Barabas [he/him]

I think it is as simple as that they start stroking his ego and give him money. He is young and charismatic enough that they’ve probably started blowing smoke up his ass about a potential presidential run.

Bernie was always a Zionist, just that it is easier to sidestep when it is at the normal status quo of apartheid, regular bombing raids and land being stolen.

It isn’t all industrial agriculture. There is also the enclosure of the commons meaning that foraging is illegal in a lot of places.

It is just 5 Norwegian libs. They are pretty unremarkable outside of being on the committee.

The Nobel Peace Price is a constant reminder of why you shouldn’t trust Norway to do anything. Most of the others are also kind of jokes (especially the literature one which is similarly a load of Swedish libs who are only remarkable for being on the committee) but the peace price is a borderline parody at this point.

I grew up poor. Mum was studying while I was growing up as her body had broken down working (she was a cleaner at a hospital) so she could only work the weekends. After she finished her studies she got good wages (she ended up working at the hospital as a psychologist at the oncology section, and her colleagues were very confused why everyone at the hospital knew her) and we also found out that the man she had shacked up with who lived in a cottage without running water in the middle of a forest actually had a very wealthy father who he reconnected with after decades of no contact and ended up getting a sizeable inheritance when he eventually died. So they got enough money to move into a house with a garden for mum and they managed to retire, which I’m very happy about.

Anyway I get actively stressed when I go shopping with mum when I visit. I just see her putting in things at full price and have to fight my urge to put them back on the shelf. She wants to spoil me and I get mild panic when she spends money on me as I know when she did that when I was younger it meant that she didn’t get to eat. I know I can also afford shopping like that but it makes me feel physically ill to get vegetables if they are slightly more expensive than usual (which is why I do the grocery shopping alone instead of along with my partner, I end up spiralling if I let her pick stuff).

Long story short, I absolutely get that feeling even now after being financially stable for well over a decade.

They view homeless people as less than human and thus use the same wording as they would about an animal. Convenience euthanasia is when you just kill an animal because you don’t want it anymore, but it is still called euthanasia.

That situation is the most I’ve ever been involved in internet lore. My partner showed me a Reddit post of a jackdaw where the top comment was Unidan calling it a crow (pretending to be an authority on it as he usually did) and I told her to correct him (in a friendly way) because jackdaws are one of my favourite birds and I want people to know what they are. This was only a few weeks before he had his meltdown over the subject.

Kind of funny to know that it bothered him enough that he would implode his entire internet persona over it.

Went over with my partner who is from England whose British passport had run out. The option if you’re a citizen is to either get a new passport delivered which will take months, get a proof of residence which costs £600 and takes 8 weeks or lie about not having any other nationalities in the ETA (UK is not available since only non-citizens are supposed to apply). When she asked the embassy they basically just shrugged their shoulders.

Worked to apply for the ETA but their current rules are a clusterfuck.

Why does Finland have so many bidets?

I usually do a double take thinking they’re a bumblebee before noticing that they move different when I spot them.

Has to be biomass, rats alone are etimated to be about as numerous as humans.

Searched for the 96% number and found this study that the graphic is likely based on: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

Depends on the context of what I’m thinking about. I think that is the case for anyone that is truly fluent in more than one language.

Austria and Switzerland have been around for more than 500 years longer than Germany. I’m sure more of these have had humans on exhibition to be gawked at like in fairs or circuses, but this is specifically about in a zoo.

The bar isn’t high if you’re complaining about the English pronounciation of Stalin.

Are you sure that they are pronouncing Japanese words correctly as it is? Because mispronunciation is a lot easier to pick up if you’re a native speaker. The way that Japanese is romanised is also catered to English pronounciations.

Anyway, a lot of Slavic names have a history of being pronounced a certain way. It is a bit like being the tedious guy that insists that Barcelona should be pronounced with a lisp or that you can’t pronounce the s in Paris. I don’t doubt that you could get droves of Germans in complaining that English people pronounce Adolf as Aedolff, Karl as Caerl, Luther as Loofah or Merkel as Murkul (4 Germans off the top of my head, there are many more). When it comes to Swedish names I’m shocked if it is pronounced anywhere close to correctly so it doesn’t even register to me.

70% of the US working population are full time workers.

30% of the working population are thus excluded, and they are likely all (with some extraordinary exceptions) below the median wage. Which means that 60% of below median wage workers are being excluded (or 51 million people), which is a significant amount compared to the top 1000 people in the above example. Doesn’t say so in the wikipedia article, but easy to tease out when they start weaseling with “fully employed” when a significant amount of the working population are not part time employed by choice.

Median numbers do look a lot better when you remove 60% of below median earning workers, who would have thought.

Yeah, that is where I grew up. Lots of Dutch people.

A lot of people from the Nethelands moving in where I used to live in Sweden for that reason.

Also that it was a dying town with no jobs that is steadily spiraling downwards so people pick up drug/alcohol addictions to cope or move away meaning that housing is cheap. But if you want solitude it is pretty swell.

I’m pretty close with my mum but have had a tendency to not tell her about struggles I have, not because of anything she has done but rather because of shame and not wanting to make her sad. She would listen and is very non-judgemental but I’d rather shoulder it on my own. The only caveat to that is that she is proper anti-drugs.

Dad was a dickhead and he can RIP in piss.