What does it say? I got “must quibble,” but that really makes more sense for the combat meetings.

Oh god, I didn’t go to an Apple Store! I went to T-Mobile (iirc, but maybe it was Cingular?). Probably not significantly better, but nobody looking at me with two iPhones 4, one smashed to smithereens, and one just most of a decade old, thought they were getting a sale, lol

This was before I was able to go outside of my provider (I had been a T-Mobile customer and I brought in a sprint iPhone, back when they were still locked and I didn’t have a SIM card yet- after that, I could switch to whatever). I eventually brought the guy a 5s and he could switch it over, but it was 2019, to be fair, and the 8 was the oldest option they had available in store.

I loved the 4. I dropped it while looking for a lost dog, and ran it over with a car, which finally broke it for good. I tried to get my account transferred to a friend’s old iPhone 4, but the guy at the store (this was before SIMs in iPhones, I think, so they needed to transfer your phone service over in store) said he literally couldn’t do it and tried to sell me the 8. No idea if that was correct, but I didn’t buy it.

I guess there is a point of giving no fucks you reach at some point, yeah. I’ve used the parking lot, but I was connected to different wifi.

The last time I had a work laptop, I did have to make an appointment with IT for them to install Firefox, because we couldn’t download any programs and it only came with chrome. It was incredibly annoying, but I guess I can appreciate it a little more now (but for real, why the appointment?).

Thinking about it more thoroughly though, I downloaded probably about 30k lawsuit filings over the course of my job there. Most were from trustworthy sources, but sometimes they were just in document repositories arranged by law firms.

I hope they have some way of securing that 🙃

Oh absolutely, because it’s the object, not the subject, but you do need the “to” for “say” to work well. We’ve basically only got a case system in English in pronouns and it feels a lot more confusing to people than it is.

Would you say “him?” Say “whom.”*

Would you say “he?” Say “who.”

*major exception: people like to use the objective case with “it is,” but that does not flow well with whom- you might call someone up and say “it’s me,” but “whom is it?” is going to hit a lot more people’s ears wrong. (Neither really makes sense for the objective case, but there are incomprehensible exceptions to normal case rules in other languages, I support English getting weird with it)

It’s “whom” either way, because the “to” is still there, it just comes at the end of the sentence, something which works perfectly fine in English and doesn’t hamper understanding at all.

I assumed they were doing the interview and sent the employee an updated cv or similar, but I was wrong

The Pyongyang-backed crew is also highly adept at job market scams - both posing as IT workers, who are then hired by Western companies, and as potential employers to lure software engineers into downloading malware and infecting corporate devices.

Fr, why use your current work laptop?

Several times vs several thousand times makes a difference 🤷

But hey, take it as a point for you if you want! Calculators are useful.

As with all anecdotes, it does not explain itself, but I can explain this one: repetition.

I don’t think that was really in question though and both you and the other person have already responded genuinely, which makes this interaction less fun than I was intending, because I had hoped my anecdote would be taken as the joke it was.

Them’s the breaks over text sometimes.

Well yeah, but so are you and I’m just bringing up an anecdote. If we wanna bring numbers into this, they’ve probably got some evidence related to the Flynn effect, but I don’t know that there’s a good way to actually determine whether the average person got better at arithmetic after calculators came out, unless we want to reuse some oooooold tests.

I once had to explain to a room of four other servers and a bartender (so you know, people who are more likely to do mental arithmetic at work than many others), that if each of five servers tips the bartender out ten percent of their earnings, then he’ll earn half of the average tips. Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do despair if that’s the best we can do.

Thankfully, removing literacy from someone is cost prohibitive.

We’ve basically already brought it back with milkshaking, but a milkshake is much less conspicuous (and cheaper, unless you’re literally just doing whip in a pie tin).

See also: chai tea

At this point, we should maybe go back to the old venetian system.

$3/gallon in the early 60s would have been wild. I can’t imagine the average mpg was even 10

The normal Boston in Massachusetts was originally named after the Lincolnshire village town of Saint botolph, iirc, so new Boston probably refers to a new offshoot of Boston, MA, like CT’s new Milford/new Hartford, but I’d be lying if I said I knew.

I’m from Connecticut, the town names of which* fall roughly into three categories: Native American names, biblical place names, and English names. Under the latter category, we have new Britain and new London (arguably the only two which fit that pattern, though maybe New Haven is referencing an older British city I don’t know about), but we also have Manchester, Bolton, and Glastonbury, and of course just English language words or last names, like Plainville, Plainfield, and Putnam.

*This is also true for most other New England states and probably most of the east coast, with substitution for French or Spanish (and a little Dutch) for English/British as appropriate. Actually, I could see this being mostly true everywhere in the US, with the relevant settling nationality taking over for British town names and last names, but I could also see biblical place names being less popular in some states, maybe superseded by other religious references.

I just looked him up to see how long he lived after his arrest - he survived until 2023.

I’m weirdly empathetic towards him, because I absolutely understand his points, though I obviously don’t agree with his methods. I can’t imagine being at the point of mailing bombs out, then having to watch the world go from 1995-2023. It got so much worse in all the ways he worried about. (I mean, I can’t actually imagine getting to that point at all, to be absolutely clear- I’m not suggesting the unabomber was a good guy or justified, but the things that drove him to murder indiscriminately drive me to despair)

So you were saying that?

Yup, I have to bow out for civility then.