I can’t imagine getting worked up about it either, but then the whole mildly infuriating deliberate oxymoron turn of phrase is that it’s something that should only really be a little annoying but which nonetheless is really quite annoying. It’s a type of silent frustration where you feel it, but you don’t really express it or visibly react.

In terms of what should they have put on these screens? If they felt they absolutely had to do this or really thought it might help make people’s situations feel even a modicum of improvement, then the glib messages could maybe have focussed on something other than gratitude as their common theme. It hardly seems like the appropriate time to bring that up. By their nature, any cheesy and overly broad phrase is probably going to have a sadly ironic and patronising tone to it in the circumstances but maybe something like “hang in there” or just about anything except what they went with has got to better.

To keep you busy so they can show up during the call and claim no one was there.

I pass butter.

Gee that Barbara sure does manage to be insightful on a lot of different topics. I try not be presumptuous but sometimes I really do feel surprised that she has so much more depth to her than her modelling career might make you think. Truly a polymath.

Can attest, did pee in it.

Maybe you should start the long process of manually changing everything to grammatically correct, parseable nonsense, comment by comment. Make it a long term project.

I once had a flight in two legs where the first leg was operated by a well known established airline for an okay ish price and the second leg was operated by a “sister” airline that did shorter ultra low cost flights. The first flight had infotainment screens and a few other minor comforts that are standard for economy flights these days and make it just slightly more bearable, whereas the 2nd flight had no screens, no food without paying separately and just made as uncomfortable as possible on purpose.

During the first flight, you could use their crappy as screens on the back of the chair in front or connect to their local network with your own device, which was free and didn’t involve any shenanigans like ads or accounts. I made use of the service which worked by entering a URL printed on the back of the chair in front. On the second leg, there was no screens and no apparent mention of an onboard entertainment offering through your own devices but there was some sort of QR code which I assume was supposed to take you to a payment portal or something but which didn’t even work. It was a different URL to the first flight.

I still had my tab open from the first flight though, and when I accidentally opened that tab on the second flight, I got access to the seemingly hidden entertainment service with no payment or logins or anything. Seems that sometimes it’s just a question of knowing the magic URL.

Oh wow that’s such a good idea. I’d probably still just continue not ever watching yt shorts since they are generally really bad but if I ever for some reason need to see one I’d love to be able to actually have video player controls on it.

They got weirdly expensive for obscure reasons. People have always shit on them for the quality of their food but I’d wager that like myself those critics have probably had their fair share of golden arches to be able to make that assesment and until recent times probably continued to do so all whilst grumbling about the quality. I’m not disputing the low quality, it has always been a product of economic efficiency and not culinary prowess, but nevertheless they have for many decades represented a kind of minimum standard that almost everyone was willing to settle for because of low prices, consistency and ubiquity. Now they have abandoned the cheap part of this triangle. I don’t understand what’s going on in old Ronald’s bright red head these days because if you don’t deliver on the cheap part of the equation then there’s not much else left to recommend McDonalds. They’re still consistent-ish (even that’s kind of going by the wayside) but that doesn’t say much when they’re consistently bottom of the barrel whilst also being expensive to top it all off. Ubiquity is still a strong draw, they’re kinda crappy, and overpriced but they’re still here wherever that is in the world, but ultimately that only works so long as nothing else is here too since they no longer compete on price.

It’s a weird strategy to have opted for having invented and perfected the streamlined factory food restaurant model that took over the world. It worked miraculously well, why would you fuck with arguably the most important part of the trifecta? Evidently it wasn’t the masterplan of super smart business minds that can see well past my simple analysis because lo and behold, if you sell cheap crap and then raise the price so it becomes expensive crap, you tend to get fewer takers.

It is necessary to build more housing stock, but if you simply do that alone while there is still significant incentive to buy investment properties then the developers will obviously sell to those that pay and it’s typically those with means that will pay, which tends to be people who can afford multiple properties more than those who are struggling to afford one place to live in. Obviously if you’re a developer looking for a return on your investment you’ll price according to what those people will pay so that housing stock is quickly swallowed up mostly by landlords who will want to recoup their investment by charging higher rents and so on.

I got 7 and even then that’s only because half way through I began to notice a theme on the really obscure ones with long names.

These are ridiculous, they often bear no resemblance at all to their supposed meaning wtf? Slanted closed eyes with steam coming out the nostrils isn’t anger it’s… “Triumph”!?

What? Why?

Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how it shakes out in time or in the reality behind the pr piece but the article does specifically mention that that this extends to employees too and that was actually what the quote in the headline was in reference to specifically.

This action was so fucked up and beyond my list of shitty things that the US might do that it honestly didn’t occur to me and so when reading the headline I found it confusingly phrased but thought maybe it somehow meant there was some hint of support for the ICC’s decision and warrants which would have been amazing. Imagine the rollercoaster for me when they actually managed to surprise me with a decision and stance worse than I could have imagined.

Sounds like you unintentionally fit the brief anyway.

At least it’s broadly kind of informative in description of some of the categories before the ‘continued’ section. That may seem a low bar but I guess efforts to educate on this topic have set such a drastically low bar in decades past that it’s encouraging to see it lifted slightly off the floor. The categorisation scheme takes a bit of a nosedive when they get to marijuana which for some reason has its own category, also for all the drugs and categories they describe they make the mistake of failing to describe the effects that make people want to use the drugs in the first place. I can see why they might be hesitant to do that, you don’t want to actively encourage people to use the drugs, but I remember when getting similar lessons on the topic thinking that it was an obvious omission because it’s hardly like people took the drugs, repeatedly, because of how much they enjoyed the “impairment” especially as I has my own first hand experience running directly counter to it. The failure to address the positive sensations taking such drugs produces that have caused people throughout all of human history to seek drugs out, damages the credibility of the information since it clearly sought to discourage at the cost of objectivity.

I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.

Given your experience and the way they made you feel from the practitioners’ sheer ignorant and biased approach I would have thought you’d definitely be the first to call the program “dumb” as the very least of the criticisms to be levelled at it.

Holy shit.

Yes, but in the context of the comment to which I’m replying, I say scare quotes because the commenter has interpreted editorial intent behind the choice of how and where the punctuation has been used beyond simply establishing that the word is a direct quote.

While I kind of disagree with what that intent is, hence my reply to them, I agree with the original commenter that there is reason to believe the quotation marks served more purpose in that headline than simple punctuation. As a quote, it’s an odd choice, given it’s a single word long, conveys nothing that the sentence without the marks couldn’t have said and used to complete a sentence that is otherwise entirely constructed by the author.

I and the person to which I replied have interpreted this choice as a form of editorial commentary upon the reasoning behind the policy being discussed in the article. In the original commenter’s case they’re taking it to mean that the article’s author thinks the premise of iphones having security problems is so absurd that the people claiming such must be crazy (which the commenter obviously does not agree with). I don’t take from it such an extreme implication, although I do read some kind of implied commentary and given that this security concern has nuance to it that a headline would struggle to convey, I have suggested perhaps that that punctuation is serving to subvert or undermine the supposed security concern in some way. When that writing technique is employed, the punctuation is referred to as scare quotes.

Or you know, we’re just reading tea leaves and it’s just a one word quote, but there’s the rationale for you at least so you know why I chose that term specifically.