shikitohno

while a diplomatic crisis between Poland and Israel has erupted after Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Yacov Livne, pushed back at what he said were attempts by the “extreme right and left in Poland” to accuse Israel of “intentional murder”.

You've really messed up if you've managed to get the extreme right and the extreme left both on the same page about your bullshit.

Don't ask the gym teacher with the German last name, blond hair in a buzz cut and a swastika tattoo on his arm if he was actually a Nazi, or he'd give you detention. Probably not a formal school rule, but people still got detention for it.

Yeah, it's just tradition at this point, though I feel like native speakers really try to oversell its usefulness when someone questions if the opening signs are necessary. People act like they routinely need to read text written like the Cartas de relación out loud, and thus, need the additional warning lest they get lost in the long, multi-clause sentences. Like, I could understand if you had to read something like

Y después acá, por no haber oportunidad, así por falta de navíos y estar yo ocupado en la conquista y pacificación de esta tierra, como por no haber sabido de la dicha nao y procuradores, no he tornado a relatar a vuestra majestad lo que después se ha hecho; de que Dios sabe la pena que he tenido. Porque he deseado que vuestra alteza supiese las cosas de esta tierra, que son tantas y tales que, como ya en la otra relación escribí se puede intitular de nuevo emperador de ella, y con título y no menos mérito que el de Alemaña, que por la gracia de Dios vuestra sacra majestad posee. Y porque querer de todas las cosas de estas partes y nuevos reinos de vuestra alteza decir todas las particularidades y cosas que en ellas hay y decir se debían, sería casi proceder a infinito.

out loud on a regular basis, but even contemporary literary Spanish doesn't tend to have nearly the same amount of sentences that just go one for half a page, much less the sort of stuff people would write to each other normally.

As you've mentioned, other syntactically similar languages do just fine without them, even including other Romance languages spoken in various regions of Spain. The only exception I'm aware of is Asturianu, which apparently also uses them, though apparently they're optionally allowed in Galego Real Academia Galega. On page 38 of the PDF, it says they're entirely optional if you want to facilitate reading by including them.

An error message you can get if you really manage to mess things up. I got it once a few years ago.

I don't know how widespread it is outside of metal, but I've been seeing more and more bands offering tapes. Sometimes a release is only on tape, other times the tape might be $6, the CD $15 and the LP $25, so there are different ties available for those who want a physical copy. I probably got 10 tapes or so within the last year.

Making it seem like it's predominately something done by middle-class men, or even rich people, helps to undermine public support for it because of the image people have of a stereotypical male cyclist, ie a well-off person riding a $1400 bike with a bunch of lycra clothes and tech gear pretending they're training for the Tour de France while they go through their midlife crisis. It's much less relatable an image for many people, who might say "Well, why do they need to ride on all the roads? They can just go on the paths in the park, or if they have so much money, they can go to a purpose-built facility."

If you frame it as though it's just going to benefit a bunch of people perceived to be living it up, you can drum up opposition from poor people, who don't want their taxes going to fund some BS project that only benefits people who are already doing alright. Your aunt that's busting her back trying to make ends meet and is trying to get back and forth to work and the shops on a bike one step up from a Wal-mart special can be much more relatable for many people who are struggling to keep up, can't really afford their car payment and might even use a bike if there were dedicated bike lanes. So people looking to discourage building out bike infrastructure will naturally prefer that everyone thinks the only ones who would benefit from these developments would be some middle-manager who owns his home, rides a bike that costs more than your rent and that has gone on more vacations in the last year than you have in the last two decades.

This works up to a certain size, then you start having to contend with more shameless money grabs, scalpers catching wind of things and making it impossible for actual fans/users of the product to get stuff for a reasonable price and more scammers.

Needle exchanges, methadone, nalaxone. All the things that let them keep using instead of getting clean.

2/3 of these are just things that let them not die as a result of use, and methadone is generally used to facilitate getting clean and minimizing withdrawal symptoms, so what exactly are you going on about here? People will use heroin regardless, but if you would prefer more entirely avoidable deaths, sure, get rid of needle exchanges and nalaxone, and enjoy community transmission of HIV and Hepatitis going up along with overdose deaths. That'll really teach 'em, I'm sure.

These aren't programs that facilitate ongoing use amongst addicted populations, they're just stop-gap measures that mitigate the worst outcomes within these groups, which impact everyone. If you think people are just going to stop shooting up because they can't get a clean needle or might OD on something that's been cut, I don't know where you've been for the last 40 years.

In the Northeast, it's often cheaper, and pretty much always faster, to fly than to take Amtrak, unfortunately. My family tried to get me on a last minute family gathering over the holidays, for example, and Amtrak was going to be over $400 round trip, and a round trip flight was less than $200, and about 2h30 quicker each way. If I look up the same trip saying I want to go from NYC to Boston today and return Tuesday, taking Amtrak at crazy early or late hours would let me have an 8+ hour round-trip come out to $285. Round trip flights would run $427 pretty much any time of day and take 3 hours in total. For me, as a younger guy often travelling solo, it might make sense to just wake up stupid late and be on a 2am Amtrak train to save some money. For people with kids, elderly folks, or anyone who has time commitments that mean they can't do that, the $427 flight at 10am sounds a lot more appealing.

It only gets worse as the distance goes up. NYC to Montreal is only a $153 round trip on Amtrak if you book in advance to snag one of the cheap seats, but it takes 11h41m each way. Round trip flights going direct run $242, but going and coming take only a quarter of the time for going one-way on Amtrak.

Oddly enough, going south, Amtrak actually makes sense. Booked far enough in advance, I can go from NYC to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, DC. for between $30-$50ish, last time I looked. Flights are more expensive and only save me about 90 minutes on the longer legs. I have heard that outside of the NE Corridor, Amtrak is much more affordable, but I don't know how true that is.

Even running Arch for the last decade or so, I largely don't have issues that wind up being any more complicated than downgrading a package every so often. Most of my config editing occur in one of three situations. First and most common, initial setup of a program to telling it where to find any files it needs and change any default settings I have a different preference on. Second, it's a program I use constantly and want to tweak it to work just so, adding to it as I discover new features that catch my interest, like tweaking my ncmpcpp and tmux setups. The last case is procrastination, where I get obsessively focused on something because, clearly, the reason I haven't written my 5 page paper due tomorrow has nothing to do with the fact I've been screwing around and not keeping up with my coursework for the last week, and can instead be squarely attributed to the fact that I have discovered some aspect of my emacs setep that needs to be refined, like realizing I dislike how biber formats my references in Auctex and needing to spend hours finetuning my reference style to m' exact preferences.

For most general use cases, like browsing the web, listening to music, watching movies and maybe firing up a word processor, this is entirely unnecessary. To give an example, I got tired of having to periodically spend a night purging my elderly mother's laptop of myriad viruses and uninstalling the dozen or so IE toolbar she kept infecting her system with. Clearly not a techy person. I put Linux mint on it, changed the desktop shortcut for Firefox to the Internet Explorer icon, ditto for Open Office's word processor with Ms Word, and she was happy as could be without really noticing a difference. I would just remote in and periodically update it. Worked fine for her until she got a new new computer, by which point she'd realized she could, in fact, live without all that malware taking up half her screen in IE.

I have a TV for when I have time to play games on my PS3 or PS4 these days, but I watch the vast majority of my stuff on my computer. Unless I'm watching something that's available in 4K that I feel is worth it, why would I bother going to another room just to watch stuff that is streaming off my NAS and accessible on my computer anyway?

I feel like a lot of people just don't have much reason to turn on their TV to watch stuff unless they still have cable and want to watch live sports.

I read it out of spite because of how often any random nonsense in my high school English class would be call a metaphor for Jesus and I wanted to be able to call BS on it when appropriate.

Suggested to my mother that she might want to read it sometime, seeing as she taught catechism classes for the local church and she gave me the most confused look and asked me why on earth she would want to do that. The very same lady who insisted I had to continue attending mass and catechism classes until I got confirmed right up until the nun in charge expelled me from their catechism program.