One major point is what exactly constitutes the national flag of Japan. Especially since it’s just a red circle on a white background, I could drop some spaghetti sauce on my shirt and end up wearing the flag. So, how is it legally different from a real flag?

According to the latest revision of the bill, the flag is defined as generally made of cloth or paper, primarily displayed on poles as a sign or decoration, and usable in real society. This means the Japanese flags in the virtual world are fair game, which is great news for my upcoming smartphone game Flag Blaster 3000.

It looks like there are ways around it, but yeah, that’s massively fucked up.

Selling it just means someone else’s safety is at risk.

I think it’s actually caused by the same thing- I have a broad English vocabulary, but don’t know what sounds most natural in this case.

For another derailment, I had a eureka moment several years ago when I wanted to say “time flies” in a German conversation, but didn’t know if you’d say it exactly the same or say “the time flies,” (it’s actually “time flees” in Latin and die Zeit flieht in German, so I would have been wrong either way), so I just said “tempus fugit” with a German accent and suddenly realized why so many nonnative but super advanced English speakers use the original versions of international phrases (mostly Latin, but also things like “qué será, será,” instead of the same without accents or even “whatever will be, will be,” or “hotelier/hôtelier,” instead of “front desk worker”).

That’s one of those “jokes” that says way more about the person telling it than the subject of it, in more ways than one.

I’m not sure what the terminology is in English, but in German, any language learned non-natively (so after the age of ~7) but in an immersion scenario is referred to as a second language (Zweitsprache), even if it’s the nth language where n>2. It actually indicates a greater mastery (especially in speaking) of the language than the other option: foreign language (Fremdsprache). My master’s program changed partway through from Deutsch als Fremdsprache to Deutsch als Fremd-/Zweitsprache in recognition of the fact that many of the graduates were going on to teach German in Germany.

Ironically, I’m a native English speaker, but I did my training in German, so I don’t know much technical terminology in English (as you can tell by the clunky-ass “immersion scenario” above; I don’t think “language bath” works in English, but I don’t know how to approach that sentence without conceptualizing immersion the way I would in German, as a Sprachbad so I ended up having to force a weird circumlocution).

The last time I bought a prepaid phone, I had to give them my identity to register it (not an eSIM), but you could just as easily drive three cities away and use a pay phone at a truck stop or train station (only places I see them anymore, and they’re often hidden away, but still there). Maybe take a cab from a nearby area to the truck stop to avoid linking your license plate with it? I’m honestly not sure if they’d put that much effort into solving it, but you could also probably ask to use the phone at a library and they’d let you (though it might not be private enough for you to make it a convincing call)

Yeah, there are a lot of potential business purposes for it falling on a Wednesday, it’s really just that I can’t imagine 4 am working as well or better than basically any other time of day for this.

Although laying a tenth of your staff off immediately before some of their benefits vest is also bound to disgruntle employees, so maybe it’s just hubris.

Not coming into work I totally get, but that’s why most companies do this on a Friday during the afternoon, cut off access during the conversation, and walk the person out, if they’re on site. Doing in the middle of the week and compensating by giving the employees a WFH day is an abnormal choice, but whatever, maybe their pay periods start on Thursdays or something.

Announcing layoffs during the middle of the night and thereby ensuring that your retained employees are less productive on Wednesday (if not the rest of the week, we’re generally affected by sleep disruption a lot more and longer than we realize and having everyone a little bit affected will magnify the effects across the entire company) and the newly laid off former employees receive that news when they’re not as emotionally stable as if they had an uninterrupted night of sleep is bizarre.

To be fair, if I had to choose an nonhuman animal to control a machine gun, it’d probably be an elephant.

My dad tried that one with me as a child. It backfired, because I am now a registered communist.

Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am in their local time zone, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday.

What an insane way to do things. How is ensuring that the majority of your employees either stay up way too late or wake up really early (after a likely restless night’s sleep) smack in the middle of the week going to improve efficiency in any way?

Should be a violet wand

Weird that they didn’t just give them access to parking lots, that would have been way faster.

On accident.

It’s weird to witness the spread of acceptance of this variant. I want to be a descriptivist and I generally succeed, but it’s more difficult for me to maintain neutrality towards grammatical forms that I myself was corrected about as a kid.

It includes grooming, so if you or your date paid $75 for a wax, that gets rolled in.

The “experiment” is one you conduct on yourself, it’s not for thinking about a process and using your imagined results as the basis of further study. It’s very useful in a number of non scientific fields, and it can serve as an aid in scientific education though, so it shouldn’t be written off generally.

The paper clip thought experiment is a punchy, memorable example of the conflict between what input you give to a computer and what the computer interprets from that. The goal is for people who hear it to remember that they need to be thoughtful about what exactly they want and precise in their phrasing when they’re programming or training an AI.

Tbh, I think we’re going the Russia route. I wish we could have as graceful a transition out of being a superpower as the UK (I’m not calling theirs objectively graceful, just less erratic and batshit).

Is it traceable to the account? I foresee a lot of corporate sabotage otherwise.

As long as he’s not the calculus teacher…

It’s not as comfortable, certainly, but there are very overweight people with active jobs (my husband’s a butcher, and this describes about a third of the people working in his shop- they’re on their feet and walking around, lifting half hogs and doing really physical work).

For most people, as long as you stay active, you can continue to be active. If you’re completely or mostly inactive, it will take some time to gradually build up your endurance, and that’s certainly more difficult, the more weight you have to move, but walking is very low impact. I’m not suggesting that two people with BMIs of 22 and 42, respectively, would have identical walking endurance, but it’s not uncommon in my very walkable German town to encounter very overweight people who walk a ton.

Walking is obviously better at burning calories than driving, but we’re really efficient walkers and it’s not very difficult to eat enough to be obese while using walking as your primary mode of travel. If you walk at a moderate pace with little incline for 2 hours a day at 150kg, you’ll likely burn between 700-1000 calories (way more information is needed to get an exact number), and you can completely neutralize that by eating an order of fries with mayo, or a container of Ben and Jerry’s.

Normally it’s too much fiber for me, but there’s a French version stewed in broth that’s amazing. It’s called soupe du journal