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dustintrex

Re:Words that seem related but aren't (2015) on Monday March 07, 2022 @05:12AM (#30586042)
Seems to be un-deaded now, praise the mods! And on closer inspection there was one naughty word in there, although technically it's a homonym that happens to have the same spelling. (And "homonym" itself is probably best avoided.)
Re:Words that seem related but aren't (2015) on Monday March 07, 2022 @05:10AM (#30586024)
Yes, but this appears to be the origin of the pejorative: bundle of sticks -> an old woman collecting sticks -> a man who acts like an old woman -> homosexual.
Re:Words that seem related but aren't (2015) on Monday March 07, 2022 @02:29AM (#30585103)
> The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French.

Brilliant. I'll need to make a point of pronouncing "outrage" to rhyme with "garage" from now on. "It is an oot-RAAZH!"

Re:Words that seem related but aren't (2015) on Monday March 07, 2022 @02:27AM (#30585092)
I posted a comment noting that some words can no longer be used because they resemble offensive words, even though they are etymologically unrelated.

I am ironically amused to note that the comment appears to have offended somebody or something sufficiently to make it disappear, even though it did not contain any actual offensive words.

The article does not mention this, but it's quite probably the unvaccinated child in question is from the fast-expanding Hasidic community in Jerusalem, many of whom are strongly anti-vax. This has led to measles outbreaks in the past in NYC as well, and the community was also hit especially hard by COVID.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/my-fellow-hasidic...

Re:Words that seem related but aren't (2015) on Monday March 07, 2022 @12:57AM (#30584622)
An unmentioned subcategory is words that that sound or look like taboo words, but are actually unrelated: "niggardly", "Gaylord", "fag" as in cigarette (from "fag end", unrelated to "faggot"), etc.
Yup, as long as the tin pot dictator is attacking some country we don't really care about.
Re:Cunningham's Law on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @03:34AM (#30525174)
Whenever I join a new team and need to inhale a new architecture or complex process, I take a stab at documenting what currently exists, and then share my notes with the team. Corrections immediately pour in, and this "wrong answer" inevitably produces a much better end result than asking any single person to tell me the "right answer".
Re:Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ (1945) on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @03:09AM (#30511090)
Sure, the orchestra can fire or not fire the guy, and they can also do so on the basis of whether they think this will fill seats. What really rubs me the wrong way here is the performative "you're with us or you're against us" demand for a written denouncement: AFAICT he has not said a peep either way about the Ukraine invasion, he is just being required to publicly renounce his past beliefs to keep his job.

For what it's worth, you're also doing some pretty selective reading of the link: he's Ossetian himself, claims he never actually signed the Crimea annexation statement, and the Pussy Riot/LGBT stuff is really an irrelevant tangent here.

Finally, no, McCarthyism was not (just) about government persecution, things like the MPAA blacklist on "Communist" actors and directors were private initiatives, and artists bore much of the brunt of that particular witchhunt.

Re:Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ (1945) on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @01:57AM (#30510570)
Yes, he appeared for a TV ad for Putin in 2012. Why is this suddenly a firing offence in 2022? Does he bear personal responsibility for what Putin's doing today?

Denouncing McCarthyism in 1950, Truman said, "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have."

Re:Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ (1945) on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @01:42AM (#30510484)
The preface was written at an odd moment in time when the UK and the Soviet Union were allied, for the simple reason that in times of war the enemy of my enemy (Hitler's Germany) is my friend. Two short years later the Cold War began and pointed criticism of Russia became much more palatable.

Meanwhile, it's 2022, and we're firing orchestra conductors because they're Russian and not denouncing Putin sufficiently vigorously.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/28/denounce-putin...

Re:The importance of having a personal domain name on Monday February 28, 2022 @08:36PM (#30508059)
My email is [email protected]. The ".name" domain is oddly underused and often throws people for a loop.
Re:Things you notice when you quit the news (2016) on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @01:40AM (#30438378)
The Economist is old school liberal: let companies do what they want (US "right-wing"), let people do what they want (US "left-wing"), but unlike US libertarians, also have some regulation and support in place to prevent the worst abuses.
Re:The Price of Nails Since 1695 on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @09:29AM (#30428309)
ACOUP has a great collection on ironworking and the generally insane amount of labor and fuel that went into premodern iron production, including nails:

https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPdviIiNAM8

Psst: co-sleeping won't stop babies from crying, but it makes it way easier for everybody involved to get back to sleep much faster.
Re:Words known better by males than females, and vice versa on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @07:49PM (#30281027)
Ah yes, a perfect term to image search at work while doing a little Valentine's Day shopping.
Re:Last call to voluntarily migrate Java accounts on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @07:42PM (#30280960)
> However, the voluntary migration period is closing soon. Starting March 10, 2022, you won't be able to play Minecraft: Java Edition unless you move to a Microsoft account.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The tax base in the Japanese countryside is rapidly collapsing and the public money used to prop up railways at the end of the day comes out of the same pot of taxpayer money that's used to fund schools, hospitals, etc. Personally, I'm a huge railfan, but it's still absurd to spend $3m/year to serve commuters that would easily fit in a single minibus.
That's a lovely story, but it's also why JR is bleeding red ink. Here's a typical story about one line that was serving an average of 19 (nineteen) passengers per day and made a loss of about US$3m/year for decades until it was finally axed in 2014 thanks to a providential landslide.

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/minispike-the-en...

Re:Facebook loses users for the first time on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @08:47PM (#30187314)
Facebook has been primarily displaced by Tiktok, which is considerably more addictive than FB. It's like zonking out in front of cable TV in the olden days, if the cable TV had access to an essentially unlimited content library of short-form dopamine hits, was capable of determining exactly what you like, and showing you exactly that forever.
Re:The bureaucracy of hiking Hungary's Blue Trail on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @08:29PM (#30187136)
"Stamp rallies" in Japan are so common that they invented their own pseudo-English word for them. The OG is the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage, which requires you to collect stamps from 88 different temples, preferably by walking 1200 km:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikoku_Pilgrimage

Although there's no prize or verifying authority for completion.

Re:Cocktail party ideas on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @08:02PM (#30186909)
There's a classic cocktail party icebreaker related to this: when you ask the usual awkward intro question about what somebody else does, and they tell you "X", reply with "wow, that sounds really hard!". They'll almost certainly tell you "yes!", explain a bit about why it's hard, and now you have a genuine conversation going.
Re:How much money flows into crypto each month? on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @07:29PM (#30186566)
Do you really believe that a 10-person company run by a convicted fraudster (Devasini) is managing $78 billion dollars in assets, making them bigger than Vanguard or Schwab, despite the financial world not being able to find any evidence of what they're actually holding?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-07/matt-l...

Re:How much money flows into crypto each month? on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @06:50PM (#30186095)
> When someone exchanges a real dollar for a USDC token

You're making the very large assumption here that people are exchanging real dollars for stablecoins, which is almost certainly not the case. Tether, in particular, seems to printing their stablecoins out of what appears to be thin air, or at best in exchange for sketchy IOUs.

Re:How much money flows into crypto each month? on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @06:40PM (#30185952)
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. If more people sell fiat and buy crypto, money is going "into" crypto. If more people sell crypto to buy fiat, money is coming "out" of crypto.
Re:How much money flows into crypto each month? on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @06:36PM (#30185899)
This. The amount of real money flowing in supposedly increasing by 5% per month is also not compatible with many real-world indicators of interest showing the opposite, including Robinhood's crypto revenue falling off a cliff.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2021/10/27/robi...

I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who could run today's SpaceX as a space cargo trucking company. But Elon deserves the credit for creating two wildly successful companies that revolutionized their respective industries, both in the face of hugely entrenched competitors in highly regulated markets that hadn't seen successful new players in decades, and both as a side effect of his actual goal of getting humans to Mars.
FWIW, this is not limited to Indian or IT companies. Many if not most consulting/banking/law companies have an "A-team" that gets trotted out to woo the customer, and as soon as the deal is sealed, the actual implementation is handed over to the Z-team of fresh grads.
Re:A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar on Sunday January 30, 2022 @07:37PM (#30142938)
Thanks! Price guide $76,800 seems surprisingly reasonable when compared to $70,000 for a mid-range Tesla 3.

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