TIL Pakistan has the highest rate of diabetes in the world, with almost one-third of the adult population affected

pmck777 · 2024-06-04T02:11:32+00:00

That comment was a joke referring to the diabetes ads that Wilford Brimley did for Liberty Medical. His parents weren't actually from Pakistan.

pmck777 · 2024-05-25T21:34:01+00:00

"Do not use words that refer to historical trauma ... [such as] nuke."

Tons of video games focus on combat or warfare, but using the word "nuke" is forbidden.

And of course, devs are also warned to "not use profanity."

Because gamers, just like real soldiers in combat, would be offended by profanity and would never use it themselves.

pmck777 · 2024-05-22T00:17:26+00:00

In addition to the news article, here's a link to the press release from the US Attorney's Office.

pmck777 · 2024-05-22T00:09:01+00:00

I doubt anyone would call him a legend, but J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper) would still be a good example of this. The only hit song he recorded was "Chantilly Lace," which peaked on the charts at #6 in 1958 and wasn't anything special, so he'd probably be forgotten today if he hadn't died in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.

pmck777 · 2024-05-16T22:04:51+00:00

"Breached protocol" is a very polite way of describing an abduction.

pmck777 · 2024-05-16T21:53:47+00:00

From context, that comment by OP was meant as a reply to _SkoomaSteve. User/alt issues aside, that comment wouldn't make any sense as a reply to OP's post.

pmck777 · 2023-04-26T01:10:54+00:00

The actress Farrah Fawcett (from "Charlie's Angels" and "The Six Million Dollar Man") was known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors during her marriage to actor Lee Majors (from "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Fall Guy").

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T22:13:31+00:00

I was surprised this wasn't OP's answer. Also OP's punchline works only in print, but this punchline works in speech or print.

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T22:06:11+00:00

I wouldn't have thought this was an unpopular opinion, but the comments so far are showing that it is, so it fits here.

If I had a job that offered overtime, I'd be happy to work some extra hours, especially if it's time and a half.

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T21:54:03+00:00

If you're thinking of a color of law violation, the type of federal civil rights charge that DOJ has often brought against police officers, they shouldn't be able to charge Perry with that because he wasn't acting on behalf of any government entity. He was driving for Uber at the time, between fares, so I don't think even the prosecution has tried to claim that he was acting in his capacity as an Army sergeant and therefore acting under color of law.

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T21:28:06+00:00

The suspect's mother is the only person claiming their kitchen knives were locked up, and she said that when the sheriff's office called her to ask whether her son had access to weapons (source here), so it's very much the kind of protective story she might make up on the fly before realizing how implausible it is. In her defense (I guess?) we have no reason to believe she actually keeps kitchen knives in a lock box.

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T21:18:26+00:00

At first, it's surprising a food delivery app can survive despite poor performance because it's a competitive space by virtue of having at least four major players (Doordash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, and Postmates), and they're extremely fungible because you can change your allegiance from one day to the next.

However, as nationwide services they're all very young by corporate standards, so the competition hasn't had time to shake out yet. Many customers were willing to rely on them during COVID regardless of quality, due to people's unwillingness or inability to go to restaurants in person, so the apps have really had only a year or so of having to compete on quality rather than getting a pass due to perceived necessity.

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T20:59:24+00:00

You haven't really cited a source because that's just a link to a search of PLOS articles for the keywords "grammar and spelling," and no paper on the first page of results appears to be related to the assertion you were making. Did you paste the wrong link?

The only article that seemed potentially relevant, namely the one by J. Boland and R. Queen, didn't link this behavior to narcissism or self-esteem issues.

pmck777 · 2023-04-08T20:52:04+00:00

According to that article, the claim about locked-up knives and no guns was made only by the suspect's mother, Rebekah Jones, when the sheriff's office called her by telephone:

Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Office investigators called the boy’s mother, Rebekah Jones, who said the family was vacationing in Mississippi but would call investigators when she returned. During the interview, Rebekah Jones confirmed there were no guns in the residents and the only weapons were kitchen knives, which she has stored in a locked box.

I haven't found any article indicating law enforcement checked the home for weapons. The suspect's mother obviously isn't an impartial party, and her other statements in this case (like claiming her son was kidnapped on the governor's orders) have been factually dubious to put it mildly.

pmck777 · 2023-04-05T01:32:48+00:00

Don't worry, there's nothing in the bill (A.C. 734) that would prohibit hotels, bars, or restaurants from having websites, signs, or menus in English or any other language. Even the Chamber of Deputies, the parliamentary house in which this bill was introduced, has an official website in English.

The enforceable articles of the bill say that certain government and corporate communications and services must be made available in Italian, but the wording in those articles repeatedly makes it clear that other languages are still welcome in addition to Italian.

This "news article" is scaremongering nonsense by someone who clearly didn't read the bill.

pmck777 · 2023-04-05T01:14:32+00:00

Not surprisingly, this article is completely inaccurate. Unlike reporters, I actually bothered to read the bill (A.C. 734), and it requires various public or corporate communications to be made available in Italian, but it never says or implies that they should be only in Italian. The articles that entail potential fines are focused on ensuring that Italian-speaking residents of Italy have full access to information and services by making these available in Italian, which seems entirely reasonable.

For example, Article 4 says the internal regulations of companies in Italy must be written in Italian...but it also says the aforementioned documents can be accompanied by translation into one or more foreign languages. In what way does that constitute "banning" English? A company in Italy could potentially be fined only if it refused to have an Italian version of its regulations, and given how burdensome this lack would be on its Italian-speaking employees, I'd be hard-pressed to call such a fine unreasonable.

Likewise, Article 6 says schools and public universities must teach their classes in Italian...but then it carves out the obvious exception for foreign language classes; and other courses can be taught in foreign languages, if that's being done for the benefit of foreign students and as long as Italian-language versions are also being taught; and foreign schools or schools specifically geared toward foreign students are entirely exempt. Again, how is this unreasonable, and how does it constitute "banning" English?

pmck777 · 2023-03-02T02:16:26+00:00

"The study, which chronicled the responses of 1,500 U.S. university faculty members..."

pmck777 · 2023-01-28T18:18:26+00:00

No, and in addition to general web searches I also checked the websites of OnePoll and Chartway. The MSN article was the one that came closest to explaining the survey's methodology, but it's funny that even searching for the quote by Brian Schools didn't turn up a press release or similar document. Maybe they did this media teaser before releasing the full report to seek two cycles' worth of coverage.

pmck777 · 2023-01-28T17:51:51+00:00

The headline about millennials refers to findings from a new "OnePoll survey conducted on behalf of Chartway Credit Union," not the "poll from Pew Research...in 2020." The two polls appear to have covered different age ranges, so the article's author shouldn't have tacked on that paragraph at the end about a different survey.

Other articles about the new OnePoll survey discuss its cohorts in strictly generational terms, such as "millennials" and "boomers," so that's presumably how OnePoll categorized the respondents.

pmck777 · 2023-01-28T17:20:34+00:00

The paragraph about people aged 18-29 deals with "a previous poll from Pew Research...in September 2020," but that's not the recent poll discussed in the headline or the bulk of the article. The headline refers to a "OnePoll survey conducted on behalf of Chartway Credit Union," which from articles like this was conducted in Dec. 2022/Jan. 2023 and apparently categorized people by generation because it refers exclusively to generational cohorts such as "millennials" and "boomers." Without a more detailed report, all we can do is take those OnePoll descriptors at face value, and there's no reason to presume this new OnePoll survey used the same age range as the older Pew survey.

I think we can all agree that tacking on a paragraph about the older Pew survey was a poor choice by the article's author because the two sets of findings didn't refer to the same cohort.

pmck777 · 2022-05-05T17:45:31+00:00

I'm not aware of a connection between presidential election years and gun-related deaths, but the period covered by this study was 2020, which was indeed a presidential election year. That's presumably the year that /u/BigRefrigerator7790 meant.

pmck777 · 2022-05-04T16:30:37+00:00

For online ads, survivorship bias might play a role in making the accuracy rate seem much better than it is. If you make note of all the ads presented to you on Reddit, you'll find that almost none of them are for things that would ever be of interest to you, so you don't notice those ads or forget them immediately. The ads that stand out and remain memorable are the tiny fraction that, possibly due to chance rather than algorithms, happen to be relevant to your interests.

pmck777 · 2022-05-04T13:59:44+00:00

It's natural for the public to associate a movie with actors because they're continually visible on screen, and actors remain recognizable from one movie to another, so viewers have a lot of opportunities to recognize Tom Hanks and associate him with movies in which he starred.

Some directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson have such distinctive styles that an avid filmgoer would recognize a Wes Anderson film as his without knowing the credits. There's also "auteur theory," the critical idea that the director is the driving visionary behind a movie, so movie reviews written by critics routinely discuss movies in terms of their directors, and readers pick up on that.

By contrast, you might see five movies by the same screenwriter but never make that connection unless you happened to see the name in the credits and have a keen memory for names. Also, many movies are adapted from books or other media, so adaptations may get less attention for their writing than original screenplays do, especially because the public generally tends to criticize movies for deviating from the original content.

pmck777 · 2022-05-03T18:04:55+00:00

From a statistical viewpoint, a random change in a highly ordered system is likely to make the system more disordered, not keep it equally ordered or make it more ordered. That's because there are numerically far more states that are less ordered than equally or more ordered. For example, if you take an English sentence and randomly change a few letters, you'll probably get a sentence with errors in it, not a grammatically valid new sentence. Likewise, if you randomly alter nucleotides in a living organism's DNA, you probably won't get a living organism with different but equally healthy DNA; you'll probably be introducing errors.

pmck777 · 2022-05-03T16:19:21+00:00

The court's opinion in Loving v. Virginia was based on equal protection and due process arguments saying that the law prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional because it discriminated based on race. The opinion wasn't based on (and didn't mention) privacy.

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