mpk

joined 11 months ago
[–] mpk@awful.systems 6 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

From the comments: "Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure."

Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they don't do that then the hygienist most certainly will...

[–] mpk@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

Definitely that. "It's all covfefe to me"

[–] mpk@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

As a white British dude the problem is that "Telephone" is an Americanism, so I think the solution is that we find an entirely new name to describe speech-like yet utterly incomprehensible-to-the-listener noises that's completely devoid of cultural appropriation. I suggest "This is all Trump to me". The game could be "Trump Tweets".

[–] mpk@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was “it’s greek to me”. I don’t know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.

Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list of similar idioms from a lot of different languages. Chinese gets a lot of mentions, but so do Greek and Spanish. Plus Turkish and Hebrew. As far as I can tell the Chinese describe any incomprehensible language as "Martian". But "It's Greek to me" goes right back to the Romans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me

[–] mpk@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago

Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but it's still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. It's also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So I'm not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond "marketing".

[–] mpk@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Seems to be like an awesome way to get tech millionaires with weird ideas about education from reading too much Ayn Rand to cough up 27 grand a year to educate their unfortunate kids.

[–] mpk@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago

This isn't the UK government or UK public education policy, to be fair on the UK. It's a £27,000-per-year private school in London - the sort that helps ram the possibly-not-so-bright kids of the wealthy through their GCSEs and A-Levels.

[–] mpk@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I like that take on it. This might explain why I always say "please" when asking Siri to do things and say "thank you" to the ATM after it gives me my money.

[–] mpk@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Huge graveyards seem to be a Catholic thing, IME, not least as the Holy Church of Rome remains pretty weird about cremation. In a lot of other countries grave plots aren't sold, only leased for a certain period of time, after which whatever bones remain are dug up and reburied along with all the other bones so the plot can be reused. They're more like safe spaces for decomposition where you can be reasonably certain that nobody's going to dig a hole to install a new drain and accidentally unearth Zombie Grandma.

[–] mpk@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I can only assume the 88 is a coincidence. it's just a coincidence, right? right?

[–] mpk@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

Plenty of propaganda, but Smoky was a real cat -- was rescued from a bombed-out building after an air raid by the woman in the picture - Miss Ann Twynam of Paddington (a district of London). While I'm sure his saluting trick didn't involve taxidermy, I'm sure it involved bribery. Cats basically owned the black market in tuna during the war when pretty much everything was strictly rationed.

[–] mpk@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Babe, you're looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, you're an M-438."

 

The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.

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