my_hat_stinks

Pedantry. Guising has Celtic origins, you don’t need to live in the Americas to dress up for Halloween.

Guising predates the USA, you don’t need to be American to dress up on Halloween.

Too consistent imo. You’d expect a giant inflatable cat collapsing or being inflated to displace a few leaves. Both pictures also have exactly the same angle so for that to make sense someone would have had to set up a tripod to shoot a Halloween decoration, that feels odd. The real cat in the first picture looks like they’re sunk too far into the ground too, could just be softer than it looks though.

To me it seems like the same base image with edits superimposed on top.

I’ve never seen that, could be true for some brands but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Most brands on a fresh roll would have a tab on the end of the tape anyway, after one use any marking on the inside of the roll wouldn’t line up with the new end.

Isn’t that because it’s Athena’s shield though? Otherwise it’s pretty easy to get around it.

You could use two mirrors like a mini periscope to look directly at her, since it’s a double reflection you’re double protected! Or maybe they cancel each other out. And what about prisms or lenses bending light, does that work as well as a reflection? Are people with glasses immune?

Fair point, here’s a lower quality version of this:

This comment is very hard to parse. Is your complaint that Linux is worse because Windows screwed up your partitioning? If you’re talking about partitioning you’re already talking as a technical user, I’m not sure how Windows screwing up your partitions is evidence Linux less usable for non-technical people?

16.2°F

A saloon is where you get a drink, a salon is where you get a haircut.

Where are you getting your news? Wherever it is you should stop, you’re being fed (and spreading) misinformation.

In the UK, wages and salaries are notoriously low

About 12-14th place worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?itemId=105

Im a lot of cases the salary allows employers to pay less because it’s considered different to a wage.

This is untrue. Minimum wage for salaried workers is calculated by average hours worked per pay period, if after dividing your pay by your average hours you are making less than minimum wage and your employer doesn’t fix this you should report them immediately.

The reason our salaries are this low is not just because of funding the NHS,

This obviously doesn’t make sense on the surface since NHS is paid for through taxes and not salary deductions so you seem to be making a tax argument instead (?), but regardless while per capita spending on health services in the UK is high compared to some other countries, it is far from the highest.

but because we have a huge portion of our population unemployed and thus needing welfare support

At ~4.2% it’s middling by most measures, but I’d definitely prefer lower. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/unemployment-by-country

which comes straight out of the money businesses have to pay people with

I don’t even know how to respond to that. You are aware that this is handled by the government and not private business, right? Is this just another roundabout way to complain about being taxed?

the government spends a huge amount on processing asylum and immigration claims (of which there’s an extraordinary amount given the size of the country)

Are you aware that support for refugees in the UK comes out of the aid budget which has been reduced from 0.7% of gross national income in 2021 to 0.5%, and further decreased to 0.3% by 2027? Less of your taxes are being spent on this category now.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9663/

Regardless, number of refugees is high but not extraordinarily so for the region. Speculation, but that’s likely due to English being the de-facto lingua franca for international communication so asylum seekers are more likely to speak the local language.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.ASYS.EA?contextual=region&end=2024&locations=GB&start=2000

The issue here is mismanagement more than number of refugees, the UK government reportedly managed to spend $26,000 per person compared to most countries spend under $10,000. As mentioned above though, this is from the aid budget which has already been reduced, this mismanagement prevents foreign aid but does not decrease your salary.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/costs-hosting-refugees-oecd-countries-and-why-uk-outlier

Barely two paragraphs in and this is already too long, if you want the rest of your comment to be taken remotely seriously you should at least add some sources.

UK, there is no standard. I’ve seen last working day of the month, every second week, 28th of every month, once per week, last Friday of the month unless that Friday is also the last day of the month in which case it’s the Friday before.

Hourly workers tend to be paid weekly or fortnightly and salaried workers tend to be monthly but as far as I know there’s no real rules, you get whatever your employment contract says.

Driving dangerously is generally illegal everywhere else. As someone not in the US, the first time I heard that ridiculous law exists I thought it was a joke. Especially when I found out it was just a scheme to save fuel at the expense of every other road user and especially pedestrians. Insanity.

You’re upset that people aren’t risking lives to save you a few seconds. You’re not exactly the good guy here.

No, you’re not. It’s square packing, this is the optimal arrangement of 17 squares inside another square as far as we’re currently aware with a side length of 4.6756 inner squares. You cannot fit 5 squares in the space of 4.7 squares of the same size.

It’s also a well-known meme and this is a science meme community.

You can’t fit 25 squares of the same size in that space. If you check the top row there’s 4 squares and space for slightly less than one more square, you can’t fit a 5x5 grid there unless you have smaller squares or a bigger waffle

No, that’s just the objectionable part because that’s the part pretending billionaires are responsible for everything good.

Easy; don’t give credit to billionaires for things they’ve only made worse. I’m not sure why you need my help to not spread misinformation?

No, I’m arguing against direct quotes from you. Unless you yourself are a strawman.

Post about it on the internet built upon tech enabled by the said class

Built by academics to share research, expanded by hobbyists and enthusiasts, and taken over by megacorps. Not “enabled” by billionaires.

, from devices sold to us by the said class

Technically true, but only in that billionaires own the workers.

, in our homes with comforts the existence of which wouldn’t be possible without the said class.

Untrue. People can live in comfort without the existence of billionaires.

Then go to work using infrastructure and means we wouldn’t have without the said class,

Untrue. This is what your taxes pay for. Transit infrastructure exists without billionaires. Even in the US, notoriously a horrible place to travel, public transit infrastructure was good until billionaires lobbied against good infrastructure so they could sell more cars. Car infrastructure costs you more than public transit.

likely doing work we wouldn’t have without the said class.

Possibly true in very specific cases where your work provides value only to billionaires. If your work provides value in any other way (eg providing services or goods), this is likely not true.

Perhaps go buy some food the likes of which we couldn’t dream of having access to without the said class.

I am fully certain you don’t really believe good food only exists because of billionaires. Has there ever been a civilization of any kind which hasn’t had chefs of some description?

Maybe indulge in a hobby - a leisurely distraction, the kind that only exists because the said class engineered a world where you have time and resources to waste on frivolity, while they decide what those resources are.

Hobbies have always existed. You have time and resources to spare because of unions, not billionaires.

You credited all of these things to billionaires. None of these things exist because of billionaires.

There is no paradox. Thing exists. Billionaire takes over thing. Billionaire ruins thing. Billionaire did not cause thing to exist.

You said these things “wouldn’t be possible” and “wouldn’t exist” without billionaires. This is objectively untrue. Without billionaires these things would be significantly better. I specifically pointed out your mention of infrastructure because that one’s so blatantly obvious unless you’ve only ever experienced car-centric infrastructure.

Are you not aware of how, for example, car lobbies destroyed public infrastructure in an attempt to make everything car dependant to sell more cars? Claiming any of these things only exist because of billionaires is absurd. They take over and destroy.

Blind game tournaments are already a thing, you should give them a shot. I’ve never competed but I like Kusogrande, the bad video games tournament.