The Irish are cool most everywhere tho.

Lol, get the Irish started on the Travelers, and it’ll come out for them, too. The amount of times I hear “They’re knackers, they’re just scumbags,” or similar when one of them shows up was pretty surprising, initially.

Japan also has a problem much like exists elsewhere, that older voters are the ones who vote most, so their interests and views get disproportionately represented in election results. I’m sure that’s only exaggerated in a country that’s so lopsided in its age distribution as Japan is. I also wouldn’t be surprised at all if it were to turn out that elderly voters tended to be more xenophobic and resistant to changes in immigration policy.

Japan really needs to get it sorted out soon, though, as they are desperately in need of work in all sorts of fields, but moving there is such a massive pain that it really doesn’t seem worth it unless you live in a developing country where you can go to Japan, do a few years of work and go back with enough money to buy yourself a home. Like, I looked into it for a laugh a month or two ago, and I actually have work experience that would qualify me for a visa as a skilled worker, but there’s no way I would consider going. You could only use it for a maximum of 5 years, it cannot be renewed, as far as I could tell, it also cannot be reapplied for, and it’s ineligible to serve in any capacity for establishing residency. You also cannot bring your family with you. That’s a pretty hard sell for all but the most desperate of people to uproot their lives for, even before you get into Japan’s famously terrible work culture.

I do understand a certain reluctance towards migration that doesn’t result in cultural assimilation to a fair extent, especially considering how big of an export Japan’s cultural products are, but xenophobic reactions to any possibility of change are going to back Japan into a corner where they have to pick between collapsing as a society, or just opening the floodgates to immigration in a way that will leave them way more susceptible to the sort of massive cultural shift that so many Japanese voters seem to fear. In my layman’s opinion, they would do far better to go about massive work culture reform and allow much more immigration with an immense amount of support for people learning the language and culture, and assistance in integrating into the community. It’ll probably be painful for all involved, but the result of kicking this can down the road perpetually will be far more painful, and they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves.

No, because I don’t see any point to it. If they manage to catch him, they may as well just kill him on the spot when they get him, as I have no faith that his trial would be anything more than a farce to try and present some sense of following process and norms, while guaranteeing he gets some insane sentence, only to be found mysteriously to have hung himself. I’m sure that, somehow, a jury of his peers will be comprised solely of the 12 most ghoulish residents of NYC one could find, and they’ll probably try to shop around for the worst judge they can to hear the whole thing.

Closest I’ve come to this was twice, both from the same doctor. She was actually my favorite primary doctor I’ve had, up until my insurance changed and I could no longer see her without it being cripplingly expensive.

Looking at my lab work results, one time she goes, “This is really interesting, you’ve got all kinds of stuff going on, don’t you?” and another was simply “Woah!”

Even if she wasn’t generally pretty funny, would still be my favorite, since she pretty much nailed down diagnoses for several issues that had been ailing me for years within the first couple appointments, was great with giving me referrals and fighting with insurance about “Yes, this really is necessary, it’s in your coverage agreement, so shut up and pay!” and got me back up to some semblance of full health in a matter of months. Like, exhaustion and joint pain so bad, I couldn’t walk down the single flight of stairs to leave my apartment some days and migraines that made me have to lay in a dark room for an hour, to now just being generally always a bit more fatigued than I should be given the amount of stuff I do in a given day.

Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”

I’m still a bit puzzled why we can’t just have various headings in the bibliography, if you want to make it absolutely unambiguous what sort of document you’re referencing? Sure, your average Joe on the street might not know how to use a DOI to find a journal article, or an ISBN for a book, but what’s the issue with something like this below?

Books

Cite your stuff here with all pertinent information.

Periodicals

See above

Journals

…

Films

etc.

It may not be as elegant and information dense as whatever style manual your field uses with placement and formatting of the information, but it’s pretty clear what is what without needing to whip up a whole style manual that will be entirely unknown to anyone outside of your own field of study.

Then again, I’m quite firmly of the opinion that any style manual that advocates in-text citations is an abomination that deserves to have said manuals gathered up and burned, and their creators and proponents sent to re-education camps until they learn the error of their ways and admit the superiority of footnotes or end notes for readability, while maintaining ease of checking references. Personally, I favor footnotes to avoid having to flip back and forth, but I’m also a fan of end notes when there is any further commentary provided on the citation that is useful to know, but would be disruptive to the main text of the document.

Not sure my mother ever topped hot dogs. Hot dogs with Sabrett’s red onions on top, and some baked beans fresh from the can were about as lofty as culinary pursuits got in my house growing up before ambition exceeded ability.

On android, GrapheneOS, AntennaPod and Tempo are probably my top ones. On my desktop, Firefox, tmux, mpd, ncmpcpp, gonic, neomutt, qbittorrent, weechat, mc, btop, Lagrange and emacs probably round things out for me outside of base OS stuff. OS side, my desktop has Arch Linux and my laptop runs OpenBSD. Bitwarden across platforms.

It depends on why they’re laughing for me. Lots of terribly unfunny people essentially provide their own real time laugh track to signal “This is the funny part, laugh please,” which gets old real quick. They also tend to laugh incredibly hard at their own jokes, far more than is merited by the actual joke. Unfunny people trying to force a joke like that get old fast.

On the other hand, I don’t take issue with having a bit of a laugh with everyone else when you land a good one. On rare occasion, there are even jokes that wind up funnier because they’re just so hilarious that the person telling them can hardly get them out without busting up themselves.

In lots of places, they aren’t liable, but many people aren’t aware of this, and/or aren’t in a position to fight it. It’s one of those things that vary by state, but in NY, for example, it’s definitely illegal.

Employers are only allowed to deduct certain items from an employee’s wages, such as taxes, insurance premiums, union dues, etc. They are not permitted to charge employees for breakages, cash shortages, fines or any other losses to the business.

Restaurants tend to employ younger workers, and often hire undocumented immigrants, so it’s easier for them to pull one over on their staff who may not know their rights, or be scared of retaliation if they do try to insist on their rights being respected.

I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.