My theory had been ‘amburger in a cockney accent

an 🍔

Going crazy trying to think of what word you use for 🍔 that starts with a vowel.

Oh, and also I used to always get the Santa Fe chicken Gordita at Taco Bell until it went away.

I think Apple’s emphasis on the privacy and security stuff would have happened anyway, because they’ve been positioning themselves as privacy focused for several years now.

I got rid of mine because I kept mixing up the receiver and the ice dispenser

I definitely see your perspective, but mostly wanted to make sure I wasn’t overlooking some obvious downside in my risk assessment.

I figure my chances are low that I will get into the situation where an authority demands access to my phone but I also don’t have the opportunity to lock out biometrics. Like if I get pulled over I just hold power and volume up buttons for three seconds and biometrics is off. That said, it certainly doesn’t eliminate my risk completely, and I wouldn’t consider anyone crazy for just opting out completely.

Regarding biometrics, I’ve felt that one advantage is that if I’m in a public space, I don’t have to worry about someone watching me enter my password over my shoulder. If I got into a situation where someone is physically overpowering me to get my finger onto my device against my will, I’m probably going to give them whatever password they want so I don’t get a beat down.

I think this is where the specific definition of “nice” is crucial. I think it’s very possible to still be “nice” while also being confrontational or standing up for things, and in fact, doing it nicely but without backing down can sometimes be extremely effective.

I know the “nice” you are referring to, where someone uses it as a shield for uncaring, selfish behavior. I’d of course rather have someone who isn’t so “nice” who earnestly tries to do the right thing than that kind of nice.

If it’s a clear sign of disrespect, can you say why the person wanted to disrespect you?

Wouldn’t that give an extra incentive to raise the retirement age?

I’m like that with turkeys. They are hilarious weirdos.

“I don’t really like X, but as long as they don’t then do Y I guess it’s okay”

They always do Y

It’s not a weird caste system. It’s just that people have always primarily just used SMS in the US, and if the people texting all happen to have iPhones, then there are some extra features tacked on (from the perception of the end user). Having been in many many large group chats for various activities and events, where it’s never 100% apple and just SMS, absolutely nobody cares at all. It’s just that maybe some teens and tweens use the colors to judge and exclude, which they famously find justifications for doing in every generation, and probably even that is overblown by the media.

There simply was never an incentive to kind of force everybody to move over to e.g. WhatsApp, and people don’t bother to do something like that en masse without a need to.

You might be the only one for whom these words makes sense

That’s just cruel

No. You aren’t getting it. The Christian god created every aspect of the universe. Light and dark. Up and down. You are still thinking about our universe, in which these negative things are possible, and how you would have to be restricted in what you do in our universe in order to prevent you from doing certain things. But god could have set all the parameters of the universe differently such that they just didn’t exist at all. You wouldn’t miss them or be prevented from doing them. It would be like if there were a fifth cardinal direction in an alternate universe, and someone in that universe thought “if god prevented me from going in that direction, I wouldn’t have free will anymore”. But here we are, with only four cardinal directions, and free will. We aren’t being stopped from doing anything, it just isn’t part of our universe and doesn’t even make sense in it.

It doesn’t matter what you tack on, it doesn’t change my point — the only way humans could “screw it up” is if God made all the negative and horrible shit part of the universe. All you are saying is that God made a universe where there was no evil or suffering actively happening, but the concepts existed and were possible — because they ultimately happened and only possible things happen. And God chose to make them possible things as omnipotent creator of everything that exists.

The Christian god created every aspect of the universe and how it works. He therefore could have created a universe in which there was no such thing as evil or suffering, and given people in that universe free will. So even that doesn’t hold up.

It’s sorta like how we value Wikipedia, which curates information, but other enshittified for-profit curators of information are trash. I don’t want the trash, but I also don’t want no curation at all. I value good curation. And Wikipedia shows it is possible to have good, or at least not garbage, curation of content.

You are an individual multilingual person from a specific place. I’m talking about how monolingual speakers on average would compare in their knowledge of formal grammatical terms to multilingual speakers, again, on average. In particular with English which has very little verb conjugation or case marking, it is very easy to ignore the class of a word if that’s the only language you learn about.

sorry but I think you are misjudging just how much you learn both grammar and vocabulary from speaking a language natively and possibly misjudging how well education can teach someone a language

languages are these surprisingly complex and irregular things, which are way easier to learn by doing than by trying. often entering school you can already use tenses or grammatical structures that students learning English as a second language will struggle with a few years later in their educational journey, while you can spend that time unknowingly building up an even better subconscious understanding of the language.

It sounds like you are confusing having an ability to speak and understand a language with having a formal education in a language, or just misunderstanding what I was saying. As you point out, people can already speak their native language (more or less) starting from the first day of grammar school. In fact, school isn’t necessary at all for a person to be a native speaker.

The children starting out in school don’t have a clue what a noun or verb is in the language. When someone reaches the point in school where they learn these grammatical concepts, they can do poorly at grasping them or forget about them after they’ve learned them and they are no longer part of the curriculum. They don’t actually need to know these things well (or at all) in order to speak, read, and write. High school students can write an essay in English that shows total mastery of the past progressive verb form without being able to tell you what it is.

On the other hand, when learning a second language (unless one does immersion), a person can’t rely on their native-speaker instinct and therefore will struggle to speak, read, and write if they don’t get the hang of formal grammatical terms to process their language input and compute the output.