shikitohno @ shikitohno @lemm.ee

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1 yr. ago

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.

Eh, non-voters in some states could help Trump win, but it's hardly a universal thing. My bigger issue with this sort of rhetoric is that criticizing absolutely reprehensible policies advanced by the Democrats does not equal endorsing Trump, as many Zionist shills here like to claim. I want to be able to unreservedly back Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections, but "enables and supports genocide and the massacre of civilian men, women and children," is one hell of a reservation to make your voters have.

Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

Sure, if it's one person. Where I used to live, the nearest park would have multiple groups engaged in loudness wars, each upping their volume in response to the others, so nobody could enjoy the park. Public spaces shouldn't be held hostage by assholes who don't understand how to behave in public, to the detriment of everyone else.

As far as what to do, it would be nice if the existing rules would be enforced that prohibit this behavior, but people cry racism for being told off for bringing a massive speaker to blast merengue and dembow in the park and somehow find support, rather than people asking why they're blasting any type of music in the park to begin with.

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.

The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

Saying "Hey, bud, don't do x, is I'll be real mad at you," and then going "Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here's a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do." is not pressuring them, it's attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.

At a national level, I think some of it just comes down to resentment at popular policies being blocked, largely because of lawmakers from southern and midwestern states. I'd also wager context plays a part in this. Sure, NY has its share of rural Republican voters, but our dumbfuck GOP voters mostly manage to just mess things up for our own urban areas, appropriating funds from the MTA budget to build bridges to nowhere in their home districts so they can point and cry about those god-damned socialists in NYC not even being able to manage the budget for a single agency (that they actively work to undermine) so they can further gut public services.

Sure, it's not ideal, but at least we're (mostly) only hurting ourselves. GOP Congress-men and -women from southern and midwestern states collectively hold the rest of the nation hostage through their disproportionate impact on the Senate. Whether it's climate change, student loan forgiveness, universal healthcare, packing the Supreme Court, or any of numerous other issues, these states hold others with vastly larger populations hostage, impeding broadly popular policies in a profoundly anti-democratic fashion.

It may not be fair to the non-GOP voters in those states, it may be misdirected resentment, but I don't think it's all that difficult to understand why people from majority Democrat, northern states might be kind of tired of the south and midwest's collective shit at this point. If the GOP-leaning demographics in those states could either be dropped into a volcano, or, failing this, soundly beaten at the ballot, it would go a long way towards addressing this stereotype

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.

A combination of factors made it happen. First up, you had low turnout. Only 20.5% of voters actually voted in that election, the lowest of the past 30 years.

Aside from that, Adams had strong support amongst voters of color. For people who don't live and/or work in these communities, it can seem like voting against their interests and be surprising, but non-white voters are not a monolithic block. Quite often, majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx can prove more conservative than many people might expect, for example, particularly on social issues. A lot of my older co-workers from Latin America at the time, along with my mother-in-law, didn't view BLM protests as legitimate actions to begin with, and just thought of them as troublemakers looking to break stuff and loot. The "tough on crime to raise quality of life" message was really powerful for many of the people I know, and they took it completely uncritically. There's also a ton of super religious folks that won't support Democrats over things like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and other culture war GOP talking points. I can't really speak to the Black community, but if you learn Spanish, there's also just a ton of casual racism, sexism and homophobia that would probably shock people.

In addition to conservative social inclinations, lots of these folks are not what you would describe as well-informed. My elderly Ecuadorian, Dominican and Peruvian co-workers at that time were constantly buying into totally baseless conspiracies they got sent on WhatsApp. That and the 2020 presidential election cycle was super frustrating at home, as my mother-in-law would religiously watch the news on Univision, where they would trot out "scandals" and conspiracies that had been disproven weeks earlier and abandoned in the English-media, but Univision knew they could get away with airing for the significant portion of their audience with limited or no English. I even remember watching the news with her, my wife and her sister, who are both fluent in English, and the three of us getting upset that an interview in which we could hear the original English statements were being translated entirely inaccurately.

When I have an option not to, I don't. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don't have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go "Hey, we won't cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark." At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn't have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn't have been abruptly missing doses of.

Even if English is your first language, it's not always easy to maintain your composure when talking about a topic you're emotionally invested in or under a lot of stress about. I would take a different stance about a driver that drops f bombs every other word, but this prudishness about occasional profanity is silly.

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.

I can't speak for everyone, but why exactly would I care about Trump's age? It's certainly a liability for him, but I was never going to vote Republican anyway, whereas my likelihood of voting Democrat has only risen now that Joe has stepped down. Why on earth would I want to potentially inspire Republicans to start pushing for a more competent candidate who might have a better chance of being elected, while also beingore competent and able to do more harm if they were to win?

For media outlets reporting on this, sure, but I think you're being overly general when talking about individual voters expressing reservations about the candidate being pushed by the party they will, in all likelihood, wind up voting for.

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.

Something similar, years back when I was taking Norwegian classes, my teacher was telling us about a relative of hers. According to our teacher, it was pretty common for families with the means to do so to send their kids off to an English-language immersion camp over the summer around the time they were 14 or so. She said most of the people would go to camps in the UK and come back with something of a posh British accent, but her one relative's parents dropped the ball on signing up and missed the chance to send her there, as all the spaces were booked by the time they checked. They looked around and found another immersion camp that was still accepting applications, and sent this girl off to perfect her English, in Arkansas. She came back with quite the accent, leaving people she spoke to in English baffled at how she wound up picking it up.

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.