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5·1 month agoThis is probably a fool’s errand, because it’s all or nothing, making it inherently unstable. If we ever get within striking distance of having enough states to cross the threshold, the law will be fought tooth and nail to prevent passage, and this battle would continue in perpetuity in every remotely purple state that has the NPVIC law in place, trying to get enough overturned to stop it.
Maybe it accomplishes something useful simply by bringing the conversation about reform to the forefront? But as an actual solution I’m completely skeptical, as much as I like the idea.
“How do I help my uncle Jack off a horse?”
10·1 month agoA problem with this question is that the US is such a big and diverse place, that you could have this same question posed to Americans only, asking about their experience visiting other parts of the US.
You think an American wouldn’t also regard that interaction as weird?
Do I just live in a weird bubble? I live in the US and I am rarely at someone’s house who doesn’t remove their shoes nowadays. I certainly grew up wearing shoes at home, but that’s changed significantly over the past 20 years or so.
Yeah, I always wonder how often there’s a need to refer to inhabitants of two continents together as a single entity. Like, if you say someone is South American or North American, that is never confused with being someone specifically from the US. When would those terms be insufficient?
Don’t you mean “from AND into”?
Bill Clinton never debated George W Bush
What kind of Dem candidate is pro fracking?
One who exists in a fucked up electoral system where the entire fate of our country rests upon a few thousand votes in western PA.
“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.
If “literally” means “figuratively,” then we literally have no word for “literally.”
It’s worth pointing out that you just used the word for “literally” and we knew which sense of the word you meant through context. Just like the verb “dust” can mean to put a layer of small particles on something but can also mean to remove the small particles from something. Humans are able to sort these things out.
However, one of the best things about language is that if a need actually arises for more clarity about “literalness”, a solution will naturally emerge to address it.
Even the word “literal” started out as a word that pertained specifically to the written word, and scholarly things, and its sense evolved to refer to things not necessarily written down, to the present meaning of “the most straightforward interpretation of what I’m saying”. A need arose and a word filled the need.
I’ve always wondered why so many people have this reaction, rather than seeing it as a cool thing that languages can do. Namely, taking bits from other languages and making them into something new.
I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but I can say my elementary school kid and friends all say “search it up”, and although they have school-issued Chromebooks and use Google for search, I can’t actually recall ever hearing them say “google it”.
It seems to me that the question of free will is only truly meaningful (aside from being an interesting thought experiment) if we could then perfectly or near-perfectly predict what a person will do. But the system in which we exist is so complex that we will never be able to model that or come close.
So we might as well consider humans to have free will, just as we consider a roll of the dice to be random.
14·4 months agoInstead of store hours like this:
- Monday 6:00-18:00
- Tuesday 6:00-18:00
- Wednesday 8:00-18:00
- Thursday 6:00-18:00
- Friday 6:00-18:00
We can have store hours like this:
- Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
- Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
- Wednesday 0:00-10:00
- Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
- Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00
Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.
And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.
It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.
It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.
Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.
I don’t want someone to go kill him, but I absolutely wish that he would drop dead without the slightest moral reservation.
My only concern is that however he were to die, everyone on the right would go full conspiracy theory and blame it on the left, and somehow we’d be worse off in ways I can’t imagine right now. The right always seems to find a way to make me regret any turn of events that I thought was good.
For about seven years, and then he went back to calling himself Prince again.