idiomaddict
@idiomaddict@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anon reads Don Quixote 1 day ago:
Aramis is the one you’re missing, and he’s also the one I always forget. I can remember porthos and athos because they sound similar, and d’artagnan was the name of the company my old job used for some supplies, but Aramis is too easy a name to forget.
- Comment on ‘I wasn’t even listening,’ Farage says of donations scandal meeting 2 days ago:
Absolutely it sounds nonsense.
It’s perfectly grammatical, but it’s one of the few commands where the subject isn’t elided. The others that occur to me are “hear ye, hear ye,” and “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,”from Ozymandias, both of which are definitely very old fashioned sounding.
- Comment on Anon becomes a landscape 4 days ago:
I dated a guy in college whom I (affectionately) referred to as “the caveman,” because he had a really prominent brow. My (unaffectionate) nickname in high school was “sleepy,” because I fell asleep in class once, and that was made up by boys.
I think most nicknames are a little unimaginative.
- Comment on Alcoholic billionaire says he wants to shove a camera up every workers ass. 5 days ago:
Solidarity is the answer
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 5 days ago:
I majored in German in college (and honestly probably only got to a high B2 or so, which is not very advanced), so I signed up flyor six months of intensive online classes from 3-7:30 am every weekday before work, then applied to a bunch of masters programs in German language instruction. I was accepted on a provisional basis for a normal teaching degree, and given a year to take more intensive German classes before starting the degree. Nearing the end of that year, I had advanced my German enough to qualify for the masters in German education. To qualify for the student visa, I had to prove my student status and have €10k that I could put into a bank account to be withdrawn in steady increments throughout the year. The intensive classes cost about €5k for the whole 18 months, and university tuition is around €400 per semester.
I do have a talent for languages, but I also think that if anyone spends 18 months doing 20 hours of language instruction per week, they’ll be able to at least get a high enough level to study a non language related degree in most countries. I’ve seen dedicated illiterate adults begin learning both German and how to read and get a language level high enough to meet university admission requirements here within three years, so a person starting out knowing their letters can do it in half the time. It’s not easy, but if you can focus on it, it’s doable.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 6 days ago:
I’m an American emigrant, living in Germany, and it’s weird: there are so many layers of problems, that I can’t accurately express what it feels like to watch your home country burn itself and anyone it can take with it to the ground from afar. The closest I can come is “shameful,” when people ask, but I worry that comes off as though I just find trump embarrassing.
I absolutely do, but it’s more that I feel deep shame for ever having believed the propaganda I was raised with; every new, horrible thing this president does is a fucking disgrace; and the mask-off nature of the administration reveals other shameful aspects of American culture and history*, which were previously less known to Europeans.
Just cutting off USAID, NOAA, and American participation in the WHO have or will all contribute to preventable deaths of innocent people around the world (there are too many things to consider them all here). We were at one point well-organized, dedicated, and well-connected enough to have a net positive effect on the world (had we chosen to do so, which we continually did not). We had a robust social safety net for some of the population at one point which could have been expanded to cover everyone in the country. By not doing that, we’ve almost certainly forced people who could have been highly skilled doctors, gifted artists, or creative inventors into wage labor, prison, or an early grave.
Because of what?
Racism?
That weird little fantasy about how the details of a person’s phenotype affect their personality or ability? It’s just a malignant, bizarro-world version of astrology! Race isn’t based in genetic science, and even if they try to suggest that there are differences based on race that are transmitted through culture, it quickly leads to the realization that perhaps treating some people as an underclass is not a good thing for society, actually, so they’re clearly not going about it that way.
It’s repeated a lot, but the cruelty really seems to be the point.
That’s a terrible shame.
*it also revealed a level of solidarity shown by people protesting ICE that I was really happily surprised by, to be clear. It’s not all bad, but there are many ways that could have been revealed which would have been infinitely better.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 6 days ago:
That sounds like it might a place with somewhat robust worker’s protections, at least on paper. Are there mechanisms to prevent employers gaming the system like that?
- Comment on Wages never caught up with costs 1 week ago:
Even my older sibling (ten years older) had significantly cheaper school in the early 2000s than I did and significantly more expensive than you. I honestly just expected it to keep growing at an insane rate- I hope it’s leveled out some.
Side note: I was really excited to earn $35k/year at my first office job in 2015, because I grew up with $40k in mind as the “made it” salary. I was… disappointed.
- Comment on Wages never caught up with costs 1 week ago:
Does anyone know if college is accurate? I went about 15 years ago, and state schools were $10k/year for just tuition, $20k/year for tuition and room and board. Private schools were closer to $40k/year for everything.
I’d be pleasantly surprised if it wasn’t more than $30k a year for college now.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
I think you’re thinking of the professional managerial class.
- Comment on I guess they didn't Edge enough 1 week ago:
I still enjoy many dark jokes internally too, but I definitely don’t share them with as wide an audience as I used to- I’ll make a joke about priests molesting kids to my husband, close friends, or immediate family, but I know that I can’t generally know who has been impacted by that, and I’m not trying to fuck up someone’s day with a flip joke.
I also don’t enjoy dead baby jokes nearly as much as I used to, because I’ve now known several people who’ve had a late miscarriage or stillbirth, or whose children died, and I can’t separate the punchline from the image of their faces while grieving or talking about the loss. I still like dark humor about things that directly impacted me, but for things that only happened to loved ones, I can’t see the humor anymore.
- Comment on Anon comes into some money 1 week ago:
Imo, lentils need carrots the way food in general needs salt, so that might have been the difference. I assume other sweetish (culinary) vegetables like squash or sweet potatoes would work as well, but since I tried them with carrots, I haven’t made them without to test (seriously, it’s that big a difference, plus carrots are the cheapest of the three).
It doesn’t need to be much, just one or two roughly chopped and thrown in with the raw lentils to cook together. I don’t generally want the mushy carrot mixed in with the lentils afterward, so I just eat it separately (which is why I chop it roughly- if you chop it finely, it’d probably basically melt into the finished dish).
- Comment on An American city has been without power for 2 weeks, unacceptable. 1 week ago:
Absolutely believable, I just haven’t been back since 2012
- Comment on An American city has been without power for 2 weeks, unacceptable. 1 week ago:
The less touristy parts of New Orleans were still fucked in 2012 from Katrina in 2005.
- Comment on Anon visits IHOP 2 weeks ago:
My first job was at friendlys, and in case you still miss them sometimes, a fribble is just a regular milkshake made with soft serve (so just soft serve, syrup, and milk).
- Comment on Boeing engineers, technical workers reject contract offer 2 weeks ago:
There are lots of these local news websites that redirect to youtube, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m accessing them from abroad or if they’re just awful
- Comment on Social Security can be saved. Scrap the cap! 3 weeks ago:
The one on the right looks like the real version of the gru meme
- Comment on Is Anon the asshole? 4 weeks ago:
I sent him the green text, and apparently he offered to fix a friend’s instrument in the past and got an earful. He would have been fine with me getting his old one fixed up, but he’s happy to have the new one
- Comment on The woke liberals are making our wars gay 4 weeks ago:
I do think warfare is more honorable and better the less technology you use, but that’s just because technology lets you increase the distance of warfare and the distance is what actually makes wars worse or less honorable.
I would not have said better without the prompt of your comment, but I value the deadliness of war negatively, so something like a club can kill fewer people than a gun, which can kill fewer people than a neutron bomb.
I think it’s more honorable to give all parties involved an honest chance in winning a fight and in harming the other side. Drone operators are functionally immune to harm, and their side only risks the value of a drone, whereas the other side is often unarmed and fully vulnerable to drone attacks, just by sleeping near a window or being outside [or going to a wedding, but that’s not my point]. It’s a lot harder to hit someone with a club without being vulnerable to their attacks yourself, and you cast an even wider net of damage with similarly low risk of the people actually impacted by your neutron bomb being able to attack you back.
A good historical example for how this is not dependent just on technology and for why medieval warfare was NOT more honorable is the Siege of Caffa. The Golden Horde flung plague-ridden corpses over the city walls, infecting the residents, causing them to flee, and likely causing the Black Death. That again, involves an increased distance of warfare. Any time you fight in a way that can’t be reversed, it’s less honorable and deadlier, thereby making it worse from my perspective.
- Comment on Is Anon the asshole? 4 weeks ago:
Depends what “fix” means, but if you didn’t get ripped off for $200, yes.
Getting it professionally tuned isn’t unreasonable imo, especially if the neck/pegs are misaligned, but in no world should that cost $200 (and don’t try to fix a misalignment).
Once you start making changes that can’t be undone, you’ve crossed the line. Get it tuned, get a nice strap (with mounting hardware, if needed), get a polishing kit or nicer case, hell, even get a replacement bridge/pegs and tools for working with a guitar, but don’t make permanent changes yourself (or have anyone else do so). All of those together could be well over $200, but you’d describe that as a tuneup and buying accessories, not taking the guitar “to a pro to fix it.”
Caveat that some people don’t like non-musicians or anyone else even touching their instruments, but I’d like to think that would be obvious to a spouse, even one who might have assumed that permanent changes to an instrument they don’t own are okay.
I’m a non-musician and my husband has a somewhat beaten up, but favored instrument that he learned on, so I’ll send this to him to see if my instinct is right (for my relationship, which does not mean it would be right for anyone else).
Though tbf, even thinking it might be okay, I got my husband a new instrument instead of messing with his beloved one, just because it occurred to me that he might react like the husband in the OP, and I didn’t want to risk it. Of course, he could also have then felt guilty about using the new one because it’s not the one he loves and felt guilty about using the old one because I gifted him a “nicer” one. I was lucky in that he’d already branched out into related instruments and the new one could fill a new niche, so wouldn’t compete with the old, making me less worried about him feeling conflicted [I’m so sorry about that sentence, I’m imagining trying to structure it in German without nominalizing any of the clauses and… woof].
- Comment on Could machines develop consciousness just like we did? 4 weeks ago:
You’re not wrong, but the definition of life that I learned in science class includes things like: homeostasis, response to stimuli, reproduction, metabolism, cell growth, adaptation, cell signaling, and death. Rivers adapt, respond to stimuli, and can “die”; maybe reproduce, achieve homeostasis, and metabolize; but don’t have cells. Crystals reproduce and maybe metabolize, but not the rest.
That’s a faulty definition, because it doesn’t clearly define viruses as alive or not alive, but it’s still useful, because the things that we can categorize as alive (or sometimes alive, in the case of viruses) under it share a lot of common characteristics that make sense to study together.
Rivers and crystals have some of these characteristics, but so does everything in nature- a star metabolizes and dies, a planet achieves homeostasis and responds to stimuli, and asteroids traveling fast enough can “reproduce” by hitting another stellar object hard enough to break one or both of them into smaller pieces. Including everything in the natural world under the umbrella of life doesn’t help us understand the world around us better according to our current understanding of the universe.
I think it’s impossible for us to determine truth, and the best we can do is an approximate theory that holds up with new information. Even when we know our model is untrue (like how we know classifying species the way we do is generally too rigid, or the fact that there’s no such thing as a fish), we can still gather information better under that model than without it.
Or so we think, maybe we’d have a much clearer understanding of the world if carcinology fell under entomology instead of marine biology.
As for consciousness, that’s even harder to define.
- Comment on Driver gets £90 ticket after using Lidl EV charger out of hours 5 weeks ago:
In July, a motorist raised similar concerns about parking restrictionsat a Lidl supermarket in Beverley, East Yorkshire, after collecting a parcel from an InPost locker outside store opening hours.
Judy Ayliffe, from Beverley, East Yorkshire, received a PCN after spending about 15 minutes in the car park while trying to retrieve the package from the locker, which is advertised as offering 24-hour access.
Her charge was cancelled after she contacted her MP.
…
Nikki Foster, a fellow EV owner, spoke to the BBC while charging her car at the Lidl car park in Barton.
…
“You’d expect to do it 24/7 because you’re paying for the service,” she said.
“I don’t see why the car parking makes a difference really. As long as you’re paying for your car, you come in and do what you need and leave.”
Emphasis mine. It really seems like Lidl wants the benefits of offering additional services in its car parks without the additional hassle. I understand wanting something for nothing, but that’s not how things work.
- Comment on True story, I hate humanity 5 weeks ago:
You should probably leave that community :/
- Comment on No Spoiler 👁️⃤ 5 weeks ago:
Literally yes (in the sense that they were the proximal cause of the crash, not the ones flying).
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I didn’t say always, but there is a long history of it. Iggy Azalea is a somewhat controversial example, Iron Eyes Cody is an uncontroversial one, and Asa Carter is an infuriating one.
The term “blackface” originated from the practice of white people impersonating black people for minstrel shows in the 1860s, for an old example.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, 2018 is fucked up and here likely indicates some sort of psychological issue, but there’s a long tradition of white people exploiting other people’s cultures for financial gain. It’s not an automatic red flag for mental illness for me in general.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Up to 2020 looks like becoming an adult and losing kid cheeks to me. I won’t comment on 2021, because yikes, and 2023 looks like she’s too thin or got work done. More recent pictures make it more obvious that she’s getting thinner and thinner though.
- Comment on They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back. 5 weeks ago:
If every grocery store did this, that is the market. We can’t decide to not eat, and even with a 10% markup, grocery stores are still cheaper than most other options.
- Comment on Hypocrisy is their default setting 5 weeks ago:
He always looks like he just finished telling you how good the bone shaped cookies were and someone walks in and asks where the dog treats went.
- Comment on Anon accepts a prestigious job 5 weeks ago:
I think it’s the other way around, but yes.