Do you have preferences about which text to speech engine that you use?
“gluteal clefts”.
I don’t know why I find that so funny.
Gin, I think.
It’s debatable about whether this counts for the question, but I’m commenting because this wasn’t a case of “drank too much, was very sick” kind of story, which many people have about alcohol. Basically I was at a small party and I downed a shot of clear liquid that I believed to be vodka. It was not.
I didn’t even know there was any gin in the house, I hadn’t seen anyone drinking it. I wasn’t keen on the taste of gin before, but the unexpectedness of the taste was so bad I was sick. People were concerned because they worried I was overly-drunk, but it was entirely the flavour that did it. Now, anything that tastes or smells remotely similar to gin makes me feel sick.
Though even if we are counting gin as a food here, this is very much gin not being consumed in its normal way - I have never met anyone who would choose to do a shot of neat gin.
Fracking already is unprofitable now, if we account for the slimy corporate practices used to avoid paying for spent wells to be properly plugged.
Propublica has done a lot of good reporting on this topic, this is just one article of many, but this one explains aforementioned corporate slime quite well https://www.propublica.org/article/the-rising-cost-of-the-oil-industrys-slow-death
I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing.
It’s sad that I can’t look at a beautiful photo of a UK river without wondering how much sewage has been discharged there.
In 2023, the sewer right near where this photo was taken spilled for a total of 299.25 hours, which is quite low compared to many other locations.
I worry about the long term state of UK rivers.
If anyone from the UK reads this, https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map has info on how people can help
Some android phones have the ability to long press on a notification, click on settings, and alter what kinds of notifications you receive. I’ve had a few instances like you describe, but where I’ve been able to turn off “special deals” or whatever. I think implementation of this is done by the app developer though, because I’m sure I’ve had some apps that had no useful settings. Example screenshot of Gmail settings:
Now you’re older, how frequently do you think you were right in your comparisons?
Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy
Listen, I don’t want to be in a pointless internet argument; I could answer your question by referencing some of the things that go into deciding what reasonable adjustments should be put in place, legally speaking (in particular, your question is getting at the “how much is reasonable” aspect of the problem"), but I only want to engage in this conversation if you’re actually interested to learn.
(On that front, I apologise for the sharp tone of my previous comment, because that certainly wasn’t conducive to conversation.)
Okay, well get back to me when you have some lived experience of deafness and maybe we can have a productive discussion then, seeing as my point seems to have gone completely over your head.
Much like many disabilities, deafness isn’t a hard binary between hearing Vs deaf, but a spectrum dependent on many factors. For example, someone may have hearing loss in a particular frequency range, which may affect their ability to hear lyrics. I would also expect that someone’s relationship to music may be impacted by whether they were born deaf or acquired deafness later in life.
The point that other are making about this as an accessibility problem is that a lot of disability or anti-discrimination has provisions for rules or policies that are, in and of themselves, neutral, but affect disabled people (or other groups protected under equality legislation) to a greater degree than people without that trait. In the UK, for example, it might be considered “indirect discrimination”.
You might not need lyrics to listen to music, but someone who is deaf or hard of hearing is likely going to experience and enjoy music differently to you, so it may well be necessary for them.
Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.
And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them
A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.
You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1
(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll
Oh damn, I just lost the game too, and now I’m thinking about the game as if it were a virus - like, I reckon we really managed to flatten the curve for a few years there, but it continues to circulate so we haven’t been able to eradicate it
Finland is very good for people who hate smalltalk.
I love stories like this because it makes me reflect on random people I’ve seen who have stuck in my memory for years who probably never noticed me. Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this
I agree, this is important to emphasise. I don’t want to ever slip into the mindset of dehumanising Trump in the same way that him and his allies dehumanise people like me, because I think that drive to so thoroughly otherize political opponents is a key driver of fascistic thinking. Having empathy for people like Trump (and those that follow him) doesn’t excuse their actions or beliefs, but I think it’s important