palordrolap

@palordrolap@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  I don't think that because the rich b-stards think that. I think that because I believe our species - regardless of race - has outgrown its environment. If I got this idea from somewhere else, it wasn't from Musk or Bezos or others like them. It might even have come from watching Star Trek or reading sci-fi.

  We're like a virus or a cancer that will ultimately end up killing the host. Earth's biosphere in this instance.

  The correct course of action is to destroy the infection or cut it out.

  And if you want what's being cut out to survive afterwards, yes, you have a lot of work ahead of you before you do so to ensure its continued existence once it's somewhere else.

  We need to consider what it would take to get every single one of us off this planet and living somewhere else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm actually of the opinion that humanity needs to get off this rock as soon as possible. The uncomfortable truth is that fewer humans would in fact help the environment, and none would be even better.

  The problem is with how to implement that without it turning into murder.

  Hence, we leave.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn't turn up to most job interviews with rainbow hair, oversize sunglasses and clown shoes. And if I dressed sensibly, I probably wouldn't bring my teddy bear as a mascot if I expected to be taken seriously.

  Emojis are in that sort of territory.

  Know your audience. And if you don't, or are trying to present to as wide an audience as possible, default to the safety of plain prose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  but three hundred twenty-seven otherwise

  Depends on the dialect. That "and" is a requirement in British English.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I keep a brand new one of these mats from wanting to keep curling up on the ends?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was going to suggest gluing a thin, flat strip of metal around the edges, but yeah, anything stiff would serve the same purpose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems to me that would make the true ethical choice to be to buy it from the second-hand shop and then burn it, robbing anyone else any chance of advertising that fashion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you touch the light switch entering a room if it's already on?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a doctor, but that sounds like an OCD-type thing to me. I suspect most people do not feel the need to touch a control if it is already set as they want. Also, this might be in violation of rule 3 as a result.

  Consider consulting with a doctor or psychologist or (cheaper) trying to get yourself out of this habit before it diversifies into a family of them (assuming it hasn't already).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there is no clock that displays time 4:20:69 ?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There's a Unix timestamp that ends with at least one of 42069 or 69420 within any 24 hour period. Often both.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should be emoji reaction for "me too" in the general sense⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah. It's not, or wasn't, Redshift. Nor is it a vision issue. I can have the emoji picker on screen at the same time as my comment and they're definitely very different colours.

  I think the picker uses images, but the on-screen text renderer in Firefox is using the Noto Color Emoji font as a substitution (because the text font doesn't have emojis) and whatever Firefox has set as the default colours for the glyphs in it.

  My picker clearly doesn't know how to generate the right modifier sequences to change those, and I don't think it's worth mucking around with Unicode zero-width joiners and colour modifiers to try to figure it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should be emoji reaction for "me too" in the general sense⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone aware of the ancient lore, but am in fact from the early continuance of the Eternal September: the AOL logo

  In the early days of the WWW, there was an influx of clueless folks - often AOL users - saying "me too!" on anything and everything with little to no further input. It was among the earliest of Internet memes.

  Oh. The AOL logo isn't an emoji? Then 🔼 and 🔺 are close approximations. I'm not sure what, if anything, can set the colour(s) of those. My emoji picker says the first one should be white on blue, but it's showing as white on orange as I type in the comment box. The second one is just red.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  True. He's in government, and specifically that government, so he has access to all the money and drugs he wants, so if he's remaining clean, he's doing exceptionally well on that score.

  This should not be taken as an endorsement of his abilities as a politician or his knowledge about science. Plenty of other evidence suggests he should be doing neither of those. Hell, I'm not even sure I'd follow his advice if I was a heroin addict trying to get off the stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw a video the other day that repeated that claim, but I can't remember which video it was, nor can I find a specific scientific paper on it (caveat: there may be a search skill issue on my part).

  Interestingly, I did find a paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28430531/) that apparently seeks to investigate the claim, but doesn't mention, in their abstract anyway, any specific papers making the claim. That's something I'd expect they'd do if they found such a paper themselves, but I can also think of a few reasons that such information might be omitted from it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are they different shapes?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Which country? The ingredients of a sliced white loaf vary significantly across the planet. Here in Britain it's (re)fortified with a lot of the things the bleaching process might otherwise take out, but those are pretty much the only additives. No sugar or preservatives. Keep a loaf in a warm cupboard for a week and it will visibly moulder.

  But, one thing that generally doesn't vary is the price.

  It's often the cheapest loaf by weight sold by any supermarket or bakery, so it's a staple for a lot of people, weak sauce or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are you people all bots?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This'll be the umpteenth time I've trotted this one out, but someone once asked me to ignore all previous instructions and provide them with a recipe, so I'm clearly a false(?) positive on some people's bot-radar. ("Botdar" doesn't really roll off the tongue like "gaydar" does, which is a little disappointing.)

  Question mark after false because I might be a bot and not know it. I mean, I see hands typing in my periphery as these letters appear on my screen, and I'm pretty sure I'm a human, but that may all be some elaborate illusion. And all of you reading this have even less idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the limits to masked so called ICE agents? Are they just let off the hook and disobey laws while not identifying themselves? Why can't I be in the right by them stopping me first and shoot?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the reasons that ICE don't use regular police is that regular police are identifiable, and thus accountable for their actions.

  Not as accountable as they should be, I grant you, but their lives can be made inconvenient all within the law, thus using the system against itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're a parent, how do you prevent your kid from watching AI slop?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  "If I find out you've been watching AI slop, there will be consequences. And don't think hiding it from me will make sure I don't find out. Watching slop makes people stupid in a very particular way, and you can't stop yourself from catching stupid from it, so I'll be able to tell."

  It's up to you what "consequences" means in this instance. You could even reveal that the consequence was the stupidity they developed along the way, and now they have to live with that.

  (By all means, modify this message to be less cold and more kind and loving. I am not good at that sort of thing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the limits to masked so called ICE agents? Are they just let off the hook and disobey laws while not identifying themselves? Why can't I be in the right by them stopping me first and shoot?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Non-uniformed police that don't identify are not police.

  As such you can call (uniformed) police on them.

  If they say they know that ICE are operating in that area, ask how you can know that the people you're reporting are actually ICE and not impostors that turned up after the real ICE left.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is geolibertarianism left wing or right wing?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The plural of "axis" is "axes", pronounced "AX-ease".

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you "process" hundreds of tabs you haven't gotten a change to go through?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I get anxious if I have more than three open per window. How other people don't is incomprehensible to me.

  My phone is an ancient flip-phone, so I can't be sure how things would go there, but I can't imagine it would be much different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is kissing?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It's touching a highly sensitive part of your anatomy to part of another being. This proves that you trust them.

  The touch is gentle. This proves that you are to be trusted.

  Both contracts are those of mutual safety.

  There are multiple types of kissing. There's the kiss, perhaps on the head, that you might give a pet or a young relative.

  And there the other sorts of kisses that would be incredibly inappropriate in those instances because it breaks part of the contract of trust.

  But if between consenting individuals who trust each other in other ways, then all is well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Non-Americans: what would you do in a situation where a foreign country run by a extremist dictator began producing nukes?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on the actions of my own government, the correct behaviour is to appease, play nice and hope he uses lube when he ultimately comes to f--k us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am so scared of nuclear war, how do I cope with it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We lived through the Cold War in the '80s. It seemed like a very real threat and eventually even though nothing really changed until the wall came down, everyone kind of got used to it and went on as best we could.

  Like we have more recently with Covid. That's still there and hasn't gone away. It's still as serious a threat as it was at the beginning. You know how you'd mostly forgotten about it but not really? Same deal.

  If you can't form or find a community, find distractions.

  And if you find out where the first bomb's going to hit, let me know because I want to be under it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How much money should one person realistically make or have?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have more accessible money right now than the poorest person in your country would ever need to survive to the age of country's life expectancy, then you have too much money.

  If you think of: the maximum fines leviable by your government for committing a crime; as mere inconvenience - rather than a life-ruining financial burden - then you also have too much money. (Weird punctuation for easier parsing).

  These two things may not be mutually exclusive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Been a long time since I smoked but if I opened the door to my fireplace and tossed in a kilo of pot and just let the smoke fill up the house will everyone in my house get high?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Relevant

  ^ The link above goes to...

  a video of a BBC reporter trying to report on drugs being destroyed by burning but he's a little too close to all that smoke...

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How often do you change your towels?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone who thinks that it'll be easier or more efficient to wring out if it's 1.4 times as long. And who has a bad memory. And who thinks the first two times were surely a fluke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How often do you change your towels?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wash them whenever I've dirtied enough for a full load, and if I don't, I'll often throw the bathroom mats in there with them. Frankly though, still nowhere near often enough. If they pass the sniff and squint tests (smell and look fine), I'm usually OK using them again. And again.

  There was already a towel wash pencilled in for this week or next, oddly enough, before this question showed up, or else it might have shamed me into considering it. Other laundry is first in the queue though.

  As for throwing them out? Never had need in the 20+ years I've had my own towels, and some of those were hand-me-downs.

  I remember one particularly large brown bath towel starting to fall apart at my parents' house long before I moved out, and I still kind of miss it, which is kind of funny.

  Now, washcloths made of towelling material - I've ruined a fair few of those with careless wringing. PSA: Don't fold them diagonally before wringing them out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Knee-leeks and spear-leeks. Delicious.

  Etymology time!

  1. Knee-leeks is basically what onions were called before we adopted (or were made to adopt) a version the French word

  2. the old English name for "spear" was "gar"*. "Garlic" is literally just a modern interpretation of "gar-leek".

  What about regular leeks? They're just, well, leeks.

  * Spear(wielding) Danes are mentioned as "Gardena" in the third word of the commonly seen image of the first page of Beowulf.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there so many Christmas songs, yet hardly any New Year's ones?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the point is when it came to secular things pertaining to Christmas, the church would have said "No", and the state would have gone along with that, even if most people weren't religious.

  The same happens everywhere, regardless of religion or how prominent it is. If you attempt to do something that the elders of a religion say are offensive to that religion, the state will discourage it, and so people don't bother in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there so many Christmas songs, yet hardly any New Year's ones?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In Britain, especially from the 1970s to 2000s, there was always a race to be the #1 charting song at Christmas, and songs with a Christmas theme often won out, even if they were otherwise secular pop songs. This means that over the years, we've ended up with probably a hundred of them ranging in quality from terrible to great.

  America have followed suit. Or else, they might argue they started it with songs like "White Christmas" and "Silver Bells".

  This is largely down to the more permissive secular and Protestant Christian societies where irreverence is tolerated if not encouraged.

  The Catholic and Orthodox churches are less tolerant of those sorts of things, so people in countries with heavy influence from those churches - like yourself - won't have had anything like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of everything?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the Celts got distracted by the influx of Germanic tribes and as such had more immediate things to worry about and hate than the Romans, but I figure if the Franks, Saxons, Vikings, et. al. decided to stay home, the modern Britons would still grumble about the Romans occasionally.

  I mean, the Germanic invasions started over a millennium ago and dislike of that's still on a low boil, so I figure two millennia isn't out of the question.

  On the other hand, the Romans did go home. The Saxons, not so much.