Partly right, but they don’t decide if a word is “official” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). For a word to be a so-called “real” word it only has to be in common use among some group, dictionaries simply document words that have been in common use. Merriam-Webster is an authoritative record of words in use specifically in US English (with some records for other English variants and dialects, I think? ) but they are not a prescriptivist organisation. A word which appears in their dictionary is almost certainly a word that is or was in use in US English but a word that doesn’t appear might also be a real word, particularly if it’s a relatively new word or meaning.

So with that in mind, arguing that a word is real when it doesn’t appear in the dictionary can be valid in some cases, but arguing that a word isn’t real when it does appear in a dictionary (like Brian did) is generally not smart.

tl;dr, a dictionary, not the dictionary; not all English; “official” doesn’t make sense here; in some (but not this) cases disagreeing is valid.

My work offered a compressed work week for a few years where employees could work the same number of hours over 9 days every fortnight, meaning they could take every second Friday off still working the same number of hours. Employees based in NA didn’t get that benefit, instead of trying to get that implemented over there NA employees were practically celebrating when the company recently scrapped it everywhere else instead.

My experience of American work culture is very much toxic crab-in-a-bucket mentality, pull everyone else down instead of trying to make work life the littlest bit more bearable, ironically directly contradicting the company’s slogan. The amount of brown-nosing sycophants on all-teams calls is pretty insane too.

So yes, I very much believe this is something American media would say.

Sort of, but but really. You’re right that historically the daylight hours set an upper limit on the amount of work that can be done per week for most types of work, but that limit is far higher than 8 hours per day over 5 days. The 40 hour work week is based on unions fighting for a 40 hour work week. If it wasn’t for the unions you’d be working all day every day except Sunday, for religious reasons.

That might change over the next few decades too, the current fight is for a 4 day work week and studies are showing promising results there.

I think you’re misrepresenting that a little. It’s not peer reviewed, doesn’t appear to have any researchers names attached at all, doesn’t mention latent demand, and doesn’t at any point consider that there could be other modes of transport. It reads to me like someone trying to sell their road building project.

There’s plenty of examples of software doing this right and displaying each language in the selector in that language, it’s hard to say why they’ve localised it here. Most likely they just didn’t consider how the user interacts with that element and localised it the same way they translate everything else, but that could be down to anyone from the developer habitually running everything through localisation to company policy where they couldn’t get an exception for that element.

You’d have to ask support for whatever software you’re using for more detail, chances are you won’t get anything useful back but if you’re lucky they might fix it.

Exploiting the difference in value of a commodity between communities is a valid way to make a living, traders have existed for a very long time, though if there’s little effort required the values will quickly align with each other. Turning it into an infinite money glitch by having a mint convert your raw material into coins is nonsense.

That’s all still assuming the coins are made of pure gold/silver for some reason. And assuming the mint is willing to just make money for you in spite what I’ve already said.

Edit: And that’s all if you ignore the fact alchemy, conjuration, and transfiguration exist in that universe so the entire thing is moot anyway. The angle they should have taken is that physical currency makes no sense in a world where you can just summon more, but I suppose that’s harder to turn into “I’m so much smarter than the entire world”.

If the coins are 100% gold or copper then you’re in one of two scenarios: the value of the coin is the scrap metal value, in which case swapping between gold and copper makes little difference; or, the mint buys your scrap gold and converts it in-house, pocketing the difference. A mint has no reason to convert your gold to significantly higher value coins for you, that only loses them their economic and political power in the form of currency control.

The only way it would work is if you specifically build a world where everyone else is incredibly stupid just to make yourself seem smart.

People are always praising that fanfic for some reason so I tried reading it a while back. If it’s the one I’m thinking of then hard disagree, the protagonist is a self-insert Mary Sue clearly written by a kid who thinks they’re the smartest person alive. One part that still sticks in my mind years later is their fundamental misunderstanding of how fiat currency works, it was some ridiculous get-rich-quick scheme like melting down wizard currency into pure gold to sell to non-wizard community then using that money to buy silver which they’d trade up to magic society gold coins. It was some years ago so I may be misremembering the details, but there should be a ton of issues that immediately jump out to you there.

I trudged through and got as far as the first meeting with Malfoy where the author realized they were being too friendly with each other, but since Malfoy is supposed to be a bad guy they decided he should randomly blurt out something about how he wants to rape some girl.

Maybe it’s just because I don’t have the context of other bad fanfics, but that’s a solid 0/10 from me.

The question reads like an XY problem, they describe DB functions for data structures so unless there’s some specific reason they can’t use a DB that’s the right answer. A “spreadsheet for data structures” describes a relational database.

But they need rectangular structure. How do they work on tree structures, like OP has asked?

Relationships. You don’t dump all your data in a single table. Take for instance the following sample JSON:

  "users": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "Alice",
      "email": "alice@example.com",
      "favorites": {
        "games": [
          {
            "title": "The Witcher 3",
            "platforms": [
              {
                "name": "PC",
                "release_year": 2015,
                "rating": 9.8
              },
              {
                "name": "PS4",
                "release_year": 2015,
                "rating": 9.5
              }
            ],
            "genres": ["RPG", "Action"]
          },
          {
            "title": "Minecraft",
            "platforms": [
              {
                "name": "PC",
                "release_year": 2011,
                "rating": 9.2
              },
              {
                "name": "Xbox One",
                "release_year": 2014,
                "rating": 9.0
              }
            ],
            "genres": ["Sandbox", "Survival"]
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "name": "Bob",
      "email": "bob@example.com",
      "favorites": {
        "games": [
          {
            "title": "Fortnite",
            "platforms": [
              {
                "name": "PC",
                "release_year": 2017,
                "rating": 8.6
              },
              {
                "name": "PS5",
                "release_year": 2020,
                "rating": 8.5
              }
            ],
            "genres": ["Battle Royale", "Action"]
          },
          {
            "title": "Rocket League",
            "platforms": [
              {
                "name": "PC",
                "release_year": 2015,
                "rating": 8.8
              },
              {
                "name": "Switch",
                "release_year": 2017,
                "rating": 8.9
              }
            ],
            "genres": ["Sports", "Action"]
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

You’d structure that in SQL tables something like this:

The dbo.favorites table handles the many-to-many relationship between users and games; users can have as many favourite games as they want, and multiple users can have the same favourite game. The dbo.platforms handles one-to-many relationships; each record in this table represents a single release, but each game can have multiple releases on different platforms.

Usually no, unless I’ve left a reply disagreeing then someone else comes along and downvotes them, makes me look like an ass who downvotes anyone I disagree with. I also check my own comments to see if people agree with me but I’ll keep the comment up either way, if I do change my mind I’d rather leave a new comment or add stuff in an edit.

It’s not too difficult to bot votes on lemmy so they’re even more pointless than they are on reddit.

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A sect is a sub-group of people unified by beliefs or practice, a denomination is essentially just a large named sect. Christianity is not monolithic and organises into groups, it by definition has sects.

Even if you were right it’s such a ridiculously pointless and pedantic argument, it does nothing to further the conversation. You’re just trying to use cheap gotchas as a thought-terminating cliche. The only thing you’ve done is to force us to literally argue semantics, that is not a good look for you.

For completeness, here’s a Christian source using the word sect to describe Christian groups, one of the top search engine hits when I searched.

The “grammatically correct” way is always whatever way is already in widespread use. Also, I’d say this is a noun adjunct, so not all that uncommon.

Aphantasia is a spectrum, but even when you can visualise a full realistic scene it should be easy for most people to tell the difference between that and seeing something physically. When you can’t tell the difference that’s a hallucination.

It’s only total aphantasia if you can’t visualise an image in your mind at all. I believe then you’d get more a concept of an apple than an image or other depiction of an apple but that’s only my understanding from hearing other people talking about it.

This specific case isn’t really to do with the evolution of language, more just ineffective linguistic prescriptivism. Some guy 200 years ago decided they didn’t like how “less” had been used for the past millennium so they made up a guideline for what the preferred (like what you just said) then people decided to treat that as an actual rule. Obviously it’s still common to use “less” that way even after a couple of centuries of people trying to enforce that rule, it’s a good demonstration of how prescriptivism is a waste of time.

Strangely enough, in my experience many prescriptivists who rely on etymological arguments are fine with language changing for this one rule. Makes me think they never really did care about historic usage of a word.

Alice: So, how do you identify?
Bob: Normal.

What’s the odds Bob’s a bigot? Someone asked how to describe their sexuality, “normal” is not a useful answer.

Fuck that, that’s implying any other orientation is abnormal. People should have the right words to describe their sexuality.

Thanks for downvote, but your response is still somewhere between unhelpful and a dog whistle.

I disagree with that framing, someone not buying your shit is not the same as you losing money. Inkscape saved millions for graphic designers, which is very different. Adobe was not entitled to that money, you can’t lose something that was never yours.

The British monarchy primarily “provides” money by owning land and other assets which would otherwise be government-owned. They also “earn” a shitload of money just for existing and still dump significant expenses onto taxpayers.

First paragraph of the article:

Earlier this month, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement added Microsoft to its list of priority targets due to the company’s intense entanglement with the Israeli military via Azure cloud and AI services. Specifically, BDS called for supporters to boycott Xbox, including Game Pass, individual games, and future purchases of consoles and peripherals. Now, in a show of solidarity, indie label Ice Water Games has removed one of its projects, open-world tactics RPG Tenderfoot Tactics, from the Xbox store.