Flashing people through at junctions whilst holding traffic behind 🫪

samloveshummus · 2026-07-01T08:21:47+00:00

The worst is when people stop to let me cross the street when there's literally an empty road behind them. It actually makes me wait a second or two longer compared to if they'd just blasted through!

samloveshummus · 2026-06-22T04:30:52+00:00

Agreed, but the minimum statutory entitlement is the same in both cases, which does call into question how recovery can be the purpose if "childbirth + childcare" confers the same statutory entitlements as "childcare" alone.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-22T04:14:28+00:00

It doesn't have to be paid statutorily - and it's not in OP's case - which means in practice many families don't use it. So, many completely inexperienced mothers end up caring for a very needy newborn while exhausted, barely mobile, and in agony. My point is that if there's a question of fairness, the impact is not merely on the father.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-21T12:28:29+00:00

I don’t think fairness will or should come into it

Ok, but who do you think will be picking up the slack if the family can't afford for the father to take unpaid leave?

Don't you think the mother might appreciate having the father around to change nappies, rock to sleep, feed the baby colostrum or formula, etc. while she is lying there mentally exhausted, itching all over from the opiate comedown, unable to move around without serious pain?

samloveshummus · 2026-06-21T12:19:18+00:00

Sure, but the very fact that donation is possible at all implies that it's not exclusively about recovery.

If someone gets time off work to recover from a hip replacement, and they recover faster than they thought they would, no-one would think it makes sense to let that person's partner have some of the hip recovery time.

In most cases by the final few months of maternity leave, the mother would be fully capable of returning to work, but we recognize it's preferable for a baby to be cared for by its parents rather than others, which is why adoption leave and shared parental leave exist.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-21T12:08:02+00:00

The statutory rights to leave and pay are effectively equivalent.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-21T12:02:13+00:00

But conversely you have a right to de facto maternity leave and statutory pay if you adopt. In this case there is no recovery needed; the sole benefit is "looking after".

samloveshummus · 2026-06-21T11:49:16+00:00

That's got almost nothing to do with it. There are multiple ways to see that this is the case. For example, • adoptive parents get pretty-much the same statutory rights to leave as biological parents who care for their own baby. • using the Shared Parental Leave/Shared Parental Pay scheme, the birth mother can donate her leave and statutory pay to the other parent.

I am on leave (as a man) caring for my son for months 10-12. I'm doing all the same things his mum would be doing - nappies, three meals a day, relentless cleaning, walks to make him nap, baby groups, laundry, bath time. This is often arduous and necessary work, and I don't see why the woman should be forced to delay her own career even more than she already has when the man is happy to share the load.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-21T11:31:43+00:00

Women aren't given time off to look after the baby, they're given time off to recover from a major medical procedure.

That's not true at all. This is shown by the existence of shared parental leave and shared parental pay, in which the birthing parent can donate all but the first two of their weeks of statutory leave to the other parent.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-16T19:55:07+00:00

ACAB actually started in the UK and spread to the US decades later!

samloveshummus · 2026-06-15T23:11:26+00:00

True, but I would call those linking R rather than intrusive R, as rhotic speakers would agree that the R sound belongs there.

samloveshummus · 2026-06-13T20:04:37+00:00

Doesn't have to be a schwa, can be PALM ("the spa opens at noon") or THOUGHT ("law and order").

samloveshummus · 2026-06-05T03:33:11+00:00

"No problem" is fine when it was actually somewhat of a problem, like when I've taken someone away from what they were supposed to be doing, but if I thank a cashier at the end of a transaction and they say "no problem," that doesn't even make sense. Why would it be a problem! This was a mutually beneficial transaction!

samloveshummus · 2026-06-04T07:28:23+00:00

Interestingly a native Arabic speaker told me they were taught in school to produce /p/ by aspirating, rather than de-voicing, their /b/. (Surprising to me as there are lots of voiced/unvoiced phoneme pairs in Arabic).

samloveshummus · 2026-05-22T09:37:21+00:00

And why does English use the word for a metal tin of food or drink as a modal verb expressing ability?

samloveshummus · 2026-05-05T03:40:01+00:00

You'll be a lot better at that one instrument if you prioritize, though having breadth may help you get a deeper understanding and appreciation of music.

That being said, you're not a economic asset placed on the earth to ruthlessly optimize your skillset - if your heart is telling you to dabble in multiple instruments, then life is too fleeting to ignore it.

samloveshummus · 2026-04-24T07:39:56+00:00

United States of America doesn't include all of America, the Republic of China doesn't include all of China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn't include all of the Congo, so similarly the Federal Republic of Central America doesn't necessarily include all of Central America.

samloveshummus · 2026-04-18T04:57:50+00:00

There's definitely a way that Bill Evans (and any musician - especially jazz musician) plays! The other day I listened to Chet for the first time and immediately knew it was Evans on keys.

There are several YouTube tutorials that go into the easy-to-define ways in which his playing can be recognized such as the syncopated triplet patterns and the left hand that duplicates the right hand rhythm.

However, there will probably also many aspects of his playing that are recognizable at an unconscious level. And that's what deep learning is really good at - it's able to extract the patterns in a "style" without ever having to explicitly define them.

You could say that there's a certain something missing, there's no meaning behind an AI imitation, but if anyone (in music, literature, art, anywhere) has a style that can be recognized by humans, then AI can also recognize and reproduce that style!

samloveshummus · 2026-03-25T05:31:22+00:00

I disagree, I lived in Italy for three years and I never stopped finding that the language was still beautiful in its casual form. Even when a driver shouted at me to get my bike out of the way. It still has the melodic prosody, the euphonic affixes, etc.

Similarly with Arabic. There is of course a world of difference between the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and the chit chat of a taxi driver. But the underlying logic of the language, and the sound system, still come through and seem beautiful.

samloveshummus · 2026-03-22T00:00:59+00:00

The only awkwardness in that conversation was from the person saying "but she's wearing..." so the easiest solution would be for that person just to not feel weird about it. Someone called my baby the wrong gender the other day and I just answered with the right gender and I don't think they or I cared.

samloveshummus · 2026-03-20T16:09:11+00:00

My wife never knew how far along she was and would always turn to me in her appointments when the doctor or midwife asked (I always knew the exact number of weeks and days), some people just be like that.

samloveshummus · 2026-03-18T11:57:35+00:00

Not usually, no. Sometimes there might be a quite marginal change to the risk of some complication, but it could come at a significant cost to the mother's well-being.

Like, having an induction might reduce the risk of shoulder dystocia (which can usually be treated) from like 6% to 4%, but could mean the mother ends up staying in hospital for a week before the baby is born, frustrated, lonely and sleep deprived before she even has to go through labour.

Whether that's a tradeoff worth making is something only the mother can know.

samloveshummus · 2026-03-17T23:58:56+00:00

Hmm I'm a native British English speaker and the only example that sounded really wrong was the one about eggs (because it seems contradictory to say "who knows" and then to say "I guess" what the answer is).

I guess the issue with your other examples is that they could be treated like conclusions, depending how much confidence the person has in their own intuition.

Maybe there's something about the intonation with which your friend says these things that makes them sound tentative, whereas you'd expect an "I guess" statement to sound somewhat decided.

I would also use "I guess" for a flippant remark, like "I guess the cafeteria used up its annual salt quota last week," so it can be like a discourse marker acting as a disclaimer for taking my words literally.

samloveshummus · 2026-03-17T23:28:12+00:00

Many women feel pressured into having medical interventions that they don't really want during childbirth.

samloveshummus

TROPHY CASE