It doesn’t matter who the hell wants to buy TikTok if ByteDance still doesn’t want to sell.

I don’t know why we keep having these sorts of conversations when they’ve signalled they have no intent to give in to the demands of the US.

I mean, we’re here talking about it, aren’t we?

2 is a maverick.

…What?

Even numbers are the purest numbers. Perfectly balanced. Most odd numbers are flawed but can be made perfect together.

Primes, though. Primes can fuck right off no matter what.

I’d like to stay optimistic and hope they did as well, though if my own experience is any indicator, there’s equal chance they fell into the pit of “Maybe climate change is real, but it’s not that bad/it’s better for me.”

“If you had just picked a better water bucket, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s your fault if the house burns down.”

Humans (and most other animals) see better side-to-side than up-down. Your eyes are spaced horizontally, giving us a wider horizontal field of vision. People generally prefer putting things side-to-side in work environments, maybe also reflecting how much easier it is to move and work within a horizontal plane than a vertical one. So the upper threshold for monitor width would be longer than the upper threshold for monitor height.

That being said, I know reading is best done in narrower columns, to reduce the amount of left-right movement your eyes need to do which can cause you to lose your place when skimming lines. Three columns of text on a 16:9 monitor is way more readable than one column of text that spans the entire monitor.

And then why do we make an exception for phones which are predominantly used in portrait mode? I guess maybe just for easier 1-handed use? Maybe also to give us more peripheral vision of potential hazards and other things happening in the background when using them, since they’re mobile devices.

Ending it as quickly and painlessly as possible then, I guess. I stick by the opinion that a life without agency and with no means to obtain it isn’t really living at all.

Fuck Oracle.

It sounds like you have no agency either way, then, which still sounds like a bad deal to me. I’d rather die at 40 living a life of my choosing than live to 400 with essentially no free will.

I’m not sure I understand the question. If the premise is that you become physically incapable of doing any action that introduces greater risk than some alternative, which isn’t even a guarantee of “immortality” as described, then it’s basically a life not lived at all. The safest option would always be to go nowhere, do nothing, speak to no one.

Imagine living life as if everything was covered in California Prop 65 labels saying “This action can expose you to risks which are known to future you to cause premature demise or other bodily harm.” It sounds awful, I’d never take that bet.

What is the purpose for standing up when the judge enters the courtroom?

This I can at least guess at, typically you’d rise for important people to demonstrate that you are interrupting whatever you were doing and giving this person your full attention and respect. I guess that’s really just a show of dominance/submissiveness, but in a pragmatic sense I suppose it is a good practice to mandate focus and engagement during legal proceedings.

Definitely not a good thing. I use Proton VPN, but only because I paid for a license before I realized the CEO is a scumbag. A lot of people are moving away from Proton’s platform, so a browser choosing to bundle it in is just privacy-violating bloatware for everyone except for a subset of users who are also still using Proton, and also for some reason don’t just have the standalone app installed.

Weird that it would be coming from Americans given how often US media has depicted the importance of the homefront during the various wars that America has participated in.

Militaries still need food and supplies to operate, so someone has to be making/raising/growing all of that stuff. And those workers need to be paid, accommodated, and kept happy, so every other industry like banking, education, healthcare, entertainment, etc. needs to keep running at full steam to prop up all aspects of the supply chain.

More than just the ones in America, I’d reckon.

Agreed, it’s an interesting thing to think about at least. The nature vs nurture debate is practically as old as time itself but it feels like we’re no closer to an answer outside of “it’s a bit of both.” But how much?

There was a show in the 80’s-90’s called Quantum Leap, where the aforementioned character keeps waking up in other people’s bodies at different periods of time. The premise is that he needs to solve some sort of problem for them that changes the course of history before he is able to leap to someone else, in the hope that he changes enough to one day “leap home.”

In this photo, Kash Patel looks panicked and confused, which mirrors the character’s behavior when he suddenly finds himself in someone else’s body and has no idea what’s going on.

I’ve said pretty much all I can say on the topic, so I’ll just call it here and award you the internet points of the day. But just need to clarify that pulling in more dictionary definitions to justify a particular use of a term as being more or less correct is the opposite of negating prescriptivism. A survey or other statistic would probably be more applicable on that front.

Apologies if I misunderstood what you were referring to, in that case.

The point I am getting at, though (or failing miserably to, apparently) is that no one here should be confused by the multiple people in the thread who question OP’s use of the term “lynched,” because more than anything else, it “especially” implies an execution by public mob, which did not happen in this case.

Just because a dictionary gets to, well, dictate the various definitions of a word, doesn’t mean that it should be used without consideration for its generally accepted meaning, as dictionaries are often poor authorities.