Oh yeah, maybe. I don’t really know how you’d measure that.

Jamie being a unisex name, I dunno if “she’s amazing” is the typo or “he is a guest” is.

cheering for a dude hooking up with his aunt.

Which dude, exactly?

Only one example immediately springs to mind, but that hasn’t happened yet in the books. And the way it happened in the show, I’m not sure was executed very well, but I don’t think it was really portrayed as a case where we “cheer for a dude”. He barely seemed into it, definitely not as much as she was.

Like many other admirer’s of Nabokov’s novel of a pedophile who pursues a 12-year-old girl, Rowling loves it for the writing style.

Oh ok, fair enough. Not an especially controversial take.

"There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot…becomes…a great and tragic love story

Oh…oh no…

When I hear an American with the caught/cot merger say “caught”, it sounds way more similar to my (unmerged) “cot” than my “caught”

Thank goodness 4-chan is there

Isn’t this Tumblr?

I don’t love the way it has to tear down the other characters in order to prop up the one. Surely the message could have been gotten across in a more wholesome way?

Very popular Netflix show. Other than that, the only thing I know about it is that the paladin in the D&D movie is in it.

For more context, the Rubicon is famous less among geographers and more among historians. Famously, the governor of a province was not allowed to bring an army south of the Rubicon into Italy, so when Julius Caesar marched south with his army, that is the point at which it was impossible for Rome not to go to civil war. The phrase “crossing the Rubicon” is an English-language idiom (I don’t know if equivalents exist in other languages, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s common across countries formerly in the Roman Empire) meaning “passing a point of no return”.

No, that’s a Rubik’s. A rubric is a river that traditionally marked the northern border of Italy.

I do find history and etymology very interesting, but I didn’t know any of this. It’s literally all taken from the Wikipedia page for the name Fitz.

Gibbon was actually a pet name form of “Gilbert”.

It depended on the time and place. Fitzroy is particularly associated with illegitimate children of the king, but until the 17th century revival of the Fitz prefix, it was mostly just meaning “son of” without any particular inclination towards or against legitimacy. But in the Stuart era it was frequently used for illegitimate children of royalty and nobility.

That Just Stop Oil is funded by the daughter of an oil exec is very easy to prove and not at all controversial.

Why she funds it is another matter entirely. If she’s sincere, she wouldn’t be the first child of a conservative billionaire to take a more progressive stance. On the other hand, if it is a false flag operation, it wouldn’t be the first time that’s been done either.

Here is her sharing her own perspective.

To take an Occam’s razor approach, that she’s sincere requires assuming…that she’s being sincere. That she’s operating a false flag requires assuming that she’s lying to the press by claiming to care about the environment, and that she has successfully fooled not just the press but also the people she’s giving the money to (or an even bigger assumption: that it’s a massive conspiracy and everyone involved in JSO is in on it, but nobody has leaked) of her sincerity, and that she believes the best thing she can do to prevent action on climate change is to fund organisations aiming to promote action on climate change.

It’s certainly not impossible, but yeah. Occam’s razor suggests to me that unless we get more evidence to the contrary, we should put more stock in the idea that she’s sincere.

As far as Latin alphabet approximates, I’d say “aw” is pretty perfect. Because I think most accents will pronounce “thought” as if you add a t to “thaw”. It’s just that what that means in terms of the actual articulation varies a lot.

So, Americans with the cot-caught merger will pronounce it with the “cot” vowel, which is what I was trying to get across. UK/Aus/NZ don’t all pronounce it the same as each other, but do for the most part pronounce it with the same vowel as they would use for the word “or”. And “thaw”, in our non-rhotic accents, is the same as Thor.

So “aw” works either way. Nice find!

Yeah o on its own is definitely unclear. I meant o as in “cot”. (As in the American cot-caught merger.)

I feel “ah” would be a better shorthand for the vowel in “palm” or “bra”, or “car” in non-rhotic accents.

thought - ah

?

thought - or; if you pronounce it the UK/Aus/NZ way

thought - o; if you pronounce it with a general American accent

As for others:

• thorough - uh (schwa)
• hiccough - up

Part of being a monopoly is being anticompetitive

No it’s not. Being hit with antitrust laws requires first being a monopoly, but the monopoly state exists merely by virtue of size within the industry.

Edit: to be clear the only point I am making here is in relation to that definition you provided. Nothing more.

Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down

Umm, what? Apple was always going to move to USB-C. The EU regulations at most hastened that by a couple of years. Their tablets and even laptop computers were using USB-C before the EU even enacted that legislation. It was only a matter of time.

But back on the subject at hand, this is nothing like that sort of bullying. This is a company being asked to build more infrastructure at their own expense, and then use that infrastructure to place its own users at risk. They’ve made a simple calculation that it’s better for their bottom line and their reputation to choose not to comply, and instead pull out of a few small markets.

There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.

It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.

If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.

This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?

I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.