This seems more like extroverts’ misconceptions of how introverts are, rather than an actual issue to me. I don’t tend to seek out relationships with highly extroverted people who can’t stand the idea of a moment where nobody is saying something, regardless of how inane that thing happens to be. At present, my companion and I have known each other for pushing 15 years, and we’re just comfortable being quiet around each other, unless one of us actually has something to say. If one of us actually has something they want to communicate about their day, or some other typical topic for small talk, we’re more than capable of talking each others’ ears off, we just don’t feel any need to run through conversations like:

“How was your day?”

“Good, yours?”

“Also acceptable.”

on a regular basis, unless we actually have something we wanted to discuss.

It’s also not as though we don’t have any hobbies or interests. We’ve got plenty of shared ones, and enjoy discussing them and planning out future activities, we just tend to do it either solo or together, but without involving large groups. Even for those we don’t share, we enjoy discussing them with each other to a certain extent.

There’s a huge difference between disliking pointless, socially expected chatter to fill dead air, and having some sort of social anxiety that leaves you unable to sustain regular conversations with others in your life. People who are not introverted just seem to assume that we either wish we could do it, but have some sort of condition that prevents us from being able to do so without it causing us problems, or that we just never learned how to do it properly, and would enjoy it for some reason if they just kept trying to get us to do it more and practice. I’m sure there are people that would apply to, but it’s not universal, and many of us would just like to be left in peace, unless you actually have something to say. Sometimes, we even meet others like ourselves, and enjoy our peace together, without the pointless talk that we both know neither is really interested in.

Relevant meme:

its owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.

To me, it’s more a case of the owner feeling entitled to do this. They have the (likely easier and much cheaper) option of buying a vehicle that’s appropriate to the primary environment they’ll be operating it in, and chose not to. This isn’t compulsion, it’s just another in a chain of selfish decisions.

Probably all the knives and the room full of people who spend 8 hours a day cutting things to bits with them. After a while, you get pretty good at finding where to cut through joints, so it doesn’t take all that long.

Because, for many people, it’s not all that easy to get the requisite visas to go to Europe legally. As it stands now, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in my household of 3 who has a few options to get skilled work visas based on my work experience. In another few years, when we’ve all finished our degrees, we’re looking at making the leap.

For other people, they might already have put down roots that hold them back before considering what a raw deal they’re getting. Even if someone can qualify to emigrate, significant others, kids or property can make it more difficult for them to decide to go for it.

And, of course, you have plenty of folks who drink too deeply of the Kool-Aid, and believe Fox News when they say Europe is overrun by communist governments that implement Sharia law in their gulags, and force you to be gay to hit the national quotas.

Nope, it’s true. When I went for the first time a couple of years ago, my bank decided I needed more £50 notes than anything, and I got several “Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these,” comments when I used them.

Also, fwiw, depending on where you’re heading in the UK, cashless payments can be way more prevalent than they are in many places. I’ve been to multiple bars in and around Manchester that just didn’t accept cash, and would bring out a card terminal to tap for every £2-3 beer I ordered.

On the other hand, bring a coin purse or something with you, because when you do use cash, you’ll get a ton of coins back, and it becomes a pain to have rattling about in your pocket real quick.

It’s seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it’ll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it’s not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.

I’m not really concerned about it myself, I’m already well beyond the point it would be terribly relevant to me. I would very much disagree re: education levels, though. I’ve worked with plenty of people from various countries, and those with less education often cannot switch to a more widely understood way of speaking, in my experience. Partly, it comes down to limited vocabulary, resulting in them being unable to provide alternative ways of saying things that might be more widely understood, and partly down to an ignorance as to what elements of their speech aren’t widely used or understood outside of where they grew up.

I would still argue that a neutral Spanish is no more real a variant than BBC English or “General American” accents and mannerisms used by news presenters represent actual variants of English, though. It might serve as a crutch for intelligibility in cases of extremely heavy accents, but most cases where you might employ it are situations where you already wouldn’t be expected to employ much in the way of slang. In regular interactions, though, people mostly just speak to each other in their natural accent, and if somebody busts out a local term that isn’t understood, the other person asks “¿Qué quiere decir huachicolero?” gets an explanation, and the conversation moves on, same as it does in English.

At the end of the day, I think pursuing a neutral manner of speaking from the beginning is something of a fool’s errand for most language learners. Like it or not, you will wind up speaking like the native speakers you interact with most. I don’t particularly use Dominican vocabulary, but people still assume I’m from DR when I speak Spanish, because when Spanish became my primary working language for 5 years after getting out of the beginner stages, that’s who I was surrounded by at work. Absent very specific goals (I knew a guy who focused exclusively on Rioplatense Spanish, as he was moving to Argentina in a couple of years to study in Buenos Aires), I think most people would be better served focusing on the fundamentals, reading widely, consuming a wide range of media and actually speaking with people, rather than endlessly agonizing over perfecting the process before actually getting to the point they can actually use the language.

After years of regular use, I can speak it fine and modify how I speak appropriately, as the situation calls for. If it’s sufficient for the RAE folks working on the DELE and the staff at my local Instituto Cervantes to not remark on anything beyond occasionally flubbing the gender of a word, I’m not too worried about the neutrality of my Spanish.

Neutral Spanish isn’t a separate variant, so much as a separate register of the language, though. It’s really just a thing I hear native speakers say when they don’t realize that educated speakers from their country do, in fact, still have an accent, but it’s more just down to vocabulary choice, rather than some major change elsewhere. Like, an educated Dominican isn’t going to call a bus a guagua and they’ll probably enunciate more clearly than they would in casual conversation, but they’re not suddenly going to start using vosotros and distinción when they speak.

Whenever I hear a native speaker talking about Neutral Spanish, it’s invariably followed by why I should try to speak like people from their home country, and that people from elsewhere don’t really speak proper Spanish. It also tends to correlate pretty well with people telling me, “Yo hablo castellano, y por eso no puedo entender lo que dicen las personas plebes, ya que hablan español.” for a nice dose of Latin American classism.

If you learn something too region specific, usually doesn’t.

My experience has been more that learners tend to not realize that certain things they pick up aren’t universal, and/or that they’re only acceptable in certain contexts, and then unwittingly pepper their speech with words and phrases from one country that are unknown/unacceptable in another, or use very informal/vulgar language in formal settings. Like, if I curse around my wife the way I would curse around my Mexican coworkers, she’s scandalized by how vulgar the profanity is, and if I told my Mexican coworkers I had a fuinfuán in my backyard growing up, rather than a columpio, there’s nearly 100% chance they’re not going to have any idea what the hell I’m talking about.

I managed to knock myself unconscious and give myself a pretty nice concussion during a particularly heated pillow fight at a summer camp. Pretty sure that’s about as unique a feat as I’ve managed thus far.

they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty.

In fairness, this is also down to companies having no loyalty to their employees. I would be more than happy to never have to go job hunting again, if career jobs, with appropriate incentives, were still a thing that actually exists. I am substantially less enthusiastic about the prospect of spending my entire working life dedicated to a single company that will not give me annual raises that beat inflation or any sort of pension as a reward for my loyalty, while my working conditions and benefits will likely deteriorate over time at the whims of a rotating group of petty tyrants in management, and the prospect of getting laid off because some dipshit in the C-suite implemented a terrible idea that anyone with the least amount of experience doing the actual work could have told them was doomed from the start and saved everyone suffering the consequences of their dumbass vanity project to pad their resume for when they pull the cord on their golden parachute and jump ship to sink another business.

I suspect a lot of people would be quite content at having the stability of such a position, if only the trade-offs weren’t so terrible for them in pretty much every other way. The vague possibility of a farewell party at the end of 40+ years of work doesn’t cut it.

I’ve never seen any of them cause problems; they simply ride the trains all day.

Maybe this is dependent on country or region, because I see wildly different behavior between the unhoused in NYC and Manchester, in the UK, for example. In NYC, I’ve personally seen them pull a knife on random people, masturbating in the middle of the day on the train, two blind guys panhandling try to beat each other with their canes, each accusing the other of faking it to invade the other’s territory, smoking crack in the middle of crowded cars and plenty of other problematic behavior.

When I’ve been in Manchester, they’ve always been pretty reserved, just trying to do their own thing and get through the day without doing anything to draw unwanted attention to themselves. You wouldn’t even know a lot of them are there, unless you’re out after the shops close, and then there’s suddenly a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the doorways, just trying to sleep out of the wind and rain in a spot that might be marginally warmer.

Too many people just view scientifically sound treatment as drug addicts getting stuff for free, and get pissed off that someone else gets a “benefit” that they aren’t entitled to. They completely ignore the knock on effects that drug addiction has to those around someone going through it and just focus on what they perceive as unearned rewards for bad behavior.

I kind of think that a lot of people would be in favor of the same programs if they were pitched without being centered on the person getting treated for their addiction. Like, instead of saying, “This plan represents the best method we have to get people off drugs,” some of those same people that are totally lacking in empathy would be in favor of it if it were put forward as, “This is a way to get all those druggies off the streets and trains where they bother you, and it’s actually way cheaper than putting them all in prison, so it works out that we spend less of your tax money and save you in the long term.” Which is a pretty damning indictment of those people.

At lot of this strikes me as non-issues, or even bordering on entitlement.

Well, for instance, if you’re contributing your own code, there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.

Well, no kidding, that’s how it works in most things. Why would a project accept a contribution that doesn’t add a previously missing feature or improve on the implementation of a current one? I would be pretty suspect of using a program that accepts a random commit so that a college kid can check the “Timmy’s first accepted pull request” box and let them pad their resume.

Some would-be contributors are very familiar with programming, reading, and writing code, but they may never have opened an issue or sent a pull request. This is a scary first step. Others may have the necessary tech skills, but not the creativity. Where should they you begin? Also, if someone is scared, that can result in impostor syndrome. The fear that people all over the world will see your bad code is a powerful factor reducing the urge to share it.

These are all things that the greybeards being maligned had to figure out at some point, I don’t really see the harm in new contributors being expected to do the same, especially when there is an abundance of documentation and tutorials available now, which simply didn’t exist in the past.

For instance, there are a lot of folks doing mods for video games. This can be a very creative activity, there is lots of room for innovation, as well as outlets such as streaming to reach an audience. It applies to all sorts of games, such as Pokémon, Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft. Game modding is a great way in. It could even be a way to set up a company, or to make a living. But it’s not considered as FOSS. For novices getting interested, it could even be attracting people away from getting into FOSS development.

Again, nothing new here. No, game mods weren’t nearly as prevalent in the past, but new devs have had the choice between contributing to FOSS software and contributing to/creating proprietary programs for as long as FOSS has been a thing.

I don’t think the old guard should be dismissive or rude to newcomers when their contributions aren’t up to the standard expected to be accepted, but they also aren’t getting paid to be these peoples’ mentors. It kind of reminds me of posts I see in language learning communities, where people would get all upset, “I completed the Duolingo Spanish tree, but the cashiers at my local Mexican restaurant speak too fast for me to understand and they switch to English when I try to talk to them in Spanish.” Cool that you want to try and use the language, my friend, but these people aren’t being paid to be your tutor, and you may well be making their job more difficult and/or holding up other paying customers by trying to force random people to listen to your extremely basic, and likely incorrect, Spanish. They don’t have an obligation to put everything else in their work or life on hold to try and stroke your ego.

Curiously, I don’t see any mention of what, in my view, is likely a much more serious issue to getting new generations of contributors involved, as well as having a more diverse set of contributors. Access to technology and relevant education is far from uniform. If little Timmy from Greenwich, CT has had a personal computer he was free to mess around with to his heart’s content from the moment he could read and attended a well-funded school with the possibility of studying computers, programming, and early exposure to things like Linux from grade school onwards, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that he’s more comfortable working with these concepts and more likely to wind up contributing successfully to FOSS projects than my friend Lucas, in Brazil, who only got a second-hand computer when he managed to get accepted to university, and had no real concept of Linux/FOSS until I explained to him why I couldn’t just install a random, Windows-only program he thought would be useful to me.

To draw another language learning comparison, it’s like how in the US, most students will only study a second language for a couple of years in high school and two semesters at university, if they attend higher education, and then you periodically have people going, “How come so many Americans fail to speak a second language compared to students in Europe?” Then, you look at the curriculum in countries like Germany, and realize they begin teaching students English as early as grade-school, often adding another foreign language later on. Is it any surprise that, when they have nearly a decade of foreign language instruction, compared to the mere two years many Americans get, alongside a fair bit more exposure to and encouragement of engaging with foreign language media, that they wind up being more proficient at using said language on average?

It’s hardly a perfect solution that will completely mitigate all of the issues with getting younger and more diverse groups of people to contribute to FOSS projects, but I don’t doubt that having access to computers in the home from a young age and access to more extensive education on computers and related fields from a much younger age would go a long way towards getting more people involved. Of course, even then, having the downtime to be able to dedicate to contributing to/maintaining FOSS projects is a factor that will disproportionately favor historically privileged groups. Even if she has the knowledge and ability to do so, a single mother working three jobs in the Bronx in order to keep a roof over her family’s head, food on the table, and the lights and heating on simply might choose not to spend what little free time she has writing a badass new MPD client in Rust that has plugins to integrate with Lidarr and automatically fix metadata with beets based on matching the hashes of files to releases on various trackers in order to scrape the release data from them, no matter how cool the concept might sound to her. And it’s not really something I could blame her for.

Yeah, it’s pretty good, especially in the summer time.

On topic for the thread, the way I make it has pretty much always gotten a “WTF are you trying to feed me?” look from Dominicans. Okay, more of an “Ay dios mío, este muchacho” eye roll and a “¿Qué es este menjunje que tu tá inventando allí?” from them, if I’m being honest. For the ones I’ve gotten to actually try it, though, they all agree it’s pretty good.

I have the usual mix of milk and orange juice, add in some sweetened, condensed milk, vanilla extract, and then I add jam/preserves instead of just sugar. I’m partial to cherry preserves, but if chinola jam were a thing I could get here, I’d probably just stick with that. Toss it in a blender with some flaked ice, and 30 seconds later, you’re that much closer to developing diabetes. Depending on the sort of night I’m having, I might toss in some spiced rum, too.

Have they tried pulling out the “Make a vehicle that’s not a massive and shitty death trap,” or “Boot the Nazi from the company” stops? Because, I suspect doing those two might help it out.

The highest I’ve ever seen someone get into without specific education was a department manager.

I’ve seen people do it when I worked at Whole Foods fairly often, but the work conditions worsened as you went up in some pretty big ways. Once you hit the level of department manager, you could be swapped into working at any store within a 50 mile radius of your home store, without any option to refuse if you wanted to keep the position, so having a car was basically mandatory, though they didn’t swap them around that much if you were doing a good job where you were. If you went one level up to assistant store manager, swaps got way more frequent, and you were salaried. Store managers seemed pretty stable in their locations, provided they were putting up good numbers, but them and their assistant managers both had to work some pretty crazy hours. On the plus side, they did get pretty sweet bonuses. My store manager at one location would sometimes earn more in bonuses than he would in his salary. This was all pre-Amazon takeover, though, so I’m sure things have gotten worse in the interim. Heck, they started making it more shit while I was still there in the bid to get Amazon to buy them.

Point is, even in companies where it is possible to go from the shop floor to upper management, there’s always a catch to it.

Or, just maybe, they could adequately staff their stores instead of constantly running skeleton crews. If they were actually sincere with their cries of high theft, more employees on the floor could deter would-be thieves, while also giving them time to help customers when needed and pack out product so the place doesn’t always look like an obstacle course left in the wake of a hurricane, with piles of stuff on the floor blocking half the aisles.

Any place that requires an app for me to shop at is a hard no for me, much less all the other nonsense they want to include.

Basically, as soon as other reliable methods became widely adopted. No, I don’t have any phone call related anxiety or whatever, I’ll call someone if I really need to, I would just rather not. I’d much rather get a text that says, “Hey, we’re meeting up at 7pm to go out and do, XYZ, do you want to come?” than a phone call that starts with that and turns to “So anyway, did I tell you my mom blah, blah, blah… And I don’t know what to say, because I kind of want to go, but it would be a lot blah, blah, blah.”

Phone calls with friends and family have a way of spiraling off into tangents when I don’t necessarily have the time to entertain them, but don’t want to be a dick all the time telling people I don’t have time at the moment to listen to them. If there’s a self-service section to a company’s website or app, I can usually do whatever I need faster than it would take me to get through the automated menus and hold music to call and have them do it. Like my pharmacy, if I want to refill a prescription online, I log in, check a box and hit submit. Done. If I call them, I need to go through three menus to get patched through to the pharmacy, tell them what I want, hold for a moment while they help someone in the store, give them my info and wait for them to look it up, etc.

When I plan to meet up with people, I make plenty of time to talk to them and listen to whatever. When I get what I think is going to be a short phone call that devolves into tangents, I don’t necessarily have the time to entertain whether the fact that my friend’s cousin had his toe amputated due to gangrene means he should get the spot on his nipple tested for leprosy, or if he should just improve his personal hygiene and see if it washes off in the shower.

If something really is going to be a pain to communicate via text, schedule that conversation and we can have a call to discuss it, but I’m not answering phone calls whenever somebody calls out of the blue unless I’m interviewing for jobs or expecting a call about some sort of emergency.

Not just that, but you’ll also experience a good deal of social pressure from your friends and family, or future co-workers. Some can be of the patently ridiculous variety, like “Oh, that’s a man’s job, why would you want to try and do that?” but you also get some that can be well-meaning and grounded somewhat in reality, like the potential risk for violence and/or sexual violence that a female cab driver would be perceived as more exposed to. These can be mitigated to an extent, if you find the right niche to go into. For example, I would think the risk for violence would be lower if you were just doing airport runs, or medical transport for the elderly, rather than being the late night driver picking people up from clubs and bars to bring them to their private residences.

For a job that has an old boy’s club formed, a new, female employee can also often expect to have to deal with regular harassment, whether it’s old-fashioned, paternalistic sexism, or active efforts to drive away women that the men working there view as encroaching on their private domain. I’m not excusing this behavior or saying it’s something women should put up with, but that is the simple reality of many career fields society views as “men’s work,” and knowing this in advance will often discourage women from even trying to get a job in these fields, absent credible signs that the company they’re considering is making substantial and concrete efforts to change this culture and make the work place not be misogynistic, or some other pressing urge (i.e. “I can’t get a job somewhere else where I live that will pay my bills and avoid homelessness and starvation, so I guess I’ll put up with the harassment and misogyny until I can move elsewhere or something better opens up.”) that means they’re willing to overlook it. Rather perversely, the men who see women leave the job in short order due to the men’s behavior, rather than the actual work or work-related conditions, often take it as confirmation that women aren’t cut out for that line of work. Meanwhile, those women who persevere, but don’t take shit from their male coworkers and dare to make them actually face consequences for their own words and actions will frequently be maligned as “bitches” and socially isolated at work.

It’s hardly surprising women don’t actively seek out to subject themselves to such conditions on a regular basis, absent some external influence that either seeks to ameliorate the hostile environment they face, or else compels them to tolerate it as the least terrible option available.