allannienhuis

I sometimes format dates in documents or emails dd-MMM-yyyy when the audience is international. ie 2-Feb-2022 using the short month form disambiguates the fields and I think avoids mental gymnastics like 'what month is 09 again?' for the reader. (or in my case the finger-counting....)

doesn't 'divisive' generally mean to divide, as in separate into opposing factions? What you're describing seems more like 'diversity', which is pretty different I think.

I believe he was suggesting misfiling, as in under reporting income or overreporting deductions in order to generate a fraudulent refund, which you could then fix/repay in cash (but keep the bonds).

yes, skylights are 'windows in the roof'. They often have a matte/white finish to diffuse the light.

"The space rock, named 2022 EB5, is believed to have mostly burnt up in our planet's atmosphere, but even if it had impacted the surface it would have done little to no damage because it was just 10ft (3 metres) wide, about half the size of a giraffe."

a giraffe? really? sigh.

That particular site has quite interactive 'painting/drawing' features (select the 'freeform' option, press a key to 'paint' with that letter using the mouse), which is the type of thing I remember from similar ascii art programs 'back in the day' :).

No matter how useful the tool, it's still the artist that makes the art of course. But the tools can make a real difference in how creative someone can be - I doubt much of the really creative ascii art is/was made with notepad.

My point was simply that there are tools out there that really can approach that experience of 'doodling' with ascii, and I thought some people might not have been exposed to that before.

ASCII editors are a thing :)

eg: https://asciiflow.com/

I know some people that used to run a number of those 'private' atms you'd find in gas stations, etc. They regularly drove to the various machines to fill them up with cash, driving an old pickup truck and carrying around 30-50k in 20$ bills in a brown paper bag. Security by obscurity I guess.

I think Latitude historically comes first when spoken or written because of the rule of ablaut reduplication, which makes it more natural for the 'a' sound to come before the 'o' sound when using phrases like this. For instance, 'bish, bash, bosh' sound natural/correct, but 'bosh, bash, bish' sounds wrong.

I get the order wrong when working with geojson with embarrassing frequency...

http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/a-hotchpotch-of-redup...

the word is not pre-determined. it changes based on what you are guessing, to make it harder to guess a matching word.

Along the same lines, pushing kids to eat everything on their plate can result in serious food/eating disorders, training them to ignore their 'full' feeling.

I presume they're charging for knowing what to do & how to do it correctly, not just for the time spent doing it.

fourlegs

That's a valid and useful rhetorical technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Although it can be applied with a bit much snark sometimes. :)

in the northwest (Vancouver, BC area) tock and talk rhyme (they are pretty much homonyms).

I actually agree with this in principle, but isn't California a huge source of food for much of the west coast? Where will the food be grown then?

I HATE that! too many times my vim muscle memory has cancelled out of a long comment or issue description :(

"I can't believe" isn't meant to be taken literally. It is a way of saying "I am astounded".

I think the relationship with the giver makes a big difference - the intent may be clearer. I was thinking in terms of wedding gifts, birthday gifts, etc. There are lots of other types of gifts where money wouldn't be very acceptable for anyone - eg housewarming/visitor gifts.

it's the thought that counts. Money often comes across as a thoughtless (easy) gift, and often comes with strings attached, which is why it's not often used in western culture. Money is a great gift for someone who really needs it.

Not saying this is a good thing (in fact I think it's a silly rule), but: kids in the western world have their 'freedoms' restricted all of the time. There are plenty of things that kids can't participate in or see. Those are mandated by various levels of the state, for the safety/benefit of the child (ostensibly).

And parents are constantly adjusting the things their kids can or can't do, often requiring kids to ask permission to do most things. Its a way of protecting them from their immature decision making ability (with functional parents anyway).

So I think the aversion is more based on the surprise that it seems to go 'further' than we'd expect in the west, and politics/culture turns that into something to criticize the CPC (or whatever governing body responsible) for because COMMUNISTS!!!

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate you didn't have to take the time to reply to a random stranger on the internet :)

Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction).

I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally.

I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.

I'm honestly curious if you would apply this reason to other types of infections? or is it something about covid and the covid vaccine that has the risk/reward ratio tilted in favor of not vaccinating for it? When I do my own assessment, I look at the tremendous success of the vaccines (efficacy and low serious side-effect rate) and compare it to the risk and consequences of getting the disease, it seems a very easy call for me. So I'm really curious what you are evaluating differently - what am I missing?

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader (I'm just a happy user)

it would be nice if that was a per-site toggle in the UI (that's the approach darkreader uses, and I think it works well).

I use https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader to optionally apply dark themes to websites that don't support themes, or don't provide theme options. It's pretty good, but there are definitely some sites that it doesn't work well enough with. Worth having though, as I do prefer dark themes - I feel my eyestrain has been reduced since using it.

Perhaps this type of functionality (perhaps limited to toggling the prefers-color-scheme setting) is something browsers should consider baking into the default UI/Chrome.

Authorities reported over 130 heat related deaths in the Vancouver area yesterday. Mostly seniors living alone without air conditioning (aircon isn't common here). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-heat-wave...

Luckily Lytton is in a semi-desert area - very dry there.

Even here on the coast of BC where humidity is higher (and temps slightly lower), it's reasonably dry right now. Beach towels we put out to dry in the sun are dry in a few minutes.

I don't believe that ensuring children conformed to the current cultural norm was or is unique to Canadian schools.

My mother was left-handed and was forced to write, etc with her right hand by her Dutch teachers, as were all other lefties. Force included bloody knuckles from rulers wielded by teachers and other corporal punishments. I've heard similar stories from other lefties from other countries.

Schools were (are?) about teaching children to confirm as much as teaching them reading and math, etc - I think that was a pretty universal thing in previous generations. Just because your experience was in Canada doesn't mean there was anything specifically Canadian about it.

pretty sure that they're talking about giving an EXTRA week of time off on top of whatever normal PTO/vaction time they have.