If it were a fruit, it would fall under a different section of tariffs. The tariff has rules for rectangles but has an exemption/special case for squares.
There’s no botanical meaning of vegetable. That’s a cooking term. In botany, you have different parts of the plant, like fruit, stem or root, you have different groups of plants, like the ginger family or monocots. And you can say a plant is edible or useful.
Exactly. I don’t why it’s always surprising to people that court battles are fought over legal definitions. That’s how legal definitions are made.
Vegetables are not anything that is not a fruit. Tomatos are both, as are cucumbers. When you say “technically a fruit is blah blah blah”, it says nothing about whether something is vegetable. The definition is from a different domain. The definition of vegetable seems to have to due with human digestion. The botanical definition of fruit doesn’t care about the existence of humans. Vegetables are culinary and to some extent cultural. “Fruit” also has a culinary meaning, but its not technical in that domain. There is no way to “technically” distinguish between fruit and vegetables as “vegetable” isn’t technically botanically defined.
Yeah, there’s this weird agism I’ve seen. Maybe they think the ‘young people’ (30 years in this case) are bragging? I just view it as someone adding their context, nothing abhorrent ¯*(ツ)*/¯
Yeah I meant it not as bragging but as acknowledgement of the reality that for many of us it is so far into the only internet we’ve ever known that as a cultural touchstone it’s lost on us, even those of us in the fediverse/linux sphere.
Young or old, in our society age isn’t an achievement or something one should brag about. But it’s important to keep in mind the wide array of ages present here. Some here lament the death of forum culture, others caught the tail end of it, and still others will need the explanation of why it’s worth missing (and yeah I’m not that young, but I know professionals who are)
The eternal September is to some of us full adults, people complaining about our parents being on the internet for as long as we’ve been alive, which is actually something we can agree to complain about, but people that age are also here
And also it feels like while there’s just the one eternal September there’s also several. I’ve been part of some and I’ve been frustrated with others, and for some I showed up in December and didn’t realize what I’d missed
Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It's hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It's pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn't live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn't quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.
Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That's a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don't get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just "doesn't understand" that "closing school for three days because the flu is so bad" is not a pandemic, and that they just don't understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)
One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was, that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms.
That’s not really true, in hindsight.
The real problem was that the tools for enforcing existing norms and protecting forum culture didn’t exist yet. Look around today, though, and you can certainly find forums and boards and other online spaces where a distinct culture exists and its norms are enforced.
In case you young whippersnappers have no clue what is so special about September:
Back then, the internet (and usenet, bitnet, talk) community had been nearly 100% academic. No idiots, no stupid loudmouths, no antivax moms, no politicians. Each September was an inflow of new students accessing the net for the first time, and it was up to the existing population to educate the newbies on things like netiquette and overall good behavior. People learned to use free and open services without abusing them. Back then, those newbies were usually quick to learn, so any problem arising from people who might cause issues usually was over within a few weeks.
Then, The Flood came. The Eternal September began. The time where AOL disks were so common that people used them as coasters. The Internet and all the services on it never were the same again. The existing netizens were no longer capable to educate new users on proper, civilized behavior, and usenet posts solely consisting of text like "me too" became common. It went downhill from there. Formerly open services closed up because of unmitigated abuse. One day, even lawyers invaded the net, people despicable things like Sanford Wallace, for example. You newbies today cannot imagine a time like it was before criminals like him invaded this space.
As part of the eternal September myself, we didn’t just use AOL disks as coasters, we used them for awesome pranks like filling eachother’s cars to the brim with them. It was truly astonishing how many of those disks were around.
Someone to act as the writer while the rest of the group debates and votes should work. Imagine people then fighting over to make rules such that the writer may never type in specific words!
In my experience, the game tends to get very “meta” very quickly. Someone could add a rule that “nobody write down the rules”, unless you had the “person X writes down the rules” as an immutable rule, so the moment someone wants to make it mutable… beware!
Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.
Indeed. He’s the director of a Russian foundation, teaches at a Russian university, and is being legally bullied by Russia, as you can see from my three-sentence summary. I’m pretty sure you can’t do all that from Portugal or something.
I think he very much should have thought of himself as one. His mistake.
He should’ve thought of himself as not currently able to travel to Russia?
Yes. If you are a Russian willing to say anything but what Putin permits, you should not travel to Russia. Putin has more say over what happens in Russia than other Russians do.
No no, please don’t get out of that armchair to pick up a book or something. It’s fine to spout nonsense like nonsense like a delirious old man who forgot his medication.
There's a lot of less resourceful russian men who fled to escape the draft as well, generally to countries in Western Asia rather than in Europe. But they had better reasons to leave then most.
The privileged Russians, you mean. I know a few people in Russia, good people, that have no prospects of ever getting out.
Being able to pick a country to reside in is a privilege most people can’t afford, and that’s before you factor in only 5% of Russians can speak English and that’s makes up 80% of the foreign language speakers in Russia and you’ve got yourself a very immobile population.
en.wikipedia.org
Oldest