Yes. It would be necessary to live a modern life, given almost everything we use/eat comes from some unethical source. We abstain from the things that are important to us, according to our values. Lyrically if a song does not itself promote [terrible thing] then the music can be separated from an artist that does.

However if it is important to you that your listening does not generate income for those people, don’t listen to their music in apps (eg Spotify, who pays based on plays), nor on their official YT channels (which are likely monetised).

Also, be mindful that playing/listening to it around others is a form of ‘conspicuous consumption’, one of many ways our actions become ‘Word of Mouth’ advertising. This may lead others to believe you support the artists specifically, and depending on their values, they may be derisive or hostile. (Or, they agree with [terrible thing] and believe you are alike.)

Dual-weilding plushies

Oh no, the mines will be so bad for my authentic supple human skin, and my favourite mammilian activity of breathing air

Ahh, just normal body variance. Guess I’ve been brainwashed into expecting pitcher’s mitts lmao

I like em dashes. I learned the alt code for en and em dashes just so I could use them easily on a computer. There is a difference between a hypen and an en dash, and a double-hyphen is but a simulacrum of the em dash!

• Hyphen is just for double-barrelled words
• An en dash is useful – at least sometimes – for inserting side thoughts
• ah boy I sure hope an em dash doesn’t interrupt m—

But let’s be real, I type kinda formally, like an AI, sooo

This is absolutely a meaningless tangent but why do his hands look so small in this photo. I thought he was holding them tiny novelty hands at first.

Is this a focal length illusion? Am I just used to photos with a short focal distance and this is a zoomed shot or something?

Seems obvious to me that if you deport a lit of people, there are less people to deport. That’ll be a reason why so many justifications for deporting additional citizens.

Perhaps it’s likely that less people are entering the country now than were a year ago, what with the conditions there and all.

Cash is expensive for stores to manage, count, and sort. That’s the actual reason they want it gone, not tracking. Sure, we’re being tracked, but that’s not the point. Thanks to our phones, our personal lives have already been completely disseminated.

Cashless is about making things easier for businesses that struggle with handling cash. A cashless society acts like consuming goods from those businesses is the only reason money exists, and that’s wrong.

Cards themselves have been very useful. They’re much lighter and harder to steal money than carrying hundreds in cash in your pockets.

It’s cashless that is a concern, not the existence of cards.

What happens when an abused person has to escape a partner/parent who controls all the money? Where do they go, what food and board are they getting?

How do small traders set up garage sales and marketer stands, especially if they don’t want to give cuts of their money to corporate giants Eftpos and Visa?

How do those with impulsively/memory issues (such as ADHD, dementia, and teenagers) manage the abstraction of their money, leading them to accidentally overspending/overdrafts?

How do you spot a stranger in need a bus fare home?

How do we support the street artists and buskers?

…I don’t like the idea of cashless. My country already uses eftpos and visa as the norm (so ofc we all pay those overseas companies their fees). But while wide accepting of the card is good and useful, true cashless has issues of usability. It’s not just ‘something something government tracking spending’.

Vulnerable people fall through the gaps, and it means people make a lot more consumer transactions and a lot fewer personal ones.

And yet, those who want easy access to guns argue its to protect themselves from tyrannical power. They are also not doing that. Perhaps, in part, because the power disparity between military, police, and a civilian gun owner makes personal guns little more than display pieces.

Gun ownership is a hobby. Most of the dialogue around them is theater. Those who enjoy guns own far more than is needed for ‘defense’, because it’s enjoying ownership that they’re actually defending.

Phone proximity is used, so if your phone is in proximity to his, the algorythm can note a relationship between his interests and yours- or even the interests of people who also interact with him.

It’s possible his behaviour is learned from a narcissistic parent, or that enough of his customers are involved in learning about narcissism. OR you also mightve been at a Cafe near a clinic for long enough your phone tried to ping the office wifi, and you just noticed it because of your interactions with him.

Google also uses your relationships, so maybe a person you know is interested, or you watched a video about (blank) and a lot of those viewers also watched narcissism videos. Your brain is asking the connection to the contractor because it’s an intuitive logical leap.

Phones spy on us in a dozen different ways, mostly pattern recognition. They track location without GPS (by recording wifi pings), and track interests without the microphone. So they can claim they’re not tracking those specific things while still gathering scary amounts of data.

It is more accurate, but for most people it probably makes it more work. If most [Group A] need [Item A], it gets labelled that way so they can be sectioned that way. It probably would be better, especially for more uncommon shapes, to use measurements. But most people don’t want to do that for everything, they want an easy answer so they can go home. A lot of women I know have never bothered to get their bra size professionally measured, and that’s a readily available service that saves so much literal pain.

Reminds me of mens/womens deoderant. IIRC the real difference is that one is creamier (for body hair) and the other is powdery (for shaved skin). So sometimes men might want women’s deoderant or vice versa, and the labelling CAN obfuscate that.

I recommend re-lacing. Autocorrect changed it to ‘replace’, but changing how your shoes are laced really helps. I have a very high arch, and found that I didn’t actually need much arch support in the shoe itself, I just needed the tongue not to be pushing down on it. It means the shoes now feel tight and secure around my ankle and toe, I don’t have to go up a size to fit my arch. Much more comfortable!

Feel like giving it a try?

It’s normal for men to have wider feet, with a wider and longer toebox compared to the length of the foot. Length is only one dimension of several. (Though a lot of people don’t think to re-lace* their shoes for arches.)

It’s unclear how much of that is upbringing. The toebox length is gendered, but toe and foot width go up wen spending a lot of time barefoot, and toe width goes down in pointed shoes that can eve n make toes ‘tuck’ and cause bunions.

A women’s 9 1/2 double-wide fits me about the same as a plain Men’s 7. Women’s dress shoes are rarely in wide, and NEVER double-wide. Though I’ve found success with Aussie brands because going barefoot is normal there and so the shoes are often wider for everyone. We’re also seeing the toebox become a more slanted natural foot shape, instead of the weird point symmetrical one.

Bodies can be complicated, and one size/shape isn’t for everyone. The way we live and dress absolutely changes the shoes we need, too.

Sure, but the children are people; they do not have the experience of wisdom to make choices and rely on adults to teach them wisdom from their experience.

It’s not your job, but those kids are the ones paying for their parents’ value system, and so the adults teaching them aren’t teaching them well. Children are people, and are being let down. Theyre not kitset projects for parents.

One day those people will be expected to make their own choices, and the only foundation they’ll have to decide with is what they’re taught now. It’s not your job, but it’s everybody’s civic responsibility to contribute to a healthier collective society, and children are a part of that.

That implies that kids are making an executive decision to stick things up their noses, and search for options. That can be true, like if their noses are really itchy; but it can also just whatever nearby miscellany they happen to be curious about.

But really, its the shape is relevant. Because these are cases that require a parent takes them to ED, meaning they couldnt solve it themselves. A coin that goes up and turns flat is muuuch harder to get out than something with points or edges to grab, like a LEGO man. Perhaps it’s not that kids are sticking less things up there, it’s that coins are more likely to get trapped up there.

I can’t tell you the minds of toddlers man, but if ED’s records say less toddlers are going to ED for nose-junk, then they probably are, and we can speculate on why that is.

Well tbf I think most ER visits from kids are these kinda incidents. So if you reduce the rate of these incidents, you significantly reduce kids ER visits overall

Inflame was the original word for ‘to ignite’ - to set aflame, to set on fire. We still see if in metaphor, ‘inflammatory argument’ or ‘inflamed passion’, for example.

So an inflammable object was one you can inflame (or enflame). The word ‘flammable’ came about later, probably to reduce confusion for people who thought it mean ‘un-flameable’.

These days we use flammable on labels for safety reasons, but inflame is still peppered throughout language in metaphor and medicine, and both are correct.

My cpuntry doesn’t have Craigslist, the ‘eBay’ alternative that used to be mainstream has become a dropseller’s market. Marketplace is the only secondhand market platform here, basically. Warts and all. Though some people will create Facebook groups to buy and trade in, for some reason.