I was shocked to see a 2L bottle of Dr Pepper that cost $3. I'm not going to be drinking it anymore out of principle.
The really insulting thing about McDonald's is the service is bad and the food is worse than it ever was. The last time I went in So Cal, we waited 5 mins to order (there was no line-- just no attendant). Ordered, my daughter got the pancakes. 10 mins later when the order came up there were no straws, napkins, or syrup. My daughter asked me to get some syrup, another 5-min wait. She knocked over her drink (no straw, she's little and clumsy) and absolutely nobody that worked there noticed. I tried to clean it up with napkins, but it was clear it was just too much liquid for that to be effective.
I waited another 10 mins and told the guy at the counter what happened, I even said, "If you can get me a mop I'll clean it myself." He assured me that wouldn't be necessary.
I went back to my table, ate my sad mcmuffin-- which was dry and weird and the “cheese” doesn't melt anymore. And they forgot the hash brown which was now worth $4, apparently, but I wasn't going to wait again.
When I left, absolutely nobody had cleaned the floor and I was terrified someone would slip, but it wasn't my problem anymore.
Last time I will ever go to McDonalds. They ruined Chipotle too.
I hesitate to write this, but PTSD is a bit more complex than that.
In some cases there's damage to the hippocampus, which doesn't get better. I've had 40 years to make peace with the crappy accident I was in. But the things like an exaggerated startle reflex, an aversion to chaotic or unplanned sounds and other triggers remain. I always carry a pair of noise-cancelling headphones if I think I might need to be in a noisy environment.
You try propranolol yet? Worked like a slow miracle for me. It completely neutered the negative physical symptoms after some time using it combined with carefully controlled exposure to triggers.
Yes, just like with the 401k. Get pretty much every working individual in America heavily invested in stock assets by default. During even a reasonable market it’s a win win win for everyone involved. Companies make more money, people get high returns on their money, employment is higher and the government doesn’t have to guarantee anyone’s pension. The downside is an extended bear market can collapse the entire system.
It's definitely a win for the financial industry. They make way more in fees than they ever did from the pension funds. I would love to see the evidence for the statements "(non-financial) companies make more money", "people (broadly) get high returns on their money", and "employment is higher".
Nah, if I've learned anything, it's that the money printers will turn on at the first sight of major trouble and everyone (some, more than others) will pay with inflation.
There's nothing inherently unsustainable about social security. If FICA tax revenues don't keep up with benefits, benefits can be cut to make up for the shortfall. If you haven't noticed, due to our still-falling life expectancy, we keep having to move armageddon day back. I think there are many in high places that worry insolvency may never come.
It is unsustainable in its current form. Of course you can cut benefits, raise taxes, raise age, etc to extend it for however long it makes sense. But it was designed for an evergrowing number of taxpayers, who'd support those before them due to strength in numbers. But as the tax burden grows, more and more people are going to be against it. I don't expect the majority of Gen Z will ever see a penny of it. I'm not sure I will, either.
If Gen Z never sees a penny from Social Security, it will be because of the loss of political will to protect Social Security as we know it. Which would only happen if this continuing misinformation campaign convinces the younger generations that they will never get anything from the program.
Social security can literally go on for centuries, just fine, as long as there is political will to keep it going.
I've been to the Keck (back 15 years or so ago). It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience seeing that telescope which was in so many PBS specials (the astronomers comes to mind)… but I couldn't help but feel we took our lives in our hands.
As a Californian, I was not prepared for the bitter cold at that elevation. We drove up in an old suburban--the roads were treacherous. If the car had broken down, or we'd gotten delayed past sundown, we would have simply died up there.
I don't know if it is still there, but there was a gift shop at the base of the mountain that you were advised to stop at for 20-minutes to acclimate to the pressure.
When we got to the telescope, it was essentially self-serve. There were a couple of exhibits, and we were able to see the telescope itself, but there wasn't anyone up there as near as I could tell.
I had a similar experience in the 5th grade. We had a creative writing assignment (write x many pages), and I wrote a short story about "space spiders" that spun giant webs between planets and moons to catch something. I can't recall.
The only thing more mundane and unimaginative than that two pages was my teacher, who accused me of plagiarizing it.
and i bet the teacher could not tell you which story you were supposed to have this plagiarized from.
in a way it's a compliment that your teacher thought the story was so good, that they didn't believe it was your own.
i have had this happen in sports. i was not very sportive and tended to pick easier activities when there was a choice. there was this school sports day where the whole school was doing activities outside, and one of those activities was running for half an hour, one hour or two hours. usually i'd pick the half hour to be done with it, but this one day, my brother, a few friends and me decided to run in a group and do the two hours.
doing things in a group can be a lot easier as everyone encouraged each other. we also didn't race but it was a relaxed slow jog.
at the end we would get a pass indicating that we had completed the activity. when i showed that to my teacher, he didn't believe me.
there was no consequence of that, but if necessary i would have had three witnesses.
in hindsight the disappointment was that the teacher did not understand or recognize my capacity. i don't think he knew that i had been biking for hundreds or even thousands of km during school holidays.
I don't speak Armenian, but I dated an Armenian woman once, and she told me they have words for familial relationships that we didn't really have concepts for in English.
At least in danish, we have “bedstemor” which behaves likes “oldemor” in being the mother or fathers mom so it’s really that form that is consistent with the system and not the parent-specific forms.
I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar (fathers mother / fathers mother) or mormor/morfar (same for mothers parents).
Sure in academic language there is probably a way to describe it (edit: and the concept is easy to explain) but there is nothing quick that you can use to tell a kid so they immediately know which of the grandparents we are going to visit without naming them or the location they live in somehow?
Even among the words that do exist, like "siblings", I have a feeling that in some dialects or sociolects it isn't used and people say "brothers and sisters" instead. (I'm not sure about this last one but I have worked with a lot of English and American people over the years and it does feel this way).
I can't tell if this is serious. I don't even know which language you're using but it is literally no different than mom's mom and dad's mom other than a space.
And I am not saying the concept doesn't exist, only that as far as I am aware there is no usable everyday word for it.
I mean: nobody will tell their kids they are going to visit dads mum and dads dad next week, rather than telling them they are going to visit grandma and granddad "across the country" or something?
Things like this can be highly family-specific. A friend of mine (German) says that in his family, his grandmothers are distinguished as "Oma" and "Omi". Which are both generic German words for any grandmother, but in his family, they are more specific. Like names. Another friend, they used "Oma" and "Großmutter" (a third generic word) to distinguish the two.
So there must certainly be families in the English-speaking world where kids commonly say "dad's dad" and "mom's dad". Even when unlike in Scandinavian languages, it's not the canonical form.
I think it's more common to call them Grandma and Grandpa Lastname or Grandma Firstname and Grandpa Firstname. I've also seen it where one set of grandparents are Grandma and Grandpa and the other set is Nana and Papa or Mimi and Pop Pop or whatever set of less formal terms they use for the relations.
I'm not sure I've met anyone who doesn't have more familiar terms than dad's mom and mom's mom. They're probably out there, but not super common.
The point of the conversation is how people express these relationships in their day-to-day so they can be encoded in software.
Would your grandparents' contact be saved on your phone as "Mom's mom" or as "grandma"? Probably the second, which is indistinguishable from "grandma" as "Dad's mom".
In Norwegian, people would naturally call these "mormor" and "farmor" and they would expect that relationship to be correctly labeled in their localized app.
I am fully aware of what the topic is about. I'm just pointing out that the English language and native English speakers definitely use the concept of mom's mom and dad's mom without the needing "official" words like "momdad" and "dadmom" because the person I responded to said
> I am fairly sure English doesn't have (or at least does not use) separate everyday words for farmor/farfar.
They then said you would need "academic" language to describe mom's mom and dad's mom. That's why I said I could not tell if they were serious. Anyway, I think you would be surprised if you asked English speakers what they call their grandparents. I personally used memere and grandma to distinguish between my mom's mom and my dad's mom. The point I'm making is that not having specific words for these relationships does not make English speakers unaware of the difference.
For day-to-day familiar conversation we generally use nicknames for grandparents in the US and that's what is in our contact list.
There are probably hundreds or thousands of nickname words for grandma based on a variety of cultural backgrounds, family tradition, and mispronunciations by grandchildren.
The language we use really depends on setting. In a more formal setting we might say paternal grandmother/grandparent.
Speaking to a friend we might use the nickname, or we might say the ambiguous 'grandma' or we might say 'grandmother on my dad's side' or 'dad's mom'.
It really depends on the situation and familiarity and formality.
There is no "grandmother" in Swedish, you just have mormor and farmor. That makes a huge difference with how you have to use the language, you can't say "do you have a grandparent" since there is no word for grandparent, you will have to say "do you have any mom or father parents".
I would have accepted it if it was something people would actually say, even if it was written like two words or more. Example: sister/brother in law is something that is close enough even if it isn't written in one word like Norwegian svigerinne/svoger.
But as far as I am aware English only uses grandsomething (or variations of it) + further description as needed.
In everyday speech you generally do not try to be this specific, but if you wanted to (e.g. recounting family history to a doctor or talking about the relationship between your parents and granparents) you could use them to be more specific in a clear way.
I agree that almost every use of farfar should be simply translated as grandmother.
English speaking people do not use these all that often. They say "grandmother" or "grandfather". They specify which side of family these come from only when they really need it for some reason.
Not Armenian, but, e.g., Bulgarian has a distinct name for the relation of two husbands of (not in-law) sisters. In English, that's just one of the "brother in-law" cases.
On the whole, Bulgarian has far more such relationship words than English.
English doesn't have any way of distinguishing between my wife's sister, my brother's wife, and my wife's brother's wife. They are all sisters-in-law. But these 3 relationships are very different for many people in practice. My wife's sister grew up with someone I'm very close to and unlike most other relatives I can't usually badmouth her to my wife. My brother's wife is someone who, like my wife, entered as an adult into a family which I and my brother have always been part of and so might feel threatened by our closeness. And my wife's brother's wife is someone who I can bond with over "we both married into this crazy family and are not really like the rest of them".
And then from my kid's point of view, not only are these all 'auntie' but so is my very own sister.
I worked for a lab that did IR research 20 years ago, so I don't know if this is still the case. But at the time, the IR sensors were made with a rare mineral only available in a remote region of Russia.
At the time (late 90s) I bought (on behalf of my employer) a FLIR camera that had a 512x512 sensor for $70k. I remember the cheapest camera we could find was 15k, it had almost no optics and the sensor was noisy as all get out.
I have a thermal inspection workstation (FLIR) that cost about $2700 and has a 320x240 sensor.
So there really has been a cost reduction. It's just more linear than exponential. A few years back, I got a camera for a friend which had a 90x90 sensor, and I think it cost $165 if memory serves. When I worked at that lab, it was inconceivable that a normal person would ever own an IR camera. They were the exclusive domain of researchers, large corporations, and law enforcement. I have 5 or so.
Also, the average person doesn't understand the electromagnetic spectrum, or concepts like emissivity or reflection. They think they're seeing an accurate temperature from their device, not understanding that every material they measure has its own k value.
** BTW: I tried to research this mineral/element and could not find any documentation on it. If you happen to know its name, or if I'm completely off base and its not used anymore, I'd love to know about it.
The really insulting thing about McDonald's is the service is bad and the food is worse than it ever was. The last time I went in So Cal, we waited 5 mins to order (there was no line-- just no attendant). Ordered, my daughter got the pancakes. 10 mins later when the order came up there were no straws, napkins, or syrup. My daughter asked me to get some syrup, another 5-min wait. She knocked over her drink (no straw, she's little and clumsy) and absolutely nobody that worked there noticed. I tried to clean it up with napkins, but it was clear it was just too much liquid for that to be effective.
I waited another 10 mins and told the guy at the counter what happened, I even said, "If you can get me a mop I'll clean it myself." He assured me that wouldn't be necessary.
I went back to my table, ate my sad mcmuffin-- which was dry and weird and the “cheese” doesn't melt anymore. And they forgot the hash brown which was now worth $4, apparently, but I wasn't going to wait again.
When I left, absolutely nobody had cleaned the floor and I was terrified someone would slip, but it wasn't my problem anymore.
Last time I will ever go to McDonalds. They ruined Chipotle too.