets (mostly intellectual property). The Studio made a profit. The movie didn't, so no payouts. The music industry in the USA was even worse.
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  322. New Zealand has a similar law: if you're within 20 (I think it is) metres of an intersection (regardless of how the intersection is controlled) or a marked pedestrian crossing, you are supposed to go the extra 20m and cross there. Also, you are supposed to cross at right angles to the road, not at a diagonal or in some weird arc or whatever. So far as I'm aware though, the only Enforcement of this law (I base this in part on how the kids at my highschool crossed rush hour traffic right outside a police station pretty much every morning without even a friendly reminder that it wasn't the best idea for my whole time there and years before and after) is that in the event of an accident, if the pedestrian is breaking said law (or is it just a regulation?) the driver of the vehicle (and their insurance company) is only guilty of/liable for, at most, failure to avoid an accident, and usually not even that (assuming they don't just drive off rather than stopping to resolve things, which is its own crime). If the pedestrian was following the law correctly, the driver (and their insurance company) is looking at much bigger problems. Mind you, it's supposed to be the pedestrian's responcability to not step out in front of cars when there isn't a big enough gap in the traffic to start with, but humans (on foot or in vehicles) do many dumb things on a regular basis. The reason for that rule, at intersections is that if the pedestrian is closer to, but not at, the intersection, they often can't see a car coming from the side roads, and the driver can't see the pedestrian until after they've turned, at which point there's generally not time for them to notice, then react, and then for the car to actually Stop before the pedestrian's already been hit. It got extended to pedestrian crossings probably mostly to keep the rules consistent combined with encouraging one not being a inconsiderate arse. (Cars already have to stop for pedestrians that are on the crossing (though pedestrians aren't supposed to start crossing unless there is either a gap like usual or the cars are already stopped for a preceding pedestrian. Of course, these days the crossings frequently have traffic lights like the intersections rather than just road markings and warning signs.)
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  323.  @lordofhyphens  They are, esentially, what happens when you fuse the propeller blade and the wing into the same object... and then compensate for all the 'fun' consequences of that. They can even land just fine in the event of an engine failure, at least if the pilot knows what they're doing. Though... umm... bailing out of them in the event of something going more ... catastrophically... wrong is a bit iffy due to the whole 'getting clear of the rotor' thing.
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  324. Definitely not a one world government. That said, it's not ALL the way over to 'the kitchen in eveyrone's house is on fire at the same time by accident'. It's more 'the same people benefited from supplying substandard equipment to those building the kitchens at about the same time, leading to them failing in similar ways at similar times when measures to compensate for the flaws were not enacted'.
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  325.  @non1263  you realise, of course, that China is a Republic, yes? In fact, most of the world's monarchies (that is, the not-republics) are aligned with the USA, not against it. (And the USA has a long history of toppling democracies for being insufficiently pro US.)
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  326.  @idraote  also, to my understanding, it didn't refer to any one european language, but something of a hybrid used by medeterainian merchants, sailors, dock workers, and the like to communicate among themselves as a common trade language.
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  327.  @gorillaguerillaDK  I followed what was going on in the UK's parliament regarding Brexit... the reality is it wasn't just the opposition opposing for the heck of it, it was multiple parties (and factions within parties) being staggeringly incompentent and perfectly willing to through the country under a bus with a 'no deal' exit if the alternative was anything other than their own deal. The whole brexit referendum was Supposed to basically just be a bit of propaganda that killed the idea so certain individuals couldn't keep using it to be a pain in the butt for the government at the time. They could Claim to be in favour of it and so keep certain subsets of their supporters satisfied, and, they Thought, be confident that it was such an obviously and staggeringly stupid idea that it would never actually pass the referendum. (and, really, even if it did, if the margin was narrow enough, the referendum wasn't binding anyway, there were plenty of ways to spin just not doing it), and the fact that they bothered asking would be a nice boost in the upcoming election. ... They underestimated the propagandists who saw benefit in a successful Brexit campaign. They underestimated the ignorance, gullibility, and (to a lesser extent) stupidity of the British public (... honestly, the general public in most countries, but only the British public is relevant here). The referendum came back in favour of Brexit. And then public sentiment and media attention shifted such that just ignoring the results or otherwise fiddling the system to avoid going through with it was simply Not Viable. So they had to go through with it. This was followed by attempting to stall and dick around such that the EU would end up basically forcing the UK to stay by way of negotiations breaking down and no 'leave' agreement being made. Then the failure to go through could be blamed on the EU (boosting the popularity and election chances of the politicians who Claimed to be against such things) rather than the government, and Brexit wouldn't happen (no predictable consequences)... Except the EU was having none of it and told the UK to either make a deal or leave without one. What followed was an utter farce, with first the government (or at least PM) constantly going with a 'make proposals that will clearly be unaceptable to the EU but make it look like it's the EU's fault that things aren't working until we can just blame the EU for Brexit not happening' strategy, despite it being increasingly obvious both that that was happening And that the EU wasn't following the script, and then once parliament as a whole (and the general public) got so fed up with that nonsense that changes were made regarding who was actually conducting the negotiations (and running the country, if I recall correctly) the situation I described in my first paragraph became the status quo (with each faction being more interested in their constituents being happy with them for trying to push their pet obsession than in getting a nondisasterous result that could be blamed on specific individuals who weren't even in power anymore and the EU when it came to calming said constituents if need be) continuing right up until the deadline ran out. Oh, and as an added bonus the PM and a few other officials decided that it would be a great idea to promise solutions to certain problems that this whole issue caused that were A: Directly contradictory to what they had told the EU they were going to do to resolve those issues and B: Flat out illegal anyway. The simple fact is there was never a good plan for Brexit because, to those who would be making such plans, it was Never Supposed To Happen! The need for election reform in the UK is almost as dire as it is in the USA, because that was a staggeringly incompitent showing.
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  328.  @frep420  wasn't it "broken pipes outside the property"? Sounded like you'd be covered if the problem was, say, the sink tap or the bath giving up and water going everywhere, but not if, say, the apartment building's water tank gave up when you had a balcony window or skylight open and the water got in that way. Still pretty bad though.
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  329. ... It's almost like they have to fix the shit the Republicans fucked up every time.
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  330. Here's a fun bonus: Written English IS standardized... across it's rather excessive number of dialects, and also across rather large spans of time. The standardization isn't perfect (there are two base standards with slight regional variations, and it does drift over time, just very slowly (usually)). That standardization is a Feature. I mean, yeah, the standard as it is definitely has problems, but they're Heavily outweighed by the fact that it IS a standard.
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  331. On the subject of money, err... not quite. Barter is what you get as a stop-gap when an existing currency system breaks down or perhaps doesn't scale up sufficiently for whatever reason. Before the development of currency, Between groups you instead get Gift economies. Gift economies are basically trading on reputation: you'd give people stuff you had spare when you encountered them and they needed it, in confidence that they'd reciprocate... and if they Didn't do so, they got a reputation for that, and people started avoiding them, driving them off rather than giving them things, or just attacking them and taking their stuff instead, because they couldn't be trusted to reciprocate friendly interactions. Note that such interactions generally Did take ability into account. Someone not giving you something because they didn't have any is quite different from hoarding (which isn't the same as stockpiling resources for, say, winter). Meanwhile, within groups you get collective ownership for most items instead. Roughly.
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  332.  @214dude2  I believe the argument is generally that the lack of walkability in suburbia is one of the many indicators that the current way of doing suburbs is horribly defective.
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  333.  @angelsy1975  the 'evil bad king' wasn't even all that evil and bad... just sufficiently incompetent that the democratically (for the day) elected parliament mostly bypassed him and did stuff without his input. The colonsists actually revolted against taxation in general (no, not lack of representation, that was propaganda that came later). Twice, actually. First was a one off levy to cover the portion of the cost of a war incured by the troops stationed to defend the colonies it was being levied against (note: they were only being charged a fraction of the amount it cost to maintain those troops, and only for the time the war was actually happening). ... it is worth noting that that war, despite being global in scale between the British and French empires... started over the very american colonists who were revolting over this tax raiding their french neighbours for their own enrichment. (ok, probably not the exact same individuals, but certainly people in their social circles). Organized refusal to pay tax is a revolt, but that tax was only instituted because the British govenrment was kinda broke due to the war. So when the First revolt happend, they didn't do the usual (expensive) thing of sending troops to round the revolters and execute/buy off the leaderships and otherwise break the revolt... they cancled the levy that was being protested against... and instead implemented the stamp tax. Which was a tax on imports and exports, collected at the ports, that they could actually enforce. It was high enough to be punative, too... which STILL left the colonists paying the lowest taxes of basically anyone worth the effort of taxing in the British Empire of the day (and, for that matter, most other European Empires as well.) That was what the revolutionary war was fought over. (and, in fact, that was what a whole lot of arson, murder, and general terrorism was commited over, resulting in most of the surviving loyalists (loyalists being about a third of the population) fleeing to what became Canada. The idea of represenation came up later when someone realised that parliament was never going to agree to 'no taxes, ever, under any circumstances' without actual MPs in parliament making deals on the colonists' behalf to get that. (in reality it Still wouldn't have worked, becuase it was Idiotic), and the first time it was written down was AFTER the fighting had already started, and only entered the public eye as recruitment propaganda for the rebels. The king's only contribution to the whole mess was a letter that basicaly amounted to 'revolts and not paying taxes are bad. Don't do that.' He otherwise trusted his advisors (members of parliament) when they said they had things handled.
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  334.  @robbedeboer2728  That would make sense... if it was uniquely a US thing. School sports teams competing against each other to varying degrees is pretty common anywhere where British culture had a significant influence, to my understanding. School clubs, on the other hand, tend to be a bit of a case of 'the students are going to form groups to do this sort of thing anyway. Much less of a headache for the administration if it's organized and supervised', though at least in my experience the nature of such non-sports clubs tends to be a lot more limited in New Zealand than in the USA... And then you have Japanese schools, where to my understanding the sports teams are a subcatagory of clubs and it's not considered strange for the school to make membership and participation manditory.
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  335. Turns out in this case they were lieing, but Not about why they stopped you from buying. When you buy, they have yo put up collateral until the purchase finishes going through a couple of days later. Normally this is only a couple of percent. But when a given stock's price is unstable, that required collateral can go up. In the case of GameStop, it went up to 100%. On what was now very expensive stock. That people were buying in huge quantities. This is actually a Protective measures to limit or prevent various disasterous failure states for the market and investors. Robinhood didn't have the cash to cover that much higher collateral in bulk. People were buying too much too quickly And the cost per transaction for the Broker was suddenly 25 to 100 times higher than normal. That's a liquidity issue, and one that's mostly not their fault. Thing is, liquidity is basically half of a broker's Job. Liquidity problems are basically death for them, as all the investors switch to someone else (and Robinhood had additional issues on this front too). So they lied about it,made up bullshit other reasons. The problem is, most people had no idea about the Actual reason, but knew the Excuses were bullshit. And Robinhood has certain business connections that could have (but, importantly, probably did not) result in a conflict of interest which might have incentivised acting to benefit the Hedge Funds, which was much easier to figure out than the actual problem... And if there's anything worse than a major liquidity problem for a broker, it's a reputation for screwing your investors like that. So their attempt to cover their arse blew up in their face. So, it's not that they were actively trying to screw over the investors, it's that a perfect storm of factors, mostly outside their control, meant they were Unable to support such trades... They then lied about that. Or, in summary: you probably can't sue them for complying with their legal obligations, and they're kind of stuffed anyway. Noticeably, Better Financed brokers did not run into this problem. (Note that the better financed ones are generally not free. These may be related.)
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  336.  @RobinHerzig  ... it wouldn't be so bad a motto if it wasn't so blatantly a lie.
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  337.  @Nersius  true, but that's a pretty big assumption.
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  338.  @zephyr139  ... broadly yes, but at the same time I can't help but think that you are massively overestimating most humans...
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  339.  @charlieread2097  At best. It would be far more accurate to sum it up as the (more representative than most) government vs a bunch of tax dodgers. The reality was that the American colonists (who paid little or no tax at the time) started a war with the French. The government defended them (as well as fighting the french in a bunch of other places as a result) when the French reacted as one might expect, as was right and proper if the issue couldn't be settled easily. The government, specifically Parliament (of which the House of Commons was democratically elected and I believe even at this point had most of the power, though admittedly American colonists did not yet get to vote in, not that they had complained about this at any point prior to this) levied a tax against the colonists to cover the costs of the troops sent to the colonies to defend the from the French. It was a fixed amount, not intended to be ongoing. Remember, this is the cost of a war the colonists started on their own initiative. The colonists refused to pay. Note that by most standards, that was a rebellion all on its own, which would normally be put down with military force. Parliament, after a bit of back and forth, elected not to do so, and instead levied a tax on the import of tea into the American colonies. Largely to get back the cost of defending them, but also in part as punishment. It had the advantage of also being Much easier to collect. The American colonists took exception. Various individuals attempt to negotiate some sort of arrangement (though what they hopped to achieve when the goal on one side was 'collect taxes to pay for expenses caused by and for the benefit of the people to be taxed' and the goal on the other was 'don't pay any taxes ever', I'm not sure), but it didn't really get anywhere. Only somewhere around this point (remember, they've been refusing to pay taxes for a while now) does the 'no taxation without representation' bit come into play. Somewhere near the end of this someone (I forget who) wrote to the King. He was, admittedly, not the greatest king for a number of reasons. They asked that he sort the thing out (in favour of the colonists). He, of course, immediately turned to his advisors... which is to say his ministers... which is to say, members of parliament (some elected, some not) and asked them what this was all about, as it was the first he'd really heard of it (everything prior to this had been fairly routine and required no particular input from him. Parliament, not the King, controlled taxes, for one thing). He was given a brief summary, from parliament's point of view, was lead to believe they had it handled, and his grand total contribution to the matter, if I remember rightly, was a letter (or perhaps a proclamation?) to the colonists condemning tax-dodgers (or something to that effect). He didn't actually Do anything other than let Parliament get on with dealing with what was, legally speaking, a bunch of criminals, who were at best tax dodgers and at worst already in rebellion. I should point out that any plan to give the colonists representation in parliament would have taken years to sort out, cost more money, seen More taxation (everyone else so represented paid much more in tax in various ways than the colonists did)... and the idea only even came up after it became obvious that parliament was Not going to let the colonists get away with what was, again, already a minor rebellion by the standards of the day, and Parliament was quite Done with their nonsense. Honestly, by the end I suspect that many in parliament were kind of wishing they'd just left the colonists to their own devices when the French took exception to their behaviour. Though, of course, they couldn't, as that would cause issues elsewhere in the Empire (which, admittedly, was not yet all that extensive, at least compared to what it would become.).
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  340. Replacing the lost fuel tax with a mileage tax isn't a problem (it's how most large vehicles are taxed in a lot of places anyway), given the absolute disaster that is infrastructure funding in the USA. There's no good reason why such a replacement tax should involve such invasive nonsense though. We've gone decades with a device attached to the the axel counting rotations and being checked every so often (and the owner being handed an appropriate bill) without any significant problems.
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  341. if by 'very often' you mean 'very rarely' except when corruption and incompetence screw up the implementation, sure. Well, no, let me correct that, you do need to be a bit careful about the specifics with high density. Medium density, however, is another matter, being the default state for cities for pretty much as long as they've existed (and for centuries the problems with it were mostly down to just not building sewers, and went away when that was fixed) as low density, exclusively single family home, suburban sprawl has been proven, over and over and over, to be an utterly terrible idea that needs to go die in a fire. Sure, it has known and predictable issues that need to be taken into account... but they have known and entirely viable solutions, too. Like, yeah, you've got to take the psychological factors into account and be sure to include sufficient green space and recreational areas and so on. Failure to do so will cause problems. But again, known problems with known solutions.
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  342. The origin of insurance was actually merchant shipping. Lots of money to be made in a successful trip, but also many, Many things that could sink the ship and thus leave both the ship owners and the people who invested in the voyage out of pocket, not to mention the effects on any family of the crew. To my recollection the share market has similar origins.
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  343. I'd probably indicate me, the food, then eating... unless I was specifically trying to ask permission to eat that particular item, rather than just indicating hunger or a desire to eat, in which case I can easily see myself indicating the food, then eating, then me (with questioning expression).
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  344.  @jillosler9353  To my recollection, the American pledge of allegience wasn't a thing prior to... I believe ww2. Possibly the early days of the cold war.
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  345.  @func8211  Ehh, some of it is actually valid. Lotta places in the US don't have the necessary regulations or enforcement capability to prevent developers getting away with some legitimately scummy practices (well, that and/or they're just flat out corrupt) that really do make areas worse to live in. Of course, that is only one part of the (set of) problem (s), and the issue you mention is very much another part. Short version: America does cities TERRIBLY.
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  346.  @esaedvik  Somehow, Google has killed the ability for Linux PCs to read the memory on Android phones that are plugged into it via USB (at least without jumping through an unreasonable number of hoops). Works on Windows, works on Mac, but if the Linux based android phone encounters an Linux PC asking to look at it's file system it just goes 'nope!'. Nothing stopping you installing random software on your phone to send data off to who knows where, but a direct wire from your PC to your Phone with no oppertunity for a third party to do anything nefarious in between? We can't have That! Gotta buy a windows PC or a mac if you want That functionality... (you used to be able to do this, mind you! it's something Google (well, whatever Alphabet's android related sub-unit is called) actively killed off.
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  347. A national average population density of NZ is pretty useless. Something like half the population live in one city, most of the rest in the next four biggest, and over half the country has no one living in it at all. Even taking that into account it's a bit less dense, but being an island nation miles away from anything is much more significant, and both would have been meaningless had the sort of idiocy found in the USA, UK, and Sweden prevailed, rather than the government taking effective actions quickly. For comparison, other small, but much more densely populated nations are also doing pretty well. A small population is a boon though: a small percentage of a small population being idiots is still a small number of people. A small percentage of a large population is still a large number of people. Population matters. Density, less so.
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  348. Britain's basically the only one with anything to gain from the arrangement in practice though. Canada's basically stuck doing what the USA wants or getting wrecked regardless, Australia and New Zealand are still heavily dependant on Chinese trade and barely more protected from Chinese expansionism (if anything, such a union would just make us a bigger threat, and thus higher priority target)... And then there's the UK's track record with such arrangements. (See: ditching us to join the EEC, the entire disaster that has been leaving the EU (I mean, Joining in the first place was a terrible idea, but they'd have been hard pressed to handle leaving any more badly than they did without skipping the whole negotiation process and just declaring war on the EU.))
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  349.  @halagavi  While you're correct about English not liking ambiguous grammar, in this case there's a little more to it. Just saying "Rain" in English is meaningful... The problem is that the meaning is an imperative verb: You are commanding who/whatever you're speaking to to perform the act of raining. Well, you can also say 'Rain' by itself and have it be a noun if you are asking a question (I think the question would have to be 'what is X?' or 'what is the word for X?', though), because questions are weird and the constrution of answers to questions are weirder. Basically, zero-marking the subject has an actual meaning (or several), so when you don't want to use that meaning you need to mark the subject. Especially as sentences with no Verb are also possible, and English can turn a noun into a verb (among other things) just by moving where it is in the sentence without otherwise marking it in any way.
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  350.  @michaelmichael2382  this is true, though grass (at least as used in most lawns) should be a much lower priority than it is. Also, When you water it is super important. Late evening is best. (No risk of the droplets causing lensing effects that damage the plants, And far less water is lost to evaporation.) Also, most other countries have less lawns than the USA, at least in areas that don't get enough rain to support the grass naturally. More proper farmland or high density housing, less suburban sprawl dumping huge amounts of water into unproductive uses like keeping the lawn green in the hottest part of the year (grass can, generally, survive the dry and heat of summer (in climates where summer is fairly dry), its leaves just go brown and dead in the meantime. But that doesn't look nice, so for maintaining lawns enough extra water is expended to simulate spring and autumn rains. Which is very wasteful.) Watering the plants that will actually die otherwise is perfectly reasonable (well, unless you've chosen Particularly unsuitable plants), likewise for food crops. Lawns, though, are mostly pure vanity, and in climates that don't naturally support them, utterly wasteful.
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  351. which makes perfect sense. Provided your bus or light rail is actually covering the trip that the people using the cars parking there would be making. If they're coming from places your route doesn't serve though, you're kind of screwing people over if you don't provide alternatived parking (well, assuming they still have to go to that specific destination.)
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  352. Won? No. Came out ahead? There's a case to be made.
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  353. Pay attention to how people actually speak in much of the English speaking world... you'd be surprised how much of that is Very indirect and euphemistic, when it isn't all impenitrable idioms, too.
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  354.  @Keirnoth  the Quartering is interesting. On the one hand, he makes solid points based in factual reality more frequently than American news media. On the other hand he's an arsehole whose take away from those points is often so warped by delusional extremism (on the side he takes and the one he's opposing) that it rather undermines his otherwise reasonable starting position (often starting at a reasonable position like "caving to extremists to your own detriment, and that of society as a whole, is dumb" and ending up precariously close to flat out misogyny or other equally undesirable positions.) Similarly, I recently watched a good explaination of the wall street bets/gamestop thing by another YouTuber... Which, after having well explained all the facts and relevant Technical bits quickly spun off into a screed about how this proved that government as a concept and especially the Democrats were evil and just wanted to Control you (never mind that in reality the corporations are actively pursuing this goal and also control the bulk of the US government, while most of the things he opposed as democrats trying to control you are measures to reduce that...) So, you know, make of that what you will.
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  355. Maybe, maybe not. If you buy an Existing city you have to replace the existing nonsense with the new, better designed stuff... which rather increases the number of costs and problems caused. Now, building one from scratch is a different matter.
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  356.  @LpSuperdiddy  Editing and fact checking can take quite a while, backlogs are a thing, and many youtubers have full time jobs outside of youtube. I know of a number of fairly big channels who do this full time, the turn around time for actually well done videos that require a lot of research and editing can easily be six months or more (and that's when other people are employed to do parts of the job, when the creator is doing everything themselves either the quality drops or it takes even longer).
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  357. Better than the idiots who were so triggered about someone wearing a mask that they thought Murder was a good response...
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  358.  @Sal3600  the question lead me to automatically conclude that it wouldn't take off. The moment I actually started thinking about the physics of it to explain Why, it became very obvious that it would take off just fine (didn't even need to run numbers, just actually consider what mechanisms were involved). The initial error is absolutely down to the question and how humans process things. Subsequent Arguments about it mostly come down to a combination of idiocy and poor education, though, as all it would take to resolve otherwise is one person correctly explaining that a plane's wheels are free spinning* and their interaction with the ground has nothing to do with the mechanism by which a plane moves. This not happening is the stupid part. *Mostly. They do have brakes.
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  359.  @unvergebeneid  There are quite a few things in the south pacific that would rather strongly object to that idea, just FYI.
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  360. Nothing racist about Actually closing your borders. Note that this is Very Different from only banning people from certain groups or places, which potentially could be (and doesn't work anyway). Remember, NZ didn't just restrict travel, it locked down and forted up Entirely.
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  361. The freedom from slavery one was kind of wrong too, given the laws in Britain have forbidden it (at least in England, and later Britain as a whole) since the middle ages.
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  362.  @sbrazenor2  indeed, though it's still a step down in terms of bias from actually being paid to advertise the thing (in cash or product). If nothing else, it's the line between being a paid advertisement or not in many cases.
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  363. I'm betting on one or more of: dialect, speech impediment, being rushed due to the need to get back to that other meeting, and his admitted low level of familiarity/comfort with the details subject matter.
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  364. English orthography is pretty far up the list when it comes to difficult writing systems to learn, fairly close to Japanese, though beaten out by a few languages in southern Asia that are somehow substantially worse.
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  365. Indeed. I mean, her objection is a legitimate issue, but it's a lesser problem than paying the power bill for a fan that's not even doing anything...
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  366. slight correction: the part of the gaming community who actually keep up with this stuff and give a damn about any of the involved parties won't forget this. The vast majority of people who buy and play games... don't.
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  367.  @SurmaSampo  the logic (making no comment regarding if it is correct or not) is that no storefront = less customers = less money = end up having to lay off employees. Not that the employees will quit.
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  368. It's a thing in New Zealand, too... though until recently the NZ ones were called 'Countdown'. ... in mroe recent times the logo has been a "CD" that looks a lot like an apple... that is suspiciously W shaped. When I was a kid it used to just be their name with the "count" part in one colour and the "down" part in another. (their slogan is/was 'you can count on us to keep prices down' ... ... ... it's been rather questionable for quite some time, mind you.)
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  369.  @queeniegreengrass3513  relative to the USA and the USSR? They kind of are.
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  370.  @minalsingla6357  they fought those unreasonably hard for an unreasonably long time, too.
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  371. of course, enough of good enough Now helps a hell of a lot more than not enough of perfect Later. It's a balancing act between the two factors, really.
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  372.  @nolongerlistless  English only actually has one pair of words where the difference between voiced and unvoiced th makes any difference: "thigh and thy". And the latter of the two is an archaic second person possessive pronoun that no one actually uses except for humour value or to sound 'fancy' (which tends to backfire as it's almost never used correctly) or when quoting the bible or Shakespere... and even then only certain, old, translations of the bible. And at this point Shakespere is basically incomprehensible to most people without translation anyway, far too many of the words have long since fallen out of use, just to start with. In all other contexts, while using the wrong reading of TH will make you sound odd, it's still perfectly comprehensible and causes no confusion... Exactly the same as L, which English also actually has two sounds for (which way you pronunce it is dictated by where it is in the word), but it doesn't even have an equivalent to the thy/thigh contrast, so no one ever considers that relevant... except speakers of other langues that either only use one L sound consistently or actually DO contrast the two sounds, to whom that particular quirk showing up when someone is speaking their langauge is a pretty big sign that the speaker's native langauge is English.
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  373.  @jmillar71110  Nah, it's just Old, from back when personal loyalty was basically the only thing half way reliable when it came to getting people to actually do their jobs properly and not screw you over (such as a military general deciding that shiny hat would look much better on His head than yours).
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  374. Someone ends up with the deposit money that you didn't get back. The money isn't 'lost', but you, individually, are out of pocket (in that you didn't get your deposit back nor actually gain anything in exchange for paying that money), and have thus 'made a loss'. Who, exactly, ends up with that money depends on how the system is set up, though yes, it does probably end up with the company making the product. Where you're going wrong is the assumption that the manufacturer comes out ahead ('makes a profit') by keeping the deposit. In reality they don't, because now they have to make a replacement bottle instead, which, with glass bottles, costs them quite a bit more than paying you the deposit amount would have... that's the entire point of the deposit system, it's cheaper for the manufacturer than just making new bottles all the time. So they're actually spending MORE money if you don't claim your deposit... that's a 'loss' for Them, too, not something that helps their profits. ... well, Technically they made a larger profit on the specific bottle they sold you, but they made a smaller profit (by quite a bit more), or even a loss depending on how the numbers shake out, on the next bottle of drink they sell that Would have gone in the bottle you had, had you retuned it, and must now instead go in a much more expensive (for them) new bottle instead. That's not them coming out ahead, and so by most logic is not considered a profit for them. (Actually, I suspect it works a lot like the Goods and Services Tax here, where the retailor records how many bottles they sold and how many deposits they repaid and then pay or are paid the balance for the month/year by the company. Businesses tend to prefer systems like that rather than individual per item/event transactions when they can manage it).
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  375. -ough is the one thing in English that has no logical pattern to it what so ever in its current form. Anything else has Something, awkward and convoluted as it may be, but not that. (Of particular note, actually marking English's 3-or-4-depending-who-you-ask part stress system rationalises a chunk of the more baffling spelling conventions with regards to vowels. Too bad English doesn't do this. Likewise sorting the vowels based on where the stresses permit them to appear rather than pretending the pre-great-vowel-shift vowel length distinction still exists.)
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  376. Well, there is the part where you can debate if that's the same category of issue, and thus relevant to the comparison, or not. It's obviously a very bad thing, mind you, just not necessarily the Same bad thing... Unless you're asserting that the USA does the same thing but its lower numbers and more accurate record keeping somehow make this better?
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  377. Eugene, if I'm not misremembering, was the guy who did such a bad job of redoing the shop floor that Louis fired him, then had to rip it all Out again. (Finding more and more evidence of bad workmanship as they did). He was also pretty shady, and a bunch of extra hunting around after the fact turned up evidence of him ripping other people off in the past (and what may have been an insurance scam? No proof on that one, if I recall correctly, just a number of suspiciously timed events)... It's been ages since I watched the video in question, I may be getting the details muddled up with something else.
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  378. Oddly enough, the Most frequently used words are actually the most Resistant to pronunciation change, followed by those that get barely any use at all.
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  379.  @shamargentle5801  the reality of 'elite' units is that they're the ones who get priority on resources. Their actual compitence is secondary. In well run militaries, generally speaking there's some effort put into ensuring 'elite' and 'competent' actually line up, but historically, in Most armies, the 'elite' units aren't the ones who are best at their job, they're the ones who can be best trusted to turn their guns on the rest of the army rather than the leadership if the two should come into conflict, or the ones wealthy enough to provide their own superior equipment. Though, to be fair, it's rare for elite units to actually be less compitent than their army's average unit, for obvious reasons.
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  380. What that Is exactly seems a bit erratic sometimes though.
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  381.  @Fangsフ  So, your problem isn't chinese companies (because there's still a chinese company doing the actual manufacturing!), but chinese Brands. Or, lets be honest, scummy retailers who use low quality chinese parts that are made for situations where that low quality is fine, in products where that low quality is NOT fine and then lie about it. Said retailers may or may not be chinese.
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  382. ... that is an Astonishingly meaningless take in this context. Because when it comes to this particular project we're not talking about a competitor in the event here, we're talking about a half-time clown who's not even good at his act.
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  383. Turns out, one can somewhat better afford to be wasteful with one's material when one has many times more of it than one's enemy to begin with. That's about all that Russia still having mechanised units engaging in combat while Ukraine does not tells you. Because while some Russian units may be doing much better than we have seen, a lot of them are doing Exactly As Badly As We Have Seen... ... that's why there's something to that effect to see. That said, credit where it's due: This video doesn't actually show very much. Ukraine pretty much elusively releases footage of it's successes when it comes to small scale stuff like this. Of course, on the other side, Russia releases a mix of its own successes and complete and utter fabricated bullshit, so...
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  384.  @TheAmericanCatholic  pretty sure no one has a problem with waste Heat that is incidentally from a nuclear plant. The 'anti nuclear crowd', that part with any actual influence anyway, is generally rather more concerned with the downsides of putting a nuclear plant anywhere near a population centre in the first place. And the ones making actually sensible arguments are fully aware that a properly functioning and maintained nuclear plant is actually Less dangerous, radiation wise, than a coal plant in the same condition (they don't want Those anywhere near population centres Either), the concern is that if a Coal plant fails... you get a steam explosion and a fire. Bad, but design can render the explosion sufficiently non dangerous to the surrounding area, and a fire is a fire, cities have to deal with those anyway, and have been forever. You take what measures you can to prevent it then send in the firefighters to deal with anything that overcomes it. A nuclear plant failing is rather more catastrophic. Yes, yes, make all the arguments you like about modern nuclear plants not failing ... they always end in 'so long as the people in charge (and certain key workers) aren't the sort of idiots who disable important safety features or refuse to pay for necessary upgrades or maintenance' which basically invalidates the entire argument because it doesn't matter if it's a corporation or a government entity, that absolutely WILL happen eventually. Too many perverse inscentives encouraging it. And that's before acounting for potential sabotage. At this point, if you found a practical way to stick a nuclear plant on essentially a raft sufficiently far out to sea (and somewhere suitable wind wise) while still getting the power back for use (and built it with all appropriate safety measures etc.), very few people would actually have a problem with it (well, in and of itself. Political propaganda is always a thing one needs to account for). And a few countries have enough empty space and suitable geography (without endangered species that people care about living there) that would be equally suitable. But no one half way aware of how humans work wants one anywhere near where they live, work, etc., and it's not just NIMBYism or ignorant fear of nuclear power in general. It's more similar to how people often don't want to live down stream of hydroelectric plants (well, maybe WAY down stream).
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  385.  @KVergara  properly speaking, it means you can 'literally taste the chemicals' in Both of them... that's how taste and smell actually Work, after all. Receptors in your mouth, nose, throat, and stomach detect various chemicals in the air, food, and water that enters your body and send signals to the brain accordingly. The difference is a matter of your brain having settled on one thing as standard and normal, and throwing 'hold on, this is different, better make sure that the difference isn't something bad.' warnings for the other one. And it's perfectly capable of both freaking out over things that are perfectly fine and completely failing to register things that are actually really bad, depending on exactly what you are and are not used to and what the chemicals in question happen to be. Mind you, some of the 'this is bad!' reactions are fairly hardwired into the system on the basis of the substance being something humans are reasonably likely to encounter in the wild that absolutely IS poisonous... Interestingly, this Does include sugars, but only in excessive quantity. Quantities that some drink companies' colas actually exceed to the point where they have to (or possibly had to, and this may not hold true across all markets, haven't looked up the current state of things in a few years) include chemicals specifically to suppress the body's automatic response to such excessive sugar intake, or no one would be able to get through a can of the stuff without puking when the taste buds in their stomach (ayup, those are a thing) registered the massive sugar dump. (on the other hand, the human body is wired to actively encourage the consumption of smaller quantities of sugar. Probably because in the wild, sugar mostly means fruit, which in turn means quite a few necessary nutrients that prevent various diseases and are rather hard to come by otherwise.) And then there's bananas... there is a type of banana that most people today will tell you tastes 'artificial' and 'like chemicals'. It's nothing of the sort, but there IS a reason they say that: That sort of banana used to be the absolute standard, to the point where it's the one that all the Artificial Banana Flavours are based on... but then a plague of some sort wiped out that type in most of the places that grew them in huge quantities for export, forcing them to switch to the (different tasting) bananas most people around today grew up with... but the artificial flavouring wasn't changed. So with the plague under control and the older type of banana being spread around and grown in larger quantities in more places again, you can now get the bananas... that taste like the artificial, 'chemical' tasting, banana flavour. Because you can absolutely taste the difference between the flavours of the two types of bananas, and there is a specific thing that is done in the process of making most, if not all, artificial fruit flavours that makes them taste detectably different from the actual fruit in a specific way (basically they find the chemical that makes it taste like That fruit, rather than a Different fruit, isolate it, and Only Use That in the artificial flavouring, so it's missing all the secondary flavour influences that the Actual fruit would have (the ratio and type of sugar, for example, will be different).), so in that case you actually Can 'taste the chemicals' ... or more specifically, the artificial Absence of certain chemicals. One of the effects of all this is that your body Can actually 'taste the chemicals', and even to some extent identify at least some of the ones that are either bad, or at least indicative that you should check that some other bad thing that often co-occurs with things that taste like that isn't present, even when you have No Idea what the chemical in question is actually called... which doesn't change the fact that a lot of people making such claims about various things are spouting a load of nonsense (if only because they lack the relevant vocabulary or, as in the case of the banana, their frame of reference is somewhat skewed by what is and is not common in their day to day life, and thus what they are and are not used to.)
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  386. @Rohith Hegde a "zone" that exists entirely because the police abandoned the area. There was a protest happening, peacefully. The protesters were unarmed, the police attacked the protest, unprovoked (no, the act of protesting is not provocation), Again, and after pulling back several times only to be attacked again each time the protesters decided they'd had enough of this shit and advanced back to their original line instead of retreating again. At a walk. Unarmed. Then stopped. They never came into contact with the police while doing this because the police Ran Away. The police then evacuated the local police station and abandoned the area Entirely. (While very obviously setting the station up as arson bait and leaving the distinct impression that They'd set fire to it (and blame the protesters) if no one else did. So the protesters set up a cordon to keep everyone away from the police station and just... Kept protesting. A few joke signs with different names (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone among them) were put up here and there. Someone made a shitpost on twitter with a map of the area. The media went Berserk over it. Then the locals and the protesters got stuck dealing with the aftermath. Getting rid of CHAZ never required doing anything about the protesters, it only required getting the Police to stop refusing to do their damn jobs. Jobs which noticeably do Not include gassing peaceful protesters.
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  387. well, there's a bit of survivorship bias there (there have always been bad movies, they just don't get the promotion or preservation efforts the good ones get because, well, they were bad), but yes, the number/percentage of Good movies in recent times is a lot lower. Mind you, we've also finally got video game movies that are actually good (not great, but good) movies rather than intolllerable garbage in the last couple of years, so there's that?
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  388.  @kekeke8988  I'm in my 30s. These were common when I was in primary school. Noticably, most of them vanished as the kids got older and expanded their vocabulary, but to the best of my knowledge they can still be heard from kids, poorly educated people, and various media (though there it's often hard to tell if its intentionally trying for a specific tone or the writers are just bad at their jobs.(and varies from show to show besides.))
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  389.  @SandySez  i'd say just buy android instead, but in this area of awfulness Google is Worse. Don't do anything that's supposed to be private or confidential in google docs or save it to google drive, the false positives people sometimes get penalized for make it Very obvious that they regularly trawl though supposedly private documents. (For contrast, when it comes to cloud services Mega is somewhat less restrictive when it comes to what you're supposed to put on their service (which is a bit funny, as NZ law is actually a bit More restrictive than US law about most of the usual problem areas), makes it Very clear that they're both required to and quite interested in aiding law enforcement when it comes to any legally problematic content you actually share with others by way of their service... And flat out Cannot Access anything you Don't share.)
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  390. @James Thomas humm. I thought it was that they wanted to use the particle board for the whole thing but the shop was temporarily out of it so they used plywood for the first bit because that was what was to be had. (Also, the particle board may or may not count as plywood under certain classification systems... Which I find a bit weird.) I may be getting things muddled up though.
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  391. The big difference is that WotC's changes weren't... fundimentally incompatible with the law in various markets. They're also charging entity A for the actions of entity B that entity A has no control over and gains no benefit from. For services they don't provide... and then they tried to claim that they would infact make entity C (in this case, valve, microsoft, sony, etc.) pay the bill for them!
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  392. Proper public transit infrastructure would account for and mitigate this issue, well, depending on the exact disability in question, I suppose.... but it would still be far from perfect, I suspect (it's also Far cheaper. Again, if done right). But failing that, much more limited on street parking that's reserved for special use cases such as disabled persons and not available for general use at all ever would still be a step up (after all, there are less disabled people who require it than non-disabled people who would simply like to have it). Parking buildings are pretty rubbish in general, really.
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  393. Pretty sure it was in fact the autocratic/absolute monarchies that hated anarchists more than anyone else did. They're the ones who kept having family members and officials assassinated and buildings blown by anarchist revolutionaries, after all. And you couldn't even Fight anarchists usefully. They had no support structure, no command structure, and if they had any backing at all it was always someone using them as a one off "useful idiot". They were basically just random crazy people. They never actually had a meaningful Plan. I mean, every other ideology I know of you can at least see where they're coming from and why They think it will work, even if its utterly batshit. Anarchists though, their plans were basically always: 1; bombings and assassinations, 2; ???, 3; ???, 4; somehow this is better!
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  394. Amazon also treats its employees terribly, and the only manner in which it is an improvement on what came before is delivery time. And that's before you start getting into the damaging economic and political effects it's had in various places.
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  395. It would be Antarctic waters south of Australia, probably.
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  396. Extra bonus: it's only that high because when steam was first starting up, the brick and mortar stores in a lot of places made a lot of fuss in the courts and legislatures about being unfairly undercut ... functionally forcing Steam to sell at the same price they did. With much lower costs, this meant Steam had to take a bigger cut in profit (not sure of the specifics of how it ended up being that way, might have been if they just paid the developers more it would lead to exclusives causing the same issues as just undercutting the price?)... a Lot of which they dumped back into improving the platform to provide more support and services for developers and players, most of which they do not charge any additional fees for. Of course, being the only significant game in town and providing a high quality (relatively speaking) platform, Steam quickly became the Standard... it's noticeable that Epic gives developers a higher... in exchange for being absolutely terrible on near on every other front and fully admitting that their practices are unsustainable anti-competative nonsense aimed primarily at bringing down Steam. Which, you know, they've failed pretty hard at. (it takes looking a little closer, but they're actually pretty anti-consumer too.)
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  397. Ehh, some of those seem more like rules intended to ensure that legitimately deserving buildings aren't preserved, even as others seem entirely reasonable.
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  398. There is no law against being a monopoly. There are plenty of laws regarding what you are and are not allowed to do in order to reach and maintain that status, and the closer you are to it the closer the regulators will be looking at you for potential screwups, but being a monopoly is not, itself, a problem. Of course, it's a rare corporation that, having found itself with a monopoly, Won't promptly start abusing the hell out of it without heavy government regulation and oversite (which the US government Hates having to do), so...
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  399. Yeah... Do some research on the actual situation they were in in economic, demographic, and technological terms. It had a couple of decades at most before it either reformed, collapsed, or both.
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  400.  @nevreiha  if I remember rightly, it's not even that, it's just the railway station that serves that village (and I think the other places in the name) and the statiin was basically given the name as a publicity stunt to encourage tourism there.
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  401. ... pretty sure this is less "Democrat" and more an intersection of "New York" and "Corrupt". Democrat vs Republican is mostly incidental.
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  402. Turns out, as stated in the video, it basically amounts to the railway company deciding that stations being malls was a good way to make money, and being correct (the two functions benefit each other quite a bit).
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  403. Even taking transmission loss into account, you're still making gains on miles-to-polution-generated by switching to electric, even using Coal plants, which are pretty awful, due to scaling factors in the generation process. Heck, if I understand correctly, just dumping the fuel that would have gone into car engines into a properly designed power plant instead of an individual engine per vehicle would make a huge difference. (Bad as it is, it's better than coal!) Microgeneration actually loses some of those benefits again. Photovoltaic cells have the same disposal issue as batteries (well, different chemicals, same problem though). Wind is not particularly reliable in most places. Nuclear has a Lot of issues surrounding the existence of nuclear weapons to deal with (both the desire for the military to have materials for nuclear weapons, and the desire to then Not let anyone Else have said materials, for obvious reasons), and has the issue that, if an accident Does occur, about the only thing worse, depending how you measure it, is being directly down stream from a hydro electric dam that has just suffered a catastrophic failure. Now, obviously, this is vanishingly unlikely with a properly designed, built, maintained, and protected power plant... But really, the USA can't even maintain its highways, bridges, and storm drains reliably. It's far from unheard of to be able to get into the secure parts of nuclear missile silos by pretending to be a pizza delivery guy. For most people, that sort of thing seems like a bad gamble the odds of failure are low, but not zero, and the consequences extreme. Mind you, if anyone ever cracks a practical Fusion generator (rather than fission), it's my understanding that most of the catastrophic failure states become much less... Catastrophic... For the surrounding... Er... Everything. (On an interesting side note, on a day to day basis, Coal plants irradiate their surroundings more than nuclear plants do, as they have little or nothing in the way of measures to actually prevent this.) Improvements are, obviously, always desirable, of course.
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  404.  @Nphen  Good electronics are still expensive Now. There's just a lot more 'not so good but still good enough for most use cases' options to be had (and, if you want cheap, some absolute Garbage options too.)
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  405.  @hydrohasspoken6227  Nah, lobbying covers a whole range of things. Some of it is perfectly reasonable and sensible and a representative democracy wouldn't actually Function without it (petitions, for example). ... but yeah, if your system isn't set up right, it can and does end up including flat out bribery... though in the USA it frequently doesn't have to: The professional lobiest class hired by large and wealthy trade associations and billionaires can spend all of their working hours interacting with politicians, while the system is quite intentionally set up to make it almost impossible for the average person to ever be able to afford to take the time off work to even meet their local politician once in a term. No further corruption necessary, the politicians are simply only ever given one side of the story (the public oftend doesn't even know the issue is being considered... not because notices aren't posted, but because they are, in the most useless ways possible, and no one has the time and resources spare to deal with them because, frankly, US employment conditions are often pretty darn rubbish.)
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  406.  @bdhale34  generally speaking, more parties works better than less. Zero would be ideal, but all that actually happens is that you end up with cliques instead... Which are exactly the same thing, just with even less public accountability by way of not being an officially recognized and regulated thing. If it achieves anything positive at all, the cliques tend to be smaller... That is, you functionally end up with a multi-party system... But it's also much easier for such a small group to end up with disproportionate levels of power within the system, as their actions are less obvious and organizing opposition is more difficult. Of course, in parliamentary systems it does have the (usually but not always) up side of forcing the head of state to at least Try to choose the best person for the head of government role, rather than just automatically signing off on the leader of the party that won the most seats in the legislature, no matter how awful they may be as an administrator. (Getting elected requires an Entirely different skills set from governing well, after all)
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  407. Well, it's fair enough when the function in question does actually require ongoing support from the company in order to be possible (rather than because they've crippled it) and is actually useful, but certainly outside of that particular exception this is absolutely the position that should be taken. If I wanted to keep paying a recurring fee, I'd Rent the thing honestly and at least skip the up front cost!
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  408.  @Tom_Bee_  The current state of things is not that unprecedented... take a look at most major empires in history generally right as they start declining from their peak, and you'll start seeing ever more instances of problems with the economic system, corruption, infrastructure not being built in sufficient quantity or maintained properly, worsening conditions for the lower classes, wealth concentrating in the upper classes (and causing problems for Them in the process too), increasing instances of plagues, droughts, floods, (often due to infrastructure breaking down and administrative issues combined with continued population growth, which combine to undermine the various measures that were previously mitigating the causes of those problems... and, of course, one can only be so lucky for so long before something goes poorly). All sorts of stuff like that. The weird bit about the modern situation is that, rather than a single Empire hitting such a point and collapsing while everyone else trundles along, it seems like, to varying degrees, most of the world is being hit by this (the exceptions mostly being places that weren't doing so brilliantly to start with). Or perhaps not so weird. An empire is, when you get down in the guts of the thing, mostly built on the back of a single, somewhat centralised, trade network, plus some degree of cultural hegemony, after all.
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  409. Weary, and wary as well.
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  410.  @patriciusvunkempen102  not that that was all that much different from how things had been under the Tsars (or, more accurately, the aristocracy under said tsars). The communists screwed up a lot of things by mucking around with things that they didn't understand and/or that were working fine before, but a lot of the USSR's ground level problems were broken tsarist-era systems they just kept in place for one reason or another.
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  411.  @thorpeaaron1110  the USA qualifies quite handily as an empire just by way of the contiguous states, between it's size, method of acquisition, and method of governance. It's obviously not a monarchy, but that is not a requirement in the first place. Then there's the rest of its territory. That said, the oft sited military bases have nothing to do with being an empire, though they are used for force projection in support of objectives that could be considered such. Rather, they are signs of hegemony, which is a similar concept with sone rather key differences. Mostly that a hegemony can get away with a lot of nonsense that would bring down an Empire, if its careful. This has nothing to do with being "woke", incidentally, just actually knowing something of the history of places outside the USA to compare it to.
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  412. Well, not Nothing. They help. fuel and road space usage to number of people moved they're a big step up from cars. Of course, to get the Full benefit you'd have to basically ban cars entirely, (both to get people to actually USE the buses, and to eliminate the traffic congestion which dramatically reduces their performance as a mass transit option) and then get a LOT of buses with implausibly well planed routes... Really, buses seem best used as feeders for larger systems where population density isn't high enough for frequent rail stops in easy walking distance of...everywhere. (what that density limit Is depends on a few different things, of course.)
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  413. And for quite a while after. The British empire didn't reach its height until after losing what became the USA, and the USA didn't hit a comparable level until after Britain was already declining The Empire was starting to have problems before WW1 (not yet too big, as such things go, but there), and by the end of WW2 was pretty much Done (cue the weirdest "fall" of an empire Ever) Meanwhile, WW2 and its aftermath are basically when the USA became more than a secondary power at best (and it pretty much skipped straight to Super power due to the competition being wrecked.)
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  414. Ahh, fun. You went from 'very wrong' to 'psychotic evil'. Definitely an improvement.
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  415. Now, you say that, but who did the analysis? Worth checking that carefully before taking their word for things. Perverse incentives and such. Noticeably, if such claims were true even half as often as they are made, the war would be long over, a stunning victory for Russia... it clearly isn't. So, maybe you are correct in this instance, maybe your not, I certainly don't know enough about the specifics of such matters to say one way or the other. But the evidence stacking up sure leans pretty hard in favour of 'Russian propaganda is exactly as trustworthy as ever' (which is to say, about as trustworthy as Fox News, maybe worse). Also worth noting: This is a result of whoever was trying to make the crossing loosing. That's not really debatable.
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  416. No, New Zealand did not "restrict travel" that's as useless as the WHO says it is for exactly the reason they say it is. For one thing, they were, as I understand it, referring to things like the USA's ban on travel from China (and later Europe) while otherwise continuing as normal. Which, you may notice, Doesn't Work. What New Zealand did was close the border Entirely, and then lock down the Country entirely. Much more extreme (and effective) measures.
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  417.  @alihms  Humidity is a whole other factor playing into the temperature issue.
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  418.  @SirBrasstion  ... Meanwhile, pretty much anyone in the CANZUK nations who's been paying attention (to sources other than Australian television news, anyway, as that's just "fox, except we can't quite get away with being Blatant insane") has no interest in any such arrangement that isn't preceded by the Republican party being utterly destroyed, the Democrats heavily fragmented, and wholesale systemic reform to purge the corruption, excessive corporate influence, and blatant Insanity from the government of the USA... And that mostly as a precursor to actually being able to pass laws sorting out the USA's Appaling labor laws, disasterous prison system, disproportionately terrible law enforcement, and business law that's more loophole than law, just to start with. And no, that has nothing to do with China. The difference between China and the USA, from the outside? China uses political power to oppress its citizens and money to oppress outsiders. The USA uses money to oppress it's citizens and politics to oppress outsiders. Both use as much force as they can get away with without destabilizing the situation enough to endanger their elite both at home and abroad. And both cling excessively to outdated and defective ideology for legitimacy. Nations stuck having to choose between them generally just pick whichever leads to the lowest risk of being invaded or subjected to a coup.
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  419. Hence why no one is talking about opening the borders any time soon. Do note, we're so far away from pretty much anywhere that any freight traveling by ship hasn't been touched by a human in weeks. The border is only closed to travelers, not freight. Our tourism industry's going to get hammered, mind you.
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  420. There is a '0 point' on the timeline, of course, (the transition from BC to AD), which may be marked as 'AD0' (or, in a common error, 0AD.*) if the display is arranged such that the numbers are placed on the end-posts of the year rather than labling the sections, but that's not the same thing. *and then there's BCE/CE which is litterally just the same system relabled so as to annoy Even More people and make it easier to mishear rather than actually improving anything.
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  421.  @elLooto  When you actually break down what they are and how they work, the Maori seats aren't actually an issue, not actually granting meaningly more representation to any individual than a regular seat would. Other matters... are a complete mess. There are areas where the system is still actively racist against Maori. There are areas where it is actively racist in Favour of Maori. There are areas that run into problems because those in charge of policy somehow seem incapable of grasping the idea of poor people who Aren't Maori (or maybe pacific islanders)... make of That what you will, but it causes problems. Then you have Maori Supremacists making a mess of things, Radical Progressives more interested in their ideological dogma than the actual reality of the situation (the UN's bit about native cogovernance makes Perfect sense when you're talking about a few native tribes who mostly don't interact with the wider nation and want to prevent them from being abused, it's complete nonsensical bullshit when said natives all but universally live in the same places under the same economic models using the same resorces in the same ways as the rest of the citizenry.), various parts of the right using rightful opposition to that as an excuse to push another round of pro-white/anti-maori racist nonsense (mind you, this is almost always as a tool, a means to an end, rather than the Goal. The NZ voting public still hasn't quite fallen far enough as to actually elect the malicious and/or deranged, mostly-american-influenced 'far right' (for want of a better term) to parliament. The parties that Do get in are all pretty rubbish regardless of supposed alignment, but none of them are That far gone.)
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  422.  @kodirovsshik  as someone who started out using DOS as a kid, then windows exclusively until... sometime during windows 7? before poking at linux a few times, sticking to 8 rather than dealing with 10's nonsense and finally ditching windows entirely when it came out that 11 was going to be even worse? Switching to Linux (and specifically pop!_OS in my case when I finally ditched windows entirely) was amusinglly Less painful, in terms of learning the interface, than switching to any post 7 version of windows had been. Because the Windows interface from 2000 to 7 was actually Good. there was room for argument about specific decisions, but over all? actually good. And Linux desktop environments generally also try to be good. Some of them are Really Weird because they're trying to be good for people who want weird things, but the ones that aren't? They have more in common with old windows than new windows does because old windows got a lot of things Right. (of course, borrowing good bits from mac UIs is also common... as is borrowing bad bits from mac UIs, so, you know, nothings ever perfect...)
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  423.  @shazzymapatazzie3117  A LOT of people lie on the internet. Often for trivial, non existent, or utterly nonsensical reasons (and then there's the calculated and malicious examples). Particularly in youtube comments, for some reason. With the subsequently added details, your story is entirely believeable. Stuff like that happens more often than one might think. But as initially presented? Not believing it was entirely understandable, people tell stories like that all the time that turn out to be absolutely bogus and random people on youtube don't know anything about you as an individual (rather than a random character string that may or may not be trying to be words and which they have never previously encountered) to indicate otherwise.
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  424.  @bluedark7724  because division is fractions are fractions are division. Except, of course, that if you want it read and done that way you, depending on medium, either Actually write it as a fraction (that means a horizontal line with the numerator above and the denominator below, not a slash between the two numbers), not division, or use parentheses to clarify that everything else is to be done before the division. Note, if you limit yourself to standard keyboard characters, / indicates in inline division, largely because there is no ÷ key and ÷ is required far more often than fractions, which means that / cannot be used for fractions where it could be interpreted to mean ÷, forcing the use of actual parenthesis instead, rather than using the fraction format to imply them.
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  425. @frenne_dilley give you good odds that, like most such things, it made life much better who were on the wrong end of the problems with the previous system, while making it worse for those who were on the wrong end of the new system. That's the usual way of these things: does a great job of solving the specific problem it's focused on but a terrible job at not breaking adacent matters. (mind you, the way political nonsense tends to shake out, the alternative is not even trying to fix the existing issue, and which state of affairs is better comes down to the coinflip of whether the job was done properly and even then depends on whether you were in a demographic being hit by the problems of the old system or one being hit by the problems of the new system or never had to interact with either).
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  426.  @Rob_F8F  Yeah, that tends not to help anything... Mind you, it's not exactly a uniquely Russian problem, either...
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  427.  @bharadwajv79  a decent sand dune on a beach, or a cliff facing out to sea is enough to be able to see the horizon curve. Build a frame at the top, aligned with the sea as perfectly as you can manage. Use a spirit level to ensure a crossbar (preferably a couple of metres long), the centre of which is also aligned to the horizon, is perfectly level. Then compare it to the horizon at different points along its length. They don't match. Either the horizon curves... Or your spirit level does. A ship (large sailing ships make it particularly obvious) sailing away from you demonstrates the curve in that direction as, rather than getting so small as to be invisible (as would be the case if they were traveling away in a straight line) the Bottom of them disappears first.
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  428. Well, there's a reason why pretty much everyone else, to varying degrees, copied the UK model and then refined it (to a more or less radical extent) to suit their needs, rather than the USA's model. America's constitution is defective by design, and even if it wasn't it's been obsolete roughly a century, if not longer. But it was never actually about freedom or justice of proper representation to start with, and it seems to have kept right on doing a great job of what it was Actually designed to do pretty much the entire time. Difference is, the current idiots have decided to stop pretending otherwise.
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  429.  j mcmann  also polio, whooping cough, and others. Few have been eliminated entirely, many have been moved from common and frequent to very, Very rare.
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  430.  @Arterexius  Correction: English is a Germanic language with a couple of stray celtic bits... and it's rather unusual in that it has those celtic bits. It is part of the West Germanic sub family. It has borrowed a lot of Words from the various romance languages, of course, but Every language does That, and it doesn't change the nature of the language itself. Further, 'Germanic' isn't exactly older than Latin, as such, Latin had been around for a Long time before the Germanic tribes and the Romans encountered each other... and from what I recall, it was the Germanic peoples who were the more recent arrivals in Europe at the time. Either way, that older form of germanic aquired a bunch of Latin loan words (which then underwent various sound changes) long before it split into the various daughter languages that eventually split further to become what we speak today. English is NOT a Romance language (that is, a Language derived from that spoken by the Romans, aka Latin), even if, due mostlyh to events in the ... 1700s, I think it was? and later, there are a Lot of French (standard for European diplomacy and nobility at the time, and thus for anyone trying to seem fancier than they actually were as well) and latin (in very common use among the scientific community, if only in the form of a source of words that wouldn't cause a fight due to being from the 'wrong' language, or the use of Church Latin, rather than that spoken by the romans in ancient times, as a sort of common tongue.) Old Norse, on the other hand, was a Northern Germanic language. The other way English is odd is that it lost a lot of Germanic gramatical bits in a rather erratic fashion. This is because west germanic Old English and north germanic Old Norse both had the same gramtical functions, but the specific sounds used in a given slot were often different, and the difference cused such confusion in the Danelaw (the part of England conquored by the Norse), that it generally became easier to just not use either modifer in those cases. That's why English verbs are modified to agree with the subject if the subject is third person singular, but remain the same for all other subjects.
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  431.  Robert Johnston  in that case, it is named because it is multiple measuring devices (meters) in one unit. The multimeter does not multitask. It is, however, capable of measuring multiple things. The "multi" describes what it is, not what it does. You don't have to swap parts or devices when you change which job it's doing. How about a "multi-mode" item? It's only ever in one mode at a time, but it still has all of its multiple modes. "A multi-year journey" certainly can't some how have all those years happen at once, but it's still correct.
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  432. Interestingly, the motorways where I live initially had that rule on the books, and were treated exactly the the double lane passing sections present here and there on the standard state highways... It got thrown out (it ended up in court before it was resolved). Basically all it did was mean that half the road needed redoing twice as often and the whole thing couldn't actually handle any more traffic than the regular road it was supposed to replace.(the rule still applies to those passing lane setups, mind you, just not motorways) Of course, the way its set up, basically in one direction all the traffic is getting on, and none getting off, until after it hits the city and stops being a motorway, and in the other direction basically all the traffic is coming out of the city and splitting away from the motorway (until it eventually becomes a standard one-lane-each-way, at mostly 100 kilometre per hour, state highway.) So what usually happens is that traffic just continues on in whatever lane it's already in, with a slight bias toward the Right lane, because any cars entering and exiting do so via the leftmost lane. (Meanwhile, one of the other cities has motorway sections with moveable center barriers, the number of lanes available in each direction being changed to accommodate rush hour traffic. It may also have a few places with exits on the right rather than the left (due to an exit on the left in the same place leading to a different destination). Basically, lanes are chosen based primarily on destination (kind of like in Cities:Skylines)
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  433. Yeah, they look at what worked for others trying to get away with the same dumb ideas and copy it.
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  434. The really fun one is that there are points on the international date line where people on opposite sides are not one, but Two days apart (at least at certain times of day).
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  435.  @williambixby3785  depends what department of what government under what circumstances. Some are much better or worse than others.
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  436. The flat map has innaccuracies caused by projecting a sphere(ish) onto a flat plain. Globes solve this problem. Assuming that's what you were referring to.
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  437. An entertaining counter point to that claim (and others like it) is to list off all the industries created or revived by millennials. The modern board game industry, for example. I remember something about there actually being a market for what amounts to cobblers again (in the USA, I believe it was) as people ran the numbers and realized they're better off shelling out for the expensive, custom or semi-custom made (better fit and style), higher quality, often locally made, shoes that can take more abuse and last a lot longer before they need replacing, rather than buying mass produced garbage that needs replacing 5 times as often or more, is routinely overpriced, and is made in a different country entirely.
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  438.  @Knappa22  Indeed. Though place names certainly stuck around, and various bits of latin get into the germanic languages well before English became a thing, and then some more make their way in via the christian monastries (before the vikings looted and burned basically all of the major ones). England was actually a major centre of literature and the like, as such things went, before that).
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  439. Depending on the specific weapons system, some can depress sufficiently while still being able to operate that they simply engage closer enemies via direct fire, similar to a tank. (that would technically make them a gun-howitzer rather than just a howitzer, I believe). Others can't actually do that, and so yes, have a minimum engagement range, so you need to use a different gun... though in practice howitzers like this tend to hang out far enough behind the front lines that it doesn't really come up, to my understanding. Oh, and the power of the shells means there's a minimum engagement range even if the angle of the gun Wasn't an issue, so there's that. Gun angle definitely affects range, with maximum range being somewhere in the vicinity of 45 degrees (there are other factors that affect things so it's not exactly 45, such as the curvature of the earth, wind, who knows what else) A larger charge will send the round further, but so far as I know only the largest guns have the charge and the payload separated, and a given gun usually only carries a small number of different types of rounds (and even then, mostly one type with a few of the others for when the specific purpose they're intended for comes up) so that's not normally used for range adjustments.
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  440. Because the netherlands was part of 'the germanies' who all spoke various types of 'deutsch' (or however you want to spell that), rendered in English as 'dutch' (and English usually uses the same word for both a people and their language)... and the Netherlands were the ones right next to England who the English interacted with All the Time, so when they split off it was Everyone Else who got renamed, so now the people of 'the germanies' (and then the German Empire, and then just Germany) were germans who spoke german, and the people of the netherlands were the dutch, who spoke dutch. And then you get the Pensilvania Dutch in the USA who are/were... ... German.
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  441. ... given that that is not, in fact, what has been said? Not really. That we probably can, and are on track to do so? Yes. That community transmission has been brought to a halt? Yes. That the whole thing is done and beaten? A significant chunk of every address, near enough, has been emphasising that that is Not the case. That we can Not afford to rush to end restrictions before we are Sure (the two weeks isn't until the end of level 3, its until the government will have enough information to make an informed decision about whether or not it needs to continue.) Certainly, the borders aren't going to open back up for a Long time yet.
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  442. I was having trouble too. It's almost entirely a matter of volume, though.
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  443.  @nicholassinnett2958  Frenchness becomeing a sign of being cultured wasn't so much a post-1066 thing as a 'several centuries later when French became the dominante langauge of the aristocracy and diplomacy throughout Europe' thing. You'll find far more French vocabulary in English tracing it's origin back to that than to the norman conquest.
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  444.  @IntelDesignS59  Their high speed rail network actually doesn't, it's seperate and a broader gauge because high speed on tracks that narrow isn't safe. Mind you, they have a Lot of non-highspeed rail, and yes, that does use narrow gauge.
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  445. 'OG' counter-battery fire was literally pre-Napoleonic artillery with line of sight on each other. It's where the term comes from, to my understanding. Just means the artillery is targeting enemy artillery rather than anything else.
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  446.  @gl1500ctv  that's a very awkward usage if you mean the resulting outfit rather than the manner in which the action was performed though. It's probably entirely valid, but I wouldn't expect to hear it much.
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  447. Depends on who's in charge of it and how competent they are... Private companies provided a subsidy and insufficient regulation are strongly incentivized to keep the service quality as shit as possible while still justifying ever increasing fares and subsidies. On the other hand, without the subsidies most infrastructure simply isn't profitable. Government run infrastructure doesn't have that particular set of problems, though it does have its own (being jerked around by politicians looking to score points rather than provide effective service, poorly thought out budget reallocations, or having people put in charge who are don't know what they're doing (even more so than people in private business who will generally at least know how to run a business in general, if not that particular service... ) The thing about key infrastructure, is that it's not really possible to just Not Use It, so you can't 'vote with your wallet' if the service is bad enough. You Can vote with your ballot if the government controls it though. ... Of course, this assumes your Government's actually any good, unlike the US's utterly impractical federal government (Chief problem isn't that it's oversized, it's that the entity it's trying to RUN is too big for the way it's trying to do it) and/or often hopelessly corrupt state governments... So, yeah, state vs private is mostly a matter of 'how well can you trust your government to properly regulate a private entity?' vs 'how well can you trust your government to actually run the thing competently itself?' when it comes to public infrastructure such as mass transit... also power, water, telecommunications, the postal service, etc.
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  448.  @pharmesq  I believe even Hobbits only have two breakfasts in the normal course of events... Though, arguably, if you're not snacking in between, any meal could rightly be called breakfast..
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  449.  @kallekas8551  There's a fun thing where it's often claimed the New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote too... Except at the time it wasn't, properly speaking, an independent nation, and many other sub-national administrative divisions in various countries allowed women to vote before then, and by the time it became an independent nation, quite a few other countries also allowed women to vote...
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  450. .... Never seen one start with the earliest point at the bottom and go up. Left to right is Massively more common than top to bottom though.
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  451. Oh, it's not the first time. It's getting their attention in the first place that's hard. Once you've got it they will do whatever benefits the platform most. Which means, Usually, complying with the law and otherwise siding with advertising companies over creators, taking whichever side in creator vs creator disputes benefits them most (usually the larger creator unless there is good legal reason not to or it will cause huge backlash among demographics they can't afford to alienate), and they'll usually take the side of a youtube creator over an outsider unless that outsider has the capacity to make things legally and/or financially difficult for youtube in excess of any benefit. Basically, you just have to consider what the law says and what benefits youtube (the company, not the platform) and things like this become less surprising. The hard part is getting them to acknowledge you actually Exist if you don't have an implausibly high subscriber count and youtube advertising revenue.
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  452.  @rjfaber1991  well, they'll turn up in droves provided the area is actually Accessable from where they live/work without a car. Plenty of cities aren't set up that way (despite the fact that they really should be.)
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  453. On the flip side, US driven trade embargos were the reason Japan was bothering to fight anyone other than the Chinese in the first place, so if the US doesn't care about the western pacific (or east asia, really) in the first place, Japan has no reason to go to war for the resources it needs (as it can still trade for them), And stays on good terms with Britain. Which, in turn, means Australia and New Zealand are in no danger in the first place (and the USA only really cared about them for logistical reasons anyway, which, again, with no west pacific interests and thus no embargo and thus no war, never comes to matter.) In such a Scenario, China and Korea are the big losers, though it's a bit of a coin flip if Japan comes out better or worse on balance (though the lack of nuclear bombs being dropped on their cities would be a definite plus, on the other hand, continued military rule...).
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  454. Notice that that's at least partially because the police officers are forcing them off the road (where they were presumably more spread out) onto the footpaths. No idea about anything else, but at one point you can quite clearly hear one of the officers giving them instructions to that effect. Also, pretty sure they were all wearing masks, at least that I saw, so that's something.
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  455.  @looweegee252  "the left".... You guys are of the opinion that they're all communists, right? The sort of individuals who hate, with a Passion, as their fundamental reason for existing, rent seeking capitalists. Right? That is how the logic goes? Guess who owns the companies that oppose right to repair? Why, capitalists, naturally. Who else owns anything on that sort of scale? And what's the whole bit about preventing repairs about? Rent seeking! ... Congratulations, by supporting right to repair You Are The Left! Byway of being a communist! Great job! This is, of course, poorly reasoned nonsense, but itt makes about as much sense as any Other argument along those lines. "The left" and "the right" as entities are exactly as meaningful as "the non-nazis" and "the non-communists",and almost every arguments painting either (with no further nuance) as "the enemy" is well over 50% falsehoods and unfounded assumptions. Generally Other People's falsehoods, too.
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  456. And it's a terrible style that makes an absolute hash out of whatever meaning you might be trying to impart, because that's just not how English works anyway. Mind you, English 'prepositions' are more 'adpositions', falling into the preposition or postposition slot as necessary for whatever you might be doing at the time. You actually Can't end a sentence with an actual preposition unless you horribly mangle it (or get interupted).
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  457. Well, even more rigged, at least.
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  458.  @smmmokin  it's both. There's a term for it that I've forgotten, but it's the same reason windows can be terrible but no one will get rid of it (at least, not in enough numbers to matter): the programs are there because the users are there because the programs are there because the users are there etc. You need a new and better option, that both the creators AND the users are willing to migrate to in significant numbers, simultaneously, RIGHT as the current platform/OS/Whatever fucks up badly enough fr user dissatisfaction to overcome inertia. Steam benefits from a similar situation. More so, if anything. Fortunately, they're negligent at worst, rather than maliciously anti-user like windows and youtube.
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  459. ... what was the current count? 11, 12, something like that? mind you, apparently time Isn't one (time and gravity are Weird...)... of course, that's if you use the word 'dimension' properly, which sci-fi (and others) classically Don't.
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  460. ... conspirators, in fact.
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  461.  @TheEthiopian1987  If you're looking at an actual globe, sure. Every flat map involves some distortion that renders comparisons between things that are different distences from the equator.... off... as a sid effect of not being a sphere.
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  462. ... that's a liquidity issue. A comparatively minor one you're being proactive about correcting, but still a liquidity issue. It's also not what he said (which is why it's hard to understand).
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  463. @Fremen It's generally used as a catch all for a whole variety of tangentially related concepts and systems, some of which are actually beneficial, others are absolutely detrimental. In practice, though, what is usually meant (with varying degrees of vagueness and/or awareness) is over-accommodation of plutocrats (who may or may not also be the political or landowning classes, and may be foreign or domestic) to the detriment of the general public, the various, often perverse, incentives that come from that, and by extension various concepts that have become attached to those in people's minds via propaganda (both pro and anti capitalism) by various people and groups. It was never really given a particularly useful Real definition, as capitalism has pretty much always been defined primarily by what it opposes, and secondarily by being mainly concerned with the interests of those who already have, and control, the capital needed to start or expand any significant venture. Frequently, though not Necessarily, at the expense of other classes.
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  464. Nah, the NZ government's message on the matter's been pretty consistent: the global economy sucks and NZ's economy's taken/taking a hit (recession? Sure, probably accurate), but it's also taking much Less of a hit than expected, and much less of one than elsewhere, and by all evidence most of it should bounce back uncommonly well and quickly. So... Both are seemingly true.
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  465. @treadingtheboards2875 It's kind of a coinflip on Day Month Year or Year Month Day, but the USA are definitely completely unhelpful weirdos with Month Day Year, yes.
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  466.  @ArtVanAuggie  turns out, the lesson There has been "there's a lot less of it in the stock market than you think." Scummy behaviour, and strange regulations (mostly due to attempts to prevent repeats of previous scams) sure. Crime? Not so much. Which isn't to say there's None, mind you.
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  467.  @edwardroh89  to be fair, there are a lot of allegations of fraud* floating around regarding the current situation that, when you look into it, are actually "complying with anti-fraud* regulations." * Using the term "fraud" rather loosly here due to lack if technical knowledge Of course, there's a lot of dodgy shit going on too.
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  468.  @britcom1  that would be rhotic vs non-rhotic speach, where what is written as an r character in the coda (that is, the part after the vowel) in rhotic speach produces an r sound, but in non-rhotic speach instead acts as a modifier to the vowel. For reference, rhotic is more common the USA, non-rhotic is more common in commonwealth dialects, but there are still quite a number of non-rhotic American, and rhotic commonwealth, dialects kicking around.
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  469. Pretty sure the details depend on the jurisdiction, and in many there are a bunch of ways around that. "Sign this waiver giving us permission or you're fired/won't be hired" seems to be a perfectly legally acceptable method in much of the USA, as an example.
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  470. Import tariffs would be the actually effective answer to this nonsense. Allows businesses that are actually compliant with local laws reguarding treatment of labour and the like to actually compete with unethical manufacturies hidden away in other countries. Doesn't help with unethical practices within the borders, but those, at least, are more easily found out about and dealt with. Unfortunately, much of the west is ideologically stuck on 'free trade'. And yeah, the idea of not engaging in tit-for-tat trade wars over petty nonsense or warping the markets to the point that the inate counterbalancing factors in the system can't drag them back into line with excessive and badly applied production subsidies is great (that being a decent chunk of the point of 'free trade' when the idea was introduced), both of those things caused a lot of hardship and damage for no real benefit. The problem is that the tools that were being abused Existed for very good reason and served important functions and have been stripped away in the process. In the name of Efficiency, the price of basic staples gets driven up in areas that produce those staples because that area happens to produce particularly good examples of such and other countries consumers, in places where said staple is either low quality or unavailable, will pay more than them. This is, in theory, supposed to be compensated by importing the same basic staple, but at a lower quality and in greater bulk from another source, but once you add in shipping costs (both monitary and environmental) and the fact that the sources for those lower quality varieties will, in so far as they possibly can, Stop Producing Those, at least for export, in favour of something higher quality (and thus more profitable), and all that happens is that it gets more and more difficult for the less well off in even wealthy nations to afford Basic Food... and of course they can't just Not buy that, and the cheap options keep ceasing to exist (when they're not just flat out dangerous), so they have to cut costs everywhere else, and also seek higher wages, both of which have their own knock on effects... Repeate similar stories in every Other industry and you end up with a rather problematic spiral, much (though obviously not all) of which could be knocked on the head with judicious application of import tarrifs and support for the creation of (relatively) local manufacturing. (note that I say the Creation of said manufacturing. If it can't compete with imports even with appropriate import tariffs in place, the subsidising production won't really fix that, and will create all sorts of perverse incentives for behaviours that worsen the situation rather than improving it). Which is to say, this is a social and economic problem with a regulatory and economic solution, if only there weren't such substantual ideological oppostion to using the tools needed to implement said solution. (ok, to be fair, 'solution' is overstating matters, but it would certainly Reduce the problem.)
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  471. I mostly agree. Though I think we could do with readopting a few of the more useful/practical anglo-saxon terms here and there.
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  472. Well, they do when it's new, I would imagine.
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  473.  @stollinroned5090  Nah, not for first contacts. They tend to be a real mixed bag. Subsequent interactions are another story.
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  474.  @sylvester999999  A problem with a simple solution: Mandate that the company provide a damn bus for it's employees when it builds way off out in the middle of nowhere! Depending on relevant numbers etc. it can either come pick you up from your house or from the nearest public transit hub. Problem solved. Failing that: actually increasing use of public transit cuts down on the number of cars needed, so that people, such as yourself in this case, who Do still actually need them are the ones getting them, rather than the large number of people who really, really don't, or at least shouldn't. Though an even simpler solution, if such a place exists, is to move to a town that's actually closer to the job site. If the job is shipping stuff in and out in bulk with any regularity, (I imagine that if it's off in the middle of a forest it's either logging or mining of some sort, though obviously there are other possibilities), it absolutely SHOULD be using rail to do so: stick a passenger carriage on the back of the train and stop somewhere in town. Properly built public transit should link the towns. Generally speaking, the argument (from people who are actually considering the problem properly) is less 'just use public transit, duh, then we wouldn't need cars at all' and more 'well, if the government would actually just Build/encourage/not prevent proper public transit, then we'd have a lot less supply and pollution issues from the cars that were still needed.'
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  475.  @True_you_coming_through  In that in New Zeland they are called 'kiwifruit', because a Kiwi is either an endangered bird or a person from New Zealand. The reason everyone else refers to the Fruit as kiwis is, if I remember correctly, because american military lableing would mark boxes or crates of kiwifruit as 'k1w1', and it spread from there. (seriously, if you say something about eating a kiwi in NZ people are going to wonder if you're engaging in poaching or cannibalism... for the half second it takes them to realise your accent isn't local.)
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  476. By every meaningful trait that is used to identify what family a language belongs to, English is Germanic. You're hard pressed to find anything about how English works that isn't either Germanic or functionally unique to English (in that if it shows up elsewhere at all it's in a Completely unrelated language for unrelated reasons). Every language borrows words and phrases and the like from it's neighbours and such. English is only unusual in quite How Much it's done so. Celtic's the only one that Might have a claim to influencing what language family English belongs in, and even then it's highly debatable if it's even a thing (and if it is, if it's enough to matter). You can rip all the non-germanic languages out of English and still have a functional langauge. But if you remove the germanic parts and try to use only the non-germanic parts it falls apart entirely. You don't just have to come up with new words (and often enough just use germanic roots rather than romance roots and form them from exactly the same parts), but completely rebuild the entire grammar from the ground up.
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  477.  @franciscovessani6720  ... smoking is inherently unsafe to those Around you, nevermind what it does to the person doing the smoking. Also, nicotine is both adictive and poisonous... and when you look at the ingredients list for cigarettes? it contains a LOT of extra chemical additives, with a surprising overlap with Rocket Fuel (also toxic to humans), many of which designed specifically to make them More addictive.
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  478. Well, they have enough wiggle room to be a pain in the arse until you convince the court they're full of it, at least. Not quite the same thing, though closely related and still not good.
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  479. when you start taking into account all relevant factors... Well, your entire premise regarding transit is mislead. Busses are actively the Worst form of public transit (edit: ok, this discounts taxis as public transit, and 'worst' isn't Quite the right word). Better than nothing, entirely suited for situations where density is too low to support anything better and 'last mile' transit from stations where density isn't high enough to justify tram stops within a 10 minute walk of basically everywhere. The simple fact is, cost to benefit (both direct and knock-on, because when the transit is run by the relevant government entities, a surprisingly large number of 'unprofitable' services actually improve economic conditions such that they boost the tax take by more than they cost to run, even if it's impossible for them to turn a profit in terms of ticket sales), If you have enough riders to support them (and yes, density is a significant contributing factor), trams and full railways are absolutely better. Now, here's the thing about subways: They are the single most expensive form of transit there is to build. Not necessarily to Operate (which is a very important thing to keep in mind and a significant part of what lets buses down). Frankly, you shouldn't be building them at all except in the dense urban core where surface lines are non-viable. Elevated rail lines come with most of the benefits at substantially less cost. ... provided you're willing to give the NIMBYs the boot to the head they deserve rather than caving to them (because, seriously, somehow city and state government can just ignore legitimate concerns at will for projects that offer little or no actual benefit and have glaring flaws willy nilly, but highly beneficial projects with little or no Legitimate reason not to proceed implode or have their costs absolutely baloon if a NIMBY so much as breaths on them, it's absurd...). Surface rail is even better still, when the current state of things allows it. Also, BRT: Kind of a scam. Like, not really, but kind of. Basically, every feature of a BRT will improve a regular bus service if applied as appropriate... but if you build a whole new BRT from scratch... you basically just spent 80+% of the cost of building a proper tram system, on a system that has significantly higher operating costs, produces more pollution, gives a less comfortable ride, and has lower capacity... With the added bonus that, if you've built it anywhere the expense was actually justified by the ridership... you're going to have to replace it with a tram system in short order Anyway, because it's rapidly going to suffer from it's own success and need a capacity boost that can't be attained otherwise. ... And if you built it to the requirements of the buses, rather than the inevitable trams (and of course you did, let's not kid ourselves here) the resulting Tram service is going to be terrible to. Which is to say, most bus services could be improved by adding BRT elements where suitable, but if you're considering Building a dedicated BRT system from scratch as your public transit solution... Just save everyone a tonne of time, money, effort, and service disruption and just build a tram in the first place.
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  480. Similar in New Zealand. You can find a few quotes saying the sort of thing NZ politicians say when they don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but have absolutely no intention of commiting to the proposed course of action (usually because it's a terrible idea, one way or another). If you look around on the internet. Actual NZ news media? Not a peep, that I can recall. Maybe an opinion piece in the back half of a newspaper once? Not from anyone particularly notable though.
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  481.  @diogofernandes7965  Critical Race Theory disagrees with you. It's also utter lunacy (and rather astonishingly racist, to boot.)
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  482. It's certainly More dangerous if they do so Without such manuals.
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  483. For clarity: New Zealand has one of the highest per-capita testing rates in the world. Tests anyone showing symptoms, anyone who's been in contact with those who returned a positive result, anyone entering the country, a few other groups I forget right now, and has recently been doing mostly-random testing (in that it was basically 'anyone who showed up at these supermarkets on this day') in the areas where undetected spread was most likely.
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  484.  Teh Chuan  ehh, at this point in the USA (parts of) the press arguably control (parts of) the government... Not entirely intentionally. (There have been some rather hilarious stunts proving you can get Donald Trump to talk about just about Anything to the media by saying the right thing in the add space during a specific program on a particular (fox) channel.) But yeah, the US government does usually manipulate the mainstream media's reporting of political matters, though usually indirectly. Meanwhile, the New Zealand has much greater official power to meddle and just... Doesn't. Usually, anyway. Though it is a bit amusing that the two main news shows on tv (used to, at least) behave differently based on who was in power. One is state funded, on a state funded channel, so they're always Very careful what they say about the current government. Not to the point of being dishonest, so much as being Very sure of what they're saying and very polite about it, as a rule. No matter which party is currently in power. Meanwhile, the other is owned by, to the best of my knowledge, big business interests. I believe not even (entirely, at least) domestic ones. They cant afford to spin things Too much, people notice when they're too far out of alignment with the other one, but they're Always in favour of the National party (economic right, socially 'less progressive than the other guys') if there's any room to spin things that way. (They also constantly try to spin our MMP parliamentary elections as presidential races between the leaders of Labour and National... Despite the out come of most elections coming down to how many votes the centrist New Zealand First party gets, as coalition governments are pretty much required most of the time under MMP. (And which way NZ first jumps depends partially on how obnoxious the other parties were in the lead up and how cooperative they are in the aftermath. ) But yeah, the contrast between the two news programs with one major party in power vs with the other major party in power is ... Interesting.
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  485.  @goste4  point of order: At a minimum, the British and Mongol empires covered more land, and the Chinese (and probably British) empires (or, more obviously, modern China) had greater population. India as well. The USA is not the largest empire the world has ever seen. It's certainly near the top of the list though. You could probably make a good case for it being (or having been) the most Powerful and/or wealthy, depending on how you measure such things, though.
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  486.  @user-ez9is7lb9p  Especially given that the actual reason (at least as anyone connected in Britain would have understood it) was that Parliament was having none of the colonists' tax dodging nonsense, and the colonists took exception to that. Which is hilarious in hindsight, as taxes went up (from 'basically non-existent by the standards of the day' even taking the stamp tax brought in on tea in response to the colonists' refusal to pay an entirely reasonable one-off tax on 'a small portion of the cost of defending you from your own actions'* into account) and Stayed up when suddenly they didn't have British wealth subsidizing the entire administration (among other things!) anymore. Which is to say, the USA as an independent entity has never had taxes as low as it did when it was still a (collection of) British colonies. *actions that dragged Britain into a globe spanning war with France, mind you.
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  487. Used to be the law that businesses flat out could not open before noon on sunday here... Turns out, business owners are voters too, and many of the aren't Christian (or went to evening services instead anyway)... So much for that! Used to be, most public holidays you had to give your workers the day off if they wanted it, and even if they didn't you still had to pay time-and-a-half... Except Good Friday, Easter Monday, Christmas Day and Boxing day, when being closed was flat out manditory without special dispensation (in practice, most restaurants got dispensation for Christmas, petrol stations always got dispensation to sell Fuel at least, a couple of industries where shutting equipment down was a problem would get permission for very limited operation, etc.) Every Year garden centres would be in the news for getting in trouble with the law over being open on the easter public holidays. Every Year! They made enough money that it was still the most profitable part of the whole year by a long shot even after paying the fines! Because the easter holiday is basically the only time most people have free for big garden projects! I think that's been sorted out (by granting them exceptions. Which... Really?) Meanwhile, basically nothing is open on New Year's Day (public holiday, but closing isn't mandatory) on the basis that any employees that aren't hung over have decent odds of still being drunk, and the boss isn't sufficiently better off as to be bothered putting in the effort needed to work around that... And if it's not true of the staff, it's certainly true of the would-be customers!
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  488. That's 'garden path', not garden pass, it comes from an idiom where you 'lead someone up the garden path'. I have no idea quite how that ideom came to be, but it broadly means to mislead someone. In linguistics, it means to construct a sentence such that the listener or reader has to completely reanalyse the sentence with every word or clause, because each new piece of information invalidates the default reading of the sentence up to that point. It's a thing you can do in English with a bit of work, and doing it accidentally is generally considered to amount to being a very poor writer or speaker (Newspaper headlines are particularly prone to Very Unfortuante misunderstandings when this is done unintentionally... and clever jokes when done deliberately). It should be noted that the classic English question-and-answer joke that so confuses Japanese people is in part taking advantage of this sort of trick (a question is asked, an answer given. In no sensible context does the answer given as a punchline actually impart a meaningful answer to the question as initially presented, except that by way of the use of some sort of word play (usually a pun) the punchline itself retroactively changes the meaning of the Question such that it is none the less a valid answer). A 'garden path' leaves you essentially getting hit by that sort of nonsense multiple times in the course of trying to follow the meaning of a single sentence.
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  489.  @KekusMagnus  Well, the Heating Element never breaks down... Every Other part of the system is exactly as reliable as any other electric system. Which is to say that if you spent enough money and the people doing the actual work and/or their bosses didn't scam you, it's fine, but otherwise... Seriously, the number of heaters I've seen crap out and die (in a couple of cases starting fires) because of shitty wiring in other components... Like everything else, they're only as breakdown-proof as the person who built/installed/maintains them is reliable. They're just not particularly prone to failing for any reason Other than being actually broken. Or, you know, a complete loss of electrical power. That's a thing.
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  490.  @nnnnnn3647  It's... not meaningfully different from the current situation with ICE cars. Well, you trade the ability to store extra fuel in gas cans or the like on long trips for the ability to refuel while the car's sitting around in your garage overnight, and I'm sure it's not too hard to find use cases where that's a bad thing rather than a good one (though the sorts of vehicles and uses for which the ability to just load up extra fuel is relevant generally also have other requirements that make current EV tech less than ideal anyway), but other than that? The problem is the car and infrastructure designed around it, not EV vs ICE. EVs are fundamentally an attempt to make money off patching some of the flaws in the car based system. They're a step up in most regards, but they're still Cars, with most of the problems that brings with it. To avoid being a slave to the car requires properly implemented public transit (which, shockingly enough, should Also be electric in most cases... though overhead wires are vastly superior to batteries in almost all use cases. Capacitor banks are the answer to most of the 'but sometimes!' issues.)
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  491.  @amicaaranearum  Or, in other words: I'll pay for your service when it actually provides a useful service. Making me pay you to uncripple things you intentionally crippled isn't a service, it's somewhere between a scam and extortion.
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  492. Ships may have two broadsides, but the enemy ship is only on one side of any given ship. Basically, only half their firepower can be brought to bear on any given target. (never mind that not having enough gun crew to fully man both sides at once was a common reality.) Doubling doubles how many guns are in effective range of any given enemy ship, and thus how much DPS (well, damage per Minute, really) they're taking, by letting two ships get into effective range of it at once. It doesn't double any given ship's output though, no. Well, unless shenanigans happen such that, somehow, your attacking lines also have enemies on both sides of them, but that event would be a bit... special.
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  493. Are there Trilobite symbols everywhere? /webcomic reference
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  494. you ask an English butcher for horse meat and he'll be highly offended. (unless this has changed in the last couple of decades). this is because (if i'm correctly remembering the details) horses were so very useful, vital to many people's livelyhoods, and to some degree expensive (and thus if you were short of resources you were better off selling it and Buying food, than eating the horse), that no one would kill one off unless it was so old and/or sick that it couldn't work anymore. meaning that if it was available at all, horse meat was at best tough and stringy, and at worst disease ridden, and if it wasn't it was probably because the horse was stolen. which all added up to selling horse meat doing a butcher's reputation no favours. so they didn't. which translated into a general attitude of "horse meat isn't food", even over and above the value put on horses in the first place. this attitude generally spread to the brittish settler colonies as well, if possibly a little less extremely so for various reasons. or at least, that's my understanding from recolections of what i've read (interestingly enough, the ANZACs, when we get to them, and certainly the NZ aspect, will consist (almost?) entirely of mounted rifles. AKA Dragoons. cavalry. that... has a bit of a sad horse related story at the end. (can't rememver if it was the end of the campaign or the war though.))
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  495. Generally speaking, basic spoken English isn't too bad, Especially if you're coming to it from another germanic language. Idiom's awful in any language, irregularities are hardly novel, and so on. It gets a bit harder if the languages you already speak aren't so closely related, obviously, and for fluency... English does have an uncommonly broad vocabulary, and even the synonyms ... Aren't. Not exactly. And we use all but the most technical of it Frequently... And that's before you get into the dialects... but still, spoken English? Not too bad. Written English, on the other hand, is a Disaster. There are worse out there (japanese is a prime example) but... Well, attempting to write a germanic language in a latin script with no diacritics was never going to end well even before you get into the specifics. We have 5 vowel characters trying to represent (depending on dialect) possibly as many as 15 different vowels And a bunch of diphthongs... Somehow... Add in vowel shifts, erratic borrowing processes (often third hand!), Latin obsessed lunatics with unreasonable influence, American (and other) nationalism, the fact that half of it was codified by dutch speaking printers whose primary interest was getting the length of the lines to line up on the page rather than logical useage... Well, lets just say its astonishing the result is as coherent as it is...
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  496. Is it all in bags? Because that just means the trash pickup is sometime between when the video was recorded and just after opening the next day. You'd see the same thing on rubbish day (or the night before) Everywhere when I was a kid. These days, where I live, the bags have been replaced by bins (with recyclables and green waste each getting their own, and the recyclables bin being much bigger and collected about twice as often when compared to the 'everything else' bin.) In residential areas. I'm not actually sure about the commercial areas these days, I don't have reason to wander around them at night anymore.
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  497. The problem isn't that the suburbs aren't big enough, it's that they're not dense enough (and being physically large compounds this problem. It would be better if they were Smaller, geography wise). And an awful lot of American city planing seems to revolve around putting an unreasonable amount of effort into ensuring it Stays that way (other parts of the world vary a lot, of course). Then you've got to convince the local government to spend money on passenger rail rather than yet another road based non-solution to the city's traffic woes (nevermind the Other issues that don't even get acknowledged). The list of problems gboes on from there, but mostly amount to, over and over again, bad management (for various reasons, ignorance and ideological indoctrination are big ones) and corruption.
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  498.  @ozzie1246  bonus points: the only party trying to derive any benefit from the situation in New Zealand is National, our centre-right party (advocating for delaying the election, among other things). If this affects Labour's chances in the election at all it would be Negatively.
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  499.  @lerkzor  i think, if I remember and understood correctly, he sold a bit more than he needed to to cover his initial investment (at several times what he paid for them) when the prices started going up decently, but that was about it. Kept the rest though.
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  500.  @Ninjaeule97  Oddly enough, government spending (Wisely and Effectively, mind, which is a bit of a sticking point) kind of IS a large part of how a country mitigates and recovers from a recession. (likewise, governments should be saving money and repaying debts so as to be in a better situation to deal with the next round of problems, not cutting taxes, when the economy is doing well)
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  501. Justa note, but while it's very difficult to argue honestly (except out of ignorance) that Trump and his lot are not facists, they're both about ninety years too late and insufficiently German/German adjacent to be Nazis. (Though some subset of their followers are apparently delusional enough to Think they're nazis... They also think the Nazis were the good guys somehow...) Much as Italian and Spanish fascists were not automatically Nazis, neither are US fascists. Also, neo-nazis, while related, are also not the same thing. ... Of course,being fascist is already bad enough, but you'll get into less, and win more, arguments about such things if you use terms correctly rather than muddling them up.
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  502. Indeed. Still better than 'proper' cursive writing though.
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  503. Only when it comes to spelling though (mostly). Most of the differences between the spoken languages (that don't involve things created post independence) came about because American English didn't change while everyone else's did. Or at least changed less.
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  504.  @BooBaddyBig  Ring circuits are a terrible idea that was only used to compensate for a Massive copper shortage at a time when mass rebuilding was necessary. Plug fueses are... debateable. That said, Switched Outlets, with the switch right there at the outlet, are an entirely different matter and there's a reason they're common even in places that never used ring circuits.
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  505. I seem to recall that that only applied if you were part of an away team. If stuff happened on the ship itself it usually didn't get the redshirts. If I remember what I read correctly, it's actually the Science department (blue) that has the highest deaths to appearances ratio, too. Largely due to how few appear, and discounting the main cast, admittedly. But yes, it's a reference to the original series of Star Trek.
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  506. Well... At least they're not trying to jam the USA in there as well...
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  507. It's not even a big government problem. It's a corruption and incompetence problem. ... Well, it's a big government problem in the sense that the USA is too big (population, land area, and economy wise) to govern without a large enough government that preventing such issues is all but impossible (it's not the only one with this problem), but that is rarely what people are complaining about when they say "big government". Usually what is meant is "I don't understand that there is such a thing as a distinction between good regulation and bad regulation and thus think we should get rid of regulation in general" usually ignoring that regulation is, in Most cases, brought in because a previously unregulated system failed. The problem is an issue called regulatory capture, where the very entities the regulations are supposed to control end up, directly or indirectly, controlling the regulatory bodies (which Can happen basically by accident and with the best of intentions, in some cases) and or outright corruption in the regulatory system.
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  508. Ehh, the New Zealand border is super strict about biological contaminants, but otherwise not usually anything special. Being an island nation that's excessively far away from anywhere else though, when the airports shut down, and the ports won't let passengers disembark, that's basically It. No ones getting in unless they do something Really absurd. Canada has the slight disadvantage of having a continent spanning land border that's basically impossible to guard meaningfully.
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  509. it is termmed 'borrowed' largely because the original language hasn't exactly been deprived of them by the acquisition. And yes, there are other words that fit, but I"m sure you'll quickly find there are reasons why those weren't chosen, given that we're talking about a technical term rather than common speech.
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  510. English's Spelling is acutally right next to Japanese (and thus very close to the top, but not quite as close as you might think due to some less well known writting systems that are arguably just straight up abominations against man and god... I'm mostly joking, but only mostly) in terms of being overly complicated and something of a nightmare to learn. English Grammar? English Pronunciation? no worse than any other language. Every langauge has it's straight forward bits and it's complicated bits, and how difficult they are to learn depends on how much they diverge from what you already know. But English spelling (or, more technically, orthography)? It's got about half as many characters as it needs, is missing two rather critical diacritics it really should have (one of which it DID have prior to typewriters becoming common), and is really just generally a mess. Most of the problems being vowel related.
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  511. Yeah, English doesn't really care, given that it's making a new word for English, and will happily mash in prefixes and suffixes from English that have nothing to do with latin or greek to begin with as well if need be. Basically: so long as the parts have the desired meaning and the transition between them isn't awkward, who cares?
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  512. Well, not Everyone. Just, you know, Almost everyone. Most of the time.
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  513.  @DolFan316  Gonna pull you up there: Long history of this nonsense tells me it had far less to do with democrat policies and far more to do with companies increasing profits by skipping out on necessary maintenance and upgrades and then blaming whatever was convenient to hand.
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  514. I'm seeing a whole lot of evidence that cities designed such that you cannot walk to either your destination, or a transit stop that will lead to a non-awful route to your desitination in a reasonable length of time, in ten minutes or less are generally less comfortable on every level than those designed such that you can. You know, assuming those responsible for such things don't screw up any other major aspect of things to offset the benefit. Being forced to sit through hour, or multihour, long traffic jams every day just to get to work, on the other hand? Yeah, 'comfortable' an't the right word for that. Stressful sure is though. Seriously, 10 minutes of gentle exercise, 10-90 minutes (and in a well designed city with well designed transit, it's more likely to be in the 20-30 minute range in most cases) of sitting in a seat*, then another 10 minutes of gentle exercise? Ok, it loses some of its appeal in particularly bad weather, but it's not like driving in those conditions is any fun either (and clothing and accessories suitable to the conditions exist to heavily mitigate this issue anyway). The shear amount of space you can just not waste on road vehicle infrastructure if you have good transit infrastructure is huge. Cutting down on massive paved areas in a city will actually Lower The Temperature In That City (some fairly basic science behind why that is, parking lots and highways are basically massive heat traps), Greenspace helps with that even more, in addition to the psychological at atmospheric quality benefits. Walkable cities also typically result in increased sales for street facing businesses, just fyi. *with, Usually, more room to move and stretch, better ergonomics, and no need to be constantly aware of everything going on around you least some random idiot do something potentially lethal you have to react to, when compared to a car, though admittedly on the particularly heavily used lines you can end up cramped or standing instead at the busiest times of day... though on a well designed transit system that actually sees the level of use that causes such a situation to arise, the answer is usually to just make your trip 20 minutes earlier or later and skip the rush, same as if you were driving.
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  515. Pretty sure they mean the block that connects your USB cable to the mains.
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  516. That'd be because Church Latin has the same relation to Classical Latin as all the other romance langauges do: They're all daughter langauges of Vulgar Latin (that is, the Latin spoken by the common people, rather than well educated schollars and the upper class (which tended to influence each other)).
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  517. The answer is that Japanese doesn't have an L, and has a very different R from English's R... Japanese R is formed in a manner very close to (but not the same as) English D (it doesn't sound like one, exactly, but it also doesn't sound like an English R, really)... It is Not the same sound as English R, but it IS the closest sound Japanese has to an English L. It's a bit of a mess but basically? Japanese has an R, it doesn't have an L. Most Japanese speakers struggle to hear the difference between English L and English R. So depending on what they're doing, they'll either write 'r' regardless (if its intended for other Japanese speakers to be able to easily read and say it), more make a best attempt at the correct one (if actually trying to speak English) with highly mixed results if they know which one it's supposed to be... or if they Don't know which one it's supposed to be (having not seen the word written down and, remember, quite possibly not being able to hear the distinction), just flat out Guessing. (for reference, there are a lot of native English speakers who, for various reasons, just flat out can't hear the difference between 'th' and 'f' (or the Other 'th' and 'v'). Sometimes due to hearing problems, sometimes just because they grew up in an area where the distinction Doesn't Exist and so never learned to hear the distinction (you'd think television would help on that front, but apparently not?). You get quite similar results. Likewise English speakers trying to learn languages with meaningful tone distinctions.)
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  518. The English equivalent would be groaning, I believe.
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  519. they end up similar enough to "believe", "old", "sheen" (related to shine), "Shield" or "Child" (depending how you do it), smash, (thorp is probably fine actually), one, (tharm Might be ok?) as to cause issues.
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  520.  @theonlycronin  To be fair, you can't trust the bowl seat toilets in a lot of more public locations... but you'd be hard pressed to convince me that a squat toilet in such a location was meaningfully better (and that's before getting into the issue of how people with various relevant disabilities are supposed to manage).
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  521. I dunno, last thing the NZ government bought for a (New Zealand) dollar for was an entire rail network...* Might need to add some value to the American side of that deal. *Yes, yes, I know it was a bit more complicated than that.
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  522. Are those particular ones actually called that? I have a sneaking suspicion you'll find that some places call them that and some don't, and some places have something they call a green belt that works quite differently, and so on.
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  523. Hydrogen in most cases is just a fuel cell that powers an electrical system anyway. Better all 'round to just skip the middleman. Also, the production, transportation, and storage of hydrogen is a pain, and uses a fair bit of energy, so even if you Do get hydrogen fueled internal combustion going, straight up electric is Still better for most personal vehicle use cases. You know, at a strictly technological level. There's plenty of room for the businesses involved to screw it all up, of course.
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  524.  @Joesolo13  you need good regulation to keep the Unions from becoming just as bad (Usually on a smaller scale, admittedly), but yes. This is why effective unions are important. As is effective regulation of businesses.
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  525.  @m1stertim  because the spelling system, at least when it comes to vowels, is not based on catagorisation, but disambiguaiton. And also to some extent based on how many copies of a given letter the printers typically had on hand and what the various options did to the justification of type blocks (which was important, because if you didn't justify it properly the length of the line wouldn't match the width of the frame and the blocks would move and screw up the print) Basically, one spelling was sort-of-decided, and then for other words that sounded the same...well, it's clearly not the same word, but it looks the same, so we need a spelling that's Different, but Close Enough... Then you add a couple of hundred years of the Spoken language doing the thing spoken langauges do, where the Sounds Change over time... and the writen langauge doing one of the very things that makes it as useful as it is and Not changing, or at least changing much more slowly and in more easily recorded and analyised stages, and the two drift apart form each other. Most of English's Really Dumb spellings actually made sense when they were adopted. Well, except the ones from that breif time period when people believed latin obsesed ignoramuses who didn't know a damn thing about how langauges worked when they INSISTED that English words that were never latin in any way to begin with be spelled as if they were. (and in at least some cases not even eclesiastical latin, nor classical latin, but 'bad half-remembered-from-their-school-days' latin <_<)... because the individuals at hand were rich or had fancy titles or qualifications... nevermind that none of those were in Any way related to English or languages in general. And then there's a few words that just have silent consonents for no sensible reason at all. But yeah, when you look back at how it got where it is, English is a lot more logical, sensible, and consistent than most people Think it is (and often the bits they think are nonsense are actually nothing of the sort), but it Does have it's really stupid bits here and there. (Seriously, there's a lot of perfectly good reasons not to reform most of the spelling, and, in fact, most spelling reforms would make things worse rather than better... but WHY is "-ough" still a thing?!)
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  526.  @mjt1517  Depends on what information was or wasn't available to them regarding Brandshield and how honest Brandshield was with them, I suspect. If they can present a sufficiently good case that they were mislead it becomes Brandshield's problem again. Well, for the things Brandshield did. Not so much for their other actions.
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  527. To my understanding the issue isn't so much that it's not an official event (though I'm sure that doesn't help) as repeated instances of property damage and other such issues resulting from drunk idiots (or possibly just idiots in general) at said event.
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  528.  @ghostxx2270  check out coin clipping, debasement, and the constant problems England/Britain had whenever they tried to issue gold coins for some of the (many!) Reasons pretty much everyone moved away from using precious metals as currency. Also why deflation is a problem, then realise that a fixed supply of coinage plus a growing population is identical in effect to a shrinking supply of coinage with a fixed population.
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  529.  @zivkovicable  well, there is an element of culture and attitude: Convincing the officials to actually do the thing to begin with. ... and even then, it's more a case of overcoming propaganda from certain (very wealthy) groups that benefit more from car-centric infrastructure.
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  530. You don't have defence of self and others laws? They usually cover "reasonable force", which starts at "equal" and then adjusts Up in terms of what is permitted based on things like your ability to escape instead, number of attackers, number and nature of people being protected, etc. (Of course it also adjusts Down for things like "you're a sufficiently high level practitioner of certain martial arts" (the arts in question both mean you're doing more damage And give you alternative safe options for dealing with threats, to a point) "you're four times the size if the other (unarmed) guy" and "you could have just taken a step backwards and closed and locked the door then called the cops" (unless you had good reason to think that wouldn't work), so there's that). Admittedly, those laws tend to require that you admit to doing the thing then prove that it was justified (and thus not a crime), but equally the case for it is also usually sufficiently clear cut (if it applies at all) that you don't even get charged to begin with. And biggottrey can obviously derail the process. But doing it any other way tends to make convicting actual murderers borderline impossible, among other failure states.
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  531. mind you, most of the need to identify where the word comes from is to allow one to compensate for certain other flaws in the writing system. So far as practicalities go, at least.
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  532.  @carll.freemanjr.9867  Literally a guy at a publishing company describing a single-digit number of authors who wrote stories set in 'what if the world's tech base topped out at steam and clockwork and it's society consequently didn't change all that much from victorian times... but technological development kept going anyway?' type worlds. ... Guy literally referred to them as "those steam punks" and it stuck. Follow that up with similar stories appearing in a few media with more pictures and the aesthetic becoming moderately popular, and there you are. Steampunk. (in terms of story writing and world building, it actually Does have some significant elements in common with Cyberpunk, which helped the name stick, though it has a lot of differences too. Pretty much every other 'punk' genre of fiction (but not music) derives from one of those two).
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  533. I figure a well designed building will facilitate both socialization and privacy as desired, without forcing intrusion or isolation.
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  534. Punishment for crimes is all over the map, and broadly has more to do with how rich you are and how big the budget for the prison system etc. is (or, in some cases, how big of a scam the private owners are running) than any moral philosophy. There's plenty of evidence that in many places punishments are quite a bit harsher than crimes warrent. The problem is usually that there are a lot of perverse incentives in place that encourage police and court systems to not actually put in the efforts necessary to produce the swift and just outcomes required for a justice system to actually Work, or to Cheat in ways that undermine it. You're not wrong (or at least, mostly not wrong) regarding parenting and discipline of children though. There's actual evidence that some reform was often needed regarding 'this is acceptable and works, this isn't, this is how you do things so you're not causing more harm than good' and so on... the baby was very much thrown out with the bath water in many cases, unfortunately.
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  535. It's somewhat reasonable that doing that would be on the list of tasks... in fact, none of the tasks listed sound all that odd... the fact that the list of tasks didn't acutally include, you know, mechanic work with helicoptors, for Three Years, on the other hand...
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  536. If the bounty was in Finnish currency, it was probably less about motivating Soviet troops to do their job, and more about hoping someone on the Finnish side would let their greed (possibly in combination with some degree of cowardice) outweigh their loyalty (and, for that matter, basic common sense and probably pattern recognition as well) and do the job for them.
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  537.  @minagica  OP is corect that the word diet is not restricted to weight loss, and also as to the defintion of the noun. On the other hand, the definition of the Verb, 'to diet', does (at least ot hte best of my knowledge) exclusively refer to attempts at weight loss. At least in modern usage.
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  538. To be fair, New Zealand does have a lot of advantages in such a situation. None of which would have been enough if the leadership mismanaged the situation, mind you.
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  539.  @mathieuconklin3146  oh, they do. They gerrymander the voting districts to hell and gone so it usually doesn't Matter, but they absolutely count them. (Mind you, that's for elections. For referenda, pretty much every Government just flat out bins non-binding referenda that don't produce the results they want. Meanwhile, binding referenda can cause their own problems due to misinformation and propaganda campaigns.)
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  540. The guy stuck hanging from a church steeple? Actually happened. If I recall correctly it ended.... Poorly... For him.
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  541. Propaganda and stupidity. In various ratios.
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  542. They don't. They reanalyse and asses it every 6 years. Sometimes they expand it, yes. Sometimes they just change zoning regulations instead. Other times their expected growth for the next 20 years might have actually gone down so they don't need to do either. And when they expand it, they get to choose how much of that expansion is where, so as to better manage infrastructure needs and maintain green space and so on.
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  543. Huh. we weren't really taught about implied parentheses explicitly that I remember... but we were absolutely taught about fractions and division being fundamentally the same thing and how fractions actually worked and how to calculate with them... I suspect the only difference was never bothering with the term 'implied parentheses' because it was explained in the context of the whole thing being a fraction.
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  544. Probably because it was to not do one thing they didn't Really want to do anyway. Probably also wasn't a one off.
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  545. Mostly because, on that scale, it's very easy for it to go very, very wrong. Also difficult Besides, the global water cycle being what it is, we're already doing this when the (mostly) cleaned up waste water is released back out into the environment. It gets evaporated and condensed and filtered and diluted in various ways as it cycles through that system before being recaptured and used again. Climate change is just problematically disrupting the old patterns of how much is where at any one time.
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  546. They have far too much impact and control over the economy in general, and not just in the USA (though the USA is particularly affected, in part because that's their main base, but also because other flaws in the way the US Works just make it especially vulnerable). They'd be dangerous and need breaking up even if they weren't influencing the government, abusing the workers, and manipulating their customers. And unlike a number of other entities that get that massive and really shoudl be regulated, there's no good reason NOT to break amazon up. Because the arguments for allowing such behemoths to continue to exist Don't Apply. (It is not doing a job so dependent on the network effect in order to be able to function that breaking it up into smaller entities would actually make things Worse for all involved, nor is it major infrastructure (infrastructure generally benefits from central planning, funding, and control*. Consumer goods Do Not.) *in the absense of the delusion that such things are supposed to be Individually and Directly Profitable rather than an awareness of the reality that they facilitate Other entities being more profitable and thus returning profit to the government by way of Increased Tax Take (without increasing the tax Rate). Because trying to opperate such things based on such delusions just results in a degredation of service, and thus the loss of the benefits they provided, thus reduced profitability for the businesses that they served (note that this may mean 'made things cheaper for the consumer who thus had more spare money and spent it at those businesses'), which reduces the tax take at a given rate... which necessitates raising taxes, or cutting services, or just borrowing more money (that last one works just fine so long as your economy is expanding faster than you're borrowing... too bad you're borrowing to cover for your economy Contracting...)
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  547.  @susanholler2128  actually, the logic behind that one is weird. It's actually should be "am not I?"... which gives "amn't I". which is a bit awkward so say, so becomes "an't I?". Yeah, that's right, "an't" is actually the 'correct' word here! (though it's Only correct for "I", because nothing else uses the 'am' forms of the verb.) Edit: oh look, grammar ninjas!
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  548. Given the a later, similar, map, I'm fairly sure that, despite what the narration implies, that's a map of countries that use FPTP systems. Noticeably, New Zealand, which was part of the British Empire but does not use FPTP, is not coloured on this map buts is coloured on the map of countries that use proportional voting systems.
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  549.  @fenrirr22  keep in mind, exchange rates don't actually reflect purchasing power (that is, what you can get for the money), except in so far as they affect imports, they have more in common with share prices than anything one interacts with day to day. Percentage of yearly pay is more relevant... but then one also has to account for how much everything else does or doesn't cost.
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  550.  @England91  it's been a Perpetual problem, really, the change is more of an ongoing reduction in incentive to do anything Else.
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  551. There have been many videos containing the rant about how poorly That went...
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  552. ... in significant portions of the English speaking world, in casual speech, using "like" in such a manner has come to mean "the impression I got was" or "I remember it being something along these lines", or even "I really wanted to react in this manner, but that wouldn't have gone well so I didn't". The point is that you're reporting on the interaction but Not actually quoting what was said (in contrast with "said" which always supposedly meant you Were, even when that was absolutely impossible).
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  553. @@johndoe-xv3wb Yes, let's just casually ignore all the useful and necessary things that the money given to the government also goes to... Admittedly, the list is shorter in some than others, but it's still not zero items anywhere functional.
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  554.  @KT-pv3kl  While that is entirely true, and of course the details have changed over the last couple of centuries, in the Napoleonic era (or a bit after) it was calculated that on average, each artillery round killed one enemy soldier. Of course, it's also true that at the time you had to fire about a man's weight in bullets to actually kill him, due to accuracy limitations. Now, both artillery and small arms have got more accurate since, and artillery shells have got more powerful (but also more expensive), though rate of fire and engagement ranges have also increased, targets are often more spread out, and so on. So the exact numbers probably don't hold true any more, but the idea that artillery kills more people than anything else does isn't actually incompatible with the idea that they rarely hit anything. Things that hit a target more reliably are almost certainly also used more sparingly, for example. An artillery shell that hits anything at all probably kills several people at once, and so on. Of course, the reality on the ground in the modern day is well outside the area I know anything much about, but this seemed relevant.
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  555. Ehh, highest valued, maybe. Share prices do very little to a company's actual ability to bring in cash.
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  556.  @ollikoskiniemi6221  the political compass Test has some substantial issues. The two axis grid is promotes is, none the less, vastly superior to the more common, and utterly useless, single line... mind you, that doesn't mean it's all that good, just that it's not completely useless.
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  557.  @Dreyno  New Zealand is similar. Highschool sports is kind of a big deal for the school (though not to the degree that is the case in the USA), but before that it's an after school club sort of activity where the only connection is maybe the club uses the school field if there's no more suitable facility available, at least outside of the occasional sports day where a few local schools might compete with each other as much to ease the administrative burden of running the thing (rather than three seperate ones) as anything else, and after you are either good enough to go professional, which has nothing to do with any educational institution... or it's just a hobby, you join a club... and yeah, sure, maybe the club is based out of the local university and uses facilities owned by said institution... but in practice all that means is that being a student gets you a discount on membership fees/priority if there's a limited number of slots, and it could just as easily be affiliated with a specific place of employment, or a facility where that sport is played/practiced, or whatever.
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  558.  @elif6908  The 'clear tax write off' charity is a ... significant thing in the USA (mind you, my understanding is that such charities don't tend to solicit donations from the public, the system is quite forgiving of the tax dodging shenanigans of the wealthy, not so much of major fraud). Rather less of one in places that have better rules (that are actually enforced) regarding what does an doesn't count as a charity.
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  559. Labour has always been good at fixing problems. They start getting in trouble when there are no significant problems To fix. Which is basically progressivism in a nutshell.
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  560.  @graveperil2169  There is a solid argument that the UK should never have joined the EU in the first place. There is no such argument for leaving. Only delusional idiocy, at best. (reasons for the general public voting in favour mostly amount to ignorance and gullability.) When you look at what the UK has done that the EU was previously preventing them from doing, the length of the list of 'things that are actively detrimental to the average citizen that EU law would have prevented' is a hell of a lot longer than the list of 'things that are in any way beneficial to the average citizen that EU law would have prevented'. ... now, the list of things that are beneficial to large (often multinational) corporations that EU law would have prevented and British law doesn't is somewhat longer.
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  561. I seem to recall in most cases they go last because they're opposing the bill. If they were speaking in favour of it they'd go first instead. Also, the lobbyists get to meet with the officials because it's their job​, they get paid to show up. Regular people generally don't for two main reasons. 1 A combination of propaganda and poor processes convincing them it's a waste of time. 2 they have to take time off work to do so (which, given how utterly shit employment laws in most of the USA are, very few can actually do.) A lot of the time the lobbyists win by default because they're the only ones that show up! Also, the hearings are a lot less significant than those one on one meetings for actually getting the representatives on side. Seem to be more about ticking the boxes.
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  562. I had no problem with track pads on older laptops, but my current one basically renders the thing unusable for one very Obvious reason: it's too big! There's nowhere to put your hands while typing that isn't on top of it! Well, not without killing your wrists, anyway. (Admittedly, this problem is solved entirely by plugging an external mouse and/or keyboard into it, which are very cheap to get, but still...)
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  563. Ehh, a permit system or something of that nature for signs that could fall on someone if not installed correctly, or obstruct the flow of pedestrians, granted only if they are installed correctly etc., makes sense. As do high fines for non-compliance. The fees required just to Get the permit are insane though. Like, "wages for the inspectors and the cost of the stationary for the paperwork, divided by the number of inspections done" should be the Most that gets passed on to the individual seeking the permit, and frankly, if that comes to thousands of dollars per permit the system has Other major problems. (Inspecting one sign should Not take over an hour unless it's really weird and horribly located... Which you can just include in the list of things that disqualify you from having a permit.)
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  564. There's a problem with that: as he's trying to say lorry (a (type of?) truck) it'd be lolly (as in sweets, such as the rather obviously named lollypop), not loli. I mean, they're Pronounced the same, admittedly, but still.
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  565.  @pennypenguin15  somewhere along the way they did the typical stupid big business thing and got annoyed with people using Other services to support theirs when those people could be using Their service more, and integrated various hosting options (while making it more difficult to use off-site services instead where possible). I don't know about video, but they've definitely done this for images... and their system for handling multiple images is... well, frankly, whatever advantages it gives the uploader, for everyone else? it's shit.
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  566.  @DurzoBlunts  that or they figured there was nothing wrong with taking it so long as they brought it back in reasonably good condition, and just didn't consider the knock on effects of the owner not having it in the mean time. That's surprisingly common.
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  567.  @artomatt  Properly speaking it is hard copy, in that it's a physical object (paper) rather than data that requires an electronic device in order to access it. (it's the same distinction as hardware vs software... though I'm not sure what, if anything, the analogue to wetware (biological components) would be. )
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  568. I don't see people saying that having distinct shapes solves dyslexia, only that having similar shapes makes things even more difficult for people who have dyslexia than it would be already... this is said fairly often by people who have dyslexia, so I'm inclined to believe it.
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  569. Used to be in NZ you could drive (learners permit) at 15, but not drink* until 21 or so. They lowered the drinking age and raised the minimum age for driving... which is a bit of a problem because previously people actually got used to driving and had time to get most of the 'impared judgement because teenager' issues out of their system before the possiblity of booze was introduced to the mix. Mind you, it's not to say that having the drinking age be that high or the driving age be that low are ideal or reasonable independently, just that gap between the two was beneficial. *well, you could drink at basically any age... under your gardian's supervision and at their descretion. Couldn't just go buy your own booze or sit around drinking unsupervised, though).
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  570. Yeah, the only thing wrong with this decision (on the face of it, without more information) is the utter hypocrisy of it. Of course, ulterior motives are always a possibility.
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  571. Not knowing one of them exists, or not being familiar with the spelling... Still, it's not the error I would expect when it comes to that name pair. That or the document he was reading from had a typo (depending how the system works, that's either the most likely explenation or impossible.)
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  572. And a YouTuber.
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  573. Amusingly, I've been greeting friends and family with "Greetings, fellow human!" for years now.
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  574. Looking back at it, that particular sequence of economic craziness had National (our political "right" at the time) running a highly centralised (especially for a supposedly capitalist US ally) economy, and in order to salvage things Labour (our political "left" at the time, currently attempting to at least pretend to be sort of progressive-centerists or something) went kind of nuts with the whole Right wing economics thing. (There are solid arguments that they stopped right at an awkward mid point where either one of going even further or stopping sooner would have been better, mind you.) That's had strange effects on the political landscape ever since.
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  575. This video has successfully put me off watching any more from this channel. There are many very misleading statements, a number of errors, and the same fact gets repeated mutliple times in rapid succession as if it somehow explains itself while no actual explaination is given. Oh, and the camera is very shakey.
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  576. In English, in dialects where such terms haven't died out, we'd say "morning tea" or "afternoon tea". Note how 'afternoon' is a compound there already. Note that this applies even if you're not actually drinking any tea at all. (likewise, there's also just 'tea', which is an evening meal... but that's a whole other mess of linguistic and cultural drift over time and between different parts of the old British Empire).
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  577. And all the super secret secure facilities, including various nuclear missile silos, where the local pizza guys had the security codes for a bunch of the defences, or the big protective doors that were only supposed to be open when people were going through them but in practice were never closed, because the inconvenience exceeded the perceeved need for the protection in the minds of those actually interacting with the security systems on the ground.
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  578. New Zealand has a fairly robust system of privacy protections (part of why we have no state ID or social security number equivalent), and the track record is such that the reasonable response is more "quietly keep an eye on just to be sure" rather than "actually stress out about it".
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  579. Understanding why they find it upsetting doesn't change how unreasonable being upset by it is, of course. Such responses are generally a result of ideological indoctrination and (either consequently or additionally) a lack of actual thought on the part of the person becoming upset by it. It isn't exactly something that should be excused. There are rare exceptions of course, I say 'generally' for a reason, but that's the usual way of things.
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  580.  @tlpineapple1  The best/worst part is that the vast majority of the various houserules that supposedly 'fix' the game actually compound its problems (from a gameplay point of view). However, when you realise that the main point in most of them is not to make the game play better, but to increase how long a game keeps the children occupied while minimising the number of tantrums thrown, thereby freeing up the adult in charge of the group to carry out more productive tasks, then it makes quite a bit more sense.
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  581. To my recollection, Most homographs are words where the two options are different parts of speech (noun vs verb, for example), and as a result have different stress patterns, and the change in stress is what causes them to be said differently. Marking the stress would deal with those ones. Of course of the remainder, if I recall correctly at lest, some of the most commonly encountered ones are just flat out irrelgular word forms (read vs read, for example). And then, of course, there's the Homophones (sound the same despite being spelled differently) and the homonyms (words that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but mean completely different things). Arguably having a bunch of homophones and homographs is at least sort of better than having more homonyms.
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  582.  @Shadowninja1200  To my recollection, Amazon's return system is 'stick it in the regular mail system, we'll toss it in the nearest landfil when it gets to us'.
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  583. ... might want to have a look at the actual situation in New Zealand. Also note that a significant portion of her message (when you see the full thing, though even just of what is shown here) is Specifically Making That Point. Community transmission is something we're on top of and have essentially (or possibly fully, I'm not up to date) eliminated. That is a battle won. And that's All that's been won. The war, so to speak, is ongoing, and that's something the PM has emphasised with pretty much every bit of positive news that could lead one to think otherwise.
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  584. The answer to any good company Remaining a good company is pretty universally "do not become publicly traded. Always maintain a supermajority of ownership,keep debts as low as you possibly can while still functioning". Anything else inevitably seems to lead to a change of ownership, a change of management, and the entire thing being run into the ground, even when that Wasn't the objective. (Also, youtube (or Android) has apparently decided that "of" is not a word now...)
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  585. Hummm. The tree could actually be a problem, depending on what's actually going on with it. Might be fine though. The dog is a reasonable concern, but more something to consider in the negatives column rather than a reason to toss it entirely. 'too many squares' and 'too bricky' are just absurd though. Fair enough when choosing a design for building a new house, complete nonsense when considering buying an existing one. Well, I say that, but 'too bricky' is a valid concern if the brick is structural and the building's in an earthquake zone. At that point either the building's over-engineered to hell and gone and having one or two bricks fall on you is a legitimate hazard in the event of a significant tremor, or it's Not and the whole building's going to come down on you in the first decent quake. If you're not in a quake zone, or the brick's just exterior cladding, though? At that point it's just silly.
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  586.  @cheetaih  NZ immigration has had systemic problems for Decades. That's not the current Government, except in so far as they haven't fixed it. NZ's immigration department has a somewhat astonishing amount of racism and unwillingness to help resolve issues if they can harass you instead. It's apparently Less bad if you're a race they like, but still not Good unless you're rich or the current minister is part of some dodgy scheme where keeping you around is more benificial than getting rid of you, or you're a highly skilled professional working for a big company or the government. Again, this isn't a current government thing, NZ's immigration department has been rotten for Decades.
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  587. @luelou8464 I'd argue that both the 'bean counters' and the engineers answer to a common superior, and deciding between what one says needs to happen and what the other says needs to happen is That person's job. You can put Some of the blame on the bean counter of the engineer if they're not doing their job Properly, but ultimately the person making the decision between the two priorities is the one the responsiblity really rests on. (Yes, even, arguably Especially, if they just set a blanket policy of one or the other being 'superior' in the decision making chain.)
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  588. The origin of the law is apparently that idiots (called jays for some reason) kept stepping out in front of cars and getting injured... And then sueing the car manufacturer rather than the driver (or being thrown out because it was clearly their own stupid fault for not paying attention, depending on the situation.). It then just became "how things are".
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  589. Extra bonus points: A beautiful building that Does fit in. Which in no way precludes it also being unique or different, just needs to blend rather than clash.
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  590.  @Flobyby  Honestly, English 'accountability' has suffered the same fate as responsable.
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  591.  @kaibroeking9968  The fun part about English grammar. You can turn anything into a verb by just... sticking it in the verb slot in the sentence, and the grammar will generally work. ... now, whether your intended meaning is coherent or not might require a little more caution, but it will be a gramatically correct sentence!
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  592. I always get the impression (based on no science at all, admittedly) that such things are usually less "we did this because racism" and more "we did this because greed. Racism is why no one stopped us".
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  593.  @shocktnc  It is, but the 'unethical' part is the process by which that wealth is attained, rather than the possesion of it. Its basically describing those who are so wealthy that the money is meaingless except as a method of keeping score, the interest on their bank accounts would keep them afloat at the quality of life they already have for longer than they could possibly live... But they still, consistently, must have more. Which would be fine if they did that by providing more and better goods and services, but they don't. They enstead engage in manipulation and abuse of the legal and judicial system to undermine anyone else who tries to, and to constantly extract more wealth for less service from consumers, and to pay their workers less for more work, and so on. It is unethical, it is imoral, and it is behaviour engaged in by the wealthy in order to become more (meaninglessly) wealthy. Mind you, there are less wealthy individuals and groups who get up to some of that bullshit too. The difference is that They tend not to be immune to the consequences when it catches up to them. Unlike the already super-rich, who frankly will never feel the consequences of their actions short of being too slow to escape in the event of a violent revolution (at which point they'll probably be too busy being dead, and it's debatable how much that counts as 'feeling the consequences', though it certainly removes part of the problem from the point of view of everyone else. ... Certainly far from the best way to achieve such results, though.)
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  594. Far as I can tell, people voted for him more on the grounds of "probably less stupid shit" than any particular promise anyway, so he can get away with a lot so long as he's not actively making the hole deeper and at least looks like he's trying to deal with the previous administration's more egregious nonsense. Admittedly "so far as I can tell" isn't really all that far.
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  595. Largely because that doesn't actually happen. To be fair, that's mostly because Actual collonialism is expensive and inspires revolts, where as abusing 'free trade' and various other similar things brings in 90% or so of the benefits at something like 10% of the cost (numbers vague and pulled out of the air for illistrative purposes). Free trade is rarely actually good for the smaller economy, except in comparion to the previous tendencing to misuse and abuse trade policy for diplomatic and political ends rather than, you know, economic regulation.
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  596. substantial portions of the land used for dairy farming in New Zealand isn't actually suitable for it.
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  597. From memory, the official definition has been changed at some point (its officially a specific number of millimetres, now), but the actual length has not since long before then.
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  598. Unions are a useful counterweight to corporations (or even rich individual owners, but the regular legal system usually has an easier time witht them than it does with corporations), but they also have their issues and need kicking back into line (and sometimes splitting up) periodically when they start getting too powerful... ... ... of course, the corporations need the same treatment under the same conditions, and reach that point more often. New Zealand's rather well known for having pretty solid worker protection laws and systems in place and being generally progressive-left-ish on the whole most of the time, so it might be rather surprising to learn that unions here are VERY limited in what they can legally do, with most of their more powerful methods of forcing their desires on employers actually being flat out illegal. ... This after decades of restrictions on them being reduced. Turns out when you shut down the entire country's economy for an extended period over whether or not a single freezing works will hire an extra worker whose sole job is to clean the Other workers' tea mugs so they don't have to use a few seconds of their break doing it themselves, you become rather... unpopular. It says something when the strike breakers are widely considered not to be the bad guys in an event like this. But yeah... people kind of liked not having the economy implode entirely due to all international and a substantial chunk of internal trade being shut down (in a country where the economy at the time consisted almost entirely of exporting food and raw materials (mostly mutton and wool at the time, I believe) and importing Everything Else)... and as bad as that sounds, the specifics actually made it worse. Basically, your unions have to be kept in line just as much as your corporations, media, religions, and political parties do. They're all necessary (well, any given union, corporation, political party, etc. might not be, but entities of those types are), but they're also all power structures, and entities which can come to weild disproportionate amounts of power to the detriment of both citizenry and state. Consequently, it is necessary that they be kept in line by well writen and well enforced laws and regulations... and thoroughly kicked into submission when they start causing damage rather than fixing/preventing it.
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  599. Nah, when he's fully rested he looks fine (or nearly). It's just that when he's not it looks a lot worse than it is, and he usually isn't (he owns a business and often pulls fairly long hours while maintaining a rather weird schedule). He actually answered that in a video once. It's apparently hereditary.
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  600. Well, they're better than having the right of way sold off entirely. While it does make reestablishing the railway more difficult, it's nowhere near as big of an obsticle as if the whole strip has been choped up into seperate titles and built over. Obviously the railway is better still, but in many places convincing the relevant entities to actually do anything about that is something of a pipe dream.
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  601. Overcrowding and frequent fires in other parts of the building at the old place, plus the landlords were really bad at getting issues sorted out, if I remember rightly.
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  602. Indeed. If you're giving them all that data about you that they really don't need and shouldn't have (because it's google. It absolutely phones home and tells them everything it can at every opportunity, that information is where they make their actual money, making you pay to give it to them is just a bonus), the least they can do is actually provide the promised service properly.
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  603.  @ohar94  Isn't that the same idiots who try to claim that Mathmatics is 'white imperialism'? The American far right is maliciously psychotic, and goes into politics. The American far left is maliciously psychotic (just often delusional about it) and goes into accademics. The Amerian moderate left basically doesn't exist as an entity thanks to decades of radicalising propaganda. The American moderate right has to do the job of the moderate right and moderate left while also pandering to the far left on the least harmful looking issues (they're regularly wrong about those) just to keep the American far right in check, because the american far right keeps actively sabotaging the instiutions the American nation-state requires in order to Function. Hence the disasterous mess that is US poltics.
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  604.  @haruhirogrimgar6047  nope. A book, a newspaper (the physical object), a CD, the internet. Those are media. Propaganda is Content. That is, what the medium Contains. "The media" s a catch all term for "the newspapers (organization), television stations, radio stations, etc".
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  605. employer mandated productivity software compatibility was, and is, the other big obstruction. Support for niche software (or, more accurately, support BY niche software) is another.
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  606. Definitely encountered it elsewhere from channels that did a very good job of the story. I agree that this is the funniest retelling though.
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  607.  @David-km2ie  not really. It's the same set of failures that are screwing over the USA as we speak, and the economic system only affects how the symptoms manifest.
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  608. I find 11"-ish tablets with touchscreens to be pretty good, and the touch screen on the self check out at the grocery store too (There are a lot of ways to do self check outs wrong too, mind you, but at least one supermarket in my area does them Right, so that's also possible). My phone having a touch screen is a really mixed bag... there are significant upsides and significant downsides and whether it's better or worse varies with what nonsense the various companies involved are getting up to at the moment. Touch screen controls in cars? The first model Proposed, nevermind available for sale to the public, should have been all it took to kill that idea, given the absolute nightmare that is the mobile phone industry, various related and adjacent industries, and just... the fact that the idea wasn't regulated against the moment it was proposed is a testiment to the ignorance (if we're being Generous about motivaiton) of relevant legislators.
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  609. avoiding conflicts like that is the point in 45 degree plugs (almost always down-right), and one of the advantages of the 'straight out the back' type (countered by all the down sides of 'straight out the back' if your plug design is bad). Actually, one thing I've noticed a lot where I live (not the USA), is that Multiboxes (powerstrips, I guess) tend to have 45 degree plugs, but the sort of things that fully expect they're going to be plugged Into a multibox tend to have 'straight out the back' plugs... and then there's the never to be sufficiently damnned wall warts. Bad enough when they all point Down (introducing the levering problem even in plugs that wouldn't have it otherwise), but then some genius started making multiboxes with two rows of plugs facing opposite ways to accomodate them... and after getting one I encountered, for the first time ever, a wall wart where the cable came out the TOP! Which, naturally, couldn't go in ANY of the sockets on that multibox. Though more recently I bought a multibox with... 10 sockets? 12? it deals with this by having some of the sockets further apart to accomodate wide wall warts, and as a result the sockets on one side are Not in line with the sockets on the other side (and they also have the two sides facing opposite ways), so there's always at least a couple of sockets that are viable for any given stupid non-standard plug. So long as you don't have too many that are non-standard in the same fashion.
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  610. What's really bizarre to me is the number of people who think basic politeness is somehow aggressive, maliciously dishonest and/or disrespectful. (And then there's similar takes regarding Standard Punctuation. Like.... What?!)
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  611.  @Bradinator  Well the first thing is that if they do the transit Properly it won't take 5 hours, so there's that. (below a certain distance, trains are actually Better for this sort of thing than planes, and I doubt the city's big enough to exceed That limit). Of course, given where it's being built and by whom, it almost certainly won't be done 'properly'.
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  612. ... that would be a reasonable complaint though?
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  613. It is worth noting that "I was just following orders" did, in fact, get a Lot of people off in the post war trials regarding what happened under the Nazi regime. When they ligitamately had no way to know or reason to suspect anything untoward was going on, or (very often) when defying the orders would not have actually achieved anything other than bring reprisals upon their family and such. Thing is, the higher up the system you were, the less either of those arguments held water. So it was more "I was following Seemingly Legitimate orders" or "I was following orders Under Duress*". "I was only following orders" By Itself us not an excuse. But it can absolutely be a major part of an entirely legitimate one. Context matters. *Or something similar
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  614. not actually that hard to do, you move one of the punctuation marks under the right hand to another key and stick the thorn there. or employ one of the many ways to give a key three/4 values instead of two (with the letter as the default and the punctuation marks still on the same key, just with a modifier added). programmable keyboards already do this kind of thing a lot (and avoid the issue of backwards compatibility too).
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  615. Well, not really. He wasn't particularly involved in most of the bits that were horribly mismanaged. If anything, he was Too Effective. (after all, the point in the referendum was supposed to be that it would fail and discredit him and those like him, while passifying certain elements of the constuency that the government at the time had Tried, but not enough people wanted it! ... The public didn't follow the script.)
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  616. In some places it's held to be invalid in part because of that, to my understanding. (Well, the combination of that and the inability to negotiate it, anyway.)
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  617. The scale and nature of the war as a whole is rather different, mostly. Also the tactics and doctrins, and the logistical situations (the USA was helping the USSR at the time, it's most notably Not helping Russia today), and so on and so forth. Not to mention the tanks themselves (in WW2, Soveit tanks were equal to or better than German tanks, meanwhile today Russian tanks are rather outdated and often in bad repair, while the tanks being supplied to Ukraine an less or not at all obsolete, and are in much better repair. (though, interestingly, from what I recall, russian tanks tend to, or at least tended to, win in a straight up tank vs tank fight because, well, that's what they're trained for. It's also seemingly All that they're trained for, given that every Other job a tank does, the Ukrainian tank units seem to have more success than the Russian tanks do.) But mostly what those 300 tanks will do is free up 300-or-so Ukrainian tanks currently doing vairious non-front-line jobs to go do those front line jobs, more than likely.
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  618. Depends where they got it from, as the word entered English (yes, borrowed from French) quite some time before the modern object it is used to refer to. (one used to 'do one's toilet'... which refered to the entire hygine and beauty routine (or part there of). Hence 'perfume' being 'toilet water', ... using the word for the place where one relieves oneself is basically the same euphemism as the American use of 'bathroom'.)
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  619. The one used for Vietnamese is also entertaining.
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  620. Only reason I bought a smart phone is because no one makes a non-smart phone that's got the necessary hardware for the new (at the time) emergency alert system here.
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  621. Helps that the borders are staying shut, no new cases can come in. Actually, the lock down lead to a rather large drop in cases of cold, flu, etc as well (compared to this time in other years), for obvious reasons. Also, despite increased stress and people putting off doctors visits they really shouldn't have, I seems to recall that most people asked report being in better health in general than usual (and not just for the time of year), which is interesting.
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  622.  @3a.m.284  not so much: steamdeck isn't meaningfully competing with the nintendo switch. It's competing with pre-built gaming PCs, especially laptops. It's making use of the same advantages that the Switch is using to be competitive with other videogame consoles. The steamdeck competes with the switch only in so far as the steamdeck is a PC. And honestly? I wouldn't expect Valve to actually be any better on the repair front... Well, no. They'll almost certainly not actively sabotage third-party repair (not intentionally or to the degree of these other outfits, anyway). But their own repair service will almost certainly be outsourced to the same people Louis is talking about. Valve just doesn't have the infrastructure for it to go otherwise.
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  623. It is interesting to note that the series of conflicts previously known as 'the Maori Wars' has, in recent times, come to be refered to as 'the New Zealand Wars'... on the basis that it was almost never 'Maori vs European' but a real mixed bag of conflicts which pretty consistently had Maori tribes on both sides of them, and frequently had various Europeans involved on the non-central government side. The whole collection can loosely be termed unification wars, but individually, some where various tribes which the central government was content to leave mostly to their own devices deciding to have a go at taking control of the whole thing, and there was a major religious uprising (by what amounts to a cult of a similar model to those seen doing similar things in other places, right down to believing that those who believed strongly enough were immune to bullets), a couple that are probably arguably more civil wars than anything, various conflicts that arguably weren't really wars in their own right but were big enought to count as skirmishes in the greater mess... and the last conflict basically amounted to the central government deciding that having a 'last village holding out against the invaders' situation wasn't exactly a great idea during World War One and sending a large group of police officers to inform them that their independance had been revoked. Not sure if I'm remembering rightly, but I believe that one didn't even involve anyone actually shooting at each other. Arugably, there's a fair case to be made that the lot of the Maori people would have actually been substantually better Without most (though not all, quite an important distinction, that) of those conflicts.
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  624.  @rhogal8310  How do the handle the part where he now has significantly Less money and nothing really to show for it?
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  625.  @herrbonk3635  'right mouse button'... except if you're left handed you can have it actually be the Left mouse button, or you might be like me and have it be a button on the keyboard, graphics tablet, and/or game controller. Whichever physical thing you're pressing, it tells the computer 'mouse button 2'. (by default, mouse button 1 is left click, mouse button 2 is right click, mouse button 3 is middle click/scoll wheel click, 4 and 5 are 'scroll up' and 'scroll down' (the wheel actually just hits these buttons a bunch of times, so far as the PC knows), and any higher numbers are any other random buttons your mouse may have).
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  626.  @kittycat-kg4dm  Mind you, what a lot of people like to ignore about the 'beaten for speaking maori' thing is that the beatings in question were standard punishment for a Lot of things you weren't allowed to do at the time, and the reason you weren't allowed to speak maori in school was Racist Maori Leaders pitching a fit about the idea that the inferior Non Maori might possibly speak their sacred language (by way of learning it as kids from their maori classmates), and the government of the day going along with their nonsense because they were trying to be respectful of maori culture? or something? It wasn't actually Racism Against Maori that got you in trouble for speaking Maori in schools, is what I'm saying here.
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  627. Ownership of IP used to be handled fairly sensibly. Then Disney (and later others. The music industry in particular) got to the relevant law makers in the US, and US diplomats and military might got to basically everyone else.
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  628. Yeeeah... maybe take a look at what NZ's grocery prices are like before you get too enthused about that. Of course, a large part of that problem is the supermarket duopoly having got Really Good at pushing just lightly enough, and backing off just far enough, that actually putting the boot into them and putting an end to their abuses is never Quite high enough up the priority queue for the government to actually get around to.
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  629.  @jameslong3351  heck, the phone book here would list the family name, initials, street address, and phone number of every person whose name was on the phone account. Which generally meant every single home owner, their spouse (if applicable), and at least one adult tenant in any given rental home. Those phone books were then delivered, for free, to every home that didn't explicitly indicate that they didn't want one. You Could have an unlisted number, but you had to actively request such. Getting secondary numbers like cellphones or fax machines listed also required you actually do something, rather than being included by default, I believe. Now, admittedly, they were a regional thing, and you only got the one for the region you were in for free, but still. Last I checked they're still a thing actually, but with the great increase in the use of prepaid mobile phones and people who just don't have landlines at all, they're getting thinner and kess useful as time goes by. Though that's just the personal listings. The seperate business phonebook (where businesses could pay to have their standard listing replaced with an actual advertisment (that incorporated their listing, mind you), while also thinner than it used to be due to various internet related factors, is still very much a thing.
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  630. Honestly, if he was king he probably couldn't/wouldn't have said half the things in the list.
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  631.  @9thbloodandfire508  They're wrong to discount how much training, experience, and moral matter, sure. Discounting how much having better equipment can matter is just as silly though. They all add up. And once you cross a certain minimum threshold in those areas, numbers matter even more. Proper direction from higher level command to ensure the right unit is facing the right enemy matters even more again, of course, but once the fighting is already happening it's a bit late for that bit.
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  632. Will open up. A bit. Carefully. And the borders will most likely remain closed to travellers for a long time to come.
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  633.  @InfernosReaper  For reference, it's a long established fact when it comes to public speaking, including (possibly especially) teaching, that if you want your audience to remember Anything you say, then you have to repeate it at least three times, presented slightly differently each time so that it is attached to more different things in their mind (but also so they're less likely to just tune it out as something they've already heard. The slight variation is important). And the more things you have to say, the more important that repetition is. Especially as people will, normally, remember only the last thing and, if you're lucky, the First thing, you said. So you get an opening that tells you basically the 'headlines', then a middle that repeates every single one of those (though normally with a lot more elaboration and detail), and then a closing that's basically a summary of the main points (not quite the same as the 'headlines' in the introduction, because it's less 'this is what I'm talking about' and more 'this is the most important bit I said about that thing')... except if the lesser details are important and need to be remembered as well, that middle bit will repeat itself a few times too. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is part of the reason the videos end up long and repetative. Sure, it's probably not the Whole reason, but probably a contributing factor.
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  634. Naturally, as is so very common with these things, no attempt to address the vowels (we write them using five-ish characters. Depending on dialect and how you count, English has anywhere from 10 to 20 vowels. The problem should be obvious), and no concern for the ability to actually write the blasted thing quickly (a large part of the reason why the lower case letters are the way they are, though not the entirity of it). And little concern for why words are spelled the way they are (and thus what changes would need to be made to support the substitutions), though it's possible I just mised those if they were present, as I was somewhat distracted at some points. There's a reason why Conlang communities generally have Very mixed opinions on English spelling reforms (basically: it's where a lot of people start out, so no one wants to discourage it, really, but they're also almost universally awful when you start actually considering the practicalities, because they tend to ignore an awful lot of factors that are very relevant to creating a usable orthography, nevermind one you can actually get people to adopt.)
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  635. Or just set the ticket prices to something actually sensible.
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  636.  @massmanute  I mean, the 'proper' way of doing this in English is... don't ask questions in the negative, and while you can't use a single word to unambiguously negate a negative statement, the phrases used (if you don't feel the need to add any additional information) are Very short. Of course, as with the 'proper' way of doing anything, many people don't.
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  637. Might want to talk to certain portions of the more radical leftists in your society. Though it might perhaps be more accurate to call them a language mafia. And then they manage to Export their nonsense. Not to say the Right doesn't have its own share of Incredibly Stupid ideas when it comes to language, just that they're much less successful at codifying and exporting them. (This is mostly a lack of skill in marketing, mind you.) And its not like other countries (my own included) don't have their own elements that pull the same nonsense, because they Absolutely Do. They're just prone to importing America's as well. And almost with out fail, imported or home grown, it's ideological propaganda the whole way down (regardless of which ideology) that doesn't make a single scrap of sense if you actually Know Anything about English, Linguistics, or History. But, given that the sorts of people who get up to such nonsense are targeting primarily the ignorant, and generally don't actually care about any aspect of the thing other than that it advances the ideology they perport to represent in ways that advance their own power and influence, well, to expect otherwise may well be expecting too much.
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  638. I honestly would have been far more surprised if it was automated, though mostly because of the shear number of things that are still manually addressed. Even packages coming from companies with printed lables stuck on them, the lables still aren't consistently formated or positioned, and the packages themselves aren't standardized in size or shape. All of which makes it very difficult for a machine to correctly handle them.
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  639. ... Viking is also germanic (it is a subset of North Germanic while English is a subset of West Germanic), and Norman is French + north germanic too. So it's 'germanic+different germanic+germanic-ish'
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  640. Yeah... About that "perfect world"....
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  641.  @flowersinawasteland  to be fair, the 'woke SJW' ideology does Nothing to help those people, and most of those people are too busy dealing with their imediate real world problems to worry about the nonsense peddled by that ideology (including any of them who are actually part of any of the minorities it pretends to help).
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  642. Polls aren't actually all that useful even in a popular vote, it turns out. because the sample size is always less than the entirity of the electorate.
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  643.  @Thinkagain-d7x  English only ever really compounds two words, or two latin/greek fragments (... admittedly, sometimes we'll grab one of each just to annoy everyone). What makes them Long is that we'll then pile on the prefixes and suffixes. "antidisestablishmentarianism", for example, has only a single root (the verb establish, I think? I don't think you can really break that down any further in English), and then 4 or 5 modifiers stacked on it. And that's not even getting into the whole 'spend a while hyphenated before being acknowledged as an actual compound' thing. It's worth noting that, at least so far as I can recall, every attempt by an inventor to call their new Thing an English name with more than two words saw the thing completely renamed by others in short order and the original name drop completely out of use.
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  644. New Zealand isn't going to be back to normal for quite some time yet. Level 3 is still pretty restrictive, and then there's all the economic aspects to deal with, if nothing else.
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  645. The rest of the plan (it's not really a plan, more a goal) is varied from city to city and person to person, and doesn't fit on a sign or in a slogan. Vary rarely is the intended message "get rid of law enforcement entirely and never have any again". It's Usually (not always, there are a few crazy anarchists about) just a more extreme version of reform, with the idea being that just tweaking the rules isn't enough so long as you have the same broken system and the sane arsehole cops in places to undermine it (Many reform attempts so far have already failed because of this). Gotta (metaphorically in most cases) burn it down and start over if you want to make any progress on reform. Which is to say, the Police get abolished, something new(ish) and much less problematic is set up in its place. Step 2 is just long and not vary catchy compared to step 1. (Of course, the occasional crazy has step 1: abolish police, step 2: abolish government, step 3: ???, step 4: ???, Step 5: Utopia, I guess? These people are some combination of ignorant and idiotic. Most protestors are not these people.)
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  646.  @vl647  Well, no... most people would NOT enjoy the consequences of that. Perhaps instead "well, that's no excuse not to try to make it better".
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  647. Those also have an actual vowel length difference, just btw. the single o sound is shorter than the double o sound. Meanwhile when people talk about 'long' vs 'short' vowels in English, they're usually Not talking about the Actual long vowels or the Schwa, but instead the 'sound that matches the name of the letter' vs 'other sounds the character can indicate'. Because the names of the letters are given are the sounds that the old Actually long sound have evolved into... which is great, except for the part where it varies by dialect and most of them are diphthongs (with the rest being short sounds). And then you get the distinction between 'actual vowel plus almost random vowel character' vowel vs 'two vowels together that indicate a completely different sound' vs 'two vowels that are said as completely seperate sounds'... It's kind of a mess. And dialects make it worse. Most people looking to reform English spelling end up concluding that you can rationalise Parts of it (substantially reducing the number of character combinations that result in the sound archtypically written as 'ee', having an actual character for schwa, maybe marking where the primary stress in the word is), but much of the complete disaster that is the English vowel system is somewhat unsalvagable without giving up on having a single, mostly-unified, written English language.
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  648. Depends how you count them... or more accurately how you define them. If you go by contiguous land mass above water ignoring human engineering projects it's ... Pretty sure it's number 3 actually... Ok, I'm pretty sure the only defintion that doesn't also include every single island in existence as ca 'continent' where Australia doesn't come last is the one where you use tectonic plate boundaries as the defining factor... at which point It actually IS very high up the list (I won't say first, because I believe there's a few others of similar size and I can't be bothered looking up the numbers) by way of being entirely on a single plate that has all of it's boundaries out in the ocean.
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  649. It doesn't need to be. There are four known cases, with no known connection to a known source, so there's however long the chain To them is (at least a couple of people, I'd imagine), and then they work in all different parts of the city, so that's multiple potential infection chains From them too, and then there's anyone else who caught it from then, and so on. That's plenty bad enough.
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  650. Sort of. The thing is though, isntances where they 'say their name' are significantly less common than instances where they Don't, so it's more practical to mark the less common one. More of a problem is that this specific quirk of English orthography is actually completely divorced from acutal vowel length (that is, whether a vowel is 'long' or 'short' outside of an English language primary school classroom). Many of the so-called 'long' vowels are actually shorter than the supposed 'short' vowels in terms of how long they're held for... and most of them are actually diphthongs rather than straight vowels to begin with. And then there's English's Actually long vowels, of which there's a couple that are just long sounds (they don't contrast with a short one other than reducing to schwa sometimes), and an awful lot that are 'the vowel after a voiced stop in one of the Many dialects (most of them, to varying degrees) where the 'voiced vs unvoiced' contrast is actually something of a lie, and they're instead 'unvoiced vs aspirated'... except s before the stop at the start of a syllable suppresses the aspiration and causes confusion, as the p in 'spot' is closer to the b in 'bot' than it is the p in 'pot' in those dialects, while the o in 'pot' is short and the o in 'bot' is long. Because the voiced consonants are still voiced... Kind of... the voicing just starts right at the End of the sound rather than the Start of it, so ends up more attached to the vowel (all English vowels are voiced, as a rule) than the consonant, making it seem like you started the vowel earlier, and thus held it longer... ' yay sound change?
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  651.  @justmenotyou3151  the Democrats are a huge improvement on the Republicans, but when it comes to things like this, the difference is only in degree of corruption. They still mostly have basically the same opinion when it comes to business vs workers. (The democrats are "economic centre right plus everything left of that that happens to sneak in" vs the Republicans' various degrees of "anti anyone not rich enough to buy off the politicians" economic position. ... Over all, at least. Individuals may vary.)
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  652. That's... Not new. Legally speaking, you Never owned software. You owned a disk that happened to have software on it, and you owned a license to use said software in any legal manner. Lots of things about that have changed, mostly for the worse, but that actually hasn't. Of course, this was, fundamentally, identical to the way you owned a book. There's a Reason I still vastly prefer to buy actual, physical books, even if they cost four, or ten, or more times as much as ebooks, and only get e-books in platform agnostic formats*, mind you. The movie and music industries abused the hell out of copyright law to the point it's no longer fit for purpose, and once the IT industry got big enough to be controlled largely by the same interests, it's pretty much been down hill ever since. *Also usually $0 and no longer under copyright.
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  653. So, using 'last' rather than 'latest' in a context where 'last' could also be understood as 'final', but clearly wasn't meant that way if one took half a second to think about it, caused just enough ambiguity as to create a mess when journalists didn't bother thinking about it (Or possibly they or their editors thought lieing(-but-technically-not) about it would make for better headlines). Yeah, that tracks. (Pretty sure most people I interact with prefer using 'latest' or 'most recent' in most contexts precisely to avoid having to subsequently clarify which meaning of 'last' they intended). I keep running into things with USB type C connectors with USB 2.0 interfaces. USB type A is colour coded*, USB type B is not only colour coded but, in some cases, a different shape. Mini and Micro USB (and their rather awful B types) each, so far as I ever encountered, only ever got used for a specific interface type, so no meaningful confusion there. USB type C, on the other hand, has absolutely no such indication. It can be USB 1, 2, any of the subtypes of 3, be on a wire that only has the Power cables ('good for charging' on the packaging of a USB cable often means 'contains no wires connecting the data pins' in some places) for type 3 or even type 1, be on some weird custom nonsense that for whatever stupid reason is wired up in such a way that it actually cares which way up you put the plug (not needing to is part of the point of USB type C connectors, but it happens anyway)... and there is absolutely nothing about the connectors that indicate ANY of that. *Except at this point that's about as confusing as the naming conventions. White: USB 1... except when it's actually a 3 connector, (identifiable by the extra pins if you're paying attention, identical if you're not expecting to need to check), in which case it's a dedicated firmware update socket... probably. Black: USB 2 Blue: USB 3, except... Red: Supposedly this was going to be USB 4. I have litterally never seen one. I'm not sure I've ever seen a picture of one. I don't know if USB 4 even Exists given that they keep making and renaming the different subtypes of USB 3. Orange: I have no idea. I've seen claims that this indicates that the socket is powered even if the device is nominally off, which is great... except... I have never encountered a blue USB type A connector this was not true of on a device where having it be true would be in any way desirable. And so far as both I and my computer can tell, it behaves identically to the blue sockets on the same motherboard. The idea that Google reads google docs comes from a few issues that have come up in the past that strongly indicate they have the ability to with minimal effort combined with their track record in other contexts. Now, they almost certainly Don't, for a whole host of practical reasons if nothing else, but given they caused a bit of an issue a while back where they had some sort of fault which caused a warning/error message to (incorrectly) trip regarding the contents of documents (not malware or the like, but the actual content of the text/images within them. To my recollection anyway, certianly that's what people were talking about at the time) which could never Correctly trip if they Weren't looking at the actual contents of your files, well, you can understand people being concerned. Ultimately that one comes down to the fact that Google has stacked up evidence agaisnt it's own trustworthiness and/or benevilence. The main reason for the persistance of the idea that you can't use Linux without using the terminal/must use the terminal for just about everything in Linux seems to be a matter of documentation and tech support: If you, as a random independent user, ever encounter a problem and go looking for help regarding how to fix it, the instructions given for how to solve it will almost universally be in the form of a string of (usually Unexplained, mind you) terminal commands, not directions for navigating the GUI (among other issues). Because the people who know what they're doing are largely the sort of people who have been around long enough that that was how they learned to do it, and then just kept doing it that way.
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  654. A djinn. Only the word had passed through several languages before reaching English and been pluralized as if it were latin. You know, like the blue guy in Aladdin. (Which i cannot for the life of me remember or figure out how to spell.)
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  655. Socially conservative (Actually conservative, not US "reactionary lunatic + economic liberal" conservative), anti-establishment (for want of a better term)to the point of being self sabotaging when running an election campaign after a term as part of the government, populist (though without most of the stupid that usually goes with that lable), actually slightly progressive economically speaking (though not particularly left-or-right aligned with it). NZFirst get labled radical centerists for a reason, ya know?
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  656. All else aside, what on earth does that have to do with a video about New Zealand?
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  657. I recommend quarantine... Lest you infect others with your stupid.
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  658.  @pleappleappleap  In Australia and New Zealand, Linked Italics have completely replaced cursive. The advantages are extensive. It's almost as fast (most people add their own extra linking flourishes here and there that pretty much eliminate the difference without losing any clarity (poor handwritting is poor handwritting regardless, of course) and actually mutually intelligable with every other way of writing the language, unlike full cursive (where most of the letters are indistinguishable from w and the bulk of the rest have nothing in common with how they appear in any other font/typeface/writing system/whatever), not to mention actually developing out of 'printing' when one is learning it, rather than, again, being funcitonally an entirely different script. Ok, to be fair, my 90-something year old Grandmother still writes in cursive (Which basically no one my age can actually read) and I wouldn't be surprised to find any future nieces and nephews basically writing only in 'printing' or 'scribble' as a result of how little use most people have for writing sigificant amounts of text by hand these days, but in between those two extremes, linked italics are the rule.
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  659. doesn't help that some of the most prominant supposedly pro-trans propaganda is seemingly designed from the ground up to 'other' trans people while also stoking paranoia and fear of non-trans people among them. (yes, I'm talking about the whole pronoun thing. The arguments in favour of it are nonsensical and require that those arguing in favour of it see no distinction between sex and gender... which is a fairly obvious flaw...) Then again, attempts to force linguistic change as part of an ideological campaign are always a contradictory mess that just make things worse for everyone. If your ideology is successful, the language will change naturally to align with it. If you have to force langauge change First, it's because your strategy for bringing about actually Meaningful change isn't working. Of course, that's just one of Many factors of that sort. Radicalisation of the political right is another major factor.
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  660.  @NecromancyForKids  it's a lot better once you compensate for inflation... Of course, then you take into account everything Else about the time period and it's not so great again.
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  661.  @xenaretos  two options. One is to just declare some long wiggly bits to be a single, slightly higher priority road (the city I live in already does this due to remoddling intersections based on the traffic patterns: the natural 'straight through' direciton has you on a different road while 'turning' keeps you on the same one, name and numbering wise). The other is to just number the hexagons, start from their most-compass-aligned point (whichever direction that may be in your particular arrangement), and then number around the outside of it (and/or the inside, depending how it's set up). Or use letters, if they're the right size and divided up correctly (you could have 13 exterior and 13 interior, or 26 of each, or just 26 around the outside, etc.), Or you could cut up the interior in other ways and do other things with it, whatever. Assuming just hexagons as the base with the interior chopped up in various ways, anyway.
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  662. It's not the only consideration though. There is a reason why 'right next to the door' is the default position for light switches (and there are (usually) equally good reasons for why they are elsewhere when that's tge case.)
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  663. ... wow. Ok, I know the situation in the USA is pretty bad, but, seriously, you could at least pick a country that's actually Less screwed up than the USA, rather than just Differently screwed up...
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  664. I'm pretty sure his logic holds up... as a broad generalization before taking into account any of the facts on the ground.
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  665. Yeah, there's the problem: It's not consistent about that, at all. And correcting it's errors requires the same knowledge that writing the thing yourself would. You get better results with specialised AI (mind you, they're still not really AI in any particularly meaningful sense. No more so than chatbots ever were, at least. Leaps and bounds have been made in making chatbots and similar, and in 'machine learning' which is a tech necessary in order to Develop AI, and they're quite useful, but calling them AI is quite misleading, really) that proofreads your code, than with having to proofread the AI's code, anyway. This gets more true the weaker your skills are, but it also gets more true the bigger the project is.
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  666. it's also still nonsense. English has rules that prevent 'fish' from being a valid reading, and if you toss those out then ' ' is also a valid reading of the character string!
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  667. The advantages of not having accent markers are completly eliminated by the existence of this fun new technology known as the 'computer keyboard'... especially the programable mechanical keyboard when the companies that mass produce the regular ones are uncooperative. The only reason adding accents is slow for a lot of people these days is that the people who make the keyboards and software force you to use unicode or messy character maps rather than just having a key equivalent to the Shift key to toggle from 'character' to 'character with appropriate marker'. (admittedly, when you have to put multiple different markers on the same character it gets a little more complicated). I mean, it mattered when a lot of people had to write a lot of long documents by hand, and when mechanical issues limited how practical it was to map more characters to the same set of ergonomically and mechanically viable keys on a typewriter (this is why English has mostly lost that nice double dot marker that I can never spell the name of)... now? not so much!
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  668.  @macartm  less ignoring, more ensuring it is a constant 1 in 80, rather than some bits being more and others less. Or at least, that's what i got out of previous videos.
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  669.  @tealkerberus748  More properly, Danish and English are both decended from Old Germanic, down different branches, which briefly got mashed back together when the Norse invaded and settled in a substantial part of England. Mind you, of the Germanic family of languages, and even of the West Germanic subset, English is very much the weird one... and not because of the excessive number of French and Latin words in its vocabulary. But it's there weird member of that family of languages, not some other, unrelated one.
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  670. I suggest checking out what UK, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand ration packs look like. The very first thing you'll notice is that they're an entire days rations per pack as well. In the case of the New Zealand rations you also notice pretty quickly (at least if you're familiar with the equivalent items you can buy in the shops) that almost everything in the ration pack (at least as of the last time I saw one) can be used in more than one way, so you can actually have variety in your meals even if you end up stuck with the same ration pack for multiple days in a row. They're apparently rated pretty highly in terms of quality and flavour, too. (they also contain no way to heat anything. Instead, the unit's officer has a portable stove in his kit for the purpose.) The Australian ones are similar, to my understanding. I mean, it may not be reaching Italian or French levels of 'live to eat', but it's a Lot better than american MREs generally are.
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  671.  @artemis.nnnnnbbbbb  Of course, one can be 'intimately aquainted' with some person, place, or subject, just to confuse matters.
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  672. Not That crazy when you consider that blowing up a ship in another country's port could quite easily be argued to be an act of war and the general public was, to my understanding, already not too pleased with the nuclear testing in the pacific being a thing in the first place. Moderately impressive though.
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  673. ... they also told customers about this Months ago, and provided the ability to transfer the account (and thus music);to their youtube music thingy, or just flat out Download the music in a standard, unencrypted format (personally, I did the latter, backed it up on a flash drive and several of my other devices, which is Entirely legal here so long as all copies are destroyed or passed on if I ever "sell" the license (which used to mean the tape or disc). It was kind of a dick move, but losing your stuff Entirely in this case is more or less on you. Under most circumstances, at least.
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  674. The problem with an anglosphere union is that it would arguably include South Africa (a disaster that would either be a massive stain on the whole thing or a Massive resource drain), the United states, which is probably the most poorly managed of the lit and would either end up defacto running the show or in a case of perpetual revolt (though splitting it up into smaller blocks (not individual states) and then dealing with those rather than the whole thing as a single unit might help, Britain's parliament is an embarrassment at least half the time (and then there's the seperateists)... Oh and good luck getting the USA to join a monarchy, meanwhile New Zealand's Government implodes for lack of legitimacy if you get rid of the monarchy or make it subordinate to an outside entity (oh, and bonus points, the monarch needs to be a descendant of Queen Victoria or the same issues come up) I'm reasonabley sure India would want nothing to do with the idea... And if not you run into the issue that if you're fair by population India dominates everything, but if you're fair by any other measure indian citizens are woefully under represented in and underserved by the resulting imperial government. And then there's how the hell you'd even govern the thing. Almost every nation involved uses very different electoral systems, and there's very little that's consistent about how they're run beyond Having an elected legislature. Most of them derive their legal tradition from pre-American independence British law to some extent, but have gone in radically different directions since. (And it's often the USA that would be the problem when it came to resolving things). And where would the capital be? Arguably geography says South Africa, which is a terrible idea. Various other arguments favour the USA or India, each with their own issues. London would be Traditional, but you'd be hard pressed to put it closer to potential enemies without sticking it in northern India, so that's clearly silly. Let's not even get into the headaches that are currency. Arguably the USA Alone is too big to run on a single currency without it causing significant problems, let alone a new Empire. (Though it would be nice to see florins back in use somehow...)
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  675. I just get the thumb nail, loading circle for ages, then "no connection, tap to retry". Not just when I shrink the app or anything, it never loads to start with. Only on this video. I think it likely that something went wrong as it was being uploaded and Youtube is choking on the resulting non-standardness. I base that on no particular evidence beyond skimming the comments though.
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  676. training birds takes a lot longer than building drones though. Also, some types of drone are substantially more resistant to such methods, or would badly injur the bird in the doing (or both). Still sounds like a very useful suplementary method of dealing with them, though.
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  677. The thing about complaints of trains being noisy? Electric trains are universally quieter* than the vehicle traffic on the street that no one cares about. You just notice them more because the road noise is Constant while the train noise only happens when a train is passing. And even then, if the trains come past regularly enough, residents quickly tune them out too, generally. *so long as you deal with issues such as corners that are too sharp for the rail gauge, poor maintenance, and overly short stopping distance causing wheel/break squeal, anyway.
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  678.  @wrathc53  ehh, there's more to it than that, but it's not Entirely wrong. Also, NZ immigration can be kind of awful to immigrants (though that's a long standing institutional problem, not a matter of government policy.)
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  679. Side effect of that being a common demand on signs at the mostly astroturfed protests against anti-covid measures.
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  680. Q and K are actually not formed the same way in the mouth, due to the W (written U) after the Q... but the sounds come out so similar that the distinction is a bit pointless. G making a J sound: blame the french. X: yeah, there's really no good reason for keeping this one other than how much of a pain changing it would be, because it's always read 'eks'... except when it's xy, in which case the combination reads 'zi'. The C, on the other hand, is actually both more reasonable and more of a mess than most people think. using SC instead of SS where SS is expected happens because SS is sometimes ZZ (I have no idea why it is not just Written as ZZ in those situations, mostly because I've put zero effort into finding out), so SC is used when you want to be completely clear that you want an S sound and not a Z sound. (supposedly there's also a third reading for SS, but I never remember what that's all about). CK replacing most, but not all, instances where one would expect CC or KK is just annoying. There's really no good reason for CK to replace KK other than people being confused about what they're supposed to do, and CC in the middle of a word becoming CK ... I think it's because sometimes you're supposed to pronunce the two Cs seperately, but sometimes it seems to be because someone didn't like the look of sticking a K in the middle of that word. And word final CK is because you're not allowed to end words in C... except when the character immediately before the C is an I, so an extra K gets bolted on the end. And then, of course, any word ending in 'IC' that is then going to take the suffix "LY" for some reason I don't entirely understand doesn't take "LY" but instead "ALLY"... which of course lead to people deciding (entirely reasonably in light of the other rules/patterns) that the base word ending not in IC (after all, word final C is not permitted) but in ICAL, and taking the standard LY suffix. ... but of course, they only did that with Unfamiliar words. So the words everyone used all the time didn't have that happen, but the ones that were new to a lot of people (even if they became common Later) did have that happen. If you want something really infuriating, try figuring out the rules for V. It's like if the rules for C were less complicated, but made even less sense. And the only justification for any of it is that in looped cursive script, lower case W and lower case VV are too hard to tell apart. ... except in loose cursive script any string of characters without an ascender, decender, cross piece, or dot on it (and some that should have those but don't because looped cursive is unreasaonable nonsense in its own right) ends up looking like vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv (or rrrrrrr) no matter what you do so I have no idea why they bothered. (There's a Reason Australia and New Zealand ditched it in favour of linked Italics with personal flourishes... I forget when exactly. My grandmother writes in looped cursive, my mother does not (I think she Might be able to, not sure?) but can read it, I can neither write nor read looped cursive. But linked italics is basically as quick to write, and if you can read printed or carved text you can read linked italics (unless the person who wrote it had Particularly bad handwriting) rather than having to learn what amounts to an Entire Additional Character Set!)
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  681. Most buildings seem to go all in on one direction or the other. Buildings absolutely should be designed to facilitate meeting and interacting with one's neighbours... but Not at the expense of the ability to withdraw into one's private spaces when desired. Those balconies aren't great, the social aspect would be better served by turning them into large, connected, walkways with appropriate amenities and having them open into the more 'public facing' parts of the apartment just like any other entry, and if that isn't the goal they'd be better designed to be actually private outdoor space. At the same time, large, shared, open park space between apartment buildings, shared courtyards within such buildings, and so on are absolutely beneficial, easily mitigating some of the downsides of small apartments, making socialisation easier (without necessarily forcing it) and helping make the whole arrangement more accessible (not so much from the point of view of people with disabilities, that takes more work, but speaking more generally). Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that Forcing either socialisation or isolation/privacy isn't necessary, or even desirable, but Facilitating both sure is.
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  682. Louis has made a number of videos regarding paypal. I suggest watching them.
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  683. given that the 'carrot and stick' isn't 'reward and punishment' but 'unattainable bait'... (literally, the carrot dangling from the end of a stick held in front of a donkey to get it to go where you want)
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  684.  @KnakuanaRka  mostly that you've got better things to do.
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  685.  @SigFigNewton  There's an aweful lot of ugly useless new 'architecture' that gets built too, mind you. Parking lots, ill advised stadiums (the supposed economic benefits never materialise, the city ends up eating most of the construction cost even when it's supposedly a private enterprise, and the tickets end up costing so much that locals can't afford to go to the events anyway), and so on. And it's a rare building that manges to be both useful And beautiful. Most supposedly 'beautiful' new buildings are, in reality, bug ugly (ranging from oppressive to 'ugh' to Litterally Painful To Look At because some idiot didn't account for the SUN when including massive curved glass pannels everywhere) and badly designed from a utility perspective too. Very Occasionally a station manages to be both plesent to look at and not awful to use, but 'unassuming' is more common.
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  686. I'd say 'any robot that is capable of preventing you from disconnecting its power supply, intentionally or not, is a bad robot'.
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  687. When I had to replace my lamp a year or three ago, a full half the lamps that were to be had were touch lamps like this. Thing is, in my 30+ years of life, I'd never seen nor even heard of them before! The sales assistant did warn me at the time that the ones with dimmer switches tended not to play nicely with LED bulbs, but given that those cost more and I didn't need a dimmer switch anyway, that was fine. It's worked out pretty well for me so far ^_^ Edit: though my having not encountered them before is apparently a bit of a fluke, as they have been around.
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  688.  @skyrre  ... Does it really count as either if you can't even fit a human in it?
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  689. It's foundation was questionably built to begin with, being built primarily around the wealthy of the day seeking to avoid taxation and making sure no one else was in a postion to change that.
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  690. Simple fact is that if English had them, the keyboard would be adjusted so they were at least as easy to type as they are on European keyboards. Which is to say, no more difficult than capital letters currently are (well, ok, maybe slightly, given that if you type Properly you use one hand to hold the shift key and the other to hit the relevant letter on either side, where as the key to get the accented characters and such is usually not duplicated like that).
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  691. Simple rule of thumb in English is that if you want a yes/no answer, you do not ask a negative question. When I was a kid we were specifically taught to use negative questions to force the other person to elaborate and engage with the conversation rather than just bring it to a halt with one word answers.
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  692.  @Ghost_Hybrid  Urban combat is always pretty grim for all involved. More so when you have artillery pasting everything and/or end up with a seige. Likewise any situation where the frontline ends up static not because no one's trying to attack (reorganising, gathering resources, focusing on a different area), but because no attacks are really getting through in either direction. And any time a war devolves into an attrition match it gets pretty nasty too. Thing is, as a general rule (and acknowleding that there are threshholds beyond which this ceases to apply), the defender doesn't need anything like as many men to hold a point as an attacker needs to take it, and seiges are usually roughly as awful for the besieger as the beseiged (modern logistics mitigate this... when you actually have funcitoning modern logistics that actually successfully transport necessary things to and from the front without them getting blown up or mysteriously disappearing...)
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  693.  @kintustis  it's found it's problem in the form of basically everything Microsoft has done to windows since somewhere around windows XP.
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  694.  @CCoburn3  ehh, there does come a point where you assume the end user is going to get someone more capable (like a system admin, if such is available) to deal with a problem that's enough of a disaster, and at that point sending them off to the command line is fair enough... but that should very much be something that comes up at the point where something is very badly broken, not the imediate response to 'how do I do (basic normal function)?'.
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  695. nuclear power is precisely as safe as those in charge of it are trustworthy and compitent. Given how often both corporations and government entities have perverse inscentives encouraging bad practice, and given the consequences of a failure? It's entirely reasonable not to want such a thing anywhere near you (or, for that matter, upwind of you). Doesn't matter how safe the design is when everything's in good repair and everyone is doing their jobs properly, it matters how safe it is when that's NOT the case. Coal plant? Steam explosion that probably doesn't do much to the surrounding area, and a regular fire (which, well, cities have systems in place for dealing with That already). Nuclear plant? Much bigger deal. Mind you, no one wants a coal plant anywhere near their house if they can help it Either, given the smoke and the fact that the things put out a mildly concerning amount of radiation in the course of normal operation (more so than a nuclear plant, in fact). Gas is, of course, less bad, but still not the greatest thing ever. And, of course, no one wants to live immediately down stream of a hydroelectric plant. Wind is Less bad, but the noise is still an issue. No one cares about living near photovoltaic cells, heck, they'll stick 'em on their houses, but those have their own downsides, and using mirrors and lensese to focus solar energy to drive a steam turbine takes up a tonne of space and actually screws up local weather patterns (for much the same reason as cities, particularly those full of excessive amounts of road and carparks, do, only much, much more so) and are rather bad for birds that make the mistake of flying through the beam. And those idiots trying to bill Orbital Power Transmiters as the solution to 'clean energy' generation... they're litterally dumping heat that would Miss the earth otherwise, Onto the Surface of the earth (kind of the oposite of the desired result) in the form of what amounts to a Giant Doom Laser (well, not Technically a laser, but functionally indistinguishable in effect)... ... if a person can't see the ways for THAT to go horribly wrong (both with and without bad actors involved) they have no business being involved in any project that might possibly have the capacity to actually implement the thing. ... Though they're at least right that it wouldn't be producing much of anything in the way of greenhouse gases.
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  696. Double v makes more sense when describing the shape, double u makes more sense when describing how it came to exist.
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  697.  @aliciaviacrusis9441  cooler, yes, but never terribly practical due to cost and the particular combination of technology available at any given time. Cruisers were generally a better investment if you had a lit of sea trade or overseas territory, torpedo boats and costal fortresses (and later submarines and aircraft) if you didn't.
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  698. yeah, the whole 'partial levitation' thing was pretty much a delusion from the get go, sadly.
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  699.  @queerstudbroalex  too bad about the part where most (all?) of the listed cons aren't cons of airport transit as its own thing, but of poor implementation in general, which applies to literally Anything.
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  700. ​ @SnakePlissken25  ... if it's a valid option for a given use case that isn't the one that was already being considered for the role, if only by default, it is an 'alternative' to that thing by definition. That's kind of what 'alternative' means. A thing that can be chosen instead. If Linux was Not an alternative it would be because Either it was already the default assumption (in which case, why is this conversation happening to begin with?) or it's not a valid option (in which case, again, why is this conversation happening to begin with?).
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  701.  @hamishfullerton7309  That might be the reason that most people who go to Australia do so, but the implication that most New Zealanders go to Australia is nonsense (your comment is somewhat ambiguous as to which is intended). NZ's food prices are an issue, and it's due to a combination of free trade (which is never actually GOOD for the smaller economy in comparison to a sensible regime of tariffs and the like, but is vastly better for everyone involved than the nonsensical situations that resulted from tariffs and other such trade regulations being used as a political and diplomatic weapon rather than a tool for regulating the internal economy) and the supermarket duopoly. I won't try to argue that the free trade problem is most that it incentivises the farmers coops to raise their domesitic prices... You keep up with Australia's problems with the supermarkets? New Zealand has similar issues, and woolworths is one of the two here as well. Admittedly, they haven't been allowed to dig in Quite as deep in New Zealand, and there's been a tendency for them to start pushing prices, only to have the government to start making noises about (or actually carry out) an inquiry... only for the supermarkets to suddenly straighten out and oh look how much cheaper cheese is now, gotta love market conditions changing in our favour all of a sudden! ... it never goes back to where it Started, mind you, just down enough that the government goes back to having more important things to deal with, but it does slow the problem down. (of course, the Current government is looking at a cost of living crisis and decided the best thing to do was try to make local governments quadruple public transport fares, so...)
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  702. Of course, acceleration is Generally defined as change in speed over Time, with speed being change in spatial location over time, but when you start using time as part of your spatial location definition that starts getting a bit weird. Recursive or something. (There's a name for change in acleration over time, and change in That over time... I forget what they are.)
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  703. The interesting thing about that 30%, is that in at least some cases it's the same word borrowed on multiple occasions over the centuries, but with different (if usually related) meanings.
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  704. I suspect that most of the time the thing holding back their terrible idea fairies was their immediate superior's willingness to tell them they were being a dumbarse combined with an inability to be taken seriously by anyone if they tried to go around/over said immediate superior with their dumb ideas. Get high enough up the chain and Politics starts getting involved...
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  705. Depends how you go about filtering the resulting smoke etc, I'd expect. Most places have laws regarding that sort of thing, after all. Depends on the type of garbage you're burning too. I know that where I live we have to sort our trash into organic/recyclable/other and the 'other' includes a Lot of stuff you wouldn't want to put through an incinerator if you wanted it to keep being usable, for example. Japan has more complicated trash seperation requirements, and one of the catagories is specifically 'burnable' stuff, that is, things that can go into the incineration plants (compared to various types of recyclables and the other things that Can't go into the incinerators.
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  706. A couple of things done post 9/11 actually helped Substantially reduce risk of reoccurance. The vast majority of the benefit was from a redesign of cockpit doors and procedures surrounding them. Airport security? Maybe there are some exceptions somewhere, but the USA's implementation has been proven, repeatedly, to be an utter joke. And not a terribly funny one, given the negative effects on legitimate passengers. Simply put? It is WAY TOO EASY to get direct access to the planes without any security oversite whatsoever. Tampering with cargo takes basically no effort, tampering with engines and control surfaces is more difficult, but quite possible. Meanwhile, passengers are no longer able to actually get into the cockpit. A regular luggage scan would show up any bomb substantial enough to matter, and that's really the only thing they can do to affect anyone outside the plane (those On the plane having already been written off as acceptable losses if the alternative is the plane hitting something important, like, say, anything that isn't open ocean or fields.) Oh, and lets not forget that, for all the fuss and bother about other things (with varying degrees of legitimacy from 'yeah, we'd rather not have your thing explode in the hold' to 'the person who added this to the list was a petty twit with a vendetta') that they won't let you bring on a plane (be it in the cabin or in the hold, and the two lists are different), they DO still let you bring lithium ion batteries in various devices in the cabin. Which is kind of amazing given how easily those can be turned into a Nasty incindiary (with added bonus toxic fumes). They won't let larger ones in the cargo hold (it's not pressurised, and lithium ion batteries apparently do FUN things if you drop the pressure. Or at least, the larger ones are sufficiently more prone to doing REALLY FUN things if anything goes wrong under those circumstances). So, yeah, checking your documentation and bags (and maintaining biosecurity in the parts of the world where that's significant)? Quite reasonable. And was (mostly) being done pre-9/11. All the other extra nonsense? Slows everything down and causes a bunch of extra stress and inconvenience for no actually useful purpose (In the USA it does let certain individuals get away with some otherwise utterly unacceptable behaviour with the only result being another letter about how the TSA will 'review their policies' so that this 'doesn't happen again', or similar meaningless twaddle, though.) In short: the passenger facing changes to airport security post 9/11 are pure theater that do nothing to stop any actual threats.
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  707.  @ulti-mantis  not really, the word "adequately" is important there.
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  708.  @Invizive Now, I know this isn't what you meant (and that what you did mean is quite reasonable, however right it may or may not be), but if you consider that currency is fundamentaly nothing but markers indicating resources owed (aka, debt), the idea of a "debt based economy" is kind of an amusing redundancy. Edit: and, in case their is confusion, this isn't only true of fiat based currency. Gold standard, rice standard, energy standard, unreasonably large stone ring standard... Tie it to anything you like and this remains true.
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  709. Not disagreeing with any of that. You're entirely correct, to my way of thinking. On the other hand, at least in the USA, the political right aren't arguing for equality At All. They just argue that any attempt at improving things for those how are mistreated is somehow an attack on those who are not. (this is, of course, made somewhat easier by the 'SJWs' on the left. For clarity, the difference between an SJW and an activist is that an activist will see a person in a wheel chair struggling to navigate the steps to a public library and, perhaps help in that individual case, perhaps not, but start an awareness campaign so the general public realise this is even a problem, and actively seek to have wheelchair ramps installed so that the library is accessable. An SJW will see the same thing and start a hate campaign against non disabled people and make life miserable for everyone until the steps are removed from the library, as steps are discriminitory against disabled people. They will consider the removal of the steps a win and move on.)
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  710. If they did, they deserved to be fired, at best, regardless of any other factors or how right their position was otherwise. For gross stupidity, if nothing else.
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  711. Egypt (and most of north Africa, for that matter) has, for most if not all of its history, had much interaction with the middle east and Mediterranean civilizations. On the other hand, aside from the occasional border skirmish with its neighbour to the imediate south, and probably some trade there, it had very little interaction with the rest of Africa. (Well, I have vague recollections of a comparatively brief period of someone from the south taking over for a bit. But the operative word is vague). Going by their infrastructure, they had more contact with India than they did with most of Africa. Sure, they're on the African Continent, but to call them an African civilization is so misleading as to be functionally false.
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  712. Lobbiests.
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  713.  @mikehammer4018  Usually, so far as I can tell, the fact checking on Youtube is more like 'this is an issue that is causing a lot of controversy and many people have lied about it. We don't care what This video says about it, it's on or related to that topic, so here are the things we have (supposedly) confirmed as true/false about that topic'. That can Look biased, whether it is or not, if one side is lieing a LOT about a given subject, and the other side is either lieing less or just not talking about it. The thing to keep in mind is that Youtube's political bias is determined by one thing and one thing only: What allows them to continue opperating and making money. They really don't give a damn about anything beyond that.
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  714. Overhead lighting is Super useful for cleaning, or large spaces where several people are doing different things in different parts of the room while facing different directions, among other things. Of course, there are also situations where it's annoying or unhelpful, and lamps are quite useful. And then there's my setup where I've got both, and they're Super useful for the things they're good at... but I barely use Either of them because the vast majority of the time I have three LCD computer monitors going.
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  715. Well, if by "any kiwi", you mean the rightwing conspiracy nuts in youtube comments, or US owned media (do remember that Australian television news is almost if not entirely owned by what ammounts to the US Republican party's propaganda wing, which is no closer to reality in terms of its reporting than the CCP equivalent) , then sure.
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  716. @Hyi Vittu oh, it matters. Just, you know, not usually in the way that the politicians want you to think it does. They're both corrupt and pro corporation. And while the federal level may flip-flop, at the state level most states have one party with such a strangle hold that even the left-most positions considered radical in blue states will be represented by a republican (or the right most, radical in red states, represented by a democrat), because if you're not part of the party you get nowhere, but there's still all those ever so useful voters who support positions that aren't standard for the party, and it works because if someone from the dominant party doesn't at least seem to represent a popular position it leaves room for the other (or a third! Unlikely as that is.) To start gaining traction and eventually flip it... But it does matter, because the main difference between the parties is what it takes to get to the top within the party. For the Republicans that mostly seems to be money and a deep seated hatred of everyone not you or willing to give you money to hate other people more. For the Democrats it seems to be money (though less so) and a general disinclination to burn the city/state/country down. Note all the things that appear on neither list, such as "a viable plan to actually make anything better", for example.
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  717. Just got to be very careful not to let anger become hatred or rage. Anger is motivating, hatred is corrupting, rage is madness.
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  718. Most English adjectives go before the noun... but some can go either before or after depending on what you're trying to say, and some gramatical structures move them around.
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  719.  @ChrisSmith-bh2hg  Should probably fact check this (I can't be bothered), but under all that ice? Supposedly Antarctica is actually a bunch of islands rather than a single landmass.
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  720.  @PerfectorZY  You'd have trouble having legal grounds to complain about them cutting off the service, I suspect, and the products not working without it is very much your own problem unless they lied about that when you bought them. Could absolutely get them for the harm done as a result of those actions and decisions though.
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  721. Yeah... turns out corruption, incompetence, and bigotry in your government (at whatever level is relevant to the matter at hand) can ruin anything. Not actually a mark against the viability of the project in question (though of course it's routinely Presented as such in some places) so much as a sign of significant need for governmental reform (at least if just giving the current idiots the boot at the next election simply leads to more of the same).
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  722. If it helps any, YouTube Does have competitors. Naturally, YouTube puts Significant restrictions on your ability to advertise that your video is also available on those other platform. Of course, getting any subset of YouTube's audience to switch platforms requires getting a decent number of creators with a significant overlap in user base to move at once, and the new platform can't be much of a downgrade in terms of usability or features (YouTube has seemingly Bering going out of their way to lower that first bar). Also, most alternatives are set up so either the creator of the viewer pays for the service, rather than advertising. This has a lot of advantages... But reduces acessability. On a different note: watchdog asleep at the wheel. Gloriously mixed metaphor producing an amusing mental image. Good job. Meanwhile, I seem to recall that YouTube's copyright safe harbour protections are somewhat at risk on the basis that by running a recommendation system At All, they cease being a content agnostic hosts and instead become a publisher. (Tagged and searchable archives are fine).
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  723. Tennis already has a four player version, btw. It's called 'doubles', because there's two people on each side. The big differences between tennis and pickleball are that the pickleball court is smaller and the ball is Very different, to my understanding.
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  724.  @ib9rt  IIII vs IV varies. IV made the manufacture a LOT easier when working with metal, and was often used even without metal when trying to be 'fancy' (it also saves space, but unfortunately VIII renders that aspect rather pointless.), and then became somewhat traditional/the default, at least in the English speaking world, to the point that it's actually rather rare to ever encounter a clock (or sundile for that matter) marked with IIII rather than IV.
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  725. There were, in fact, multiple sets of runes, one of which was specifically for English and fit pretty well for the English of the day, to my understanding. Arguably the biggest flaw of that system was that it didn't really have a cursive form.
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  726.  @superadventure6297  I've certainly seen open kitchen/dining/living areas that worked, but every time the point is 'yeah, we made it two stories tall and then DIDN'T put a second floor in!" the only thought is "I guess you expect the owner to employ professional window cleaners? ... maybe hire some outfit to clean the ceilings?"... To be fair, this is because the house I grew up in had stupidly and pointlessly high ceilings in some parts of it (among other suboptimal decisions) and the cleaning process was kind of absurd (... and actually kind of unsafe, in a couple of places, come to think of it).
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  727. it's not too difficult to make a pedestrian friendly roundabout... but it's also very easy to make one that's worse than a regular intersection. That and traffic conditions matter. Certainly, medium sized roundabouts with middling traffic levels, a roundabout is almost certainly very favourable for pedestrians... but I've seen a couple in areas I've lived in or regularly traveled through where the combination of the size and design of the roundabout with the amount of traffic going through it actually made it substantially Worse for pedestrians than the regular intersection it replaced (mind you, those roundabouts were installed primarily to force large trucks bound for other places to take the bypass rather than driving straight through the middle of the town's main commercial district, and not with any other particular goal in mind (to the point where they had to promptly modify one of them after finding they'd managed to block off a section of town in such a way that the local fire engines couldn't reach it... whoops!)... though it's noticeable that the really Large roundabouts around here tend to be built with underpasses or the like for pedestrians... or the asumption that said pedestrians will simply not cross there for one reason or another)
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  728. Well, that at least makes Some sense.
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  729.  @zukodude487987  we are designed to consume carbs, and there is a minimum we should be having... but there's also a maximum and these days it is fairly routinely exceeded. Said maximum is tied to amount and type of exertion, mind you. And the type of carbs in question is also relevant: Sugars are actually useful and necessary to brian function, but humans are wired up in ways that work great when your primary sugar source is Fruit, not so great when it's 'additives in the vast majority of foods in your diet', as the latter results in an excess of sugars in general, and an imbalance of sugar types, when treated (as the human brain is naturally inclined to) as though it were the former. A fit and healthy adult doesn't necessarily need many, or even any, carbs for long distance running (provided they're getting enough of everything else, at least), but when they start lifting and moving heavy loads, digging, sprinting, etc? the carbs become quite necessary. And, of course, there's the matter of food storage. It seems like the human body is set up such that carbohydrates are quite significant to the body's ability to get through periods of shortage of anything else.
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  730. Voters aren't registered automatically in New Zealand either. But the whole system is set up to make it as easy to register as possible. The difference between enrolling in the first place and informing the relevant officials of a change of address is... Negligible. Having been in jail in the past doesn't disqualify you. Being In Jail At The Time doesn't disqualify you if your sentence is short enough (basically, if you would miss out on voting in only a single election entirely due to when the system got around to sentencing you, you can still vote, but if your sentence is long enough that you would miss the election regardless you don't get to vote until you get out.) Note that our votes are done Entirely on paper, in part because it is so much easier to subvert electronic systems without leaving evidence that any such action took place. (Well, I'm not 100% sure on that if you're casting your vote from overseas, but certainly otherwise). This year the polling stations were open for two weeks before "election day" (though any Particular polling station wasn't necessarily open all day every day for that whole time period, as the buildings and staff still had to serve their usual purposes as well), and at least in the larger cities there are so many of them that in previous years at all but the busiest, when open only on election day, you were particularly unfortunate if you had to wait for two people to get their ballots ahead of you, (and if you had to wait at all for a booth to vote in after that). This year anti-COVID precautions actually lead to higher than usual voter turnout, but also longer wait times. Still no more than 5 minutes though. The process of voting in person is dead easy. Turn up at a polling station. Wait in line if there's a backlog. When its your turn, give your name,and wait while they find and cross it off the list (this goes faster if you bring the easy vote card you get sent in the mail before the election. It's litteraly just a bit of card with your name and a number, and the number mostly just makes finding the right page and line on the list quicker. Cuts down on need to repeat or spell out your name etc, you can vote just fine without it.) If the polling station is not one intended to handle the electorate you should be voting in there's some extra paperwork. The attendant crosses your name off the list, tears the relevant ballot paper (or papers, if there's a referendum going on, as was the case this time), folds them, marks some stuff on the stub (basically an indication that it was issued properly, and it does not include your name or number ), you go over to the booth (just a cardboard lecturn and privacy screen, basically), unfold and mark your ballot, fold it back up, then walk over to the ballot boxes and stick it in the appropriate box. Then leave. That's It! You can also get a form that lets you appoint someone as basically a courier for you, which authorizes them to go to the polling station, collect your ballot papers, bring those papers to you to fill out, then take the filled out papers back to the polling station and put them in the ballot box for you. Not sure exactly how that process works, but given its intended use, it can't be too complicated. You can also go through a slightly more complicated process to vote (more) early at local government offices, or vote by mail, if you'll be away from your electorate (or flat out out of the country) when the polls are properly open. If you're in hospital or prison or an old folks home or whatever, the polling station kind of comes to you. The votes are Entirely anonymous, as the only person who can connect you to your ballot paper (and even then only if they have an unreasonably good memory and Specifically cared about You) has nothing to do with the counting process, so far as I'm aware. The number of ballots issued can be checked against the number of names crossed off, the specific ballot papers issued can be checked against the ballot papers received, the different polling stations rolls can be checked against each other for duplicate voters... If discrepancies crop up, cops show up and start asking pointed questions, and presumably if said discrepancies could alter the outcome then presumably the electorate's vote gets redone. Don't think it's ever come up. Early votes are counted on election day, election day votes are counted immediately after the polls close. Provisional results are announced that night. In the past that might have meant the early hours of the next morning, but with all the early votes counted during the day it wrapped up before midnight (and was mostly decided even earlier) this time around. You then have a couple of weeks during which special (mostly absentee) votes come in, and the count gets rechecked multiple times before the official results are locked in. Usually a one or two seat shift to the left (usually to the Greens at National's expense) in the party vote, only Very rarely changes the result of any electorates, Might affect how much National or Labour need any given coalition partner, but not which of them manages to form a government. And that's the Election done with. Note that at no point do you need any ID. Which is good, because the way the law is set up here the electoral commission would have to issue that itself. Edit: whoops. That got away on me a bit. Didn't mean to make it that big.
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  731.  David  ignorance is more likely than stupidity in most cases. Not universally the case though.
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  732.  @JohnSmith-tk3pw  the issue is that English mostly doesn't actually have prepositions so much as it has adpositions, which can fall into a prepostional or postpositional slot depending on what you're doing with the sentence. Trying to avoid this just results in awkward and unnatural (sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, and that has been the case since before this 'rule' was introduced (one of many instances of someone who had been taught Latin in school but had made no study of how English actually works making a big stink about nothing). Because of how that works out, it's very difficult to actually 'end a sentence in a preposition', though not impossible if you mangle a sentence badly enough. Though if you manage that its meaning is also going to be unintelligable nonsense. They're called prepositions entirely because that's what the equivalent part of Latin was called, and when the term was introduced centuries ago no further effort was put into the matter until far more recent decades, and in between times a collection of rich and powerful individuals with a Latin fetish and no Linguistic training made things up as an excuse to deride people they didn't like for not speaking 'properly'.
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  733.  @deadadventure8318  true. Dialect is the wrong word. The correct one is... Register, I think? Might be misremembering that one. Formal, informal, polite, casual, technical, etc. Most languages have them and switching between them as appropriate (code switching), at least to some degree, is a fairly basic communication skill most people pick up in their teens (so as to be able to fit in with their peers And not offend, say, grandma). So while a jocular dialect is certainly not a thing, a jocular Register (or whatever the correct word is) almost certainly is.
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  734.  @OMGAnotherday  semi detached makes sense once you realise that the default in most UK cities for a long time was row houses (terriced? I forget who uses which term for them), and Detached houses thus had a major selling point due to the extra yard space and lack of common walls, so you'd note a house that Was detached rather than one that wasn't. So a house with Most (kinda-sorta-half) of the advantages of a detached house notes that it is Semi-detached. Of course, from there we get the odd situation of using the same term (at least in New Zealand) for garrages. A Garage is either separate, attached, or Semi-detached... Which is just silly. (Semi-detached means it has a common wall with the house but you have to go outside to enter it. Needless to say, this is Not a common design choice anymore, though sometimes still used due to the geometry involved. Detached is just a separate building, and attached can just be semi-detached plus a door in the common wall, or part of the ground floor being the garrage with part of the house proper built over it.)
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  735. 'barstardized' in the sense that it's a different dialect. That's somewhere between refering to Australian English as 'barstardized' English... and calling Portugese 'barstardized Spanish'. Québécois is as much French, as it was spoken in France when the French Colonists arrived there, as Parisian French is. The difference between the two is that they underwent different changes (or lack there of) since then. (You will, however, note that I said 'France' and not 'Paris' there.)
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  736.  @adrianalexandrov7730  ... He has the rather dubious distinction of managing to Lose Money running a Casino, too.
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  737. Previous examples I've seen of similar 'get chat GPT to write code' responded to problems with the code by asking ChatGPT to make corrections, (and not specific '"replace the word blah in line X with 'I-X'" corrections, but 'rewrite section X to do Y' or 'Rewrite section Z as if it were Q' or even 'no, that's doing X, I wanted Y', and leting ChatGPT figure it out. For well constructed, but still vague, corrections it did a pretty good job of following them and producing the desired result (sometimes in one pass, sometimes in two)... Well, so long as sufficient pre-existing examples of the relevant constructions existed in its database with appropriate indications as to what they were for, anyway.
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  738. What do you mean 'at this rate'? The ongoing refusal to actually patch the bloody thing to fix all the various bad precident attached to it in a sensible manner had it reaching that stage decades ago.
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  739. @Jim Allen my cat doesn't complain too much just because he can see the bottom (usually, anyway) but he will Always assume it needs topping up. Doesn't matter how much food is in there, he'll almost never just go sat it, he'll Always go find a human to shake the biscuits down into the bottom/middle of the bowl, or top it up, or sometimes just Point At It before he'll eat (except occasionally if everyone's asleep or he's Super hungry). I think he's just decided that's better than checking on his food first and Then going to find a human if necessary, for some reason.
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  740. Amusingly, if you look into the actual factual records (rather than after the fact American government propaganda), the whole american independence thing was entirely about wealthy plutocrats (well, at the time Would-Be plutocrats) in the American colonies trying to dodge taxes. At the time, American colonists paid the lowest taxes anyone in any of the European empires paid, mind you. Which is to say, initially NONE, Britain was paying for 100% of all administration, infrastructure and defence of the colonies. Then there was a one time levy for a percentage of the cost of maintaining the part of the British army that actually defended the colonies being charged, and only the costs accumulated during the actual war... which was started by British-American colonists raiding French-American colonies. This levy was instituteded entirely because the resulting Globe Spanning War between the two empires had drained the British coffers, even though they won. The coloniests (or at least, the wealthy and influentual ones who actually had the money that would be used to pay the levy) refused. Rather than doing the usual thing of the day and sending in the army to execute them for treason and take their stuff to cover the tax bill, (organized refusal to pay taxes being basically rebellion, and as clear as you could Get in terms of indication that you were in full revolt short of actually shooting at garrisons and government officials) Britain instituted the Much more collectible Stamp Tax. It was intended to be punative. It was permanent, and much easier to collect: various goods (most notably Tea) could not pass through an American port without an official stamp indicating the tax had been paid. Sounds bad, right? Nope, American colonists were STILL paying the lowest taxes in the British Empire, and some of, if not the, lowest taxes of any of the European empires (save, perhaps, for groups of people so poor and out of the way that actually collecting tax from them would cost more than it would bring in). This is the point where the various wealthy colonists pitch a fit and start their rebellion. they manage to convince Maybe a third of the population to go along with the idea. Another third are actively loyalist and opposed to this, and the remaining third don't care and just want to be left alone. Pro-rebellion elements start murdering loyalists, burning down their houses, and running them out of towns and the like. (for reference, a significant portion of the English speaking population of Canada are decended from essentially refugees escaping this nonsense). There are riots and such. Note that at no point until now has representation come up, at all, from anyone. Nor has the king been involved, this is all parliament vs colonial would-be plutocrats. ... heck, arguably it's two or three Ministers vs said plutocrats, for the most part (those in charge of the colonies, the treasury, and the army). Someone eventually writes to the king about this, he checks with his ministers who tell him they've got it under controll, so his some total involvement in the entire course of events is basically a letter telling his colonial subjects that rebellion and tax evasion are bad and engaging in such would also be bad, not to mention end poorly for them, though if I remember rightly it also had some positive things to say about them first. It should be noted that the fellow is rather widly regarded as one of Britain's less capable kings (to put it politely, assuming I"ve not muddled it up). Somewhere along the way, various influentual colonists get sent to Britain to speak directly to parliament regarding the whole matter. At the same time, the ones who DIDN'T go get set up for, and then begin engaging in, armed and open rebellion. Negotiations in Britain go exceptionally poorly, given that Parliament's basic position is 'rebellion is forbidden, also we're having financial problems and thus need more income and this tax is one of the less awful ways to sort that out' while the Colonist's position is 'no taxes, ever.' and they refuse to budge on that matter. Representation first comes up (either in a letter or journal, I forget which) when one of the colonial delegates realises they're not really going to make any headway with parliament (not really surprising given that their starting point and the one issue they won't move on is utterly intollerable to any government of the day, and wouldn't get you very far with any of Today's governemnts either!) without their own full time MP as a representative to actually properly engage with the system form the inside. ... Of course, by THAT point the colonies are already actively at war with Britain. A bit later 'no taxation without representation' starts showing up in propaganda and recruitment posters. I guess it sounds better than 'no taxation on those rich enough to afford luxury imports' or similar. If the goal had actually been representation, rather than tax evasion by the rich? All the colonists would have needed to do was say "hey, parliament, we're willing to pay the same taxes as everyone else if we get MPs the same as everyone else" right at the start and Parliament at the time would more than likely have pretty much LEPT at the idea (remember, money problems, and the population and wealth of the colonies at the time was such that a fair number of MPs still wouldn't have been enough to upset the balance of power in parliament too badly). But that was never the goal. Note that at the time that war proper broke out, even taking the stamp tax into account, britain was STILL Heavily subsidising administration, infrastructure, and defence in the American colonies with British taxes. Post independence? American citizens had to pay Massively more tax than they did under the British, and it Never Went Down. ... But the Plutocrats got to run the system how they wanted and build in all the little loopholes that meant they paid pretty much exactly as much tax as they wanted to and have much more power. (I'll admit that, at the time, there wasn't all that much in the way of 'infrastructure' to build and maintain yet, but that's neither here nor there.)
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  741. It helps that most of tbe claims of fraud (and law suits) are verifiably a load of horseshit that'll be thrown out (and at least one already was) the moment they're put in front of a half way honest and half way competent (or better) judge. The claims of more ballots than eligible voters in at least one state were using Last Election's count of eligible voters, for example. Use This Election's count and the problem suddenly vanishes. Strange that.
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  742. honestly, the one indicating 'long' vowels is misleading and confusing to begin with... if only because the thing it's indicating has nothing to do with the actual vowel length and is more to do with which syllables in a word it is permitted in or not... which is already goverened by the stress marks (for reference, 'long' A, I, O, and U are all diphthongs, and 'long' I in particular is actually a pretty short sound most of the time. 'long' E can be actually long, or actually pretty short, depending on where it is being used, but the length is non-contrasting... except there's the whole issue with the ongoing transition from 'syllable initial voiced stops' to 'syllable initial unvoiced stops followed by long vowels' (note that the now unvoiced stops are still Unaspirated, where as the 'proper' unvoiced ones are actually aspirated As Well, so...)
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  743.  @everfaithful9272  yeah... No. They Are more suitable to the conditions in much of the USA than passenger rail would be, though. Well, a dedicated modern transcontinental express high speed passenger train setup (with a setup similar to the Japanese shinkansen) might actually be better still for most instances of that trip if you could convince anyone to spend the money on it, but other than that. Still, that's less a problem with Trains, and more a matter of large portions of the USA being flat out Empty. Passenger rail actually still does pretty well in the north eastern USA,as the distances between the places people actually want to go are suitable for it, and freight rail is Still the most cost and fuel efficient way to get bulk Anything from one place to another overland (ships are generally better still, of course, but have the slight downside of not being able to traverse drunk and :p).
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  744. Given what I've heard on the matter, you may be damning him with faint praise there...
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  745.  @Rockmih  Yeah... That's not just a Europe thing. Where I live, the standard is reasonable force, which in practice is basically non-escalation in most situations (what, precisely, counts as "escalation" can be pretty situational, but the basics are pretty straight forward). And even then, while "defence of self and/or others" is a valid defence, it's an affermitive(sp) defence, where you basically have to go "yes, I did it, here's why it was legal anyway" (though in practice, it's one of those things you only get charged with in the first place if it's very obvious you're in the wrong or the whole situation is a huge mess.) There's no castle doctrine equivalent. You call the cops, and only if the situation escalates to actually being unavoidably dangerous before they get there do you engage in violence yourself. The USA is actually kind of unusual on this front, as such things are generally a Hallmark of states that are unable to actually maintain law and order consistently within their borders and have basically given up.
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  746.  @kaiseredge  I'd take "doesn't do shit" over "actively breaks stuff", personally.
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  747. Either they don't realise it's French, they don't know that French's written final consonants are silent, or the word is no longer considered a foreign import and has been Anglicized, rendering it functionally an English word when used in English. On top of that, of the English speaking peoples of the world, the most likely to get it Right are probably the Canadians (Quebeck exists, after all) and the British (right next door). Most others not only have no idea, they have no reason to have any idea, and so, encountering the word in an English text with nothing to indicate that it is Not an English word, will read it as such. (Notice how it has no characters, nor character combinations, that are awkward or invalid in English?). Complain if they still get it wrong while speaking French :p Or have that fancy academy fix the nonsensical French spellings to actually match what is said. At least English's orthographic nonsense actually has a* logical excuse (and the particularly egregious examples are exceptions, not rules). French is just "yeah... But random silent consonants at the end of everything are cool," at this point. *Ok, several, compounding. The point stands.
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  748. ... Allah is referred to as heaven in this text. They referred to Mahomed* as a budha... Your joke needs a little work there. *(apologies, my spell checker insists this is wrong but refuses to suggest an alternative that isn't clearly nonsense)
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  749.  @CMG78  or are attempting to avoid all the malicious nonsense car manufactureres have taken to including in the vehicles that reduce their utility and convenience. And I don't mean the safety features and environental stuff, I mean the things that prevent you from repairing the car, or can lock you Out of the car with far too much ease when they shouldn't... or charging you full price for a car that they've actively disabled features on but can reenable those features digitally... if you pay a repeating subscription fee... or flat out unsafe digital interfaces that really should be seeing the car fail any and all certification due to how often they require the driver to take their eyes off the road to deal with basic vehicle controls (or similar issues that amount to 'the car is being run by a PC and the car manufacturers don't no jack about making non-terrible PCs') and on and on and on.
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  750. If I recall correctly, she herself recognized that 'the death and life of great american cities' is a flawed work for a number of reasons (mostly personal bias and nostalgia creeping in way too much, if I recall correctly). Of course, she subsequently wrote a number of other books on related matters which do not have those issues, too.
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  751. Have they fixed the problem they used to have where they achieved thinner and lighter by compromising structural integrity?
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  752.  @ezbody  as an added bonus, the logo shows up right on the spot on the tweet that the 'close' button would be... if they had one.
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  753. I have a related shirt. It has a picture of a drill, and says something to the effect of "remain calm, this is only a drill".
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  754.  @mateuszcielas3362 trying to get my head around the wiki article... something about rotational force? It's something to do with levers and fulcrum position... the relevance seems to be how violently one end of the lever moves compared to how much power you put into the other end. Really, it seems like one of those things where you very much need a demonstration of the various possibilities to actually get your head around if you've not specialised in the relevant field (and possibly even if you have).
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  755.  @Dommifax  Honestly, there is very little about the entire structure of the US government that's actually a GOOD idea. Not nothing... but there's a reason no one has ever copied it wholesale... including the USA itself when forcibly setting up a new government in other countries.
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  756. That and the European countries can just flat out not buy the oil transported via the pipes, while they can't directly stop anyone else from buying oil sent by ship.
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  757. ... well, there are laws about harasment for a reason. It is a legitimately problematic thing. Of course, those laws have actually reasonable standards for what is and is not harassment. Or assault, for that matter.
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  758. ... i suggest you find better textbooks.
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  759. Ehh, at the moment it's a moot point, as almost no one in NZ will shake your hand in the first place :p
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  760. Medium density housing, mixed use zoning, and actually functional transit systems would solve this problem. ... ... good luck with that, I guess?
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  761. Indeed. Though that is still an improvement and they did mention other modules you can put in the slots instead. Still, you'd at least think it would be USB C to 2 USB As... Actually get some benefit out of the space it takes up.
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  762. Ayup, and they tend to get dropped when the word is 'naturalised' and no longer considered 'foreign'. Hence why you'll only usually see the accent on the e in cafe when someone is trying to be fancy, pretentious, or Extra clear about it being said that way in the specific context... with it more commonly being written as 'cafe' without an accent... and then said as if it were spelled 'caf' ... because, you know, we needed Another silent e that doesn't actually do the thing we're told silent e in that position does... (any silent e at the end of a word that is immediately preceeded by a v is also there entirely because English words just aren't allowed to end in v for some reason and doesn't affect the preceeding vowel Either).
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  763.  @MarcMartino  nah, you've got two parties in the US: the conservatives and the anarchofascists (don't ask me how they manage that combo, but they do). By which I mean the democrats and republicans, respectively. And yes, I wrote that correctly.
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  764. Eeeh, seemed to add to "what we call gravity is force, it's just not a meaningfully seperate thing from any of the other forces" kind of like how centrifugal force doesn't exist, as such, but you still feel it as a consequence of how centripetal force and momentum interact. There's absolutely a measereable amount of force acting on you in the direction that centrifugal force would, it's just the sum effect of other factors rather than it's own thing. Or... Gravity is force, it's just not A force. Or rather, it doesn't exist, but the effect it describes does. That's my understanding anyway.
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  765. Pretty sure the actual problem is that in it's normal usage "vinyl" is a mass noun, which then causes it to sound decidedly off when treated as a count how in the context of "a vinyl". Certainly, when I was a kid (in the 90s), no one called them that, they were "a record", but either vinyl or record works equally well as X in "a X collection", because collection is a count noun.
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  766. Most of the redit (&co.) guys are investing money they can afford to loose, in much smaller quantities per Individual, in a way that means they can't come out of it having lost any more than the amount they spent to start with (which, having spent it, they only sort of have until then anyway). They Consequently don't actually Care if they're left holding the bag at the end, so long as they take the hedge funds with them. Getting cash at the end is a bonus. (And if they Actually need money, they're getting out while they don't have to sell many shares to get lots of money). Seems relevant.
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  767. It's almost like it's a problem pretty much everyone else noticed over a hundred years ago and avoided or did away with since. Seriously, having your elected polticians apoint your highest judges completely neuters the judciary when it comes to acting as a counter weight/control the excesses of the legislature and/or the executive.
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  768. if by 'and now' you mean probably decades ago at this point. It's been a Long time since the movies were delivered to theaters on actual film rather than on discs or as digital files at this point, and that's entirely seperate from how the movie was created.
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  769. gunsights, even camera and screen based systems, have a surprisingly narrow field of view. All it would take to miss them in that regard is to have the gun pointing a slightly different direction for one reason or another. Of course, that only excuses the Gunner not spotting them. The Driver should have been looking pretty much right at them, to my understanding...
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  770. Which is, in turn, also moving.
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  771. Nah, convincing Kiwis it's not an empire is easy enough. Convincing them it's actually a good idea? Much harder. Well, at least the ones who know their history or have been paying attention to Britain's handling of Brexit and Covid...
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  772. Honestly, Joining the EU (or the entire chain of events to get to that point, it wasn't a single one off decision) was arguably a poor choice for the UK (certainly the way they went about it was Very bad for quite a few members of the Commonwealth)... but Leaving was a substantially worse one.... Even that might have been salvagable (or at least quite a bit less bad) though, if not for the utterly Staggering incompitence of the British political class as a whole when it came to the handling of the whole matter.
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  773.  @rickchyczewski576  Almost anyone can sing. Singing well enough to make money is another story, and well enough to make a carreer out of it is a different matter again (
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  774.  @dragonlord1225  intent and willingness are not the same thing.
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  775. well, the macron would probably mislead you a lot, because English 'long' and 'short' vowels... aren't. 'long' vowels are the ones that sound like the name of the letter, 'short' vowels are the ones that don't... most of the 'long' ones are actually diphthongs, the reaminder are more properly short vowels by any other standards, the 'short' vowels can be reduced to schwa (at least mostly), 'long' vowels usually can't, and this results in interactions with the stress pattern regarding where they can and can't appear. And then there's the Other diphthongs, and the sounds represented by digraphs which may be long or short but are neither 'long' nor 'short', the list goes on. Oh, and just to make it worse, English Does actually have a proper length distinction, but nothing about the writen words normally indicates this, as it's usually a result of silly things going on with the surrounding consonents. But yeah, most of these would be helpful.
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  776.  @startedtech  The solution to boiling water is to just buy an electric jug/kettle to begin with. Though I understand that these are actually rather rare in the USA, so you might need to import it... Mind you, you still don't want to buy the cheapest ones, as they're often...er... well, you get what you pay for. But the mid range one's still aren't actually expensive, by any real measure. Basically an electric heating element optimised (well, somewhat) for boiling water. To my recollection, the difference between heating an amount of water in one of those and heating it in a mettle kettle on a wood-fired stove is... well, my recollection is that they take about the same length of time (plus or minus having to set the fire if you hadn't already), with no risk of accidentally boiling the kettle dry (with all the consequences of that) if things don't go to plan. No idea with gas, never lived anywhere that used it (and wouldn't want to, honestly, all relevant local factors considered (including unplanned rapid disassembly events caused by gas company negligence...))... Of course, such stove related problems may or may not be down to how your electrical grid works and how the stove is intended to make use of it. Around here they're part of the house, essentially, wired into the house's electrical systems fairly directly (not plugged into wall socket or the like) and I believe draw more than the standard wall socket and associated circuit are rated for (240v, pretty much universally in residential environments). For comparison, fridges, washing machines, and even the hot water tank (usually the single biggest source of electrical demand in any given house, just... a bit more spread out than the stove) all plug into standard 240v sockets.
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  777. @Fearghus Keitz  rightist logic is no better, they just pick different issues to be utter morons about.
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  778. well, the longest duration indicator in the modern system of musical notation... after a Lot of evolution from the system it was created for. And then there's the semi-breve, aka 'the longest one most people will ever actually encounter'.
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  779.  @MyMy-tv7fd  It is the difference between a bare stem, where that bareness is meaningless (leaving things unstated or unclear), and a bare stem, where that bareness is meaningful (the lack of modifiers is itself a modifier, essentailly). Zero marking is the latter. Mind you, English can do zero marking as well: cat, The cat, A cat, The Cats, cats, Cat. The first one is a bare stem. The second has a marked definite article, and a zero marked singular number. The third has a marked indeifnite article and a zero marked singular number. The fourth has a marked definite article and a marked plural number The fifth has a zero marked indefinite article and a marked plural number The sixth is a proper noun, having a zero marked definite article and a zero marked singular number. (it also has nothing to do with cats, being a diminutive of Cathrin (or many other variations on that name). Note that the 'cat' in 'the cat' and 'a cat' is not, gramatically speaking, a bare stem, despite having no afixes. English only really uses the bare stem of nouns as a reference form. The important part is that a bare stem is making no distinction between various possible options (it doesn't mark number or definiteness, in the case of 'cat'), while a zero marked term Does make a distinction, and one (or more) of the options is (or are) indicated by saying or writing something, while the other is indicated by the fact that you did not. It's basically the difference between starting counting from 0 vs starting counting from 1. Humans tend to naturally do the second, but because of how many things in computing work, almost all computer related things start at 0 instead. so rather than having a number list like: 1: rabbit 2: duck 3: badger Computer code will usually read like this: 0: rabbit 1: duck 2: badger Zero marking is a similar concept.
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  780. Well, a moderately decorative big hole, at least.
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  781.  @nobodynoone2500  or anywhere else. Most forums' 'delete' option does NOT delete the content, but instead merely hides it form everyone but the admins. This is usally Not malicious, mind you, but a side effect of a number of other factors regarding both how forums work (threads genearlly aren't actually a Thing in terms of how the data is stored, instead the individual posts are linked together, so if you Actually delete one out of the middle it all breaks) and the need to be able to comply when legally compelled to produce evidence and similar things.
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  782.  @mydevices768  Most of the time all that actually happens is the stupid thing's complete lack of security gets exploited to hijack it to form part of a bot-net.
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  783. Indeed. Apple, after all, makes a tonne of money out of Not fixing theirs (and going out of their way to stop anyone else from doing so either). Just as an example.
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  784.  @SerbAtheist  to be fair, bad as they were, I'm fairly sure the latter two don't actually qualify as genocide, as such. The first absolutely does though. Several times over, I believe.
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  785. Actually, it's more like older versions of English case marked everything, but over time that was dropped, except on pronouns. We Have actually lost some of the case marking on the second person pronouns, but that happened because (as has happened in a lot of (western?) European languages, the plural and singular got tangled up with politeness/formality, and the more intimate Singular second person pronoun was eventually dropped entirely. "Thou" made All the same distinctions that "I" does, while plural "you" made, and makes, less. Anyway, it does serve a purpose: it allows for more types of agreement, allowing for more redundancy, meaning less information is lost when the signal to noise ratio increases due to, say, strong winds, crowds, etc. It also allows more Precision, which is useful in, say, legal contexts (if they had much use for standard pronouns in the first place, that is.) Basically, there is a difference, for all that it's purely grammatical, not semantic, and it is useful. I'll grant it's not Necessary though.
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  786. In a lot of US cities it was basically oil/car companies pulling shenanigans with legislation at the federal/state/city level to make anything other than buses and cars a horrendously expensive and impractical option early on. A number of those used to have Great public transportation systems before that happened. Many other places just don't have the money for it. And public transportation proposals are almost always Buses (not surprising, they use the existing roads and are fairly cheap.) The problem is, the buses use the existing roads (so still get stuck in the gridlock until Enough people use them, but people won't use them until that's not a thing because...), are typically far less comfortable, often feel crowded, take longer to get from A to B due to constant stopping to pick people up and drop them off, AND often involve lengthy walks at either end (never mind Changing buses, which (as buses often fail to keep their schedules) can result in Further delays, which can become Very large if the one you're on is late enough that the one you need to change to has already Left on a rout that doesn't see enough use to run a bus every 5-10 minutes.) Trams are Better, as they have generally higher comfort, the tracks can be built such that they aren't actually on the road in the higher traffic areas, either by elevating them, running down the median, or turning off and going their own way to cut corners or the like, and they usually look nicer too. The other side of that is that they are more expensive to build (a lot) and maintain (tracks). Though on the third hand, it's quite possible to set them up so they can haul goods around as well, reducing Truck numbers, as well as cars. (bonus points if you use the same gauge and couplings as the main railways so that moving freight from a tram to a train is a matter of shunting rather than offloading and loading. Might even work with standardized shipping containers if the tram in question is just an engine that pulls passenger carriages or freight wagons rather than a bus-on-rails (which is how most were designed in the past.) ... But still not perfect. Subways are, of course, better still, though have a bit of a tendency to be horribly over crowded if used enough to justify their existence. A state of affairs which can be mitigated Greatly by not putting all your residential areas miles away from your jobs/shops/etc. Thing is, as long as you have usable roads going from where people are to where they want to go, the car will continue to have a lot to recommend it. To get rid of the roads, you need a system which can handle passengers (including those with mental and physical disabilities, which can get a bit interesting), freight, and emergency services, and to some extent the military (at least in places where there's any chance of being attacked in a way the military can deal with.) Other than that, there are a bunch of variations on the tram or subway which... basically continue to have the same issues as those. (standard railways used within a city in any useful way are just 'subways' which aren't actually underground, so far as passenger services go.), Ferries, which are basically Great in some situations and awful in others (basically, if you can build a rail bridge, it's Probably better than a Ferry. A car bridge is always worse... except for the part that the car takes care of everything on both Sides of the ferry anyway, and you can always have a Ferry which can carry the cars across anyway) are only relevant if you have a decent sized body of water which needs crossing regularly, and calling Aircraft viable public transportation within a city is just silly. If you want good public transportation, you have to combine good city layout with intelligently arranged rail and tram systems (as well as foot and bicycle paths, ideally), emergency access roads (not available for use by the citizenry, emergency services vehicles only) ... All put in place when the city is first laid out, because otherwise you have to buy and then bulldoze things to build it, adding More expenses, or people get in the habit of using their cars rather than the public transport and then never switch over due to perceived convenience. (it also really helps if the cost of the public transport infrastructure is bundled into the local taxes rather than it being "pay to use". If it's in the taxes, people feel somewhat obligated to Use it to 'get their money's worth'. If it's "pay to use" people tend to go "but... cost to comfort/convenience/speed most times but not always, Car is better..." (even when it's not.)) Also other factors I've not even thought of, of course. but those are all fairly big ones.
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  787. The only "correct" way of saying this is "Jackie and I went to the bar". The first person pronoun comes last in a list, and if it is in the subject slot, is "I". Changing the order of the individuals who make up the subject doesn't stop them being the subject, as that is defined solely by how they interact with the verb.
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  788. Matt Davis actually, if i remember rightly, English only has two tenses. Past and not-past. Everything else is aspect and mood. Of course, it's all blended together in a hopeless mess and can, of course, be used to express things about the future anyway.
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  789. To be fair, the main problem with building up is... well... Earthquakes. No reason not to build four or five stories up, I suppose, but actual skyscrapers? ... Let's not and say we didn't. Not only is it a problem for the people In said skyscraper... there's also all the Other buildings it falls on if it comes down! Now, to be fair, there's a fair bit which can be done to mitigate that, but it's borderline, if not actually, impossible (or at least seriously impractical) to build something capable of withstanding a sufficiently large earthquake, and said sufficiently large earthquake could well happen. More people in a smaller space is also a problem in the event of a need for evacuation (earthquake, tsunami, whatever else one might think of.) Especially if they don't have their own transport. Though, to be fair, depending on exactly what you're evacuating For, Suburban sprawl's not really better for that one, you probably need more, smaller, cities, with proper spacing, with better arterial transport between them if you want to improve that issue. But a tonne of skyscrapers in the path of a tsunami? It's just more people you're not going to be able to get out in time. There's a reason New Zealand as a whole doesn't build Up much. (or down, for that matter.)
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  790. Lack of standardization, for one. Further, larger cannons (quite obviously) weigh more, which becomes a problem for the ship's seaworthiness. Worse, larger cannon need larger shot, and both that and more range need more powder, which means a more powerful explosion, which, in turn, needs a stronger barrel or the entire cannon explodes. The metallurgy of the day wasn't up to it. This is even more problematic as there were no recoil absorption systems. (well, sometimes there was some rope...) when the gun fired, the entire thing went violently backwards towards the middle of the ship. A bigger gun may or may not go further in that case, depending, but it'll do far more damage to anything it hits, even worse if it comes loose, and take substantially longer to put back into position... if the men can even move it. Accuracy ran afoul of precision of manufacture issues. neither the barrels nor the balls were perfectly standardized, so there were always mismatches leading to tumbling. unevenness of the gunpowder (pretty much inevitable) caused more of the same. both could be compensated for to Some degree, but not eliminated. add to that the sea itself causing the ship to roll (and, bonus points, the larger, and thus the more stable as a gun platform, the ship was, the less seaworthy it was in bad weather, generally.) in a not Entirely predictable manner, and again, lack of precision manufacturing techniques meant that the necessary precise instruments needed to compensate didn't exist, and, well, accuracy beyond very short range was doomed. Further, the cannons were not rifled, and were muzzle loading. Pretty much all the problems come down to lack of standardized, precision manufacturing and a lack of needed advances in metallurgy. You'll notice that once both had been developed and figured out properly you got such fun things as cruisers and battleships... and even ww2 ships with radar missed quite a bit (to be fair, by that point the ships involved are moving a Lot faster and are engaging at much longer ranges, in worse weather, and/or at night.)
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  791. Partly: "me too" is something of an interjection, much like "yes" or "no" in isolation, so they partly ignore everything else and just do their own thing. I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that though. "I too" doesn't work mostly because it leaves the listener expecting a verb, which causes confusion. "Me too" doesn't. Though one might say "And I as well" without causing problems beyond people looking at you strangely for using what is basically an archaic construction these days.
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  792. Rudy_Eila english "came from german" so long ago as to be meaningless. They're both Germanic and came from the same source, but one didn't come from the other, and they've both changed a lot due to other things in between. "I too" is valid in English as "I too would like pizza" (may require punctuation, and we'd typically say "I'd like one too"), but as an interjection "i too" isn't even a thing.
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  793. Laurence Fraser * "I too have eaten pizza" or "I ate some too"
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  794. D. Brandtair sadly (he says, a year later) most schools in most of the English speaking world, do not have classes covering English (the language) except perhaps as remedial classes for those struggling with basic reading, writing, or education in general. You're expected to pick most of it up in passing from reading and primary school level creative writing. "English" classes are almost exclusively Literature classes, and often stretch That term to the breaking point. (My own highschool English classes would probably have been more accurately entitled 'media studies', given the content.) This, to my understanding, was as a result of the Previous way of doing things being found faulty and abandoned... Which is fair enough, as the previous way was often of questionable sanity, being based on the absurd idea that the only and correct way of writing English was according to the gramatical rules... Of Latin! Not universally, of course, and the details and timescale varied, but the teaching of grammar was basically abandoned entirely in many places.. Only to be brought back, in some form and places, when the universities started complaining about having to offer remedial classes on the subject because too many would-be students were failing entrance exams due to inability to construct basic sentences correctly! Its a mess, basically.
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  795. That's "myself" as a reflexive (i believe that was the word) pronoun. It's actually explained in the video. The object would Normally be "me", but because the subject is already "I", which is the same entity, the object becomes "myself". If it were anyone other than "i" enjoying it, the subject would be "me" (and the sentence rather strange without context.) ... but yeah, that one's covered in the video.
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  796. Ahh... now you're getting into Spelling reform. A matter a great many intelligent and well educated people have delved into and broadly reached the following conclusion: There are a few optimisations to be had. They're almost universally NOT the ones the average layperson would propose, and the downsides of the process of implementing them (even if you could actually manage it to begin with) Vastly outweigh any theoretically benefits of such changes. Most people tend to conclude that bringing back Thorn (a single character representing both TH sounds... which English spelling already treats as if it were a single letter so far as spelling rules were concerned anyway) would probably be a good idea. There's a couple more things that would Probably be helpful. Doing away with 'not as redundant as people think' characters from the current set is... a long way down the list. (also, at one point I, 1, l, and | were the same character on the keyboard (I'm not actually sure | was a thing, come to think of it), as were 0 and o (mostly a typewriter thing)... this was great for the manufacturers, but AWFUL for anyone reading the resulting document. Computer keyboards fixed this... then some idiot font makers decided that Reintroducing the Ambuiguity was a Great idea, and then those fonts somehow became the Default in many uses... including here. The cross bars on a capital i? They're Not Seraphs! they're actually part of the character! The seraphs, when present, are the little flicks at the Ends of the crossbars! An upper case i should look more like an upper case t (T) than a lower case l (l). (for reference, there's this whole thing with 1,7, and 4 as well, though that's more of a problem in hand writing than in typed form).
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  797. Usually, once you allow for the inevitable "some people are just arseholes/idiots" factor, the Rules aren't the problem. It's a combination of them not being taught and/or following them being impractical or unsafe. (There's a particular intersection in ... Denmark somewhere? A city with Lots of cyclists, and where people on the roads are generally law abiding. Literally No One follows the rules when using that intersection, because they're unintuitive, unsafe, and impractical due to the way it's designed. What they do instead isn't much safer, and even then only because it's closer to what people Expect to happen, but it is a lot more practical.) Also, I'm pretty sure New York is unsalvageable. Too many badly designed roads and intersections combined with terrible drivers who don't even Try to obey the rules even before you add cyclists into the mix. Also, just watching Louise going to and from work, the layout of the bike lanes is kind of crazy, when they even exist. Sometimes understandably so, but still.
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  798. you... do realise that district heating can be fueld by things Other than burning trash, right? In some places it's run off waste heat from industrial processes, for example. heck, my understanding is that a lot of places seperate out (most) organic waste for processing into fertaliser and such before the trash even leaves people's residences.
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  799. At the low end, you get what you pay for (if you get lucky, more than you pay for!). In the middle, you (usually) get what you pay for (unless someone's decided to be 'clever' recently). At the high end? If it didn't come with your own small country you got ripped off. This is pretty consistent across everything that the 'tech companies' get their hands on these days.
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  800.  @astridkjellberg  If you limit yourself to pop music, it mostly does. That whole '90% of everything put out by the big record lables in English was written by the same two guys' issue.
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  801. The fastest way to see any good idea that would actually benefit the participants go down in flames is to get the USA involved.
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  802.  @bite-sizedshorts9635  That is very bad...but is it true of other drinks? because coke is Notorious for being just generally a terrible chemical that reacts badly with pretty much everything anyway. Including the humans ingesting it, mind you. (did you know that coke contains a high enough concentration of sugar that your body reacts to it as a poison and would make you vomit to purge it before it could get further than your stomach...were it not for the fact that coke also contains a chemical Explicitly To Suppress That Reflex?)
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  803. Well, some of them. Sounded like there were other modules that could go in the slots instead/as well if you wanted. And having them fit inside the case as a semi-perminant structure, rather than sticking out of the external plug, is nice.
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  804.  @BlapwardKrunkle  The democrats used to blame 'rural conservatives' for everything wrong with the USA in the same way... it's why rural conservatives overwhelmingly vote for Republicans pretty much every time despite the Republicans actively making this worse for rural conservatives pretty much every time they get in.
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  805.  @DrWhosmate  You do run into a fair number of pretty major Brexit related problems predating the pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine... but those things having happened, yeah, there are plenty of problems that have nothing to do with Brexit too.
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  806. I did find it odd that he focused on that bit so much given the rest of the story included some glossed over instances of actual malice and/or incompitence by superiors (and in one case, what sounded like flat out murder). I mean, it did seem like there were some rather significant flaws, or at least inefficiencies, in the system, but there was nothing inherently humiliating or demeaning about the jobs themselves. (well, it sounded like that was All the guy was doing for three years, which is a bit of a weird use of someone you've supposedly trained in helecopter maintenance, even ignoring everything else, but that's a seperate issue).
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  807. In some businesses. Others found that the locals were actually Terrible workers (they paid perfectly decent wages in both cases.) It varies.
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  808.  @YounesLayachi  There is a reason that the oft misquoted line is not actually that Money is the root of all evil, but rather that the Love of money is the root of all evil.
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  809.  @YounesLayachi  Sometimes you run into issues like with the standard textbook model of the atom. It has very little in common with the reality, but without that model as a starting point the concepts that you need to understand in order to understand the reality of the atom are pretty much incomprehensible. (and you will sometimes find that there are multiple layers of this).
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  810. Capital letters are an odd quirk of the Latin alphabet (and I can't remember if the Romans even used them)... Wingdings aren't the Latin alphabet, and have no established rule regarding the use, or lack there of, of capital letters.
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  811. Well, it Does discourage people who Don't need it... and the poor... claiming it's only one or the other is incorrect either way.
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  812. Problem is... Nowhere in the USA includes taxes before handing you the final bill. It's kind of nuts. Where I live? Price tags include all the taxes. Unless the item is something that's prone to having it's price change a lot due to options, haggling, market fluctuations, etc. Which are usually big ticket items and won't include the tax but instead Specifically State that they don't include the tax (as they are legally required to do). Or its' airline tickets, because every so often those companies will try to rip off the customers by way of getting up to shenanigans regarding what is and is not included in the base ticket price (... there is no sensible reason why the fee the airline pays to have their plane use a given airport should be a Seperate Fee on the passenger's ticket, as just one example.) The USA doesn't do ths.
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  813.  @jholden0  Pretty sure it was US territory though. Got annexed a while before that. The USA still has territories that are, indeed, part of the United States of America (the locals are citizens and everything), but are neither states nor part of any of the existing states, for that matter.
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  814. And while they might increase speed, safety, and traffic flow if they work out, I'd be astonished if self driving cars made the trip That much more pleasant. Consider the current experience of being a passenger in a car. All self driving vehicles do on That front is mean the driver's experience is equal to that of the passengers... Which, really, is awful for anything other than talking while staring out the window, or maybe sleeping, unless it's crawling along on congested urban roads, and even then only if the roads are well maintained and it's a spacious (and this inefficient) car.
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  815. Interestingly, at the supermarkets here in m y part of New Zealand, the self checkouts are a mix of ones which will take cash and ones which won't (clearly labled with signs you can see from a way away from them). The ones which take cash are set up to give change, for obvious reasons. Thing is, just like the manned tills, they're Also set up to be able to give cash as change for Debit (and probably credit) Card Purchases (it's just straight up listed as change on the print out in both cases). Just got to select the relevant options in the payment step. Which is a very good thing, given that the banks went from 'no fees at our ATM for our customers, low fees for other banks' customers' to 'we sold most of our ATMs to third party operators who charge 'other bank' level fees to all users... oh, and the fee for our customers actually going up to a bank teller and getting their cash that way is even higher but Isn't Charged Imediately, instead coming weeks later'... meanwhile the supermarkets have just built the EFTPOS transaction fee into the price of their goods to start with and don't have to make any more or less Cash transactions (and are using the business bankign system rather than personal banking anyway)... So if you're buying groceries Anyway, might as well get your cash out at the same time. Actually, ANY business that uses EFTPOS and has enough cash coming in over the course of the day compared to how much change they usually have to hand out can do this, though I think the supermarkets are the only ones that will just casually let an automated process give you a couple of hundred NZD cash because you decided your wallet was a bit empty. (properly speaking, if you're asking the cashier at the supermarket for this, you ask for 'cash out', and that's what the self checkout buttons refer to it as too.)
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  816.  @markallenbialik  That happens when Americans have spent decades telling everyone how great and free they are and everyone else should be like them... meanwhile everyone else has either been sorting out their shit or being given more and more reason to resent the USA... and we keep gettting more and more evidence that living in most of the USA sucks Arse for most people who aren't rich and your political system Doesn't Work.
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  817. For your last point: one piece at a time!
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  818. Well, there's energy efficiency, noise reduction, and a few other reasons to upgrade, but straight up "More Power!"... not really. Well, aside from dealing with the ever more poorly made websites and other such resource hogs.
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  819. Indeed. Though English is Probably the more chaotic about it.
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  820. The version of runes used for English was a better match for English than the Latin alphabet is... but to my understanding they had no cursive equivalent, and weren't really very compatible with creating one, which was a pretty big deal when everything had to be written out by hand. And, of course, were an entirely different writing system from the one the people doing most of the writing were used to.
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  821. Ehh, it comes closer to being phonetic than it does to qualifying for any of the Other types... But it's more like it has the fossilised remains of a phonetic writing system.
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  822. Given land prices in NYC, it probably at least partially a case of doing what they can actually afford :p
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  823. nico heidenreich if the ship doesn't fit through the panama and/or suez canals, you have to take much longer routs and/or travel through areas with much worse conditions, wiping out any gains and then some, which limits length. The ship must actually fit in the various ports, limiting depth, width, and possibly length. It must be stabal and not tip over, limiting height (based on depth and length), while the longer it is the more trouble it has with turning, also significant. As an added bonus, the world is actually currently significantly overstocked on cargo ship capacity. Significantly more exists than there is any use for. Which discourages new building somewhat.
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  824.  @anonymes2884  There seems to have been a fairly strong indication that they would do bad things to existing encryption methods...oh... five, ten years ago? So one could see where such a misunderstanding could come from if that wasn't his field of expertise... Of course, my understanding is that a lot of effort was since put into plugging that hole before such devices were available to people who could use them for such purposes, and that quantum computers capable of generating even stronger encryption that would Not be trivialised in such a fashion are easier to attain than quantum computers able to trivialise current encryption.
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  825. "/" is defined as 'whichever division related symbol I need here, because the character set and medium don't actually facilitate the multiple ways of indicating division clearly in different contexts'. Wondefully helpful, that. In practice, it's usually the same as the in line ÷, with parentheses being used to indicate otherwise when need be. where ÷ is, indeed, 'divide the term immediately to the left by the term immediately to the right, after resolving parentheses and exponents if they are present'
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  826.  @JoshuaKA02  it's pretty bloody ambiguous when you use a percentage symbol to indicate anything other than a percentage!
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  827. Mmmm. And how well did that go?
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  828. It comes from a wall or the like being 'plumb', or matching the plumb line (that is, the string that is held straight by the lead weight of the plumb bob), and thus being correctly vertical (you can probably imagine the potential issues with awall Not being truely vertical when it is supposed to be.)
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  829. Use the combustion engine they absolutely still have? Its only the very reason we ever started putting the things in ships in the first place.
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  830.  @ericmaclaurin8525  My understanding is that previous attempts at carbon markets resulted in various scams that made some people very rich off doing nothing much and did very little to actually change carbon patterns. Also, while some countries can manage smart regulation most of the time, and most can manage smart regulation some of the time... smart tax policy is a pipe dream, because basically the defining trait of most big 'centre right' (yeah, that's questionable labling, but moving on) parties is 'we'll gut the many and various useful things that the taxes pay for (but never the corrupt nonsense that's not working, oh no) so you pay less taxes! pay no attention to the fact that the actual reduction is so low that 90% or more of the population won't notice any real benefit and that privately owned sources of the same product/service, when hey even exist, cost several times as much per person (not per user, mind you)!'. It's pretty rare that they have anything else going for them as entities (their individual politicians can be just as capable of looking after their constituants local needs and interests as anyone else, but their higher level policies? yeah, tax cuts and 'screw the people who need services (such as clean water) and aren't rich!' is pretty much the whole of it, at least most places.) ... and that's when your 'leftist' parties even understand what a budget is and why you shouldn't just jack up taxes, print money, or force everyone to work for no compensation (this is less consistent, there are plenty of 'leftist' political parties that understand this just fine... but there are also a surprisingly large number that Don't!)
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  831. It would be the ideal solution... Too bad about the price.
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  832. Depends on your dialect at this point. (Also, the word "oft," rarely used these days but closely related to "often," would like a word.) Unlike many other things that people insist are acceptable, this matter has no impact on one's intelligibility.
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  833.  @VulpesHilarianus  Nah, a fair number of those have that functionality because it's actually useful to their job. Problem is, no one involved at any point in the process is being paid to ensure that the things are actually in any way secure. And keeping them secure would require the ability to update them... which requires either more parts of the board (raising costs) or that their software/firmware be accessible via their internet connection. Well, ok, that's where they Started Out... but why have a chip custom made for your use case when you can pay a Tiny fraction of the price to buy a more powerful pre-existing one?
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  834.  @seraphina985  I'm not seeing why you'd want the brake lights on when the car is just stopped. The tail lights, at night, sure, but why the brake lights? They tell you that the car is decerating. If it's stationary (that is, not in motion) it's not decelerating. So what are the brake lights actually telling other drivers in those circumstances? I'm also not sure why you'd care what the driver was Intending to do, save perhaps as a back up if the sensors intended to engage the lights based on what the car is Actually doing should happen to fail (and only then, because if the two are in conflict then what the car is Actualy doing is the important information).
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  835.  @TheWickedWizardOfOz1  well, polticians, nobles, successful businessmen, insufficiently ideologically pure fellow revolutionaries, and on and on and on. If I recall correctly the era is refered to as something along the lines of 'the terror'. Napoleon's main qualification for taking over was putting an end to that.
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  836. I invite you to look into Tom Scott's video on why E-voting (and, for that matter, electronic voting machines) is a terrible idea at the best of times. As for technology and campagning, it runs into the echo-chamber problem: only the people who already support you see your message. In person, giving speeches, participating in debates, attending local meetings and answering questions and such, That gets more neutral people to actually consider you. (I know one such meeting was the only reason I had even heard of a candidate i ended up voting for in that election prior to getting to the polling booth, for example.) Mind you,New Zealand is perfectly Capable of safely holding an election under COVID-19 alert level 2 conditions if it needs to. With a bit of a run-up it's probably quite possible to carry out an election under level 3 as well (entirely by mail in ballot). Campaigning, on the other hand, is a bit awkward under level 2 and highly restricted (just as a side effect of the regular restrictions) under level 3. (For reference, level 4 is full lockdown and level 1 is almost entirely business as usual if you're not trying to cross the border.)
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  837. Plenty of time basking in the shininess though :)
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  838.  @John_Lee_  not so much. Asset value isn't money you had to use, it's more a measure of the willingness of the banks to give you whatever arbritrary amount you want at any time. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, how much money you actually have becomes utterly meaningless, as you basically never spend your own money on anything except serving the interest on loans. The banks make more money on you paying interest than repaying the loans, and if you ever stop being able to pay the interest without paying the loan, they take your stuff, so so long as your stuff is still worth more than the amount you owe them and you keep paying the interest, they'll keep lending you money. If your stuff isn't worth enough any more, but you can still pay the interest? well, they might require that you repay some loans before taking more, maybe. So... yeah, so long as he can still pay interest and his stuff is still worth enough to the banks if they have have to collect in collateral rather than cash? he's still Functionally got exactly the same amount of money he had before: an infinity symbol rather than a number.
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  839.  @zetaforever4953  Historically, other matters will shape which groups are complaining about what, and to what extent, and various factions and interests might engage in poltical manouvers or even attempt a coup, but food shortages are usually the final straw that tips things over into full on general revolt. Basically you can bribe or terrify the population into accepting just about anything... right up until something else provides a greater motivation for them to revolt Anyway... looming starvation is one of the more powerful of the possible examples of 'something else' in this context.
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  840. The issue is, once they were invented, there was the very real problem of 'ok, no how do we avoid our enemies using these on US?'. Quite relevant once said enemies already had the things. This was basically the most practical solution to that problem that anyone managed to come up with. You may also notice that it worked. So far, at least.
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  841. ... one of these days I'm going to learn not to read the comments on Louis's videos. One day. (Seriously, how on earth do such sensible videos with such fundamentally reasonable points attract such abject insanity?)
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  842.  @danielstickney2400  I imagine you were joking, but for clarity, that's backwards. Ring mains came about due to needing to do mass rebuilding while also suffering a significatn shortage of copper wire. The safety of the standard plug came about due to the need to compensate for the inherent horribleness of ring mains. Ring mains have since been done away with (save, perhaps, in sufficiently old buildings that no one's got around to fixing up), the safe plugs have not.
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  843.  @kc9scott  thinner wire, maybe, but also you don't have each outlet/light (or set there of) having to run a wire all the way to the switch/fuse/breaker box and back, instead the wires just run to the next (generally closest) one in the ring. That's where the saving in copper wire came from, it required substantially less than half as much. It was a post war measure to compensate for a shortage of copper wiring.
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  844. A roof to keep the snow off and some sort of wind-break makes sense. That would be understandable... But most of those are just nuts.
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  845.  @cfs11111  err... It kind of is by definition, given that "first world" was literally "The USA and its allies, maybe also its puppets", second (never got much traction) was the USSR and its allies and puppets (and also the few other communist nations of the day) and the third world was everyone else. That happened to correspond to wealth and development levels at the time, mind you, but the terms were entirely about cold war bloc alignment. Hence why "third world" has mostly dropped out of use in favour of "developing" or "developing world", "second world" has gone the way of the dodo, and "first world" has mostly been replaced by "developed". In most formal contexts, at least. The USA is still first world and developed... It just has this small problem in that much of its economic and political elites seem to have set their sights on "failed state" status as the ideal scenario...
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  846. I suspect this is part of the reason for the move to implement 'stable coins'. which are basically just crypto if you replaced the volatile and wasteful 'mining' element with the system actual banks use (when they want to generate money but the central reserve isn't printing any more right now): Issue loans against existing assets (where the asset used as collateral is actually worth a fair bit more than the amount loaned). Which is to say, every coin represents a chunk of an actual, physical asset. This, amusingly, makes it actually Less of a fiat currency than most, even if it's not operating on any one particular standard (like gold, or silver, or whatever), because each coin is a specific percentage of a specific loan against a specific item. Or at least, that's my understanding.
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  847. Interestingly, when you watch urban planning or transit related channels and the pedway and similar come up, it generally gets praised as a great idea that significantly improves things... usually with a few notes about how a bit of centralized planning would smooth out it's rough edges and how HUGE a difference something as simple as a coherent, unified system of signage makes to its usability, while Malls are generally considered bad thing with negative effects all over the place far outweighing their benefits... Except perhaps in so far as a particularly pedestrian friendly station complex often tends to end up with most of the benefits of a mall without most of the downsides just as a side effect of doing everything else right while trying to mitigate cost issues.
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  848.  Raymond Babcock  pretty sure they're not. They have some of the same obligations as lawyers when it comes to handling clients' money. This is contrary to that.
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  849.  Roger Loquitur  ehh, arguably it was founded on plutocratic propaganda in the service of tax evasion, more than anything. So, you know, it's even more in line with tradition than you thought!
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  850.  @samuelpinder1215  To my understanding, the exact specifics vary. Keep in mind, you can and will get sued (or at least copyright struck on youtube) for showing pictures of the Eifle Tower That You Took Yourself and show no other identifiable humans, at least without getting permission first, if the relevant Parisian/French authorities happen to notice. Plenty of places offer a great deal of freedom in most areas and then go full oppressive stupid in certain others.
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  851. Significant portions of New York run their heating (and air conditioning!) Off the waste steam produced by the powerplants. The vents releasing steam are from the pipes that carry it to the buildings,, usually while maintenance is being done on that section, if I remember rightly. By the time it reaches street level its cool and dispersed enough not to be a hazard, to my recollection, but there's still the big hole in the ground, so, orange tube things.
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  852. Turns out, they Can be protected... sort of, somewhat. Just not with copyright or trademark, but with Patents. Except D&D is old enough that if such a patent was filed it's long since expired by now. Not that any of that matters, because the way the US system is set up, all such matters would have to be resolved in Court... where Hasbro's deep pockets mean that anyone who gets to that point rather than just rolling over gets wrecked by the costs of the process even if they 'win'.
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  853. Nope. Plenty of places with voluntary voting and no such problems. It's propaganda and burnout, mostly. Also first past the post. Many parts of the USA have Elections for any or all of: judges, high ranking police officers, city councils, district attorney (prosecutor of criminal cases, I believe), the heads of various local and state agencies, state legislature, governor (president of the state basically), one or both houses of the federal legislature, and the president of the USA. I'm almost certainly forgetting some. Many of which are horribly corrupt (like, Actually bribery rather than just round about lobbying, corrupt.), Though which ones and how much so vary. Combine that with Republican propaganda on one side (99% lies) and sensationalism with occasionnal bouts of pro-corporation propaganda on the other (just honest enough to make spotting the lies harder but usually doesn't even talk about the issue to start with) basically making up the bulk of political reporting on any significant scale, the idea that any attempt to limit corporations is communism ("better dead than red" after all. Let's quietly ignore the Republican party's colour scheme), oh, and the rampant gerrymandering and voter suppression (in most cases, an employer is Not obligated to give you time off yo vote, and elections are held on normal business days. Skip work to vote anyway? In most cases your employer is perfectly entitled to fire you. And that's Before taking the Race based nonsense into account. Meanwhile, First Past The Post ensures that third parties don't happen until and unless an existing party splits, usually (but not always) after the Other major party collapses. Of course, the problem of voted splitting promptly sees each electorate reduced to two parties again in short order, and if that's not enough to reduce it back to two nationally, a three way split tends to cause enough problems that one of them will collapse or merge with another so as to actually get stuff done, eventually. Wholesale reform or outright revolution are the only way That mess is getting fixed.
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  854. Solving English's consonant problems is pretty easy, The hardest part is getting people to stop moaning about the 'obvious problems' that aren't actually actually an issue at all and move on to the ones that Actually need fixing.
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  855.  @manuel0578  There's been something of a trend in recent times back towards the physical buttons as various manufacturers have realised that touchscreen/touch button controls aren't fit for purpose for a lot of the functions of a car. Mind you, for cooking, my experience is that for Some things touch buttons are a huge step up... and for others they just make everything more difficult. And the difference is quite simple: when the button does one thing, maybe two, same as it would if it was a physical button, it's great. When instead there's a bunch of menus and layers so that you can use maybe four buttons to do the job of what should really have been three dials? kind of awful.
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  856. You do run into the issue that the standard configuraiton is tailight = red, brake light = double intensity red. (usually this is done by having two lights in the module, with the break light control powering both of them while the tail light control only powers one) Brakelights often, but not always, include extra red lights (near the top of the vehicle) as well, which the tail lights generally don't, but that's very much an optional extra. Also that dimmer systems have (at least in the past) typically worn out faster. Oh, and flashing amber indicator lights have specific meanings (whether it be only on one side or the other (turning), both (hazard) or spinning on the roof (also hazard, but of a rather different sort)), which interacts poorly with the rather dumb idea that is using the car's red brake lights as turn signals even without flashing Red lights actually having a distinct meaning. All quite fixable, of course (and most places don't even have that last problem because, well, they don't do the dumb 'red turn signal' thing.)
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  857.  @richatlarge462  con-TRIB-u-ting con-tri-BUT-ing, or something like that, I think. My brain processes it roughly that way, at least.
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  858. That would be Entirely relevant... If the subject of the video was any of those jobs, or Indian people in general, rather than, you know, Explicitly About Gas Stations!
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  859. Err... The history of officer ranks comes pretty directly from the leaders of mercenary companies, and the imediate subordinates of nobles, generally. Put simply, a Captain? The leader of a mercenary unit. A Leuitenant? A captain's immediate subordinate who would act on his behalf if he wasn't present. Heard a few different origines for 'major'. 'general' comes from 'Captain General', when a military leader hired enough mercenary units that he couldn't manage them directly, he'd desigante one of them as 'Captain General'. Most of the other 'general' ranks have similar origins: An ordinary job-based rank, but we need someone to do it for the whole army. The Field Marshal was the retainer who's job it was to organize all the various units to actually Show Up and join the army, and get them organized in camp, originally. Basically, the origin of most of the ranks in their modern usage amounted to 'we have more companies than is practical to manage with the current structure, split them into two or three groups and create a new rank for the guy in charge of that.' NCO ranks are more mixed, sure, some of them might have been camp followers ( 'camp followers' included blacksmiths, engineers, the various soldiers wives and children, cooks, washerwomen, animal handlers, and the list goes on (now, admittedly, some of these were not mutually exclusive with being a prostitute)), but only in so far as it was hardly rare for the son of a mercenary soldier to join up with the mercenary unit when it came time to get a job of his own (same as any other job, really), but the origins of the Rank amounted to, either 'this important job comes with the authority to order some of the soldiers around to get it done' or 'this company has become too large an unwieldy for it to be pracitical for the Captain and his Lts. to maintain discipline and control under battlefield conditions, best create some intermeidate positions'. How far one could get promoted in such an army without being part of the nobility varied a lot from era to era, of course. You're somewhat right that the title for a lot of the high officer ranks actually come from the titles of fairly low positions (or, more accurately, largely non-combat positions involved in logistics and support), reapplied to 'the person who does this for the entire army' (hence the 'general' part. Though that normally had it's origins in the retainers of the King and those of his higher nobles, not camp followers. The Navy, on the other hand, started with the basic unit, also comanded by a Captain, being not the company but the Ship. Where as armies got bigger mostly by putting more companies together, Navies got bigger (in ways that required the creation of additonal ranks, at least) mostly by having Larger ships. Which meant more crew. Which meant more ranks Under the captain rather than more ranks Above the captain (as was the case in the army). Unlike the Army, where most of the officers were nobles or their close retainers in most armies, in the Navy, because traditionally it consisted mostly of impressed Merchant ships, noble officers below whoever had been made the admiral incharge at the time were often quite rare in most times and places (often, the captians weren't even the Owners of the ships, but professionals employed by said owner, and consequently the 'master' and 'commander' of a ship might not be the same person). As navies became more professional and ships became larger, more ranks between the captain and the common seaman were needed to keep things organized and disciplined. So you first have Leutenants, same as in the army (acting in the name of the captain, basically), then you had Commanders, then leutenant commanders in between. And midshipmen below the leutenants. And then you had the various NCO equivalents, almost all of whom had specialist roles, rather than existing to managed dicsipline and command and control issues.
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  860. A chain boat as described in the video, or one of the many varients of what is more typically now called a cable ferry?
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  861. Used to see them on TV... When i still watched TV.
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  862. I always find it hilarious that the party in the US that keeps insisting everything they don't like is communism is the one that uses Red as its colour.
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  863. Stop? Probably not. Reduce/improve by allowing modeling to get further before you reach the "must test against the real world to ensure no part of the input or process was screwed up" point? Almost certainly. Testing will still be needed, but more undesirable results can be found, filtered, and prevented before that stage in more situations. Or at least, that's the idea.
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  864. For th sounds, while there is a "correct" answer as to whether a given instance should be voiced or unvoiced (If you're unfamiliar with the term, z is the voiced form of s. You vibrate your vocal chords while making the sound for voiced sounds), which one you use doesn't actually matter, except for one specific pair of words: thigh and thy. The first (part of the leg) is unvoiced, the second (an old and rarely used possesive pronoun that's basically the second person version of 'my') is voiced, and there's no other difference between the two words. All other instances of th, the word will sound a bit odd if you use the wrong one, but it won't cause any confusion or misunderstanding, because there are no other pairs where that's the only difference between the two. Which, admittedly, doesn't answer your question, but should at least help you out. As for s vs z in plurals, in most cases this is fairly simple. It's a matter of voicing. If the sound before the plural is unvoiced, so is the plural. If the sound before is voiced, so is the plural. Of course, because English is just really bad at being simple and consistent at the same time, there are exceptions. There are probably rules for how the exceptions work (there usually are), but if so, I don't recall them. Exception example: path ends in an unvoiced th. You'd expect that paths would thus be an unvoiced s. But it's not. Instead, both the s and the th are voiced! Mostly because, for whatever reason, it's easier to say that way. (Unvoiced paths is almost as tricky to say as 'sixths', for somewhat obvious reasons)
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  865. English sentice structure started out as fairly standard for a Germanic language... then it lost half the bits that made that work (gender, verb agreement, probably some other stuff I'm forgetting (we get to blame the vikings for some, but not all, of that)) and over time the current system developed out of finding ways to make the remaining pieces fit together again properly. May or may not have picked up a couple of little bits of celtic somewhere along the way too (and, if they were celtic in origin, whether that was due to interacting with the pre-anglosaxon inhabitants of England or the Welsh next door at a later point is a whole other issue).
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  866. Well, save that one should generally seek not to so aggrivate the feelings of another that it drives them to taking actions detrimental to one's goals or well being, anyway.
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  867.  @d3fau1thmph  nah, Apple abuses the people they've Already influenced.
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  868.  @thepoliticalgunnut8018  Nah, it just sticks warning lables pointing you at sound medical advice when the video starts talking about COVID because there are so many dumbarses spreading 'cures' or 'treatments' that actually legitimately, provably, WILL fuck you up... like, you don't even need to be a doctor or anything to realise this, basic understanding of what bleach is and does and Not Being A Complete Moron will do. But there's still people peddling that nonsense. YouTube's a lot less biased than people tend to think. Oh, it has a bias. It has a very strong bias. That bias is towards 'whatever will keep you on Youtube longer to make the advertising numbers go up'. To that end it's recomendation software optimises towards figuring out what your biases and preconceptions are, and reenforcing and radicalising them (well, showing you videos that will). Because That's what gets you to stick around, making comments, watching more videos, and so on... Facebook, Twitter, and such are worse, as they'll do that, but also intentionally throw things from Opposing groups in from time to time, Just to make you Angry... because that also drives 'engagement'... which keeps you around... viewing advertisments (or at least, they can claim you did.) Keep in mind, Youtube has no idea what your biases and preconceptions are, all it knows is that videos with X,Y,Z traits keep you around longer while videos with A,B, and C traits result in you leaving faster. And this is done by bots, who have no idea what those traits even Are, only that they're present. So it recommends you videos with more X, Y, Z, and less A, B, C. Just so happens that for most people, that leads to political radicalisation in various directions. (for the more well adjusted, it leads to 'nothing but cooking videos' or 'all the Vtubers' or things of that nature.) You can train it to not do this, to some extent, mind you. It involves purging your history and then Deliberately watching enough random, completely different things that it gets confused. Your recommended lists will be complete Junk, mind you, but it won't be driving you ever further towards poltical extremes, either.
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  869. Red Light cameras are banned in a bunch of places too, largely because of how ridiculously they were abused.
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  870. Oddly, to my recollection, around here a Pack of AAAs and a Pack of AAs will cost basically the same... but the AAA pack will contain more batteries. On the other hand, you can often get 20 packs of AAs for even cheaper, not so much AAAs. Probably because the AAAs tend to go in things with much lower power draw, and thus last longer, while things that actually chew through batteries tend to use AAs. That said, used to be the two most common uses for Cs or Ds were tourches and Radios... these days the tourches use LEDs and run on AA or AAAs (I think I have a weird one that uses three AAAs aranged in a triangle with the holder in the middle in a space about equivalent to where the old C or D batteries would go), while radios either use AAs (quite a few of them) or larger rechargables (I have one that can take both, with the later being a standard cellphone batteries from back when those were actually replaceable, at least going by form factor, which came with it... except... this is just straight up a radio (well, it can play audio files off a USB flash drive if you don't mind setting the thing on fire, or a flash memory card, but other than that it's just a radio... a really budget radio...) and the battery, fully charged, won't even keep it powered for a single day. ... so in the normal course of events I just keep it straight off it's usb charging cable with no batteries in it and if it ever needs to run off battery power it's getting AAs shoved in there).
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  871. Well, they Do, but the entire Point of the internet from its creation was redundancy and damage resistance, a function that's still there, and taken collectively, the internet as a whole (and its user base) treats censorship as damage and responds accordingly with the tools available. Lots of stuff is lost fairly regularly simply because the infrastructure changes over time and not everything is important enough to get rehosted etc, at least not to the people who happen to have access to it at the time.
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  872.  @htoodoh5770  indeed. Most complaints I hear about Jews these days are almost universally misdirected complaints about wealthy businessmen. Strangely enough, the less wealthy jews tend not to exhibit the traits complained about, whilst many wealthy businessmen of non-jewish decent do possess such traits, and worse. Well, at least when it comes to the complaints by modern English speakers that aren't just flat out fabricated nonsense. Edit: of course, you get specific sub groups of Jews doing dumbarse things, same as any other group. (For obvious US examples: See that one funeral in New York while the city was locked down... But see also Republican Everything regarding COVID-19, so... *Shrug*)
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  873. It's kind of amazing how many English words come from portugese... they get mangled in the translation, and in most cases were words that the portugese already borrowed and mangled themselves for things they found in far off places when exploring or traiding, but there's a lot of them. Of course, I'm pretty sure you're talking about the common latin origin of the English and Protuguese words, given the video, but still, interesting bit of trivia.
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  874. Better question: should you even have those highways?
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  875. Bribe or threaten. Your elected representatives are Supposed to fear losing their jobs if the fuck you over. The party system in general greatly reduces that threat. It's worse still in the USA: not only is there the whole two party tribalism excessively partisan nonsense, but the electorates are all gerrymandered to hell and gone... And even if that Wasn't the case the whole thing's too damn big. No one representative answers to a small enough group with any common interest other than party tribalism. And that's Before all the corruption problems (where, again, shear Scale makes it hard to deal with)... Probably needs more layers to manage the scale, and the layers to be hierarchical rather than pointlessly parallel. Power can still flow bottom to top ... And it becomes easier to prevent egregious nonsense from becoming the norm.
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  876.  @billzusner4873  'always' eating the liver is fine... provided you only hunt things that have livers that are suitable for consumption. There are a number of differnt animals where eating the liver will straight up kill you, despite other parts of the animal being very good food.
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  877.  @MollyHJohns  You have to be a bit careful with animal organs... the same organ in some animals is very good eating and in others is toxic enough to kill you. Also there's a long history of media reacting to a similar history of organs being cooked... Badly... for various reasons, and consequently putting people off them entirely. Still, the right organs cooked well are absolutely something that should be more common in many people's diets than they are.
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  878.  @Lee.S321  mind you, it's still 9 as many years as you like later if you didn't go into the specialised fields that decided it wasn't.
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  879.  @BK-uy9nj  well, if by "PC" you mean macbooks and iPhones, I guess. He's also fairly involved with certain areas of politics, too (right to repair involves farming, as well as phone repair, and other things). And, of course, runs a business. He's fairly significant on youtube, probably more for what he has to say about New York (particularly real estate), running a business, and just stuff he's learned over the course of his life as for the board repair stuff he created the channel for. He's been on TV before too.
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  880. My understanding is that Ukraine is getting weapons mostly from NATO countries and their allies who, noticeably, use standardized ammo specifications wherever possible. The only awkward bit is that Ukraine itself is, to my understanding, using an odd mix of old soviet era stuff, modern Nato stuff, and (for certain weapon types) their own more recent weapons, the standards for which I am unfamiliar with. So that's an issue, but less of one than you'd think.
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  881. ​ @chroma._.5986  In pretty much every meaningful respect it's an empire with a lot of red paint. Mind you, the USA is very much an empire as well, claiming otherwise is a matter of ideology, not fact. It's not hard to make the case that India counts too. Mind you, they're not Monarchies, that's a seperate matter.
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  882. except, of course, the moment you run start applying it to different dialects and accents and suddenly a bunch of the charactgers either have two readings or overlap again.
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  883.  @wickian9571  it's not even leftist dogma, it's Radical leftist (well 'progressive') dogma. And a significant portion of the loud part of the radical progressive left is made up of people who would be Right At Home in far right hate groups... were they not either part of the very minorities those groups hate, or alergic to the idea that their particular variety of malice and hatred might be seen as socially unacceptable. Mind you, the same is true, and has been for decades, with the American right calling something 'communist' or, in recent times, 'woke'. It's entirely about radicalised tribalism and legitimising their own bad behaviour, rather than anything meaningful or productive.
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  884. Which, so far as I ever understood, is what gravitational waves were supposed to be Anyway...?
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  885. Kidney issues seem to be up there with cancer and car accidents in terms of frequency of serious health issues for cats.
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  886.  @AlonzaStewart  I present to you: the allied submarine tender. Well, if those are still a thing, at least.
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  887. You'd have to track the entire production chain to be sure, and there are a couple of points where options are very limited... I'd settle for "avoided wherever there was an option that would actually deal with us"... Of course, in an ideal world that's The Same Thing, but, you know... Reality.
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  888. Watch them blame the problem on the democrats in republican circles, and vice versa.
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  889. heck, in recent years we've even managed to get video game movies that are actually... good movies. Not Great, but actually something to be excited about seeing if you liked the game/series it's based on (and to get some enjoyment out of if you know nothing about that) rather than the previous state of things where such movies were universally just... BAD. In the past, video game movies got terrible ratings and did terrible numbers at the box office and Absolutely deserved it.
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  890. Honestly, the only thing that should be calling anyone other than the owner/occupant (as applicable) first for Anything is the fire alarm. Buglar alarms used to make sense because there wasn't really any way TO call the owner if they weren't already home, but that's not the case any more.
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  891.  @tweetyericsson  it was a plan to build a bunch of housing (and thus bring down house prices) that didn't work out. Doesn't Seem to have been any sort of con, or scam, or corruption problem, or even particularly mismanaged, as such things go, at least on the government's part (certain parts of the media would have been All over that if so, they weren't) but it was certainly costing more and taking longer than planned, to the point where it couldn't possibly meet the stated goals. Edit:might still be ongoing, for all i know, they revised it enough times to try to make it work...
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  892. Arround here (not the USA) we solved that problem by getting rid of the bags... well, no, it was before that, actually. Your items are stacked quickly in a trolley which you take over to a seperate bagging area and pack yourself... or just take straight out to your car and don't bother with bags at all, if you're feeling like dealing with loose items for some reason. They used to chuck the plastic bags in the trolley as well. When we got rid of the bags that was just replaced with bringing your own reusable ones.
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  893. ... you realise that gerrymandering is endemic to the system and engaged in fully by both parties because your political system is Corrupt as Shit right? There's a REASON no other funtional democracy that I'm aware of let's any political party, be they currently in power or NOT, have ANYTHING to do with drawing up electoral boundaries. Or if they do, it's a commity of members from ALL such parties who must unanimously agree to the results that they derive in accordance with much stricter rules. Also, for reference, those clames of electoral fraud? Actual investigation carried out produced this result in the presidential election trump recently lost: Statistically insiginificant (as in, inevitable counting error would affect the outcome more (and neither would be enough to change the outcome, or even force an additional recount to make sure of that), and most of the invalid votes were marked in support of Trump. Your system is fundamentally broken. It has Always been fundamentally broken, to the expicit interest of the Plutocratic class at the expense of everyone else. You fought a war to get out from under a functioning democracy specificially so that corrupt class could instate the corrupt system you now have. The difference between the Democrats and the republicans is very limited, and very simple: The democracts want to have a functioning nationstate to rule after they're done. The Republicans don't. In all other matters they both do whatever the wealthy lobbiest throw money at them to do, or what is profitable for themselves individually (and thus the plutocratric class to which they belong), making only occasional minor consessions to others to keep things ticking along. All else is meaningless hot air.
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  894. It's apparently pretty important actually, due to where the various roads and such do and don't go. Of course, Flattening It (as is the usual Russian way of dealing with defended cities) rather reduces it's value.
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  895.  @Marcustheseer  science has not, and cannot, be 'proven to be wrong', because Science is a Method and Process for figuring out what is true and what is not. A Scientist (or team there of) can be proven wrong. Happens all the time when there aren't perverse (financial) inscentives masking it. Science being wrong is about as meaningful as saying that a Game Show is wrong because one of the contants was rightly declared to have answered a question incorrectly. Note 'science' and 'the science' don't mean quite the same thing, as 'the science' generally means 'the results of our research' or, more commonly, 'the highly distorted report three layers of information transmition later that claims to be about the results of our research but is actually whatever is convenient to the person writing it'. I mean, I'll happily agree that various claims made by the scientific community have ... issues... but again, that's not the same thing as 'science is wrong'.
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  896. Fundamentally, if you want English spelling to be more intelligible to both foreign and native readers alike, the marker indicating the Primary Stress is the single most important one you could add. The others have varying merit (the one marking 'long' vs 'short' just needs throwing out entirely, as it indicates not actual vowel length, but instead which of several readings that have nothing to do with length is being indicated... except that with the stress pattern actually Marked the existing spelling already does this just fine in the vast majority of instances... IF you indicate the stress pattern (becuase the spelling rules only bother disambiguating between readings that the word's stress pattern permits, pay no attention to the complete lack of indication in the orthography as to what stress pattern is being used in a given word!)
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  897. This was indeed a significant issue. Too bad that you had the option of labour, who were busy making this mistake but not actively trying to ruin everything, the Greens, who most of the time are better read as 'virtue signalling radical progressives' who routinely have no idea how budgets work, te parti maori, which is just straight up a racial supermacist party these days, ACT, who might be the most tolerable liberatrian party you'll find on the planet and have a few good ideas here and there, but are still none the less absolutely a libertarian party with all the flaws and biases that brings (aka: If you're not one of the rich elite you can go die in a ditch and they will file that as a win), NZ first who have gone from compitent, moderately populist, conservative party which is good to have a round (if preferably not in government) to 'basically the american republican party if they were a bit less psychotic', and National, the party that is consistent only in demanding tax cuts, breaking our infrastructure (look into why our health care system is so broken at the moment and you'll find a string of Incompitent decision making by national regarding funding for it) and insisting that anything labour suggests is the worst hting ever because labour suggested it. Which is to say you have the option of Labour (bad) or Anyone Else currently in parliament (an unsalvagable disaster)... and the parties who don't even get in (of which there is basically one that isn't somehow even worse than the existing options). Keep in mind, National (and/or ACT and/or NZ First) Scrapped the Tobacco Ban (that thing we were massively praised for due to finding a way to do it without screwing over anyone other than the tabacco companies) because they needed the money from selling addictive poison to their citizens (causing More Costs to healthcare later, mind you) to cover the Gaping Great Idiotic Hole in thier budget caused by the Unnecessary Income Tax Cuts they insisted on (along with trying to jack up the price on any publicly funded survice they can manage, which, because of how economies of scale work, leave the vast majority of people Worse Off). But, of course, the media and the population did as they always do, and we got what we always get. And there's very good odds that we'll reelected the idiots again at least once unless they set new records when it comes to offending the general public... and given that we kept reelecting John Key that might take some doing!
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  898. no, they're just the only ones still making something that works on windows and Isn't built on chromium.
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  899. The Democrats are your somewhat typical mildly corrupt centre right party, that's also gathered up everything Left of that because the USA is set up as a two party system, and the other party is the Republicans, who have, as a party, spent the last couple of decades actively undermining the ability of the US federal government to even Function at every opportunity (and are At least as corrupt). The democrats have, collectively, mostly, acted relatively sensibly in the face of covid. Some republicans have too. Most, including Trump, have gone full denialist lunatic. The US basically has a conservative party of self interested governance, which includes trying to fix anything that gets Too broken so the system can keep ticking a long, and a reactionary party of greedy, self interested economic liberal corporate raiders, who've some how contrived to convince the bulk of rural America (who have Legitimate and Understandable issues with the democrats and their supporters, mind you) that despite Actively Making Things Worse For Them, somehow the Republican party is On Their Side, and therefore they should be on the republican party's side. And, because of the two party system, this works. Under a better system the Republicans at this point would be the radical liberal-reactionary right who mostly get ignored because they're idiots, there'd be a legitimate rural-conservative party that Actually represented those interests, the Democrats would be a part of urban conservatives and the most moderate and centerist of progressives, and the US would act have a meaningful Political left. (Hopefully a actual centre left, maybe some sort of green party, and the Actual communists and radical lunatics could, like the republicans,be shoved in a corner and ignored except when one of the more sensible parties notices that one of their loony ideas actually has promise if you work on it a bit to make it reasonable rather than just doubling down on the crazy.) Meanwhile, the only Good thing Trump's done is pull out of the TPP... Which was shit. Noticeably, it Wasn't shit before the USA somehow got involved in the negotiations and turned a Free Trade deal into a "protectionism for US corporations and fuck your economies and consumer protection laws" deal (before Trump's time), but so long as the USA was involved that was never going to be fixed... So yay! Trumps idiocy actually achieved something good that one time, by accident... Maybe.
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  900. arguably, when they already don't know how to do it is the best time to change the system, then you teach them the new system without them first having to unlearn the old one. Of course, the actual problem is a combination of bad parenting (sometimes enforced by bad labour laws/practice, or similar indirect causes, sometimes just because the parent is, for want of a better term, unsuitable for the role), and various bad policy that prevents teachers from compensating for that (or, in some cases, Requires that they lower their standards, due to the metric being 'kids passing' or 'parents not complaining about their kids not passing' rather than 'kids actually learning', or otherwise forces poor outcomes for similar reasons. Like the particular batch of idiots trying to claim that the teaching of mathematics to black kids was somehow racist (I give good odds that most people heard about that idea from various propaganda against far more reasonable reform that didn't acutally include it... but I'd also give good odds that the origin of that particular stupid was encountered in the wild rather than fabricated form whole cloth, and either way you can absolutely encounter people in the wild who actually agree with it Now!)
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  901. Actually reducing consumption wouldn't do a damn thing to harm anyone. Randomly cutting off the supply without doing the work to actually reduce consumption needs First, would, sure, but that's not the same thing at all.
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  902.  @Olivernight09  Ehh, based on my experience watching unedited blogs, there are others who are as good or better (depending on your taste, I suppose), but it's still kind of a rare skill. That said, I'd argue that the longer your content, the less benefit the extra length provides, because there are corispondingly more things you're compeating with that the viewer could (or even must!) do instead. Is your stream (which already has this issue) longer than 3 (Maaaaybe 4, tops) hours? Then your VOD has the same problem and functionally exists entirely for clippers and anyone else who seems to have watched the whole thing Probably put it on late at night and fell asleep not far into it.
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  903. Discman equivalents were (barring a possible few exceptions I never heard of or encountered) terrible at the thing they were advertised to do: replace the walkman. CD players just really don't like the amount of bouncing that happens when you're walking around, nevermind jogging or running, and skipped Constantly, rather ruining the playback experience. MP3 players had no such issue. Portable CD players were great at taking up a heck of a lot less shelf space than a full stereo system though, and substantially less of a pain in the butt to move from place to place when you wanted to.
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  904. New Zealand locked down heavily. Total infections so far? Under 2000 ( less than 1500 last I looked). Total population roughly 5 million. Over 1000 recovered. Total deaths? 20. Infection rate is below 0.5 now. The results of 5 weeks of total lockdown, at least two more with lesser restrictions to make sure nothing got missed. An important part is the ramp up from "one case" to "lockdown" was less than a week (and at least Some preparations were already being made before that). We locked down not just hard, but Early to prevent the thing really taking hold in the first place. Which worked. Very few places in the USA are even Trying to lock down properly (they can't, your system's too fucked to not implode if they tried), and way too many of your citizens aren't even trying to follow the necessary rules, and in many cases are actively trying to sabotage the protective measures.
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  905. I suspect that often includes the individuals responsible for said values... Or at least for regulating the various nonsense that can affect them.
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  906.  @Ledabot  ... Dark ages are explicitly regional and indicate only that the records for that place in that time period have been lost, or were never made, which the chart represents quite well. Further, if you actually pay attention, the non-european cultures also experience major shifts not far to either side of the European ones. Given the need to put dividers in Somewhere, and that the European shifts are usually closest to the average points each time, the location of the dividers would be weirder anywhere else. As for the names of each age, they've been established for centuries at this point. You could follow the same rather dishonest logic as that responsible for the whole CE/BCE shift (which if you break it down is primarily a product of ignorance and bigotry rather than any sort of enlightenment or being of any practical benefit) but it really wouldn't achieve anything other than annoying people trying to find more information because no other source would use the new system created just for this chart. I mean, the most accurate change that didn't just make the whole thing objectively less useful for no gain would be to drop a big "dark ages" box or five over most of the Americas and Pacific sections and otherwise leave it as is, at least in English.
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  907. Oh, no, they're* Very pro-capitalist. It's everyone else who's screwed. (Note: investors and the like are capitalists, small business owners generally are not.) *Well, ok, it varies, they're generally pro Elite though, and capitalists are generally an elite class.
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  908. As someone who Does watch a lot of livestreams (on youtube)? Not having a job helps. As does most of them being in the 2-4 hour range (so, basically a movie, if at the longer end of the scale) rather than 10+ (this is 'radio on as background noise your brain is tuning out beyond "that exists"' territory).
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  909. Probably need at least Some, I would think. Maybe less TV ads than in the past, but still some.
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  910.  @victorzvyagintsev1325  Ehh, from what I've seen, Wagner being better than a lot of regular Russian units wouldn't be much of a surprise, due to regular russian units often having their supplies of everything but bullets sold out from under them by their superiors. Of course, I'd be equally surprised if Wagner was actually better (at least in most roles) than any properly supplied, trained, and functional Russian military unit that still exists.
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  911. For an amusing counterpoint (? That might not be the word I want) in a number of not socialist/communist at all countries, the state Does own all the land, officially, technically, etc. The "owner" instead owns most or all of the possible usage rights (which can be broken up in many and various ways.) Its a concept that goes back to at least the feudal era in north-west-ish Europe (and possibly surrounding areas). Amusingly, the US's eminent domain laws are generally worse than the equivalent in those places (in that they generally at least need better reasons to kick you out and have to jump through more hoops if they want to rip you off in the process.)
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  912. On the other hand, Actually Meeting the Baseline is a rather large step up from most manufacturers these days, so it's still kind of a big deal even so.
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  913. As it spreads to more people it has more chances to Mutate. This Can make it less deadly... Or much more so. Being more infectious but less deadly is the winning strategy for viruses, but they don't always go that way.
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  914. I dunno, I've seen and heard a lot of things about awful behaviour from NYC officials. It certainly seems to have been one of the most Visible examples, though.
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  915. It's about volatility: unpredictable change with poorly understood causes. Which is usually a sign of shenaniganry, so protective measures kick in. How much the stock is worth and how often it changes hands is a lesser concern than whether it's following the usual pattern of things or not. Robinhood basically halted buying of anything it couldn't afford the collateral for. Expensive stock with low collateral trading in the usual volumes? Sure. Cheep stock with high collateral at unusually high volumes? Not so much.
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  916. I still participate in at least 4 active forums, myself. Reddit is literally just a forum made to current (god-awful) web design standards, which turn it into a massive resource hog for no actual benefit.
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  917. ​ @robertpendzick9250  Nonstandard configurations are entirely warrented in some cases (see the Steamdeck's weird battery that is Decidedly nonstandard... because the alternatives are making the thing massively bigger (it's already arguably slightly too big), gutting it's batterly life, or having the whole thing burst into flame), though whenever that is Not the case standard models should absolutely be used (You'd think the usual penny pinching practices would make this the norm already). Rechargable vs non-rechargable is a Big Deal. Frankly they should always be rechargable and it kind of pisses me off when I stop to think about it that rechargable AA and AAA batteries seem to have largely vanished (or at least been displaced from your typical battery display in random non-specialist shops) here while the non-rechargable ones keep on trucking. Mostly due to waste disposal issues, but also saving the customer money... of course the people who Make batteries would really rather you have to constantly buy more, so it's understandable why they went that way, even if it has a strong negative effect on my opinion of them. On replaceability, though, you're absolutely right. Making the battery non-replaceable (note that I'm discounting 'it's nonstandard for good reason and a reasonable number of spares were produced but it's many years later and they've all been used up now' here, as if one is really desperate in that scenario one Could assemble a viable alternative power supply, it just wouldn't be as good) is fundamentally inexcusable, and most of the time it's a scam to force you to buy a new one sooner than you otherwise would (batteries being a wear part)... of course, Sometimes it's just penny pinching to save on the cost of designing, buying/making parts for, and assembling a more reasonable battery housing (why bother when you can just glue it to the case?) and Exceptionally rarely there might be a valid reason for it (though most of these are also at least partially a price issue, though usually not just a matter of penny pinching). But usually it's the scam option.
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  918. There is also the situation where one might accept that there were a few extreme situations where it was necessary, and while not doing so outside those sitautions, and doing ones best to avoid allowing those situations to arrise, such events could happen none the less. You then get the idea that 'if anyone must be whipped, it is best that it one offender with all others seeing the consequences of taking actions that go so far as to make whipping necessary, so that they do not take such actions, and thus the need for them to be whipped does not arise'. I mean, the thinking is flawed and based on some assumptions we wouldn't take to be correct these days, but you can see how the logic might shake out.
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  919. Not terribly practical, but it would absolutely serve the tractor companies right if they did.
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  920. the process of how it came out lead to most people with a clue who were paying attention concluding 'this probably isn't a scam... but it's also probably wrong... but there's a Slim chance it might be an actual thing'. As events transpired and more pictures and video came out that shifted to 'these people are actually delusional'... because 'partial levitation' was litterally 'behaves exactly like a piece of iron of the same size in a magnetic field'. Which is to say, nothing like a superconductor. Still pretty sure it's not a scam, because there was no way for the 'scammers' to actually gain, well, Anything out of pretending to have something they didn't, given the way everything happened. Honestly, the entire process was more someone who got booted from the team tried to steal credit for what they Thought they had while the rest of the team was still trying to nail down if they actually Did have what they thought they did (and, importantly, the ability to replicate it reliably), and the ex-team member doing a very bad job of it in a way that made everyone else on the team look bad, then a mad scramble to salvage That situation even as the origional dubious paper had set off a cascade of internet hype.
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  921.  @hpdpco6634  Honestly, a lot of people don't even really understand that swapping browsers is even an option that they Have.
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  922. Patent law, mostly.
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  923. Nothing wrong with mail in unless your postal service is compromised. (Which, to be fair, Is something the Republicans have been putting a lot of effort into achieving in the last few years.)
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  924. English Did use it. Then the typewritter happend and it was replaced with - between the letters because the diaeresis was the only diacritic that English actually used for English words and it didn't come up That often (likewise this is the origin of I/l confusion, typewriters used the same key for the number 1, the lower case L, and the upper case i (also 0 and o shared a key). Modern typefaces maintaining this (or, actually, Bringing It Back), however, have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the creators being sadistic morons) ... then I-have-no-idea-what happend and that dropped out of use as well.
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  925.  @isaacbruner65  half the reason for the terrible orthography is the unsuitability of the script to the langauge, mind you. I should emphasise that that "half" cuts both ways, of course (see basically every other germanic language, just to start with... though they do add extra characters to the script in question, so...)
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  926. To be fair, moving it out from the wall Does introduce other practical problems, it's not just a matter of appearance. Simply put, the Fan's base is too narrow for it to be stable. Also the room it's In is very narrow. Most of the problems flow from those two facts. Though, really, that just means The fan needs a suitable base plate attaching to it. (And maybe moving an inch or so back towards the wall so it's behind the line of the edge of the table or whatever that was, assuming that's not enough for it to call again).
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  927. Import tariffs work to facilitate the profitability of domestic industry. They do little or nothing to affect the seller unless they're so high that they're effectively a ban that rich people get to ignore, causing unrest. When the goal is to inflict damage upon the selling party, for reasons the general public agree with, a flat out ban is no more damaging to the economy or individual than tariffs would be, while actually being Effective in its intended purpose and causing Less unrest.
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  928. USB C has two significant downsides: It doesn't have the colour coding present in A and B connecters, and it's substantially more complicated for designers/manufacturers to use correctly. I'd argue that, for all that people bang on about reversibility, that's actually a decidedly trivial part of the benefits of the USB C connecter. The type C connector is not actually a particularly significant improvement over the type A in the roles the type A is intended for but it's a Massive improvement over all the various connectors intended for situations where you're not supposed to use a type A and/or there isn't space for one. For reference, before type C, Every USB cable (extension cables aside) was supposed to have a type A on one end and one of the many and various other USB connecters (or wired in directly) on the other end. This was, of course, sometimes ignored (smartphones using micro on the "wrong" end, usually, but also occasionally external hard drives using type A on both ends, etc.), but still.
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  929. Turns out, Robin Hood actually had a major liquidity problem (not enough cash to cover the collateral they were legally required to put up for the buy orders they were facilitating) but admitting That was Terrible for their business prospects, so they lied about it... Which, in the context of what was going on, made it Look Like they were colluding to manipulate the market when they were actually just complying with regulations designed to protect the investors (including the reddit level guys) from bad actors at Robin Hood's level in the system... And lying about why they needed to. The regulations aren't particularly common knowledge, but the fact that they were lying about Something was very obvious. They basically didn't have the money necessary to support the Rate of trading that was happening. Other newer, smaller, brokers had the same or similar problems, but some were more honest about it, while older, more established brokers with deeper pockets to cover collateral requirements with, could handle the volume of purchase orders and thus had no problems and no need to limit trading.
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  930. Physical controls in cars are Still considered a good thing... by everyone except car manufacturers and certain flavours of techbros/idiots.
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  931. 'course, doesn't help that the American political right has gone utterly insane at the same time. Usually, if the far left or the far right is gaining too much traction, you put the moderates on the other side in power for a couple of terms to reign them in. Doesn't really work when your choices are "moderate right that needs to pander to the far left just to get sufficient support to do anything at all" and "radical right who have no interest in actually having a functional nationstate at the end if they're not in charge of it and benefiting at everyone else's expense"... Makes it very easy for the crazy part of the left to hide behind the entirely legitimate threat of the far right fucking everything up, only far, far quicker. (The loud and crazy part of the far left hates everything and everyone, but wants to be seen as the good guys (if only because that automatically makes their opponents the bad guys and let them get away with more awful shit). The far right simply doesn't give a crap if you starve to death so long as they're observably better off than you. Doesn't help that the supporters of the far right usually don't give a crap if they have to live in a cardboard box and live off bread and water so long as the groups they lable as "the other" are starving and don't even get a box. (The supporters of the far left tend to be of the opinion that boxes aren't good enough for Anyone if better is possible,but if they have to live in a box, then damnit, no one else gets to live in a better box! Noticeably, if you're not part of the "in" group of those in power, the latter is better most of the time. Doesn't change the fact that they're both complete shit.)
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  932. ... How on earth do you not Already have such laws? I know we do here. Can't have television screens or the like in the driver's field of view. Made somewhat awkard by vehicles that have reversing cameras (with screen) rather than mirrors, and the modern tendency to use basically android tablets to control things instead of physical buttons. (A pracitce that needs to die in a fire, they're pretty much universally implemented Badly such that you have to take your eyes off the road to control fairly basic functions of the car.)
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  933. They definitely do legitimately contribute to some legitimately sensible and helpful stuff in some places... and are apparently complete and utter nutters in others. such fun.
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  934.  @Lilybun  Such rediculous requirements often come from a desire to get around laws or policies that affect hiring/firing... absurd requirements are put out so that they can claim that they can't find candidates within the required pool, or produce rigged stats for propaganda and lobbying campaigns (when those are just flat out lies), and then if they hire anyone at all it's somebody's mate who was Probably 'good enough' for what they Actually needed.
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  935.  @softmechanics3130  ... you're setting the bar absurdly low, and then clearing it by only the slimiest of margins ... but you're not wrong.
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  936. You're lucky if they survive first contact with your own forces, really...
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  937. ... the only common denominator between 'woke' things in practice is 'far right radicals are losing their mind over something, declare everyone who might possibly disagree with them to be woke, regardless of if they're flipping out over something that is actually problematic radical progressive nonsense that deserves some push back, or a completely delusional figment of their immagination (and both absolutely happen, though the latter seems more common)'. This is entirely independent of the fact that Vanguard Group, Blackrock and... I guess state street? (never heard of that one before that I recall) seem to be involved in a lot of large businesses which are engaged in very poor behaviour. Though the actual Problems with that behaviour have little or nothing to do with the progressive left at all, nevermind the malcious radical part of it, save as a layer of smoke and camoflauge to discourage criticism while they act in ways that primarily benefit the upper ranks of the shareholder class, if they benefit anyone at all. ... For reference, you might well be familiar with the names of some of that class. A lot of them seem to be at the forfront of American Republican and adjacent movements...
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  938. Sounds more like he proves that it's as real as centrifugal force. Which is to say, it absolutely exists, it's just not a thing in its own right so much as the experienced result of the interactions of several other things.
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  939. Err... The first Europeans in Japan were Protugese. The Dutch were, rather, the ones who did a good enough job of not pissing off the local leadership that they were allowed to sort-of stay (in the sense that their trade ships could dock in, and they could stay in their own limited section of, one, maybe two, cities) when Japan closed itself off from everyone else.
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  940. Ehh, where I live both are kept and which is 'prefered' is situational. That said, so far as I can tell most people appreciate their presence. Importantly though, they do not actually replace the typical checkout, which people absolutely still use quite happily. They're an 'in addition to' rather than an 'instead of', with the goal seeming to be to speed up customer throughput where possible rather than cut costs. Hasn't seemed to have meaningfully changed anything so far as shoplifting is concerned (anywhere adding them already had antishoplifting measures in place that were effective enough and worked just as well with self checkouts as manned ones).
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  941.  @VortexHaze  I'm reasonabley certain that Android (aka Google) only makes the Play store and Maybe chrome unremovable. The rest of that crap is on the manufacturer and/or carrier. Android is a Linux variant, and the manufacturers customize it on installation. I own a ZTE phone in a large part because of how little came pre-instapled and unremovable on it: play store, basic phone and OS functions, little or nothing else. Certainly no third party social media etc.
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  942. I don't know. Might want to look into the definition of a cartel,too. Mind you, Monopolies aren't Inherently bad. Sometimes they're unavoidable or even beneficial. But they Are very open to abuse. The usual, and effective, solution to this is proper regulation. Sadly, in the USA a combination of coruption and decades of ideological propaganda render this rather less effective than it should be.
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  943. Turns out it's actually because of an old injury.
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  944. Of course, you need hydrofoils that don't snap under the weight of the ship and its cargo. For that matter, the Hull, being up in the air rather than supported along its entire length by the ocean, needs huge improvements to ifs structural integrity.
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  945.  @Last_Resort991  Well, they Might... but that would be 'in available cash, for privately funding the sort of project that is normally carried out by governments or megacorporations.' because there are situations where doing such would make sense. More significant is when you look at these people's actual income and realise how utterly impossible it is to spend that money anywhere close to as fast as they're being handed it. Anything that big is very much a one-off that takes Years to actually use the funds in question, after all.
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  946. Which would work much better were the bourgeoisie ever actually unified on anything save by incidental cominality of circumstances*, and the proletariat ever unified by anything other than malicious (or sometimes, admittedly, just incompitent) actors peddling delusions. *any person, given the same data under the same circumstances, is very likely to make the same decisions, baring Personal (not group) factors rendering them irrational on the matter. They will also, generally, act in what Appears to be their own self interest, from their position at the time. The trick is to cause their self interest, and the interest of the populous as a whole, to align, by elimiating inscentives to act against the common good in the process of persuing the personal good
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  947.  @stantonfuerton  Mind you, it's not even a vowel shift in latin or one of it's daughter langauges, but a Germanic language... a shocking lack of forsight really.
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  948. Cases are a different thing again, and are a function of nouns, not verbs. They use aspect and mood in such a way as to render tense unnecessary. (English uses all three and mashes them together in a convoluted mess, for contrast.)
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  949.  @lakrids-pibe  It's interesting to note that the way one holds one's mouth to form the sound written Q (when the word isn't a foreign borrowing that has not yet been fully anglicised) is not actually the same as the way one holds one's mouth to form the sound written K. ... largely because the former is always followed by a 'w' sound (written U) while the latter is not (except when someone is playing games and spelling it kw precisely because that's not how it is usually written). English actually forms 'r' sounds several different ways due to similar issues, and has two very different pronunciations of 'l', with which one you get being dicatated by where it is in a word (and thus its interaction with other sounds), with the latter example making for quite a distinct English accent in languages that only have one l pronunciation, or have both but as distinct sounds that can actualy form minimal pairs and are made on purposes rather than just as an incidental result of surrounding sounds. C is absolutely a confusing mess, but it doesn't need to be. CH is fairly obviously it's own thing. The k sound is K, there's really no good reason to write that with a C. The "rule" about word final C is a bit messy. IC is permitted, but otherwise it must become CK or CE, depending. And of course there's a lot of situations where you should get KK by the standard rules and get CK instead as well, and CE introduces confusion where it looks like the E should modify any vowel before the C but it just... doesn't. Except when it does. (oh, and as an added bonus, most words that ended in IC but took an ALLY suffix where other words would take an LY suffix have changed over time to instead end in ICAL and take the standard LY suffix). SC is a bit interesting. This isn't C being weird so much as it is S being weird and C being incidentally caught in the crossfire. Because S can be read as a 'z' sound, and particularly because SS can be read as if it were ZZ (and the fact that that's a Thing is a pain in the butt in its own right), SC is used to indicate 'no, I actually mean the 's' sound, but a double letter is required here'. I also vaguely recall something about there technically being a third 's' sound to go with unvoiced s and voiced z, and that also influences which way it's written, but I can't for the life of me remember how any of that works. Mind you, where C is confusing, V is just Dumb. First off: Can't end words in V, ever. So any word that Should be written ending in V, is instead written either with F, so words which actually end in the 'f' sound must be written with word final FF. Or, if that is not done, the word must instead end in VE. This is a silent E, just by the by. You'd think that would cause confusion regarding the reading of the preceeding vowel, except nope, V always counts as two characters for vowel interactions, despite being written with one character and the W, nominally a double V, only count as one... TH (digraph, not across a syllable boundary) also only counts as one character for vowel interactions, mind you. C's confusing weirdness, you can at least see the reasons why it's weird, it's not hard to track back and go, 'ok, yeah, I hate the result but I can see why it was done that way'. V is just inexcusable nonsense. The only justification for any of it is that bad handwriting/poor typefaces make VV and W too similar (well, I suppose in looped cursive vv and w are hard to tell apart... but then again, even written entirely correctly, looped cursive writing basically looks like vvvvvvvvv or rrrrrr with the occasional acender, decender, dot, cross piece, or capital letter Anyway (seriously, so many of the letter forms have Nothing in common with any other way those charactes are depicted), so that wouldn't make it any Worse. ... There's a Reason Australia and New Zealand straight up abandoned looped cursive in favour of linked italics decades before the (English speaking) world apparently just gave up on proper handwriting in general in favour of typing everything (and given that kids are apparently taught on ipads these days, not even doing That properly): In linked Italics you can actually tell what the letters are.)
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  950.  @JorWat25  while the two th sounds are different, Very Few dialects actually use the same vowel for both of those words, and the vowel difference is vastly more obvious than the voicing or lack there of on word final TH (probably why it ended up like that, really.).
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  951. Looters aside, most instances of Rioting that I've found reliable reports about follow a pattern of 'people protest peacefully, police open up on them, protestors protect themselves', at least by the reports I'm seeing. Also a lot of 'kettling' of peaceful protests to force cerfew violations, which is both entrapment and arguably kidnapping. Fair bit of evidence that in at least some places, the vandalism isn't the 'rioters', but white supremacists, agents provocature(sp) from various law enforcement and right wing extremest groups, and sometimes just flat out the cops themselves. There have been a few instances of Targeted vandalism and arson by actual protestors/rioters. When you see how short that list is and which places are on it (and why!) It becomes Very clear that that is not at all the same thing as the general nonsense random business owners in New York are having to put up with though. (Its mostly police stations and a few businesses that were Very active in enabling abuses by the police. Including a Target. ) Looting is a separate and Far less excuseable or justifiable matter. (In that it usually can't be excused or justified at all).
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  952.  @uhohhotdog  it probably contributes, but that hardly invalidates the point regarding bad policy and avoiding responsibility. (Problems can, and often do, have multiple contributing causes, after all.)
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  953. The entire point of passive voice is that it flips which entity is the subject and which entity is the object so the sentence is still SVO, to my understanding. And so far as I can tell, English does topic-comment too, just not all the time as the default. ('that it is' is, to my understanding "(topic) (subject) (verb)", and the subject may well even be a dummy subject, depending, because English really does't like not having a subject (despite the fact that you can drop 'I' and 'You' in the subject slot in casual speech, or at least casual writing, in many sentences without any great issue).
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  954. What I was taught (not in a single lesson, but over all given the way Other things were taught) as a child, and it supprises me that so few people seem to grasp this, is that if you just want a simple yes or no answer and then to go about your day/task/whatever, your question Must be formed as a positive statement. On the other hand, the entire point and purpose of using a Negative statement is to force the other party to actually elaborate and engage in conversation... in fact in school we were explicitly taught to do this for just that reason.
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  955. It actually does not 'reproduce all the sounds we can think of'. It represents the sounds that existed in korean when it was created. It's functionally the korean specific subset of the IPA (and with centuries of linguistic drift, it's not even perfect at that anymore, to my understanding). It is a very good script for writing Korean, in much the same way that the roman alphabet is a great script for writing latin. That doesn't make it any good at respresenting English. Actually, given how Korean script represents syllables, and how English syllables are formed... It would actually be substantially worse than the current roman alphabet, when it comes to representing English. Edit: Ok, to be fair, because of Exactly how it does things it probably can represent more sounds than just the ones in Korean, but I distinctly remember there being a number of things in English that it just straight up cannot handle as is.
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  956. Ahh, I remember reading about that. It's not actually taken that far, but from what I recall it is taken further than would even be practical in most places, let alone what you could actually convince those currently in power to go along with. (I'm pretty sure most places could manage being a lot closer to "what Switzerland is" than to "what those in power are willing to permit" without too much trouble beyond the initial setup for changing over, though.)
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  957.  @tonysheerness2427  The same claim was made regarding automation in factories. The idea was that each worker could work less hours, get paid the same, and output more product, so the bosses would make more money because they sold more stuff and the workers would have more time with their families and the like. This is how it was sold to the public. Actual result? half the workers get fired (and thus have either no income or live off state pensions or find other, less well paying work, and thus have less disposable income, and thus buy less stuff! ... well, a reasonable minority probably moved on to better things, but generally not), the other half are working longer hours than before (when government regulations do not prevent this), for the same pay (sometimes inflation adjusted, sometimes Not and thus effectively Worse pay) to make roughly the predicted amount more stuff, and the bosses make Way more money... which they then proceed to largely... not spend. Or spend on things that have little or no impact on the over all economy. Certainly not enough to feed back into the whole system and increase Everyone's effective wealth the way paying the workers more or having them work less hours would have. Well, I say 'half'. Acutal numbers varied of course.
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  958. There's a reason I'd prefer to buy just about anything on DVD over basically any other option. And yes, I said DVD, not Bluray. Bluray also has antipiracy features that mostly serve to get in the way. (you won't notice if it you're using windows or mac, because Microsoft and Apple pay for the license to include the decryption software in their media players, but it becomse Super Obvious if you try to use a Linux machine, which does not. (and let's not get into the mess that is trying to get that license yourself, you're better off just buying a bluray player (a second hand PS3 in good condition is actually one of the better options on that front, provided you don't care too much about 4k and such. Bluray players are often very loud, and also frequently make a lot of noise at high frequencies, which is no problem if you can't hear those, but downright Painful if you can. The PS3 is generally not to bad on that front (though the PS4 might as well be a jet engine. You're going to need headphones if it's not burried in a cabinate somewhere))
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  959.  @MARCBOIREAU  Yeah... that's not actually what that's about. There was an issue at the time with bad actors of the Jewish faith swearing oaths (usually to non Jews, if I remember rightly) on one thing or another and then Breaking them, claiming that it didn't count because they didn't swear on the right specific thing, or because the other party wasn't a Jew. The problem wasn't with making the oath, it was breaking it. The text reads 'let your yes be yes and your no be no' in most translations. Not swearing specific oaths At All, and just being generaly honest, was a later idea, on the basis that it made it easier to just not have the issue in the first place. Also, every time you sign a bit of paper declaring that you have 'read and understood' a document, you are functionally swearing an oath. It's the same mechanism.
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  960. New Zealand has a law against leaving kids under 14 home unsupervised... mind you, a 14 year old kid is considered sufficent supervision (and if you don't have one of your own, well, paying someone that age to do the job is a long standing tradition). On the other hand, letting the kid walk to or from school on their own is considered perfectly fine. (well, people might ask questions if you're letting/making your 5 year old kid walk to school on their own if doing so involves crossing any busy streets, but 'trustworthy older kid' would be sufficient accompanyment in most people's eyes).
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  961. Dude with a shovel :p
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  962. Pretty sure the correct answer to that is "diversify your product lines. Bonus points for overlapping parts requirements. Also sell service contracts, and be good at servicing the things." not "make worse products that are harder to repair".
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  963.  @blackarrow1259  thing is, in English? "-tion" is a four character unit indicating a specific sound, (the one in "operation". Usually said roughly like "shon". No idea why), so if you're trying to spell something phonetically, without resorting to IPA notation, you need a different letter sequence to indicate... Not that. Fortunately, "y" is a semi-vowel to start with, and in non-sylable initial positions, the character is mostly used to indicate "this is an i or e sound of some description, but, due to some combination of tradition and the way spelling conventions interact, writing it as such would screw up the reading of rest of the word" English spelling suffers from having about twice as many sounds as it does characters, with most of the excess being vowels, an intense hatred of diacritics, and undergoing one of the most significant recorded vowel shifts pretty much Immediately* after it codified and locked down the bulk of its orthography (which was already a bit messy due to many of the standards being dictated by Dutch (rather than native English) printers needing to keep lines of text justified (that is, all the same length) as much as by the actual sounds being represented. Dutch and English are similar enough that this Worked, but it's sometimes a bit odd.) *As such things go. In practice it happened in fits and starts and waves over the course of a century or two.
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  964.  @TechBearSeattle  Not that the UK is all that great at it... Mind you, the UK was a funcitoning democracy with the king having very little influence over most things (including, specifically, Colonial Policy), at least in practice, outside of exceptional circumstances, Before the American war of independence, and kept itterating to correct problems with the system pretty consistently there-after, so...
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  965.  @kingforaday8725  A number of countries do this now too, in effect. (Certainly, I have to pay GST* on purchases from Steam, Amazon, Ali Express, and other large online retailers these days). *Goods and Services Tax. A consumer tax. Roughly sales-tax-equivalent.
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  966. we could do with having some of those back, really. Others never left and are just considered 'archaic' showing up mostly in quotes and poetry these days.
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  967. Well, first off is all the vowels, which, depending on your dialect and how you count diphthongs, there might be around 20 of...
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  968. The main problem with food supplies, globally, isn't actually overpopulation, few, if any, countries are actually overpopulated (individual Cities, on the other hand...) it's lack of infrastructure to move food from where it can be grown to where it is needed, and economic conditions that strongly disincentivise fixing that. Actually, many developed countries have a very real problem with Depopulation of everything outside their largest cities.
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  969. It's been Referenced a bunch of times though. But only the knock-on effects have been relevant.
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  970. There's no agreed upon standard of what is and isn't actually a city. The USA calls some things separate cities that where I live would be considered suburbs, but those American cities can also includes rural areas that here we wouldn't usually consider part of the city at all. Just as an example.
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  971. I think that's the best use of that meme I've ever seen.
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  972.  @bastiaan4129  and calling this a downside is a delusion born of pro-car propaganda, mostly. It's also one trams Also have and thus irrelevant to the question asked. The simple fact of the matter is that, except at major junctions, you can barely even See the wires when looking anywhere humans Actually Look most of the time. Far more relevant is the poles holding them up, And when a suitable design that actually matches the aesthetic of the street is chosen, they Enhance it rather than detracting. (mind you, the practice of hanging a cable between the buildings on either side of the street and then the power line for the vehicles from that is never going to look Great, but that rarely occurs in areas that look nice enough for that to actually meaningfully detract from their appearance anyway.
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  973. General rule: If a tram is viable with your budget and geography, it's better than a trolley bus. If not, the trolley bus is a nice step up from an ICE bus, giving the bus some of the up-sides of a tram without its downsides. Mind you, once you get past a certain minimum number of buses (and capacity and frequency demands mean any bus route that's actually used is very likely to) a trolley bus is 100% better in every regard than a Battery powered bus, with the Possible exception of up-front set up costs. And battery vs ICE is pretty much a no brainer in any context where the battery equivalent of the rocket equation doesn't get in the way. (this issue is why battery powered big-rigs are basically nonsense, btw.) Also: Trams can also share road space with other vehicles if necessary. The problem is that you never want to do so. But an honest evaluation says BUSSES never want to do so either! Sharing the road with other vehicles, rather than having their own dedicate lane or fully grade separated path, Significantly degrades the speed, frequency, and reliability of the service, which is kind of a terrible idea, given that those very features are the primary motivations for people to use public transport rather than their own cars in the first place (to the point where 'time to get from A to B' via public transport vs via car is The determining factor behind if public transport is actually used or not: If public transport is faster than a car, not in terms of peak ground speed but in terms of Actual Travel Time (including any walking at each end), it will be used. If not, it won't. sharing the road with cars guarantees that public transit cannot be faster than those cars, at least in that section.)
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  974. Heh. That amused me. Where I grew up, they overpass bridges over the motorway were a lot steeper. I had no trouble with them at all on my bike. Single gear, steel frame, road bike. It did have fairly large wheels though, which I suspect made a huge difference. (Mind you, they, and the approaches to the bridges over the rivers, were basically the only slopes of note in the whole area.)
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  975. US traffic engineers did something very basic that succeeded spectacularly (for all it's effects were fairly limited), actually: They noticed that basically everyone went 10mph over the listed speed limit basically all the time, and started listing all the speed limits as 10mph slower than they 'should' be so that drivers would actually go the speed they were supposed to. It worked.
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  976. The biggest problem with runes is that they really don't lend themselves well to cursive scripts of any sort. Linked Italics might work a bit better than traditional looped cursive, but it's still awkward. And you'd have to somehow convince the keyboard manufacturers and the people who make all the business software, etc... and we can't even convince half of those idiots that I and l shouldn't be the same character!
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  977.  @Elkerlyc  The EU as a whole seems to have had energy prices go up (but not by so much as to be a problem due to some good planning) and... that's about it? The UK is having some serious issues, but how much of that is the war and how much of that is their government spending the last decade being incompetent and ruining everything? Of course, pretty much Everyone's getting hit with inflation issues and shortages of critical components and resources that were previously supplied almost entirely by Ukraine and/or Russia, But Russia's getting hit at least as hard as anyone else by those issues, and it's mostly lead to finding/building other sources so that they don't have to go back to relying on Russia (and to a lesser extent Ukraine) in the aftermath (though these are projects with a fairly long ramp up time).
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  978.  @pauls3075  ... it can be a later defintion of the word. It doesn't make it less valid, because that's how langauges work. English particularly Loves turning other word types in to verbs, as is the case here.
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  979. No, they fought for independence to get out of paying taxes and to ensure there was no one in a position of power above them who could tell them to stop making deliberately exploiting the government for their own financial gain. (seriously, when you look into the actual historical records of events rather than founding myth nationalist propaganda, the whole thing is just one giant rich person tax dodge).
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  980. Heh. Until you run into the various regional dialects, at least. They can get pretty incomprehensible.
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  981. ... it is though? That's kind of like asking claiming that dollars aren't decimal on the basis that a shop sells stuff for twelve or sixteen dollars each rather than ten or twenty.
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  982.  @andrewntoth1  well, they don't hurt the exporter Directly, though the resulting reduced sales don't exactly help said exporter either. Same with the importer, and everyone else in the chain. Fun extra bonus: the US dollar is loosing value as well due to all the shenanigans. this has... functionally the same effects as tarrifs do on things sold to the USA. But it makes things sold By the USA more competitive! ... ... except the USA doesn't actually export all that much physical stuff, it turns out (that trade deficit existed in the first place for a Reason), and tariffs on importing the materials needed to make the things it does export drive Those prices up too, wiping out the advantage they Should have. And, of course, a very large portion of the cost of buying anything from the USA is Shipping Costs, which ... Well, last I saw Trump was introducing... I think it was some sort of tax? on any ship belonging to a fleet that contained any ship that was made or registered in China. China, for reference, builds most of the worlds' ships, and is also one of the easier non-sketchy places to register a ship (where ships are registered has basically nothing to do with who owns them and what they're used for in practice, only who gets to handle the legal and financial proceedings in the event that everything goes wrong). So if that goes through Shipping Costs on goods going to and from the USA, already Very High depending where you live, Also go UP... all great fun.
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  983. I was wondering about that. Last I had heard relevant scientists had concluded that time was a property/effect of mass/gravity, and not actually a dimension... Not that that ever made a lot of sense either, to my not-terribly-educated-on-the-matter self.
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  984.  @mitonaarea5856  Well, that and the founding principle of the USA is actualy 'We refuse to pay any taxes, ever, to anyone, for any purpose, and will send other people to their deaths to enforce this'. Those responsible got what they wanted, too. They wrote a new law code that had everyone else paying taxes far in excess of what the British did (because they were no longer being heavily subsidized by the taxpayers of Britain), while creating so many loopholes and exceptions and ways for the government to pay Them for things that in practice they never paid a cent in tax that wasn't for propaganda purposes, denied most of their tax payers (never mind the women and slaves) the right to vote... and things have barely changed since.
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  985.  @phillyphakename1255  or opperate on a small enough scale that the difference doesn't matter. That works too.
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  986.  @blackrazer22  it would also help if many places didn't elect a million low level officials to positions most people never interact with, or which absolutely should be going through a standard hiring system rather than an election. There's usually only one candidate (occasionally two), little no information, and certainly not enough time to do all the research on all the positions. Leads to fatigue, apathy, and people getting specialist jobs based not on qualifications but on having more personal friends they can convince to show up to vote at all. Past that, it mostly comes down to media presence. Local stuff tends not to make the news unless it's Super local (and thus shows up on local stations where they exist) or a disaster or scandle of some sort. Otherwise it ends up in niche publications at best.
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  987. All that is really required for it to be a 'good' idea is 'we've got to stop them Somewhere, and no where further back is any better given the broader situation'. Anything and everything else is really just a bonus in light of that consideration.
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  988. ahh... by accent, you mean stress, yes? In which case... NO. Very no. I always forget which is which, but of nouns and verbs, with two syllables, one defaults to stressing the first syllabe and the other the second, with adjectives and adverbs derived from them flipping to the other pattern. With three syllables, the stress moves all over the place, and then you start sticking Prefixes on it and it becomes even more of a mess. A seven syllable word in English Must have it's primary stress as the Centre syllable.
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  989. In this comment thread: irony
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  990.  @colincharan-kumpula6424  A lot of people also seem to struggle with the idea that Russia's behaviour with regards to it's neighbours is the main reason it's neighbours are so keen on joining NATO <_<
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  991. What little research has been done indicates that the protests are having crap all effect on it. they're generally outside, wearing masks, at least a bit spread out where possible, and don't tend to be people with symptoms, oh, and the sorts of people who don't take such things seriously are also mostly on the other side of the issue and so not in the protests ... Though tear gas and kettleing have a decidedly negative effect on those factors. Gyms, churches, malls, hairdressers, etc on the other hand? Yeah, major transmission hotspots.(indoors, crowded, singing is just about the Worst for not spreading this kind of thing, even before getting into individual behaviour).
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  992. Most people don't think of themselves as evil. Some of them are wrong.
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  993. I'm lead to believe it varies by species. Some have bounced back well, others are still in rather significant trouble (including some of the ones Japanese whalers keep going after last I checked... though that was a while ago now.)
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  994. Rice milk is as good as, and in many cases better than, regular milk in most cooking. It's basically the same when put on your cereal too. ... It's basically undrinkable though. It tastes like you're drinking raw grain. ... somehow, pouring it on cereal, then Eating the Cereal out of it... (and, mind you, I don't mean the American 'this is basically just sugar and food colouring' cereal, I mean the ones that are almost 100% grain) ... results in rice milk that's actually really good to drink... Here's a fun fact: Coca-cola has So Much Sugar in it that they have to add a chemical Specifically to suppress your vomit reflex because otherwise your body purges that shit before you can digest it, just due to the toxic levels of sugar. That's before taking the damage the caffeine or any of the other crap does to you. On the subject of how hard it is to find food without wheat in it? Soy/Soya is almost as bad. I can't eat it, does bad things to me. It's In EVERYTHING. It gets added to meat to basically cheat on the weight, it gets used as an emulsifier all over the place (it's in chocolate, for example), almost every 'oh, you can't eat X? here, have a substitute!' products have soy in them... on and on it goes. Mind you, some of the best chocolate I've ever had is Moo Free (maid in Britain) which goes out of its way to have no allergens at all. Tastes GREAT. The trade off is that you have to keep it in the fridge, because it melts at a Way lower temperature than most other chocolates.
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  995. Actually, most of the other countries are Probably more worried about the USA, including, among other things, its occasionally rabid anti-monarchist bent, utter lack of respect for the sovereignty of other nations, horribly corrupt governmental system, and the sheer size of its economy compared to the rest of the would be member states. Among other things. Many, many things. On the up side, reduced Chinese influence, yay?
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  996. It's not even doing a great job of handling the language it's narrowly tailored to, unfortunately.
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  997. Local safety and liability related issues (and possibly regulations) mean every escalator I can recall seeing in my life has explicit warnings on it against changing which step you are on while riding it. Rightly so in at least some cases, where the escalator is narrow, steep, and, in some cases, has steps shallower than the length of my foot! (Not by very much, just enough to be unsettling) Of course, the more modern malls have, in some cases, done away with escalators entirely, using something more akin to a sloped travelator(sp?), Which can accommodate shopping trollies, wheelchairs, etc as well. Obviously, those have no such warnings. They also take up a lot more space.
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  998. ehh... I mostly agree with you, though there's certainly justification for a public ground floor space to actually be 2-3 stories tall, if it's area is large enough, if only so that the ceiling doesn't feel low and oppressive in comparison, and likewise for a similar sort of space near the top of the building with skylights for natural lighting... and then there's whatever benefit (if any) the open space provides in terms of air circulation and temperature management for the building... But yeah, other than that, it's fairly wasteful. Perhaps somewhat justified, if done sensibly, in areas with particuarlly extreme climates, but otherwise? Yeah, wasted space. ... also, to some degree something of a safety hazard... though more in the sense of 'some people are idiots and/or murderers' than of 'this is likely to cause an accident'.
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  999. Taht's... Not actually true. Revolutions can very easily go very badly wrong, communist or otherwise. (Also often end up embodying the Other meaning of the word, ending up about where they started). Communism has problems as well. Still, the current system is Definitely broken, and does require repairs, at minimum. Possibly replacement. Just, you know, not with cheap knock off brand "one size fits none" systems that'll break the day after the warranty runs out. Get some high quality bespoke systems that perfectly match the actual situation installed properly instead. (to horribly abuse a metaphor)
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  1000.  @donm2067  This tells me you've really not being paying attention to how the USA is just going into an absolute meltdown right now... Like... the curent grand idea is to replace income tax with import tariffs... in the best case import tariffs can cover 4% of the government budget... and those tariffs and various other ongoing stupidity is on track to do such massive damage to the American economy that the tariffs will bring in far less than that. For reference, the interest on the USA's existing debt is substantially more than 4% of their budget, nevermind anything else. This is just one example of the complete nonsense happening there right now.... which has very good odds of taking out the global economy in the process given how much of it is dependent on American institutions in the background (which the current US government is actively taking an axe to).
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  1001.  @maryhildreth754  I'd argue that it makes sense if you make the distinction between a road and a street. Streets are a big deal. Roads? People use roads to go right Past businesses. Now, your massive 'big box' stores at the highway interchanges might well be supported by the highway, as might industry that has all its inputs and outputs shipped via truck (which is a whole other issue of its own), but anything that is a 'local business' in more than the most technical sense would benefit much more from a street that actually facilitated foot traffic far more than a road.
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  1002. There used to be a limited number of "standard" dialects, facilitating communication between those who spoke different dialects much like one learns English now, or French back in the day, in order to be able to communicate with as many other people a possible without learning every language under the sun. Somewhere along the way this was deemed discriminatory and ideologically unacceptable, as was tossed, depriving many of a useful skill and making it more difficult for them to communicate with others, with all the problems that brings.
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  1003.  @An_Attempt  It's noticable that the colonies that the British managed to put through their entire orderly decolonization process (rather than the later ones that they just flat out abandoned due to lack of money and interest (and possibly also due to American pressure)), which involved establisheing education and governmental systems involving the locals and giving them time to become the established norm before the British actually left, tended to do a lot better in the aftermath than other ex-colonies. (it is noticeably that in at least one instance this lead to the British military putting down a rebellion, in a country they were actively in the process of leaving... by the white colonists who realised that they were so outnumbered as to render their voices completely irrelivant in the democratic government the British were setting up on their way out.) Forcing a bunch of random groups together does cause problems, yes, but it causes a lot Less problems if all the appropriate administrative and representative structures are in place. (The way Britain Wanted to handle Indian Indepence prior to ww2 vs how Indian independence After ww2 ended up actually happening is a pretty good example, too. here's a hint: What happened is what Ghandi's independence movement wanted. The British position on the matter called for a slower withdrawal and whole hell of a lot less relgiously motivated murder. Of course, then ww2 happend, which rather radically changed Britain's priorities in a way that was not in India's favour at all, so...)
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  1004.  @peterrauth118  Modern day kings in many countries actually DO have Effective immunity from prosecution, as such. It's just usually via a whole bunch of round about convolted fiddly bits... and isn't the same as being immune to being censured in various ways.
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  1005.  @rogerpalmer3723  if you succeed at overthrowing the government, you are now the government, so the legality of the matter is irrelivant. If you fail, then you caused a whole bunch of pain, suffering, missery, and death and have produced nothing of value to compensate for that. It's basically the same as regicide: Attempted regicide will get you executed. Successful regicide... well, either you become king or you become an inconvenient loose end the new king has to clean up (reasonable expectations at that point are a well paid and comfortable exile if you're lucky, and being executed (either out of paranoia or as a convenient scapegoat) if you're not.)
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  1006. There are some things for which centralised control is necessary. There are a fair number for which it's advantageous if you can compensate for the downsides... And then there's everything else where it does nothing but make it more abusable and fault prone. Unfortunately, very few law makers understand the distinction.
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  1007. I believe the usual practice in the English speaking world is to just write new laws that deal with the same thing in a way more applicable to the modern day, and the newer one overrrides the old one... and every now and then some part of it becomes enough of a mess that either a law will be passed specifically voiding some great long list of obsolete laws, or an individual old law that is particularly silly but somehow actually came up in a way that mattered will be specifically repealed. Not so sure about the USA, but that seems to be the pattern for governments built around the westminster system, at least.
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  1008. The dark ages only affected the western part of the Roman Empire (basically Italy and everything west of modern Switzerland, plus England, Wales... Maybe Belgium?) The eastern part kept on happily chugging along for another thousand years or so. And even so less was lost during the dark ages than most people think, and in some fields technological development kept right on happening, too. Basically, history would be very different, but skipping the dark ages wouldn't have done much to general progress. Could potentially have even slowed things down, actually.
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  1009.  @thomsen256  Thing is, China doesn't particularly want to keep Russia strong. In practical terms, the only thing they like about Russia is that it's a more obvious threat to the west than China is... Except Russia has already conclusively proven that it really, really isn't actually that. Leaving the little matter of China and Russia having long standing border disputes, Russia being an easy target, China not being particularly dependant on Russia for anything (sure, they buy oil from Russia via pipeline, but they have an easier time finding other sellers than Russia does finding other buyers, and it's a relatively small portion of China's oil consumption)... Conflict between the two was only really staved off due to shared ideological opposition to the west (and their ideologies diverged sharply and quickly... not to mention the fact that at this point neither of them are particularly communist, though China's kept most of the trappings and a few systems here and there (in reality it's got more in common with the old Imperial way of doing things, on many fronts, than it does with Communism, at this point), while Russia really hasn't.) Basically, China's more likely to take advantage of Russia's weakness than to prop it up, with the world the way it currentlyl is.
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  1010.  @ST4X-0N-ST4X  You know what's actually Super Likely to kill you (and that the USA is also highly resistant to attempts to do anything about)? Cars. Bad road design, defective license requirements, not taking away people's licenses when they should be (or people driving despite not having a license...though as a side issue: removal of license for things that have Nothing To Do with driving), lack of safe alternatives to driving, bad car design... the list of contributing factors is LONG and the casualty rates are ridiculous... Mind you, it's a problem elsewhere too. Just... Usually less so. If only because the existence of functional public transport systems tends to reduce the number of people who Really Shouldn't Be Driving who do anyway for lack of other options. Note: there's a solid argument in favour of there being a right to freedom of movement, or the classic British 'right of way' (from which we get the term 'give way' (equivalent to American 'yeild'), meaning something along the lines of 'permit the other party to pass') Nothing about that requires car ownership (and, in fact, mass car ownership results in the construction of infrastructure that actively Obstructs the right of way, and ability to move, of those who do Not have a car, rather than infrastructure that actually facilitates Anyone being able to cheaply and easily go places).
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  1011. The solution that will cause you the least grief is to use normal dumb switches that aren't connected to the internet of things. Save yourself, and any subsequent owners, untold hours (days, weeks) of headaches and frustration when one company or another pushes a broken update or goes out of business and compleatly bricks your entire lighting system. Among other unnecessary problems. Not to mention such things are almost never properly secure, and are almost always Connected To The Internet. If you can't see how That can go wrong, you shouldn't be ON the internet, for your own safety <_< And that's before getting into the nonsense that is Amazon and Google's abuses (both malicious and neglegent) of the access to the data they get out of such devices (and any other source, to be fair). I won't argue against the convenience when they're properly setup and working though. But, you'll save yourself and others a LOT of pain if A: the system is completely isolated from any sort of internet access (meaning you need physical access to actually change anything), and B: No part of it is propritory.
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  1012. From memory, the reason the police in the USA won't do anything about this is that it's not their jurisdiction. The post office has its own law enforcement division which deals with such things (regardless of carrier, as I understand it). You have to contact them instead. How Functional it is any more (with the government passing laws actively intended to sabotage the organization by striping it of it's income sources while also piling impossible and nonsensical artificial expenses on it... And then, naturally, using the resulting disfunction as justification for attempts to privatize it.), i wouldn't know. But they do take package thefts seriously.
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  1013. They revolted against an older one, for one thing. They can make a credible claim for oldest modern Republic though, I believe.
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  1014.  @markgriz  correspondingly more expensive though.
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  1015. It's not that you necessarily need more or less... It's that you need to purge the corruption. Your laws and regulations are full of shit because of how easy it is for the rich (not just corporations) and powerful to mess with the system so a law that was Supposed to be about something entirely sensible (maybe not using materials that burst into flames at the slightest friction as brake pads, as an example) ends up instead being about how no new businesses can make brake pads at all (and all the smaller existing ones are priced out of the market by compliance costs). That's not a Big Government problem, that's a Bought Government problem. (It doesn't help that once a bill is introduced in congress or whatever, the Only Thing the bill presented for the final vote is required to have in common with the originally presented document is its Registration Number!!! That's insanity!!! The inability to pass anything that isn't so laden with toxic and destructive riders just to get votes is also nuts...) So yeah. The US government has major problems. Its size isn't actually one of them. (Arguably, the size of the USA itself is though. And probably the size of its military budget too.) Seriously, the sort of horseshit bills that are the only sort that the US congress seems able to pass these days would be unpassable in my own country. It would be basically impossible to even get more than a couple of people in your own party to vote for it, let alone anyone else... Except that what would Actually happen is that it'd get tossed out by the speaker (and you probably censured) before you even got done reading it, let alone started the vote, for not actually being the bill you were supposed to be presenting, and instead being an entirely new one. (And as a New one... Well, even assuming you convinced your party to use one of their limited number of slots for new bills in the term, or won the lottery that determines which non-party bills are presented, you wouldn't get past the first reading due to the bill trying to do too many unrelated things at once. At best the parties would nick any good bits for their own upcoming bills on various individual matters.
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  1016.  @honkhonk8009  Straight up misinformation is, amusingly enough, the founding mission statement for Fox News. It's entire existance has always been about muddying the waters so badly that no one can tell who is and is not telling the truth, on the basis that most people will respond to such a state of afairs by Giving Up on figuring it out and just going with whichever line supports their pre-existing biases. Turns out that works out a lot better for the Republican Party over there than factual reporting does.
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  1017. Ehh, you might want to account for inflation there. Being, or becoming, a millionaire without any of that shady nonsense is entirely possible these days. Becoming a Billionaire is another matter.
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  1018. Most people can somewhat appreciate some of that... it's just the combination of quantity and extent (and bad teaching practices making the problem look even worse than it already is) is a bit much for most people. Also, for all the 'romance' words in English, when you list words from most to least common in terms of usage, the common end is made up almost entirely of Germanic words and an awful lot of the romance words are down the 'barely used' end (and that's not just the effect of all the latin 'scientific names' that show up in the technical dialect used when discussing biology, it holds up even when you exclude them.)
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  1019. The switches have contacts on both sides rather than contact on one and no contact on the other. Not sure if the standard practice is to use the latter sort normally, or the former and just not wire up one of the contacts. You then wire up the circuit as power-switch-switch-light-power, with side A of switch 1 connected to side A of switch 2, and side B of switch 1 connected to side B of switch 2. When both switches are in the same position, you have a complete circuit and the light turns on, when they are not, you don't. Adding more lights works exactly the same as it normally does. Now, if you want to add a Third switch, it gets a lot more complicated.
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  1020. Citizen of New Zealand here: New Zealand is a Shit place to build bunkers. The whole place is just as earthquake prone as Japan (though serious quakes are less coming on average for whatever reason, they can and do still happen), there are vulcanos and aquifers all over the place, the list of reasons goes on. To the best of my knowledge those bunkers are largely, if not entirely, a myth. On the other hand, a number of wealthy foreigners Do own fancy houses here. Still, currently, if you're not a citizen, permanent resident, or it is specifically necessary that you be present for dealing with an emergency or government project, you're not getting in,and if you Are, you're going through at least two weeks quarantine when you get here. (More if you don't return negative test results at both the begining and end of that period.) Also, we currently have a Labour/New Zealand First coalition government. Labour tends not to give Rich people special treatment (NZFirst isn't particularly prone to doing so either that I know of), while NZFirst tends not to give Foreigners special treatment (and, the political situation being what it was even before the pandemic, Labour can't really afford to do that either.) So... Yeah. No hiding out here for the random rich folks unless they were lucky enough to be here at the time when the borders were closed (which happened very quickly, at least partially as a result of tourists refusing to follow lower level restrictions prior to the lockdown, which Also happened pretty quickly.)
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  1021.  @stevemcgowen  it probably won't be stollen in Ukraine. Sadly there's a Lot of corruption in US politics and procurement and the companies that produce the material love running the same racket that Apple, john deer, and so on like to pull, where you can't field repair anything they can possibly force you to buy a replacement of or drag back to their (not actually) well trained representative and pay for Them to fix... maybe... in a few months... at 10+ times the price... maybe. An awful lot of that money vanishes into corporate pockets for no useful result... and that's built into the price of the items, not skimmed by individuals in the chain, so not Technically classified as corruption most of the time.
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  1022.  @zaarkeru3391  Frankly, most communists barely know what the hell socialism is (or was) beyond the word they use to seem legitimate rather than like a bunch of bomb throwing psychopaths*. Much like right wing lunatics insist they are 'conservative' for similar reasons. *Early socialists were quite popular with governments and bankers. They played by the rules and were quite helpfil in mitigating and managing the down sides of capitalism... then the radical political faction that would come to be 'communists' became a thing... they publicly called themselves socialists, claimed to represent socialism... and acted almost indistinguishably from the Anarchists of the day, who were most famous for boming police stations and assasinating government officials and generally just making life difficult and dangerous for everyone, and particularly those with power and authority. One can imagine the consequences of that, no? Meanwhile, Workers Co-ops, and early socialism was basically workers co-ops and various related tools, systems, and ways of thinking about things in practice (and had little or nothing to do with systems of governance), are actually moderately common in... the USA (though one can find them in other places, easily enough). Where they act as what they were pretty much always intended to be: A patch on capitalism to account and compensate for the way industrialisation and automation distorted the labour market (that distortion being detrimental to the workers).
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  1023. Well, people want things that American capitalist elites keep insisting are socialism so as to piggyback off decades of anti USSR propaganda, anyway. Whether they're actually anything to do with socialism or not varies. (Seriously, it's Painful watching Americans (and others who buy into the same propaganda) try to claim concepts first thought up and implemented by German conservatives or British industrialists prior to WW1, or things straight out of Biblical Law are "socialist", and thus bad, and that anyone who might possibly want anything like them is a (godless) communist and thus the enemy)
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  1024. AAA is purely an indicator of budget, and to my recollection the marketing is about as much of the budget as the development is, at that point.
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  1025. I believe those are called 'perverse incentives'.
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  1026.  @jwb52z9  yes? There are situations where cars are necessary. There are situations where ICEs are still the best option. Both are a tiny percentage of the situations in which ICEs and cars are currently used, and aren't all a good reason to not replace both systems in the situations where superior alternatives are available. And fundamentally, public transit infrastructure IS the superior alternative in most cases. Extra bonus: in an awful lot of cases, railways can use existing highway right of ways for most of their trip. Heck, Good railways would allow for the highways they then share right of ways with to get Smaller due to reducing the amount of traffic on them. Even a four track rail right of way is less than half the size of highway with 4+ lanes in either direction, after all.
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  1027. Well, if you were just watering your lawn (Especially with those sprinklers that just clip onto the end of a hose and have no actual controls other than the incoming water pressure), he was probably right. On the other hand,if you were watering plants that actually need it (especially food producing plants) in a non-wasteful manner (actually going around and carefully only watering the bits that need it they amount that they need), then obviously not. Under normal conditions, at least.
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  1028. Of course, it sounds like the regular Russian military isn't doing anything like as much in the way of 'basic training' as they should be either, so...
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  1029.  @burhanbudak6041  Well, You can geoblock things... Other people's things. As part of resolving copyright disputes. But you can't preemptively geoblock your own stuff so as not to create the legal issues in the first place, no. That would be far too reasonable.
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  1030.  @amentco8445  That would explain why the corporations put so much effort into trying to prevent such regulations being implemented... clearly. For reference, Actually protecting the environment IS for people. Mind you, the US legilsative system is so hopelessly corrupt that Any regulation will get twisted around to serve those with money eventually, if not right of the bat, and it's not uncommon for the law that actually passes to have nothing in common with the law that passed the first vote other than its Registration Number so....
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  1031.  @denverbraughler3948  Some of it is pronunciation shifts, some of it is questionably chosen spelling, some of it is having more than one standard of spelling (technically there's more than two, but most of the extras are just 'one or two words a divergent from standard Commonwealth English for various reasons'. The biggest thing though, is that English spelling is a bit inconsistent, but nothing like as inconsistent as it Looks, because mostly it's just unreasonably Complicated, and the logic of that complicated system is badly taught, making it seem less consistent. (that and it depends on you somehow magically knowning where the primary stress in a word is without actually marking that in any recognizable manner, for some godforsaken reason).
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  1032. Ehh... Generally, sure. But then you listen to some of the more radical Greens, actually pay attention to the implications of the nonsense ACT comes out with, and realise that the Advance New Zealand party exists...
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  1033. It's telling that the list of things that the EU would be less or unwilling to move on, they include most of New Zealand's major exports. "free trade" already massively favours the larger economy t the expense of the smaller economy, even without that.
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  1034. ... you realise that, legally speaking, there's an argument being made that the (non elected! He's normally answerable to a minister) director of public health was supposed to take over pretty much Entirely (or at least, that's the way it's presented) once a national (pandemic type) emergency was declared, not leave cabinet (which one can't be a member of without being elected to parliament) making most of the decisions, and that the (center right) opposition party is using the fact that he Didn't as a reason to attack the government's handling of this? Because apparently giving an un-elected specialist (even one whose very good at his job and Probably wouldn't abuse it) more power than the Prime Minister usually has, much of it over things with large effects on things well outside his area of expertise, is clearly a great idea that can only end well. Also, by law (as written, and I won't argue it's written well, as it is quite clear that a situation which warrented a response that covered the whole country at once wasn't considered as a possibility by the people who wrote it), he had the power to do Exactly this... Or even enact stricter measures. (Actually, as written, there's a case to be made that almost any random beurocrat in his department could technically have ordered the same, once the emergency and pandemic were officially declared. Difference is, no one would have gone along with it outside the local area without sending it up the chain first (and they might get replaced, too) if they tried. I did say that particular bit of law had problems.) You may notice, for example, that we were never under martial law. Regardless, all signs indicate that it worked/is working so far, and that every effort is being made to mitigate the downsides. (Remember, New Zealand has Extensive (and strict) privacy laws. It's most of the reason there's no such thing as an equivalent of a social security number or national ID.)
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  1035.  @kylehendra6740  To make having a minimum setback at all (not a huge one, mind you, that's a different matter) make sense, all you have to consider is some older buildings in Britain (and possibly elsewhere) where the front wall was right up against the foot path... and the doors opened Outwards. (or that windows in many places still Do open outward, as windows that open straight up are a hazard and those that slide sideways are usually Very easy to get open from the outside, while windows that open inward make a decent chunk of the room unuseable (among other issues) and... windows that open downward just don't seem to be a thing?) They don't actually inherently prevent desirable, walkable spaces, either... well, in theory. That setback Should be a prime place for trees and decorative gardens, or at least a nice hedge. Of course, then you get other regulations, or home owners associations, or whatever demanding that it consist of nothing but perfectly green lawns, which, yeah, terrible...
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  1036. Honestly, the habbit of talking about 'first name' and 'last name' rather than 'personal name' and 'family name' (with additional terms as necessary) needs to be put out of everyone's misery. It just makes talking about Actual people's actual names (including most native English speakers named in the usual English Speaking Fashion) far more awkward and confusing than it should be.
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  1037. There's money in origional material as a solo act (if perhaps not as much as there might once have been unless you combine it with other things). As a band? seems like the money there is being hired by the solo guys and/or as the 'house' band to do all the backing/backup/whatever work for a bunch of different people.
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  1038. The problem is that, nonsensical as it sounds... It kind of is. In that sone of their "logic" goes from "insane troll logic" to "off by one error".
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  1039. Anything being updated 'over the air' is something to avoid like the plague unless it both demands your confirmation before begining and actually informs you of what it is doing (in a way that isn't going just producing a gibberish character string that you'd need several degrees and a manual they won't provide you with in order to understand)*. Because 'over the air fix' can be, and in a number of cases HAS been, indisitinguishable from 'over the air sabotage'. Fortunately, to my understanding, this has yet to cause major problems with cars, but there have certainly been appliances and 'smart' home systems that have suffered from this effect. Very convenient... right up until you suddenly can't actually use the thing anymore... especially if the update broke the updater and the company that controlled it went out of business (or got bought out by someone else who cancled the product/service) before the issue could be corrected... (and hey, want to give odds on how such issues interact with Warrenties?!). *Oh, and if you can't use the thing as it was Pre Update without allowing the change, baring instances where the thing is flat out unsafe without said change I suppose, the confirmation dialogue is Useless because every user ever is going to hit 'yes' if their car will not leave the garrage without the software update when they need to get to work... Or similar issues with other devices. No matter how terrible an idea it is.
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  1040. Most men's trousers I've encountered (the ones intended to look decent in any context, rather than super formal or fashionable or whatever) have pockets large enough to hold "pocket size" books. Proper coats, when you can find them, seem to as well. So far as I've ever been able to tell, Nothing else mass produced does. Admittedly, I'm a guy, basically a shut in with little interest (except when I need to replace things) and less (no) skill or ability relevant to the matter, but that has been my experience/observation. Of course, nonsensical fashion choices regarding pockets could easily make for essay length rants, there are Many of them (even if women usually have it worse on that front).
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  1041.  @basillah7650  shockingly enough, a single payer, government run system actually results in the medicines costing less in the first place than they would otherwise... and then the tax payer covers a decent chunk of that reduced price, yes... of course, the specifics of the systems vary from place to place, but in most of them you either don't need health insurance on top of your taxes, or it's quite a bit cheaper and pays out a LOT more reliably than in the USA, and either way it's not tied to your Job, so you can, if need be, quit without losing your coveage (though, of course, you may eventually run into problems paying your premiums, depending on exactly how that works where you are). Amusing quirk of the US health system: half the reason so many things cost so much is that the insurance companies screw over the health care providers just as much as they do they customers, so the health care providers jack up the prices so that the times they can manage to nail the insurers to the wall and get them to actually pay up cover all the times said insurers just flat out refuse to pay even when they absolutely should. ... yeah, if the insurance companies weren't such scum bags many parts of the American health care system would be Cheaper... on paper. In practice it wouldn't actually be that much cheaper most of the time because the insurance companies would actually be paying 4 times instead of paying 4 times as much once (which might affect the polices and payments of individual customers in some fashion). Oh, and apparently quite a few places, in at least some parts of the USA, will actually give you a discount down to something much closer to what the particular service they provide Should cost if you pay them directly, without involving the insurance companies (and presumably before you leave the premesis), because they don't have to deal with that whole mess. ... of course, for larger and more expensive matters that's not much help, but for the lower end of things it can be a big deal.
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  1042. @Leo A The only way you're ever going to get ANYONE on Russia's border to demilitarize is for Russia to... basically stop being Russia. The high militarization is pretty much entirely down to Russia's long history of using their mitlitary strength to strongarm and/or invade any of their neighbours who don't have the military strength to kick their teeth in when they try,. And the ensuing warcrimes and abuse of the local civilian population that goes with that. Heck, NATO would have imploded decades ago now if not for Russia's constant dickery regarding its neighbours. There's actually good odds that if Russia had just Stayed Home back in... what was it, 2014? Trumps' nonsense might well have been enough to kill it. But no, Russia just can't help itself. Honestly, basically the only reason the USA really has Allies at this point rather than having managed to drive most of them off is because Russia, China, and a couple of other more local powers keep being complete dicks to their neighbours to the point that it makes the USA's brand of awfulness look positively pleasant in comparison.
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  1043. it also tends to avoid acknowledging the part the system, and straight up Luck, play in success, too. Simply put, if you don't put in the work to achieve success (for whatever definition of success we're talking about)? You will fail. If you don't have the necessary external support? You will fail. If you are not lucky enough (that bar varying a lot depending on preciselly what we're talking about at the time, from almost irrelivant to utterly overwhelming), you will fail. Most ideologies find it convenient to ignore at Least one of these.
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  1044.  @AdhvaithSane  it is completely impractical at sea. And getting regular rail trains anywhere that Isn't the ocean (and sometimes even places that are) is mostly a matter of budget and political will, not physical/technological ability.
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  1045. Depending on how you're defining 'the main defenses' (and what they are, for that matter) that's a great way to lose a lot of tanks to prepared defenses. There's a reason armour commanded by anyone compitent doesn't go anywhere near built up areas without significant infantry support. I've always been left with the impression that the pattern is more like 'artillery and tanks blow the crap out of anything around the edges that might prevent the infantry getting to the city to begin with, followed by infantry (almost certianly with at least some vehicular support so as to have heavier weapons avaialble, yes) moving into the city to actually secure things, calling in artillery to deal with anything to solidly defended, with tanks only really being brought in if there are enemy strong points in areas that are too built up to call artillery or air support on without also destroying things you really don't want destroyed, and that after the roads leading up to that point are quite thoroughly secured by infantry. I suspect the reality is a lot more complicated and situational than either of us is making it sound, though.
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  1046. Seems to be "add an extra axis for time and rotate your reference frame so the acceleration in question is on That axis", so far as I can tell. This could be entirely wrong, but that's the most coherent explaination I'm getting...
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  1047. Sort of. Actually, Epic Games had an absolutely standard agreement with both Apple and Google to get their games on those stores. Epic recently Broke the agreement, in both cases and, predictably, got kicked off the stores (this kicks fortnite off IOS entirely, but does Not kick it off Android). Epic then sued Apple and Google for a bunch of things only Tangentially related to the fact that it's own actions basically got its game thrown out for breach of contract. They're not even going after Apple for anything they might have a hope of winning a case about either, precident says that apple is entirely within it's rights to maintain control of what can be sold on it's platform, and even more so, Epic has about as much grounds for complaint regarding Apple not selling its game as it would if Walmart refused to stock its game. None. Basically, Epic is a Shit company that routinely does shit things. On this occasion it is trying to do those shit things to Apple, which is also a shit company, and Google, which is a slightly less shit (but still pretty shit) company. (Note: Apple's position is "you breached the contract (to avoid paying us) you agreed to, you're done." Google's is "you are not in compliance with the contract (which you agreed to) and so cannot be on the play store until and unless you are once more in compliance. We're willing to help make that happen. Also, other stores exist so it's fine regardless." ... Epic is suing them both.) Epic is also entirely in the wrong on this matter.
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  1048. And you know that, if it Did get updated, they'd be screwing with the UI every six months.
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  1049. Well, the baseline for the binary corrupt/not distinction is "do you have to pay bribes just to get officials to actually do their jobs at all", so....
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  1050. Well, aside from it marking 'long' and 'short' vowels in the sense used in primary school English... which is to say not actually long and short vowels at all (which English does actually have again these days) but rather that the 'short' ones can become 'schwa' while the 'long' ones are said the same as the name of the letter (which is usually, but not always, a diphthong). In practice, the main difference is that (for the most part) the 'short' ones can be reduced to schwa if unstressed and the long ones can't (and thus usually can't appear in syllables where the stress pattern would cause schwa). Current spelling rules actually already account for this... if you know what the stress pattern you're dealing with is, because they only tell you which reading to use from among those the stress pattern permits, assuming you already Know the stress pattern... so, yeah, marking the stress pattern (or even just the primary stress from which the rest can be infered) is a Huge deal. Wind and Wind, for example. The one with the 'long' I by English primary school conventions (it says the name of the letter) is, by length in the way it is used for vowels in any other context, the Shorter of the two. Marking it as 'long' is just going to confuse things. (for reference, the two 'i' sounds in these words are formed in completely different parts of the mouth, they're functionally entirely different vowels... though this may vary by dialect). Wound and Wound, one is a diphthong, the other... you could argue it's a long vowel or a short vowel, but it's probably a mid length vowel or in free variation between the two due to not needing to actually use length as a contrast with anything. Either way, the two are completely different sounds, again. (actually, the baffling part is that they're not spelled 'wound' and 'woond', given that that is a valid spelling for that sound). The nonsense with s and z is one of the few things where just changing the spelling would actually be the best solution. Same with f and v (and do away with the idiot rule that says 'words can't end in v, so words that should end in v end in ve*, so ve is treated as vve for interactions with other sounds, and some combination of this and how recently we shifted to actually distingushing v, w, and u means that v is usually treated as if it were vv (that's two vs, not a w) in other palces as well.) *except, of course, where they instead are written as f, and thus the words that Actually end in the f have to be spelled ff... and as a result we get 'of' and abriviated 'have' being confused with one another and people pitching a fit over it when you point it out because they hear 'could've' and think 'could of' and then assume that that is what it's Supposed to be and can't understand how it could possibly actually be 'could have'.... Err... which is to say an accent marker would be a bit silly for the voicing issue when the correct characters already exist and wouldn't actually cause any meaningful confusion, unlike most other english spelling reform problems.
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  1051.  @alexzeng9833  Seems like there is definitely a significant subset of the Japanese population who would say 'absolutely yes'. ... and also plenty of Japanese people who would think that first group are idiots.
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  1052. Nah, so long as the fine is small enough compared to the increase in profits from breaking the law, or increase in expenses from following it, big businesses Literally just treat them as another tax in their budgeting and keep doing the thing anyway. Because so long as it's a fine it hits the Business, not the individual making the decisions. Especially if it will never go to court yo start with unless they object.
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  1053.  @jamesgollinger208  That's basically how copyright Worked before Disney got hold of it. I mean, roughly, the specifics varied, but it was that sort of system.
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  1054. ... why do you even have the extra lanes if you're not supposed to use them? Seems like you could save a fair bit of the roading budget by just having passing sections periodically instead of double lanes the whole way. Or, better yet, ban anything that's actually slow enough to require passing from the motorway entirely (assuming you've not managed to somehow have no alternative routes...), Then you don't even need that. Or just toss the rule entirely and save money on maintenance as a more even spread of traffic across both lanes significantly​ improves the useful lifetime of the road surface. (Or, if the entrance and exits are frequent enough, go with 'keep right unless entering/exiting/making an emergency stop). About the only setup worse than "keep left unless passing" would be... Ok I can think of downsides to others, but none that actually make them worse on balance. Just treat the motorway the same as any other multilane street: be in the lane that corresponds to the direction you're going at the next exit. Works much better. (Well, no. Obviously comply with the local road rules. The above is more about what the Road Rules should be/do)
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  1055. Same way you borrow anything else. And as I understand it, you're usually borrowing them from brokers.
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  1056. They can't protect individual words that way. Also, some of the stats are kind of badly named to begin with.
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  1057. Well, this comment thread is a disaster. Actual errors in Hardware Loaded's original post: "vedio ...." Should be "video..." Only three dots, which read as "a comma, but pause longer" or "the speaker kind of trailed off rather than finishing the sentence". Actually, it should probably be "video." followed by the best approximation of a paragraph break that you can manage, given that the topic of the next sentence has nothing to do with the topic of this one. "Wont" should be "won't" as, much as it isn't obvious, "won't" is a contraction of "will not". I honestly have no idea why it's an o rather than an i though. I could certainly make a few guesses, but they all basically amount to "languages change over time and there is no central entity* to ensure that written and spoken English match up." *Not even the dictionaries, which, in so far as they effect this at all, make the spelling Less likely to change, even if the spoken form (or the written form of related words, for that matter) does. Also, unless the "Innovation Academy" is a thing mentioned after the 20 minute mark (I got distracted by comments before I finished the video), you've misheard or misunderstood, as the buzz word being used was "Innovation Economy". Well, that and/or you're referencing something else and I'm misunderstanding, which is certainly possible. Odd stylistic quirk (not really an error): while "I hope that X" is grammatically correct, in most contexts, at least In dialects I'm familiar with, "hopefully X" is more common. (I think this has something to do with subordinate clauses and the presence or absence of the passive voice? I'm not sure about that though.) There's more going on here but this is already less me making potentially helpful corrections and more just me being a language nerd, so I'll leave it at that. Yeah, this despite the fact that English requires dummy subjects for verbs that can't really have proper subjects
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  1058. The one that Really bugs me is when the result Doesn't work and is clearly nonsensicle... but they'll still insist it's correct even when you lay out all the particulars and explain it properly.
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  1059. Reducing silent and 'redundant' characters (other than the disaster that is -ough, just... centuries of sound change have completely eliminated basically everything that made this stack of disambiguating characters make any sense) is about the least meaningful and useful change one can make (and it often turns out to reintroduce the very problems that those characters are used to solve, or it turns out that the 'fix' only works in certain dialects while the thing Being 'fixed' works well enough in most-or-all of them). Reducing irrational nonsense (like the whole mess that is not being able to end words in the letter v, which results in silent e in places where it otherwise shouldn't be, which then demands that v be treated as if it were actually vv so that the e behaves correctly, but of course we can't just write vv and solve it that way because that looks too much like w and seriously why can't we just end (normal) words with a v where appropriate! (it also fixes the of/off sillyness (which should actually be ov/of if it weren't for this nonsense)). And yes, I'm aware that this gets rid of a silent e in passing, but that's an incidental side effect rather than the goal), on the other hand, is very useful indeed. Even just actually indicating the primary stress would do a Lot to rartionalise the already existing system.
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  1060. which is then Exported, agrivatingly.
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  1061.  @johndorian4078  As I was taught it... we learned order of operations before algibra. Before algibra, you'd probably get told to right the multiplication sign in, and may or may not get an brief aside about how this was short hand that would be learned later on in algibra, but wasn't useful for what was currently being taught, so please don't do it. After algibra was a thing, people would might look at you a little funny, because while 6/x(2+1), or (x/2)(2+1) were generally considered pefectly normal, 6/2(2+1) was something that would generally only come up part way through your working for something that started out more complicated, not as a start or end point. (whether it was an acceptable answer or not would depend on the question... but I'd be hard pressed to think of a situation where a question with that as an Answer would come up (they'd usually want you to resolve the multiplication and division and produce a final result, by the time you got down to something that only had numbers in it like that.)
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  1062. The large vowel inventory isn't so much 'English is weird' as 'Germanic langauges are weird', to my understanding. Well, mostly, at least.
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  1063.  @ChantalsShoulderFly  ... They were literally protesters and locals left holding the bag when the police bailed of their own accord (while setting up a Super obvious trap that no one fell for). The Capital Hill Autonomous Zone sign was a joke (one of several with different names). The Map the media was going insane about was a random twitter shit post. There was never an insurrection of any sort. They didn't in any way revolt against the government. They changed the name (or, more accurately, actually got organized and Chose a name) so people would stop trying to claim otherwise.
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  1064. If someone points out actual errors (and points him at correct and credible information) Louis is pretty consistent about correcting his errors within a video or two of them being pointed out.
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  1065. The only people who want to get rid of the monarchy in NZ are politicians who think they'll get more power out of it, the sort of people who think civil wars are a Good idea, and the profoundly ignorant. There's plenty of people who think it would be nice if we were a republic alraedy, none who know what they're talking about who think the transition process is in any way worth it, and most change their minds pretty quickly when you point out the additional powers being a republic would give to elected politicians (most people don't trust politicians as a class, or most politicians as individuals, and almost all of them have at least one party they're so ideologically opposed to that the idea of Them ever getting hold of what are currently the Monarch's powers is terrifying. After all, they might actually Use Them! )
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  1066.  @Winnetou17  There's actually a case to be made that you should Start with Arch, absurd as that seems on the face of it, for one very simple reason: Documentation. Arch (I'm told) actually has full and proper documentation freely and easily available in a central location that's all properly organized and explained in a way that's surprisingly beginner friendly. Arch is very much not 'plug and play', as I understand it, but it also avoids the whole issue of random things not working for reasons you don't understand and the fix requiring hours of hunting around the internet only to find complete randoms telling you to enter arcane strings into the terminal with no explaination of what any of it actually Does (and half the time it's several versions out of date and no longer applicable), nor how to Reverse it if it isn't actually what you wanted to do. Of course, as with so many things, the actual answer to 'which distro should I use?" is "It depends". Fun.
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  1067. Ehh, usually is actually, unless all things taken are returned to their rightful owners as soon as possible.
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  1068. There's been a few analysises(sp) of the demographics of the USA for various reasons... Take away the overarching political ideology and you have, Roughly, the west coast (dominated by California) as one entity, Texus (and maybe its' immediate neighbours) as another, the south-east as another (though that one might fragment a bit, depending), the north east, I think Utah tends to end up as its own thing, a chunk in the north of the 'mid west' that's a coin flip if it becomes its own thing, joins the central planes, or ends up joining Canada in the long term (though it would be almost as distinct as Quebec if it Did join Canada), and then a sort of 'central planes' bit. Oh, and Alaska... which either ends up joining Canada, joining California, or staying seperate but forming very close ties with both, due to matters of finance, infrastructure, and defence. The edges don't strictly line up with state lines, either, though in most cases it's more a matter of a few 'border towns' being on the wrong side of the line on the map.
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  1069. Pretty sure the lack of a ten hour work week is because the bosses realised that it's cheaper to just pay one person to work 40 hours than to pay four people to work 10 each,Plus whatever time and effort go into scheduling things so they're not spending most of that time standing around waiting for someone else to get done with a preceding stage of the process or the like.
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  1070. Simple enough: capitalism combined with inadequate regulation (usually more of a quality and enforcement issue rather than a quantity issue) and/or corruption. It is more profitable than paying fair wages and suitable working conditions, so they do things that way. Large corporations particularly like to exploit the effects of doing different things in different jurisdictions, among other tricks. (And no, a single unified world Government wouldn't help, you'd just get the same nonsense that currently happens in the USA etc but with less mitigating factors (however insignificant those might be). Regulatory capture sucks. Edit: also what @Pvshka said.
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  1071. Your statement regarding profit on printing notes seemingly failed to account for printing replacements for existing worn out notes, btw. No argument on the actual point, mind you.
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  1072. Thing about being bought out: it requires that you sell. Don't become publicly traded and maintain majority (ideally supermajority) control and it never becomes a problem until and unless the big companies start pulling really shady shit (and there are things you can do about That, too) or the current owners want out. And even if the current owners want out, if they at all believed in the point of the exercise ratgervthan just profit, it can Still be avouded.
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  1073. that's a long way off 'eventually' for some of them, simply because being profitable (and thus able to continue functioning) requires a certain degree of ability to scale up to rather large sizes... at which point the infrastructure gets Crazy expensive. Patreon isn't too difficult to replace, really. Youtube very much is. The major credit card processors (there's less than five of them to my recollection) are basically irreplaceable. ... Well, Paypal Sort OF managed it...except it's the worst offender when it comes to pulling stupid shit and screwing over its users (like 'actively conspiring to get them killed and take their money (in the most deniably beurocratic way possible)' is not unheard of.)
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  1074. Crush them and toss some stewed or canned fruit in the bowl, drown it in milk and let it go soggy,and it becomes decidedly less sad. Soggy is important, if it still crunches it hasn't absorbed the milk and fruit flavours yet. (Just, you know, don't leave it sitting around long enough that the water from the milk and fruit evaporates back Out of it, not only is the result disgusting to eat, it's an absolute pain to clean off the plate). You Can use (small amounts of) sugar instead of fruit, and I believe most grain based milk-substitutes work just fine too. There's a reason eating whole, dry, weet-bix (or equivalent) with nothing added to them is a challenge people only do to show off. Or, you know, just eat muesli instead. There's a lot of variety to be had, some of it pretty good.
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  1075. I noticed that... Though it was hard to tell if she actually got the name wrong or if it was more of an accent issue.
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  1076. I imagine that, much like the video game industry, the manufacturers of such equipment will claim that, whichever is currently being used to beat them over the head for failing to uphold their legal responsibilities to the customer, the other is actually the case. Getting away with that shit takes a little more effort in this context, but they'll still do it. (Videogame publishers do Exactly that regarding whether they're selling a good or providing a service. Constantly.)
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  1077. Well, that's one way to show the extent of your ignorance of history, I suppose.
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  1078.  @GoldenCroc  10 year old kid walking alone to their destination? perfectly fine in New Zealand last I checked, at least in and of itself. Maybe you'd get in trouble if enough other factors stacked up... (on the other hand, leaving a kid under 14 at home unsupervised (and the 14 year old kid is sufficient supervision in most cases, if I recall rightly) will absolutely get you in trouble if anything goes wrong). Meanwhile our age to be able to drink, vote, appear in porn, sign a contract without your parents/guardian needing to countersign it/having the right to veto it (depending on the exact type of contract in question), and basically everything else are all 18, so that problem would never come up. If the police had reason to care about whether a drunk person walked home or not, in most cases it would be a matter of Encouraging it (because at least it means the guy isn't driving while intoxicated) or if he was far enough gone (or the route he'd have to take home was hazardous enough) that they had actual cause to worry, depending on the situation they might well call for a taxi themselves... or give him a ride home in the police car... or take him to the hospital... Worst case he might end up spending the night in a jail cell sleeping off the booze and go home in the morning. ... assuming he's just drunk rather than commiting any actual crimes.
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  1079.  @alanmorris9425  Credit ratings like that didn't used to be much of a thing in New Zealand (at least not the way they are portrayed as being in the USA)... imagine my surprise finding out they Are now when I first move into a rented flat on my own and can't find an electrical company willing to let me sign up to have them be the ones taking a cut of the electrical bill for doing no work (the situation with electricity distribution here is a whole rant of its own) because the credit rating outfit never updated their system to handle the Official national ID cards (that are only issued on request, and people only bother with if they don't have a drivers license or passport), and so comes back with an 'undefined' (which is equal to 'doesn't exist' which is equal, for no apparent reason, to 'has a long history of not paying their debts'). Extra bonus: When I finally found an outfit that Wasn't doing sketchy shit (the entire process made it Very likely the credit rating agency was piggybacking off the ID numbers on the drivers licenses and passports for their records rather than using their own system ... which is actually illegal here)... they took my Community Services Card (government issued non-photo ID that indicates you are entiteld to certain concessions due to poverty, disability, or a couple of other things) as sufficient, no need to talk to the credit rating outfit at all... I guess on the basis that having such a card means that if I don't pay my bills they can just go talk to the local office of the relevant government department, who will pay the bill and take it out of my income (possibly with some sort of penalty) until it's paid off (at least unless I also go talk to that office and give them a very good explaination about what's going on, in which case, depending on who you get handling the issue, they can either be very helpful and understanding or downright malicious about resolving things).
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  1080. English pronouns aren't gendered either, they're Sexed. As are Many English nouns. (actually, the only context in which 'gender' applies to any word in English is as a euphemism for sex (not the verb), which came about to get certain immature idiots and whiny busybodies to stop causing problems for officials due to the word 'sex' appearing on official documents) The distinction is pretty basic: If they were gendered in the usual meaning when talking about langauges, then it would interact with other parts of the grammar, and wouldn't actually care about the reality of the thing being refered to. Meanwhile, English nouns care about the physical sex of the thing being refered to (where applicable). This can be extended out to refer to things that Appear male or female, or to anthropomorphise inanimate objects (because English doesn't have the ability to stick something in the 'animate' catagory without also sticking it in the 'male sex' or 'female sex' catagory. This is also why refering to someone as 'it' (other than a newborn baby when you've not been told their sex yet) is Very insulting. You're not just not refering to them as male or female, but are in fact actively declaring them to not only not be a person, but in fact less capable of thought and voluntary action than most animals.))
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  1081.  @Bohemianrevival  Well, sure... if you ignore the entire process by which Russia acquired basically everything east of the Urals.
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  1082. how much of the issue is that people mostly live in suburbs that are in turn not served by any practical transit that actually links to the rail network that would be providing the service to the airport?
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  1083. In my experience, no, but apparently so? I mean, I struggle to talk to people At All, but if I can manage that bit, asking directions is just sensible? Not that it actually comes up much in the first place, given that I can read maps properly and understand such concepts as street signs (if the font isn't garbage on the map or the sign you don't even need to be able to actually read them as such), and, lacking intersections to use as reference to orientate the map, a road only goes in two directions, and where you came from is one of them, so you can line it up that way. But yeah, guys not asking for directions when they should is more common than women not asking for directions when they should (though, having asked, the next step is actually listening to/writing down the directions, then following them properly. Doing so or not seems to skew in the Other direction.)
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  1084.  @padarousou  indeed. Once you hit 4k going higher offers no qualitative improvement of the experience for the human viewer, the only benefit is permiting the same experience to be attained from further away from the screen, provided a larger screen is being used. Well, unless you're trying to deliver VR video (why?!) which is Functionally 8k at every step of the process prior to the point where the video card splits its output between the two displays in the headset by way of having to deliver a 4k video to each of them.
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  1085.  @padarousou  a lot of creators upload their videos in 4k or higher resolutions not because they need to, but because of some shenanigans in how youtube handles bitrates. Something similar may or may not happen with live streams. That said, there's almost never any point in Watching the video in greater than 1080 unless you're playing it in the livingroom on a 4k tv. Playing it on your PC with a large, high resolution monitor? no point increasing the resolution, just stick the video in a window of a size appropriate to the video's resolution and do something else with the rest of the screen.
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  1086. ... I'm pretty sure they Are. An insurance policy is a contract. Generally, attempting to change such unilaterally and without notice... Results in a judge firmly reminding the party who attempted to do so that that's not how contracts work, and (at minimum) enforcing the unmodified version of the contract. (Changing the contract unilaterally With notice generally requires the contract include a clause saying they can do that... And any contract with such a clause is one you probably shouldn't sign.)
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  1087. It helps that you're usually paying less than half as much per song if you buy the whole album, too.
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  1088. Well, or Very wrong. They don't like governments actively being annoyed with them, and so on.
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  1089. I've been using a graphics tablet instead of a mouse for a while now due to shoulder problems making a mouse non-viable. Having a fully split keyboard (substantial ergonomic benefits) and sufficiently wide shoulders ('sufficiently' is 'not noticeably so for an adult male, possibly even a bit narrower than average), I can stick the tablet between the two keyboard halves, which means I"m not losing much in the way of desk space in practice. It really only has two downsides: Absolute Positioning input doesn't play nicely with the camera in most first person games (and some others. And switching it to relative positioning often only switches the camera from 'swings around randomly and constantly' to 'will stay still when you aren't trying to move it, but still unusable otherwise'), and, in my case, I lose a Little bit of precision when clicking on tiny things, or in situations where slight movement has an effect on the result (the movement to lower the stylus to the tablet to 'click' generally also results in Slight cursor movement, not enough to matter Most of the time, but when tiny movements matter it's a problem). My solution to the former is a game controller. Either the game will accept controller input in the first place, or you can use a program that interprets controller inputs as mouse inputs to achieve the same result (Steam can do this, and on Linux AntiMicroX will do the job). For the latter, I also use the game controller (can 'click' without bumping the cursor, among other benefits), or if that's no good (or if something has failed and isn't working right then) my keyboard is programable, and I have a layer set up for mouse inputs. Not great for regular use, but makes a good backup for most edge cases that the other two can't handle, or if one of them temporarily stops working. Having used all three of these input methods, they all have areas where they shine and are actually superior to the mouse, and areas where they're hopeless (which fortunately do not overlap), while the mouse is really really good at all of the things... the trade off is that the mouse essentially uses ergonomics as a dump stat. It is Ergonomically the worst option by a long shot. My conclusion is that, if you want to get rid of the mouse entirely, then depending on what you're actually using your computer for, you're very likely to need more than one input device to fully replace the mouse's functionality, but if that's not an issue for you the graphics tablet is a pretty big upgrade. Oh, added bonus: a small graphics tablet might take up more space at rest than a mouse, but you don't need clear space Around it anymore than you do around your keyboard (which is, some in front so your arms aren't knocking into stuff while using it), while a mouse generally does need a fair bit if you don't want to loose precision or put even more strain on your wrists. If nothing about the above puts you off, I absolutely recommend usign a graphics tablet.
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  1090. Well, arguably the people disagreeing with the position are still talking about it, I guess?
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  1091.  @mixlllllll  ... I think that says more about Finland and/or Finns than it does about fun or booze, honestly.
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  1092. Ehh, there's is significant (though far from total) overlap between the vegan crowd and the 'no fun allowed' crowd in a lot of places. Fun without meat is entirely possible. Fun with the sort of people who forbid meat? ... well, sometimes not so much. Alchole free weddings are rare here, to my understanding (though if someone of significance to the process had, for example, had issues with alcholism in the past, you'd not get any real complaints if you did it that way)... but the booze being limited to a couple of glasses of wine with the meal at the reception is far more common. Of course, depending on who is involved, everyone getting completely hammered on cheep beer is also entirely possible. Though usually people are putting in enough of an effort to not ruin the event that it doesn't get out of hand.
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  1093. It's postfix. Contrast with prefix, which also shows up in grammar (though gramatical postfixes are called suffixes instead, for some reason). Infixes also show up in grammar, though as English barely uses them for anything other than adding expletives for emphasis they tend not to appear in standard education on the matter.
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  1094. Better that what some of the (Australian owned) banks in New Zealand used to do (might still, for all I know, I switched banks.). They'd give you the full amount you asked for, bill you for the fee, forcing your account into the negative, then hit you Again with an unscheduled (or something like that) overdraft fee. Which was just the tip of what could be a Very nasty iceburg (I dodged the rest of it myself, but one of my mother's friends, who was on a very tight budget, ran into major issues because of this and the rest of the associated nonsense that could happen) Meanwhile, Kiwibank (who I'm with these days) will respond to an attempt to withdraw more money than you have with "sorry, can't do that. Would you like to try another transaction?" And basically doesn't Have transaction fees for personal banking. (They do charge you for the privilege of having physical statements mailed to you these days though.)
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  1095. Google maps did not solve that problem, at all, which caused my brother some drama a few weeks back when he had to go to a business meeting and a number of the roads either didn't exist anymore or were closed (wasn't his only problem that day, mind you, but it didn't help.)
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  1096. The supports aren't good enough, the extra weight would drop the floor into the basement (once the bring in all their stuff, at least.) That was half the argument against self leveling cement, at least.
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  1097.  mister.T Jr  Nah, the USA's got a two party system. The problem is that, thanks to decades of crazy propaganda and long standing social and systemic problems, one party is right wing extremist crazy people, and the other party is Everything Else... and thus only has to worry about the right-most parts of their voter base (which, in most other countries, would make up about the middle of the Right of the entire spectrum) possibly voting for anyone other them, and thus constantly take measures to appease that right most group to keep support away from the crazies (with various degrees of success) while mostly ignoring everyone else. (this would change if an actual third party could ever get off the ground, but preventing that from ever happening is one of the things the establishment of both parties manage to agree on.) Multi-party systems often still form broadly 'left' and 'right' blocks, mind you, but they tend to have a center bit, and there's room to vote for someone other than the guys who keep screwing up without having to vote entirely against your beliefs. Mind you, First Past the Post voting will, over time, inevitably lead to a two party system. It's just how the incentives which guide the behaviors of the different actors in the system work. On the other hand, purely proportional systems do have their own issues, and the various mixed systems have their issues too. On balance, though, pure FPP on an electorate by electorate basis is pretty good right up until political parties start to be a thing, at which point it becomes a disaster and needs scrapping in favour of a system that doesn't automatically eliminate all but the most powerful two groups.
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  1098. I mean, that's rather the point of the exercise. Thing is, the way scientific progress works, 99% of the time the result is just four other people figuring out the same thing in other countries a couple of months or years later.
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  1099.  @border7778  Yeeeah.. it's a lot more complicated than that and pretending it isn't is buying into a Lot of propaganda that exists largely to let unsavory individuals get away with things they shouldn't by pointing you in other directions. Lets just say that while there have been a few stand out instances of the British/central government doing things they shouldn't have that were very racist, they also get blamed for a LOT of things that either werren't them or just didn't happen (for instance, the perpetual story about maori kids getting beaten for speaking maori in school? Europea kids would also get beaten for speaking maori in school. This was because said beatings were standard disciplinary measures at the time and there was official policy that Maori was not to be spoken in schools. Said policy did not, however, originate with the evil white government attempting to oppress the maori, but rather with the (rather foolish) white government attempting to Support Maori Culture and autonomy by going along with with the Maori leadership of the day wanted... said amori leadership being a bunch of racist old men who didn't what then 'inferior' non-maori 'defiling' their 'sacred' language. ... ... Bit of an own goal, there, really. ) Mind you, the same sort of people do the same thing to those on the other side of such issues, because actually rationally looking at the facts might let actually reasonably conclusions be reached by actually reasonable people who would then not be too busy dealing with both sides' crazies to actually to a stop to the nonsense people like David Seymour get up to.
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  1100. No, English spelling does have some issues that do need straightening out. The problem is that most people's assumptions as to what those issues are are incorrect and have more to do with the quality of teaching they recieved on the subject than they do with the actual system itself (grammar is even worse in this regard, mind you). For example: Many rules of English spelling regarding how one is to read (and consequently write) vowels presuppose that the reader already knows the stress pattern of the word, thus only disambiguating the reading of the vowel if the stress pattern actually permits more than one reading. Which runs into the problem of the English language having such a large vocabulary that you're inevitably going to encounter words you have never heard someone else say, and thus have no idea of the correct stress pattern for. An astonishingly large amount of the seeming 'inconsistency' in English spelling just straight up Vanishes if the primary stress(es), and thus the stress pattern, are Actually Marked. Also, there is really no justification for the persistence of -ough beyond 'we've not yet figured out a way to get everyone to agree to a change it'.
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  1101.  @paigetomkinson1137  Well, at least ONE varety attempts to argue that Basic Addition is a product of white imperailism that shouldn't be forced on black children... Which is to say that it is a blatantly racist campaign aimed at sabotaging the education and prospects of black children wrapped up in popular leftist buzzwords. Hence Black politicians in the UK resisting attempts to export it there. perhaps there are other varieties that are not so odious.
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  1102.  @aaad3552  in order to be useful, a model must be simpler than reality. By way of being simpler than the thing it is modeling, it is thus inherently incorrect in at least some respects. Consequently, all models are wrong. Some models represent what they are intended to in ways that one can act on and get the results intended, others are flawed, based on nonsense and producing bad results if one acts on them. The former are useful, the latter are not. Or, in other words, in what way and to what degree they are incorrect is important.
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  1103. All those germanic vowels and barely pronounced suffixes, with almost ever other sound being "p p p p p p p" yeah? For extra pain, try the full thing, if you're not already doing so: "Peter Piper picked a pair of pickled peppers, a pair of pickled peppers Peter Piper Picked. If Peter Piper Picked a pair of pickled peppers, where's the pair of pickled peppers Peter Piper Picked?" Actually, for all I know that might make it easier. Probably not though. Also, I don't think I managed to type "peppers" correctly even once when typing that out. Every error was different too. (I fixed it, obviously)
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  1104. I suspect it's mostly ease of replacement.
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  1105.  @ozemale6t928  There's apparently some advantage to doing that in terms of resulting print quality if they're doing it right... but the main reason they do it, and don't have the option to NOT do it, is to drain your cyan ink faster... I have a vague (possibly inaccurate) recollection that this is more common on printers that have a single 'colour' carttridge than those with seperate cartridges for each colour (which I believe are kind of rare anyway?)
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  1106. Ahh, the joys of boilerplate legal forms.
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  1107. Mind you, even once you take that into account, the USA is still second, and unreasonably far ahead of everyone else even after taking population into account.
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  1108. The baffling part is people still falling for what amounts to 'electricity is magic' ... it's not like the scam isn't over a century old at this point.
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  1109. It's worth noting that the same period is called the same thing in Britian (in many ways at the height of its power at the time), and the term fits the situation There fairly well. Well, such is my understanding anyway. This is the first time I've actually heard the term applied to the USA, anyway.
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  1110. meanwhile, in Europe and Aus/NZ (though at least in the latter case this is a recent-ish change) just insulate the base of the prongs so the levering issue never becomes a safety hazard to begin with. (and NZ at least has switched sockets as standard too. you occasionally find unswitched sockets, but they're generally old and/or intended for a specific purpose where the thing plugged into them will both be unplugged only for repair or removal) 45 degree plugs are generally more practical while still maintaining the advantages of stright down plugs, too (though whether you get a 45 degree plug or 'straight out the back' plug with the Aus/NZ plugs depends on how recent it is and what the expected use case it.). Basically, Aus/NZ plugs are Slightly less safe than British ones (not by enough to matter much though), while being noticeably more convenient (usually). Also, wallwarts are just a menace in general.
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  1111. To be fair, most of the words sited in the video were words borrowed from German directly centuries after the two languages split.
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  1112. Militia, conscripts, etc. are pretty much always reliable and effective... when defending their homes, provided their superiors and administration haven't sabotaged them in any of a number of ways (such as selling off their much needed equipment for various reasons). They've always been highly variable in any other role, from 'functionally an elite unit' to 'more damaging to your own army than the enemy', and everything in between (and a few oddballs off to the side, too). Quite what results you get out of them depends on a Lot of factors. Moral is definitely an important one.
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  1113. Given what the cache actually Does... That sounds very strange. The sort of thing that's Probably either a flawed idea or a scam... But that changes Everything if it turns out to be legit and work. Still, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence ... And your claim's pretty extraordinary.
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  1114. They make about as much sense as some of the early railways being cable hauled by stationary steam engines at the end(s) of the line. Which is to say plenty, for a given tech level and budget... right up until the engines got better by enough that the benefits no longer outweighted the drawbacks by enough to justify it.
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  1115. "yes" in response to the statement "You still haven't subscribed to my channel" can only mean "you are correct, I have not". No is a bit more ambiguous (it could be 'no, I haven't, you're right' or 'no, I have, you're wrong'), but in isolation 'yes' can only mean that you are Correct. Right up until you turn that statement into a question. Then it gets messy. The way you're Supposed to deal with this in English is to just Not Ask Questions In The Negative... not if you are expecting a one word answer without elaboration, anyway. In fact, asking negative questions like that is a trick that one learns/is taught specifically to Force the other person to actually engage with and continue the conversation rather than just giving a single word answer that kills it dead, because they Must elaborate in order to not be misunderstood.
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  1116. That sounds less like a union and more like an HR department that's been outsourced to dodge employment laws somehow...
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  1117.  @SuperUltimateLP  Apparently most western european and north american road bridges won't hold them either. Rail bridges will, but you really don't want to be crossing most of Those anywhere near enemies (and the best way to cross them is loaded up on a train anyway).
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  1118. well, there are certainly people who pronounce it as 'ahmind'
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  1119. But also keeping the parties isolated from each other. Of course, there's no way they doing a full decontamination between parties in a given unit, so any advantages are immediately lost, but at least it actually had some to start with, unlike the "barely even trying to pretend they found a technicality to operate under" examples Louis has been showing us in most cases.
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  1120. @Teringventje the only functional definition of "Republic" is "not a monarchy". All other supposed definitions I've ever come across have problems. By that definition, the USA is absolutely a Republic... Though North Korea arguably isn't.
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  1121. Yes, delaying them a few weeks to allow time to actually conduct proper campaigns in the lead up to them, which works in favour of her Opponents, because said opponents requested such and went on record saying that not doing so would be unfair is the same as canceling them. good job.
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  1122. Doesn't matter how much work you do if it doesn't actually address the problem though.
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  1123. You probably weren't alone... but for people who've had to deal with them (see: anyone in Europe, anyone who ever got the European versions of video games, anyone who played strategy games set in europe, and probably several others) they're really good shorthand... and for everyone else, they're not that hard to look up.
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  1124. Mostly it seems to make it monumentally easier to ruin a perfectly good vehicle after the fact (and then charge you a subscription for the privilage of not loosing vital features) if the usual practices in industries claiming such benefits are anything to go by.
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  1125.  @hagoryopi2101  Youtube is pretty good about preventing the malicious code injection, to my understanding (largely by way of the advertisments they display being just another video like any other + a link), but have not the Slightest interest in doing anything about fraudulent advertisements. The links also can't be inherently malicous, to my understanding... but they can very much go to a site that is just straight up a malware delivery platform (maybe with a cut out splash page with a 'click here to X' link just to fool any bots youtube might have set up to half-arse verifying things).
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  1126.  @sub0rLai  for reference, it's copyright. From 'the right to control who gets to make copies of your work'.
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  1127.  @zuko9085  they announced it because then others would pile in and Also sell short, which in turn made it seem like the company in question was doing worse (after all, people were trying to get rid of shares in it!), Driving the price down further, making profit both bigger and more likely for the short sellers.
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  1128. Unfortunately, the treaties about such things allow very limited scientific whaling... and also involve a lot of small pacific islands that are rather poorly off and thus VERY suseptable to bribes (of the 'we'll build this really important infrastructure for you at little or no additional cost if you vote against the latest attempt to get rid of the loopholes we use to hunt whales' sort.). And without getting that sort of things passed (and, frankly, if it did, Odds are good Japan would just withdraw form the agrement unless it involved a lot of other stuff that was very important to them) trying to deal with the whalers in any sensible way rappidly starts causing .... Problems.
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  1129. before the modern therapist was a thing, at least in the west, the role still existed. In fact, it was often a large part of the role of the local priest. Of course, the resultant quality of care varied a lot (though, to be fair, that hasn't changed, some therapists are good at their job, some are flat out scammers).
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  1130. Old office was in the old shop. The new 'set' is just his new, much bigger, office in the new shop with proper sound dampening panels (and some actual lighting beyond the normal ceiling mounted stuff). So you're kind of out of luck on that front.
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  1131.  @yashagrawal88  You have to be doing something REALLY WRONG for metros to be less eco-friendly than road vehicles... 'cept bikes. Simple economies of scale tend to make them massively more energy efficient and less polluting per person-kilometre travelled, even if they're not electrified. It gets even better if they are.
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  1132. -ette is a diminutive suffix, by the by. It's Where we got 'diskette' (a smaller disc) from, for example. (And, yes, it is often used to indicate femininity as well, as is common in many languages)... Possibly cassette too (a small case, which holds the tape). There are a few others diminutive ... Thingies... Too, but as is the case with a lot of things like this, they're mostly not super productive in modern standard English. Not across dialects, at least.
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  1133. If she wouldn't date Johnny Bravo, it's not Velma :P
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  1134.  @starventure  Yeah, see, the problem there is less mass transit and more the perpetial US incompitence and corruption when it comes to urban and transit planning and infrastructure. Mass transit is plenty inviting... when the people responsible for planning and running it aren't (effectively) idiots. See, for example, pretty much everywhere that isn't the USA that actually put any money or effort into mass transit (you know, plus or minus the places where the entire city is basically a shithole and the transit is the one thing they managed to actually get right, and even then the transit is no worse than anywhere else). Putting transit stations in the middle of highwayus has always confused me... a lot. Running Track down the highway median or elevated over it makes perfect sense, lets you dodge the NIMBYs for the most part, among other factors, but building stations there? Stations are Expensive, why the hell would you stick them somewhere no one can actually Get At Them? (yes, yes, I'm aware that they're usually either interchanges or have pedestrian bridges to the surrounding area, it's still generally fairly rubbish compared to having the track Leave the Highway and building the station somewhere actually useful.)
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  1135. Shockingly, as with all such matters, effective regulation to prevent perverse incentives from undermining the point of the exercise is required. Corruption inherently prevents effective regulation, and US politics are horrifically corrupt. Often by design. Heck, Federal politics have the corruption so baked into the system and normalised that most Americans don't even really view it as corruption any more. States... Well, some of them make the worse ex-soviet nations in the 1990s look good <_< Though, regardless, 'less for your money' isn't inherently bad if what you're getting is still meeting acceptable minimum standards and the actual cost (rather than cost relative to what you get) is also dropping into a range that more people can afford. Seriously, if supply goes up and price doesn't go down, either you're Still not meeting demand (and thus more work is required), or someone's actively preventing that from happening and needs taking to with a (Metaphorical, I would hope) bat until they cease doing so.
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  1136. There was the guy right at the begining who basically stepped into the road in front of him then just... Stopped... As well.
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  1137. ... hence the whole 'not opening the border' thing. Also, level 3 is still pretty restrictive. Travel is still limited. RNZ had a bunch of videos of the measures businesses are having to take in order to operate (also proving the advice that masks are generally not worth the effort for the general population. Not because they don't work when used properly, but because most people Don't use them properly.)
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  1138. mind you, the usual way of providing off street parking (a small lot of 8 to 16 spaces for one to four shops immediately on the other side of the footpath from the road) can be a major safety hazard on busy roads, especially near intersections and when that parking is also used by employees... and as a loading area for commercial vehicals (add a couple of inconveninently placed poles for powerlines and street lights plus the pillars in the actual car and experience the joys of multiple near misses with traffic accidents in the course of one attempt to park simply due to a badly possitioned work truck and obstructed sight lines!) I'm sure it's fine if done properly. It's VERY easy to do improperly.
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  1139. Pro tariff is easy, so long as you're also either anti-corruption and stupidity, taking advantage of the corruption and stupidity, or an idiot. Properly implimented and managed tariff systems can be highly beneficial to the economy. The problem is, the moment you start making exemptions, adding subsidies to the mix, or implimenting tariffs as an Attack rather than a Defence (especially due to political rather than economic considerations), you are no longer implementing or managing a functional tariff system, you're just pointlessly harming your own economy. For all that the term has been used to cover all sorts of other shit practices, the original idea behind "free trade" was basically 'ya know, maybe we should Stop Doing That!'. It wasn't "no tariffs" so much as "no stupid tariffs that just make things worse". Tariffs to level the playing field so local industry etc can compete against cheap imports (by way of being similar in price so that quality etc matter more) are absolutely fine and cause little or no harm and noticeable benefit (mind you, they work best at the City-and-surrounding-area level, not the national level, especially when that's USA level nonsense.)
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  1140. No more so than there is with closed source. 'open source' just means software where the source code is available for public inspection, allowing greater knowledge of what it's actually doing and (in theory) making flaws easier to spot. In practice there's a number of secondary elements that usually go along with that regarding licensing... and then the term has spread to encompase similar licensing in other contexts, where it becomes some combination of 'non-propritary', 'avialable for public inspection', 'very liberal licensing', and 'accepting voluntary contributions from interested parties'. That 'public inspection' part is usually supposed to act as the safety against the sort of risks you are concerned about. How successful it is varies based on how many people with the skills necessary to spot bad actors are actually intersted in inspecting the specific project. On the other hand, most closed source projects are the product of large corporations acting with little or no supervision and great motivation to hide any flaws (malicious or otherwise) in their product. They're Usually better about vetting who is involved in the project, sure... but then the bosses flat out Mandate it contain various malware as part of the point of the excercise... something open source projects generally can't get away with. Of particular note with open source projects is that if there's a lot of demand for the function provided and some sort of flaw (malware or otherwise) is found in the existing version, if the origional team won't fix it, you'll usually find it doesn't take Too long for a fork without those flaws to be created by an interested party (often someone who needed a version without the flaws themselves).
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  1141. That and not paying taxes, yes. Seriously, when you actually look into the historical records rather than American founding myth nationalist propaganda, the whole sequence of events is one giant unjustified tax revolt, that only got as far as it did because using the army to put it down was expensive and the taxes in question came about due to a need to make up for budget shortfalls caused by a recently ended globe spanning war that was Started by (still at the time British-)American colonists illegally raiding their French-American neighbours to line their own pockets... And upon gaining independence taxes went UP (turns out the British were straight up subsidising the administration and defence of the colonies with the taxes paid by the people back in Britain) and never came back down. ... but those wealthy individuals who started the whole mess (and their families and friends) sure did do a great job of writing tax codes that left them a lot of ways to be effectively exempt from those taxes...
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  1142. And what happens if your oh so wonderful cheap parts that you insist the repair person use are cheap because they're garbage and That is what damages your device? I mean, I know what would happen Here, roughly, and it would be quite reasonable, usually. I'm pretty sure what happens in the USA is that you sue the repair guy for doing exactly what you instructed him to do, and either you lose and further undermine consumer protections or you win and put the repair guy out of business, which is a pattern of events that tends to be bad for the existance of small businesses within the affected industry. Minimum,the repair guy should be absolutely within his rights to refuse to repair your device if you insist on him using parts he can't verify to his satisfaction are actually suitable for the job.
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  1143. @kgbgb3663 Did you include any links, slurs, or chunks of text commonly used by spammers, scammers, or people engaged in malicious harrasment that gets bad enought that youtube can't ignore it without running into legal problems? Because Youtube generally doesn't actually censor much on the basis of political alignment (iit's downright KEEN on funneling you into more and more radical stuff because that will keep you coming back and sticking around!) but it REALLY doesn't like anything that can cause legal problems or cause people to stop using the site. ... and it uses AI to do this. The biggest problem with said AI being that the I part is a flat out lie and the necessary human oversight required to keep it doing it's job correctly and not become deranged doesn't really exist. Seperately, youtube does provide the Channel Owner with some capacity to filter comments, and also has a tendency to punt what it sees as borderline comments to the channel owner to review and then approve or deny (at which point they will be posted or deleted)... many channel owners either never get around to checking or set it to auto deny everything... many others just turn it off... and it's youtube so that almost certainly doesn't actually work Properly anwyay.
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  1144. Well, to be fair, as a counter argument, I direct your attention to the current state of the USA. Monarchy isn't really the problem, Any system that allows a single individual too much control and influence can suffer that problem very easily. Various solutions to this problem have been tried with varying effect over the course of history. Even the most successful have had their issues. Not that I disagree with anything but your conclusion, and even then only partially.
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  1145. It's the least bad solution to a number of legitimate problems... But there is a Reason that a lot of places have Very strict regulations and controls on it. It can very easily go horribly wrong otherwise. I mean, Fiat currency is a related matter, much the same deal. The fact of the matter is that the system works better with them than without them, so long as you have suitable regulation (and enforcement there of) keeping the idiot humans from breaking things. (Note that this category usually includes politicians, bankers, and the like, in this instance.)
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  1146.  @sohopedeco  'easter' being basically 'passover with christian heresy* stapled to it and then a coat of pseudo-pagan paint slapped on top'. *say whatever else you like about Christianity one way or the other, when it was starting out it was technically a heretical sect of judeism.
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  1147. it's not Too bad for those who already speak a germanic, or to a lesser extent romance, language (though the Celtic bits will still trip them up, being few in number but also very core to the grammar), and once you get further affield in terms of what the learner's native language is, English isn't particularly any worse than any other langauge equally distant from their own. Well... English spelling/orthography is pretty awful, and being a native speaker doesn't make that any less so, but while it rivals Japanese in that respect (though I'd rate Japanese as a Little worse), there are a number of south asian written langauges that have them both beaten quite thoroughly in orthographical awfulness.
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  1148. given how cheap heatpumps are to run, I would have expected that to be the baseline to compare to to begin with <_<
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  1149. While potentially sad for the framework guys... If it can be made to stick, for consumers that's kind of the desired result. Framework doing well out of it (and maybe becoming a big deal in their own right) would be a nice bonus though.
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  1150. Rough summary (if I haven't misunderstood): Maya's tense/aspect/mood system doesn't actually have a Tense element, instead offloading that work onto aspect and mood, in such a way as to let them also skip a bunch of temporal adverbs and adjectives. English does a lesser version of this when dealing with the difference between present and future. It marks the Past tense as a tense, then lumps present and future together as a null-marked "not that", so far as tense goes. Moods and aspects are then combined in such a way as to render the incorrect option between present and future nonsensical (or the distinction irrelevant), rather than actually having two separate tenses. (And yes, some of the mood markers commonly get described as marking "future tense" instead, but that's almost entirely because no one bothers actually explaining aspect or mood to the native English speaker untill said individual tries to learn a language that uses them differently. (Or studies linguistics, even at the level of a hobby, and goes "Oh, so That's how that works!")) Maya seems, going by the video, to do something similar, but instead of just the present/future distinction, uses it to indicate all temporal distinctions and relationships (past, present, future, before, after, during, and so on.)
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  1151. New Zealand also doesn't have laws against advertising medicine directly to the public. However, it does have stricter standards for advertising Anything, and the process of getting perscriptions is Very different (the US system involves a lot of 'bribing doctors to prescribe unnecessary drugs' as normal and accepted practice. That is very much NOT a thing in New Zealand), so you mostly end up with advertising for painkillers, alergy meds, and a couple of niche things where the advertisment ends up (in practice) serving more to raise awareness of the problem the product is intended to treat, rather than actually selling the product, because you 'ask your doctor if X is right for you' and the doctor almost universally says 'No, no it is not.'
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  1152. ​ @janetlynch1170  Thing is, while he was being a bit of an arse about it... he wasn't actually wrong. ... ... which is probably (at least part of) why he felt comfortable being an arse about it.
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  1153.  @MrCroky123  Oh, as casting goes it was a rather dubious decision for a number of reasons, but yes, terrible might be overstating things. But yeah, the terrible part wasn't casting her for the role... it was letting her Talk To The Public.
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  1154. Some of our devices do, in fact, not have an actual off switch here in New Zealand. It's Really Annoying, because sometimes those same devices are also designed on the assumption that you'll never Want to turn them off, so do stupid things like revert to factory default settings when you do. (These are usually things made primarily for other markets, admittedly. Not always though) Most have actual switches on the device as well though. Broadly speaking, the wall switch on the power plugs (in most cases identical to the light switches, as I understand it) provide a whole bunch of minor improvements to safety (mostly not Electrical safety (though a little of that too) as such so much as safety from fire, tripping hazards, and 'i just stepped on a spikey thing!', especially for children, the elderly, etc.), convenience (particularly when mucking around with proper extension cords. No, not multi-boxes.), And reducing wear and tear (many less instances of plugging and unplugging, plus the rapid disconnect the same as in light switches). Of course, our plugs aren't a Lot better than american ones. The plug housing Always flairs out to completely cover all three sockets even on two pin plugs and keep your hand away from the pins (well, some old ones didn't. They do now though!) the bit you grab to unplug it is a bit more solid (admittedly, it's often some sort of transformer/converter brick thing...) and the pins are Never long enough to stick out of the socket when plugged in properly, but that's pretty much it. Standard safety measure is inserting plastic dummy-plugs (that are roughly equivalent to childproof lids on medicine bottles) into unused sockets, but no one bothers with that if there aren't small children in the house (not least because they have a Really Annoying (though perfectly safe and easy to fix) failure state where the mechanism to get them out breaks off...)
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  1155. ... but that would actually be a valid English sentence, spelling aside. (I mean, most people would use the shorter "bike" rather than the full "bicycle", but the two work identically when it comes to grammar) Maybe "Let's Cycling!"?
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  1156. English disagrees.
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  1157.  @DakotaFord592  Yeah, the USA seems to have mostly screwed up the logic. Self checkouts seem to be doing quite well where I live, but that seems to be because the logic was less 'minimize staff to cut costs' and more 'increase customer throughput'... they basically got added as express lanes while retaining ther regular checkouts (well, minus one or two so there was space for the self checkouts to exist in). seems to work pretty well. Especially as they don't treat the customers as thieves (there's a staff member hanging around, but they spend most of their time quickly correcting machine or user error, generally being friendly and helpful when needed and otherwise out of the way... Though there's probably a security guy standing somewhere near the exit (a bit away from the checkouts), though detering (or detaining) shoplifters is only one of the reasons for that.
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  1158. Try looking for studies on the specific electromagnetic frequencies, rather than 5G specifically, if you haven't already. Then realise that most US research is locked behind paywalls, unhelpfully (also true of other places to varying degrees.)
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  1159. Say what you will about him otherwise, but he's always been good at shutting down idiots ^_^
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  1160.  @drlukewhite  It probably helps that English's Actual irregularities aren't actually too bad compared to any other langauges. Though a lot of people think there are many more than actually exist, because, for some reason, it's pretty common to teach what is actually a rather complex system as if it were much simpler than it is, and the things that don't work as a result of what is being taught not actually being how it actually works get written off as 'irregular' or flaws, when they're not. And just to clarify my stance on these things: There's no good reason why -ough is such a disaster and hasn't been at least tidied up. Just... Sound change has completely destroyed the logic that lead to that spelling in the first place. (mind you, I'm not sure how much I like the typical replacements ("tho", "enuff", and so on)). And there's no good reason why (normal) words can't end in v... especially as English has plenty of words that Do end in v, you just can't write them that way... which necessitates adding a silent 'e' to the end... but then that would affect preceeding vowels, so we have to claim that v is always treated as if it was a double letter, but you can't have actual double v, because vv and w are too hard to tell apart. So now we have a whole stack of special rules and exceptions when we could... just let words end in v in written form and be done with it. Which is to say, there are certainly some Issues that could use tidying up. Just... mostly not the things that your average random English speaker would think of. Functionally, for all that English is written using the latin alphabet, in partctice, between the two, three, and even four letter combinations needed to indicate certain sounds, and the position in a syllable affecting how a charcter is to be read, it really functions more like a syllabalry (I believe that's the word I want, I may be muddling it up).
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  1161. For reference, Android already encompases many different phones made by many different companies, and the possibility of loading different OSs does exist (it's complicated, technical, and the options have issues, but it's there). The main problem is that Samsung is the big name brand for such things and copies every anti-consumer thing Apple manages to get away with that it possibly can.... and that Google isn't really any better than Apple or Microsoft over all (the Ways they are bad are different, sure, but the extent, not so much).
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  1162. For reference: they will not be charging for installs that have already happend. They've done enough shenanigans that they don't get in trouble for Retroactively charging for things, because they're only charging for things that happen after the date of the change (along with some other contractual nonsense). They're either violating EU law or commiting fraud when it comes to determining the bill, among other legal problems, but they're not making That basic mistake.
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  1163.  @ThomasTomiczek  Oh, it may still be Desirable to buy oil from Russia (when they're not being shitheads), but it will no longer be Necessary. An important distinction.
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  1164.  @512TheWolf512  being fair, half the time lobbying is mostly Just Actually Turning Up (to talk to the politician in their office prior to the farce of a formality that is the public meeting). Of course, large portions of how US society is set up seems to be built around making That (and voting) difficult-to-impossible if you're not rich, and there's plently of bribery to go around too.
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  1165. Thing is... it doesn't actually matter? there's the same number of them either way.
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  1166. Of course, that whole debate is rather shot in the foot by the fact that a fully split keyboard (functionally two half keyboards connected by a wire so they can actually be positioned Correctly for the person using them) with ortholinier key arrangement (the columns being straight rather than the rows), with no change to what key is where relative to each other, has a much greater benefit with much lower overhead, compared to moving which key is where around without actually fixing the fundamental problems with the basic interface element that is the standard keyboard. Benefits of moving the keys around relative to each other are more dependent on the task being done (or at least, done most frequently) than any other factor, and most of the actual benefits seem to come more from better positioning and arangments of the non-alphanumeric keys. (it's rather amusing how much things are improved by simply... not having a caps lock and freeing up that slot for something Useful.)
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  1167.  @twistieman1078  ehh, corporations have this strange tendency to flat out lie if it'll make them more money. Trustworthy, they generally are not. Still, there are limits to the sort of thing they can get away with without actually Credible entities taking them to task for their nonsense, and the various issues people have with 5G (well, beyond the companies flat out lying about their coverage and how much benefit it actually offers at the moment) are well past that point. Like most conspiracies, pulling this off requires nigh omnipotence and omnicompetence, in a way that is utterly incompatible with being caught at it by the conspiracy theorist, let alone them being able to do anything about it. The 5G bit gets credit for being less unbelievable than most (well, at least untill it gets comboed with bill gates, vaccines, nanobots, covid-19, and kill switches, at least.)... But it Still requires that Many telcos to coordinate, across multiple countries, subverting the regulatory bodies of those countries, not get caught by law enforcement or intelligence agencies in those countries, not get however they go about all That caught by the legislature (including opposition, where applicable!), Executive, or Media of any of those countries, And not realise that it would be a Hell of a lot cheaper to just not bother. Seriously, when telcos 'conspire' at all, it's to get away with price fixing and failing to meet their obligation to actually provide the service they pay for, not this sort of nonsense.
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  1168. Centipedes are absolutely bugs, but they are certainly not insects. Too many legs.
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  1169. coke-a-cola that helps you not absorb fat... meanwhile, contains enough sugar that your body would make you Puke to avoid poisoning yourself with it if it didn't Also contain an acid that specifically inhibits that reflex...
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  1170. It's Australian TV news... Pretty sure they have the same owner.
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  1171. ... well, depending how you count. The New Zealand Wars were absolutely a thing,after all, and there's a few different lines of logic regarding at what point New Zealand starts really being its own thing.
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  1172. Yeah, this isn't a british thing. The word 'draught' is pronunced 'draft' in every English dialect I'm aware of. ... heck, the game Americans call 'checkers' (or at least a much more commonly played variant) is called 'draughts' in the UK and the rest of the commonwealth... and is pronunced 'drafts'... though admittedly it's probably not played as much now as it was 30+ years ago, what with both video games and more, significantly better, boardgames existing these days.
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  1173.  @BrunodeSouzaLino  keep in mind, someone using your intellectual property without your permission and someone Stealing your intellectual property are two different things. Not just in the sense of 'copying is not theft', but also Legally, because Actually steallings someone's IP is actually a thing that can happen. It's just not the same thing as copyright infringment (it's a hell of a lot simpler, legally speaking, but also a hell of a lot more serious as far as actual harm done goes.)
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  1174.  @camojoe83  here's an extra bonus: if they're not Pulling a Line of barges, it's not a train. (single unit railcars are also not trains, nor is a locomotive by itself). Barges still exist, sure. They're generally lashed together side by side (and sometimes a couple deep) and Pushed by what amount to tugboats, using a completely different engine type. Sure, barges, boat, carry cargo, float... but by that logic there's no different between a steam engine hauling a bunch of four wheeled open trucks and a Semi.
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  1175. It's more that if they're already there and actually Are seeing a lot of traffic, it's rather difficult to convince the officials who make the decisions that they should be got rid of, as they seem to be doing their job as intended. As for why it's so hard to build rail? Lack of established rail construction industry, institutionalised corruption, and the whole NIMBY issue. (along with a few other, less consistent, secondary issues).
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  1176. Most of it's cities, including the largest in each island and the capital, being right on the coast might cause problems along the way though.
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  1177.  @Archon3960  koei, if the latest entry in the series is anything to go by :p
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  1178. I'll give you good odds plenty of stuff will change... it'll just mostly be behind the scenes stuff that you'll see little or no direct effect from unless you happen to be part of the specific target demographic for that particular change, and any indirect effect will take years to propagate through the system. That's usually how such things go. By which point odds are good that Australia will have managed to elect a right-of-centre government who will have set half of it on fire again (the effects of breaking things tends to propagate faster than the effects of fixing them).
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  1179.  @LuisAldamiz  yes, clearly. Pay no attention to the influential warmongering idiot (who was so bad he was basically exiled from the court over it for a time) who's chief rival (who was also advocating for peaceful solutions to Austria's problems) was just assassinated in Austra. Lets just Ignore Germany building up a navy that's utterly unsuitable for defending its colonial holdings, coasts, and trade routs but funnily enough is just the sort of thing for attempting to destroy an enemy navy. Who cares about french revanchism over the Franko-Prussia war. Clearly Russia's Only nearby ally being attacked couldn't Possibly motivate them to act without it being a British plot! Austria and Germany couldn't Possibly have signed an alliance without Britain making it so! Turkish nationalist gets German support, Including Warships, to ennact a plot to drag the Ottoman Empire into the war? Britain's fault, Entirely. And, of course, it's Absolutely Britain's fault that Germany Invaded Belgium After The British Explicitly Stated That They Would Be Required To Declare War On Anyone Who Did! Obviously. No, no, Obviously it's all Britain's fault. ... Incidentally, how do you feel about bridges? I've got this very nice one over here. A bargin at twice the price! Edit: ...ok, that particularly comment didn't quite deserve the full rant there, sorry. Been reading waaay too much stupid in the comments here and went a bit overboard.
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  1180.  @NeverlandSystemZor  I mean, if they'd kept 'the same old format' we'd still have the entirely functional (if not as pretty as it maybe could be) windows 2000 UI. I think about the only major UI flaw there was the 'dancing tabs' issue. (plenty of other issues, of course, but that's a different matter).
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  1181. 48 characters isn't actually meaningfully harder than 26 if it eliminates enough special weird rules about how 'this makes this sound, except under these circumstances where it makes that sound, unless this other thing in which case it makes this other, completely different sound'. because those rules mean you're actually not only learning 26 characters. Well, ok, you only have to learn how to Write 26 characters, so that part's simpler, but you learning to Read and Spell is a lot more difficult as a result. Mind you, the Shavian alphabet has plenty of other issues, to the point where I think it's not a good option at all. But 'it has more characters' is not actually an argument against it, given that Any good representation of English that actually works is going to have over 40 characters because learning to write a bit under twice as many characters (and we're still not talking the numbers needed for something like kanji by a Long shot) in order to massively simplify spelling and reading is actually a good deal.
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  1182. Some of the "smart" functions are actually useful for making them work better. Strangely enough, you can apparently get the necessary equipment to fix those bits yourself.
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  1183. I have a sneaking suspicion that that's a matter of definition. (what, precisely, is and is not meant by "smart" and "artillery round" by a given individual.)
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  1184. Arguably, the memory one is, at least, possible... depending on how you define your terms, anyway.
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  1185.  @Charles-pf7zy  And at least one variety of it argues that black children should not be taught basic mathmatics because that is and oppressive and 'white imperialist' concept, and thus to their detriment. It actively seeks to sabotage their education, and thus prospects and chances of prosparity, on the basis of their RACE. Which should be reprehensible enough to discredit that line of thought entirely and seriously damage the entire ideololgy... but they wrapped it up in popular leftist buzzwords about how everyone who isn't a white male isn't and can't possibly be oppressed (regardless of reality) and everyone else is by default (regardless of reality) so it slid on through.
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  1186. you say five... but to my recollection vowel Length is actually meaningful, so it's more like 10. Mind you, to confuse the world, English often uses this vowel length distinction as well. When it shows up it's usually something that's written as 'voiced stop + vowel' but actually said as 'unvoiced consonent + long vowel' (meanwhile 'unvoiced stop + vowel' is usually (there are exceptions, mostly when it's 's + unvoiced consonent + vowel', which is said as it is written) said as 'asperated consonent + short vowel')... How much this is a thing varies from dialect to dialect, of course.
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  1187. I would too... Mostly because that would mean I was in the USA for some benighted reason.
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  1188. Nah, he was absolutely lieing. It's just that he was trying to hide the rather crippling liquidity issue they were having (largely not actually their fault, but still a very bad look for a broker) not dishonest (and illegal) dealing. Buying was halted because safety mechanisms kicked in that meant Robin Hood had to put up more collateral per "buy" trade when gamestop etc. stock became unstable. To put the brakes on and level things out (not drive prices up or down, just slow the rate of change), the required collateral went from single digit percentages of each trade to 100 or so percent of each trade. Given that people were still trying to buy those unstable stocks in large numbers, Robin Hood ran into the situation where it just did not have the money needed to process the buy orders and had to halt them until enough outstanding trades went through (and thus returned the collateral they had tied up in them). As for "why can't they just use the money you actually paid?"? Turns out that's illegal (doing that apparently contributed to the negative effects of sone great flailing years back.)
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  1189. They do have the advantage that, as they're using it as Collateral, rather than actually spending it, the risk of not repaying it once things level out is low. (Probably).
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  1190. Possibly a Bit optimistic, that. Well, depending on what you mean by 'open'.
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  1191. It is the only one Chris took without a bunch of kanji in it :p
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  1192.  @youreallygotmenow4855  Nah, it's entirely believeable. I'd give good odds they requested specific Songs, not the Bands, though. Also, the copyright black hole means that a lot of content creators (streamers and youtubers, but also video game developers) use older music (either actually old, or at least old enough that copyright law wasn't busted enough to functionally create a cultural dark age yet at the time it was published), so those older genres become popular again too.
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  1193. Honestly, I suspect it doesn't actually matter who gets elected, it's more that right before an election it's too late for the current government to Start doing anything about them, and then after the election, well, having been seen to have fixed the problem (by way of the supermarkets lowering the prices again), the party in power gets most of the benefit they were going to get either way, and the problem is now less bad and so drops down the priority list again... I suspect the supermarkets have got pretty good at judging how far they have to reign it in to drop far enough down the list that the government never actually gets around to them due to all the other, more urgent problems they have to deal with. But the supermarkets can't Quite get away with doing that Every election, or that would become an issue that needed dealing with in its own right... so they pick the ones where, again, bigger problems will dominate the campaign. Or something along those lines. Because, honestly, a National government is always going to favour the supermarkets over the general public unless it's got to the point where food riots are looking likely, so you'd expect a different pattern if it was about getting a favourable government in rather than just exploiting the electoral cycle to make a quick extra buck.
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  1194. Honestly, it seems to just be a case of 'one of four things can happen, it makes a sound for each thing, someone decided it would be amusing to use Pac-Man sounds in this instance'.
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  1195.  @seanwebb605  worth noting: for all that a lot of people (Americans in particular, these days) like to make a fuss about such usages, and one could argue that that was Profaning the Lord's name, perhaps, 'do not take the Lord's name in vain' actually has nothing to do with that. In this context (in most contexts, actually), 'vain' means 'falsely' or 'meaninglessly', and 'take' being along the lines of 'claim'... basically, having claimed to be a follower of God (Jew or Christian), don't then behave in such a way that no one can tell the difference.
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  1196. at 25c most people can hapily wander around in shorts and tshirts, in my experience.
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  1197.  @galoomba5559  a significant chunk of the failures, from memory and assuming that's the zompist article I think it is, was a computer having trouble telling the difference between a digraph and a syllable boundary​ with one of the components of a digraph on each side of it, which is less of a problem for humans. That said, for all that Most of the issues with English orthography are poor explanation more than a poor system, it Does have some room for improvement, and I wish it would do the following: Mark stress! This one change renders the Entire vowel system vastly more intelligible, as a lot of the spelling rules for vowels seem to apply or not at random. Most of the time it's actually that they only apply to stressed or unstressed bowels with no other indication as to which you're dealing with. (Collapsing the unreasonable number of different ways to spell what is called 'the long E sound' wouldn't hurt either) English has a rule against ending words in V. This rule needs to die. It results in V sounds spelled with f (forcing f sounds to be spelled as ff, when they're not ph), or as ve... With no concern for the fact that there's a rule that says the E affects the vowel on the other side of the v unless the v is doubled... Except there's a (actually reasonable) rule against doubling V as well! C has the same problem as V, but uses s and k to cheat around the doubling limit. (Also, v tends not to show up in the middle of words. C does, so you sometimes see cc, but that's not double c, that's k-syllable break-s. If there were Not a syllable break it would be written as x. And then there's -ough. Just... -ough. It's a disaster that needs to die. Four things. Fix them and the vast majority of English's nonsensical spelling problems are solved. You still have some stupid silent letters that could be done away with here and there, but given the disaster that is US spelling as a result of Trying to do that (and not taking dialects into account), and the fact that a fair number of them are "this individual word is just dumb" but quite a few others are 'this is only silent in this form due to other factors, it Comes Back when we add/remove an affix. Having it silent in this form is a much simpler rule than the one that would be needed to explain when and why to add it to the others'. And Then there's the homophones, spelled differently for improved reading comprehension/speed. They often use silent letters. Not arbitrarily​, morethe sound was lost in spoken english but the spelling's unchanged. So, on balance, I'd leave silent letters alone so as not to break anything. Note that only One change involves altering the character set, and none of them involve learning new values for any character. Two of them are eliminating exceptions that only Cause problems! 90% sure the V rule is an artifact of how recently (as such things go) U, V, And W came to have distinct forms and values. The history of which is long, convoluted, and also the origin of Y, and I think another letter I'm forgetting. Basically, one written form was used at the begining of words, the other elsewhere, and both were used for all three sounds. So, of course, when they could be confused you needed Sone way to indicate which you meant, right? Which eventually became standardized into the current mess.
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  1198. Meanwhile, governments doing the same vary wildly, often it IS actually to the individual's benefit, more often still it's definitely to society's benefit... but sometimes it really really isn't. But you'll get the same people insisting that the government is Always malicious .... but that corporations doing it is somehow fine?
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  1199. Well... If it proves they actually did no such thing, of course they will. Otherwise... Well, who knows.
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  1200. Going to be honest, the whole idiotic document needs ripping up and you need to start over from scratch, taking lessons from what Everyone Else has learned over the last, what, two hundred years? about how to make a governmental system that Doesn't Suck. ... ... ... Actually, probably best to just outsource the whole process, otherwise it'll be hijacked by either the same set of rich idiots or the lunatic radical fringe (... and yes, depressingly, those Do overlap in places, but they're not the same thing) and you won't be any better off.
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  1201. To give all view points equal merit is to be the unthinking mouth piece of propagandists and liers . What news reporters are Supposed to do is present the Truth, objective reality. Or at least as close as they can manage with the available information.
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  1202.  @prohanta9360  much is made of vertical streaming being great on phones etc. It's not. It's really not. What it IS great for is sticking on a secondary, portrait aligned monitor on your PC. Shove the video over there, hit full screen to get all of youtube's garbage out of the way, it's great. (seriously, on a mobile device you're better off watching regular video in landscape in full screen mode. And watching on a phone is going to be kinda bad no matter what you do.)
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  1203.  @coopercovelo  Given the companies in question, I'd say go with both, though if you absolutely Must pick one, probably google.
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  1204. Man, most, if not all, of this chain of comments is just two different flavours of ignorant biggotry smashing into each other over and over and over and proving little other than that we should be glad those involved are (one hopes!) not in charge of anything important.
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  1205. Huh. A ghost.
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  1206. mmm. 'oddball' tanks (or anything else, really) are better than nothing so long as the supply of consumables lasts, so are a moderately useful short term stopgap (especially if you can stick them in more stationary, rearward positions closer to your logistical centres to free up more standard units that would otherwise have to do those jobs), but they're not really a Solution to anything, it's true.
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  1207. If they autoplay or are Technically a different site (as embeded videos and Most Advertisments generally are) it's possible an ad block or the like suppressed them.
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  1208. Australia might not be the best example to use when trying to sell people on proportional representation, given how unstable and scandal-prone their governments regularly end up...
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  1209.  @Stephensouraski  same way anyone else does? Just because you run out of land before you hit the edge of a nation's territory in every direction rather than just one or two (or none) doesn't men there aren't borders, it just changes the practicalities of crossing and controlling them. Also, New Zealand isn't a single island anymore than Japan or the Philippines are.
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  1210. ... Chrome and Firefox are web browsers. Not search engines. They're not the same thing.
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  1211.  @dansprague2  I vaguely recall that that phrase, as originally used and intended, was actually perfectly reasonable and sensible and worked quite well. I believe it was something about being Subtle about redirecting a customer who's being an idiot*, so they still walk away happy and come back to spend more money in the future, rather than getting into an argument with them over it so they get pissed off and leave without spending anything at all. At least if I remember rightly. Which, admittedly, I may not. * Or is misinformed, or ignorant, etc.
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  1212. Marking stress would actually make things Better (half the complication with the vowels is because the reading is dictated first by the stress pattern and the spelling only disambiguates between options the stress pattern doesn't already eliminate). Bringing back the diaresis (probably spelling that wrong) to mark the difference betwen co-op and coop and many similar things would be Great, as English only lost that in the first place due to the mechanical limitaitons of the typewriter. Just make it standard rather than 'can optionally add this to disambiguate where you think there might otherwise be confusion' so it's normal rather than some bit of random weirdness that occasionally pops up. Probably at least one of the other ones is worth it too. But yeah, we certainly don't need the whole lot (especially the one about 'long' vowels which doesn't even actually work as described due to the term 'long' being used in a completely nonsensical way (admittedly, the way it is used in primary school class rooms when teaching children to read) and is mostly solved by marking stress anyway). For reference, there's no decision to make about the pronunciation of a homophone. Homophones are the words that are pronunced the same way despite being spelled differently. Homographs are the ones that are said differently despite being spelled the same. Homonyms are the ones that are both spelled And said the same, despite having different meanings (and for those one must rely on context entirely).
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  1213. Something about time being a valid axis of motion, it sounded like.
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  1214. The problem with double negatives isn't using them, it's usuing them improperly, causing confusion as to your meaning. There are certain combinations of double negative that don't actually fully cancel, instead resulting in a weaker meaning. There are certain combinations of dobule negative that go the other way and compound, emphasising instead (though this is largely dialect specific). And there are combinations of double negatives that either fully cancel, leaving the reader confused why you bothered, or introduce confusion and ambiguity as to what you did and did not actually intend to negate.
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  1215.  @Civsuccess2  We use oil for a lot of things, and thus certainly need it... but there's no call to be anywhere near as irrisponsibly wasteful with it as we currently are.
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  1216. Busses are in fact extremely good at things trains are bad at. Such as 'last mile'* service in lower density areas. Try to use a train where you Should use a bus and you're going to have problems. Of course, if your bus is going any significant distance down a highway, (well, unless it's serving a bunch of small places that aren't quite big enough or far enough away to warrent a rail connection) then its not really being used for what busses are best at, and using busses where you Should be using trains is going to cause issues too. Of course, saying that busses Benefit from highways is a bit of an interesting statement... because they kind of do, about as much as cars do, but they also Suffer from them, much as cars do. ... basically, at rush hour? if they don't have dedicated lanes, they're just a mildly less stressful way of being stuck in traffic. But yeah, saying that busses are 'never' the solution is just blatantly incorrect. (now, there's a solid argument that a heck of a lot of them Should be Trolley busses, of course). *this can actually be a fairly long way in more rural areas.
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  1217. actual evidence is that Dvorak is not actually objectively better, only situationally. Same with pretty much every 'change which character is mapped to which key without changing the phsyical position of any of the actual keys' alternative keyboard layout. Well, ok, I'm excluding the objectively, and sometimes intentionally, Terrible ones, but QWERTY doesn't actually fall into that catagory either. You want a keyboard that's actually Better? Ortholinier, full-split, ergonomic keyboard. THAT actually makes a significant difference, even keeping the qwerty arangement. Well, I say 'keeping the qwerty arangement', but just about everything that isn't the alphanumeric keys ends up shuffled around somewhat in practice (the spacebar is split in two, but it's Really common to replace the left half with the backspace key, and put the enter key right next to the space bar under the thumb, similar things like that). So... basically, the relative arangement of the alphanumeric part of a qwerty keyboard is fine. It's everything Else about it (and standard format keyboards in general) that needs improvement. And while switching from qwerty to dvorak might be a matter of tradition (it's not actually tradition, it's cost/benefit... the cost of all the time wasted on retraining vastly outweighs the Actual benefit of switching layouts for all but a few niche use cases, but that decision is often made subconciously, so the difference isn't always all that big), switching to full split ortholinier is a small part cost (you're functionally making two half keyboards and a wire, it's a bit more complicated and uses slightly more raw material, even if you don't make them mechanical or programable), and a large part.... also cost (retooling factories is Hugely expensive compared to just... continueing to make the same thing you already do, and then there's the opportunity cost of all the keyboards you aren't making, and thus selling, in the meantime.)
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  1218. It's also utter nonsense. 'Ghoti' can only be read 'goaty', not 'fish' because English does actually care where in the syllable a given character appears when determining what sounds it can and cannot make. If you ignore the rules that prevent Ghoti from being pronounced as fish, it can also be read as , with every character being silent. English is nothing like as chaotic and nonsensical as a lot of people try to claim. It is unreasonably and unhelpfully complex, which may well warrent some reform in its own right (marking stress, maybe introducing some more characters so we can do away with the more problematic digraphs...), but it's Actually unjustifiably nonsensical bits aren't meaningfully more numerous than is the norm among the languages of the world.
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  1219.  @An_Attempt  Of course, when you do find such a school, they're usually even more heavily biased in the Other direction, as the current government attempts to discredit former administrations or models to make their current way of doing things look better.
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  1220. Smart TVs just barely make sense. Smart Monitors are just idiocy. The whole point in a smart TV is to get some of the benefits of a PC that's connected to the internet and add them to a television. All a smart Monitor does is put more crap in the way of doing it's job... oh, and let amazon, google, etc. get access to you system despite anything and everything else you might do to keep them out when you inevitably reach the point where there are no NON-smart monitors available. Seriously, there are applications where CRT is still (to my understanding) the superior type of monitor precisely because of the lack of extra computational crap in the monitor slowing down the I/O loop (mostly gaming, though there are other applications where other properties of CRT make it useful)... and they want to jam MORE crap in there?
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  1221.  @twincast2005  The symbol was trademarked, which was... fine-ish. I believe the problem (and the thing they didn't get away with) was the attempt to patent the act of turning the card sideways to indicate something. While I don't know about mechanics in D&D, Magic introduces new mechanics at least once a year.
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  1222. You think That's bad. Try looking at what happens when you move to a Different Country. Despite being one of the louder voices complaining when another, smaller, country did the same thing, the USA collects income tax based on Citizenship, not residencey. ... Well, no, that's a lie, they'll collect on non-citizen residents too. (to my recollection the USA is the only country that still does this, mind you.) And the way they go about it is incredibly scummy, often leading to citizens who are working in other countries to be paying 'income' tax on money they transfered between their own accounts (having already been taxed on it), being taxed in higher tax brackets than they should be, not being Informed of any of this until the angry letter about penalty fees owed for non-payment shows up... Oh, and if you renounce your citizenship to get out of this mess? Yeah, sure, that's fine... so long as you don't Mention that the dodgy tax collection was the reason for that decsion anywhere the general public might hear about it, Otherwise you will suddenly find that getting a visa to enter the USA is impossible. Too bad if you had relatives there you wanted to visit, or business to conduct, or the like.
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  1223.  @EkillRetired  Ehh, there's always a distinct element of certain subsets of the rich and powerful actively trying to keep everyone who isn't them down because that's how they stay/become more rich and powerful, and racism is a popular tool for those types as it's an easy way to set people whose interests would otherwise aline against said rich and powerful individuals against each other instead. Also, NZ's immigration workers are somewhat notorious for how many of them are Very racist and/or anti-imigrant. But yeah, there's not really any active attempt by any one group to suppress or oppress any other. (well, aside from te parti maori (not sure on the spelling) which, last I checked, looks an awful lot like a maori suppremicist group with all That entails... Which is rather sad, as the Maori party started out with at least legitimately good goals (the fact that they could have any success in the first place said bad things about both the system and the other parties, and I didn't agree with them about very much, but that's a different matter))
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  1224.  @justinlast2lastharder749  CD ROMS never really entirely took over at all, despite various attempts to make it so or pretend it had already happened, because they weren't actually suitable for the main thing most people used flopy discs for. CDs were great for distributing software, and for distributing and storing and playing music, but their limitations made them decidedly unsuitable for just... random file transfers. DVDs were basically just CD version 2, now good enough for video. Even rewritable CDs and DVDs were worse for the tasks floppy discs were actually used for in every respect except storage space. What actually killed the floppy disc was... the USB Flash 'drive', which actually Was suitable for the jobs floppy discs were mostly used for, while having eliminated basically all of the downsides of the floppy disc. (incidentally, while a 3 1/2" floppy disc could be called a 'disk', it's the only one. Because 'disk' is actually short for 'diskette', a dimunitive of 'disc' derived from the fact that it was so much smaller than its predicesors. no other computer disc is a diskette, and thus no other computer disc is a disk. English also uses the 'disc' spelling for all other contexts where hte word pops up.)
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  1225. Historically, conscripts/reservists/militia have Always been quite reliable at defending their homes, provided their superiors/the administration wasn't nicking their kit to make a buck or otherwise sabotaging them. It's when you start trying to use them for anything Else that their quality becomes... highly variable (depending on a Lot of factors). Smetimes they end up functionally elite units, sometimes they fail so badly that they do more damage to their own army's moral than they do to the enemy.
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  1226. Reasonabley sure that IS a liquidity problem though...
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  1227. well, yes, no, and sort of. In a lot of cases we've had things all along... but it's only recently that they've become Practical outside of certain very specific niches, for example. You'd be amazed how many things were invented Long before ways to actually apply them on a large scale came about. (for example: The ancient greeks had figured out the steam engine. Metulurgy sufficient to allow it to be actually Used for anything other than toys wasn't figured out until sometime in the 18th or early 19th century. Then you started getting steam powered pumps being used to prevent flooding in mineshafts. It took quite some time after That before steam engines started being used in other applications, and longer still before steam locomotives became practical for general use. It's intersting looking back through history for when things were invented. Many things were invented much earlier or much later than you'd expect. Of course, we've had issues with oil companies/decades spending decades actively spreading misinformation and engaging in campaigns of economic and political manipulation to keep their profits up even after the reality of global warming was known. (it was actually scientists working for ... Enron, I think it was, who first figured it out. The oil companies' response was... to build their oil rigs with taller legs against the possiblitiy of rising sea levels and start a campaign to suppress knowledge of the issue... then actively promote the myth of Global Cooling... and sabotage the development of photovoltaic technology, delaying its widespread adoption by decades).
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  1228.  @thecashier930  A lot of things about the USA look suspiciously like a diet version of things you see in old footage of Soviet and Nazi indoctrination techniques when you stop and think about it. And it's mostly stuff that just gets accepted as 'normal', rather than the things that the more politically deranged will attach such terms to on the basis of said thing not aligning to their particular flavour of radicalised insanity.
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  1229. ​ @HotelPapa100  i don't have a problem with silent letters in general, though in practice English's use of them could use a little tidying up here and there if one was bothering with reforms to begin with.
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  1230.  @Hashiriya985  Australia and New Zealand abandoned cursive decades ago in favour of linked italics (it has... a Very Large number of advantages), but hand writing in general is a less important skill when all official doccuments, corrispondance especially, is typed, so it wouldn't surprise me to learn that many younger people can't even manage that. ... Of course, the number of people who also can't Type properly is a bit concerning (and not limited to Australia and New Zealand, at all).
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  1231. @Paul Brennler ehh, the Democrats seem to generally still want to have a country left to govern when they're done, the Republicans not so much. But that Is the main (and only meaningful) difference between the two a lot of the time, by all indication. Especially given that in many states one or the other party has such a lock on control of the state government that you end up with a situation where a politician who should be a republican by any measure is a democrat instead, or the reverse, because the alternative is never getting into office in the first place and thus achieving nothing at all. Though usually this is the more moderate sort rather than the radicals, for obvious reasons.
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  1232. This is true almost universally... of course, equally (or perhaps more) true is the fact that humans simply do not work like that. Rather your actions can change which groups they see you as belonging to or not belonging to. (part of the reason marriages are such a big deal, incidentally, they (usually) realign some of the most core and fundamental groups for the individuals involved, and their relatives).
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  1233.  @_aullik  Actual pickups aren't much worse than a regular car (the front half of them basically IS a car, shape and size wise. They're a bit longer, their frame and suspension are stronger, the engine may or may not be heavier, and the back end is shaped differently, but other than that? basically a car). modern american SUVs are substantially longer, taller, heavier, and have Less Cargo Space (not that that matters, their owners aren't using them for that) than an acutal pickup truck, as well as being shaped in a way that is less aerodynamic, impares the driver's field of vision, and increases the harm done to pedestrians and occupants of other vehicles in an accident.
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  1234. ... I invite you to actually take a serious look at the alternatives. Once you eliminate the actual loonies, then realise the NZ media that Isn't state owned is mostly owned by the same interests who own the Australian TV news, who Also own Fox, and are basically the US Republican party's propaganda wing (and just as "honest" as their CCP equivalent, at best), and that ACT broadly follows their Ideology, while National is basically in their pocket when not bending over for Chinese corporations instead (oh, and their leadership's gone full Trumpist-conspiricy-monger and actually managed to piss off the media in the process)... Then consider that the Greens seem to legitimately forget they're not supposed to be a communist party from time to time, and take into account Winston Peters's track record... ... Not really, no.
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  1235. Similar things here. Between high speeds resulting in accidents and grinding damaging the edges of things that weren't really suitable for it, a lot of local authorities passed local bylaws that forbid rollerblades (actually also skateboards and rollerskates... and often icidentally scooters) from the town/city centres, or from being on footpaths at all... Which had the weird consequence of rendering them legally identical to bicycles... which made sense in most respects, save that they Weren't bicycles, and weren't legally allowed on the road (as, officially, a skater of any sort was still a 'pedestrian', if only due to an inability to maintain sufficiently high speeds as to not obstruct traffic), and even if that weren't an issue, riding a bike on the road is already super dangerous (largely because the overlap between 'idiots' and 'drivers' is unfortunately high due to both being rather large portions of the population), and any sort of skating was even worse, to the point that even the sorts of people who do stupid tricks off really tall ramps and the like wanted none of that just for getting from A to B, and no one was going to be doing tricks in traffic (well, a few idiots might try it, but the number of times you could get away with it before being seriously injured on eating fines for various flavours of obstruction and endangerment was... low single digits, probably). Combine that with road surfaces rarely being smooth enough for a good ride (and if I recall correctly doing bad things to the wheels) and that pretty much killed it even in places with dedicated skate parks (places you were generally more likely to see preteens mucking about on skateboards than anything else unless they were right next to a highschool or university... which they almost never were.)
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  1236.  @capncookie1110  properly speaking, neither sociopaths nor psychopaths are things that exist so far as medical psychology is concerned. One of them is a term used in Law to describe a certain collection of mental issues that can be of some legal relevance, the other is, if I recall correctly, since depreciated catch all for a whole bunch of different issuses that have long since been reclassified in ways that are actually meaningful and useful.
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  1237. Tariffs have up sides to balance their down sides (if used competently) and can be a net benefit. Exemptions gut the upsides almost entirely, while having a much smaller effect on the downsides. So, yeah, roughly agree with you there.
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  1238. Oddly, English 'q' is just what you get when, as an English speaker, you try to say 'kw'. It gets its own character entirely because the result is a different sound formed in a different part of the mouth that does actually appear as its own thing in other langauges (and, naturally, printers). No idea why that resulted in qu being normalised rather than qw though.
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  1239. Doesn't help that Shakespeare just flat out made words up frequently. Some stuck and became common, others didn't.
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  1240. properly speaking, your aunts and uncles could be refered to as... I think it'd be 'siblings once removed'? but that's not really any less clunky than 'aunts and uncles'.
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  1241.  @randombuilder01  it Might be more practical, it's certainly NOT more efficient.
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  1242. a slight bias towards the index and away from the pinky is probably Desirable, actually. Or possibly the reverse, depending on your logic. For reducing stress and strain, which character is on which key (and thus finger) is rather less important than the relative position of the keys. QWERTY or not, the staggered rows (rather than the Columns being offset to accomodate actual human biomechnics) are the real killer there, along with the hand position forcing one to hunch and strain one's wrists (a fully split (not just ergonomically angled, though that's better than nothing) keyboard deals with that problem.)
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  1243.  @kosrang  it'll take a hell of lot more than that for NATO to actually commit to getting involved directly. They're not 'waiting for an excuse' so much as 'waiting for Russia to implode'. Simple fact is that no one trusts Putin and his idiots not to push the 'nuke' button if Nato actually gets involved (because, make no mistake, given how Russia's been going? In a conventional war with NATO they'd get Wrecked at this point).
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  1244.  @juliusnigelmarturillas3629  trying to build more houses. Mostly failing. They got in in the previous election on promises to deal with various crises, of which the housing market was one. They were struggling with or failing at their plans to do so pretty much across the board. Then COVID happened, and they handled That really well. General conclusion seems to have been that the Labour party had maybe 3 people who actually knew what they were doing and almost everyone else was unreasonably new for the level of responcability they ended up with. Combine that with trying to deal with it's coalition partners (you'll get different answers as to why depending on who you ask,but let's just say that conservative-centreist-populist-kingmaker goes a little awkwardly with centre-left progressive, and even more awkwardly with extreme-progressive environmentalists who occasionally (and I do mean occasionally) forget they're not supposed to be communists.) and the end result was going... Poorly. Fortunately, when it came to COVID, those problems weren't so relevant.
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  1245. The workspace manager kind of treats them all as the same work space in some respects... though it becomes very obvious that they're not the moment you disconnect one of the monitors ^_^
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  1246. Living in one of the places where 240v is the norm, so far as I know and/or recall, outdoor lights tend to be battery powered, run through a transformer of some sort, and/or not be cheaply made at all (extra money and effort being put into making sure they can safely survive the outside conditions, raising the price accordingly).
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  1247. No worse than a flash drive, and probably better, on that front.
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  1248. And then, of course, there is the possibility that someone brings up a situation where the reverse is true. Usually it's because they're not understanding something. Sometimes it's because the new theory is imperfect, incomplete, and/or incorrect.
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  1249. ... actually, to my knowledge it was butchers, in Britain, in a time when horses were so valuable for their labour that the only way anyone would send one to the Butcher was if it was so old it couldn't work anymore (and thus Really low quality meat) or diseased (and thus a health hazard). Thus implying they were selling horse meat was to imply they were either cheating their customers, or trying to poison them. Not because horse was Inherently bad or anything, but because Good horse meat wasn't to be had. That at a point where horse was very much Not competition with cattle in the meat markets, and also basically Because it was no competition. The taboo stuck around, because of a combination of cultural inertia and horses shifting from being thought of in the same category as cows, sheep, and chickens (where an individual animal might be a pet, but that's not the role of the Species), to the same category as dogs and cats: primarily pets, but also useful (unlike goldfish, which are useless, or rabbits, which are pests)... Most people aren't too keen on eating cat or dog, either, you'll note.
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  1250.  @agisler87  ... Ummm... Which one? They're often hard to tell apart, you see...
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  1251.  @stripedcollar335  a 'dark age' is litterally just a period for which we don't have much in the way of written records. We probably Are in a Cultural dark age due to the complete insanity that is modern copyright law in most of the world, but we're nowhere near the circumstances that lead to the dark ages in Europe. In the north east, it was mostly that no one was really keeping records of most things yet anyway, in the west, the collapse of the roman empire lead to economic decline that meant that there simply weren't the spare resources to dedicate to specialists whose entire job was to keep records of stuff that didn't really matter all that much in the shorter term, as more people had to be farming etc. locally to make up for the collapse of the trade routes, and big cities couldn't fit enough farm land close enough to the city to do that, so a lot of the biggest cities shrank as people moved to... smaller cities and larger towns where that wasn't a problem. Society as a whole didn't really Collapse, technological regression was limited and inconsistent, technological Development continued, etc. The biggest problem was probably that no one entity had the resources for most large scale engineering projects anymore. Fortunately the Romans built major infrastructure stupidly well (and even if they couldn't build on that scale, maintainence was still possible for more local entities) to the point where it was still highly significant in many places up until the world wars. Mind you, the modern world would, in some respects, be a Lot harder hit by such a collapse of trade routes (heck, just look at the effect of recent disruptions), but we're still not talking complete chaos and collapse.
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  1252. turns out, qu and kw are not actually the same sounds. q and k are actually different. Mind you, English just flat out cannot have the k sound before 'w', and I'm pretty sure trying to put the q sound anywhere but before w is difficult at best, and there's no good reason to write qu rather than qw, really... or even just q. I mean, because of how English works you Can just merge k and q, but there's a decent argument for keeping q around if one is so inclined.
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  1253. Indeed. Though, it's going yo be a while longer before most trucks go electric, so those ones might actually keep selling gasoline, at least for a while.
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  1254. There's a case to be made that you can pin the war going off when and how it did on Austria (and, for that matter, Specific Individuals in the Austrian government actively trying to start a war), But the circumstances of Europe at the time were such a mess that any individual sub part of that conflict could have gone off for one reason or another at around that point (if it failed to for long enough various contributing factors would change for various reasons and who knows what the result of that would have been) and could have caused a similar cascade almost as easily.
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  1255. Shockingly, Apple (and Google) are in the right on that one, however scummy their other practices are. And, because the other party is Epic, I'll be quite happy to see Apple win that one.
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  1256.  @VoicedDentalFricative  far too many typefaces already make 1, l, and I (not to mention |!) indistinguishable, which really needs to stop. These were already solved problems and I have no idea what idiot thought bringing them back was a good idea. 6/b actually is a problem in some (limited) contexts, as are O/0 (there's a reason it used to be common to use a null symbol in place of a 0 in any context where a null character wasn't actually a thing that would otherwise show up but an O could). 8/B, S/5 and Z/2 are basically non-issues save in Very poor handwriting due to the usually very clear distinction between a straight line/right angle and a curved line.
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  1257.  @dickdrapper5491  ... At this point very few of the USA's Allies have a positive opinion of the USA. For most, it's been a long time since the USA was a desirable ally, or even existance, beyond its ability to keep the even less desirable Soviets/Russians and Chinese in their respective boxes. Not that I agree with the fellow you're responding to. German nationalist attitudes to WW1 can at times be almost as detached from reality as Japanese nationalists sometimes get wrt WW2. (Not that WW1 Germany was as bad as WW2 Japan...)... Of course, neither have Anything on the more deranged nonsense that comes out of certain sections of the USA... (No, you did Not "win" WW1. US troops arriving was one of many factors that lead the German leadership to, upon running the numbers, realise that they couldn't win and thus surrender. With out the USA, WW1 would have lasted a few more months, more people would have died, and ... The German leadership would have run the numbers, realised they couldn't win, and surrendered. It's not even like WW2 where US industry was a huge deal. ... Doesn't stop various Americans claiming otherwise though.)
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  1258.  @JeroenJA  It was probably perfectly phonetic... in the dialect of the person who codified the spelling, at the time when they did so. Too bad about the many hundereds of other dialects, or everything drifting over time, and the need to not render texts from other times and places unintelligible to the reader (well, shifts in vocabulary still do so, but that only requires an appropriate dictionary, not relearning the entire skill set that is reading). English spelling is actually a lot more logical and consistent than people give it credit for (though not perfectly so). The problem is that it's also a lot more complex than most people, including those Teaching it, tend to give it credit for as well. And is rather let down by a couple of rather significant flaws English straight up needs a diactiric to indicate where the primary stress in a word is (it would eliminate so many of the problems with the vowels, as it is for some insane reason assumed that you already know the stress pattern, and thus that only ambiguity regarding the reading of a given vowel that is not already resolved by way of it's position in that pattern needs to be clarified via the spelling), as well as bringing back the one that indicates when a two vowel character string is Not a digraph (because there's a syllable break in the middle)... and applying it to consonants in the same situation would probably also help.
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  1259. Probably doesn't help that the banks and associated financial institutions (collectively) have a long history of dodgy behaviour that leaves people highly unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like this. Not to mention the politicians. (Louis's recent experiences with the banks doing nothing to improve their image on that front).
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  1260. Ecclesiastical (or 'church') Latin decended for Vulgar Latin (that is, Latin as spoken by the common people, rather than the schollars and nobles), same as all the other romance languages. Which was, of course, rather influenced by the whole Roman Empire thing...
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  1261. ... does Tokyo/Japan not have street name signs at the intersections or something? Why on earth would you need a compass?
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  1262.  @la-ia1404  the important thing about that scam, at least if it's​ the one I think it was, is that the company they were taking fractions of a penny from was working out payroll to some absurd fraction of cents and paying 'out' the total, and each employee was assigned their portion to a similarly absurd fraction of cents, but the company had no way to Pay Them in less than whole cents, and always rounded down, and kept no record of the remainder. It just vanished from existence inside the machine, basically. What they did was add a bit of code to the system that tracked all the 'lost' penny fractions and then dump the accumulated total into their pay cheque as a bonus periodically. Might have been a different movie though. Properly, of course, they should have done this for everyone based only on the rounding from that individual's pay cheque, but That would have required dong it officially, which would have required convincing their bosses... Who (I believe) were the sort of people who would have insisted that the money instead go back into (at minimum) the part of the company budget used for payroll, though more likely elsewhere, instead, which isn't better.
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  1263. Well, obviously you, given that you saw the title and thumbnail and bothered to actually come over here and comment on it (maybe even watch some of the video)... and all the people who commented before you... it's almost like you intentionally set out to make yourself look silly.
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  1264. Basically just the concept of treating time as an extra spatial dimension, if I remember rightly. Or at least, bundling the two concepts together as "the reality-stuff everything else exists in". Something like that.
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  1265. Oh no, you can Very Much pin Most of the blame for the war on a very small number of individuals in a very small number of countries and not be all that wrong at all. Now, for the circumstances that lead to the war going the way it did, and being as much of a disaster for all involved as it was? that's another matter entirely.
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  1266. The relevant rule is actually just that you're not allowed to put non-edible objects in the food (or there-abouts), to my understanding. It's a not very well written law that's also kind of old.
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  1267. Here's a fun thing: doesn't matter what cable you're using when your device is using that USB C connector to output USB 2.0.... stick a USB4 cable in that socket if you want, you'll still only get USB 2.0 speed. Well, for data, but charging is a similar situation. There's an awful lot of USB C to A adaptors floating around where the A side connector is white, indicating that it's USB 1.0 (though it might actually be 2.0, which Should be black... definitely not 3.0 though, not enough pins). And then there's cables that are 'good for charging' ... by which they mean that the data wires are missing from them.
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  1268.  @4rumani  that woud be the actual job title of a person other than the owner whose job it is to deal with various upkeep issues (and sometimes other stuff) on rental properties. Often handling more than one property. Not in the sense of doing the electrical work so much as ensuring that an electrician is actually brought in to do said work.
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  1269. Not extemely so, but... you're not wrong.
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  1270.  @drayke8886  Importantly, while automated sorting is cheaper than manual sorting, Changing from one system to another is hugely expensive. And most of the expense is not the bits you'd expect, (yeah, sure, the machines cost whatever huge amount, but that's the Easy part).
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  1271. Ahh, but you don't get in trouble for being wrong, you get in trouble for blaming the government for your nonsense.
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  1272.  @AshPooh  frankly, if you let society become overly individualistic, it ceases to function meaningfully and you lose the benefits of having a society and government. The USA and to a lesser extent much of the English speaking west, is running into this issue to a degree. There is no ability to just tell the malicious idiots to go jump in a lake and stop ruining everything for the rest of us (and, often enough, for themselves in the long term), just to start with, which rappidly leads to the undermining and destruction of infrastructure and institutions necessary for the common good. Which is to say, it actively gets in the way of the ideals of liberalism. On the other hand, if you permit (or force) society become overly collectivist, if the society as a whole, and it's structures, don't account for and act on behalf of the individuals that make up that society... well, history is rife with examples of That failure state and its consequences. Necessary reform becomes impossible, for one. Fundamentally, trying to push for one to the exclusion of the other will lead to failure. One must balance them against each other in every instance of every matter that arrises. A single inflexible rule will always lead to forced bad decisions. Mind you, I'm not sure a perfect balance is ever possible. Things change constantly, after all.
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  1273. In most cases (once you ignore the scams) that I've seen of this sort of thing, there are changes that are only possible due to modern technology that make them better than their older equivalents, even though the basic concept is only revolutionary in the sense that it is coming full circle.
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  1274. @@paladinely3337 Yeah... the clearly stated part seems perfectly reasonable... Which is kind of the point, it's how such things get passed, and get past the media and the public until it all blows up. They're then Deliberately Written Badly so as to facilitate the actually intended, unpopular and harmful, purpose. It's a constant and ongoing problem with american legislation. The Republicans are usually worse in terms of what they tend to sneak in via this method, but it's far from a uniquely Republican trick (and most of the things that get snuck in are in favour of existing, overly powerful, corrupt, corporations which act against the public interest, generally intended to actively suppress any attempt by any compeitor to provide a better service, and there are Plenty of Democrat politicians who are Entirely on board with That nonsense). Frankly, no, no one other than the parents (and frankly an awful lot of parents shouldn't be either, given the idiocy that they get up to) should be discussing matters of sexuality and gender with young children. On the other hand, given how common parents being abusive of kids who in some way don't fit their particular ideal of how things should be are... rules about what teachers and school staff do and don't (and must and must not) disclose to parents about their kids really should not be "you must automatically break confidenced to inform a kid's parents about whatever the kid (especially in their mid to late teens) happens to tell you regarding their sexuality and gender"... but it's written badly enough that that is the result. ... it would probably be fine in a system and culture that didn't not only permit but franklly encourage expensive litigation over stupid things with a bad habit of stupid rulings on such matters. Good luck getting Anyone to be sensible on anything that's been set up as a matter of Radical-republican*-psychotic-nonsense vs Radical-progressive**-psychotic-nonsense though. *they're not actually conservative **they're neither liberal nor terribly lefist
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  1275.  @robetheridge6999  problem easily solved: they're postpositions. Most English "prepositions" are actually "adpositions" usable in either slot. The "rule" is wrong twice over. Not only is the usage it forbids permitted (and arguably sometimes required), but, by definition, when used coherently in such a manner, they aren't prepositions at all, but postpositions instead. Otherwise this rule results in " ... up with which I shall not put!". For "...which I shall not put up with!" And other such nonsense.
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  1276. Tom Scott does still make vidoes from time to time. The Technical Dificulties channel will periodically have a series of videos of him and his friends playing silly not-gameshows, and I believe he's still involved in some other projects on other platforms and the like.
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  1277.  @Pileot  That sort of thing already annoys me. It's like "there are plenty of Legitimate issues that need addressing. Why are you discrediting people trying to get those fixed by associating them with your completely made up nonsense?!". Happens with lots of things, both things where the actual problems being fixed so the thing can be usable is desired, and things where the problems are so great that you would never want the thing adopted. Very annoying.
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  1278. Not to say they have anything close to a monopoly on the latter, mind you.
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  1279. Meanwhile, Sane people wouldn't touch it with a barge pole until after the whole putrid edifice was actively purged of all but the most moderate of both democrats And republicans, and then the entire shitshow that is the american electoral system was ripped out and replaced with something less prone to extreme tribalism, and extremism in general. (Let's not even get into the utter disaster of corruption that is most state level politics. Or the corporate lobbying.)
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  1280. TamTroll Pi is a property of circles and the like. It is necessary for finding the radius from the area, or the reverse, and some other things. Thing is, in any formula it shows up in, if you find all the numbers, then treat Pi as a variable and solve for it, and write out the number... You'll never stop, because the decimal places just keep coming. I believe the pattern of digits also doesn't repeat, which is why memorising it to however many decimal places is a big deal.
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  1281. How much you do or do not need carbs depends on how much of what you are doing for how long. Fit and healthy humans are pretty much Optimised for long distance running. Hard labour, on the other hand, is a different matter, as is anything requiring significant mental activity. Sugars are particularly useful for the latter, and humans are wired around the assumption that sugars are going to be... not scarce, exactly, but generally available only in small quantities at a time, so should be eaten whenever they're availalbe. This, of course, runs into problems when encountering modern food (and 'food') production processes. There's other factors involved too... the ultimate conclusion of which is that you Should be eating Some carbs, but most people's diets include substantially more carbohydrates than they really should. (mind you, Potatoes are also SUPER nutrient dense, provided they were grown in good soil. Grains, not so much).
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  1282.  @TheRealBillBob  advancing west form Germany wouldn't put you in poland and Ukraine... it'd put you in France and the low countries. I suspect you meant east.
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  1283. For reference (and assuming I'm not getting muddled myself, always something to keep in mind), a "metric ton" is a "tonne". To the best of my recollection they're still said exactly the same way, mind you.
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  1284. To the best of my knowledge, the 'draught' error is just straight up a spelling pronunciation, indicating that the issue was simply having never heard the word before. To the best of my knowledge it's less an Australianism and more the result of a lack of exposure to watercraft.
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  1285.  @blahorgaslisk7763  Louis himself, I believe (in case that wasn't rhetorical).
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  1286.  @D4PPZ456  which you now find out when people get sick and/or die, often in rather disturbing ways, rather than in testing. Approval processes (when not horribly corrupt, which is its own issue) are mostly about safety tests. (Also about pharmaceuticals (among others) companies often being bad actors in general...)
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  1287. Pfftt, the root cause of the problem is humans. The only difference from one system to another is how aware those creating and running it are/were of how humans actually function, and how much effort was put into dealing with which issues compared to what was considered an acceptable downside. Fact is, communism does a worse job of actually handling humans being humans than capitalism does, but the proponents of capitalism as an ideal (as opposed to the best baseline to build from that anyone's come up with so far, but still a system that needs a lot of situation specific tinkering to be any good) tend to have a rather skewed idea of what is an "acceptable downside" (worse, many aren't actually advocates of capitalism at all, they're advocates of deregulation. Not Better regulation, by getting rid of it entirely. They don't like being told they're not allowed to do things that make them pointlessly more wealthy if those things cause great enough harm to the population and/or planet as a whole. They also mostly seem to advocate against long-term planning. Well, that or they're dirt poor but have bought into that group's propaganda.)
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  1288. Very little. Most of the french influence comes much later by way of the English educated elite when France was the dominant power in Europe and French the language of diplomacy. Most Latin comes from either Much earlier with christianity (though, noticeably, little or none is left from the Romans themselves, as the English language and people came quite some time after the romans had left.) or much later with scientific progress, too. Each group ( that is, the Normans and the English) mostly stuck to their own language, those who had to act as an interface between the two learned both. Though That is somewhat responsible for the tendency towards redundancy in English legal terms (things like 'cease and desist' rather than just 'stop' started out because the legal code needed to be clear in both languages. Phrasing things that way, at least, don't know about specific examples.)
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  1289. the simple over the air download is the most likely source of such problems, just for added bonus fun times.
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  1290. Properly speaking, if the vehicle is actually Stopped, it's not decelerating, so the lights shouldn't be triggered by accelerometer controls when it's at rest anyway.
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  1291.  @recoswell  not sure how that's sexist? Inappropriate for a bunch of other reasons though.
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  1292. Probably not actually that many. One wouldn't be surprising. Probably low single digits, at most. Most of the 'maze' is a set of much more straightforward sub components linked together in fairly straightforward ways.
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  1293.  @yaro21a  I would be quite frankly Astonished if Ukraine 'didn't plan to go to war' given how blatantly obvious it was to everyone, Especially Ukraine (as they took other actions that were clearly based on this) after 2014 that the only way Russia wasn't going to take another shot at them was if Putin died or Russia imploded due to other factors first. Now, not planning to Start a war is an entirely different matter.
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  1294. Well, if they're honest, at least...
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  1295. ... humility and humiliation are rather different things. One generally imparts cooperation and understanding, the other anger and vengefulness.
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  1296. They're also pretty rubbish chairs.
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  1297.  @EZX280  I believe those are called wing doors, though I could be wrong.
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  1298. Half the point in the real estate bit was that he had too many employees for his old place.
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  1299. I have a similar opinion on the constant quest to make things lighter and thinner. Not sure if it's still the case, but for a while, being lighter and thinner was what you were paying for a high end phone... Except they regularly achieved this by compromising structural integrity. Much higher rate of, say, USB sockets snapping off the board because it's not properly anchored. Bit of a problem when said USB port is also the charging port.
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  1300.  @marvelfancyrus2847  Army? Yes. A very good one, actually. The Navy's pretty good too, though simply due to matters of scale it's never going to be a war winning asset against an enemy that's actually capable of deploying their own warships. It mostly does various flavours of 'law enforcement with big guns', and army transport/support work as a result. Also emergency response stuff (transport ships and landing craft/helicopters are pretty useful in an island nation when an earthquake knocks out the road and rail connections to a town, for example). The Air Force is basically a joke as a combat element though. In practice it's a (very effective) logistics unit.
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  1301. Well, more like 'you can't use tanks in open areas due to modern anti-tank missiles... unless your tanks have effective counter measures to the kind of anti-tank missiles your enemies are using'. I know US tanks have some rather absurd (and effective) anti-missile systems, but I have no idea how willing they would be to hand those over to someone else.
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  1302.  @CarterHancock  ... no, what you need to do is reform your utterly defective political system that actively encourages corruption and incompetence. (at least if you're an American, which it sure Sounds like you are.) "too much government" is a repeatedly cited, and repeatedly disproven, Excuse for stripping away Good regulation to facilitate further abuse by the already rich and powerful (the same people calling for such deregulation often being just fine with new regulations that suppress competition in favour of their friends and investments). When you dig into it, the problem is almost never Too Much government, except on the occasion that the government has become overly large and bloated as a consequence of the Actual problem: BAD government. Almost universally due to corruption. Though there is a related problem where a single geopolitical entity is just too large to govern effectively by any method other than almost pure bureaucracy, at which point all of the various checks and balances that should prevent abuses and bad actors start breaking down under the weight. If you're lucky it's a strong monarchy and you get a competent emperor who purges the worst of the rot and institutes reforms to mitigate the problem for a couple of generations. But you can''t solve that problem by getting rid of Laws, or governing bodies that actually do useful work, only by breaking up the geopolitical entity into small enough units (by both land and population) that the sheer scale of the system cannot insulate those in government from the consequences of their actions.
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  1303. Part of it is logistics, even if nothing else weird is going on the logistics of getting the right people in the right place at the right time with the right tools and materials, often across several jobs at once, is kind of crazy for construction and renovation. Especially when you're trying to minimize random down time per worker and get the projects done as quickly as possible. I mean, there's plenty of rubbish that happens too, but even when everyone's honest and organized, it's Still like that to some degree. Heck, it's like that even for individual tradesmen, let alone contractors who have to deal with a tonne of them. Good luck having a plumber show up quickly and/or on time here if your house isn't flooding, for example, because someone else's probably did, or the problem on another job was worse than anticipated, etc. Now multiply that by a few times for all the different relevant trades... And that's somewhere which Doesn't have New York's... New York -ness to deal with.
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  1304. Blowing it up In Someone Else's Harbour could quite easily be considered a terrorist act, however... against the owner of the harbour. Heck, it wouldn't take much stretching to consider it an act of war. ... Fortunately for all concerned, the NZ government of the day was fairly well aware that a war with France wouldn't have gone terribly well. Consider, however, that the population of NZ wasn't terribly keen on the whole "Nuclear testing in the pacific" thing Either.
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  1305. It's usually pretty mild, but sometimes it becomes Very obvious.
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  1306. stopped paying for youtube premium because, well, my financial situation changed and I couldn't afford it anymore (and then realised that I wasn't even using most of the features other than not dealing with advertisments, and that the few I did use sometimes were 'on by default and toggling them off is a pain' when my acutal use case wanted 'off by default but easy to toggle on when the situation calls for it'). Youtube tried to convince me to pay for premium Lite on the way out... about a third the price (and thus within budget), no adds but none of the other premium benefits. I was fine with that idea... except that attempting to accept... didn't really work? Apparently you can only get it through google play (not youtube's site!)... through the web browser. Attempts to use the youtube app or google play app on a mobile device? Not a bar of it, couldn't be done. Or at least, they made it Very difficult to do. Come to think of it, cancling the premium membership also required going through google play (that, at least, Could be done in the app). You can't actually cancle premium from the youtube website. So, the end result was that I just cancled entirely. No money from youtube for me. ... At which point I discovered that the browser I had switched to while paying for premium has a built in adblocker, that youtube only detects as an add blocker intermitently (and refreshing the page does away with the popup).
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  1307.  @HotelPapa100  to be fair, the "creole" was Anglo-Saxon/old English (not sure which at that point) and old Norse, from different branches of the Germanic language family (though English had picked up a few celtic bits by then too). It still marks a third person singular subject on the verbs because that was marked the same way in both languages (all the Other combinations previously marked there were different enough to be a pain to remember for the large wave of adult colonists being assimilated into the population and ended up being dropped to reduce confusion). The end result was just the English of the day with some of the grammar filed off and different vocabulary on a regional dialect by regional dialect basis (which happens on its own anyway) which got evened out in waves of standardization (many not entirely deliberate) over the course of centuries, rather than the creation of a new language.
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  1308. Better than a bad touchpad, worse than a good one, or such was the case years ago...
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  1309.  @TonyPombo  you see plenty of old pictures where 'gas station' is 'two pumps completely out in the open outside the car mechanic's shop' or the like, so you're probably not wrong there.
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  1310. There's a few very basic changes to modern English orthography that would Vastly improve the whole thing for minimal cost to anyone but keyboard manufacturers. They're largely not the ones people automatically pounce on. Mark primary stress (So Much of the weirdness of English Spelling rules exceptions comes down to disambiguation only being used if the stress pattern didn't already block alternative readings... with the only indication as to which stress pattern to use being the presence or absense of such disambiguation!), bring back the marker disambiguating between digraphs and syllable breaks (coop vs co-op, among others). Then you get sillyness like words just... not being allowed to end in v. And v being treated as functionally a double character string even when it isn't. combine the two and you get a lot of word final silent e that doesn't actually follow any of the other rules around silent e because the rule forcing its existence is 'words can't end in v, v counts as two consonants when determining vowel interactions'. ...just... let words end in v and let vv be a valid letter string (though the former eliminates most instances where the latter would be required). -ough words just straight up need re-spelling at this point, it's a nonsensical dumpsterfire of unsalvagable historical debris. Let that settle in then reanalyse. You'll note that this involved the addition of a couple of diacritic modifiers (both of which can go on any vowel, one of which might arguably also be used on consonents), but did not require the elimination or replacement of any digraphs, instead just straight up disambiguating what's already there so the over all whole is less incoherent. Yes, there's an argument for doing Something about C (no, just straight up eliminating it doesn't fix things), yes, bringing back Thorn would be aesthetically pleasing, no, we shouldn't be getting rid of q (English q and k are actually different sounds, though they are mutually exclusive: If a q can exist a k can't, and vice versa, so there's no minimal pair, so you Could get rid of the q, there's just no need to do so. Might be an argument for doing away with qu in favour of qw or just q, though (we already have j for dzh, after all)).
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  1311. A dedicated wall climbing robot, sure... of course there is the matter of what type of wall (what's it made out of, how's it built?), how big the robot is, Why it's climbing the wall (and thus what Else it's supposed to do, which translates into weight and complexity), and so on and so forth. After all, it's not exactly difficutl for a robot to 'climb a wall' if you just need the robot to go up and down in a specific spot... a couple of rails and a chain on the wall, wheels on the robot, and a motor to move the chain, and you're basically done. Climbing any given random wall at any given random spot is, of course, more complicated.
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  1312. the I/l thing was originally to help with mechanical limitations of typewriters. They're clearly distinguishable if you write them properly by hand. 0/O had a similar issue. And then computers came along and the reason for having the characters be interchangable was eliminated and so we went back to acutally using two distinct seperate characters... And then some IDIOTS involved in certain big tech companies thought reintroducing this Already Corrected issue which only temporarily existed due to the mechanical limitations of typewriters (and cost saving measures by their manufacturers, I suppose) in the most common standard typefaces was just the Best Idea Ever. ... Just... WHY?! A capital i should look like an i-beam, that's where the name comes from. The symbole your mouse turns into to indicate 'you can type here' is almost identical to how an upper case i should be written. Further, an upper case i should be full line height, while a lower case l should (Properly speaking) only be 3/4ths of a line high... which wouldn't matter if they were being written Properly in the First Place but... arrrrrrgh!
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  1313. I can see how that would be a protective measure to prevent worse problems... But also how it would cause problems of its own even if it's functioning as intended rather than being abused. Sounds like the system needs work.
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  1314. They're only Required to hold an election after 3 years anyway. Usual practice is to dissolve parliament earlier than necessary relative to the election date, then have the election earlier than necessary compared the the maximum term length date. Both can consequently be pushed back a bit without issue.
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  1315.  @amherst88  properly speaking you do post a comment, and thus they are 'posts'. Holdover terminoilogy from the days of 'bulletin boards'. Videos, however, are more usually 'uploaded' and/or 'released', and the like (it's actually a multi-step process, unlike comments), which do not become 'post' when one wants to turn it into a noun.
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  1316.  @dexadrinepancake  ok, the moment you call the invasion of belgium a 'misunderstanding' you destroy all credibility your argument might have othewise had, regardless of how true it may or may not be, becausee that is just utter Nonsense.
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  1317.  @Brian3989  And yet in many ways the difference between them and regular grammar is quite consistent.
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  1318. They're 'ov' and 'of' but english spelling for some reason has a pathological aversion to ending words in 'v'. You get a lot of silent 'e' in places where it doesn't look like it should be, doing Nothing, because written words Can't end in v so have to have something after it, never mind that there are plenty of words that, as Pronunced, absolutely do end in v. This nonsense goes so far as to cause a single v to be treated as a double consonant (at least some of the time, not sure if it's entirely consistent) when determining how vowels around it interact, though to be fair that might also be because to this day it's very hard to tell vv from w in handwriting and many typefaces. (meanwhile, the digraph 'th' is often treated as a single consonant in similar situations). Though why it came out as 'of' and 'off' rather than 'ove' and 'of', I couldn't tell you. (mind you, the seperation of w, u, and v into their own characters is a lot more recent than you might think (honestly, it's recent enough to make me question how the heck anyone managed without it for so long), which may also have contributed.)
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  1319. @Jim Allen Think you missed a few decades there. Beta started life as closed, internal testing by QA. To my recollection, Alpha testing is testing various systems and figuring out what's even viable. Beta testing is 'this is baaaaasically finished, mostly only debugging left' (sort of). Video game companies have been Explicitly charging their customers for the privilege of beta-testing for many years at this point ("Pre-order the over priced collectors edition and you automatically get approved to help beta test the next generic shooter!" used to be a Selling Point... some how ... <_<)
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  1320. you know what'd seriously mitigate the risks while plugging and unplugging those badly designed plugs? Switched sockets :P Seriously, if the socket isn't live when you're plugging or unplugging the plug, the plug's terrible design is kind of irrelivant to how likely you are or are not to get shocked in the process. Of course, that doesn't help with any Other issues, but it does solve that one.
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  1321. fundamentally, the 'optimal' layout for mobile is... whatever you're already used to for whatever reason you may be used to it. Because you're either using both thumbs basically equally, and resting position varies wildly based on hand size, or you're using your index finger and the positioning is entirely irrelivant. Especially as there's no actual tactile cues on a virtual keyboard, unlike a physical one.
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  1322.  @davidbyers1151  The record companies also used to straight up be loan sharks engaging in what amounted to wage theft and fraud against the bands the vast majority of the time. Most bands would end up living off ever increasing loans that they could never pay back. It was set up such that lables often wouldn't even bother keeping track of what they were supposed to be paying the artists and/or how much of the loan (because the money they gave artists when they were signed was never a bonus, it was a Loan) had been paid back unless they tought said artists would make it big right out the gate, and it mostly didn't matter unless one unexpectedly DID make it big because the whole thing was set up such that the artist's cut would never be enough to both live on and cover the costs of doing their job as singers/musicians, so they'd have to borrow more from the lable, and paying that back would eat up more of their cut, until in practice what was actually happening was that the lable wasn't so much paying the talents as including a 'talent expenses' line in their own accounting book. The flip side of this was that when the artists quit, that same 'accounting system' meant that they couldn't really force the artists to pay back the remaining outstanding debt most of the time, but still. Seriously, the record lable would take half the income, then charge you for using all of their facilities and services out of Your cut (I think they paid for advertising and actually making and shipping the physical records/tapes/CDs? not much else though) then take another chunk of Your cut to pay off that initial bonus (loan) you got when you signed with them... you got what was left... Except, as noted, they wouldn't actually keep track of the loans properly, most of the time, just perpetually take a chunk of your cut to theoreically pay them off, forever. I'm lead to believe they got better somewhere along the way, but that used to be standared behaviour for quite a while.
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  1323.  @EarthSouthside  good to know.
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  1324. "just print money" was actually viable given the nature of the problem they were trying to solve... If that money had actually been going into the hands of the general public and actually small businesses to keep things ticking over (and there Was/is a limit to how Much, obviously)... Problem is that most of it didn't make it that far, because the USA has systemic Corruption problems... Seriously, where I live, banks hijacking stimulus checks (intended to cover Rent, among other things) to cover pre-existing debt wouldn't have been allowed in the first place. (For one thing, the Government owns one of the consumer-level banks specifically so it can set minimum service level standards without actively regulating things more than necessary. It wouldn't do that (the Government has less problematic ways to achieve the same result), so any other bank doing so would, at minimum, see its customers defecting to the Government owned bank in droves (and borrowing from that bank to clear their debt with the original bank on the way out.)
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  1325.  @MySqueezingArm  servers cost money to maintain. MMOs (properly made ones, anyway) are one of the rare cases of software as a service where you're actually paying for, and getting, a service. (Especially back in the day when running such a thing required dedicated custom hardware and technicians rather than just renting recourses from a data centre or whatever.) With that being the case, when it eventually reaches the point that the servers cost more to maintain than the game brings in, shutting it down is Entirely Reasonable. Which doesn't stop things like what happened to city of heroes being a little iffy.
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  1326.  @davidalves6813  meanwhile they spent years advertising Thinner as being the big thing... compromising structural integrety in the process.
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  1327. 'course, most characters are named for (one of) the sounds they make. H is one of the very small number where the sound doesn't appear in the name. (it's name would fit better if it were the character for the sound we write as CH), while if you pronounce it 'haitch' it does... Of course the people who say 'haitch' are usually the same ones who drop initial 'h' sounds off Everything Else, so... (well, the combination seems less consistent than it used to be, but that was my experience for the longest time).
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  1328.  @jtg1465  one questions witnesses as well as the accused, ya know?
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  1329. Given some of the things I've seen regarding things that can go wrong with even non-cloud smart homes? You're not wrong, but the Other thing that's very clear to anyone who actually does the research is that Nothing should be any 'smarter' than it Needs to be. Because the advantages are, in most cases, FAR exceeded by incresed likely hood of problems (aproaching 100% as the system gets older and the venders either stop supporting it or stop existing, and that's when they don't flat out cock it up themselves) and difficulty in Fixing those problems.
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  1330. ... no one wants that. It is a Terrible idea. I mean, maybe if you disolved the Union first and the independent states joined up a few at a time it might not be a total shit show, but I can't see it working any other way.
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  1331.  @tullochgorum6323  "driving a little less" is how you sell actually useful public transit.
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  1332. yeeeah... the problem with that? Most of the 'silent letters' aren't acutally silent, but part of digraphs. Sometimes particularlly stupid or awkard digraphs, but still digraphs. The rest? they either represent sounds that don't actually exist in English anymore or were added by latin obsessed idiots and serve only to make life difficult for everyone... except they're pretty much all characters with ascenders or descenders, meaning they're signficant to the overall shape of the word, which is a very important factor to how the brain Actually processes reading, so changing them would make everything even worse (by making it difficult for everyone who has to read a given bit of writing, rather than only the one person who has to actually write it. Though, admittedly, only for a few decades rather than 'forever').
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  1333. On the other hand, for the loan words that settled in quite nicely, replacing them with anglish sounds alien, awkward, and in places even incomprehensible and/or hostile. As for insincerity, that probably comes more from how English uses the borrowings: They're often a lot more specific and defined, with the older, simpler, germanic words being used when that precision is unnessicary. Consequently, the loanwords show up more in contract law... and when used by weasels looking to pretend that what they did was actually something else (but also by perfectly honest folk when what they did or said actually Was something else and they're dealing with unplesant individuals who are pretending otherwise.) Well, that explains the insincerity. 'Mushiness' is something English just does to itself, or perhaps more accurately that its speakers do to it. Bland is, if anything, rather confusing, as generally speaking the term indicates a Lack of variety, while English gets most of its variety from precisely such borrowings (and an awful lot of English's borrowed words form further afield come by way of Spanish or Portugese).
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  1334.  @creativecraving  Linked Italics. I know I contrasted them with cursive earlier (because they're not what most English speakers mean when they say 'cursive' in normal conversation), but they're technically a Type of cursive, in that the characters are written with curved lines and link together. A character very similar to an alpha is used instead of the standard typographical lower case a, but otherwise it's just straight up the standard latin characters used when the letters are written separately or as they appear in most type faces. The upper case characters are just flat out the same as the typed ones and not (supposed to be) linked at all (unlike most other 'this character doesn't link' rules, this one is generally not ignored). Properly speaking anything with a decender terminates a line and you are supposed to lift your pen and start a new line on the next character... most people I know tend to end up at least giving those characters whose decenders curve or angle to the left a loop to link them into the next section and keep going. If you're doing it properly, i, x, and t have you only putting down one of the two strokes as part of the initial word-line and then going back to add the cross pieces and dots. (j, between having a decender and generally only appearing at the start of words, isn't Supposed to link to anything, and so gets its dot immediately... people absolutely link to it as if it was an i when it appears anywhere other than word initially and give it a loop back up to the next character otherwise though.) Every link is basically just starting the character with a seraph at the mid-point of the line, and ending with a seraph at the end of the main penstroke of forming the character... and then just not lifting your pen as you move onto the next character (this means that most characters are connected by a half height /, with a few (including o) linking to the next character with a -, and as mentioned, decenders aren't supposed to link but in practice any that curve left usually do with a loop that transitions into a /). The result? Very few characters are actually formed differently from how they would be if you were writting the letters unlinked, and most (all?) of them it's more a matter of 'write the rest of the letters then come back to do the second stroke instead of stopping to finish the letter immediately' rather than 'write this character entirely differently'.
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  1335. I'm not sure it's 'way off', it's certainly a thing that Happens... it's just one of Many problems, some of which exist as a result of trying to deal with others, with how the USA does cities in general (not that it's the only place with such issues.)
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  1336. Not necessarily. There's a minimum to afford all the necessary services, sure. But past that point more money mostly just means more endurance and bribery. Thing is, popular support often beats funding on endurance if the issue is easily understood, and bribery doesn't make a lot of difference when the one being bribed isn't the one making the decision. Just gotta make sure to undermine (largely by exposing it for what it is) any FUD based propaganda.
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  1337.  @DazedandInsane  it's more like 'at least back then the problems were more obvious and easier to solve by sticking pointy bits of metal into the appropriate individuals in ways they were decidedly unhappy about'.
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  1338. New Zealand has it that you can buy/be served alchole at your own discretion once you are 18 (used to be 20, if I remember rightly, but they lowered it a while back). Younger than that, you can still drink... but only with the permission and under the supervision of your guardian (Normally this would mean your parents, but there are various obvious exceptions... and some fun interactions with Marriage laws...). I'm not sure there's any explicit lower age limit... though, yes, if the CPS equivalent has reason to look into you and finds you being, shall we say... overly liberal... when it comes to your kids' access to booze it's not going to go well for you.
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  1339. Well, given that one of his problems is that the banks won't lend him money anyway, that's less of any issue than it might otherwise be.
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  1340. ... given the sort of idiocy 16 year olds routinely get up to of their own accord... you'd need a Lot more evidence than that to justify claiming that the individual was a plant. Now, law enforcement and the legal system taking Full Advantage of the resulting situation to achieve something they wanted to anyway when the opportunity presented itself? sure. A plant? Decidedly less likely. To much risk of it blowing up in their faces, Badly, if it leaked.
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  1341. Ehh, yes and no. There's definitely some people where this is true, but there's also a decent overlap where they don't actually care. The bigger problem is usually not that They don't want to live in an appartment (it's very rare that a person selling a property to a developer actually moves into one of the resulting buildings rather than moving somewhere completely different, regardless of what sort of housing is built, simple because it involves moving Twice and finding somewhere else to live in between, with all attendent costs). No, the actual complaint is generally that they don't want their Neighbours living in apartments. With complaints ranging from somewhat legitimate issues regarding sunlight and vehicle traffic* to completrely nonsense that has no baring on reality (the exact complaints vary a lot). *which is a coin flip between 'resolves the issue entirely' and 'final nail in the coffin for any hope of the project going ahead' depending on if you get 'reasonable person with legitimately considered concern' or 'delusional NIMBY'. The latter doesn't care How much benefit they, personally, will get out of any part of this. It helps Someone Else, and they can contort that thought into it somehow being harmful to them (even if you can 100% prove without a doubt that every aspect is at worst neutral and some will even be of significant benefit), and just come up with more and more new and nonsensical reasons to oppose the thing no matter how many times they're shot down, until the authorities eventually cave or the costs get so high that the developer gives up. (meanwhile, of course, if there is an actually Legitimate problem it's amazing how often the developers can convince officials to let them go ahead regardless of evidence and mass protest).
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  1342. "instead" probably isn't the word you want there. (And if it is, you have a problem.) Totally agree that it's super important though.
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  1343. A large part of the problem is that even when it wasn't a complete mess (number for how good it was, letter for what type of plug), articles on the matter claiming to clarify and explain would still frequently conflate the two.
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  1344. I'd have to disagree with you fairly strongly there. The architecture is but one part of the problem, and not even a particularly large one.
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  1345. Well, in the sense that English didn't have a word for it and the various English speaking peoples decided that it was a thing we could do with a word for after the German (?) Word for it was pointed out (within my lifetime, I believe) then did what English does and just borrowed the one that was already there (and maybe filed off the serial numbers and made some adjustments to the fittings).
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  1346.  @filanfyretracker  American Customary Units aren't actually a 1:1 match for Imperial units. If I remember rightly it's mostly the units of volume that are actually somehow Worse than the British Imperial system (units with the same name but different sizes, less sensible conversions between units, etc) , while units of length are the same and I can't remember if weight was better or worse, but I belive ACU has less different units than British Imperail. From memory.
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  1347. Seems like the trick to getting people to know you exist in music is the same as getting people to know you exist on twitch: Make it big somewhere else first.
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  1348.  @tovsteh  not that they needed to. Trump and his lot did a pretty good job of being complete shitheads live without any spin required.
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  1349.  @TheCynicalAutist  The vast majority of significant issues were fixed or otherwise no longer relevant before the media even heard of it. I mean, it COULD have caused some major issues if the people in charge of certain critical systems had decided to be idiots, which does happen from time to time, but... they didn't, so it was fine.
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  1350. So far as Steam is concerned... you absolutely can. It has an offline mode specifically to facilitate that. Which doesn't stop the publishers of the game sticking extra crap in there (steam does provide such an option itself, but it's very much intended to be absolutely minimal in its effect on legtimate users and more so that the people who know what they're doing can tell idiot shareholders they're 'doing something'... most smaller developers and publishers choose not to opt into it). The update thing is a tech support issue: Steam insists everyone have the latest version If Playing Online (you can use steam in offline mode, remember) simply because of how much of a Catastrophic Headache it is to debug everything when the actual issue is 'user isn't using the version that we Already Fixed and is being an idiot about it'. There is a way around this if the developers/publishers are feeling helpful though: Steam's beta testing system. Basically a fair number of developers/publishers put the immediately previous version, and certain particularly popular previous major versions (there's a cap as to how many they can have, if they've not hit it yet they may include All previous versions) as options in there. This is particularly useful for games with substantial modding communities. But yeah, Steam won't actually force you to go online regualrly, that's the individual game publishers.
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  1351.  @wodmarach  unless you live in country where that is not standard. Where I live they were taught as being shorthand for * (and you would stick the * into your working the moment there were numbers rather than variables or parentheses on both sides to avoid confusion).
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  1352. In practice, in English, the two words have related, and in a small part overlapping, meanings... But as is often the case, by this point those meanings have split a conceptual space that could be quite happily covered by one word, or in a reasonabley sensible manner by four, between two terms, where the centre of the conceptual space occupied by each makes perfect sense, but the edges, particularly where the two overlap with each other than other, less related terms, is chaotic and arbitrary. Loosely, something is secure if it is not at risk of leaving is proper location by any but the proper means under any but the proper circumstances, by any method. This leads quite nicely into also being protected from tampering. Likewise, something is safe if it is not at risk of causing, or receiving, injury, damage, or other harm of any sort from any source. This leads quite nicely into also being protected from tampering. And then, of course, there is the fact that one often ensures safety by way of using locks and such to secure doors or lids. And the fact that an Area can be "safe" not in that is is protected from harm, but in that people and objects within it are, and be "secure" in a similar manner. English law codes Frequently have pairs of words that seem to have the same meaning bound together in standard phrases in the same way we often say things are "safe and secure", for similar reasons: initially it was to reduce confusion: one couldn't be sure a lower ranking official spoke Norman French or Church Latin, though it was a safe bet that they had access to Someone who could Read or the other... But the commoners generally only spoke English (with varying degrees of Norse and Celtic influence depending where you were)... Resulting in a law code that restated important terms in multiple languages even while any given law was only written in one of them. Of course, languages being what they are, the words didn't actually have the same meanings, only being best approximations. And while all the laws got updated to be in English, they still meant the same thing, by this point usually the full scope covered by the combination of the two words... So the two words with their seperate meanings got codified into English (often with much of the overlap filed down and assigned only to one word or the other) as distinct things, and the law kept the phrase with both words. And then the words spread into common usage, with all the usual consequences, making the pattern so common that when it came to new ideas, English generally follows it, being far less likely to stretch the definition of an existing word when it can borrow or create a new one and file the edges off any resulting overlap. (Well, such is my recollection and understanding, anyway) This leaves English with a very broad selection of words that look like they mean the same thing, and are often interchangable... Right up until you hit that very small gap of meaning where only one of them works, and the others that seem like they mean the same thing produce an utterance that is either incoherently nonsensical, either in terms of grammar or meaning, or means something utterly different from what you were actually trying to say. There is a reason they are similes rather than having one or the other just drop out of use in any given dialect, after all. And also why English dictionaries (and thesauruses) came to be things.
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  1353. Pretty sure that's a different issue that needs a different argument to make any headway.
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  1354.  @ofdrumsandchords  The reason why Grammar isn't (or wasn't) studdied much in school in English is not lack of interest... it's because a few decades back it was realised that the way English grammar had been taught up to that point was Absolutely Delusional Nonsense derived more from the ravings of ignorant rich people with a latin obsession than any actual study or understanding of English, and as such most of the grammar taught was Wrong. Actually factually incorrect. (For a classic example "Never end a sentence with a preposition"... depending on your definitions, in English it is either Impossible to end a sentence with a preposition (because it would, in fact, be a Postposition if used like that), or it is entirely right and proper to do so in many situations and attempts to avoid it often produce awkward, confusing nonsense... because that was never actually how English worked, it's just someone with a Latin obsession insiting that because it Cannot be done in Latin, it Should not be done in English, because, they would insist, Latin is the perfect language (somehow)). Once this was proven, all but the most basic and easily confirmed facts of the language's grammar were ejected from most curiculums (note worthy exceptions seem to be largely American) on the basis that not teaching it at all was better than what came before, while Proper research was done into both how English Grammar Actually Worked (completed quite some time ago, you can buy books that lay it all out quite nicely if you already know something about how grammar and languages work), and how to effectively Teach it to students (a Much more complicated task). My understanding is that that task has been mostly completed and the teaching of grammar has been reintroduced... when the absolutely moronic idea that teaching someone how to speak the common langauge so they can actually communicate with people other than those in the same village they grew up in is somehow 'oppressive', or even 'cultural genocide' (depending who you ask), and in fact somehow So Much Worse than... leaving them unable to access most services because they can't make themselves understood, isn't getting in they way. Still, what this meant was that for a long time, "English" class was almost purely 'literature' class (or, in my case, arguably 'media studies', which is another layer of issues). And while it was reasonably common to add semi-related useful skill sets to Remedial English (how to write a letter properly, useful skills for dealing with government forms and documents, that sort of thing), 'normal' and 'top stream' classes included nothing of the sort.
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  1355.  @ShrexyGuy  More than Guy Fawks's crew had, at least. Keep in mind, it's not so much the idiot politicians you have to worry about. Other aspects of 'the government' are generally much more compitent (if not always in a direction one might like.)
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  1356. Even before you get to corruption, there's just too many elections for too many things that no one has time to do the research to vote sensibly on, so in practice for a lot of those lower positions, the only people who even actually cast a vote are the friends and supporters of the candidates... if anyone even bothers running against the incumbent.
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  1357. IPA does as good a job as can be expected, really. And for the contexts where that's actually Useful, it's pretty good. For most other contexts? You want a script that's sufficiently good at the particular langauge you're dealing with, not one that's making compromises in order to represent a bunch of stuff that's not relevant to your use case.
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  1358. The kite sail idea has been around (and used, to some extent) for litteraly years at this point.
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  1359. ... Only if you're using an utterly nonsensical definition of the term. Going by all the reported facts, the problems in New York have nothing to do with the far left (delusional republican ranting aside, the democrats are mostly Conservative Capitalists who incidentally also collect up the progressive and leftist vote because the alternative is far right reactionary lunatics who keep Breaking Things!). It's entirely a matter of beaurocratic plutocratic corruption and greed.
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  1360. And YouTuber.
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  1361. Depends how many of his descendants married into the other royal (and high noble) houses of Europe. Being a descendent does not require that line of descent to follow the same path the crown passed down through, nor does it need to be the same line the dynasty's name passed down through (and dynasties/families get renamed from time to time too.). All it takes is for one link to have been a woman who had brothers around to inherit the name and all the titles and the lines can diverge, and nothing stops them meeting up again generations later. After all, the house of Windsor was the house of... Was it colburg-saxgotha? Something like that. A German house, either way, before they came to the British throne. And either way, the European royalty intermarried so much that as of ww1 it was becoming a problem. (Though in the past they had married other high ranked nobility, who had married slightly lower ranked nobility, etc, often enough to prevent it becoming too much of a problem in most places most of the time) So, yeah, much like most of asia can trace ancestry back to Gangis Khan, it would not be surprising if this was the case.
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  1362. Sounds like time to get into the truck manufacturing business, really.
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  1363. If I recall correctly it's generally more of a semivowel... or a type of glide? something like that. But the way you form it with your mouth is the same as the way you form consonants, not vowels. Except it's a bit of an odd one, because where most consonants use a single point of articulation, the W sound uses two. (vowels, on the other hand, don't exactly use any, as such).
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  1364. If you have marked the stress, you've already eliminated half or more of the vowel characters from being able to become schwa (it only shows up in unstressed syllables). Then you eliminate all the diphthongs (they can't reduce to schwa). Along the way you've already eliminated all the 'long' (and let's be clear here, they're not Actually long at all, one of them is frequently one of the shortest vowel sounds in the English langauge other than schwa itself) vowel readings. At that point I'm pretty sure the ones that Aren't reduced to schwa are the exception rather than the rule, so if one is dead set on not introducing a new letter that's actually Read as 'schwa' in the first place, it would probably make more sense to mark the ones that Don't become schwa at that point.
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  1365.  @bytejuggler  the contraction of 'have' is Barely different, sound wise, from 'of', in many dialects. If you're sufficiently poorly educated that you don't know what's going on with the grammar, and you don't do a lot of reading (or you do, but it's all either hyper formal and so doesn't use the contraction, or is random internet trash from people no better educated than the reader), it's very easy to end up with no idea the two are different things. Also, while you're correcting things? "Should have gone" not "should have went". Or, perhaps, "should've gone", given the cause of the complaint.
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  1366.  @SvendleBerries  Sure, he'd be chased out of the school for being far right (well, depending on the school in question. Some universities in the US have been as thoroughly hijacked by the lunatic radical left as the Republican party has by the lunatic radical right, others not so much)... and then out of large portions of the modern media industry for being too progressive, or 'not a team player (AKA neither corrupt nor a door mat)' or whatever spin they want to put on 'not compromising journalistic integrity by pandering to the advertisers and scandle-mongering that bring in the big bucks'. And get it in the neck from all sides on the internet. Also note: Unbiased means 'honest and truthful regardless of who is favoured by that honesty and truth'. This is Not At All the same as 'presenting the propaganda of all sides as being equally valid'... but it is also not at all the same as 'picking a side and presenting their propaganda as correct and all contrary information as incorrect by default'. And it can actually be better to be up front about your biases (such that the reader can compare what you have to say with those of other, known, biases and thus arrive at the truth), so long as you are also correctly and honestly reporting the facts, as all that actively Hiding said biases does is make it harder for the reader to spot them in order to filter them out when attempting to attain true and useful information. Still, there's a difference between 'not attempting to hide bias' and 'writing a propaganda piece'.
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  1367.  @Praenuntium  Nah, the problem here is that your options are 'moderately discriminatory in favour of maori' 'maori suppremacists who would really like to deport all the non-maori, and probalby anyone who's not 'maori enough' too' and a bunch of right wing parties (ACT is 'far right' in the sense that they're Fairly mild libertarians and that's as 'far right' as you can get and still have any legitimacy At All here without riding the chain of failures on everyone else's part that alowed te parti maori to exist) who like to Claim to be about equality but in practice are about using the racial divisions that the other parties have so helpfully provided with their poorly thought out (or sometimes just poorly Presented...) policies and positions as a way to prevent opposition to their generally anti-general-citizenry, 'screw anyone who isn't already rich and powerful', actual goals and policies. Rule of thumb? If Labour says something is about equality? They're Probably actually trying to improve equality... now, how good a job they'll do is another matter (when it comes to racial matters their track record isn't great, on other matters they tend to be fairly good). The Greens? it won't be about Equality, it will be about performative virtue signalling, any actual benefit to anyone will be entirely incidental. Te Parti Maori? It will be a flat out lie, they're Maori suppremacists, if it's not screwing over everyone else it's not 'equal enough' for them. If New Zealand First says something is about equality? ... well, there'll probably be some vague attempt at improving equality in there somewhere, but it's vastly more about saying the right thing to get people to vote for them (NZ Firsts actual actions are generally a mix of 'putting the breaks on dishonest or really stupid moves by other parties' and 'whatever is in the interests of whoever made up the core of their voter base this election cycle' (which can generally be summed up as 'whoever is not currently being well served by anyone else and wasn't put off by whatever message they used to entice as many people as possible away from other parties this time'), National? It's almost universally just trying to attach the terrible idea they're trying to push to an ideological staple which one can't oppose without having many loud and annoying unrelated groups pitching a fit over That, and generally degrade opposition by causing division. ACT? The same, but more so, with a side of legitimately trying to get people to beleive that the connection actually exists so they'll actually act against their own interests.
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  1368. Looks like all the little modules are connected by USB C and have easily 3D printed cases, so that much isn't too hard for someone else to make parts for, at least. And the more standard parts they use (that aren't locked off by apple style shitty business tricks) the less of an issue them shutting down would be. So... About the same thing that happens when Apple decrees that you must now buy the latest model,only probably less so?
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  1369. Except the word is older than that, and refered to labourers of some sort... I think it was something related to some of the worse forms of serfdom? Certainly the phrase 'aboloshing the robot' comes up as a good thing... at a point in time when automation wasn't a thing yet. (unfortunately, it's been quite some time since I came across the specifics.) The play is how the word came to spread to other languages (including English) though, yes.
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  1370.  @joonglegamer9898  The pattern of youtubers having their own sponsors IN the video came about entirely due to Youtube constantly screwing creators over on revenue from the actual ads (combined with other factors also making it ever more difficult for them to get money in less annoying ways). Many of the better creators actually use the timestamp system to stick the sponsorship section in its own 'chapter', so if you've already watched it and are rewatching the video, or aren't interested in what's being advertised, or don't have time, or whatever, you can skip them about as easily as is possible without giving YouTube control of them.
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  1371.  @joesmith701  Anything longer than about 10 seconds has a 'skip' button in the bottom right that you can click after a 5 second countdown. Of course, like much of youtube, it's not coded very well... for a while I had to pause the video before I hit skip or the whole thing locked up <_< (note that it had worked fine for ages before that, and works fine now, so the problem may not have been Entirely youtube's fault.) Though that's still no excuse for sticking a 5 minute add before the premier of a 2-3 minute (usually music) video, when the add doesn't start running until the time the 2 minute countdown is scheduled to start. Sure, I THINK they've got it worked out so that the advertisement and the countdown run simultaneously, but when the add is longer than the countdown, that Doesn't Help!
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  1372. In this case it's more like diesil powered ships with sails as auxillary propulsion. Sort of like the early steamships (as opposed to sailing ships with auxillary steam engines), though the technology of both the sails and the combustion engine is much improved and the reason for having and using the auxiliary system is different.
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  1373. Currently, in New Zealand, deseil vehicle (mostly not cars) owners are charged a road usage tax based on a meter on the vehicle, and its weight class. I believe electric vehicles are the same. Vehicles with Petrol engines, on the other hand, are taxed based of fuel usage. There's literally a levy on the petrol at the pump. Thing is, you're charged GST (sales tax, essentially) on the actual sale price of the goods in question, so your tax gets taxed! (The same thing happens with tobacco, actually). The others pay their road usage tax as, you know, a tax. No GST on that. Also, NZ petrol prices are just high to start with, partially due to shipping costs. Mind you, Something about how the taxes work mean that, with the already high petrol prices, when oil prices spike... Something in the system absorbs most of the spike so fuel costs to the consumer don't bounce up and down anything like as much as they do elsewhere. Anyway, the point is that there's a Lot of money to be saved on fuel by switching to electricity, which may or may not leave room for spending more at the associated businesses on a regular basis, but certainly reduces strain on the budget if you live somewhere that cars are more necessity than luxury.
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  1374. More like income and legal matters. Everything else is incidental.
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  1375. Going by other comments, you have to be a much bigger business before AMD will even respond to your messages, let alone sell to you,while Intel goes out of its way to be helpful to smaller businesses like this. If true, well... It both explains the lack and also torpedoes any hope of alternatives any time soon.
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  1376. ... meanwhile, where I live, the peanut package will still say it contains peanuts simply because the standard food packaging regulations require all alergins be labled. It's part of the standard bit with the ingredients and nutrition information on the back, generally.
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  1377. Izzy Gordon probably a mistranslation of "drip", given the coffee. I seem to remember something about drip filtering or some such? I mean, I know basically nothing about coffee (the overwhelming smell of it at the food court in the mall is enough to make me quite ill), but I believe that's a thing?
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  1378. Minimum housing sizes make sense... in that there's a limit to how small they can be and still be Livable for the number of people it's supposed to house. Beyond that? Well, in the interests of being moderately polite, I'll say only that it's silly.
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  1379. If they don't abrupty switch sides or do other silly things. They are still an armed fighting force that has just been cut off from supply with no hope of that changing at that point. Such units start doing... interesting... things to change that situation. Sometime they just go home, sometimes they decide 'well, why not set up our own kingdom over here, then? Taxes are a Great source of income!'
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  1380. ... strangely enough, so are the Republicans. And said "big tech" includes John Deer (sp)... You know, the guys who make tractors and such. And noticeably does Not include many of the usual "big tech" suspects. Likewise, the small number of politicians who actually Get It come from both parties as well. It seems to come down more to what state you're in (and how deep the relevant corporations have their hooks in in that state) rather than which party is currently running said state. Something Louis himself brings up fairly frequently.
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  1381.  @LiyangHU  there is a zero Point, there is not a 0th Year. A year is the space Between the numbers, if you use the number line analogy. 0 is the transition point. It's exactly the same as birthdays. Your first birthday marks the End of your first year. When you are "one year old" you are actually one Complete year old, and whatever number of months and days. The 19th century is the one that Ends when the calendar ticks over to 1900. Equally, AD1900 is one thousand nine hundred complete years since the zero point. (It theoretically counts from the birth of Christ, but by most calculations if's actually off by about three years, and if you were being pickier still the years should tick over in Spring (northern hemisphere) some time rather than mid-winter.) The point is reached at 1900/01/01 00:00:00.000000...01. you may notice that months and days also do not have a 0th month or 0th day. People also go back and forth over midnight being 24, 12am, or 00. I've seen clocks in all three formats. There Is a zero Point, there is not a Year Zero because Years Aren't Points. Oh, bonus point: recent usage trends to the contrary, the days in a month absolutely Are ordinal, and there's no zero There either.
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  1382.  @Anthem127  he's explained several times in several videos, why splitting the storefront and the workshop is non-viable. Gist of it is that Not doing that is a significant part of why he's doing as well as he is while his competition (who did) failed. (Not the entirety of it, but significant)
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  1383. Most of the problem was that the entire referendum was expected to fail on its own merits, due to being a very dumb idea. (The ignorance, gulliblity, and idiocy of the general public were underestimated). In the aftermath, a non-terrible brexit was Possible... but the incompitence of the political class as a whole in that regard was... impressive.
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  1384.  @matthewpiper4328  last I heard Youtube was doing that in more places than just Europe, and of their own initiative, so as to keep the service up and at a reasonable speed in the face of a Significant increase i usage from all the people who would normally be busy at work, school, etc. and currently are not.
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  1385. NZ typically has its elections sooner than required, and disolves parliament earlier before the election date than required. Pushing it back is, as a result, less of a problem. For bonus points, while the PM Can call an election before the 3 year term is up, and usually does, if they Don't, the Governor General (or the Queen, if she happened to be around at the time) just dissolves parliament when the term runs out and calls the election Anyway, unless it's mid-kegitimate-state-of-emergency, and even then requires parliament to pass a bill with a limited duration to that effect which the GG must sign off on, and Parliament generally doesn't like doing things like that for the same reason the GG doesn't like not signing bills which pass the bote into law: constitutional crises are bad. And election shenanigans are one of the few things that would see Parliament come off worst from such.
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  1386. Properly speaking, the 'train' is the part that 'follows along behind'... on railways, the locomotive is not 'the train', and calling it Part of the train is already debatable (though camel trains, wagon trains, and multiple units all blur things a little such that you can include the leader, in this case the locomotive, as part of the train). If they're being pushed rather than following behind, then they're not really a train... though we might still call them such if they have enough similarities to the archtype (which, these days, would be a locomotive hauled railway train). if the barges are attached to each other more than one wide the analogy breaks down entirely so they don't count that way either.
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  1387.  @brosef5033  over rated or not, the question is 'who has the palest and most unblemished complection' (that being the meaning of 'fairest')... so...
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  1388. The main reason to subsidise farm production is to ensure it continues to exist, protecting the food supply against various disruptions even though, lacking those disruptions, it's not the most economically productive and would cease existing. You run into problems if your main source of food is a country that decides it doesn't like you, after all. But yeah, if your objective is anything other than 'ensuring domestic production and related skills continue to exist despite Current market conditions being unfavourable to that', production subsudies are a Terrible way to do it.
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  1389. Being a monopoly isn't actually a thing you can be convicted of, just by the by. It's not actually a crime in most places (USA included) Engaging in anticompetative practices (which can lead to an undeserved monopoly) is illegal in most or all of the English speaking world, so far as I'm aware, and it's usually fairly hard to attain a monopoly without doing so (though it can and does happen). Likewise, there are various abusive practices a business can engage in as a monopoly that, absent that status, would see their competitors utterly destroy them (well, unless said competitors were also in on it. Cartels and the like are always fun to deal with...) Those are Also illegal, at lest for the most part. Being a monopoly? That just means that the regulators are paying Very Close Attention to what you get up to, and, should you step out of line in a way they can actually nail you for, will take great joy in doing so... unless you've bought them off in one way or another, anyway (generally also illegal, but loopholes are a thing).
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  1390. Which is interesting, as the Russians had done exactly the same thing to the Swedes (when Their empire was at it's peak) ... Not sure exactly when, other than "less than 200 years before"... It broke them, too.
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  1391. I think most English speakers look at the silent letters and go "well, yeah, but in English they either actually do something or they're a weird historic artifact on one or two words, French just looses entire syllables (near enough) for no apaprent reason)". I mean, arguably the English problem is worse because it's more chaotic, but the issue's just more immediately obvious in French precisely because it's so consistent. Well, that and, let's be honest, that sort of claim is more an excuse to not put in the effort of learning a language than any sort of legitimate critique, most of the time.
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  1392.  @sukhmandersingh4306  'both' is an entirely valid option here.
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  1393. Not That bad. Should be 'take on' rather than just 'take', though (at least it doesn't say 'take out'). Unless you mean the video he's reacting to, which does, indeed, have a Super clickbaity title.
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  1394. The channel does not control advertisment length, and any ad that's more than 15 seconds can be skipped after 5 seconds.
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  1395. I'd argue that while eggcorns may show intelligence, they absolutely Do show ignorance (if of a very minor and understandable sort), because if one were Not ignorant... one wouldn't need to be creative in coming up with a possible solution because you'd already know what the correct form was! Intelligence and ignorance aren't actually contrasting traits.
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  1396. nah, wouldn't be that much harder to type. It's basically just a second shift key... and we already have the completely redundant capslock key, and doubles of ctrl and alt (in fact, my understanding is that European keyboards deal with this precisely by coopting one of the alt keys for a secondary shift function). I mean, the main reason we lost the double dot to disambiguate digraphs from syllable breaks in English in the first place is that it was left off of typewriters for manufacturing reasons. Convince manufacturers to actually put it on the keyboard and no one would have the slightest issue with it. You do start running into a bit of an issue when the same character needs to take multiple marks at the same time though. Maybe not much of one, but a bit.
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  1397. Last I had heard people were quite happy with American nuclear weapons staying the hell away (well, nuclear weapons in general. Enemy nukes in particular, for obvious reasons :P), but general opposition to the very idea of considering nuclear power plants as an Option had substantually reduced. Also amusing: The nuclear free policy becoming a Thing was mostly an accident of miscommunication... and even then it Initially only banned nuclear Weapons, and may have put some restrictions on precisely where nuclear powered ships could or could not dock (but, of course, the USA wasn't going to reveal which ships did and didn't have nuclear weapons and/or powerplants, so the result was just 'no American ships at all'.) Of course, events then proceeded as they did.
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  1398.  @TheStevenWhiting  A lot of the time it's less actively lieing and more putting little or no effort into checking whether what the sponsors put in front of them for the ad read is true or not. Often for good reason, the successful ones are functionally small business owners... which tends to entail rather more than 40 hour work weeks.
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  1399. I recently bought sandals (of German make, I think) with cork soles (in New Zealand). Probably the most comfortable footwear I've ever owned. (The cork isn't the only reason for that, they're very well made in general)... Also some of the Warmest footwear I've ever owned that wasn't lined with, or made of, wool (and things that are never breath well.)
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  1400. ... then you compare that to the ratio of good to terrible drivers in cars... And consider that the Main cause of accidents involving cyclists is carcdrivers just flat out Not seeing them* when the cyclist is absolutely following the law.. And the world gets just that little more absurd. * Or at least, so the drivers claim,with varying degrees of credibility.
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  1401. I'm sorry, did this idiot just claim trump was Coherent?! In words or position? It really doesn't matter what your opinion is on other matters, that right there is proof positive of being completely out of touch with reality. Mind you, Trumps most likely opposition currently (as I understand it) is showing signs of being legitimately senile (as in, potentially medically so) ... Kind of tells you something when there's even room for debate as to which is the worse option... Seriously, the trump administration is going out of its way to make it Harder for the various US states to deal with the current pandemic. It tells you something when various states are basically having to engage in borderline smuggling operations to actually get necessary medical supplies without someone from the federal government showing up at the supplier and poach their order (on the basis of offering more money in cash on the spot), while said federal government refuses to provide said supplies from the federal stockpiles to states which need them. For goodness sake, Trump just tried to ban the export of masks to Canada. Masks which cannot be made without certain components. Components which are only available to the manufacturers in question From Sources In Canada! In the name of increasing mask availability!
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  1402.  @keithklassen5320  Beating the Internet is Easy, sure. And you do it by NOT starting a war with the masses. 'win first, and then go to war'... or, more accurately, win first so no war is required. The moment you Actually start a war with the general public on the internet, particularly one you haven't already effectively 'won' before it started? Things are going to go Very Poorly for you.
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  1403. They delayed Dissolution over 9 cases. They delayed the Election mostly over the opposition complaining about the resulting shortened campaign period. There is a minimum time between dissolution and election, but the usual practice is to allow longer than that for campaigning and such. If Dissolution had been delayed long enough it would have Eventually forced the election to have been delayed too, but that's not what happened.
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  1404. In New Zealand most of the powerplants aren't even anywhere near the cities to begin with (we get a Lot of our power form hydroelectric dams, and most of the rest from coal and gas plants that are also generally further away from populated areas where possible), so cogeneration isn't really a thing that could really be done. On the other hand, every school I attended (didn't go to university or the like, mind you) had its own furnace, which would burn coal to provide heat for the entire campus via hot water pipes (and most of the school's rubbish would end up burnt in it too, to my understanding). Of course, that's largely because the schools themselves are mostly pretty old. Newer schools, and newer buildings, are just hooked up to the electrical grid and heated that way.
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  1405.  @alenasenie6928  not just the USA. It's basically become the standard way of expressing the numbers in most/all English speaking countries. Certainly I've ever met has used "millard" or whatever in my lifetime unless they were explaining the old system for some reason. The simple fact is that the old/European/long system makes numbers you actually might use much longer than they need to be while very rapidly reaching words for numbers bigger than needed to describe the number of stars in the universe, while the New/American (might want to double check that, I suspect it may have been a British creation)/ short system significantly reduces the amount of time/space needed to express numbers that actually get used regularly while still handling exceptionally large numbers perfectly well. Nevermind that if the system Actually made sense it would start at thousand rather than million before tacking prefixes on.
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  1406. modern English does not even "kind of" have genders because of the pronouns, English instead divides pretty much all living things by their physical number, age and sex (the number of divisions made in practice varies based on a whole bunch of factors, you'd be surprised how long the list can get for one kind of farm animal), using a different word for each relevant combination, and the pronouns reflect this. A lot of ignorant people have put about a large amount of of confusing stupidity due to a combination of not being able to get their head around this fact and the fact that English uses the word "gender" for four very different but tangentially related things: Grammatical gender, (an agreement system used in many languages. what gender a word has is usually more down to it's pronunciation or spelling than any real association with a given sex), biological sex (because the word "sex" was becoming badly overloaded, while prudes and immature idiots were making life difficult for the bureaucrats of the time about it), specific social constructs (gender roles. the individual responsible for most of the nonsense surrounding this was a journalist who later admitted to pretty much fabricating the bulk of it in order to meet a deadline. didn't stop various factions latching onto the idea and exploiting it to the hilt for various ends), and what ultimately amounts to an aspect of neurology and psychology (gender identity. transgender people and the like. I'm of the opinion that a lot of baggage and nonsense could have been avoided if a better term had been chosen, because malicious and/or stupid actors on all sides of That issue have run the ability to use the terms to conflate the concepts into the Ground in their rhetoric. often actually undermining their own point if the listener actually applies an ounce of logic to the argument... not that most do, tribalism and ideology being what they are).
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  1407. This is usually followed by a lot of more sensible follow up that won't fit on a sign or in a slogan... (Even most people who want to get rid of the cops entirely recognize that detectives whose job it is to investigate and solve significant crimes are important to have and that if step 1 is abolishing the police, then step 2 is establishing a functioning organization to take over that role, and shifting a lot of the other things they do (and their funding!) To more appropriate (often already existing) organizations.) Though sometimes it's utter insanity that's worse than the current arrangement instead.
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  1408. Parcels take longer to get to NZ than the virus can survive on them, generally. (There are exceptions, of course). The outside of them is also usually easy to disinfect, and the inside just a matter of leaving them in the garage for a few days before opening.
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  1409. Yeaaaahhh.... You might want to look into the history of the two nations... That ain't happening without Significant extenuating circumstances. The two countries have a lit in common and mostly get along fairly well, but they also have some Very Fundamental differences. There are Reasons New Zealand has never been willing to take Australia up on its offer to become an Australian state (which as I understand it Australia has written into its constitution, even), and that's not likely to change any time even moderately soon.
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  1410. A perfectly reasonable argument... until you live close enough to the disaster in question that it makes up a significant chunk of your day to day experience of life.
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  1411.  @MindForgedManacle  Do keep in mind that Fox News was founded for the explicit purpose of spreading intentionally false information to undermine trust in the news media in General after honest and effective reporting lead to the downfall of it's founder's preferred President. It has maintained this policy to this day. It's not even the usual policy of trying to spread a message to the benefit of their interests, it's an active campaign to undermine the public's ability to even evaluate the truthfulness of a given report. ... They actively don't care if you believe their narrative (they'll flip it around and contradict themselves all over the place), only that you don't trust Anyone Else Either. If you just give up and declare all media sources equally dishonest and thus all facts unknowable, Fox (and Murdoch's 'news' empire in general) has achieved it's goals. Other sources have their biases, but they are generally interested in truthful reporting outside of those biases, and generally actually trying to push a specific line within those biases, so you can aggregate them and determine, to some extent, truth and falsehood by simply comparing sources with different biases and accounting for those biases. Not so with Fox. It actively and intentionally spreads (ALMOST! Occasionally an actual fact will be sufficiently useful to be incorporated into a given nonsense narrative, after all) exclusively junk data at every opportunity. Which is to say that Fox News is actively and intentionally Anti-News... Fake news, one might say.
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  1412. might want to look into/consider their treatment of employees, too. It's... pretty dire.
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  1413.  @jenniferpearce1052  my default assumption regarding the timing would be poorly synced audio. Doesn't change everything Else wrong with that bit though.
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  1414. Ehh, I like widescreen these days. It finally delivers on something PC's have been Claiming to do, but failing at, since ~windows 95: actually having two documents (or whatever) up on the screen at the same time,with both in a usable state, without needing an entire seperate monitor. (Only using half the screen at a time for a given task helps mitigate the downside of having a curved screen, too(last time I needed a replacement, it was basically impossible to find a flat one).) Of course, I'm not sure how well that carries over to laptop screens (I have a laptop, but in recent years it's spent 99+% of its time plugged into external... Everything. The rest of the time it was being moved around for one reason or another). The one thing this Doesn't work well with is web browsing. I seem to consistently run accross pages that are violently opposed to the idea that the might possibly not be displayed in full screen (even as most of the page is whitespace due to being optimized for phones, in many cases). Which I'm pretty sure is a matter of poor page design, more than anything.
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  1415.  @VasoPerasLikodric  English has some exceptions, but most of the things that Look like exceptions actually aren't. There's no justifying -ough, mind you, that one's just terrible. The thing about English is that it has an uncommonly complicated stress system, and the stress is lexical. It's not just "the stress is on the Xth sylable, unless Y" it's "any given syllable is either stressed or unstressed in an alternating pattern, every second Stressed syllable is more (or less,depending on how you look at it) than the others. Which is all fine and dandy, except that Lexical stress means that the first syllable in a word can be at any point in the cycle, And two words can be identical Except for that stress cycle start point. None of this is marked in the written language... Except it actually IS, in the most irritatingly backwards way possible: certain vowels/vowel sounds are forbidden or permitted only at given degrees of stress (points in the cycle). So when there are two possible sounds a letter combination could make, if the stress pattern permits both, extra characters are inserted to indicate which is intended, (that "VCCV" vs "VCV" resulting in the first V being different, for example)... But wen the stress already prevents it that characters aren't inserted! Well, that and the orthography was basically codified immediately before the Great Vowel Shift changed how we pronounced damn near everything in the vowel space. Oh, and words are spelled differently based on the language they were borrowed from, with the main indication of which language they were borrowed from being how they are spelled... Bonus points: a 1:1 sound to character ratio for English would need over 40 characters and would be dialect specific, which would utterly destroy mutual intelligibility. You think learning one-and-a-bit English spelling systems is bad? Try try anywhere from tens to hundreds (depending exactly how the politics of it shook out). Basically, English is absolutely a mess, but it's (mostly) a much more logical mess than most give it credit for.
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  1416. Not no one, but dialects where it's the norm are definitely less common than those where it isn't (or, well, in my experience, much of which is probably out of date by this point).
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  1417. On paper, in New Zealand and other such places, the Queen (or, in practice, the governor general) can veto any law simply by not signing the thing. And that's exactly what's supposed to happen to bad ideas that make it that far. There is no way to over ride this. Of course, what actually happens is that anything which would have that result is corrected before the bill is presented to be signed into law. If the governor general was blocking something for illigitimate reasons, the legislature would complain to the monarch, who would replace the GG, and the bill would be presented again (and theoretically go through). If the Monarch is refusing to sign a bill for dubious reasons it gets more complicated. In theory, the check on That is that parliament (the legislature) controls the purse. But there's that whole personal union thing... And the monarchy being independently wealthy. What you get instead is international diplomacy leading to the heads of multiple governments pointing out to said monarch that, for all that the whole monarchy thing has been working out pretty well so far, there Are alternatives, so maybe they'd like to be a bit more reasonable, or, failing that, abdicate in favour of their heir? The counter balance to That is that doing so requires that multiple different governments agree that the monarch, rather than the parliament proposing the bill, is in the wrong. Governments who have to then convince their people that A: the monarch is wrong and B: what amounts to a coup and/or revolution is a valid response to their actions. So, yeah, absolute veto right... But only if the thing you're vetoing is legitimately that bad and/or you're willing to deal with the rather extreme consequences.
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  1418.  @dside_ru  ... And that somehow these are different from the "experts" you aren't supposed to listen to, apparently.
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  1419.  @chiyerano  ... I'm pretty sure there's a joke to be made there about model numbers and replacement parts in humans, but as my brain isn't cooperating, I'll leave the humour as an exercise for the reader.
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  1420.  @jcdenton1111  ... You have a very strange definition of "overtaking"... One which would require every car traveling straight through a multi-lane intersection to stop and wait for the cars in the turning lanes on their own side of the road (specifically, those waiting to turn across oncoming traffic) to go before proceeding in order to not be "in the wrong" if the driver of one such turning car suddenly decided to change lanes in front of them without warning.
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  1421. Meanwhile, New Zealand's multi-month total lockdown did no such thing, with the exception of some tourism based businesses. Of course, NZ's government focused on getting rid of the disease as quickly as possible while ensuring there was an economy to go back to afterwards, and by the end only had a week or two of buffer left before things would have started breaking... But importantly, it did still Have that buffer, and once the disease was stamped out (quarantine facilities for people entering the country aside) the economy bounced back beyond all expectations (and best case predictions). This was achieved mostly because the government was willing and able to subsidise wages (I'm not sure exactly how that worked for the self-employed, but it seems to have), so near on everyone whose job wasn't at a supermarket, doctor's clinic, pharmacy, hospital, emergency services, or maintaining vital infrastructure either got a paid vacation or was working from home (or some hybrid thereof) during the highest level lockdown, and after that businesses were allowed to open if and when they found ways to operate while meeting new required safety standards. These days, unless you're entering or leaving the country, everything's pretty much business as usual. The new normal is barely different from the old normal unless you worked in tourism or only returned because of the pandemic, economy included.
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  1422. That's a bit puzzling, as 'Negates a diphthong' would be an incorrect answer. It actually negates a Digraph, telling you to read the characters seperately rather than as a single unit. English has quite a few diphthongs represented with single characters (most of the 'long' vowels aren't actually long at all, but diphthongs), and double characters that represent monothongs, or that indicate diphthongs but can't actually be split the way the diaeresis indicates due to only one of them actually being a vowel.
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  1423. Probably some combination of the jurisdiction in question and exactly how the systems are set up. If the cobot's control setup and range of motion is such that it cannot intersect with where the opperator (or other persons in the area who aren't doing things they're not supposed to)'s head and neck are located at the time, it might be considered acceptable, for example.
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  1424. Err... It helps reduce Heating bills. Depending on other factors it can actually Increase cooling related (AC etc) bills, or make the house miserable to live in in summer. Depends on a tonne of details regarding layout. The house I currently live in is like this. Well, southern hemisphere so it faces north instead, and no AC (the idea of even Having any sort of AC in anything short of a multi-story office building was new when I was a kid, and even now it's not universal in your average house, and is handled differently than is the case in the USA.). It's supposed to help heat the house in winter... Except all the glass needed to let the sun in and warm one or two rooms in the afternoon lets so much heat Out at night that it's counterproductive (even after replacing most of the big windows with double glazing). Equally, in summer, most of those same rooms are unliveably hot, even after shutting the sun out in the middle of the morning and not opening the curtains back up until almost sunset (admittedly, this is partially because on hot days here there is also frequently no wind at all for most of the afternoon. Do get evening sea breezes though.) The better your insulation, the less benefit you get out of the house being orientated towards the sun, and the more the downsides stack up. And the insulation usually has a bigger effect on the bills than the orientation... Well... Where I live. Different climate may result in different results.
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  1425. The internet is over 50 years old. The web a bit less. Random citizens having easy access to it became reasonably common in the 90s in wealthier countries. Borderline ubiquitous access is more recent again because it required smartphones to first exist and then become affordable. Also, tech progressing as fast as it does Now basically wasn't a thing before the 1800s... and even then the entirity of the 1800s and the begining of the 1900s was the period of acceleration.
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  1426. Reddit is just a forum. It got big mostly by the simple expedient of not making you do anything more 'back end' than user content moderation, and then by Already having a large userbase, which encouraged people to just make a subreddit (aka, a subforum) there rather than making their own, seperate, forum. (there were places that would let you host your own forum for free already, mind you, but they had distinct limits in place to ensure their costs didn't exceed the value they were getting from doing that and made you do a bit more technical stuff if you wanted it to not be VERY ... bleh. And, of course, hosting your own ment acquiring your own domain name and hosting server (or renting a share there of) which, of course, cost money.)
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  1427. ... is that another round of "stab in the back" bullshit? Because much was made of the idea that the German army could have won if the government hadn't surrendered (they were still occupying enemy territory, with in enemies in Germany, after all), but the reality is that their entire logistical support base was just Done. If they'd kept going all that would have happened was ever increasing shortages and starvation as they were driven back into Germany and an even less favourable peace. And if the claim looks suspiciously like blaiming the Jews, then it was probably just Nazi propaganda.
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  1428.  @xxxBradTxxx  You'd have to change the entire model of owning and operating cargo ships globally... there have been a bunch of viable improvementes for cargoships created in my life time. Few, if any, have been implemented, because the people who would benefit are the operators, not the owners, but the owners are the ones who'd have to pay the extra costs to implement the changes. That and there is a persistant surplus of cargo ships (leading to rolling failures of the companies who own them... but their stuff just gets redistributed to others, with most of them succeeding and a few of them finding they're now the least good option and collapsing, with their stuff getting sold to other companies, over and over and over and over).
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  1429. depending on the programing language, some punctuation marks get moved to be more accessable, and I believe the escape and tab keys may get moved around. That's about it, as most programing langauges were developed around keyboards that were fundamentally QWERTY (or very close to) to begin with.
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  1430.  @Novashadow115  to be fair, he'd actually be right about...well, most people. It just has nothing to do with EV vs ICE or much of anything else that might be thus implied. Most people simply do not actually travel to other cities much. Usually due to lack of time, lack of money, or just lack of reason to do so. Perhaps they don't see other cities as other countries, really, but that's largely due to not really thinking about either very much... There's places within reasonable travel distance by whatever methods are available for just doing day to day things, places that are within day-trip distances for doing something a bit special on a weekend or other day off, and then there's everywhere else that requires a lot of planning ahead, packing, organization, etc. (degree of paperwork and language learning involved varies, but beyond that not much changes) That's really how most people think about that sort of thing. EV cars, ICE cars, various public transit options (of whatever type and quality happen to be available), they all nudge around which thing is in what category a bit (and just being flat out rich makes a big difference Not to mention the fact that the USA is large enough that more distant states (and the cities there-in) pretty much Are different countries in most meaningful respects.
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  1431.  @BlackHawkBallistic  Ideally if you're going outside of EV range you'd be able to make use of various mass transit options... ... of course, some parts of the world are much better in that regard than others. Also, last I heard smaller delivery trucks and vans could be battery powered quite happily. Of course, you do hit range and mass limits after a while. EVs have their own version of the rocket equation to contend with. The ideal solution to this is, well, electrified rail in most cases, but there is a range and throughput band between 'last mile consumer and small retail delivery in cities' and 'roll several entire train cars right into the warehouse', and that does assume the rail infrastructure's still in place/gets built. (too bad so much got ripped up in the later half of the 20th century). For that, ICE vehicles are still the way to go... Though there has been an interesting experiment/first stage infrastructure project in... Germany, I think it was? Basically takes its cues from trolley buses. Basically your standard big-rig trucks, except there's a pantograph on the cab roof and overhead cables along the outermost lane of the highway (some of these are hybrids that use ICE once they leave the highway, others have batteries for their last mile in cities, and I think some just run between depots that are just off the highways and served by the cables as well. Can't quite recall for that last one)
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  1432.  @Lolhjl7274  repeatedly provable. Pretty universally, replacing car traffic with foot traffic improves business performance. ... You know, provided the public transport etc. exists to allow the foot traffic to still get there. (almost as universal is businesses owners complaining before hand that the change will cause them to lose customers.) Turns out, foot traffic actually stops to look at (and consequently buy) things. Vehicle traffic just drives right on past and if you weren't the intended destination to begin with you might as well not exist.
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  1433. If you put in the effort (listen to the videos and have a clue what any of the place names refer to) you can find what neighborhood he lives in... And that's pretty much it.
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  1434. Seriously, that's a Selling Point. (Err.. well, ok, not if they've since fixed the structural integrity issues that high end phones and tablets ended up with due to the constant need to be lighter and thinner.)
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  1435. There's definitely room for improvement, but the first step to achieving such is tossing out the notion that making the alphabet 'more phonetic' is a useful goal rather than an occasional, and temporary, happy accident. The second is probably actually including any indicator at all of stress patterns (given that the existing system rather bafflingly assumes you already know them, and becomes more consistent when you do).
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  1436. The USA is not the first melting pot, and it's absolutely worked in the past, and in other places. The important part is that the metals must be allowed to melt, and alloy, (forming a new, singlular identity consisting of the best parts of the contributing elements) for it to be of any benefit. Both leftist obsession with multicultralism as an end goal (when it is in fact the natural expression of a healthy and ongoing process of assimilation) and promoting individual minority groups as independant things not to be subsummed by the whole (prone to causing enclaves that become indistinguishable from ghettos), and the rightist obession with dividing and suppressing minorities and lowerclasses so as to more easily oprress and exploit them (often just flat out Intentionally creating ghettos) prevent this process from actually occuring properly (as it naturally does in the absense of those factors), and thus all benefit is lost.
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  1437. Given that "deadliest warrior" was frequently nonsensical garbage in terms of its results and justifications, I hope they're not taking Too much inspiration. Though it was, admittedly, pretty cool regardless.
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  1438.  @bensheard3969  That might be the 'simplest' in some contexts. Reality is that there were probably Some people like that in the mix... but also probably some who legitimately did wan't a healthier option (and then didn't like the healthier option presented), and some who just didn't want the temptation (who would have been better served by the vending machine just not being there), and probably several other factors as well.
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  1439.  @bensheard3969  That might be the 'simplest' in some contexts. Reality is that there were probably Some people like that in the mix... but also probably some who legitimately did wan't a healthier option (and then didn't like the healthier option presented), and some who just didn't want the temptation (who would have been better served by the vending machine just not being there), and probably several other factors as well.
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  1440. The amount of money and connections available to make a pain in the arse of themselves, mostly, i suspect.
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  1441. some programable keyboards have the ability to elminate the shift key entirely and get the secondary character by just holding the key longer (in addition to just flat out changing where any and every character and function is actually located), if that's any help. Great for anything involving typing once you get your mappings figured out right... rapidly becomes something of a Problem for non-typing uses of the keyboard though.
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  1442.  @maryginger4877  Reports from actual Russian soldiers and their families indicate a VERY different reality.
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  1443. sometimes for relatively good reason (regular flooding can do FUN things to graveyards, for example), others, not so much.
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  1444.  @optimisticnihlist9705  what reports I've seen regarding the housing crisis is that there are quite literally not enough houses. Say whatever you want about the Rest of the situation, that's a problem. Pre-COVID the government got in on the back of promises to fix that, as much as anything else. They were failing miserably. (They then handled COVID really really well and, that being considered a very important matter (and the main party on the other side of the house basically self destructing) they got reelected anyway.)
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  1445. That'll happen when you (in this case the National government a couple of decades back) completely bugger the funding system for your entire health system, and the subsequent government changes the funding policy back to something sane but refuses to then actually fix the damage already done. And when you INSIST on cutting taxes when the country really, Really cannot afford it. And jack up public transport prices and scrap every improvement project you can get your hands on (never mind centuries of evidence that more and cheaper public transport leads to Increased Economic Activity and thus More Tax Income while having less and making it more expensive does the opposite. No no, build more car focused infrastructure, which is actively detrimental to anyone who isn't selling cars, fuel, or road repair services, instead!) Remeber, the Labour government was actually managing to return a surplus and reduce government debt while improving the state of things before the pandemic got involved (admittedly, improvements were Slow, but they were happening). The pandemic necessitated borrowing a lot of money... but that sort of situation is exactly when one Should be borrowing money. That and when financing infrastructure and similar improvements that will lead to improved profitability (and thus the ability to repay the debt and come out ahead). Increasing automation and importing cheap labour are two completely different issues... contradictory ones, even. More automation leads to needing More Expensive labour... just a lot Less of it. can't speak to the fertaliser issue one way or the other beyond that what I do know about such things rather implies that it's unlikely to be as direct a chain of cause and effect as you're presenting it as.
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  1446.  @PhilosophicalZombieHunter  I present to you... American political parties. No one ever said it was rational or useful.
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  1447. Actually, English spelling cares about Where in the syllable the characters (including digraphs, trigraphs, and tetragraphs) are when determining their sounds.* Ghoti cannot, in fact, be read as "fish" only as "goat-y" (that is, either "goat-like" or a type of beard, depending on which of the homophones you want). The same nonsensical violation of the system that is required to read it as "fish" also produces another amusing possibility though: all parts of it appear as "silent" letters in other words. So if "fish" is a valid reading, so is... Well... A null value. A silent word. *Also where the (variable and completely unmarked, mind you) stresses fall (and yes, English has more than one stress point per word if it has enough syllables). It's actually a Lot less chaotic than it looks once you allow for that. I mean, there's still no good excuse for why on earth the nonsensical disaster that is -ough hasn't been sorted out at some point (its the result of a whole series of sound changes (possibly across multiple dialects and or languages, it's been a while since I read up on it), with the spelling only representing Some of them.), And a couple of other things have their entire logic amount to "some idiots with a latin fetish but little understanding of Either language came to be influential 'authorities' on the matter for a while." (On a related note, the Long debunked "rules" about preposition placement and split infinitives come from the same source... But in the last 5-10 years I've seen an awful lot of downright Strange sentences resulting from (mostly) Americans who seem to have decided that they apply...)
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  1448. I know English word order is as rigid as it is (not unchanging, but the changes are goverened by fairly strict rules) precisely because it used to have a lot of affixes indicating case and verb/subject agreement and such, then lost most of them and compensated for that by using the word order to impart that information instead.
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  1449.  @OGruurd  On balance, electric cars are better than ICE cars... but they're still awful. What is actually needed is a reduction in cars, total. Which can only be achieved by reducing the Need for cars. Which involves investing in building and, importantly, Actually Maintaining, proper public transport infrastructure (Note: this is generally Cheaper to build and maintain than road infrastructure with a lot less downsides... but good luck getting that through people's heads after decades of auto-mobile and oil industry propaganda (and before anyone complains about subsidised rail: Planes are subsidised in the USA on routes where, in Europe, cheaper rail services would be subsidised, and cars are subsidised to hell and gone almost Everywhere))... Yeah... some places will manage that, but most, particularly much of the English speaking world? Good luck!
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  1450.  @Panocek  Cars are already an extreme luxury that few can afford. The problem is that in many places the transportation infrastructure is so shit that you have to buy them Anyway (sometimes even to get to your nearest food shop, even when it Should, by the geography, be a ten minute walk away) so you have to make cuts elsewhere instead.
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  1451. Well, that and it would have been cheaper regardless. Exchange rates and such. But yes, it is almost certainly a significant factor.
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  1452. less vs fewer isn't a problem in and of itself, but it has contributed to the lack of undertanding which has knock on effects, such as not understanding the phrase 'few and far between' (often said as 'far and few between' from lack of understanding), and the use of 'one of the only' when the intent is 'one of the few'. 'Only' meaning, essentially, that there is only one that falls into that catagory. 'One from among the one' rather than 'One from among the small number'. ... it's kind of an issue.
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  1453. Well, generally you should keep your phone between 40 and 60 % charged at all times, as the nature of the batteries is such that you'll get more up time out of the phone before the battery gives out for good if you do than if you let it drain super low then charge it to full every time (also, the battery takes less time to gain the same amount of charge in that bracket than at either end). This is caused by a combination of the nature of lithium ion batteries, and the safety features built into them to prevent them from bursting into flames (they are, at base, more dangerous than the older style batteries, requiring extra safety features that the old ones didn't have... Which results in them being safer than the old ones). If the cars use the same type of battery, the same will hold for them too. If they use something else then it will, of course, work differently.
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  1454. It's astonishing how little of that sort of nonsense you actually need if you pay your employees properly (Exceptionally rare in the food service industry in the USA) and have a small-but-noticeable staff discount for your employees. Tends to encourage the employees to actually give a shit about their employer and the business as a whole doing well. Hilariously, where I live, the local subway staff had a bit of a conspiracy running to get around regulations put in place by their bosses too: The customers wanted grated carrot and ingredients that were actually as good as advertised. Subway mandated the use of imported ingredients that, by local standards, were rather low quality And Did Not Include Carrot. Which meant they weren't allowed to Sell carrot in the sandwiches. The conspiracy? They bought high quality carrot, mostly from local suppliers (Via the supermarket in the same mall, at least if they ran low during the day) and included it as an option anyway. It was quite popular. Not sure what they did about keeping track of the money. I do know that they had to get rid of it any time anyone from higher up the hierarchy was coming through the shop though.
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  1455.  @Nightmare-wo2gd  Added bonus: not only would her recording their conversations without him knowing be legal in Canada (where she is) the UK (where He is) and Japan (where the company is based)... none of that matters because the recording in question was a left over file from a Test Recording in preparation for a collab stream. Which he was fully aware was being recorded at the time.
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  1456.  @RextheRebel  Because it's legitimately faster, mostly. Except when it isn't, at which point you shouldn't. Which has largely been solved where I live (not the USA) by using self checkout as the 'express lane', like the old '12 items or less' express checkouts we used to have (which they seem to have directly replaced), but with higher throughput and no hard item limit (though there is a Practical limit, it varies with what sorts of items you're buying). ... it helps that our machines seem to be less terrible and better integrated with EFTPOS (the system which handles credit and debit card transactions) than seems to be the norm in the USA. We still have the regular checkouts, fully manned (at least at the times of day when there's enough customers to warrent it), and if you don't mind waiting in line for a bit, or have items that are annoying to put through the self checkout, or just have too much Stuff, you go through them instead. Importantly, the thinking here seems to have been generally about increasing customer throughput (and thus income), Not cutting staff numbers (and thus costs). Mind you, it's been ... decades, I think, at this point, since supermarkets employed people Specifically to bag your purchases (that went out of style about the same time as a new chain popped up whose entire selling point, to the point that it was in their Name, was that in exchange for bagging your own stuff, everything was cheaper (they also did other things to keep costs down relative to their competitors, of course). At this point very few supermarkets will bag your stuff for you... and you have to bring your own bags anyway (which are often rather nonstandard) given that the old single use plastic bags aren't a thing anymore.
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  1457. while 'keep making them bigger' isn't great, for a while they were obsessed with making them Smaller to the point that it compromised structural integrity, so... Oh, wait, no, they're still doing that as well, nevermind.
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  1458. except that chairs, or at least stools and benches, had been around for a VERY long time before that. And the amount of people who spent most of their time sitting around wouldn't change overly much until after the great vowel shift had ended.
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  1459. Records mostly sell on the basis of the COVERS work really well as decorative merch. CDs are a fairly practical way to bypass the massive downsides of the modern digital distribution system, though to my understanding what Most people do with a CD is rip the audio to their computer and then treat it hte same as they would had they acquired the music file any other way... but they'll then store the disc as a backup/part of a collection (with the covers serving as a substantially lesser version of the record covers). Casette tapes are the really interesting one, because their entire role was just... ENTIRELY replaced by the MP3 player. They actually have no meaningful advantage or use case where they're a better option than an MP3 player... Except that the MP3 player was in turn entire replaced by the smartphone, and therre are a whole bunch of niche reasons to want a Seperate device for that.... but even so, casettes are mostly a novelty item. The simple fact is that using them causes them to Wear Out too quickly, unlike CDs, where (baring mishap) Using them won't meaningfully affect their lifespan. On the other hand, the castte tape does have a significantly meaningful retro vibe, while the CD, while generally obsolete, still fits right in with modern tech just fine... plug a general purpose external optical drive into a PC, toss the CD in, and it all just works and doesn't look the least bit out of place.
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  1460. Less annoying if the charger is located somewhere you'd want to be anyway, of course. The supermarket, that restaurant that serves particularly good breakfasts st a decent price, the games/comic shop you and your buddies hang out at for several hours a couple of times a week anyway, the movie theater*, and so on. This could potentially have the bonus advantage of breaking up rush hour a bit, ad people take different routes to different places to stop different lengths of time (minimum of however long a charge cycle is) on their way to or from work. Obviously, there's a lot of vague hand waving to be found in those thoughts, but it's worth looking into! *Actually, given that these are slowly starting to die out, there might arguably be a market to bring back the drive-in movie theater... That is also a charging station. Arguably you'd want to show shorter movies... Though if people are stopping in every day on their way to or from work anyway there's room for showing what amount to tv shows! Still, yu couldn't just show the same movie at the same time every day, or on the sane day if the week several weeks in a row, if you're expecting people to stop in regularly as part of their commute...
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  1461. I'd say a bit of both, given that he races the trains over the bridge (and wins) in better weather. Of course, the trains aren't going That fast at that point, but they're not all that slow either.
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  1462.  @LRM12o8  Not sure if you're trying to make a joke or legitimately unfamiliar with the practice of treating vehicles as if they were people when talking about them. While almost universal regarding ships, it's far from unheard of for other vehicles... or other machines and devices of particular significance, for that matter.
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  1463. He's not entirely wrong, such political debates can Easily get derailed by the most irrelivant aspect of the plan which could be changed on a whim (or if new data is being presented) being latched onto, drowing out all well reasoned debate about other, more significant aspects, and it's frequently in the best interest of an opponent to Do that, which is Highly undesireable if you actually think your position has merit. ... Which isn't to say he's right or justified regarding anything else, at all, nor that the problems with the argument are invalid, just that this point is slightly less nonsensicle than it initially appears.
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  1464.  @vkngwmn6636  'music makes people think'... well, it makes some people think. A whole lot of people 'just like the beeps and the boops' and have no awareness of the lyrics (not helped by the tendency towards 'music' that has so much base that the lyrics (and often everything else) are utterly incomprehensible and not actually providing them in text form anywhere actually convenient to find).
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  1465. My experience in (my part of) New Zealand is that, for the most part, self check outs have basically replaced the old '12 items or less' express checkouts, though you can fit six of them in the space required for the old express checkouts, with one staff member overseeing the lot rather than one or two per old express checkout. And people's use of them pretty much matches: if you have a quantity of groceries that it's practical to carry out (rather than using a trolley to get it out to your car, and also needing a car to take the groceries home) that doesn't include any awkward items (certain products don't register properly on the scales or require more fiddling around to enter the purchace), the self checkouts are a fast and easy option and if they allow more shoplifting (no real evidence one way or the other that I've come across, though I've also not actively been lookking), it's by less than the efect of increased sale throughput and reduced cost per transaction, given that the self checkouts don't seem to be going anywhere. Importantly though, the regular manned checkouts remain and still see a lot of use. Interestingly, while the old express lanes were generally a supermarket only thing, the 'self checkout as express option' has cropped up in a number of other places too... but always more as an 'as well so as to increase throughput and income' rather than an 'instead so as to cut staff and reduce costs'.
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  1466.  @philippashirkey2192  ehh, Christchurch probably gets cold enough at certain times of year, especially if you need to be outside in the early morning (yay frost! :P). though mid-afternoon sun means you perhaps wouldn't want dark colours for your outer layer on clear days (the Air's still cold, but anything well insulated against that gets hot pretty quickly). And then, of course, there's the rain (Christchurch gets most of it's rain in spring, to the best of my recollection, but winter and autumn you'll get days (usually a few in a row) where it absolutely buckets down. Summer's usually bone dry) which has all sorts of interesting interactions, both good and bad, with wool.
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  1467. well, if it's any consolation, that would disambiguate it from the rather common running together of 'so often' into 'soffen'.
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  1468. I'd be a bit surprised if Europe considered the USA an experiment in Democracy. After all, Britain had been running an increasingly democratic (if limited in some ways by technology, tradition, and corruption) government since we'll before the USA was a thing, and by the American civil war they weren't the only ones doing so. The USA was generally considered an experiment in modern Republicanism to my understanding, particularly as it wasn't a city-state. I mean, US propaganda (or perhaps just lack of education) likes to pretend that democracy and republicanism are the same thing, but they're really not. One is about the general population having a say in government, the other is about not having a monarch. The fact that Noble republics and constitutional monarchies we things puts paid to that idea.
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  1469. To say that class is the Only difference to ever matter is ... frankly, it's a lie. However, it's certainly a large difference indeed, perhaps even the largest, and it's certainly true that other issues (ranging from the real and moderately significant, through the real but trivial at best, all the way to the utterly fabricated) are often used to distract from it.
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  1470. "freedom of the press" is Not "freedom of access to information" "freedom to be a reporter" ir Anything like that. It's not what it is, ut's not what it means, and the idea that it Is is just something dodgy arseholes who happen to also be journalists try to push to run over people who don't want to talk to them or to avoid being charged for what is often functionally corporate espionage (or Actual espionage). What it Does protect is your right to Publish. Literally, at the time, the government could not restrict the ownership and use of the physical printing press (the only publication method available then). In Louis's case here, freedom of the press does not entitle him to record (though other factors might permit or entitle him to, or forbid or prevent him from, doing so for all I know). It Does mean they can't prevent him from publishing this video about them not letting him record, or a video detailing what was said (based on recordings made anyway, notes taken while there, or just from memory), and so on (doesn't stop Youtube from doing so, mind you, as it's their "press") Also, arguably, if Louis set up his own video hosting service, freedom of the press (properly applied) would protect its existence and his right to publish video on it, or permit other people to do so, provided the material being published was not, itself, illegal (which is a slightly different, though related, matter). That doesn't mean he wouldn't have to pay the various fees associated with patents and copyrights, comply with trade mark law, or the many and various Other laws that might be relevant to the matter, just that the government cannot prevent one from accessing means of publishing one's views (or data, or entertainment), except incidentally (such as being in jail for something else and not having a visitor willing to deliver your works to the "press".) Though they totally Can punish you for What you publish, provided it was already illegal at the time. I have no idea how much of this is represented in US law, nor how well that is applied. Among other things, I am not a lawyer. None less, this Is what freedom of the press is actually about.
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  1471.  @GazMatic  it's capitalism in so far as capitalism (or, more specifically, anti-communism) is always the argument trotted out for why shitty behaviour can't be legislated against. It's capitalism in that this sort of anti-competitive nonsense is Always where capitalism ends up if it is not correctly regulated. But regulations are communism! Supposedly. Of course, to be fair, it's Mostly corruption. But good luck getting anyone to acknowledge that when they can instead blame (communists/BLM/poor people/the Chinese/etc.)
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  1472.  @PhotonBeast  heck, google maps can be bad at Car navigation, getting confused by rear sections with long driveways, detached garriages, and all sorts of other things (anyone trying to get to my place following google's directions will find themselves looking at the wrong side of my back fence, for example, and misnumbering every property on a street happens more often than you'd think, and then there's sending you off down hilly back roads when the correct path is to backtrack slightly onto the main road because it's shorter, nevermind that you need a four wheel drive vehicle or chains or have to slow to a crawl or whatever).
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  1473. Nope, 4 cases and they took an action that may have required the election to be delayed if the current state of affairs lasted too long. Over 100 cases and the situation under control and improving, and they delayed the election about a month to ensure there was time for proper election campaigns to be carried out. A course of action mostly advocated by the Opposition, I might add, with the PM being entirely within their rights to call a snap election (that is, election day being the absolute minimum legally permissable time after the day parliament desolves.)
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  1474. ... you mean like English? ... the number of people who seem utterly baffled by the idea that 'overlook' and 'look over' (never mind 'over look') mean different things ... Though not grasping the fact that it all flips around when you change what part of speech you're dealing with is fair enough.
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  1475. ... you know, I thought I knew the answer, and went to provide it, only to realise that all I know/remember about flux is that it's used in soldering, particularly when you want to remove solder... Which is blatantly obvious to anyone who's ever watched one of Louis's videos where he's using the stuff. Which is kind of pathetic given that my dad was self employed, worked from home, and did basically small scale electronics Manufacturing for Years...
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  1476. lack of agreed upon standards, mostly.
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  1477. Sometimes (especially with most ifrastructure projects), it's that... but their 'interests' are entirely fabricated, often not even out of malice, just ignorance and pig-headed idocy (Ignorance alone, after all, can be corrected).
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  1478.  @billdoggonejones  Remember that most such people haven't actually read the book at all, they just vaguely recall hearing it mentioned in semi-related contexts in the past.
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  1479. Not a road map, no. Well, maybe if you're in a country which doesn't believe in road signs... But all you need with a road map is to find a T intersection and line up the one on your map so it points the same way... Or, heck, know what road you're on, align your map to it, check if the sun (or the town/city/land mark/last intersection) is in the correct direction and rotate the map 180 degrees if it's not. Compasses are for when you go somewhere where you can't find a road or town by following a river, hedge, treeline, fence, etc in one direction for 15 minutes or so. If you stay on the roads they're utterly unnecessary.
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  1480. Ehh, the list is pretty long. It's not as silly as most of its detractors claim, but certainly much sillier than its supporters would care to admit. Certainly, though, the way it is treated in the USA is utterly daft. Not that NZ's behaviour regarding Rugby is much better, and Europe's treatment of 'football' (a term meaning literally "a ball sport played without horses", and thus encompassing gridiron (american football), every variations of rugby, soccer (a term originating in England, not the USA), and several others, to the point where using it for a specific sport is a little unhelpful) is only different in the nature of its foolishness. By degree it may even be worse.
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  1481. Shorting over 100% is easy: you short the stock, then the person you Sold to lends it to someone else to be shorted again before you buy it back. Or, if the situation's really crazy, they lend it to You again.
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  1482. I dunno, seems pretty in line with it's founding ideologies to me. The actual ones that are quite obvious when you look into the historical records, that is, not the nationalist propaganda of the founding myth that is apparently taught as 'history' in schools there.
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  1483.  @mariuszmoraw3571  Oh, the bullying part isn't unique to the USA At All. The shootings are what happen when you let that combine with Other elements that most other places put rather more effort into keeping under control.
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  1484.  @samfetter2968  China isn't really a dictatorship, and it hasn't been communist in any meaningful sense beyond the paint job in decades. At the same time, it's very much not a free or democratic nation in any meaningful sense either (note: local governments being democratically elected is not incompatible with this). In many respects it's basically right back to being a beurocratic empire, just without the (usually but not always) powerless (nominarlly hereditary) monarch supposedly in charge of everything. For it to be a dictatorship, the head of state would need to have direct control of the military and only need to keep the top military officials and maybe a couple of direct administrative subordinates happy in order to retain power. To my understanding this is not the case in China. It's definitely Authoritarian, and has a lot of things going on that would be considered quite undesirable by the more rational parts of the population of the 'free world'. But that's not the same thing as being a dictatorship.
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  1485. Might want to try a news channel not owned by the Republican propaganda network then. Australian TV news is basically "Fox, but we have to put in a bit of actual effort because the public isn't quite so thoroughly brainwashed and the government regulations are a bit better written/enforced". Side effect of having the same owner. Granted, even the non-Fox US tv news media is pretty dreadful.
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  1486. I've got to say, as someone who grew up with analogue clocks, clocks without any numbers are a pain, and clocks without any markings at all (or only a line for the 12) are just pointlessly idiotic. I'm not fond of the ones with no minute marks either. but you're right otherwise.
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  1487. Indeed. Though given that there's no way they're properly decontaminating the units between uses it's still just a useless dodge.
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  1488. Turns out using an ortholinier key layout(? arrangement? not sure on the term there. It's not which value is asigned to which key, it's where the keys themselves are physically located relative to each other), putting much less strain on your fingers, and a fully split keyboard (because 'ergonomic' keyboards that Aren't fully split aren't actually all that ergonomic, just less bad than the straight ones), putting much less straing on your back, shoulders, and wrists, makes dramatically more difference on that front. Dvorak somewhat reduces how often you're doing the thing that strains your weaker fingers. A better shaped keyboard just removes all the issues that cause unnecessary strain in the first place. Admittedly, they also tend to be programable, mechanical keyboards, so they can be Dvorak as well if you like. The downside, of course, is that they're not the mass produced standard, and are consequently Expensive. Also, by all metrics other than phsyical strain, the gains from using Dvorak (or any other layout for the alphanumerical keys) rather than Qwerty are so small that they're pretty much entirely overwhelmed by the losses from having to retrain... so if picking which one to learn in the first place, Dvorak is probably a bit better (aside from the fact that you'll almost never encounter any keyboard set up that way outside of enthusiasts) than Qwerty, but if you learned Qwerty there's no real benefit to switching. That said, there's a Lot of benefit to be had from reasigning various other keys based on what you actually use your keyboard for the most (people using certain programing langauges all the time get quite a bit of benefit out of having the Esc key where Tab is normally located, for example).
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  1489. Webster didn't simplify spelling. He made it more complicated by breaking the patterns that made the existing systems consistent, making it More Complicated. And it would have been bad enough if his changes had stuck properly, but instead adoption was erratic, making the problem worse. And, of course, his changes were more about nationalism and being not-British, Also complicating English spelling by spliting American English away from the standard that was, and would be, used by the rest of the English speaking world... which was a problem at the time and became an absolute Mess when the USA started significantly influencing the world outside North America and started spreading their system to other places (Coming to a head with the invention of spell-check).
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  1490.  @momatotsosrorudodi  That's... silly. Communisim in it's 'true' form is a vague utopia. Socialism in its 'true' form is just co-ops plus or minus various government safety nets (didn't even start out as an ideology, just solutions to specific issues that had come about as a result of capitalism and the industrial revolution). Communism as implemented by various 'Communist' states is ... authoritarianism with a side of central planning... And to be fair, the 'central planning' part has it's place in certain matters when implemented competently... but much like the free market it has Major Problems when applied to things it Really Shouldn't Be... and when you are ideologically incapable of actually using the right tool for the right job, well... it goes poorly. Like.... you can make a positive argument for most of the things 'communists' Claim to want to do... once you sanity check the specifics for compliance with reality... but... really. The one thing communist governments did well (when they managed to put competent people in charge of things) was speed run the industrial revolution stage of things while dodging some of its pitfalls (and falling even harder into others, in some cases, mind you).... and having done that they promptly.... stalled out until and unless they implemented reforms that amounted to decentralising control of most things. Which would be why China isn't actually communist in the slightest (beyond the various aesthetic trappings) anymore by has largely reverted to how the old Chinese Empire used to do things administratively and a mostly fairly western model for economic matters. That said, I'd give you good odds that if you actually analised most of the capitalist sides arguments they'd consist of little beyond bullshit propaganda that didn't hold up to reality Either. Because as ideologies go they're both pretty shit. Various subsystems advocated for by proponents of both are quite useful when properly applied to the correct things, but neither system is any way to run a government, a country... or even an economy, really. There's a reason why basically everyone actually runs what is termed a 'mixed' economy these days, and most of the more livable places run something that's a Lot closer to the middle than either end.
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  1491. I live in New Zealand. We use AM and PM for pretty much everything and... have no problem with 24 hour clocks. You ask someone what time it is, they'll glance at a clock saying "16:15" and almost universally they'll read that '16' as a '4', though whether they say "four fifteen" or "quarter past four" varies.
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  1492. ... might want to rephrase that, New Zealand is rather a long way away from Asia.
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  1493. Yeah, last three months seems fishy. First three seems like it would make the most sense, the average of the whole lease period I could see an argument for, at least. Last three, trying to claim it's standard? Sounds like they're, at best, just pushing to see what they can squeeze out of him.
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  1494. Spelling changes, in any useful and consistent manner, don't either. That's half of why Websters attempts at reform made things worse rather than better. In English at least.
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  1495.  @cmdrmonkey  Of course, among other factors that go into that (most of them favourable to the Abrams, mind you), the Abrams has, to the best of my knowledge, only ever been put up against the 'export' version of Soveit built tanks. That mattered back in the day. Of course, how much that matters Now, with the state of the current Russian army, is up for debate. ... then you need consider that we're talking about (probably) export versions of the Abrams, which might tip things a Little Bit the other way.
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  1496. In practice, there are a bunch of different ways to hold your mouth to produce the English r sound, and which one a native speaker will use will depend entirely on the sounds to either side of it (half the time the r in my first name ends up being formed as a retroflex consonant (that is, the tongue curled right back so the tip is pointing towards the back of the mouth), for example). That said, the one presented in the video is probably the easiest for someone who's having trouble with it to get right, at least without getting overly technical (and confusing people) when describing how to do it.
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  1497. More commonly, a king or other noble, as the highest authority in the land (by conquest or birth) would judge disputes or criminals. As law codes got more complicated, populations larger, etc. the ruler delegated more tasks, including such legal matters. It is noteable that in Britain (and not that many years ago, most of the Commonwealth), the highest "court of appeal" is, on paper, directly to the monarch in their role as the highest judge in the land. (In practice even this is deligated to the privy council, but that is in their role as the Queen's personal advisors and lieutenants acting on her behalf at her discretion) Not as a direct part of the judiciary. Well... Again, on paper. So to speak). Well, that and republics without a single head of state needed someone (or a group of someones) to do the same job. Biblical judges... Were basically that for a nation who's government was "tribal and theocratic bits here and there, and they have a code of laws, but mostly anarchy" at the time. Which in practice meant they were the leadership that was to be had when a military campaign or revolt was in order.
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  1498.  @peterhoulihan9766  More significantly, those industries where it actually had a chance to cause problems beyond 'ah, yes, need to correct some paperwork' had noticed and fixed it years before the media picked up on the issue.
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  1499. An old advertisement with playback issues, apparently.
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  1500. Probably mostly by just not drawing attention to that fact until resolving it would cause more problems for those in charge of things than just letting you get away with it would.
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  1501. Its more that they're cheering for the guy who's not going to fix anything winning over the guy holding a bunch of explosives and a detonator. Actually Fixing anything would require a major overhaul of the American government to break the shitty two party system they've got going there. Because, Really, you should have an actual political left. The democrats should be broken up into a moderate progressive party and an urban conservative party, you should have an actual rural-conservative party instead of the republicans Pretending that they have any intention of being such once every four years. And the republicans, like their counterparts in most functioning countries, should be left to rot in irrelevance as that one far right party that no one takes seriously but is allowed to continue existing because doing so makes it easier both to show, publicly, how deranged they are, and to round up the treasonous idiots when they inevitably cross the line and try something. Quite frankly, being able to do the same to the lunatics who seem to be in charge of much of the USA's higher education system and entertainment industry these days is one of the most compelling arguments for allowing radical progressive leftist party to exist. Moderate progressives are actually necessary and useful.a good balance of them and Actual conservatives is quite necessary to a functioning legislature, and nation. Radical progressives are at least as damaging as Reactionaries, and usually just as delusional. Though they're more insidious, as the more toxic elements amongst them tend to target those in positions of power (though, naturally, this rapidly becomes anyone insufficiently supportive of their particular flavour of lunacy) rather than the reactionary' equivalent's tendency to target the obviously disadvantaged.
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  1502. well... it certainly comes closer to that than cars do, at least. (stations without platform screen doors, level crossings, and a variety of other points where trains interact with 'things that are not trains' can all lead to fatal consequences if one interacts with them poorly while drunk, after all, and various driver/software/hardware faults Can caus trains to occassionally do things they really shouldn't, such as speeding, though is certainly far less common.)
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  1503.  @lokifgr4789  English can happily use any noun as a verb and any verb as a noun, provided the surrounding grammar can be made to fit and the end result is not nonsensical. Still, verbing weirds language, so it's useful, but not something to do excessively or needlessly. The infinitive is one of the more basic grammatical forms of a verb (English doesn't actually use it much unless one verb is modifying another). In Latin it's the one you'd use in dictionaries. For some reason everyone seems to have agreed to pretend that's the case in English as well, though the reality is that, not being preceded by the particle 'to' (as distinct from the Preposition 'to', which has a different function and meaning), the dictionary forms of English verbs are actually in the Imperative form (which indicates an instruction, order, warning, etc), as the Imperative is the form indicated by just using the verb with no modifying bits at all. (It's technically in the second person as well, for agreement purposes). You know, just in case you weren't joking, of were and someone else was confused by it.
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  1504.  @hhs_leviathan  UGBs are fine, so long as the Rest of your planing properly accounts for them. NIMBYs just need beating with a stick <_< Like, seriously, address the legitimate concerns (sometimes this involves changes, but often it just requires Actually Explaining Things Properly due to existing regulations or plans already accounting for the issues raised) and then the remaining idiotic whiners can just be told to take a hike. I mean, it's not like developers and city councils don't just tell the public to get stuffed without addressing Legitimate Problems on a regular basis, so I'm really not sure how NIMBYs with their nonsensical non-issues seem to manage to have a meaningful effect on a regular basis... and yet somehow they do.
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  1505. Indeed. Heck, stripmalls have a maximum depth, but any office or residential space doesn't have to compete with the commercial parking space, just stick more parking Behind the building and mark it off as "tenants only" ... Gate it even, if you're worried about security. Put not parking in the customer parking area into their tenancy agreement. Heck, straight up build a parking structure back there and you can extend the whole thing a bit more in terms of residential and office space. Only downside is that if you do too juch of that you end up functionally driving up the value of the retail spaces to overwhelm the main advantage to setting up in a stripmall to start with: they're cheap. Of course, now you're starting to wander into the realm of the original, mixed use, vision of the shopping mall...
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  1506.  @ELCADAROSA  the origin of that idea (no idea if it actually Happened often enough to be called a practice) was matters of insurance companies being insurance companies vs salvage law in the age of sale (and probably a while after): a completely abandoned ship had no owner and was fair game for anyone who could be bothered to salvage... Including it's cargo. A corpse was proof it hadn't been abandoned, and thus if salvaged, the salvager could expect to be paid for their efforts, but the ship and its cargo were to be returned to their rightful owner (or at least you were supposed to check what they wanted you to do). In the event that the insurance company had paid out for the loss of the ship, that was them. Consequently, it was apparently a thing that they Wouldn't Pay Out on ships that were "abandoned". Or at least, that's what I recall of an explaination to that effect that encountered a fair number of years ago.
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  1507. To be fair, recording contracts were frequently a straight up scam that amounted to wage theft, back in the day.
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  1508. Ahh, so I should be blaming the Australians for those abominations... good to know.
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  1509. Or any number of cities run by governments of any number of nominal political alignments around the world. That's not a democrat problem, that's an institutionalized corruption problem.
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  1510. You also have the problem that the new USB standards don't support anything other than USB C. C is just falt out superior, on many fronts, to Micro or Mini USB. Now, comparing USB C to A and B brings you to the Problems with USB C. It has advantages over both, but also reintroduces a number of problems that the distinction between A and B exists largely to Prevent (largely, B exists because random device manufacturers can't be trusted not to ground their devices's power supply via your PC's USB port's data pins. Exactly how it deals with that, I don't actually recall.) and apparently C is something of a pain in the butt to wire up correctly within the device... to the point where a lot of makers of cheap devices don't Bother (and let's not even get into bad USB C to A cables), resulting in... similar issues.
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  1511. It's not the first time that's happened, mind you.
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  1512. the USB 'standard' is becoming progressively more of a joke as time goes on, unfortunately.
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  1513. Unlike the consonant chart, the IPA vowel chart is not a set of 'all the sounds that exist', but rather a set of cardinal sounds, which is to say, reference points. Any point on the vowel chart can be used in a given language or dialect, and generally one would use the IPA symbol closest to it that wouldn't be better used to represent a different sound in the same language/dialect, to my understanding. And, of course, diphthongs aren't points on that chart, but rather lines/transitions between those points.
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  1514. This, of course, assumes the carrot actually Exists. It's not at all uncommon in such schemes for the carrot to vanish somewhere between the point where people agree to the scheme based on its existence and the point where it would actually have to be delivered... often at, essentially, the very last moment.
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  1515. A rather extensive amount of nationalist propaganda, in some places, it seems.
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  1516.  @b.a.erlebacher1139  would that be intrusive r, linking r, or 'actually just straight up part of the standard word but not represented in the writing system for some puzzling reason' r? (I'm pretty sure it was r that last one applied to, though I might be getting it muddled up with a different sound).
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  1517. Done well, it's a much less headache inducing one... well, aside from those caused by the need to beat keyboard manufacturers over the head to get them to actually comply with it. But you're not wrong. (also, for all that they're not random in Origin, there are places where the system is so badly designed that in practice they are funcitonally random to the actual user. -ough, or the fact that the stress, which dicates a number of other things, Isn't Indicated, for example.)
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  1518. Yes,well, given a choice between conservatives who like being alive and Reactionaries who apparently think killing off the voters is a winning move, strangely enough, progressives (both the useful moderate sort and the less utterly delusional of the Problematic radical sort) tend to prefer the former. Strange that.
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  1519.  @KameradVonTurnip  I've seen a number of pictures from ww2 of tanks happily parked on roads that have turned to such utter disasters of mud that humans on foot struggle to move through them. Such might be contributing to confusion. The important thing about those pictures, though, is that the tanks are Parked. And on roads. Also, I'm pretty sure the most famous one shows a guy who's just jumped off the top of the tank, to the muddy road... and sunk to his waist. Importantly, tanks do better at ground preasure than humans, and things that are just Sitting There do better than things that are Falling. <_<
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  1520. Mobility scooters can also have reverse alarms of the beepy sort. Having one back up right next to you In A Shop is Awful. I imagine getting your foot run over by such a scooter would Also be awful, and they're not as loud as the ones on trucks, but still... As for reverse lights, around here it has become Fairly standard in recent times for cars to have White lights on the rear that turn on when going backwards, in addition to the red... basically running lights that indicate you're looking at the back of a car (or other vehicle, based on their number and position) and get Noticeably brighter when the breaks are activated. There's been a law/regulation on the books for longer than I've been alive that cars Can have white lights on the rear, so long as those lights only activate when going Backwards (and likewise, Can have red lights on the front... so long as they only activate when going backwards), but manufacturers didn't actually Bother until... honestly, I don't remember, but it was rare enough to be noteworthy if you saw it in the early 2000s, and these days cars that Don't have such lights are rare enough to be noteworthy. There are also parking lights. From what I recall, those tend to be a sort of yellow-ish white, often postioned so they make the rear license plate Very obvious (by way of shining right on it from the sides and sort of using it as a reflector) and so you can see just enough around the rear of a car that you won't bash your shins on the tow bar (if your car has one). Might help a bit with getting things in and out of the back of the car or changing a rear tire, I guess?
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  1521. Some of the changes are matters of use and materials, functional improvements or practical limitations. Which in no way explains or justifies any of the remaining nonsense.
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  1522. Here in New Zealand we solved that second problem many years ago, by an incredibly simple method: We got rid of cheques. They're just straight up not a thing. Between debit cards and internet banking there's just no sensible use case for them anymore. The 'ridiculous small talk' problem seems largely solved by a cultural difference: most cashiers won't actually start a conversation with you beyond the exchange of polite greetings and the information exchange requried for the transaction (though they're usually happy enough to engage in conversation if you start one... though only for as long as it takes them to actually process your purchase, under normal circumstances.)
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  1523. Last bit if information I came across was that the city has a depressing tendency to constantly cut their funding, preventing them from doing necessary maintenance and repair, until the system becomes non-functional and/or fatal accidents, and only then invest the money needed to keep it going. Also the signalling system is massively out of date, no money for upgrades, which means they can't safely increase the frequency of trains to compensate for increased usage and breakdowns.
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  1524.  @therealyogibear2k225  At this point there are a number of Linux distros where you have no more need of the terminal than Windows does of the command prompt... the only issue is finding someone who knows what they're talking about who'll actually give you Instructions that Use the GUI rather than a string of unexplained terminal commmands to copy and past when you have a problem.
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  1525.  @Sigilstone17  The US government wouldn't need to Buy it if they actually wanted/needed it. No, when and if they sell your data, they mostly just sell it to other corporations. Where it goes after That is another matter, of course.
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  1526. 'Airportd' was almost certainly a typo of 'airports'.
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  1527. ​ @deann7898  Ahh, see, the problem there is that you're excluding the Entire Catagory of 'not online multiplayer' games. Yeah, online multiplayer doesn't work out of the box... mostly because anti-cheat systems can't be arsed to recognize that proton is a thing. Great job being part of the demographic that only plays the one thing that doesn't work though! Believe it or not that's not actually a Linux problem, that's an anti-cheat problem. ... Seriously, Linux is effectively bad at online multiplayer. It's also bad at weird niche proprietary hardware (due to the manfacturers never bothering to support it and people who do linux stuff never encountering the hardware). It's also Way less user friendly (though not actually meaningfully less capable) than it should be for dealing with anything sound related more complicated than adjusting the master volume. Those are all areas where Windows is better. However, if you don't care about those Particular things (and contrary to certain loud and opinionated individuals, that's actually a VERY Large portion of the gaming population), it absolutely does, in fact, do gaming 'out of the box' just fine. Heck, it'll run MMOs and other online games out of the box just fine too... if they bother actually supporting linux directly so the game doesn't have to run through proton (and so the anticheat is not trripped).
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  1528.  @deann7898  it's very much less 'linux not supporting the game' and more 'the publishers/developers not only not supporting linux, but actively sabotaging Steam's attempts to do the work for them' when it comes to anything using anti-cheat or badly designed third party launchers.
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  1529. Well, that and an awful lot of people who are upset about it weren't actually old enough to vote in the referendum, but absolutely Were old enough to vote in subsequent elections.
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  1530. Well, in this case there's a fair bit of evidence that it probably wasn't a Scam, just because of how the events actually transpired. But, well, it started at 'there is probably an error here, but it Might be a thing' and very quickly shifted to 'this is almost certainly an error' and then 'this thing you are claiming is proof not only isn't proof, but isn't even what you're claiming it is' with all the 'partial levitation' nonsense (and it wasn't just the people who made the thing and initially claimed it to be a room temperature super conductor who were claiming 'behaves exactly like iron in a magnetic field' was 'partial levitaiton' which somehow meant something completely different). So... yeah, dudes were wrong. Probably weren't faking or trying to scam anyone, just wrong. And to be fair, LK-99 apparently IS a bit weird and interesting. It's just... not at all a room temperature, ambiant pressure, super conductor. If they ever legitimately got results indicating such (rather than messurement errors or misinterpreted data), then it was due to something else weird happening in the manufacturing process.
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  1531.  @serfillustrated4018  or a constitutional monarchy. A republic, after all, is literally just "any government that is not a monarchy (or Theocracy, but those get sort of lumped in as monarchies after a fashion, traditionally)". So happens that most (not all) monarchies in the world these days are constitutional monarchies with democratically elected legislatures and a division of powers that favours the legislature over the monarch (the President if the USA has more power, and less accountability to anyone at all, at least in practice, than the monarch does in most constitutional monarchies.). There are actually (well, were when i last checked not that many years back) more republics that were not democracies than there are non-democratic monarchies. Both in absolute terms and percentage wise. Partly, it must be admitted, because more absolute monarchies had no counterweight so inevitably, eventually, fucked up badly enough to cause a revolution which did away with them. Of course, the numbers are a bit skewed by many of the world's remaining monarchies being former parts of the British Empire and the large number of republics that Technically have elections, but have a process in place that completely undermines them (such as rounding up and shooting anyone willing to run against the current government, or just not actually counting the votes and declaring whatever outcome they want, and so on.) Which could be counted either way on the democratic or not issue, depending on tye spin you were going for.
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  1532.  @jimmy8445  Libertarianism, when you actually look into the specifics and then consider how humans Actually Behave... yeah, it's not facism (well, not inherently). It's a Very fast route to feudalism though. Libertarianism has the same problem as Communism and quite a few other ideologies: Humans Fundamentally Do Not Work How The Ideology Claims They Do!
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  1533.  @119beaker  you're also specifically supposed to take the most direct path possible across the road. mind you, to my understanding, in this case "illegal" means "if you don't do it the way you're supposed to, you'll be the one held responsible for any resulting accident" rather than being something you get in trouble for directly. also, "marked crossing" in this case includes everything from dedicated pedestrian crossings to completely uncontrolled intersections.
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  1534.  @delphicdescant  meanwhile, large portions of the Tech industry really need to learn the lesson 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is supposed to impart. Like many other things, applied in the context it's intended for, it's very good advice, applied in other contexts (or warped to express something more palatable to the speaker than the original message) it's useless at best. A similar example: "the customer is always right". This was started life as a short-hand reminder of how a given sales person was supposed to handle difficult customers in a way that deescalated, got money out of them, and would result in them returning to spend more money later, generally with a mindset that would make them less inclined to be terrible to the staff in the first place on subsequent interactions. The most basic element of which was "don't tell the customer he's wrong, con him into thinking the right answer was his idea" (note that in this case the 'right answer' should be read as 'the product that's actually suitable for the customer's use-case') ... Needless to say, various business owners and managers in certain parts of the world have twisted it quite thoroughly.
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  1535. If you think That's a good idea, you haven't paid any attention to how the USA treats treaties and agreements. Give you a hint: the only non-standard thing about Trump was his unwillingness to even Pretend to deal in good faith. Congress just straight up never ratifies anything that isn't horribly lopsided in the USA's favour. Take a look at what happened to the TPPA: it started off as a bog standard trade agreement between a few smaller nations around the Pacific. The USA wasn't invited. They forced their way in anyway, threw their weight around until it included a million protectionist measures to cripple other nations businesses ability to compete with US corporations In Those Nations, slowing the whole thing to a crawl, then threw a hissy fit and bailed on the whole thing because it still obligated them to make any sort of consesions at all about anything. That last bit sounds like it's just Trump being Trump, but going by past history, congress would have used the same excuse not to ratify it anyway. Not unless enough politicians were bought off by the pharma, music, and movie industries to pass it so as to use meeting treaty obligations as an excuse to force through more anti-consumer legislation. And that's but the first of many problems to cone to mind.
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  1536.  @stankovich7990  Well, assuming that it was actually shot down rather than a mid air collsion as others are reporting (in which case that's more of a Win for NATO as it amounts to Russia taking out one of its own jets)... I'd expect a formal protest at most. And possibly not even that given the actual situation.
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  1537. Heck, even most UI "updates" are change for change sake to justify the employment of the person whose job it is to make those changes... usually for the worse. If your UI is updating for reasons other than 'need a new button for a useful new feature' or 'finally found an actual fix to a known problem'? If you weren't getting significant complaints about the flaws in the old UI, It's Very Likely that you've just made it worse, not better (or at least, not better enough to justify forcing the user to relearn it.).
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  1538. That 'entirely new language' or whatever for txt messages? Most of it is/was a REinvention. A century-ish before, people used mostly the same tricks for mostly the same reasons when sending messages via telegraph.
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  1539. 'greater than 100% efficiency' is a bit misleading. in terms of 'electricity/fuel consumed to heat delivered', yes, sure. But it's not magically creating heat form no where :P Arguably, if it's exchanging heat with the outside air, it's functionally compact solar heating.
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  1540. Amusing fact: in some countries, this is Quite Literally true. In the sense that the reserve bank is a government institution and quite literally owns the bank notes. For bonus points: the Main Defining Trait of legal tender is that the government will accept it as payment when you show up to pay your taxes. Not the only factor, mind you, but the biggest.
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  1541.  @JAN0L  Ahh, but how many of those cars are actually on the road at any given time? How many of them are owned by people who live in the parts of the country that Don't have particularly exceptional public transit (by way of not being the major cities), and so on? Ubiquitous, well designed public transport supported by rational zoning laws (so... ones designed around maximising liveability and minimizing problems, rather than maximising racism and oppression of the poorer classes) absolutely reduces the need for cars substantially. Also very important is improving the walkability and cycleability of the areas around the public transport hubs. Certainly, you won't eliminate cars Entirely, but you can certainly substantially reduce the number of viable use cases for them. And if you then make rental cars much easier to get and more practically located for the use cases that Do remain, so that most individuals don't even need to own one when they do need to use one, well, that drops the number needed even further. So, no, it can't absolutely remove all need for car ownership. But it Can make a HUGE dent in it... which is really all that is needed.
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  1542. There is a rather important distinction, however: In WW2, most of those losses were taken defending against a foreign invader, among other factors. In this war? They ARE the invader. This makes huge differences to the logistics and moral aspects of things.
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  1543. Which subset of them are you talking about, and what dialect do You speak? Because I don't think I've ever heard an American pronounce 'soldier' in a way that sounds like 'sodder' to me. ... of course, most people I hear, myself included, sound more like they're saying sol-(some ambiguous syllable starting with a j)
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  1544. Road works in New Zealand tend to be a bit better organized, at least. They do short sections at a time, do one side of the road at a time, put up temporary traffic lights (or, for short term stuff, have a guy standing there with a sign) when they have to close off a lane entirely (most of our highways are a single lane in each direction, except right near large cities where/if they see a lot of commuter traffic. They're highways in the traditional sense of being the crown's responsibility, unlike lesser roads which are the responsibility of the local goverments.) Still take ages, often enough. Simple resurfacing might be just a couple of days, anything !ore elaborate may take weeks or more. It's often a matter of scheduling availability of limited specialised workers and equipment.
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  1545. ​ @doncarlodivargas5497  Do you mean that in the sense of 'normal person has no time for the leftwing radicalized idiots' nonsense' or in the sense of 'right wing radicalized idiot pretends that not mistreating women (among other groups) is somehow the reason for everything wrong with society"? Because the world needs a lot more of the former and a lot less of the latter <_<
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  1546.  @jaimedelgado7529  I've encountered people where I live who will say 'Lux' (another brand that was very common in some parts) instead. Took me a while to get used to, because Most people where I live say 'vacuum', and the few I'd encountered who didn't did, indeed, say 'hoover'.
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  1547. Fun fact about cheese: the process of making hard cheeses (and, like, two of the soft ones) actually breaks down the lactose into a form that lactose into a form that doesn't case problems for (most?) people who can't handle lactose. Same with the process of making butter, actually. Though it sounds like they're using processed cheese in that food, and I've got no idea what's up with that stuff beyond it always being kinda rubbish.
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  1548.  @chaos.corner  USB C doesn't keep the cables simple, because the reason teh cables aren't simple has nothing to do with the plugs. ... if anything it makes it Worse, Every Other USB connector clearly indicates, either by shape or by colour, what USB standard it is rated for (1.0, 2.0, 3.0 (ignore the subtypes, it's a disaster), though apparenlty not 4.0 because you can't use not-C for that) USB C does not. And can be, and often IS, anything, with no labling at all. You're lucky if a C to C cable says what it's rated for, There's a lot of adaptors floating around where the only indication is that the Other end of the adaptor is colour coded. Most phones and tablets with a USB C socket? Yeah, that's a 2.0 connection. On the other hand, your fancy monitor that's getting power through a USB C to C cable? Yeah, that apparently wants a USB4 connection (if they've not renamed that Again) ... ... ... I have as yet seen no indication that any such cable exists outside of the ones that come with such monitors (mind you, I've not been looking particularly hard for such).
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  1549. @Jim Allen gotta compensate for inflation, but other than that, yeah.
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  1550. I'd really rather we skipped the whole formal/informal thing, honestly. But bringing back the singular/plural distinction would be useful.
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  1551. Nah. He was the Health Minister... And perpetrator of one of the country's more egregious lockdown violations. ... Two of them, actually. The PM said at the time, on live national television, that the only reason he wasn't getting the boot right then was that they were too busy dealing with the pandemic to also deal with the disruption that would be caused by the process of replacing him. So he got sidelined and we got Dr. Ashley Bloomfield (highest ranking civil servant in the health department, nominally the Minister's chief subordinate but in practice the actual division of responsibilities is... Weird) doing much of the Minister's job as well as his own for the duration. That's now done with, so the (now ex-) minister's getting the boot properly, if for no other reason then because Failing to get rid of him is one of the few things his party could do that might actually result in them loosing the upcoming election (a change of leader would also be a very poor idea at this point)
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  1552.  @bonbonpony  Ceasing to opperate older generation infrastructure's slightly different issue, and less 'intentional and malicious active sabotage' and more 'yeah, infrastructure's expensive.' Not to mention said infrastructure is generally opperated by entirely different companies from the ones who make the phones. ... which really makes you wonder why the device manufacturing companies are so keen on moving everything to the expensive infrastructure they have to build and maintain when they could just build functional devices and leech off the infrastructure built and mainted by others.
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  1553.  @chrismillar7593  The flaw in that logic is that when the product is a necessity, consumers can only choose not to buy the shit product if there's someone out there selling a Not shit product... and when it comes to cellphones? ... there isn't anyone. Unfortunately, when they're not actively coordinating with each other, and instead just Reacting to each other, it's not illegal anticompetative practices that get caught by relevant legislation. It's the sort of thing that is only fixed by specific minimum standards regulation (with penalties big enough to Matter) or the introdution of a government opperated competitor (which is mandated not to perpetually maximise profits, but to meet minimum quality standards and try to be mildly profitable wherever possible. Basically artificially creating Legitimate competition).
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  1554.  @PhotonBeast  one of the easiest ways to make a roundabout an absolute nightmare for pedestrians is actually making it Too Small for the amount of traffic going through it. There ends up being no safe time to cross without getting wiped out by cars coming OUT of the roundabout (traffic Entering the roundabout is generally safe enough, though.) When I say 'too small', I don't mean the number or size of the lanes, I mean the diameter of the circle. Mind you, a big enough roundabout is indistinguishable from a one way street/road that just happens to go in a circle.
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  1555.  @jusss31  I suspect there are other candidates for replacement that would be subject to rather less debate from the sort of people whose opinions are actually worth anything, somehow. From what little I remember of who appears on American currency, anyway. Of course, American money in general is long overdue for an overhaul, it rates very poorly on almost every metric so far as 'items used as currency' go (that's independent of the USD's value and usefulness as a currency, mind you.) I mean, it still beats 'rocks too large to move, several of which are underwater' and a few other similarly impracticle alternatives, but as actually practical options go... it's pretty bad.
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  1556. Huh, the way we were taught BEDMAS, 6/2(2+1) ... never included a step where (3) existed. Basically, we were taught the order of operations before we were taught algibra, so that multiplication sign was always explicitly present. Then, the examples would Always go straight from 6/2*(2+1) to 6/2*3, there was never a step that read 6/2*(3), nor one explained as such. (2+1)=3, not (3), basically. Note that this means there is no step where you replace the () with *, because the two have nothing to do with each other. Then we got to algibra and started seeing things like '2a-4c'. This was presented and explained as Shorthand for '2*a-4*c'. Only after That did you start seeing 4(3-2) type constructions even appear (though with no variables and only one set of brackets the * was often still written). And so the sequence for resolving it was not 4(3-2) -> 4(1) -> 4*1 -> 4, but instead 4(3-2) -> 4*(3-2) -> 4*1 -> 4, apparently dodging the step where the error comes up. (I should note that the '4*(3-2) step was generally not actually written down when doing it out by hand, so much as it was just how the 4(3-2) step was read in the first place) This seemingly tended to lead to people just automatically entering the multiplication sign when entering the thing into calculators, too. I suspect that the calculators that the schools considered acceptable (once you got to the point of even using scientific calculators at all) also did the 'you must explicitly include the multiplication sign or it'll just throw an error' thing as well, but I also suspect it didn't come up much. I certainly don't recall anyone ever having a problem as a result either way.
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  1557. Meanwhile the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is a government institution, answerable, so far as I know, only to the head of state. It's entire job is making sure inflation stays in the 1-3% range (usually basically 2%) needed to prevent the economy from locking up due to population growth etc without crashing, and to make sure new notes and coins are issued to replace worn out old ones. It somehow manages not to cause any problems at all. It even occasionally prevents them. All money is nothing more than transferrable debt. Non-fiat currencies have all the same problems as fiat currencies (though for some things slightly more elaborate shenanigans are needed to do the thing) with the added problem that they react to population growth, absent other Negative factors to compensate, by Deflating. Which tends to cause economies to grind to a halt. Fractional reserve banking has problems, but also solves worse problems that existed previously. In places where it is Properly Regulated it's beneficial. The US's problems generally amount to corruption resulting in Bad regulation. Either necessary regulations are removed entirely, or overly complicated and convoluted regulations, absolutely riddled with loopholes, exploits, and "gotcha!"s are implemented. Both are Bad. One of the problematic elements which allows this to happen is the process by which regulation is enacted. Under the US system, it's possible for a bill to pass its first reading/vote/thing, so that it will actually even be considered, and be sent to committees and such... And by the time it comes back for its Second go, literally the only part of the original bill still present is the Filing Number (whatever that's called) that says it passed the first vote/reading, and its new contents cover four different, completely unrelated things! That is Appalling!
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  1558.  @ThomasVWorm  They solve not Quite the same problem actually. More accurately, the imperial system is a whole pile of specialised systems mashed together, while the metric system is a singule, unified, generic system. In practice, the imperial system is often Better for the specific things it's component systems were actually designed for... but worse at everything else. Where 'everything else' is most things.
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  1559.  @ThomasVWorm  fundamentally, fractions and division are the same thing. The problem is the assumption that a marker that could mean either automatically means the one that can't actually be clearly represented in the medium being used, rather the one that can. (which is to say, they're trying to claim that there are implied parenthases in a medium where the formating that Implies the Parenthses Doesn't Exist!)
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  1560. After being refused, by the sounds of it, so I'd imagine the bankruptcy part wouldn't be relevant because it was entirely over and done with. Though, of course, suspicious as it looks, it is entirely possible the two facts are unrelated. Just less likely than it should be.
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  1561. It's worth pointing out that such resignations are frequently a case of them jumping before they're pushed. And the Prime Minister pretty much flat out told the general public on live television that the only reason he wasn't being kicked out immediately was because they were too busy dealing with the pandemic to deal with disruption of doing so. He Was quite thoroughly sidelined on all COVID-19 related issues though.
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  1562.  @rheechashaipu1927  licking down trading entirely to let the hype die down or prevent panic trading, sure. This has been Much more targeted with a specific goal of forcing the stock price back down to bail out the short sellers at the expense of small investors. Rather different. Also not actually working, as the small investors have responded by simply not selling either, for the most part.
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  1563. Not sure if this is a thing in Europe, but where I live the credit card companies provide (in partnership with the banks, so sadly Which credit card company you use is tied to which bank the account is with), for a very low flat yearly fee, a service where by your Debit card uses their system... It's basically a debit card for all purposes, right up until you want to buy something online or overseas, where your debit card normally wouldn't be accepted. Then it goes through the credit card system instead, except instead of billing your credit balance with the credit card company (you don't have one, after all) it bills your bank account Exactly like it normally does as a debit card. The down side, of course, is that it doesn't offer the same protections a credit card does, in terms of fraudulent transactions and the like. Actually, it does offer most of them, but you've only got a week or two to report an issue and get it sorted out rather than months (after all, it's Your money that's gone, not the credit card company's and you don't pay them interest on the bills and so on, so they have less reason to devote time and money to your issues) Point is, if you can get them, they're great. All the benefits of the infrastructure set up to support credit cards, none of the downsides of actually borrowing money.
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  1564. the only thing that thorn does is replace th with a single character. It's a nice character, but the trade off is 'we have to remember one more charcter, in exchange for writing one less and not having to remember that this particular combinaton of two characters is treated as a single character when determining how vowels are to be pronounced'. Not saying it's not a good deal, just that it only covers a very small, and relatively minor in importance as such things go, number of the 'little annoying sound pronunciations'. Actually marking the primary stress would make a much bigger difference.
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  1565.  @mbmurphy777  Except... it doesn't? Buring the neighbour's house down might... Might. The Mayor actually trying to evict the neighbour over the matter might. The mayor not actively helping your neighbour keep your pool (and oh, by the way, the Mayor wants you to give him all you furniture for the privilage of having had him resolve the issue) would not start ww3 (or, if we actually make it fit the analogy, cause a city wide riot).
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  1566. USB C is, in fact, simply the shape and arrangement of the plug. The rest of that stuff is USB 1,2,3,4 etc. (except, of course, the organization in charge of these things keeps changing the naming scheme to be ever more nonsensical and the latest standards is basically a list of 'all the ways the cables and devices should, but will not, be universal or standardized')
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  1567. The most important part is how easily you are understood, and whether you're making it more difficult for Others to make themselves clearly understood. Far too many people are too busy being offended by the very idea that they might possibly be in any way in error to even vaguely consider such matters. edit: huh, that's what I get for not watching to the end before commenting, you get to roughly that point eventually.
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  1568. Which does boost efficiency, and sometimes reduce waste... But, simultaneously, strips the system of failsafes, which is a bad thing.
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  1569.  @DelphinusVyse  Easy to see because it's happened before, with attempts to eliminate dangerous or invasive animals in certain areas. Pay people for proof of a kill and after a bit someone will inevitably start farming the things. It's not even a 'these days' thing, there's records of such things happening going a Long way back.
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  1570. Worth noting that, at the time that line comes from, "cake" wasn't a sweet baked good, it was the assorted crud that built up in the bottom of the bakers ovens over time. Less hopelessly out of touch, more utterly uncaring.
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  1571. Other cars insanely bright and focused headlights are already bad enough...
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  1572.  @tomscorpion6288  Not so! it follows an Unreasonably Large and Complex set of rules! And follows them at least as consistently as most other languages mange to follow theirs. Those rules are, unfortunately, rather routinely taught very badly or not at all, such that the result is very similar to not having any. Though -ough has no excuse for continuing to be a thing and the whole system would work a heck of a lot better if the primary stressed syllable was actually indicated in any way in the orthography (other than by prosses of elimination when certain features only appear when knowledge of which syllable is the primary stress wouldn't be enough disambiguation), given that a bunch of other aspects of the system actually depend on knowing which one it is! Edit: of course then you have to account for dialect, and for place names being their own whole other mess on top of the language's more general issues (mind you, English is not unique in that regard).
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  1573. His old office didn't seem to have any either, though?
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  1574. ​ @UmarHamza one: that cost is largely some weird issue that seemingly only applies in English speaking countries. It's actually a problem with how they are planned and funded, not the technology. Even more, they're actually Substantially cheaper than the amount of road infrastructure needed to move the same number of people the same distance. Difference is entirely that wasteful road spending is considered "normal".
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  1575. ​ @basedmuscleman6539 well, that and have non-garbage bus systems with low friction transfers for the last mile
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  1576.  @donaldhobson8873  whether it's multiplied or divided by technology depends on the speicifc technology, yes. It's not consistent. But you do run into the problem that if an LED uses less electricity, the electrical bill goes down, which leaves a gap in people's electricity budget, which they generally fill by either getting/using something they couldn't afford to before, or being less careful with their energy usage now that the preassure's taken off. (screens are more energy efficient, thus costing less to run? sure, that could result in less electricity usage... or we could have bigger screens now that they fit in our existing energy budget! ... ok, purchase price is a bigger issue there, but it's not an invalid example. Graphics cards are similar. More efficiency doesn't result in less use, so much as better results for the same use, most of the time.) Well, unless the cost of living is going up and making everything worse, in which case the excess funds for electricity will be reallocated to other things (that's functionally affluence going down though, I think?)
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  1577. Some of those can be reliably predicted, which is almost as good... When you're in a position to act accordingly and don't ignore the obvious.
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  1578. So far as I could tell, the politicians expected the EU to make it Impossible, allowing them to reap all the benefits of the process in subsequent elections without having to deal with the consequences. The EU didn't follow the script.
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  1579. Counts, going by the pattern you set up there.
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  1580. I'd be more interested in the one they've built in Japan, to be honest. It's actually built in one of the Exceptionally Rare use cases where the specific tradeoffs that come with the advantages and disadvantages of maglev compared to regular rail actually make sense, and so it's actually indicative of whether maglev tech is equivalent to hyperloop (complete nonsense) or monorail (actually does have valid use cases where it's better than regular rail, they're just very limited). Well, to be fair, maglev is Already substantially ahead of the hyperloop. They have actually been built and used in practice, after all. Generally they've then been repalced by more suitable regular rail or the like, but they Did work. Unlike the hyperloop which... well, it never actually happened. Even the test track wasn't actually the tech that was promissed, and the actuall Result of that nonsense that got built was...well, we all know about that. Not even vaguely indicative of the initial concept.
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  1581. Pretty sure that what you actually end up doing is turning one of the redundant modifier keys* into a 'shift, but more so' key and then giving the letter keys a third value when pressed in combination with that key. Basically what european keyboards do, to my understanding. Of course, this breaks down a bit if a given character can have more than one potential modifier, and even further if it can have two at the same time**. *Capslock, for example, fundamentally has no business existing on a computer keyboard in the first place. ** though between capslock, paird alt and paired ctrl keys, not to mention modern programable mechanical keyboards being able to register a keystroke as being distinct based on how long it is and/or being able to register a 'half' press vs a 'full' press, there's a lot of options for handling this sort of thing.
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  1582.  @AUniqueHandleName444  ...large portions of the world would celebrate if you did. The rest would be too busy worrying about Russia and China (you know, two of the three main reasons anyone puts up with the US's nonsense.)
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  1583. 'reasonably expected schedule for the type of operation they seem to be undertaking, the resources they have, and the problems they are facing' is rather long and unwieldy. Well, that and the tendency of Russian politicians and media to proclaim that they will have (or sometimes Already have, contrary to reality) won by such and such a date.
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  1584. ...somehow, I suspect that many of the people complaining about the non-board-repair are part of the 8k who actually watch them.
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  1585. Seperately, there is also 'fan bake'. The difference between 'fan forced' and 'fan bake'. Far as I can tell, fan bake mostly gets used for preheating the oven faster, or making sure things on different shelves cook at the same speed. The difference is a matter of where the heating elements and fan(s) are positioned relative to each other.
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  1586. Given how American companies tend to opperate... I'd give good odds on 'mostly imperial, with just enough random metric bits to make everything more of a pain in the arse than it needs to be'. Of course, given the tendency to opperate outside of North America a lot, You'd expect metric to be standard to reduce logistical disasters, but given that the US military's being hit by the same complete bullshit that US Farmers (and consumers when it comes to mobile devices and the like) are being hit by in terms of manufacturers engaging in what amounts to outright sabotage in order to extort more money from their customers by preventing anyone else from actually repairing anything...
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  1587. Nah, the USA's just weird for issueing it's soldiers field rations by the meal instead of by the day. (heck, some armies issue a way of heating the food to the Unit rather than the individual soldiers, nevermind the individual Meal.)
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  1588. A one time combination of bugs and errors on the part of several parties. The actual problem was fixed very quickly, steps taken to avoid the situation arising again, and System76 have since made changes to the way the OS handles a number of things such that even if such an unlikely thing did happen again, the user would have to work a LOT harder to screw themselves over (like 'if you know enough to be able to do this, you know enough to know NOT to do this' levels of harder.) It should also be noted the Linus didn't actually wipe his system. He uninstalled the desktop environment. Just as unusable, much less unsalvageable.
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  1589. English's vowel problems are entirely solvable... provided you're willing to almost double the character count and ignore inteligibility between dialects (the second part is more important to rendering this possible than the first is, mind you.)
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  1590. Ayup. There's definitely room for improvement, but the first thing that needs to be done is tossing out the notion that making it 'more phonetic', is actually meaningfully achievable without irreperably fragmenting the language.
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  1591.  @ProgressiveConservative  You're correct. Unfortunately our right wing politicians are no more interested in actually fixing that than the Maori nationalists, it just makes a convenient lever to turn those who would otherwise oppose their generally anti-citizenry policies against each other and keep them distracted.
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  1592. Little thing called Dialects. Though there have been a few... Odd shifts amongst the politicians and news readers in New Zealand the last few years. The former makes sense (different generation, different region, etc.) but the latter's just strange (same individuals, shifting to Less Standard pronunciations. Very puzzling.
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  1593. Something to do with inflation, at least in part. I can think of other things that might contribute to retail rentals being done that way too.
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  1594. Well... if we're going to be honest, opposition to Very Careful implementation of nuclear Power has reduced a LOT. But you're right about the rest of it.
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  1595.  @Elesario  depends on the gesture in question, and the range of how universal a given gesture is caps out at 'very' rather than 'absolutely'.
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  1596. The way protestantism handles localisation is... Well, the Anglican church to some extent follows the catholic and orthodox methods. But most denominations either end up either adapting to the local culture or spinning off a local variant denomination within a couple of generations. (Denominations are weird. Most have their roots in theological differences, but aside from churches within them not disagreeing with each other over matters they consider important, most of them are more about having a broader resource base than anything, otherwise you'd get a lot more churches of no particular denomination. Noticeably, in the town I lived in as a kid, the four or five (i forget) main churches, of different denominations entirely (one catholic) had at some point worked out (and, admittedly, they were mostly older, more traditional denominations, so this may not have been a new innovation or unique to the town) the theology, concluded that they all agreed on the most Important bits, and that the rest either didn't actually matter or was sufficiently debatable that it wasn't worth making a fuss over... And so consequently joint events for major sacraments were pretty common, among other things. It's noteworthy that churches here vary wildly, building wise. You have a couple of Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, and plenty of traditional Anglican churches... But most of the churches are basically just meeting halls or auditoriums, internally, and Externally... Well, I've seen everything from a concrete block rectangle painted white, to one that was basically just part of an office building. Sometimes they look like fancy conference centres. Not all that exotic no matter where you put them.
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  1597. ... You know what the Greatest Argument in favour of regulation and restriction of gun ownership in most of the world is? The absolute Shit Show that is the USA's handling of firearms. Note that there are other countries with similarly limited restrictions on the ownership of firearms that have no such problems. The reasons are varied, but mostly amount to cultural factors that do not apply in most other countries, and bringing them about would involve rejecting current cultural elements that the locals quite like... so... fire arms regulations it is!
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  1598. English spelling has a lot of issues. The US atempt to 'reform' it (more from nationalism than any attempt to actually make it legitimately better) was a bit dodgy to start with, and then only erratic Parts of the reforms proposed actually stuck, so rather than making the spelling more consistent, all it did was erratically eliminate the existing cues that would otherwise help deal with the almost-impractically-complex (though much more consistent than people tend to give it credit for. -ough has not excuse though) existing English spelling. (seriously, the US spelling reform targeted NONE of the major actual problems with English spelling and instead went after a bunch of non-problems).
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  1599.  @ianc7866  What I've been hearing (which is admittedly limited) is less that Germany doesn't get how serious it is, and more that there are certain high ranked individuals in positions that allow them to prevent action from being taken who have determined that it is in their own, personal, best interests to prevent Germany from acting in any meaningful way. No idea how legitimate that is, mind you.
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  1600. It simply isn't taught.
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  1601.  @btf2842  probably true in the current situation, but doesn't in any way reduce the problem.
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  1602. Eh, getting someone who actually knows what they're talking about to explain things to you properly, rather than just reading up on a bunch of stuff with whatever random ideas you might have started with as a basis, is probably better... Though yeah, it shouldn't be 'get X to design it for you' so much as 'learn from X, Y, and Z, then design for yourself' (and that's learn what NOT to do, as much as what to do.)
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  1603.  @JH-tc7wb  problem is, they get their money from advertising. Advertisers pay based on how many people are watching and how often their adds are shown. This encourages short content segements that are almost entirely taken up by recaps and "coming up next" bits, and long and/or frequent ad breaks, and news chosen based not on what you need to know, but what they can best draw out the hype for while expending as few resources as possible to get (which in practice cones down to flat out making things up more often than one might hope). And if that's Not the case it's because they're entirely bought and paid for by usually unspecified interests. Generally speaking, well run state owned news networks tend to avoid those pitfalls, and have known and predictable biases that are easier to compensate for, and actually have Less interest in exploiting psychological weaknesses in their audience. The problem comes when it shifts from "public information resource" to "ruling party propaganda organ". (I think the short terms between elections are one of several factors that helps New Zealand avoid that problem.). Better, stil, it's very easy to work around the biases simply by watching the equivalent news from two or three countries whose areas of interest don't overlap (opposite positions aren't as helpful as you'd think. Different degrees of investment in the issue has a bigger effect.). Unless said foreign news is being censored by your government, but that tells you what you need to know all by itself. (The TV news here does have its issues, but quality of reporting isn't a particularly big one. The writers being overly fond of puns and dad-jokes on the other hand...)
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  1604. Oh, Almost everything Can be worked out with awareness and ethics... provided everyone involved is willing to actually engage with such methods. Coercion and violence are what one employs when the other party refuses to engage with more reasonable probelm solving methods in good faith. The "almost" is due to those instances where forces outside of the control of either party prevent the enactment of solutions that would actually work out for both parties.
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  1605.  @PvblivsAelivs  Problem with leaving, of course, is that the creators will suffer a lot more and a lot sooner than Youtube ever will, and while people might actively Want to spite youtube, most are pretty keen on the creators actually being able to keep making the cool things, and also eating.
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  1606.  @MillionthUsername  the claim that ghoti can (let alone should) be correctly pronounced as "fish" is entirely untrue. By the rules of English spelling (which not only exist, but are more regular than most people think. Mostly due to being more complicated than most people think and actually caring about the stress pattern despite not actually marking it) itan only be pronounced as "goaty". Position matters! Those characters cannot produce those sounds in those positions. Once you toss out That rule, it's equally valid to read it as a series of nulls, as all of them (in other positions again) are Silent. Meaning that it would read as " ". So, yeah, persistent myth. A joke at best.
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  1607. Go woke go broke. The problem with that is that it implies that one causes the other, where as all indications are that the connection is more that the 'woke' part is just the latest coat of paint on one or more not at all new type(s) of bad logic and stupid decisions that have been driving businesses and products to failure for at least decades, and probably centuries.
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  1608. While that wouldn't be particularly surprising to learn, it would still be more surprising than the far more likely situation of shithead owners and managers fucking over their workers in order to cut costs and boost profits. If you don't have good regulations, and reliable methods of enforcing them (which includes methods of detecting such violations), this sort of thing happens without fail. Note that the word "good" is Super important there. Bad regulations will, of course, make things worse rather than better. (As I understand it, US law is full of bad regulations... Which then get used as a justification for "deregulation" (among other things)... Which strangely enough usually seems to involve removing the regulations that were actually working as they were supposed to, and only rarely the ones that actually cause problems.)
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  1609. To be fair, such methods exist. They almost universally consist of 'have a suitable weapon' and 'hit the other guy from behind before they know you're there', at least once 'run away' has been determined to be a non-option for one reason or another.
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  1610.  @InsanityPlusOne  To be fair, a lot of the shops still have 'countdown' written on them, last I looked (I'll admit to not usually paying a lot of attention) I figure changing the lettering on the building is expensive and a pain to organize. Till recepites and such have been changed though. And, of course, they've had that weird hybrid CD/W/apple logo for a while even before they changed it.
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  1611.  @jer103  The self checkout machines where I live (not the USA) don't have those problems, they freak out if therer's anything on the scale before you start (unless you go through the process of telling it you've got your own bag, and even then if it's anything other than a standard empty shopping bag it's going to demand an attendent check it before proceeding in most cases) and will pitch a fit over certain products (usually potato chips, in my experience) where something about the way they're packaged causes them to not move the scale the way the machine expects, or if you just don't put anything in the bagging area after scanning it, or randomly removing something from the bagging area before the transaction is processed...
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  1612.  @mj91212  hilarious bonus: the USA is one of only two countries In The World that Keeps Taxing You even once you leave. You have to renounce your citizenship as well to get them to stop, and if you publicize that that was Why you did so, they blacklist you from entering the USA (to, say, visit family) thereafter. Also, they don't tell you any of this until the first time they start harassing you for non-payment, and their method of calculating what tax you owe is nonsense.
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  1613. ... I've had this argument before and it's infuriating. The moon is absolutely rotating. If it wasn't, then it's orbit would cause it to Appear to rotate. It is tidely locked to earth such that it's orbital period and rotational period are the same length, that's all. And then the counter argument is always to wander into the insanity of reference frames and it all being relative because Of Course It Is, but that doesn't change the fact that if everything's moving then a stationary thing will appear to move to an observer on one of the mobile things so in order to Appear stationary it must be moving such that it counteracts the observer's motion with sufficient precision. Basically, if you sit on earth and look out into space at something Actually stationary, it'd move past so fast you wouldn't have time to register its existence... And then, of course: how do you define stationary? Everything is, after all, relative! Then there's the joys of the apparent paradoxes you can produce with three observers accelerating away from each other along a single axis (one continuing, one accelerating, and one decelerating)
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  1614. @remag-yx4ed It's not. Because the pre-ww2 appeasement was entirely a product of the UK and France not being ready for another war yet and needing time to rearm and recover. Which they did. Hence why they were able to act (...sort of...) when Hitler invaded Poland. This isn't anything of the sort, this is just Trump being an incompitent moron who is screwing over the USA, and it's allies, and basically bringing down the world order, because he has an excessively fragile ego and the social skills of a todler... and somewhere along the way deciding that his grand ambition was to emulate Putin as much as possible... except he's bad at that too. Think less France or the UK and more Italy.
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  1615.  @unhippy1  I recall there was a solid argument for some limited money printing because the problems the pandemic caused were the sort that would counterbalance/be counterbalanced by it. Though going by all the complaints they went way overboard (of course, money that vanishes straight into rich people's savings accounts is Functionally removed from the economy again, and a lot of government spending in the USA seems to end up in those accounts...).
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  1616. honestly, foil or plastic, that water soliable crap is just straight up intentional, unnecessary polution going straight into the water.
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  1617.  @stephaniemay792  Act has all of one good point: they take mental health very seriously. Pretty much a disaster otherwise. These are the twits who though privatization of the water supply would Improve things! Meanwhile the Greens periodically forget that they're not actually supposed to be a Communist party, National can't seem to go an election cycle without some sort of scandal and it's leadership sometimes forget that New Zealand isn't a US state, New Zealand First has reached a point where it's impossible to tell when they're actually doing something suspect (and not all the actually suspect things are even wrong and/or bad, just to further confuse matters!) vs when it's the other parties having a go at them (oh, and then there's the part where sometimes the Party is a meaningful entity and sometimes it's just straight up 'the Winston Peters Party'), and Labour is a progressive centre left party... Right up until something breaks economically and then suddenly they go full right wing economics on us (whatever their other faults, communists they are Not!) And also have a bit of a shortage of people who actually know what they're doing at the moment... The Maori party (and splinters) are periodically hilariously racist, TOP's got a bunch of good ideas but is so radical that no one's quite willing to gamble on them (and somehow contrives to persistently Seem a bit dodgy despite not actually doing anything wrong)... I'm probably missing a couple. And yet somehow they're All better than the american Republican party or the CCP :p
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  1618. Less so if the vessel in question actually Is a boat, of course.
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  1619. Doesn't help that the alphabet used by English doesn't fit it at all. It needs about twice as many characters, most of them vowels, for it to be entirely consistent in it's spelling. The latin alphabet doesn't really have enough vowels for any of the germanic languages, mind you, but the others use diacriticc marks to bridge the gap, while English went all in on digraphs (though prior to the invention of the typewriter we Did have a diacritic mark indicating the difference between the oo in 'coop' and the one in 'cooperate', and similar situations). Just bringing that back and actually marking the primary stress in a word would make English spelling a lot less confusing, at least in so far as there would be less possible readings for any given character combination.
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  1620. well, not long term, anyway.
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  1621.  @RegulatedMilitia  see,I keep seeing this claim,almost universally from Americans. The problem isn't the existence of a central bank, it's the corruption. In New Zealand, for example, we have a central bank. It is part of the government, but Not answerable to the legislature. It has very strict rules which are very difficult to change about what it is and is not allowed to do under what circumstances, which include limits on how far it can go in any direction... And I believe the penalty for breaking the rules is fairly significant. Their fundamental mandate is to keep inflation low, but not so low that the economy stalls out (which can happen as population grows. Deflation is actually More problematic than inflation). I believe the target is for it to be at or very slightly below 2%, with 3 being the maximum and 4 being right out. To this end they set the dates for fractional reserve banking (how much money a bank can lend out compared to how much it actually has) and interest rates (not sure what number this actually is, it's not the rate the consumer pays/recurved, it's some other value that affects the bank, which often gets passed on one way or another.). That said, we also have much stricter regulations than the US does with regards to the sort of profit generating nonsense the banks and financial markets can get up to here, at least to my understanding, which helps a lot. Oh, and a state owned consumer bank which sets a floor on service quality that other banks have to meet in order to be competitive just by existing. (It's not subsidized, to the best of my knowledge, at least no more than any other bank here might be, but it's owner's expectation of its performance is "actually provide the services properly, don't loose money", so it has more room to move on that front. It was instituted after the inevitable happened when the old postbank was privatized and every single full bank in the country ended up owned by foreign interests... With inevitable ever increasing costs and degrading services for the consumer. It's mere Existence (well, and a bunch of people switching to it the moment they could) put an end to that, no regulations needed.) All of this adds up to a lot less corruption in the banking system. They try less stupid shit, get caught and penalised for more of what little they still try, and the end result works pretty well. Meanwhile the USA has a privately owned, barely regulated reserve bank that runs on a for profit bases (so far as I'm aware) answerable, In Theory, to a corrupt legislative, and variable but frequently More corrupt executive, which stand to gain by the continuation of this state of affairs. So... Yeah, nothing wrong with central banking. A specific central Bank, on the other hand, can easily be a disaster if it's regulation is left in the hands of those who benefit from it being so... But that's true of Anything.
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  1622. generally, what actually happens is that much of their everything is absorbed into the local biosphere by the various insect and bacteria scale creatures, fungi, and other, smaller plants. Even forest fires, when everything is allowed to go how it should/managed correctly don't actually clear out Trees much. Oh, I'm sure Some of it escapes in the process, but unless you actually just straight up burn it, it's far from all of it. Which strongly encourages planting wetland and rainforest and such rather than fire prone dry forest, I supose.
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  1623. to be fair, the spelling's a bit rough too. Side effect of only having half the characters necessary to do it right and not including rather important diacritics.
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  1624.  @ajbp95  that would require other, viable, platforms. Such things... don't exactly exist for most creators.
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  1625. Government regulation, mostly. In some places that is a viable and effective solution... in others... well...
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  1626. Man, two less words and you would have been Golden. (Because seriously, there are Plenty of people more divorced from such concepts as "logic" and "reality" than (most) socialists. Conspiracy nuts, just for starters.)
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  1627. Yeah, on a good day you can see across at the closer points, but the gap is Deep, and faultlines are an issue. Among other issues. A bridge or tunnel isn't really possible. NZ USED to have a very good rail system. Pretty much every meaningful settlement was connected to it (even if the lesser ones were served by a carriage or two on the back of the regular goods train a couple of times a week). That started degrading with the shift to car focused infrastructure in the 60s, and then was utterly destroyed by some combination of malice and incompetence when the railways were privatised (I think in the 80s?).
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  1628. I operate almost entirely out of my subscription feed. You used to be able to tell the youtube app to default to it, but they killed that at some point to my recollection.
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  1629. ... You realize that the biggest problem with the fan being in the walk way is the greatly increased likely hood of damage to the fan due to it getting knocked over, which Also ruins airflow, right? Like, Louis's entirely right here, but Erica's concerns are not invalid nonsense either, they're actual issues. Mind you, the biggest problem here is that that is an awfully designed fan.
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  1630. Anyone remember the days when Interchangeable Parts, and the corresponding ease of manufacturing, maintainence, and repair, was commonly considered basically the most important technological revolution in history? (Ok, if you do you're probably pretty old at this point, the internet kinda displaced it in the public consciousness this century. But still.)
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  1631.  @adamyoung9132  Oh, there are plenty of things that have no place in a democracy. Largely things that tend to rapidly result in it ceasing to be a democracy. Militant radicals tend to be one of those things. Now, whether the group in question actually are such or not is another matter, I suppose.
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  1632. 14 days... If they test negative both at the start and end. Over a month if not. And neither Labour or New Zealand First are particularly prone to bend the rules for wealthy foreigners. The current rules only allow citizens and permanent residents (and their dependants) into the country, with room for a few specific exemptions because we're small enough that there are occasionally some pretty important tasks that we don't actually have anyone qualified to do domestically. Simply being rich doesn't qualify for that.
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  1633.  @PKSkeith  Really wishing I hadn't sold my PS2 back in the day, to be honest (to be fair, I no longer had a tv with low enough resolution to not completely stuff the image, but still!)
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  1634. Well, given that flywheels predate electricity (they were used a fair bit in early industrial age machinery.)... Kind of?
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  1635. ... if you buy a road map, will be traveling on the roads, and are in a country which actually has road/street names sign posted at intersections... Why would you buy a compass? Among other simple methods of achieving the same thing, you can simply stop at the first T intersection you come to and align your map to it accordingly.
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  1636. Supposedly does something to the algorithm, if I recall correctly. Of course, at the time i got my information it didn't actually make an appreciable difference compared to any number of other factors, most of them outside the Creator's control.
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  1637. ... Louis has been doing this off and on for a while. Put out quite a few videos like this when he was looking for a new store, which was mostly during the summer.
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  1638. The current state of things in New Zealand is that books only get looked at by the part of the government that does official censorship if someone complains about them. (there are restrictions on the sale of publications containing pornographic images, but not on texts) In the event that there are credible complaints, the censors go over it and impose whatever restrictions they think reasonable to deal with said complaints. This only rarely happens and it's rarer still that it amounts to anything. Still, there was one book banned in recent times. It was considered objectionable due to advocating various things including holocost denial, but the thing that actually saw it censored (flat out banned, I believe) wasn;t the views expressed in it directly, but the likelyhood that not doing so would lead to riots, one way or another. At the same time, the author was doing some sort of speaking tour... he was refused entry into the country on the grounds that the resources required to prevent someone from murdering him or his presence from causing a riot wasn't justified when they could just not let him into the country in the first place, particularly given that the police weren't actually confident they'd be Successful at those tasks (more effort may have been put into finding alternative means if his views were more palitable, mind you, but at the same time the problem would have also been less serious to begin with in that case too.) On a more amusing note, a particular Shirt was also banned in New Zealand by the censor's office. Again, they don't even Look at anything that's not video games or tv/movies unless there are complaints (or it's a very edge case thing and the creator submits it for review themselves just to make sure there's not going to be an issue, I suppose). Basically, the standards for getting them to even look at such a thing are pretty high, and the bar for them going 'nah, it's fine' is Very low. In this case, the shirt was banned. But the reason it was banned was interesting. It wasn't that it was offensive, but that it was Only offensive. It's purpose was deemed to be 'to shock and offend, and nothing else'. Turns out, if it had actually been making a joke, or some sort of statement, or even just arranged in a meaningfully artistic fashion to make some sort of picture, or really Anything to give it a reason to exist other than to upset random people for no good reason, it would have been Fine... but it was just a bunch of swearwords (and maybe some slurs, can't quite recall) printed on a shirt that enough people took offense to to warrent the censors office making a ruling on the matter, and so it was banned.
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  1639. Seems that Russia is pretty good at using tanks... against enemy tanks... Other contexts, not so much...
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  1640. Frankly, that's giving the UK poltiicians far too much credit.
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  1641. See, this whole idea is a bit weird to me, because in common usage Here, a suburb is literally just a sub unit of a city. There's no confusion, a city has suburbs, a suburb can't have cities, and if it's Not part of a city it isn't a suburb, it's a town. (Or township, if it's a sign post, a shop or two, a church and a petrol station in the middle of the countryside, not even always on the same road.) Cities get their own local governments (towns and surrounding countryside get grouped together into districts instead), and generally have universities, ports, cathedrals, stadiums, and other such major infrastructure. Generally in different suburbs. Towns generally don't. Admittedly, most cities have a "central business district", often labeled as as "(city name) central" or something like that on maps which show suburbs, which isn't usually refered to as a suburb (except collectively with the others), but nor is it the city. Of course, most of the suburbs started life as entirely separate towns, too, so they generally have their own, if lesser, 'down town' equivalents (not that we usually call them that). Of course, there is the slight oddity of farmland immediately around cities sometimes falling under their jurisdiction, and greenbelts often include farmland too, mixed in with the parks and reserves. Part of the city (and even of a suburb, usually) administratively, but no one would claim you were In the city while standing on such farmland unless it was in part of the greenbelt that had city on both sides of it (not always the case, cities not being circular), and even then, only sort of. The joys of dialects and diverse systems, I guess.
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  1642.  @DrWhom  The two get habitually confused when it comes to talking about Any absurdly rich person being massively over compensated compared to their actual contribution, too. And really a bunch of other concepts when dealing with 'there is litterally no way to spend this money (as an individual) faster than you earn it, it's just a way of keeping score at this point' scale wealth.
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  1643. There's a rather distinct difference: Piracy explicitly involves killing people, stealing cargo, or hijacking vessels, to my understanding. Then there's various rules about navigation, safety, and such, the violation of which may be some sort of crime. Then there's just being an obstructive pain in the arse... and so long as you're not endangering anyone other than maybe yourself... well, your right to protest isn't exactly protected, but if the other ship starts taking potshots at you... technically, if anyone's engaging in piracy, it's probably Them (in reality they're probably doing something more along the lines of 'reckless endangerment' or something.). It gets even more fun when you consider that, in some places, the ships they're 'protesting' are technically poaching, or only dodging such a charge on a technicality. (seriously, the only reason Japanese whaling ships in NZ waters aren't just sunk out of hand is... well, ok, because the people making the decisions are sane and don't want a war with Japan. But the general public sentiment is (or at least certainly was last I heard) that if that weren't an issue then the navy patroling for and sinking whalers and other poachers on sight would be entirely right and correct. Not to say they don't patrol for them now, but short range boats with an MG or two and a loud hailer are rather less heavy on 'actually getting the message across' than something with an actual gun putting an acutal hole in ship getting up to such nonsense, ya know?).
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  1644. It's not that surprising, no (though the reasons you list are actually barely relevant). But it could Easily have gone otherwise with less competent leadership.
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  1645.  @dansmith1661  Which is silly. The Gold standard is actually kind of defective, you'd do more to convince people not to bother, at less cost, by just Letting them. For all fiat currency's flaws, it was implemented to solve certain problems with the gold standard, and did and does so quite successfully. Now, getting off the US Dollar, That's a good idea. (heck, there's a case to be made that most individual countries are large enough that a single unified currency does more harm than good)
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  1646. Case per capita is a useless number. Absolute case numbers are only useful in comparison to the health care system's capacity. Deaths per capita, rate of infection, and number of deaths per number of infected are all Very meaningful numbers. Particularly rate of infection. (That last number was Also very low in NZ btw. Sweeden, less so.) Also, keep in mind that about half of New Zealand's population lives in a single city.
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  1647.  @testing6753  That is demonstratably false. However, there is significant overlap between the people who do not care about others at all and those who have the traits that allow them to attain power in large organizations (such as governments, corporations, religions, large charities, large unions, and the like). And people generally have a more difficult time caring about people they don't see themselves having any common cause with (part of the problem with both the radicalised progressives and radicalised 'right', whose messages consistantly boil down to 'This group of people is acceptable, That group of people is unacceptable, and if you don't make the right noises about this you are also unacceptable regardless', with the difference being who belongs to which group and what methods of expressing this are 'socially acceptable'... both actively demand you reject you have any common cause with anyone not in their 'acceptable' group... which is a small minority of the population. Note that this is specifically the Radicalised groups, quite independent of the ideals they purport to be attempting to bring about).
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  1648. Well, if one got Really enthusiastic, one could solve the th problem by bringing back thorn... heh.
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  1649. I'm pretty sure they're entirely within their rights to deny you access to their Services for whatever reason they want (plus or minus any penalties in the service contract, and you can garantee that in a contract they wrote there are NONE of those for them!). More fool you if you bought products from them that Stop Functioning without access to those services. (unless they Misled you about that, of course, that's another matter). Might be a different story if it cut of your power or water or caused an accident or caused an accident prevention system to fail to prevent an accident... but even then that's a seperate issue. Almost certainly has a valid claim against the driver and/or whoever made the decision for the problems caused, to my limited understanding, but its a more generally 'you wrongfully caused me harm as a consequence of your actions' deal rather than a 'the actions you took were illegal' deal.
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  1650. looking at Star Trek and then claiming we're 'behind' is a bit of an odd take. It's set centuries into the future, after all. My recollection of it's timeline (well, in so far as there's a single coherent one (there's not)) is that if we were using That as a metric we'd be about due for a third world war involving widespread use of atomic weaponry.
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  1651. ... you have a point, but I'm not sure what fiat currency is doing in that particular list. (I mean, it exists for good reason. But there's a reason other places have much stricter controls on it than the US seems to, as it's abusable. It's just not anything more to do with gambling than, say, savings accounts are.)
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  1652. "American Identity" before the war of independence was 'British'. The only reason a distinction came up is because the same sort of rich plutocratic arseholes (though, to be fair, not yet having any political power, they weren't technically plutocrats yet at the time) who keep screwing everything up Now decided they didn't want to pay a one time levy to cover the part of the expenses incured directly by defending Them during a globe spanning war with a peer power that was Started by a group of those same overly wealthy arseholes raiding neighbouring French colonies (without any permission or authority to do so, for their own personal gain, I might add)! And the British government of the day was sufficiently broke that following standard practice of the era and putting down the rebellion (because that's what organized refusal to pay taxes when you have the ability to do so IS) by force of arms was seen as undesirable when they could just institue a much more collectible import tax and meet the costs that way. Incidentally, representation doesn't come up At All, untill a party of rebel colonists realised that their attempt to get their imovible negotiation position of 'no taxes, of any sort, at all, ever' through parliament when said parliment was having Financial Issues was never going to work if they didn't have their own representative In parliament 'playing the game'. ... the shooting war in the colonies started before this idea could even get back to them, and 'no taxation without represenation' later showed up as Recruitment Propaganda. In the mean time, loyalist colonists were murdered in large numbers, frequently had their homes and business burned down, and largely ended up fleeing to Canada. And the actual rebels made up less than half of the Remaining population after that. Keep in mind, after the war ended, with the British taxpayer no longer shouldering the complete cost of administration and defence, taxes in the now ex colonies went UP for everyone (they had, previously, been paying essentialy the lowest taxes in the western world, even with the 'oppressive' stamp tax), while only particularly wealth men (including those responsible for the war, who were now in control of the goverrnment and writing a tax code that meant that in practice most of them paid little or nothing in the way of taxes) actualy got representation for a Long time after that.
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  1653.  @Rickyp0123  if it's wired up the same way it is here (where it's very common to have a switch by the door and a switch by where the bed is expected to be in the master bedroom, or at each end of a passage way, or any other similar situation), the lights are On when both switches are in the same position and Off when they switches don't match. I've seen how the wiring for that works before, but I forget exactly. And this bothered me enough that I went and looked it up: First off, the circuit doesn't go power-switch-light-switch-power, as one might think, but power-switch-switch-light-power. Then it's really straight forward: The switches have their 'top' pins connected to each other, and their 'bottom' pins connected to each other. So when both are 'up', there's a complete circuit, when both are 'down', there's a complete circuit, and when one is in each position there is not. The quote marks there are because it actually doesn't matter which way up the switches are. They can be sidewise, it doesn't change anything. Heck, you could have them up opposite ways (or, perhaps more accurately, wired 'backwards') and it wouldn't matter to the circuit (though, it would be a bit more confusing for the user, and potentially cause problems for anyone having to work on the thing again later).
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