Not in the US.

On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.

The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here…

We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.

Edit – I should add that I’ve met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn’t allow that kind of nonsense here.

Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it’s another name for Tylenol.

A few bad people who hate others because they think putting others down means they win picked a fight on the playground. They got other people on the playground to join them because they yelled the loudest and some kids thought that the louder you yelled, the more right you were. The people they were yelling about just wanted to be on the playground too, but the yelling people didn’t want them on the playground, so despite the fact that they didn’t want to, the people being yelled at played a competitive game against the people who were yelling.

After a long long long time (LOTS of sleeps) the yelling bad people won against the people they were yelling at.

The yelling people didn’t know what to do then. They only knew how to be angry and they couldn’t find anything else or anyone else to yell at and people were starting to leave their team because all the excitement was gone and there wasn’t a competitive game to play anymore.

So the bad yelling people panicked and started randomly picking other, smaller groups of people on the playground to yell about. They made up things about them and told lies.

It didn’t work at first, and they tried telling lies about lots of different groups of people one after another, and eventually they started picking on some people who were JUST different enough that some of their old yelling teammates who got bored and left believed those lies and joined the yelling again. There was SO much yelling and it was so much louder that it was impossible for anyone near the yelling people to hear the truth.

And that’s how we got from “abortion as an issue” to “trans people as an issue”.

So, for this, the easiest way I’ve found is to look at it in the following sort of way:

Using the example of coding, you can already USE software, think of that like knowing how to DRIVE a car. Start with learning how to REPAIR the car (GUI building block code).

Then learn how to MOD the car with a kit (high-level object-oriented, TYPED code with an IDE or editor that does stuff like auto complete, syntax highlighting, and has add-ins that assist in getting the typed code to completion).

Then learn how to create your own car mods from “scratch” (get to the point where you don’t necessarily NEED all those editor widgets to help code)

Then learn how the car functions at a base level and how all the various chemicals, heat, and aerodynamics, pistons, filters, etc interact to make the car function (interacting with and modifying OS-level code/low-level languages with things like hardware access instead of applications that run on the OS)

THEN worry about the various chemicals themselves create the energy needed to generate power for the car (firmware on top of circuits and chips like the CPU/GPU/PSU, storage controller boards, audio chips, and motherboard/bios)

THEN worry about the actual molecular interactions occurring in the batteries or fuel at the atomic level (binary electrical functions of the parts themselves, where 1’s and 0’s are just current on or current off).

Just because the binary is there at every stage doesn’t always mean that understanding how the bonds between the “atoms” operate is going to make you a better programmer UNTIL you understand what you’re trying to get those atoms to do and why.

For the briefest of moments, I thought this post was someone opening one of those packages of ea-nasir’s copper.

I’m in my mid 40’s, late Gen X and I absolutely despise any phone calls I don’t decide to make myself, and out of respect for others who might feel like I do, I will try most other avenues of communication before resorting to a phone call.

I didn’t use to mind them at all back in the land line days, but as soon as everyone started getting cell phones there was this undercurrent of expectation that every moment of YOUR time actually belongs to someone else…because you’re AVAILABLE ANYWHERE NOW.

It started slow, but it didn’t get really bad until about 2007.

It got to the point where people would get your voicemail, hang up, and redial over and over until I answered. I saw it happening more and more frequently to myself and many others, from all walks of caller.

I finally started cutting people like that out of my life a few years ago because in the intervening decade and a half it hasn’t really gotten much better, except among the younger folks who just hate phone calls.

It’s almost like Self + Possibility of Instant Gratification = Utter Fuckwad much of the time.

It’s not about respect or anything, because fuck entitlement, but if it’s really not so ridiculously utterly important that I should be stopping mid-poop and doing something about it, LEAVE A MESSAGE. USE TEXT. USE E-MAIL, USE MESSENGER, USE ANYTHING ASYNCHRONOUS.

Too many people’s priority is themselves and only themselves to the outright blatant detriment of others.

It’s ridiculous, and I blame cell phones, social media, and large swaths of marketing and advertising firms for the cultural paradigm shift.

The drain on a person’s emotional and mental resources when they feel a social responsibility to their relationships with their friends and loved ones but are always forced to do things on everyone else’s “me first” terms is the exact same sort of phenomenon that causes workplace burnout when jobs do it with things like not setting up a good work/life balance and not being proactive/planning in regards to workplace tasks/projects/deadlines. (Agile is a major offender here, as is scrum, and every management book from traction to…hell, pick any one of them, everything I’ve been forced to read is borderling toxic when applied.)

Therapy’s great and all and I’m 100% in favor of it (for everyone, really), but when noone is respecting boundaries, there’s not a whole hell of a lot it’s going to do in this particular regard.

Hell, I know a lot of people whose boundary is “no phone calls unless (list of super serious things like someone died) or we text first and agree on a phone call” and when someone potentially has that boundary and then panicks when they get a phone call outside of it, the solution might be a little more advanced than “seek help”. It sucks, (and there’s plenty of room for nuance) but I feel the change in culture is far more at fault here than anything else.

Are you saying that in countries where employers can’t just make up reasons to divest themselves of employees without repercussion or paying unemployment that the employees themselves are somehow bound to their employer and can’t just walk out?

Unless you’re under some contract, I don’t see how that would be enforced other than having laws on the books in individual countries about a minimum required notice.

Even if a country DOES have laws on the books stating all employees in all full time jobs must provide x weeks of notice before quitting, if the same country has a bunch more clauses to protect employees from employers than the U.S. currently does I have to imagine there are protections in place for the employees in cases of hostile work environments or whatever.

I can’t see a situation where a country that protects employees from the sort of hostile, predatory, dehumanizing behavior we see carried out consistently by U.S. companies wouldn’t have continued to take said employees into account while also protecting their country’s employers from things like large scale business-wide walkouts or whatnot.

It could be like the wild west. There’s one real cop

Mikey Doran was a racist crook, not a real cop.

Wait, wrong section of Minnesota.

Nevermind.

Mosseri didn’t get into why he felt Android to be superior

This is disappointing, because I’d really like to hear what he has to say on the subject.

As an Android user in the U.S., I feel the exact opposite.

As an IT sysadmin doing mobile device management with BYOD in the workplace, iOS has a clear edge if you’re willing to pay for MDM products that handle it. The built-in options in Azure are…varied for both products. ( https://download.microsoft.com/download/e/6/2/e6233fdd-a956-4f77-93a5-1aa254ee2917/msft-intune-enrollment-options.pdf )

As a personal user, though, the sheer ridiculous amount of variety of the android kernel between different carriers and models on the current version alone is positively insane. It should be a beautiful bonus smorgasbord of consumer choice, but with all of the carriers rolling their own lockdowns, hobblings, and forced includes it’s a buyer’s nightmare of trying to find a device that doesn’t lock out the things you want while also letting you remove the things you DON’T want (preferably without needing adb to do so).

Separate text notification sounds for each contact? Not always!

Advanced SMS options? Totally inconsistent.

MAC Address randomization? Roll a d20 against the number of flagship models and carriers in your area. You’ll probably get it, but no guarantees.

Heaven forbid you want to do something that should be straightforward in today’s day and age like download your SMS History? Voicemails as audio files? Custom Do Not Disturb settings? Good luck.

Apple users have been sending text messages interchangeably between their phones and computers/tablets for years. I still recall the shock and awe when my android phone was getting a barrage of text messages from my boss because he could send them with the full keyboard on his laptop while I was one-finger-punching the touchscreen on my phone to reply.

A lot of this isn’t the direct fault of the android kernel itself, but it is a large portion of the default android user experience in the U.S. and as such it’s what I have to base my judgement of the android kernel ON.

Android should be the superior option, but at this point in time, I don’t think it is.

Okay, so I hit rotten tomatoes, checked movies that were both critics rotten AND audience rotten, and started perusing titles for stuff I thought rocked.

abraham lincoln: vampire hunter

waterworld

hellboy (how is this in here? I thought this was universally loved)

mars attacks! (56 and 53, I also feel like this shouldn’t be on the list. It’s too good, and not in a bad way)

x-men origins: wolverine (again, is this not considered awesome? I thought it was great)

daredevil/elektra (I enjoyed both movies)

and now for stuff I’ve watched at least five times:

the ninth gate

planet of the apes (2001)

avp

prince of persia

green lantern

van helsing

I’m dead serious, I was looking forward to MORE green lantern movies along the lines of that first one. I bought it on amazon having heard nothing about it (I was in a societal black hole for a few years there), watched it, loved it, and was like “sweet, when’s the sequel coming out? I wanna see sinestro do his thing…wow, this did not do well. Fuck.”

I wasn’t super happy with ALL of the writing, but that’s comic stuff in general and I thought the whole thing was still quite enjoyable. Like, multiple rewatches enjoyable. Seeing Hal Jordan on screen and having Ryan Reynolds do it was great.