Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
“will protect the most vulnerable,"
It’s often useful to imagine that they know what people will think they mean when they say things like that, but that they actually mean an entirely different “most vulnerable” group: MPs, their friends and associates.
Depends how Picard ended up in that situation. Are we talking the “natural ageing and eventual death” kind of entropy or are we talking “somehow invulnerable except at the quantum level in an infinite void of nothing, awaiting quantum decay”?
In the former, Q would only save Picard temporarily to make a point or for one last adventure. Q won’t help indefinitely and entropy wins.
In the latter, Q’s probably the reason Picard is in that situation in the first place. There’d be some jape or point (“now you know what it’s like to be bored as a Q” or somesuch whiny nonsense), but Picard would eventually be back in his regular time stream, at which point we’re back to the first scenario.
When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.
This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.
Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.
There are plenty of people whose first language is English and who have confused, or still confuse, the two things anyway. As you say, it’s at least partly cultural. They don’t really teach this stuff at school, or at least they didn’t when I was there.
I was one of the confused people once. Then I learned better (and I’m still learning).
I think what’s important is that we’re willing to learn.
For anyone who has somehow missed this bit of business knowledge, it’s extremely common practice to delay paying something for as long as legally possible, if not longer, to the point it’s expected that your debtors will do this, and that you’ll do the same to everyone else in return. It was set up so that small businesses got time to pay for things, but of course, it was immediately corrupted by large businesses to screw over the little guy as well.
I worked for a company that used the pay late tactic, and did this often enough and long enough to one smaller creditor that the creditor managed to issue a winding-up order, which was - or so I gathered - a nuisance to have to sort out.
The downsides are 1) you have to get creative with the “prove [company] cannot pay” clause that’s required, especially if they’re big and wallowing in cash, 2) it costs roughly £3000 that you’ll only get back if you’re successful and 3) If you involve your own legal representation, that might cost extra that you definitely won’t get back.
For the first one, an incompetence argument might work. Or else that the fact they haven’t paid means that their assets, however large, cannot be made liquid enough to pay. For the second, that money comes back from the debtor if you win, so it costs them more money. For the third and for everything else, good luck with that.
My first thought when accidents happen is always “How do I make it so that this didn’t happen?”
I know this is an irrational thought, but you asked. It’s probably from using computers where “undo” is commonplace. (And much missed, often with horror, when it isn’t).
For dry foods, anything that didn’t touch the floor is examined closely and then put back on a fresh plate. Or the same plate after a quick rinse and paper towel dry. The rest would be tossed with heavy heart.
Wetter foods get similar treatment, but there’s more floor cleaning required. That would be done immediately, and any rescued hot food that had cooled in the meantime would get a quick re-warming in the microwave.
Either way, I would be cursing silently the whole time, and I wouldn’t enjoy my meal, but I’d still eat what, if anything, I saved.
… sometimes I will eat escaped dry cereal when pouring from box to bowl just to spite it, even if it ends up on the floor, but it has to look immaculate for me to do that. Anything vaguely oily or sticky doesn’t qualify for this, even if it looks fine.