obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish

Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)

Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

• causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
• necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
• convolutes timetables, where present
• means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
• complicates both secular and religious law
• is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
• makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
• does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
• is not simpler.

As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

old.reddit.com works just fine. Logging in to view NSFW content is not required.

Yes, they’ve been saying that since forever.

What do you mean “the world isn’t getting better”? It definitely is. I mean, just look at, well, uhh… well uhhh… nevermind.

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1. There’s a lot less people over here, but that will get better over time.
2. The community is a lot more left-leaning. It’s not that I don’t like this. I do agree with most of these opinions.

Probably the 20-year-old microwave.

I don’t speak Bân-lâm-gú unfortunately. I just looked up those words, and they do sound slightly different!

• 在: tsāi
• 再: tsài
• 應該: ing-kai
• 因: in

(For Chinese learners reading this, please note that the tone markers in the romanization of Bân-lâm-gú (Southern Min, a group of languages including Hokkien, Taiwanese, etc.) is different from those used in Pinyin for Mandarin.)

I also looked up how these words are pronounced in Cantonese. They sure are really different! Mandarin really does have a lot more pairs of homophones and near-homophones compared to other dialects.

On a semi-related note, I think it’s really sad that the majority of Chinese dialects are slowly being replaced by Mandarin.

I never knew that there was such a key! Thank you! It’s really useful.

I’m a native speaker of Mandarin from Taiwan. In Chinese, some people often mix up 在 (zài) and 再 (zài) in writing. It’s a bit hard to explain their definitions since they are merely function words (words that have little lexical meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence), so I’m just gonna copy and paste their definitions from an online dictionary:

在: to exist; to be alive / (of sb or sth) to be (located) at / (used before a verb to indicate an action in progress)
再: again; once more; re- / second; another / then (after sth, and not until then) / no matter how … (followed by an adjective or verb, and then (usually) 也 (yě) or 都 (dōu) for emphasis)

As you probably have noticed, their meanings don’t overlap at all. The only reason some people mix them up is because they are homophones.

Another typo some… let’s just say, less educated, people often make is 因該 (yīn’gāi). The correct word is 應該 (yīnggāi), meaning should; must. 因該 is never correct. You can think of 因該 as the Chinese version of the much dreaded “should of.” The reason is that the distinction of -in and -ing is slowly fading away in Taiwan (it is still very much thriving in other Chinese-speaking societies), and some people just type too sloppily to care.

By the way, I should mention that 在, 再, and 應該 are very basic words, probably one of the first 500 words a non-native speaker learns.

Thank you! I often feel the urge to use “less” before a countable noun despite knowing that I’m supposed to use “fewer.” Good to know that it isn’t just me.

I also hate going through prep. Not being able to eat normal food is bad enough, and now I need to down cups and cups of this sickening liquid reminiscent of burnt plastic?

if the surgeon lost his watch in there

Are you implying that the surgeon once stuck his fist into your anus?

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The year is 4 digits. This is just an age confirmation dialog asking for your birthday on a sketchy website, so I’m pretty sure the date won’t be displayed later.

You might find this video on open-source notes apps interesting:

https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE

This has always, always, always been the case for me since I got a laptop with Windows 11 preinstalled on it. I dual boot Linux (openSUSE) and rarely use Windows, and this screen pops up like 5% of the time when I boot to Windows.

It’s not common but you can absolutely find some at the candy section in a supermarket.