Quakers just eat the oreo dry.

Seems like a form of torture the spanish inquisition would have practiced, so catholic

BD = Bande Dessinée, the french term for both graphic novels and comics. Both have a huge history in Europe in general and France-Belgium in particular, but it’s extremely unusual for english speakrs to know or care, it’s really appreciated.

I guess i shouldn’t speak so definitively, it’s not like i have data to back up the fact that there are more French than English speakers with bad grammar; but really, french grammar is worse than complex, it’s unintuitive and arbitrary, and it does feel like i see more french speakers with bad grammar. For what that’s worth

It’s called a national animal

Quotes from the article:

According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors. “I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”

and

The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store.

Brother you’re on desktop, you could have cropped

Yeah, so by all accounts i’m the kind of person most likely to love the french language: native speaker, effortless spelling and grammar, avid reader of BD, i even like the flowery and decorative aspects of the language (language soutenu); but then i also speak other languages, and this gives me the perspective that, from a practical standpoint, there’s a lot of issues with french. There’s layers of sediment accumulated over centuries, a lot of rules and spellings are vestigial and serve no purpose anymore other than make it harder.

Also, a lot of rules and spellings come from grammarians just saying so, and writing prescriptivist style guides to make people spell The Correct Way. To a point, i even think the ability to invent and follow an arbitrary The Correct Way hass been a class signal.

Even native french speakers sometimes have bad grammar, or at least that’s much more common than english speakers having bad grammar.

English speakers say the same things about their language, but they don’t know about ô <— this accent and the agony of trying to guess when it should be used or not. It’s supposed to indicate a difference in pronunciation, but this difference depends on the accent and is also obvious from context. I’ve known teachers to dock points for shit like this, and it radicalized me against arbitrary rules despite being completely capable of following them. In my opinion, people use features that have a purpose; if people don’t use it, then it’s pointless.

And from a global perspective, fewer people speak french than a lot of other languages. On the one hand this doesn’t matter, lots of people speak mandarin, it’s about who you’re likely to interact with; but i’d say your more likely to interact with spanish speakers.

Unless of course you’re that much into BD. That doesn’t surprise me at all, lots of english speakers learned japanese for weeb reasons, i think it’s completely legit to learn a language for the culture. Actually i find it pretty impressive

What gaming is like for a non-gamer

This guy had his non-gaming wife try different games, very enlightening for your purposes

Yeah i don’t think it’s worth learning french for almost any reason, lots more people speak spanish

I’m in France and my cousin married an American.

Cost of living is high and the language is bullshit, but the standards of living are some of the best in the world. Very old established democracy and rule of law, workers rights, social security, and whatever the complete opposite of political apathy is. Culture is rich with a disproportionate level of global relevance for the country’s size. The location is ideal in the middle of europe, with a good variety of landscapes and climate.

Internet is cheap and fast, but i don’t know anything about the state of tech jobs.

I don’t know much about the tax system either but my assumption is you might save money just on the healthcare alone.

Overall i wouldn’t recommend, you’d be better off in a country with a language closer to english, such as most countries north of France. They’ll have better english proficiency and you’ll learn the language easier.

It’s like a graveyard of companies that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Sharing files is one brand name (Sharepoint if i recall), making video calls is another name, planned events is another - every function has a brand name to it, which made me feel like these were the last remaining trace of long-absorbed companies.

But that’s just my recollection, i haven’t touched Teams since Covid

True, but this design philosophy is currently omnipresent in electric vehicles. I guess i shouldn’t say never, maybe someday they’ll make an electric Lada and i’d buy that in an instant

Imagine being in a burning car and needing the manual to open the doors. And then you can’t find it so you start googling “Tesla model S manual”, find a PDF, then start scrolling through it trying to find out how do you open the doors.

Here’s an idea, how about just make it so the handles mechanically open the damn doors? This is why i’ll never own an electric car, they’re full of bullshit like this where things are done electronically for absolutely no reason. I hate this fucking design phylosophy where everything has to be more complicated, less reliable and less functional.

I had to switch Mastodon instances because of leftist infighting.

There are no Taco Bells in my country but if this aired i’d take a flight to go burn one down.

The owner of my laundromat claims that it’s cheaper to do your laundry there than at home. At first i thought “of course a laundromat owner would say that”, but then he argued that his machines are more efficient than the ones we buy and that they are collectively heated.

I still think he’s fulll of shit because he only argued about energy costs, not including his rent taxes or profit; but it did get me thinking that it would be cheaper and more efficient to wash our clothes collectively.

I think we overrate the ability of the government to change the living conditions in a country. The government is only one factor among others, such as technology, geography, ecnomics, history, climate, and the accumulation of small choices made over decades.

Yeah, but everyone else around him does have clear goals and plans that they do want to accomplish. And they’re prepared this time, whereas they were kinda caught by surprise in 2016.

I don’t know, but Linux’s reputation is that it can probably be modded out.

Currently writing from a Mint laptop, works perfectly with minimal setup and no command line whatsoever, the only annoying thing is that the caps lock key behaves differently. Though Linux’s reputation is that it can probably be modded out.

I also installed Diodon to recover the cool clipboard function that Windows has.

I could probably get the customizeable start menu, but i actually don’t miss it that much