I think the only correct answer will be “there are lots of different reasons”.
My wife took my last name, even though it’s not a good one and I suggested that we pick a new one.
Here are a couple of her reasons:
She wanted us to have the same surname.
She was very close friends with my cousins growing up, so the name didn’t seem weird to her.
Tradition - she’d always assumed she would change her name to her husband’s name, so that seemed the most normal thing to do.
We could technically do it now, but you’d need a ton of quality control.
A basic workflow:
Use an image generator to generate start (and optionally end) frames of each scene.
Use a video generator like Runway to create the scene.
Use something to generate the speech, either a realistic text-to-speech engine or a record the dialog yourself and use AI voice changing software.
Use a lip synch AI to match the mouth flaps to the audio.
Generate music using something like Udio
Job done.
All these technologies exist and in some capacity are available to use. The only issue at the moment is consistent quality. This is coming on in leaps and bounds, however.
Ah, ok - that’s fair.
I thought you were implying that we had some kind of firewall like China or something!
I agree, US sites geolocking their content is sometimes a pain, but I get your meaning. We do tend to be more comfortable with our governments trying to protect us than the Americans seem to.
I’m really curious about what you think you’re not being allowed to visit on the internet.
I can’t think of a single thing that’s ‘blocked’.
Unless you’re under 13, of course, in which case I concede there are a lot of restrictions - but that’s a good thing.
This.
Alternatively, it might be that it’s just an additional identical role, but company policy means they need to go through a new round of interviews.
NHS = National Health Service
It’s what we have in the UK, and essentially means that all your health care is free.
Vasectomy = free. Having a baby in hospital = free. CAT scan = free. Insulin = free.
Admittedly, it’s paid for in taxes, but at a small fraction of the cost of the American way of doing things.
If you’re interested in smaller scale sculpting, it’d be remiss of me not to direct you to The Crafsman Steady Craftin’
Had mine done through the NHS. Basically two questions, “do you have children already” and “how long since your last child was born?”.
If you haven’t had kids yet, you just need to explain why you want a vasectomy, usually with a specialist. If your last child was born less than two months ago, they want you to wait (apparently a lot of men’s first reaction to the realities of having a baby is to try to ensure it won’t happen again).
Lemmy was released as an open-source fediverse alternative to Reddit.
Just over a year after launch, r/ChapoTrapHouse, moved across after being banned from Reddit. This is likely what you’re referring to. It had well over 100,000 active users on Reddit, so represented a sudden sizable influx of users.
I’d wager the biggest influx of people by far, though, occurred when Spez upset a majority of mods and many users by banning third party apps.
People looked for an alternative, and Lemmy was it.
But why are so many people who lean left politically? Because the Venn Diagram for “people who like the idea of a decentralised platform that supports everybody and is free from the machinations of millionaires”, and “people who would like society that supports everybody and is free from the machinations of millionaires” is nearly a circle.
You might be underestimating the timescales involved.
For example, grass - super simple organism, right? Should have appeared early on? No, dinosaurs appeared before grass did. But when the first grasses did evolve, wow, they were successful on a scale that is hard to overstate.
The beauty of sexual reproduction, from an evolutionary point of view, is that by its very nature, it allows many experiments to take place at once. The success criteria of each experiment is how many babies can the subject make.
Little wings evolve on seed pods for the same reason they evolved on anything else. For whatever reason, each step along the way made them a tiny bit more successful at having babies than those without.
Maybe a little spike makes them slightly less likely to be eaten, a bigger spike less likely still. A flatter spike helped them catch the wind and scatter further afield, and broader ones further still.
There’s no feedback needed for individuals in this system - it’s literally a numbers game based on who/what can make the most babies. They’re the ones who, millions of years down the line, end up winning.
It’s not the boiling that’s the important factor - it’s the temperature.
You could make a cup of tea with it, but it wouldn’t be much different than just plopping a teabag in room-temperature water for the same amount of time.
Absolutely - if anything, there’s a reluctance to use formal titles in the UK in general.
I used to teach at university - students and staff alike just use first names when addressing each other. When signing emails, we just use our first name, no letters, job title, anything.
It’s even something specifically touched on in our orientation guide for foreign students.
As for newspapers and Prime Ministers specifically, one of the biggest newspapers, The Guardian, has a cartoonist who has always drawn David Cameron with a condom covering his head. There’s absolutely no deference shown to Prime Ministers here.
Primary sources? No, but there are independent secondary sources by people with no skin in the game.
Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus (circa 93–94 CE).
Annals by Tacitus (circa 116 CE)
The earliest Christian writings are also more about the teachings of a disruptive Jewish preacher who was then crucified, than they are about magic.
Let’s not do the ‘every Christian’ thing. It’s worth remembering the US has a very ‘unique’ type of Christian.
This. There is evidence that a preacher called Jesus existed, was crucified, and was well-regarded enough to start a following that persisted even after his death.
There isn’t, however, strong historical evidence for any of the magical parts of it.
Is that actually true? I suspect not.
Most people start “enjoying their own company” years before getting to try for real.
If there was a question of insensitivity, then surely problems would be much more prevalent at ages when people are enjoying themselves more frequently. But it’s not the case at all.
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Fact 1 - sexually active people subconsciously look at peoples’ crotches when meeting them.
Fact 2 - evolution doesn’t fine tune things if they’re good enough to get the job done well.
So the fact that pubic hairs are unsightly crazy-looking things might not be because they are fine tuned to be like that - it might just be because they do their job well enough and they just ended up looking like that.
What job could that be?
To confirm visually that you are sexually mature.
That may literally be it - a localised fuzzy indicator of whether or not you’re able to make babies.
I’m not trying to downplay the reality of serious health concerns sometimes being behind food habits, but I think I need to say…
Picky eating is an absolutely normal part of child development. Anecdotally, both of my kids went through two distinct phases of picky eating, at around 3-5 and 8-11.
They gradually grow out of it. All you can do is try to make sure what they are eating is nutritious enough while they are going through it.
From an outsider’s perspective, I think a lot of people think you guys sailed past the point of no return back in the 80s.