Prosecutorial discretion is a big problem really. It’s what allows laws to be applied unequally, why black people are prosecuted way more than white people, and, as you mention, provides justification to jail anyone at any time because you ARE violating some law every day, almost certainly.

If prosecutorial discretion did not exist, if agents of the law were required to prosecute all crimes to the fullest extent of the law, it would require the entire legal system to be restructured in a more precise way, and would have far less room for racial, sexual, and class discrimination as well as far less capacity to be weaponized against enemies of those in power.

Become orphan. Get adopted by both.

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The big question is how many times to press it. Once at least is a given. It does specify the death as gruesome, so I don’t really want the death, but I’d also like enough money to not have to worry again until a non gruesome death.

Like, if it was painless death, I’d probably say something like 20 or 30 times, but with a gruesome one…maybe 5 max, or perhaps even less. Still, one or two pushes is a given.

You take off the glasses during totality. Only during totality is it safe to look.

Speed limits usually have been set by data, it’s just bad data or badly used data. Like one of the actual ways they determined speed limits was to see how fast people actually drive through an area and then set it so 15%of them are above it.

Of course, much of this was done a half century ago or more. Now most roads have speed limits set by simply choosing one of the ‘standard’ numbers.

But the real main issue that some studies have shown is poor road design. A road needs to be designed to make the driver adjust to the appropriate speed. A wide road with wide clearance on either side encourages higher speed. A road with trees very close to the road and narrow shoulders encourages you to slow down.

Design roads to encourage the speed you want, a d you’ll mostly get it.

You can do makeup that looks like eyebrows and it’s less of a hassle than shaving constantly.

Besides, with the center pill, you could look like an unkempt troll and the people you find attractive would still like it; the lack of facial hair is thus for your convenience, like not needing to shave.

Well it doesn’t specify dragon type/color. Not every dragon has an innate alternate form ability, so hopefully you get one of those.

Age is also an issue. Depending on how old you are, you’ll probably be somewhere between young to young adult. If you’re at least 50 you can hit young adult. This means you’re pretty limited in a lot of things, and if you have your innate spellcasting at all, it’s gonna be pretty limited.

If you’re one of the dragon colors that doesn’t get innate alternate form, you’re probably gonna have to hide for the better part of a century just to get old enough to have some decent spells.

So there are downsides, if temporary ones, to the dragon option. Still, it’s probably the best choice, yes.

Yeah, to Duke, I think a hot chick is a hot chick no matter what.

Hah, meanwhile I think partner sounds bad, because it will never stop making me think of a law firm.

Depending on where you live and when you began behaving like this and calling her your wife, you may in fact be married.

Well, framing it as ‘this is the currently accepted way of doing it, and according to current norms your use is wrong’ seems correct enough to me; someone can certainly be speaking incorrectly according to a certain set of norms.

It also increases the ‘friction’ somewhat, causing those who want to change things to actively push against current norms rather than argue from their own position of faux superiority, citing the changing nature of language to insist no use can ever be wrong.

And in any case it is also likely to slow down the change, which I at least think is a nearly entirely good thing. I want to still be able to read things from a couple hundred years ago, and I would similarly like those who come after me to understand the things I write without translations or aid, at least for a couple hundred years.

It’s not necessarily worse, I suppose. I think it is worse in this example, perhaps you don’t, and I think we can acknowledge this as a reasonable difference of opinion.

I primarily object to the seemingly common attitude acting as though it is unreasonable to consider a change in language usage bad and be opposed to it at all. The attitude that anyone objecting to a language change has the same sort of ignorance as those who don’t want the language to ever change from whatever idealized version they have. These people are ridiculous, but not everyone who opposed any particular language change is one of them.

Yep. This post is largely mixing up cause and effect. The popular programs are like that not as the cause of people not learning underlying logic and such, but as the effect of it.

The only thing that would happen if popular GUI based interfaces had never come along would be that computers in general would still be something only a tiny amount of people use.

If you are not going to read something, perhaps you should avoid making ignorant comments, considering that for the most part, those topics are already addressed in my posts.

It’s worse in that there is now no common way to say what it used to mean, without adding several more words, where previously one would have communicated the meaning clearly.

Anytime a language change increases the likelihood of misunderstanding it definitely has negative effects. It may also have positive effects, but it shouldn’t be simply accepted without regard to that.

Now, disagreement on whether a particular change’s negative outweighs its positive is going to happen, obviously, but it’s important to acknowledge the bad parts exist.

It’s also important not to accept a mistake and insist that it’s fine because language changes, out of pride and desire to not be mistaken - a trend I definitely see a lot. It’s often not ‘I am using this word in a different way and have considered it’s implications’, it’s ‘I don’t want to be wrong so I will insist that I didn’t make a mistake, language changes!’

While language does evolve over time, we shouldn’t encourage unnecessary and somewhat negative evolutions of it, and especially not encourage it to change over less time.

When two previously distinct words come to have the same meaning, this can be a problem. First, older written things become less comprehensible. Few of us today could read and understand old english because so many words have changed. The evolution of language has taken a long time to get to that point, at least. But if we encourage the acceleration of this change, something which appears to be happening even without encouragement, how long will it be?

Today, we can still pretty clearly understand things written 200 years ago; some bits are confusing but for the most part it is still clear. If language change accelerates enough, in the future, people may struggle to understand something written only a hundred years ago, or even less.

The second problem is that if the word for a thing goes away, it becomes more difficult to express that concept. Consider the word ‘literally’ whose meaning has become extremely muddled. In order to express the original concept, we now require additional emphasis. There are other, more difficult to think of terms like that - a concept for which a particular word would have been perfect had the word’s meaning not significantly changed.

So when a word’s usage is corrected, do not be so quick to defend the misuse of the word through ‘language evolves!’ If people accept that ‘oops, I used that word wrong’ and then see if there is already a better word for what they were trying to express to correct themselves with, that is probably better - in most cases.

Even more notably, new words should be used when possible, if an older word doesn’t quite fit a newly emerging thing, or even a concept that has existed for some time but has not had a word to describe it precisely. One of my favorite examples of this is the word ‘cromulent’ which expresses a concept that did not have a specific word for it in common use at the time, even though the concept of ‘understandable and linguistically correct’ certainly already existed. Also consider the now common word ‘emoji’ which was coined specifically to represent this concept. This is an excellent evolution of language because it took nothing away. It arose in response to something which did not exist, and described that thing with a word created specifically for it.

That said, fighting against the evolution of language that has already happened and is far too entrenched to ever change is nonsensical. My father, for instance, insists ‘cool’ should be for temperature description only, even though that word possessed its non-temperature meaning before he was even born. Similarly, sometimes the change is resisted for bad reasons; like the word ‘gay’. In these cases, it is best not to try to fight the change, but instead embrace and encourage it.

So ultimately, when a word is used wrong, consider whether the word evolving to the way it is being used is a positive change. If it does not make things better, it’s probably best not to encourage it.