📛Maven

Alt Gr is something else. Non-english keyboards use it all day every day for typing their charactersets.

It could probably replace the right OS key, though.

I pressed it like, 20 minutes ago? It’s a pretty normal part of a lot of coding workflow, not to mention browsing, accessing context menu keyboard shortcuts without having to move your hand to the mouse for one buttonpress.

Oh, I didn’t realize. I am in Canada, I turned them off a few months ago after my third amber alert this year for someone at the far end of the province (how likely am I to be able to help someone a 30 hour drive away???) and haven’t gotten one since, but it must just be coincidence. That’s annoying.

Again, they are IMPOSSIBLE to turn off through general device settings

I don’t know about your phone, but at least in mine, they can in fact be turned off in general device settings. There’s a “Wireless emergency alerts” section in the options, under which you can individually toggle Extreme Alerts, Severe Alerts, Amber Alerts, and Tests

The body spray is Axe. And both spellings are accepted for the tool, with axe being the common spelling and ax being the american, so it’s not a matter of correct or not.

Every time I explain this to someone, it seems like another-- hey, wait a minute!

Serial writing used to be a big thing, and even today there’s a reason for the popularity of fanfics and webnovels. Hell, remember Homestuck?

Okay, lets say I accept the thesis that Spotify is directly to blame for the demise of physical media and the rise of streaming. In the current moment, what is Spotify supposed to do that would satisfy you?

For every dollar I pay to Spotify for their music service, Spotify sees 33 cents of it. Much of that goes to running the service that people want access to. The label takes the other 67 cents. They pass about 2 cents of it on to the artists.

Let’s go full fantasyland, say Spotify cuts their own take entirely and somehow subsidizes the entire thing. The label is now making the full dollar, a full 150% of what they were making before. Well, is that better for artists? 150% of what they were making before is 3 cents on the dollar. Is that a solution? No, it’s barely a difference.

Let’s say Spotify triples sub prices so they can take only 10% for infrastructure. Most of their current subscribers won’t pay that, but let’s just pretend. Is 5.3 times what the artists were making before an acceptable amount? Six cents on the dollar? Weird Al would’ve made $60 off Spotify this year instead of $12. Is that satisfactory? Because that’s literally the most Spotify can do, even theoretically.

Spotify can’t solve the problem.

The problem is labels locking artists into contracts where the label gets to keep 90% or more of everything they make. Spotify has no say in that.

Conversely, if we go back to the current split, but have the labels share their cut with the artists 50/50, the artists are suddenly making 1650% what they were before. Snoop’d be taking almost a million dollars for his billion streams. These contracts made some shred of sense in the physical era, when you needed to own a studio and audio engineers and marketers and media factories to push and print a band, but even back then they were widely known to be exploitative. Nowadays, when any tiny town has a studio for rent and anyone can edit a killer track in their bedroom and go viral on social media? They’re a fucking joke.

The villain in this scenario is blindingly obvious, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a plant or a useful idiot.

Twix aren’t conjoined… Are you thinking of kitkats?

It was worse when I was a kid, in winter we had to heat the house to blistering on friday afternoons and just hope it stayed warm enough til sabbath ended (if it wasn’t, we had to get a non-Jewish friend to come turn the furnace on for a bit, and there was all sorts of rules about whether that was allowed too). And if you turned a light off at night by reflex, it stayed off. Nowadays there’s all sorts of “sabbath mode” gadgets lol

The really short version is that the jewish belief is that an omniscient god wrote the torah with the complete foreknowledge that people would be debating over its intent in edge cases for the rest of time, and so he wrote exactly what was necessary for rabbis to collectively come to the correct conclusions. If an interpretation would’ve been wrong, then god would’ve written that part differently.

Essentially it’s D&D rules lawyering

Unfortunately not, just normal elevators programmed to go up and down to each floor automatically at regular intervals rather than requiring any user input.

those loopholes are the fence around the Tora?

That is essentially correct. The torah itself is sacrosanct, and Rabbinic derivations are not seen as loopholes, so much as expert notes to aid in understanding the intent of the torah and accidentally violating the letter of the law. The really short version is, god is omniscient, and therefore knew when he spoke how his words would be interpreted for all time, and so if he didn’t want people to interpret them a certain way, he would’ve said something different. In other words, following the letter of the law is integral, but rules lawyering is not just allowed, it’s expected. There’s actually a famous jewish parable about a time rabbis exiled god himself from a debate because if he wanted to influence the proceedings, he should’ve done so in the torah.

“The torah says we can’t start a fire on the sabbath. But what counts as ‘fire’ or ‘starting’, exactly?” “The torah says we can’t carry a heavy object more than 4 cubits while outside our private domain on the sabbath. What counts as heavy? What is a private domain?”

To be fair, that’s pretty close to describing the Jewish faith. One fundamental tenet is that God put loopholes there on purpose, and it’s the rabbis’ duty to debate legalistically to extrapolate what he meant based on what he said. That’s why they’re called laws. (I was raised jewish, for the record)

One common one that most people have heard of by now since they went viral on youtube a couple years back, is eruvim. Since there’s a bunch of rules around how much effort you’re allowed to exert on the sabbath (e.g. you’re not allowed to move anything from inside your house to outside, or to carry anything heavy more than about half a meter while outside), people hang a wire, called an eruv (plural eruvim), encircling an area ranging from a small neighbourhood to several city blocks to the entire island of Manhattan, proclaiming it to be one big “home”, allowing practicing Jews to do anything they’re only allowed to do at home, anywhere inside its area.

Another fun one that has a lot of ramifications is that we’re not supposed to “start a fire” on sabbath, and rabbi have traditionally declared that turning something electrical on or off is “starting a fire”. Because of this, jewish hospitals have elevators that run constantly between floors so people can just walk on without actually pushing a button and causing a circuit to close. Or lightbulbs; for the longest time, the “solution” was just to leave your lights on all saturday in case you needed them, or maybe spring for electronic timers, or just get your goyim buddy to come over and turn em on for you, but with the modern prevalence of LED bulbs, there’s now jewish smart lights called “shabulbs” that have internal shutters which cover the LEDs without actually extingishing them, so you can turn it back “on” again without breaking the rules. Some places even sell ovens with a shabbat mode so they stay slightly warm all day and never turn all the way off, don’t show the display screen, and don’t turn on their internal lightbulb when you open them after sundown on friday! All this because there’s a rule against starting fires.

Maybe I got a bit off topic, but my point is, In some ways you might say that finding loopholes in Abrahamic law is practicing religion lol

I would hazard a guess that

1. this is just a picture of a “telephone with a handset”, not the specific thing they’re talking about, and

2. their phone has a removable “hook” that was removed and lost sometime in the past and they’re seeing the slot where it went

The “shoe” is the mount. “Hot” means powered, for things like flashes. “Cold” means unpowered, for things like tripods.

This is adorable

I’ve only known tiny vintage communicator for 5 minutes, but if anything happened to him, I’d torpedo the planet

I mean, yeah, when one party wants to put Jesus in the government, make being gay illegal, and deport nonwhite people, I’m not interested in being friends with anyone who supports that mission statement. I’m intolerant of intolerance.

I am paying a to-my-door delivery service to deliver things, to my door. I shouldn’t have to specify that I expect people to do the entire job and not just the easy part of it. If they don’t want to do the entire job, that too is a conversation for them to have with the company, not me.

Wowww, they have borg cubes! Two kinds! Good consolation prize!