IMO the proper thing to do is to answer the question and make damn sure the poster isn’t falling for the XY Problem.

Sometimes the weird solution is justified by a weird context, and we gotta treat people like adults. But also, you’re probably asking the wrong question.

Like, I can tell you how to disconnect your bike’s brake lines, but if you’re asking how to do that with no context I would most definitely like to know what problem you think you’re solving.

Just live in a country which refuses to acknowledge cell broadcast exists, then you’ll die in peaceful silence in the next national emergency while operators take several hours to to send 11 million unicast SMS.

Taps forehead

The Catholic Church: Co-opts a pagan holiday and re-brands it

Two millennia of tradition: Mix pagan imagery with Christian imagery

Nonbelievers: Co-opt it back without the explicitly Christian imagery

You: Nooooooo it’s religious!

The Church has had an iron fist over much of my continent for near two millenia, so of course you can find a religious tie for every holiday (except the First of May probably). However my family is almost completely non believing and we’ve always celebrated Christmas and Easter, with Coca-Cola Santa and no Mass. Why this laic co-optation is so controversial I will never understand.

Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn’t pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.

To complain about “religious persecution” of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is… certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.

I don’t think there is one beyond “hey look we all know this thing”.

Americans: “We are a diverse patchwork of cultures and saying the US is one gigantic boring monoculture just because we share a common language is offensive”

Also Americans: hundreds of millions of people literally all relate to the same quirky element of childhood imposed through immense conformist institutions, can’t even process the idea that other cultures exist that do not relate to this specific element.

I need to hear what this connector would sound like when connected to an actual Dolby Atmos system. Do the crackles and pops get spatialized and make an impromptu symphony going around your room? The people must know!

I don’t think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going “Glory to Artsotzka” every five minutes.

It’s tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn’t an authoritarian hellhole. But it’s way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn’t.

You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don’t have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain’t any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)

The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.

A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji… The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.

You expect us to not notice how you skipped over the entire 0-50 range there? “It’s just better for everyday temps” my ass.

Also 100F is not deadly if you got water and aren’t working hard, and neither is 0F if you got appropriate clothing.

And don’t get me started on how y’all pretend that measuring temperature has to be on this stupid ass scale “because it goes to a hundred where I live” but then y’all count your school grades (which are entieely made up and would cost literally nothing to change) to 3.8 or whatever the fuck.

If 100 % of Indians start using English as their lingua franca (they’re on a track to just that), does that make Hindi a dialect of English?

The sociopolitical reality of a lingua franca does not define the scientific linguistic reality of other languages.

I will say that personally the notion of catalan being a subset of castellan sounds ridiculous on account of the fact that in its written form catalan is roughly mutually intelligible with french, where castellan is not. If it’s going to be lumped in as a dialect of something, it’d be more intellectually honest to make it a dialect of French.

IMO a queer person is by definition GSRM. I wouldn’t call anyone Queer that isn’t part of the community, it’s weird.

But queer as an adjective can mean many things. It’s basically taken on the mantle of “gay” in that sense. 10 years ago we’d say “anything LGBT-adjacent is gay”, now for the sake of inclusion/intersectionality the meaning has been transferred to “queer” and I’m all for it.

The fact that people not fitting strict gender norms are being called queer… well 15 years ago they’d have been called metrosexual or butch or straight-up slurs lol. The behaviors haven’t changed, and that’s the problem.

no but seriously tho

I’m a cis dude, overall quite masc, but it drives me up the wall how peak acceptable fun in male gender expression is wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Anything beyond that (e.g. painting nails) is automatically queer. Which is fine, I am queer, but why would my cis gender expression be classified as queer?? Or put another way, why don’t cishet men paint their nails, wear earrings, or skirts or crop tops? Do they hate fun?

Wearing a crop-top in public sounds super fun if it wasn’t for the fact that a bland black crop top would earn me even more attention than if I was Margot Robbie herself. My introverted ass can’t handle that. But also I really wanna. God fucking damnit we truly do love in a society.

Sorry about the rant I guess I had more on my mind than I thought.

There are legitimate concerns… Low genetic diversity is already a big problem, especially when an artificial species outcompetes indigenous variants only to all die to the same random illness.

GMOs aren’t inherently different but make it significantly easier and cheaper to fuck up ecosystems in this way, which is the most convincing argument I’ve heard against them to date.

Also the patenting of crops is a terrible practice that needs to die, and GMOs are just amplifying the problem by making “patent-free” crops even less competitive.

Finally we already have more than enough food in the world to feed everyone (we just lack the ability/willingness to properly distribute it), and that’s before taking into account just how much of farm land is used for cattle we don’t actually need or to grow cattle feed (it’s a LOT). So in this way GMOs kinda sound like a solution looking for a problem (at least when only viewing them as yield/profit multipliers). Doesn’t Monsanto make enough money already?

That’s a very high fucking horse to be standing on top off when their device is specifically made to be plugged into a television. Y’know, the thing that almost never can display an image with less than 100 ms of latency even in “game mode”. Any decent bluetooth codec has less latency than a standard TV so that’s a bullshit excuse.

Also there are low latency bouetooth codecs like AptX-LL with less than 40ms of E2E delay. Sony could enable bluetooth for those devices if it can negociate a low latency codec. They could show a warning about how they can’t guarantee the user experience. But they won’t.

The real reason is that they want to lock their users into a walled garden where they have an effective oligopoly. It’s a very old and scummy business tactict. It’s that simple and there’s no need to regurgitate their pathetic excuses.

If you want? You’re also free to pay for hand-kneaded bread at a traditional bakery from hand-harvested flour (damn harvesting machines taking the jobs of peasants!) You’re free to only listen to music in concerts rather than rely on cheap and automated reproductions (damn vinyls taking the jobs of bards!)

I think it’s weird to shame people for going with the cheaper, more efficient, industrial version.
Some jobs don’t call for art, they call for illustrations, and AI tools are perfectly adequate for that.

Of course it’s terrible that artists are losing out on illustration jobs, but I don’t see how it is meaningfully different from any other kind of automation taking jobs and why we should shame its users. Artists being undervalued in market economies isn’t a new problem, and shaming users is at best a temporary and leaky band-aid on the situation.

The first two are also applicable to English. I still don’t understand half of English poetry because my native-french-speaking ass doesn’t even have an intuitive concept of syllabic stress, and English pronunciation is so beyond fucked it’s not funny. “It’s pronounced read and not read” “-ough like tough not dough” how about STFU.

I’ve used one for cycling.

Overkill? Maybe. Quite nice to have a dark country road lit up well enough to light up the road close AND far (most headlights have a tight beam that only does either).

Also I like the reusability/repairability of productd based on 18650 cells

“Lofi” as it is understood nowadays is more about background music that aims not to be distracting when working/studying. Basically lofi == “lofi (to study to)”.

Trip-hop like Portishead does it, while it is “low fidelity” (as in it uses warm tones, crackling, record scratching, etc), it is not lofi, in the same way that Sabaton is Rock but not Rock&Roll.

catholic countries are actually more religious now

In South America and Africa, somewhat maybe depending on the country and what you’re comparing to (current day America maybe, Middle Ages catholicism definitely not).

In Western Europe, L. M. F. A. O. I don’t think there’s a single catholic (or formerly catholic, now secular) country in Europe that comes close to being as religious as the US, by any useful metric.

Within Europe we can try to compare Catholicism vs Protestantism, but let’s be real, most of these guys were murdered, converted, or sailed off to the new world centuries ago.

Also there are cameras contemporary to some already deadly firearms (late 19th/early 20th century at a guess). You’d think at the very least a musket would work, or more likely a bolt-action rifle.

My headcannon is that wizard society is so fascist that they just find it too horrifyingly distasteful to use muggle technology (even against Voldermort himself), but also it’s why they try so hard to stay hidden because deep down they know they stand no chance against anything resembling a modern muggle army, despite their claims of superiority. I mean, even if Hogwarts itself is protected against technology, an artillery shell is hardly technologically advanced and could be fired from tens of km away.