I didn’t think you were, I was more saying that the loss of many of those jobs that had been outsourced in the pursuit of cheap stuff means that, even if Trump’s proposed tariffs were effective at bringing those jobs back, it might not matter because they would still cost more than most residents of the US would be able to afford. At least, with current working conditions, many of these goods would simply cost more than people would be willing to pay, as we’ve been collectively conditioned to want as much stuff as possible, as cheap as possible. Domestic production of so many goods would require a drastic shift in consumer habits to even have a chance at being viable in the long term, but they absolutely couldn’t do the sort of volume that places like China has and be able to sell at a profit, barring the implementation of Chinese-style working conditions.

nor the desire to build their own shit

I would say that we’ve also largely lost the means to afford stuff built here, in large part as a consequence of our endless pursuit of cheap crap while scraping the bottom of the barrel with outsourcing. Even if you want to buy domestically-made goods, since we’ve lost so many of those good union jobs, especially in manufacturing, we no longer have the means to pay what it costs to make such a product with American workers. Especially if people intend to continue with their current consumerist trends.

I’m making $20/hour at the moment. If I want to buy American, union-made shoes, it’ll run me $400 a pair, on the lower end. I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a pair of work boots, a pair of regular shoes for wearing out and about, and a pair of dress shoes, which at that low end will run me 37.5% of my monthly gross pay. Now do the same for domestically produced clothing, and you’ve probably run up a bill of several month’s pay, just to have enough outfits to last you a single week, leaving aside coats, seasonal clothing, or formal attire. We’re either going to have to sharply curtail our purchasing and focus on buying a smaller amount of goods meant to last as long as possibly, or the sadly more likely scenario, we’ll see the establishment of domestic sweatshops to fuel the consumerist impulses of what remains of the middle class and up. Whether we’ll just go even more insane in our treatment of the poor here, or use prison labor and undocumented migrants “pending” deportation in these sweatshops remains to be seen, but Americans have demonstrated we shortsightedly value our ability to accumulate cheap trash over anything else.

I’d love to be proven wrong, and see a growth of strong unions and domestic production leading to a resurgence in American craftsmanship again, but the current environment is less than amenable to this outcome, to put it mildly.

Beating your wife? I could not see as a cultural thing.

That’s kind of exactly my point, though. I see claiming being loud and inconsiderate to others as people practicing their culture to be just as disingenuous an argument as saying wife-beating is a part of Irish culture that just has to be accepted. It’s just brought out to defend bad behavior, often with the implication that if you continue to criticize said behavior, you’re automatically in the wrong, having revealed yourself as bigoted against whatever group you’re criticizing.

its people practicing their culture.

Personally, I hate this line, because I only ever hear it trotted out to excuse bad behavior that people know they shouldn’t. Saying that being a loud nuisance in public is people practicing their culture is just as absurd as saying Irish men getting drunk and beating their wives is practicing Irish culture. It might be a negative cultural stereotype some of them actually live up to, be it doesn’t mean it should be tolerated.

Even if you want to accept that it’s a valid argument, one’s right to practice their culture ends where it limits the rights of others to do the same. People don’t get carte blanche to make everyone else change their lives to accommodate a culture with no sense of appropriate volume or consideration for others.

A lot of the things they name aren’t inherently city noises, either, though. I don’t live near any concert venues or airports, so I don’t hear noise from either of those sources. You could live in the middle of nowhere, but if you live above the local bar, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s loud on Friday and Saturday nights. Dogs and birds aren’t exactly uniquely urban phenomena, and the sound of peoples’ shoes on the sidewalk being a major source of noise just strikes me as absurd.

I don’t mind interacting with others in public, but I very much dislike inconsiderate people who decide to monopolize public spaces at the expense of others being able to enjoy them in their own way. I don’t care about someone listening to the radio with their friends at a reasonable volume while they chill and talk. The reality is more often rival clusters of people with massive speakers, each turning their stuff higher because they can’t hear their crappy music over the other people doing the same thing up and down the block. Me being unable to sleep at 4AM on a Wednesday because I can hear your terrible choice in Dembow and Rap that you choose to accompany your domino games and hookah sessions from my apartment on the seventh floor isn’t us having an interaction, it’s you being a nuisance.

They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.

I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.

Also, not everyone that is good at a job has the personality to be in management. I’ve found myself in several management roles before I realized I absolutely hate being responsible for other peoples’ work and am just not cut out for it.

It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

Are you in licensed dispensaries? Pretty much all the ones I’ve been to, the edible options are 2.5mg, 5mg and 10mg. My other thought, are you sure you aren’t looking at the THC content of the whole container? I have some 10mg chocolates in the freezer, but dead center on the lid’s label is “100mg THC”, then underneath and in a much smaller font, “per bottle.” I’ve noticed that on a lot of packaging, as well as dispensary websites, they choose to list stupid big numbers by just listing the overall content, and not what you would get per unit.

X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.

I just do Auctex instead of orgmode, but this is the way.

Zotero is awesome, and I’d also recommend the browser extension with an account. Account is free, but it’ll let you save any web sources with all the metadata you need and sync it to the main program.

Zotero in combination with LaTeX and Biber have saved me so much time. Especially when I had a crazy professor who would make last minute changes to style requirements. I remember we had a paper to write that they initially said “Just cite with whatever format you want, it’s fine as long as they info is there.” Cool, write my ten pages or whatever with footnotes containing short citations and full citations available in the bibliography at the end. The night before the paper was due, “Actually, I need all papers to use APA citations or you’ll be docked points.”. No problem, just change my citation style at the top of my LaTeX doc and tell it to reprocess the paper, all the citations fixed in about 5 seconds, without even needing to learn the ins and outs of APA formatting.

For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance.

With a few caveats, yes. At least with the insurance I had last year when I hit the max for the first time, it has to be both deemed medically necessary to do, and be in network. Just because you hit your annual out-of-pocket max doesn’t mean you can get free cosmetic surgery, for example. Out of network treatment also had a separate annual max, so if I saw the wrong specialist or went to the wrong hospital during an emergency, I could still have gotten hit with another $10,000 in bills before that kicked in. And finally, I learned that there are actually annual maximums for certain types of treatment. In my case, I have an autoimmune condition and my doctor wanted me to get blood work done for it every 3 months. In their boundless wisdom, my insurance decided I shouldn’t need blood work more than three times a year, and I got a $1,700 bill for going over the annual limit for such care.

The limitlessness of their wisdom and beneficence is matched only by my pettiness, so I had the pleasure of having my first colonoscopy and an endoscopy the day after Christmas because my gastro said there was a tiny possibility of me having a problem more serious than hemorrhoids and I knew those assholes would have to pay for it, since they pre-authorized it, which added a few grand to what they had to pay for the year.

There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

Time to go take the Browns to the Super Bowl.

Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.

I would argue the main benefits are to teach people how to effectively switch registers as the context demands, and to expose them to a range of language they likely wouldn’t ordinarily encounter in their daily lives. English teachers could do to lose the judgmental aspect of “This is the one true way to speak English, the way you talk amongst yourselves is wrong and you need do stop,” but there’s a definite value in teaching students, “This is a way to write/speak clearly and effectively that will be understood by quite nearly every other educated English speaker you might encounter.”

As far as exposure to a broader range of language than one normally encounters in their life, I saw the importance of this first hand with many of my coworkers who were heritage speakers of Spanish. It’s not my native language, but it was my primary work language for a good 5 years, and I wound up getting put on interpretation duties for our safety meetings over a native speaker with pretty limited formal education in Spanish. For topics to do with daily life, family, friends, etc, this guy would be able to speak much more naturally than I could. I might not say something that was exactly wrong, but perhaps I would be too formal or make odd word choices he wouldn’t. The problem was, he completely lacked any technical and professional vocabulary, and had no concept of what words/phrases were unique to his own country and what alternatives might be more widely understood.

We would have safety meetings once a night, and they would have topics like, “When a forklift has its forks in the air, don’t walk beneath it, as hydraulic failure could lead to injury or death.”. He translated that one night as “Cuando la vaina del pasillo tiene esa vaina de en frente en el aire, no pasen por debajo de la vaina. Es peligroso.” Basically “When the thing in the hall has the thing in front in the air, don’t walk under the thing. It’s dangerous.” Best case, he might say “El forlift,” but he would never land on “el montacargas,” or even think to look it up. Some of his wilder attempts at interpretation didn’t work for anyone, and the ones where he just used a Spanglish version of technical terms only worked for other coworkers who already knew at least a bit of English, and probably didn’t really need the translation that much to begin with. Unfortunately, we had a fair number of employees who were monolingual Spanish speakers that he found himself just completely unable to communicate with effectively.

Granted, not everyone takes full advantage of it, but English classes do (or at least should) expose you to a broad range of the language, as it’s used in various contexts and forms, while also furnishing students with the ability to expand upon that and adapt to new contexts on their own in the future. Failure to do so leaves students with stunted linguistic and communicative abilities.

Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.

For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”

To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.