Schadrach

Because English is a Germanic language that has half of it’s vocabulary as borrowed words from a Romance language (French) that then got chewed up and mangled for a few centuries.

Not like Gaelic, which has to own the fact that most of it’s words are pronounced in the least sensible way one might think that series of letters is said.

Less a brand name because multiple companies can make parmigiano reggiano, but it’s a combination of requirements designed to protect local industry - for example, for it to be parmigiano reggiano cheese it has to be made with one of two lists of three ingredients, the milk has to come from cows from a specific region of Italy, a certain percentage of the feed for those cows must come from a specific region of Italy, is aged for a certain minimum time, etc, etc. It’s an entire set of industries protected by a legal definition of a cheese.

When you see “parmesan” instead of “parmigiano reggiano” it’s a similar sort of cheese that isn’t made within the legally protected definition. Most often it’s just not made in the one specific part of Italy with milk from cows from that part of Italy fed by feed from that part of Italy, it’s made somewhere else using dairy that doesn’t have to be imported. Or it’s aged “enough” for the flavors to develop but not the full time required. Or both.

There are a whole array of product designations in the EU that basically exist to protect individual agricultural industries from competition by requiring that products be made in a certain place, or using products from a certain place in order to prevent outsiders from duplicating the product, increasing supply and driving down prices.

Basically the same logic as “if it’s not from the Champagne wine region in France it’s just sparkling white wine.” Also the same reason why “real” balsamic vinegar costs a fucking fortune.

At that point, the government’s already paying for it, so why not just implement universal healthcare?

Because private health insurance companies are major donors, and no politician wants to upset the donor class?

And the comparatively recent shift in Sony policy about what content is acceptable is because who makes those decisions moved from the Japanese office to the US one and the US is full of various flavors of prudes.

Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art.

Mostly because you’re defining “art” in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.

I once tried to install Linux around then, not long after ISA cards with Plug n Play became a thing.

Linux: So now to even pretend to get the card to work you have to download and run a tool to generate a config file to feed to another tool so you can then install the driver and get basic functionality from the card (which is all that’s available on Linux). Except the first tool doesn’t generate a working config file - it generates a file containing every possible configuration your hardware supports hypothetically having and requires you to find and uncomment the one you want to actually use. Requiring you to manually configure the card and thus kinda defeating the point of Plug n Play (though I guess that configuration was in software, not by setting jumpers).

Same card in Windows at the time: Install card, boot Windows. Card is automatically identified and given a valid configuration, built in drivers provide basic functionality. Can download software from manufacturer for more advanced functionality.

That soured me on Linux for a long time. Might try it again sometime soon just to see what it’s like if nothing else. ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.

I’d actually be more surprised to learn they didn’t move to Ada when that was THE DOD programming language.

Could he? Wizards are apparently able to handle significantly more physical trauma than Muggles and have access to considerably more advanced medicine.

Like, they teach 11 year olds to play sports on flying brooms several stories in the air in which they hit heavy balls at each other very fast. They teach 16 year olds to teleport with the explicit risk that they might mess up and leave part of themself behind (and we don’t even ask the question of what happens if there’s something physically blocking their target location, such as another person). Somehow, the school doing these things doesn’t have multiple fatalities every year which means that getting hit then falling 60 feet to the ground is generally not a death sentence, or even a particularly serious injury.

You shoot Voldemort pre-horcruxes and he’s likely going to apparate away, drink a healing concoction of some variety, and try again in a few hours or days unless it’s a headshot. You shoot him post-horcrux, and even if it is a headshot that’s just a somewhat longer delay. And that presumes a lack of some kind of magical defense that would block a small projectile coming at you very fast.

I mean I’m somewhat interested in how the Wizarding world manages to keep hidden despite all the kids from the muggleworld supposedly having friends and connections and things before Hogwarts.

I imagine the kindest answer to that involves magical law enforcement obliviating and confounding any witnesses, akin to how Gilderoy Lockhart had a career but perpetrated at scale on a large populous of second-class citizens (aka Muggles). Which is horrifying, but any other answer I can think of is somehow worse than wizard cops mind raping anyone who saw anything.

and letting children marry.

Most still do so long as the line being drawn is “is there any hypothetical situation in which a 17 year old can legally marry?” Most of those specifically allow older teens (16 or 17 depending on the state) to marry under narrow circumstances, usually requiring any minor have parental consent and/or court approval before allowing it. All states allowed under-18 marriage in some conditions until 2018, and only about a dozen have set a hard 18 limit with no exceptions since then.

With CA being one of the worst offenders in that it has no hard legal minimum age of marriage at all and relies on parents and courts to prevent serious abuse (no minimum but requires approval from one parent or guardian and the court). MA was very similar with no hard minimum at all until recently passing a hard 18 minimum.

Which means if you have the right people in your pocket (a parent or guardian and a judge) you could hypothetically marry someone very underage in CA then cart them off to a state where marriage is an explicit exception to age of consent (such as NM) and engage in legal CSA.

Which when you try to say it as written sounds like some degenerate version of “lick nuts” which is possibly not intended?

…and let’s be fair, it’s an ad so the corpo bullshit is mandatory.

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.

That would be accurate. But it would fuck with your ability to open it by just double clicking it, which less savvy users would see as fucking the file.

Sure sure, but we’re talking ease of use for a typical end user. Also, Firefox isn’t mandatory for the other app, so you technically don’t need to add that step even if getting away from Chromium in general and Edge in particular is a good idea as regards avoiding advertising.

Maybe, but Windows has the advantage of being preinstalled on the hardware most people are buying (meaning they get to skip the install the OS step for Windows).

I mean, I’m an atheist and still visit the cathedral as frequently as I can, if only to hear her speaking in tongues.

We had a local street person who was nicknamed Aqualung who was a fixture here from the mid 70s to the mid 00s. Fan of the local minor league team, very private person. Was a rumor that Nick Nolte studied him to prep for a part once.

I actually had someone whose family member died of Covid tell me that his brother-in-law didn’t really die of Covid, he died of something else, because it’s all overblown and the hospitals are doing a similar scam to this myth (i.e. making it out as a bigger deal than it needs to be.)

That sort of thing goes around here a lot too, usually framed in terms of “He didn’t die of COVID, but if you die from any cause whatsoever while you also have COVID they’ll count it as dying of COVID to make the COVID numbers bigger.” It usually falls apart when you ask why they want the COVID numbers to be bigger than they really are.

We always have been, it’s just that the begging started out looking like math and has gradually gotten more abstract over time. We’ve just reached the point where we’ve explained to it in mathematical terms how to let us beg in natural language in certain narrow contexts.