I can’t really answer for anything other than ebikes, but that’s mostly because ebikes have attracted the same group of inconsiderate assholes that dirtbikes and quads in urban areas have attracted in the past. I’m sure there are plenty of people on ebikes that just ride them around as they’re meant to, and I’m all for using them for replacing cars and stuff for commutes. But if you ask me what I think of them, the first things that come to mind are assholes riding them at high speeds in the dark with no lights, cutting through grass, trails and anything else in the parks in my city and nearly running people down. Or people whipping around corners on crowded sidewalks on them. Or delivery drivers running red lights on them and taking people out in crosswalks that had the right of way.

None of these things are the fault of ebikes themselves, but when a huge portion of the ridership that someone comes in contact with consist of either inconsiderate assholes or desperate people whose livelihoods are determined by inconsiderate assholes, it shouldn’t be a shocker that it leads to an overall negative impression of people using them.

Depending on the state, you could also easily record the calls for documentation. Look up state laws, and if you happen to be in a one party consent state, have at it with the phone calls, too.

I don’t think I’ve ever followed that workflow to be honest. Except for when doing something niche and way above and beyond something a casual user would do.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually done that after maybe 2010. Package managers are awesome, and package availability is better than ever. Linux has improved massively in this regard since then, but its reputation still seems to be stuck in the “Well, if you’re serious about using Linux, you’re wasting your time with Ubuntu. You should install Gentoo and build everything yourself!” era.

Even on the odd occasion that I’m unable to find something in the repos, I’d sooner just find the project’s git repo, clone it and build it. Most of the time now, they have some sort of automated helper script that will build and install the package for you, and when they don’t, you’ve gone way off the beaten path and left behind any semblance of pretending to be an average user. But, hey, at least make isn’t a terribly difficult command to use.

If someone is already informed enough to care about having a local account under Windows, seek out ways to circumvent the normal account procedure and feels comfortable applying edits to the registry, I think they have already excluded themselves from the category of people who are unwilling to invest time and effort to get their computer/OS running how they want.

What you wrote may apply to the general public, but not for the circumstances discussed in the post you’re replying to.

Yeah, and you get all sorts of weird pronoun use in Brazil, anyway, once you branch off from formal speech. I’ve heard people using tu with the você conjugations, people trying to act like gangsters using nós instead of a gente, Brazil is a weird place. On the plus side, it makes it a bit easier for non-natives, since you can mess up most things in terms of pronunciation and conjugations, and still find someone that will go “Ai, meu deus, mas você fala igual às pessoas da minha cidade.”

I would think this needs the regional classification. There are big chunks of Brazil where tu may as well not exist as a pronoun. I also wouldn’t necessarily say that addressing someone by their name would be universally taken as a sign of respect. Plenty of people will just use names like that in informal speech, like “Você não vai acreditar o que falou o João ontem.”

For Spanish, I pretty much only use it with customers at work, and nice, elderly people. I guess I would use it if I were in a court for something in Spanish, but otherwise, I don’t really use it at all.

That thing better be running on TempleOS and be coded with HolyC, or I’m calling BS and telling people they’ve just found a new way to make LLMs even more annoying than they already were.

Gastrointestinal Distress Nuggets seems like an unfortunate name for a horse, but here I am.

Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??

They shouldn’t be, since the model for updates is quite distinct from Windows or iOS in a way that I would argue should effectively meet the requirements anyways. If a distro releases a new version twice a year, outside of enterprise situations where a company is paying for support, there’s nothing to really stop anyone who wants from upgrading. They don’t charge for it, and while new versions might add out-of-the-box support for new hardware, it’s pretty rare for Linux to suddenly change minimum hardware requirements in a way that requires you to buy a whole new machine in order to run the latest release. The only case that immediately comes to mind is that of distros increasingly removing support for i386 machines, but in fairness, Intel discontinued manufacturing of i386 chips 18 years ago.

Of course, this all assumes that the people in charge of making these decisions actually understand the technology in at least a general sense, and it’s not being left up to a bunch of idiots who have refused to keep up with any innovations more recent than the fax machine, so odds are kind of crap.

Probably varies largely on where you’re talking about, and even then, which university program you’re looking at enrolling in. If you go and look at universities in the UK, for example, a BA studying a foreign language generally seems to assume that this is a language you’ve already been studying for several years in secondary education. You’re meant to be entering the program with roughly a B1 level in the language, and allegedly develop up to C1 over the course of 3 years of study. Meanwhile, in the US, you can rock up to a university and be a Japanese language major with nothing more than “Well, he says he likes anime and his grades are okay.” and the degree program will start you off in a 100-level class that expects negligible prior knowledge, if any.

Then again, having attempted university in the US, and now doing it at a UK school, university education is pretty drastically different. The US schools take 4 years to grant the same degree, and you spend almost the whole of the first year and a good chunk of the second just doing general education requirements that are, at best, only tangentially relevant to your chosen field of study. If I were doing my current degree program for a BA in French and Spanish as a first time student in the US, unless I did a bunch of AP courses or took night classes at a community college on the side, I’d need to do a general English composition class, a few math classes, probably get to pick between a biology or chemistry course, something to do with world cultures or music and the arts, and a handful of other electives I’m forgetting about. For that degree in the UK, from start to finish over the course of 3 years, I exactly 2 modules that aren’t either French or Spanish, with one being the “Hey, we need to make sure you can actually write in English competently, too” module, and the other being a free choice of an introductory language module for something else.

I’d also assume the US’ lack of a national curriculum also plays into how things work out with universities here, as well. Since things can be so variable at a regional and local level, not only in terms of the established curriculum, but what courses your particular secondary school has the funding to offer, universities can’t really assume much of incoming students’ education. You can have a kid from one state whose school was a Spanish language immersion school offering bilingual education from day 1 of Kindergarten, and later offering French, German, Japanese and Arabic as a third language for the final 4 years of compulsory education sat side-by-side with another from a different part of the country who only had the chance to take 2 years of Spanish classes. Even for subjects with a better baseline, someone whose studies covered all the available math classes up to geometry and algebra is going to have a totally different starting point from another whose school partnered with a local college to offer college level courses in calculus and statistics in high school.

It really isn’t, in this case. The issue is not the currency being used for the transactions, but rather two companies having a duopoly on processing those transactions that allow them to dictate terms to other people on how they can legally use their money. If there were two similar points of failure in processing cryptocurrency transactions, they would be just as vulnerable to having whoever occupied those two spots throwing their weight around. Sure, I suppose in that situation, companies could take payments to a new wallet easier than they could open new business accounts, and bypass the restrictions temporarily, but it still wouldn’t be a viable solution in the long term.

And then there’s people like my once naïve ass, who just blunder their way through attempted muggings. The first time someone tried to mug me, this guy was asking for money at like 2am, and when I told him I couldn’t help him, he said, “You know, I got heat.” I told him that was good, at least, because my landlord was a dick and my apartment was cold as hell, since they still hadn’t turned on the heat for the building. Got back home, and my wife was like, “You idiot, you know he was telling you he had a gun, right?”

My big question would be what would that add? If you speak Japanese, Spanish and French, 日本語, Español and Français would give you all the information you need. Adding the language name in a second language would increase the work to do, while also not really providing any benefit that I can see. If you manage to change the language to Spanish, or are using somebody else’s device, “English” is no less helpful for you than “English (Inglés)” would be.

You can wind up in some pretty weird jobs just by putting in the right terms off your resume into job boards. When I was looking for jobs a few years ago, “bilingual supervisor” on indeed landed me a two year stint as the supervisor for the night shift in a pharmaceutical plant. I managed to get that despite not simply lacking a degree in a relevant field, but a college degree at all (working on it now), but simply because I was masochistic enough use SAP at work for 5 years and apply for another job that needed someone who could make sense of it, and I could speak Spanish.

If you have a degree, I’m sure there are more options that would open up for you, but you might only find them searching for things in pretty vague terms and seeing if anything pops up as being interesting. The downside is, you’ll probably see a lot of irrelevant stuff, but you also come across some wild stuff. After I got laid off from that job and had sent out applications from normal searching of job boards, I took a look at some less specific searches and came across some weird stuff, like a company that was hiring a production supervisor for their facility making probiotic dog yogurt.

Depends on how much you mind restoration/cleaning work for fountain pens. I’ve already got all the entry tier stuff covered, so buying new pens at MSRP would probably mean somewhere between 1-3 pens, depending on how fancy I’m looking to get. I already have an ultrasonic cleaner and plenty of repair supplies, so I’d be hitting up auctions, personally. Depending on what’s in the lots and how many people notice the contents, 1000€ would probably get me somewhere between 200-400 pens. Probably another 200 or so if I get to count what I could buy with the proceeds of selling off the ones I’m not interested in.

Kindly refrain from putting such stupid words in my mouth, and keep them in your own, where it seems they rightly belong, thank you.

You asked about Israel and Hamas, then instantly conflated this particular conflict with a broader conflict to come between Israel and Iran, which are not the same thing. That’s beyond moving the goal posts, we’re no longer even discussing the same events. You’re also conflating Israel with Jews as a whole here. Calling for the state of Israel to no longer exist and calling for all Jewish residents within its borders to be either killed or displaced are two rather distinct things.

I know of no definition in which a single attack in isolation, or merely killing civilians during a war, is considered to constitute genocide. Even if this were the case, the civilian casualties in the many conflicts between Israel, Hamas, and more or less all of Israel’s neighbors in the region have been decidedly lopsided. Israel suffers far fewer civilian deaths than those they inflict on others, so even if we were to entertain the notion that Hamas’ resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories constitutes a genocide and we accept that the Iranian regime is in some major capacity responsible for such actions because they provide funding and support to Hamas (which, lol, even Israeli media admits Israel did, too), just going by the casualties, we’d have to conclude that Israel is either a decidedly more genocidal regime, better at genocide, or both.

Israel continues to interfere in the affairs of other sovereign nations, support settlers stealing other peoples’ land and is actively engaging in a brutal genocide. If the Israeli state were to be dismantled and Israel ceased to exist as a nation, I could only say that it’s past time for it to happen. And before you put more hysterical words in my mouth, note well: Israel no longer existing as a sovereign theocratic ethnostate and the Jews who currently live in the region being in any way harmed are two entirely separate things. Calling for a particular state to no longer exist is not a call for genocide, in and of itself.

Tl;dr: Get lost with your hasbara attempts, they’re woefully transparent.

What makes the Israel-Hamas war a genocide and for example, the Vietnam war not be considered a genocide?

Because Vietnam was a war of ideologies, not a land grab intended to wipe out the current occupants so they could be entirely replaced by a “superior, chosen” people not of the ethnicity of the current residents.

This is such a mindblowingly stupid attempt at a gotcha question. Ffs, you literally had over a million Vietnamese fighting on the same side as the US in the ARVN during the course of the war. The belligerent parties in a conflict both being composed of largely the same peoples fighting each other tends to preclude it being described as a genocide.

Lots of people in Brazil and many Spanish a speaking companies would disagree with you unfortunately. It’s incredibly embedded in those countries, to the point where WhatsApp will often be the primary, and sometimes only, point of contact for a business. At least it’s not that bad here.

I had a similar situation at my previous two jobs, but I just told people I wasn’t installing WhatsApp, if they asked, and nothing ever came of it. If it’s that important, they could text me or use my work email.