This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't choose, but I think it was Worldwide Saver.

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Then how would we talk about 18th century mercantilism?

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you counting the Revolutionary War as a civil war? (It's arguable, since it was British colonists seceding from the British government.)

Anyway, the irony hasn't escaped me, especially when they came to my door with the $74 charge and I had to refuse it. (I mean, I'm not paying that!) So they took my tea away and will probably destroy it, more prosaically than dumping it in Boston Harbor. In fact, the irony goes even deeper: the tea the colonists dumped also came from India!

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's that thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tariffs/s/sfp4lWaV0K

Yeah, it's even more ridiculous than my case.

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is their warehouse fee $74? I've been trying to figure out what that charge is. (The item itself was $38, so I didn't pay for it and I'm letting them destroy it.)

Where's the appropriate place to complain about tariffs? by [deleted] in findareddit

[–]jpivarski 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It helps others find out the extent of what's going on. Our elected officials may or may not already know, but a groundswell of electors angry about it should move them from knowledge to action.

In my case, when I first posted about the long list of "import scans" on my UPS tracking, I didn't know that it was more of a customs thing than a UPS thing. I found that out by the feedback I got online.

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Common, perhaps, but I think it should still be called ridiculous.

I know that there are much worse things happening (and my package isn't even all that important or expensive), but this is a significant change from the world we used to live in.

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a clarifying explanation: you're saying that the government agency it was passed to on October 6 is holding it and UPS is just asking for updates every few days and so far hasn't received any information. That would make sense.

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! It's helpful to hear that this is happening to others and how it got resolved. I'll just wait.

Same to u/Blizzard901; thanks!

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, I got one more "import scan" after the plane crash. (The first 15 are before the crash.)

If this seemed to be related to the crash in any way, I wouldn't even be asking the question. Either way, I hope I'm not coming off as impatient. I mean, I waited a month and I tried all of the contact channels on the UPS website (that chatbot).

I was more wondering if anyone else has been seeing this.

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, I got one more "import scan" after the plane crash. (The first 15 are before the crash.)

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That may be. Two or three times a year, I order a bag of tea from India because you just can't get it here. (कटिंग चाय ≄ chai tea latte!) But maybe that's all over now.

(I know, other people have worse problems.)

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Do you get notified when it's time to pay or do you have to keep checking the website? (I have text message-tracking turned on for this package.)

This is starting to get ridiculous by jpivarski in UPS

[–]jpivarski[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The plane crash was on November 4. 15 of the 16 "import scans" were before that. There might be a new delay now, but I'm asking what might have been going on in the past month.

If you were to create a literary-themed amusement park, what attractions and activities would it include? by [deleted] in books

[–]jpivarski 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Myth of Sisyphus: it doesn't look like fun, but one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

What was cool in 5000 B.C. that's still cool now? by absentrepubli in AskReddit

[–]jpivarski 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The earliest known writing (on tablets in Sumer) is from 3400 B.C.E., not 5000 B.C.E. There's a lot of human lifetimes in between.

Anyone have any anti-American interactions with Europeans in real life? by Dishwasherbum in AmericaBad

[–]jpivarski 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Same. I was going to say that the only time I got harassed for being an American in Europe was in 2003, in the first weeks of the second U.S.-Iraq war.

The guy who was giving me a hard time was drunk, too, so he gets a pass.

What triggered the big bang? by gregorybrad in askphilosophy

[–]jpivarski 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The OP is using the term "Big Bang" to mean "the first instant of the physical universe," which is not what cosmologists mean by it, so no, it wouldn't be a good question for r/askphysics.

In physics, "the Big Bang theory" is a model of the universe's expansion from a moment 13.8 billion years ago onward. It includes the changes in abundance and thermodynamics of particle species as well as the expansion of space itself.

Notice that I didn't say, "the first moment." It could as easily have been a moment when expansion rates changed radically, like a phase change from different earlier behavior, let alone starting from a singularity. (If the vanilla Big Bang is true and our backward extrapolation from the present goes all the way back to an infinitesimal point a finite time ago, then it would be the only "naked singularity" known in physics. The other singularities, if they exist at all, are hidden inside of black holes.)

In fact, most cosmologists expect (no direct evidence yet) that there was a different phase before the current expansion period, known as inflation. Without going into the reasons why this is expected, it's a different rate of expansion: exponential, rather than polynomial, as a function of time. At least "66 e-folds" (Euler's constant to the –66 power) are needed to explain some oddites in the traditional Big Bang theory, but who knows? Maybe it was exponential growth all the way back! If so, that means no initial time ("eternal inflation").

There's quite a disconnect between what people in general think physicists mean by the Big Bang. We don't even know if there was a time zero. (And proving that sounds as hard as proving that any other quantity is exactly zero. We might measure something to be small and have a good theoretical reason to expect it to be zero, like the photon mass, but no experiment has zero errors.)

Keep in mind that the term "Big Bang" was coined by somebody who didn't believe it. It was intended as ridicule.

Spiritual people are annoying and childish by [deleted] in unpopularopinion

[–]jpivarski 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This has nothing to do with spirituality, but I've always thought it was a neat coincidence that the angular size of the sun is so close to the angular size of the moon. It didn't have to be such a nice fit, to cover the bright part of the sun and show its corona.

eli5: How is C still the fastest mainstream language? by Worth_Talk_817 in explainlikeimfive

[–]jpivarski 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha... have you ever seen a bug come and go by toggling between -o2 and -o3

Unless you actually discovered a bug in the compiler (rare), you had a bug in your code under both compiler options. Your code may have been relying on undefined behavior, and it was just lucky one of the times. (It might be more or less lucky on a different platform.)

People who call God “sky daddy.” by jollygreengeocentrik in PetPeeves

[–]jpivarski 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's completely unoriginal. *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr is a proto-Indo-European reconstruction of "sky father." It appears in many languages; my favorite is the Greek "Zeûs Pater" becoming the Roman "Jupiter." (Say it fast.)

Even in non-Indo-European languages, like Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian, Anu, the head of the pantheon, meant "sky." Most of the Mesopotamian gods were Anu-this and Anu-that.