Zagorath

I think the solution to the problem with quarters is to say “calendar quarter”.

Hardly the first time Spanish courts have completely fucking failed to understand technology (I will never get over how monumentally stupid the Mario Costeja case was), but this manages to take it to an incredible new level. The idiotic lack of forethought asside, you’d think that once the consequences were made clear and people were actively being prevented from accessing all sorts of legitimate websites, including GitHub, they’d immediately reverse course. How the fuck does one private sporting company gain the right to force a huge swathe of the Internet to be blocked, anyway? Utter fucking nonsense.

What about it?

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Ah yeah that’s pretty solid evidence. My own experience has been with my own comments getting removed, and it happening far too quickly to be manual moderation. If you actually saw someone else’s comment, and then noticed it gone, it’s hard to call that anything other than a deliberate silencing of their viewpoint.

Honestly, reading this comment is really just reinforcing for me why we say American. Reading “USAien” over and over again hurts my head.

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That sounds like the name of a person from Docklands in Melbourne.

The reason for this is simple: the word in English is “American”. Because in English speaking countries, it is almost universally the case that we talk about the 7 continents. And in the rare case we talk about 6 continents, it’s from merging Europe and Asia (which, frankly, is blatantly a far superior model of the continents), not merging North America and South America.

So “America” unambiguously refers to the country, and there’s no need for estadounidense, any more than there’s a need for “commonwealthian” for someone from the Commonwealth of Australia.

Yeah, that was another one of the theories. Linguists seem pretty sure it has something to do with Dutch, but are in disagreement over exactly how it came to be. (The “Janneke” example I gave above being, according to what I read, a diminutive form of Jan.)

Australian rhyming slang in this case, but yeah, it functions in much the same way as Cockney.

Bruh, check my instance.

Motornormativity. Not all of it, it’s a huge problem, but there are so many really small bits that could easily be addressed. Like get rid of slip lanes, and make corners into side streets sharp right angles. When you’ve got a bike path (yes, putting in the bike path at all is one of those big difficult problems, but when you’re getting that done anyway), making sure it has clear priority when it crosses side streets through the use of wombat crossings and road markings.

I dunno how to get it noticed. Half the problem is getting people to acknowledge it even is a problem when it’s directly pointed out to them. Half the people are so deep in carbrain they refuse to acknowledge there’s even a problem with everything being centred around cars. And most of the rest buy into the neoliberal “pErsOnAL reSpONsiBiliTy” nonsense and blame crashes (or “accidents”, as they invariably call them) entirely on the bad driving (or worse—victim blaming it on the cyclist or pedestrian), rather than being willing to acknowledge that bad driving is inevitable and designing so that (a) bad drivers have other viable alternatives to driving if they want, and (b) the infrastructure could be designed to be forgiving of bad driving and reduce the likelihood and severity of crashes.

Were they removed by him, or were they automatically removed? I’ve seen some extremely egregious auto moderating on YouTube lately.

Out of interest (because I know nothing whatsoever about GrapheneOS), how does its lead compare to Linus Torvald?

Idk what a 4 nation game is (at least if it doesn’t involve Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), but I always thought the land from (fake) London to Windsor, Ontario was very suspicious.

Oh that’s really interesting. I would have sworn that o-shortening was a distinctly Australian thing. Do you have other words that you shorten like that? Do you know if that’s a specific term that Brits might have borrowed from Australia, or if it evolved naturally out of British slang?

I dunno how true it is, but I’ve heard it gets even more specific once you’re in the north. I shared a map in another comment detailing the different meanings of it.

As for the etymology, apparently it goes back to Dutch settlers of New Netherlands, and may be connected to the name Janneke. It seems to have gone from being used by English settlers to Dutch settlers to being used in precisely the reverse at some point, and has at times meant either someone of English descent, of early Protestant descent, or other things.

It was used more generally by outsiders to refer to Americans as far back as the Revolutionary War (the song Yankee Doodle Dandy was originally making fun of Americans—macaroni being a sophisticated style of dress), so its history being used in that way actually predates the Civil War associations that I think many Americans would give it today.

So yeah, it really does have a fascinating linguistic history.

Also, weird…this is the second time in as many days I’ve had cause to look up Yankee Doodle Dandy.

In America, yankee means people from a particular part of America. But we use it here in Australia to mean any American. It’s especially fun when people from the south (that is…the south of the country America, not from the continent of South America) take offence at the term IMO.

We also use “seppo” which is an Australian shortening slang of “septic”, which is rhyming slang (of the kind used in both Australia and London, England) that comes via “septic tank” via “yank”.

Gringo seems strange to me. I thought that was a predominantly Latin American term for white people, and would apply equally well to Americans as Canadians as Australians as (of particular relevance to someone from Spain) English…but only the white of each, so it would seem to me it shouldn’t work as synonymous with “American” because it excludes African Americans, Asian Americans, etc. But I’m not Spanish or Latin American, so I might just be misunderstanding the word.

Edit: what yank means depending on where you are (allegedly):