About a decade ago my employer had an intern present their findings from analyzing some survey data. One of the findings was this:

“People who answer surveys are really old. Like really old. Like thirty.”

I went through the comments, and I’m still lost. What is the punchline here? Is a long string of bad gun safety decisions by multiple people funny, or am I completely missing the joke?

Not sure what phone you have, but on Android you just hit power and volume down at the same time.

The A in ADSL literally stands for “asymmetric”. If you want matching upload you’d use SDSL. But generally you don’t want that, because it sacrifices some download speed.

Nice!

For others considering this, keep in mind that not all phones support external monitors, they need specific hardware for it. Pretty much all Samsung S phones support it, Pixels do not. So check if your phone supports external displays before you buy any hardware!

Getting a USB dock instead would probably get you both charging and Ethernet.

We know how it works, but we can’t explain exactly how it got to the answers.

It wants to show you a graph of your air quality.

Also: Move stuff, don’t delete it. It’s faster to restore from a renamed folder than from backup.

We may have just gotten lucky. I also had a great time in Venice once by wandering off randomly and ending up somewhere I can only assume tourists don’t normally go. We bought some fruit off a boat which was both delicious and very affordable, so I assume the target demographic was not tourists. I’m pretty sure that’s not the universal experience of Venice either.

We were in the mood for a chill day, so it was nice to just chill in a park and walk through some random old neighborhoods until we stumbled across a restaurant. There’s nothing chill about Milan, though, at least not where a clueless tourist would find it.

As a European from elsewhere in Europe, I’m never going back to Milan. Maybe it’s fine if you’re into fashion, but if you’re not there’s not much to look at except a cathedral which resembles every other cathedral, and it’s impossible to get a photo of it without also having a friendship bracelet scammer in the frame, actively harassing you.

All tourist locations in Italy and France have people trying to scam you (and some non-scammers just trying to sell you cheap toys), but Milan is the only place I’ve been to where they’re straight up harassing you non-stop. Go to Pisa instead, it’s super relaxing there and you can marvel at their past mistakes in structural engineering. A far better deal.

I went to a top university in Norway. My tuition was about $80 per year. All in all various student discounts on everything from haircuts to car repairs to housing, my tuition was effectively negative. I spent a good chunk on books, but rarely used them, and honestly could have saved the money. Considering everyone gets a scholarship from the government for the first 7 years (would have been converted to a loan if I didn’t pass enough credits worth of classes), I effectively got paid to study. I still had student loans, because they were interest free while I was a student and cheaper than a mortgage after. I spent some on food and housing, and saved the rest. Like most Norwegians I was not in a hurry to pay it down. Student debt is generally low priority for Norwegians to pay down due to the cheap interest.

It is in fact often intentional. It’s basically the same business model as printers. They make money from the refills, not the machine. Obviously people want to save money with generic paper, so they make sure the dispenser only works right with their paper.

What the dispenser manufacturer doesn’t consider is that whoever orders the paper doesn’t use the dispenser, so they don’t give a shit whether the dispenser works well or not. In fact, it not dispensing well saves even more money on paper!

No, you don’t have a point. You’re missing the point. The point is that America in English is not the same word as America in Spanish. They’re false friends.

False friends is the linguistics term for two words spelled the same in two languages, but with different meaning. For example, the word “glass” means ice cream in Swedish. We don’t tell the Swedish they’re using the word “glass” wrong, we accept that it has a different meaning in Swedish.

Sometimes the false friends are pretty subtle. The word “må” means “may” in Danish, but “must” in Norwegian. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, because unlike the ice cream example above, you don’t get any hints from context. You just have to know.

It’s the same deal with America. English-speaking countries (yes, the UK too), and all of the Nordics for that matter, use a continental model where North and South America are separate continents, and America is shorthand for United States of America. And the superior amount of Spanish speaking countries don’t give them the right to tell other countries what words should mean in their native language.

In my experience “USians” is usually used by butthurt Spanish speakers who think that because America means one thing in Spanish it has to mean the same thing in every other language.

Do you genuinely think that giving Americans a few hundred bucks caused immediate and persistent inflation? Because I’m more inclined to blame the spike on a collapse in the global supply chain due to quarantining of factory workers and container ship crews, and the subsequent increases on a combination of factors, including interest rates (or, more accurately, what caused the raise in interest rates) and corporate greed.

Gone in 60 Seconds is fantastic, except that one tiny scene in the final fight where he’s hanging from his fingertips and the bad guy stands around almost stepping on them without noticing. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief to some extent, but that scene is an insult, and so close to the end that the sour aftertaste lingers past the credits. I should really just rip the Blu-ray and edit it out.

I don’t usually care about cars, but for 6 months after every time I see that movie, I kinda do.

I got it on Blu-Ray, because fuck “buying” things on streaming platforms. I’ll rent stuff there, but let’s not pretend “buying” is anything but an undefined extension on your rental.