English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:14

@Cerberus They used to cut ice out of Lake Geneva where I grew up from the late 1800s through the 1940s for delivery to fancy hotels in Chicago and Milwaukee and to people's home ice boxes. It got stored in big sawdust-protected warehouses to last past winter. Our lake is spring-fed and 163 feet deep, about 2x7 miles, so its clean water was ideal for this.

Cerberus

@tchrist Yeah, that sounds perfect.

Many houses still have ice-boxes.

tchrist

My grandparents' generation always calls the freezer in the fridge the ice box.

Cerberus

I think many people's closets were once ice-boxes, if they have those very thick doors and are in the cellar.

tchrist

We had a "root cellar" in the basement with thick walls and an unfinished floor.

Cerberus

@tchrist In Dutch, we still call a refrigerator an ijskast. To say koelkast betrays middle class.

@tchrist Ahh I've heard that term before, why root? Because roots might be visible?

tchrist

00:18

No, because it's where you overwintered your hard root vegetables. You have no power, remember.

I imagine given where you live you won't be stumped by the puzzle of how during the 1800s they got the giant ice blocks to the Chicago hotels before they melted.

There are two obvious answers.

But only one applies.

tchrist

00:30

I was thinking you might guess by canal, but if you can cut ice from the lake you probably can't navigate waterways. And anyway, the White River that comes out of Lake Geneva isn't really big enough for shipping until it hits the Fox River draining south to the Illinois River which flows south to the Mississippi away from Lake Michigan. They used the railroad cars to get the ice to the big coastal cities.

This was, of course, before cars or trucks, at least at first.

Tracing things is difficult when there is no governing body to guarantee uniqueness of names. It is perfectly common for towns, rivers, and lakes to each occur with duplicate names even within the same state. As a kid I grew up knowing that the White River drained into the Fox River, but I had always believed it was the Fox River that skirted the Wisconsin River at Portage and went north to Green Bay, not the Fox River that went south to the Illinois River and the Mississippi itself.

> There are 15,074 documented lakes in Wisconsin. [...] Many lakes have the same names, with 116 named Mud Lake.

Cerberus

@tchrist Ah OK, makes sense.

@tchrist I would have thought by sled or rolled on tree trunks to trains, depending on location and route?

tchrist

@Cerberus They used horses to get it to the train, yes.

Cerberus

They had all sorts of technologies that we have forgotten about.

tchrist

Dragging sleds.

Cerberus

Yes, of course horses would pull.

tchrist

00:42

The train station was about a half mile from the lake, but I don't know where they cut from. I'll ask my great-uncle on Wednesday when I see him.

Cerberus

So much time was once spent on things that now go automatically and very easily.

tchrist

But they got it done.

Robusto

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

That's just what we need.

tchrist

Did Musk steal her from Bezos?

Robusto

Dunno. This is undoubtedly Amazon's AI getting its LLM from the internet.

Oh, it cited Rumble.com, a right-wing fantasy site, as the source. So much for vetting.

CowperKettle

00:56

German of the Day: Einstellung -- Einstellung (German pronunciation: [ˈaɪ̯nˌʃtɛlʊŋ]) is the development of a mechanized state of mind. Often called a problem solving set, Einstellung refers to a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though better or more appropriate methods of solving the problem exist.

alphabet

01:13

@tchrist Speak for yourself. I'm within walking distance of three different supermarkets. My commute is a 15-minute walk. There's a train station ten minutes away. Granted, nowhere near as good as in Europe, but I don't need a car.

I don't even have a bike. I do need to take Ubers on occasion, though. Fortunately I have a very boring life and do not need to go many places other than work and the grocery store.

Cerberus

I almost never take a taxi, only once or twice a year, when I must visit some remote location in the country without buses.

Dannyu NDos

I often take Shurcle, a Korean transportation system which is an intermediacy between a taxi and a bus.

alphabet

Granted, I have epilepsy, and while I can safely drive now, I'd need to re-learn how. So I'm kind of forced into it.

Boston has much better public transit than other cities its size. Not Europe-level, though.

Cerberus

Of course public transportation is easier to finance in cities.

tchrist

How can you take a taxi to "some remote location in the country without buses"? Doesn't that cost you hundreds of dollars?

Or thousands, even?

Suppose you wanted to go from Denver to Grand Junction, two cities separated by the Rocky Mountains and 200 miles. The bus is maybe $60 and the train is around $100. It takes you 6 to 8 hours to get there, depending. Can you imagine how much a taxi would cost? You can drive it in under 4 hours by car, if you had one. I do not recommend a bike.

You couldn't pay for 8 hours of taxi ride (there and back again), could you? That would be exorbitant, I should imagine.

But it's very rare that there's connectivity between arbitrary towns here. I simply picked two that do have connections. Or you could fly and be there in a half hour. But it takes an hour to get to the airport, an hour to get checked in, etc.

For the most part, things like trains and buses are for within a metropolis only, not for getting between places in the country.

The cross-country routes for bus (Greyhound) and train (Amtrak) are very rare, and they only connect the very largest of metropolises. So you have to want to get somewhere that's along those routes.

It pretty much only works well for the starless metros in the far northeast.

Dannyu NDos

01:46

I take taxi only when I'm too lazy to switch bus routes.

tchrist

There just aren't buses except in dense urban areas. You could never run a route from one town to the next: people wouldn't take it and it would fail for lack of riders. There simply is no such thing as public transportation like that in most of the country. From my home town there are no buses or trains that take you anywhere at all, not to Milwaukee or to Chicago or to Madison or to Rockford, the four largest cities around it and with airports, let alone to the other little towns around it.

There are school buses, but that's it.

alphabet

Ok tchrist, we get it. You live in the wilderness.

tchrist

No, you don't get it at all.

That's not Wilderness. Southeastern Wisconsin is densely populated.

But there is no public transportation between one place and the next. It doesn't happen.

Have you never lived anywhere else than in the urban core?

alphabet

No it is not densely populated. There's a reason we call it flyover country.

Dannyu NDos

As a South Korean, that quite feels like a sad story.

tchrist

01:56

Are you being intentionally insulting, or unintentionally so?

You can tell it's densely populated by the horrible light pollution.

But really, there are people everywhere there.

alphabet

Not by my standards, much less by European ones.

I don't mean to be insulting, sorry if I came across that way.

tchrist

I couldn't care less about standards that demand suicide by rat.

"Flyover country" is fighting words.

alphabet

Claiming Southern Wisconsin is "densely populated" justifies my annoyance.

If you don't have apartment buildings, you are not in a densely populated area.

tchrist

Wow.

Live and learn, kid.

alphabet

Ah. It appears you live in "not technically wilderness."

tchrist

02:08

You don't even know what wilderness is. You have none.

alphabet

Yes, us urban sophisticates have no need for such things. If I do say so myself.

But please. Densely populated? Maybe by Wisconsin standards.

tchrist

As for density, Walworth County WI = 200 ppl/sq mile; Rock County 230; Kenosha County 224; Dane County 450. That's very very dense. The state of Colorado is around 55; New Mexico is about 17 ppl sq mile. Therefore southern Wisconsin is clearly densely populated. There are cars and roads and people absolutely everywhere.

You just live in a hell hole, so you can't compare.

And there is no wilderness whatsoever.

The only wilderness left in Wisconsin is a few dots way far up north, and not much of it.

alphabet

My county = 13,698 ppl/sq mi. If you think yours is densely populated... "There are people everywhere" isn't saying much.

When you take the population density of an entire state you're including the uninhabited (or uninhabitable) parts.

tchrist

Yeah, that's not liveable.

Boulder County is about 460 ppl/sq mile. It's full of people everywhere.

It also has actual, legal wilderness. Thank God.

I just have higher standards than you have. The wilderness is that standard.

alphabet

You do not know what "densely populated" is.

tchrist

02:20

I'm sorry that you don't understand anything.

Densely populated means you can see other people, hear them, smell them. You can't avoid them. They're everywhere you go, their sounds, their destruction.

It means they've paved over so much of the earth as to do injury to it.

Did you even know that the Milky Way can be seen by the naked eye? That stars can?

Many city people are unaware of this.

alphabet

Densely populated means you live in apartments.

Imagine trying to use Grindr in rural Wisconsin. "Yeah, see you in 45 minutes, just gotta dig my car out from under the snowdrift first." Now that sounds like hell.

tchrist

Children.

alphabet

What about them?

tchrist

Don't be so gross.

Cheap anonymous sex with strangers is why you live in a city? Now I know.

alphabet

Generally it's free, not cheap.

tchrist

02:30

I meant cheap as in degrading, not as in costly.

These are children's troubles. That's why I said that.

alphabet

Degrading? Now who's insulting who?

tchrist

Thanks for helping us understand what really matters to you.

alphabet

Quite welcome.

Michael Rybkin

@Cerberus Thank you for your reply.

Cerberus

03:02

@tchrist I take the train to a country train station, then take a taxi from there.

If I don't have much luggage, I rent a very cheap station bike instead.

They cost a few euros for a weekend.

CowperKettle