FriendOfDeSoto

I would like to add to my upvote a personal note of gratitude for the time and effort you put in here.

I think that is a slight misconception. The full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So UK≠GB. Great Britain is just the three contiguous home nations (and possibly all the weird little islands I think). And then the British Isles include all the islands including all of Ireland. It is no wonder people are confused.

Does the naming of the software maybe precede the popularity of the movie Pulp Fiction? Was the naming done by people who don't speak English natively? Do you also suffer like this when you want to remark on a pretty great tit on a tree?

It's a question of shorthand and relative distance to the country. In most European languages, the spelling equivalent of America refers to the country by default. The continent as an entity doesn't get mentioned that much and when it does either context gets you there or a regional attribute like a cardinal direction or central. In my experience this applies to British English as well. "The United States" is often more cumbersome in translation and might require grammatical inflection when used in a local language - and confusingly could refer to Mexico as well. Funny enough though some languages adopted "USA" as another way to refer to the country, even if in translation this should get you a different letter combination.

Because of the dominance of the English in the United Kingdom, a lot of continental Europeans lazily refer to the UK as their version of "England." Might be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, a channel island or what have you. We gave up in trying to distinguish. People and how they call places are like that. Quiet understanding beats accuracy.

I think you overthought that one.

I looked at them too. I opted for Heliboard because FOTO's management made the news last year or maybe '24. I don't remember the details but it was enough to overcome the Google hurdle for me.

Yes, they are. Me thinking something in the early 90s and it being objectively so at the time are not the same thing. I've already let 90s me know that you think my opinion was wrong.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram's encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I'll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn't mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It's annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It's only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn't happen a lot.

Don't engage with anybody you don't know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

I'm sure there was harder rock in existence. My point wasn't they were objectively the hardest. It was that our perception of music changes over time.

I can kind of understand why people who aren't used to bikers on their roads are lacking practice. And that becomes a problem when there are more people on bicycles. Another thing that makes this worse is that a significant fraction of bicyclists often disregard traffic code as well.

That being said, this article reads like a subtle way to shift responsibility away from drivers. It's not their fault per se! It could be the laws. That is some bullshit. If you are unable to read the bicyclists next move unambiguously, keep a safe distance. Done.

You grew up in a world where Rock'n'Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn't before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock'n'Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It's only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It's not just the quality of the music; it's the culture and the change within it that came with it. It's a big package.

I remember listening to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That's the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.