Pet peeve. Whatever three-quarters of the world seems to believe, any sewerage system can handle TP. That is: real TP has almost zero fiber integrity, it literally turns to goop on contact with water. Goop that has no more structural consistency than an average pile of sh*t. If still in any doubt then just make sure to flush it in single sheets, each one will be a pea-sized ball of goop. This misunderstanding seems to be purely cultural. I’ve been to a ton of developing countries, all with the usual dodgy sewerage systems and narrow-bore pipes. Yet only some of them, notably Latin America, have the disgusting cultural norm of TP bins. The rest understand that there is a difference between TP and paper towels designed for the kitchen and your face. TP is always flushable, by design.

Seafile is not FOSS, as I understand it. But I tried it anyway, since I also found Nextcloud bloated.

In the end I went back to the purest strategy of all: peer-to-peer. My files are synced between devices over the local network using ssh, rsync and unison and never touch an internet server.

Ideally, you don’t go anywhere. You talk to those assholes and degenerates and try to understand them a bit better and maybe even try to make friends with them (yes, yes, crazy idea). They are your fellow citizens, after all.

From over here in Europe, questions like this really make America look screwed. Let’s hope it’s not.

That’s perfectly fine. Don’t worry about forgetting words. You will forget them, look them up again, forget them look them up again, eventually they’ll stick.

This is exactly what I tell people who ask OP’s question. Technology made this a feasible approach. In the era of paper dictionaries it was a different story.

Babbel. Was not paid to say this.

But why does a fertility-rate decrease “need to be solved”? Obviously if it’s in absolute free fall that’s going to cause short-term problems, but the underlying reality is that our planet is overstressed with 8 billion humans and counting. Personally I just do not get this anxiety about fertility rates, it seems so disconnected from reality.

They recognize that one person’s rights can infringe another’s. That’s all.

Not if the alternative is that people begin to see the role and the person as the same thing. That’s the dream of every would-be dictator. A certain chancellor of Germany knew this very well in 1934 when he abolished the titles of Chancellor and President and made the army swear its oath to him personally.

This is just standard political theory: to protect democracy, respect its institutions. Absolutely does make sense to me.

Yet the idea underpinning it is sound. It’s to separate the office from the individual. If you attach reverence to the role, not the person, you make it easier to change the person and avoid dictatorship.

Approximately 5 days before the day in question, “next” becomes “this”.

That’s the answer.

Excellent question that has always bothered me too.

Using the app that is the vanilla website.

To change the default for comment sorting, YES PLEASE.

I am having to click “Top” for every single post. It’s become a reflex but seriously this is crazy. It feels like I must be doing something wrong but I have looked everywhere for the setting and there isn’t one. I’ve assumed this is just an oversight that will soon be fixed, but it never is.

I just don’t get it.

If literally everyone speaks fluent English (which is true), then you will not “pick up the language over time” by immersion. There are a ton of Anglo expats in Scandinavia and the Netherlands who do not speak the local language, for just this reason.

Yes, and I am saying that you clearly do not understand the reality of what goes on in the average factory farm. Or do not care. But I prefer to imagine that it’s ignorance, that is less disturbing.

Very frustrating to argue with people who claim to have no concern for living creatures when in fact they probably love their dog or cat and would find it just as hard as anyone else to watch a video of what goes on in factory farms. Food choices are such a fundamental part of human culture that most people just cannot stand having them questioned, it’s as if you are questioning their religion. Alas.

Terrible, no-good argument. By that standard you do not exist in the economy.

Factory farming is indeed legal. You seem to be suggesting that it is ethically defensible as well. That’s a serious stretch if you know what it really looks like, even in the most restrictive jurisdictions, i.e. Western Europe. The only charitable explanation is that you have not looked into the subject very deeply.

IMO this is an unpopular opinion mainly because capitalism is a terribly polarizing word which now means different things to different people. On the left, it’s associated with imperialism and oppression. Among moderates and liberals it means the flawed ideology which beat something even worse, i.e. communism.

But the original meaning of capitalism was basically: accumulation. In other words, economic growth. And I think the jury is now in on this one. In the end, exponential growth is just not compatible with a living planet. The evidence is mounting on all sides. One example: the only period in recent history when the environmental indicators were all pointing the right way was the short deep recession that followed the financial crisis. That says an awful lot.

As a liberal I’ve changed my mind on this subject and I now agree with you.

You sound very certain that they are. Perhaps you should be the one who provides evidence?

As I understand it, in dogs most differences are between individuals, like in any other species. What can be said about breeds is that differences concern the application of their intelligence rather than how bluntly “smart” they are. For instance, labradors are a bit better at understanding social cues, and collies at acting on certain commands.

A recent study went into this. One point it made:

We did not find breed differences in tasks measuring logical reasoning or short-term memory

This makes sense. Dogs were domesticated more recently than the human lineage split between, say Aboriginal Australians and southern Africans. Would you be happy about making IQ statements for that case? If not, why exactly would it be different?

Intelligence is a pretty ill-defined measure, verging on pseudo-science in lots of case. Personally I think it is all but useless and that we would be better talking about easily measurable traits instead.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others

“Obviously”, hmm? The balance of expert opinion is in fact that dog breeds do not vary in intelligence. Which makes sense given that dog populations have significantly fewer millennia of genetic divergence than human populations, and these days nobody much claims that some human breeds are smarter than others.

Falling into your own trap!

But otherwise a decent question.