I believe the lack of charges for lying to Congress does lend a little credibility to the story he tells.

The tobacco execs who testified to Congress that nicotine was harmless and non-addictive didn’t get charges, either. Does that lend credibility to the claim that cigarettes are good for you?

Fuck no, it doesn’t. Because nobody has ever been charged for lying to Congress. Even when they’ve been bald-faced directly lying to Congress.

Probably has its roots from way back in the day so that women couldnt effectively run away from the men and get very far.

Can’t speak to Muslim culture, but European culture way back in the day didn’t want women riding horses because of sex.

There are a lot of branches on that tree, but the biggest one is that since horseback was believed to be capable of rupturing the hymen (hymen science has progressed quite a bit since I last looked into it, so I don’t know if that’s actually a thing), it was the same thing as having sex for women. They believed that women got sexual pleasure from it (which, I guess, was a bad thing), that they’d start craving horses as lovers instead of humans, and all sorts of weird shit that only twisted, perpetually horny dudes would think of.

So the sidesaddle was invented. It allowed women to ride horses while, literally and figuratively, keeping their legs closed.

Unfortunately, riding sidesaddle is a massive pain in the ass, so that fad didn’t last long. Maybe about fifty years or so of general popularity (because, obviously, you can still get a sidesaddle and learn to ride in it today, if you want, for whatever reason) over the course of all horse-domestication history.

Of course, like so many things from European history, this primarily applied to rich/noble people. The poor didn’t have the luxury of giving a fuck about most of it.

It’s not a story a perfectly spherical Jedi in a vacuum would tell you.

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

Oh, some percentage of the dead people are brown or brownish? Well, that makes it all ok then!

POV: You have no idea what POV means.

As is tradition with everything posted as a cool guide.

We don’t know what’s in either of their pants.

It’s going to be a science-based 100% dragon MMO.

Who is downvoting a puppy, and why?

Wow. You’re really sensitive to external stimuli, huh? Even just hearing someone cough disrupts your entire workflow? You know that’s not typical, right?

I guess. I’m watching YouTube to learn stuff, either documentary stuff or DIY stuff. But I’ll be honest, other than funny skits that stopped being funny to me years ago, I can’t imagine what kind of content would be interesting in a 2-3 minute burst.

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

2-10 minute videos are the worst. The information takes forever to get to and is super shallow, and most of them are going to be an advertisement for the youtuber I’m currently watching. A 30 minute video is fine. An hour long video, I’ll watch happily. Hell, I’ve watched movie-length videos on cool subjects with no problem.

But if I have to sit through 90 seconds of “smash that bell, thanks to my new subscribers whose screen names I’m going to read one at a time” before getting a nugget of content that can’t be more than a few seconds to a couple of minutes long, yeah, I have no attention span for that shit.

Got to the one where I had to include an emoji. I know I can get them on desktop, but I wasn’t willing to learn how tonight.

How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.

You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.

I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.

If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.

If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say “JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.”)

As for the bit about speech, you’ve lost me. I’ve never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I’ve lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the “and”. Maybe it’s different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.

I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.

I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.

Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.

I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.

And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.

So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/health/oxford-comma-maine-court-case-trnd/index.html

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

I’m right there with you. It may as well be a meteor on track to dead-center the planet, for all we can do about it.

There’s a miniscule chance it’ll miss us, or that we’ll come up with some way to deflect it at the last minute, and if that does happen, you don’t want to be the guy who sold all his stuff and went out into the cornfield to wait for Jesus to show up, if you know what I mean. No matter how certain we are, we have to hedge it as if we’re not about to be smashed flat. And the only sure way we can help the meteor not hit us is by voting in literally every election, from president to dog catcher, for the people who believe meteors are real and dangerous. No amount of metal straws and reusable bags will cancel out letting meteor-skeptics keep their decision-making positions.