English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:48 AM

@Cerberus I don't have the numbers but almost certainly yes. Fewer students than ever smoke, and I'd think we have more smokers than Europe but fewer than the US (relatively)

@Robusto I think the percentage must have been very different among different age groups, and still is.

Very disproportionately, rural areas have more smokers, is my impression

It may have been 60% among young people in the fifties, for example, and 1% among those older than 60.

@M.A.R. That's great.

So the development seems similar to here.

@Robusto I love oranges but I recall a few times when I subsequently saw US news and changed my mind

Trump is affecting my health

I think America has fewer smokers than most of Europe, though.

12:51 AM

@Cerberus I think the tobacco dramas died down and people sobered up and kinda accepted the fact that smoking ruins lungs. Maybe the effects are more visible and the media has succeeded

If they accepted it about vaccination and masks, the world would have been a happier place.

People are stupid.

I mean, believing in a flat Earth is equally stupid but much less harmful

That's a tobacco store on a pueblo I ride through. Pueblos are tribal lands. Lotta smokers among Native Americans.

Well IIRC the way corporations made cigar was much more harmful

@M.A.R. In what respect?

12:54 AM

It had polonium and some dangerous crap

Polonium?

Yeah, I dunno which brand they'd analyzed but I saw it somewhere I could trust

Well, that's definitely a carcinogen.

Without even trying

But if you're ruining your lungs with truly herbal narcotics, maybe you'd die less painfully

Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko

But isn't that gilding the lily? I mean, tobacco and all the chemicals they put into it are carcinogenic enough without adding Polonium to it.

The Russians use it for assassinations.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and KGB. After speaking critically about what he saw as corruption within the Russian government, he fled retribution to the UK, where he remained a vocal critic of the Russian state. Six years after fleeing, he was poisoned by two Russians in a suspected assassination. On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized. He died three weeks later, becoming the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. Litvinenko's allegations about misdeeds of the FSB...

12:57 AM

Probably a side effect of not caring rather than intentionally adding it there

IIRC cigars have a myriad of poisons (I see crazy numbers like 200 or 4000), the thing is they have this minimum permissible exposure in foodstuff and air and the like, but you'd be ever slightly higher than that, everyday, for the entire duration that you're smoking

Technically you're not supposed to inhale the smoke from cigars.

That's what does the trick. And consequently there's also a jillion diseases that occur at a higher rate in smokers.

Probably cancers we haven't even investigated clearly

When you see a list of all the shit that's in cigarettes, including hydrogen cyanide, it isn't any wonder.

> Cigarette smoke contains over 7,000 chemical compounds, including arsenic, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, lead, nicotine, carbon monoxide, acrolein, and other poisonous substances

@Robusto well yeah, for the exact same reason. It's like playing with a pile of asbestos

I remember my father had a sheet of asbestos he put underneath his stereo's tube amplifier. I touched it. I'm still alive. Probably it was only a serious threat if you inhaled the fibers.

1:04 AM

Well yeah

But it's one more instance of the cure being worse than the disease. The asbestos was used for fireproofing.

A: How did Pirates of the Caribbean play in China considering that the movie depicts skeletons?

There are probably a few things around in my neighborhood that might be made of asbestos still

9

I come from China, I can share some information from the Chinese perspective. In the case of movie theaters, except for Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 3, 4, 5 are all released in cinemas in mainland China. The release time of Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 3 is later than...

@M.A.R. Good.

Has there ever been an idea in history executed so poorly as internet censorship?

Or digital censorship, for that matter

Well, it's like damming one tenth of a river's flow.

1:07 AM

You can still find many uncensored "immoral sites" here, while sometimes a simple online graphing tool gets censored.

i.stack.imgur has only recently been unblocked

99% SFW

I'm almost certain it's the same in Russia

Yeah, comprehensive censorship is just not possible, unless you accept 99% false positives or something.

Heck, there are plenty of anti-government stuff lying about. You'd think they care about those

Can't stop everything.

But they only censored BBC and those uh, VAO, VOA?

Basically, it only stops people not technical or motivated enough to get around it.

1:10 AM

@Robusto well a few months ago they rendered most VPNs useless

Who did?

The censors

Probably more sophisticated than Russia now

Russia is sophisticated enough, but their sophistication is used for meddling in other countries' politics and for ransomware attacks and the like. The real censorship state is, of course, China.

Heh, the other day I was doing some statistical analysis of stuff and I didn't have the calculator close by, so I tried a site for calculating Standard Deviation and such. It was censored

lolwut?

1:13 AM

I checked with a VPN that works, and it was just a calculator

They probably thought Standard Deviation referred to some kind of deviant sex.

@M.A.R. Probably only temporarily so?

Even the ads weren't risque

I'm trying to imagine risqué ads for a calculator ...

Is alcohol outlawed in Iran?

@Cerberus No, I think generally the level of IP obfuscation necessary to bypass the filters now has increased, I'm of course just a layman so I talk about it like it's an RPG

1:15 AM

In Dutch, subtract is the same as jerk off: aftrekken.

Af = off, down.

Trekken = pull.

Most VPNs in Google Play Store don't work even now.

@Cerberus well we figured that one out. Don't tell them or they'd remove math from the curriculum

@M.A.R. Ah, OK, but, as long as VPNs adapt to that obfuscation, they will function again?

@M.A.R. Quite possibly.

Subtract my root, baby.

Few have, I still can find a handful of working VPNs

In China, it's even harder.

Some are too obfuscating and bridgy so they're rendered useless with the very sluggish internet speeds

@Cerberus yeah which is why I'm only comparing it to Russia. China is a whole other level

1:18 AM

> We found these to be the best VPNs for China:

ExpressVPN Consistently works in China. Fast and works well with Netflix and other blocked sites.
NordVPN Recently working in China and offers good value
Surfshark Works in China and unblocks Netflix US
VyprVPN Own all their own servers for excellent speed and uptime
Hotspot Shield Fast speeds, cheap and works in China.
PrivateVPN Works in China with Stealth Mode turned on
Astrill Expensive but can work in China.

Hotspot Shield doesn't work in Iran, for example

Express is freemium but you can purchase a license or subscription here. Unsure about Nord

Tangentially related

Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.

@M.A.R. And it probably isn't even on github.

Haha.

All too true.

I think there was this drama with Node.js a while ago?

Where there were dependencies built upon dependencies, all depending on one three-line library. Then the developer of that library removed it because of this fight, and all the Internet went down.

@Cerberus I didn't hear about that.

> Rage-quit: Coder unpublished 17 lines of JavaScript and “broke the Internet”
Dispute over module name in npm registry became giant headache for developers.

arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/…

1:33 AM

@Cerberus Well, it's not surprising.

When you add dependencies to dependencies to dependencies, all it takes is one little fuck-up to snowball into a gigantic clusterfuck.

Yeah.

It is odd, though, that those dependencies can be pulled out of existing projects.

The days of fun programming are over. It's all a rat's nest now. And it has been for about eight or ten years.

I would want to just copy the library, rather than depending on its existence elsewhere, outside my control.

Well, but you can't. You have to rely on others.

And often that means you have to debug others' code.

It's like that when browsers introduce bugs that affect front-end code.

Those get fixed pretty quick, usually, but I remember pretty serious problems—are you listening, Microsoft?—that went unfixed for years, and you had to know arcane fixes for them.

I copy a library, rather than depending on something that can be pulled.

Apparently, NPM is not designed like this.

But I think it should be.

1:44 AM

But if you have thousands of downstream users then everyone has to always keep copies current, and it's a mess.

I've relied on CDNs for a long time.

If you copy the library to your own package which your users download, then it can't be pulled by someone else.

For example, I can either copy the jQuery library and deliver it myself or rely on a CDN call. I choose the latter because it's just more convenient.

It also means the library gets cached in the users' browsers.

Without me having to deliver the whole thing ever.

I still think delivering it yourself is more...Robust.

haha

Færd

6:28 AM

6:52 AM

our world needs a lot of cleaners. So sentencing people committing obscene crimes to do cleaning work is a good idea.

7:29 AM

7:40 AM

how to solve hunger trouble and sleepiness trouble at the same time?

SmokeDetector

9:13 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at end of answer, potentially problematic ns configuration in answer (62): "These sort of things": is it grammatical? (2,670,000 hits on Google) by Raymond Andersen on english.SE

10:27 AM

Are you sleepy?

I feel quite so.

Are you wet?

Somewhat, because it's raining.

How to make your socks dry when in a mart?

10:54 AM

I wrote a question in a sleeping concerned website last Friday night,and got an email from them today.

I asked them how to deactivate my neural system so that I can sleep when I am tired.

SmokeDetector

11:39 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with a link in answer, link at end of answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer (142): "In/on the App Store" by saqib khan on english.SE

12:42 PM

Do you feel so hot?

12:56 PM

Do you care to be heated by the doctor?

Do we need to worry about that?

Since doctors should be kind

Sorry, I meant Do you care to be hated by the doctor?

1:30 PM

@CaptainBohemian What, what does that mean?

Oh, "hated"

Well, doctors often do their job regardless.

A nurse hating you can be much more painful though

tchrist

1:50 PM

America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them.

3:29 PM

@M.A.R. I feel nurses seem to always be gentle, not knowing if they are since or pretending. But doctors can be sombre or grim.

Xanne

5:02 PM

@CaptainBohemian Where do you live?

6:45 PM

yesterday, by Robusto

@tchrist: You can see the difference in air quality today. Notice that the Jemez mountains are almost totally obscured by whatever fire smoke is in the air.

I just finished a shower 🚿.

7:09 PM

Why is the cover of the gutter filled with whorls?

7:29 PM

nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/…

DUN DUNN DUUUUUUNNN

So. What does this mean? This can't be shrugged and undermined anymore, right?

@M.A.R. I don't know. I really don't. I honestly don't expect anything to come of it, given the Republicans' unwillingness to live up to their oaths to the Constitution.

7:43 PM

Still, the report wouldn't have gotten out of the Senate if the Republicans didn't wish it.

Rats deserting a sinking ship? Who knows?

> A girl came into my bookstore and asked "What are the chances you have a book on curing eating disorders with religion?" I told her "Slim to Nun"

Xanne

@M.A.R. There’s also the Diet of Worms.

RegDwigнt

8:47 PM

@CowperKettle I believe literally none of these things.

What I do believe is that this is a public place and that there are laws against libel.

@CowperKettle of course there is a counter-argument to that woman. You could easily supply half a dozen. None of them, however, are "that's just your opinion, I don't care".

11:10 PM

@Robusto Or perhaps some Republicans would actually prefer Democrats winning over Russians.