Youtube comments of Laurence Fraser (@laurencefraser).

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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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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