Nice to meet you, from a new resident of Switzerland/Ireland/Iceland/Colorado

Germanic speakers moment

I don’t think they have one full time, but I think given the context of the changes it’s very plausible that companies put together committees formed of minorities or marketing or anyone with an opinion to workshop rebranding and renaming options to make the company appear progressive, and I think even if it wasn’t the case, the perception of that sort of thing happening is more responsible than people think for the rise of Trump, AfD, Reform, FN etc. as the average person doesn’t want posturing and is pushed towards the opposite direction by it, with the shift amplified by the fact that people aren’t happy with the status quo at the moment, so if the status quo are acting like the left then the people will see the right as the opposite of that, regardless of who’s in government.

That’s not to say the opinions of the people who you know have complained about it aren’t valid, it’s just that I’d much rather have some dated vocabulary, slurs occasionally being used casually and questionable branding than raids on immigrants and the rights of minorities being eroded after one extreme pushes moderates to the other extreme.

I don’t recall any actual person saying they had an issue with it before corporations started changing it though, I always thought it was a precautionary measure more than likely thought up by a committee looking for exactly this sort of thing…

That said, it may be different in the US given the history of overall more systemic discrimination, and divisiveness over what’s acceptable, rather than the fairly widely accepted casual slur-slinging and stereotyping you get in Europe.

The Leif Erikson one is very subjective though; you could celebrate:

• The first humans to cross the Bering Strait, which is a long extinct lineage
• The earliest ancestors to settle the Americas, whom we don’t even know the descendants of
• The first Europeans to reach the Americas, ie Leif Erikson (Polynesia did it much later)
• The first people to cross an ocean to get to the Americas, most likely Polynesians but possibly Columbus
• The first Europeans to form a permanent settlement in the Americas, ie Columbus
• The founders of the forerunner to the US, ie Walter Raleigh & co
• The founding fathers for founding the US

And plenty more I’m sure you could come up with

She also had her hands full, and using a torch as a baseball bat only goes so far

They know exactly what they’re talking about, and especially how they’re talking about it.

It’s all considered to make it look like both the local and national politicians are doing a great job and you should vote for them. Whatever the medium for that happens to be isn’t really important.

There’s levels though, places that refuse to let you exist (most Arab states), places that would rather you wouldn’t exist and so settle for making it hard for you to exist in public (Russia, US, much of East Asia), and places where they’re ok with you existing, but sure as shit aren’t going to help you or give you any protections from those who disagree (much of Western Europe)

As far as I know there’s not really anywhere which goes much beyond that now, but there is at least some better places than the US

The bible also says you should be put to death if you work on a Sunday, so checkmate anyone who doesn’t have a mon-fri office job

Yes, Asus’ flagship for sure as I’ve had them since most manufacturers removed it. I think there’s a couple of others but I’ve been very happy with the two Asus phones I’ve used for about five years now.

I work in advertising, I know, it’s just that in the industry it’s pretty well known that Google, Facebook etc. hugely overinflate their numbers as they arbitrarily decide that it definitely did have an effect on you to make their systems look better

The problem is the ones with all the data have no real use for it.

Google, Facebook, etc. tell you they have data, sell you the ad, run the ad on their own site, then tell you how well the ad did, but not in absolute terms. All in a black box. They don’t actually have to use their data, as they’re the ones grading their own work, they can just flaunt it to get buyers onboard.

When I get ill, sometimes I sleep for 18h straight, through alarms and everything…

You sleep more when you’re ill anyway, but what wakes you up about outdoors is light. It’s much darker inside than out by a way more than you’d think, so that’s probably why you feel awake when outside.

The $1m isn’t in cash… You forget that the average house price in London is around $900k, and for Sydney it’s $981k.

That means your pool for your car, furnishings, investments etc. are either minimal, or you have a mortgage, and definitely can’t live passively off $30-40k per year unless you’re living in cheaper than average housing (one would call this “not super wealthy”) and definitely not if you’re supporting a family.

I’m not saying the cost of living isn’t worse in the US, just that $1m is a comparatively tiny amount everywhere and that most millionaires (as there will a correlation between net worth and frequency) are frankly closer to the working class than they are to billionaires.

Most, sure, but Europe, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and more are still a significant part of the world where $1M puts you firmly in the same “well-off and comfortable, but certainly not rich in the way billionaires are” territory you’d be in the US

Worldwide, I think it’s definitely safe to say most millionaires’ lifestyles are much closer to average than they are to billionaires’ (ie still having to make regular payments for housing, but mortgage rather than rent, and still having to perform most tasks for themselves rather than having PAs to do it for them)

The H1-B visa is fundamentally broken (or working exactly as intended, depending on how you look at it) though, so you apply for just under 10x as many as you need and end up with the number you want.

It’s not Microsoft’s fault the US Government is actively encouraging importing cheaper, average employees by using a lottery rather than filtering based on “you must earn n% more than the median income in that sector” or a similar metric to avoid reducing wages for Americans and companies using them to cut costs…

The problem is time.

You’re just considering human spaceflight. Keeping humans alive and equally importantly sane for years is very different to sending a probe somewhere, and we’ve been getting better at the latter

Unclear, but somewhere between 1865 and 1875, which makes it right around half the age of my parents’ house

there’s a gap on both, just in different places and you can get from one to the other just by sliding. The constraints are elsewhere so wouldn’t allow you to twist.

It is a different definition, but it’s the same unit… it’s also more like saying “that ball of yarn is 10 metres” - the ball itself isn’t 10 metres long in any dimension, but the meaning is clear given the context, as it would if you said “it’s 0.05 metres”. By having two meanings distinguishable by context, it seems like two definitions to me.