Ah! But you’re not accounting for radio, then television and now the internet. Mass communication is squashing languages and dialects and accents flat, while at the same time working for archival purposes.

Spoken, live languages? Very damned few. Archived languages? We might do pretty well.

In my lifetime I’ve seen accents disappearing in America. Doing tech support in the early 90s, I played a game of guessing what state a person was from. Did quite well! I could almost always match their accent. (Midwestern was my kryptonite, very generic.)

We’re seeing regional accents and dialects disappearing very quickly due to the internet, and formerly, TV in general.

For example; I haven’t heard a deep Cajun accent in ages, unless I look for it on YouTube, and even then it’s mostly intelligible. I talked to people 25-30 years ago I could not comprehend, and I’m good at languages!

Another example; Go watch Steel Magnolias from 1989. (Great movie BTW!) That deep, propuh, Mississippi female accent is all but gone except for the oldest, and those women only use it amongst each other.

In any case, English seems to rule the internet, a modern lingua franca, don’t see that changing any time soon.

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”

― Peter Watts, Blindsight

between yourself and God knows where

Kinda gathered that bit. 🙁 I may install it and try to track exactly how that flow works. Anyway, seems an easy way to bypass the UK’s block without hassling with a VPN.

I’m in Florida. Fire up my VPN to surf porn. But that’s not a thing I want running 24/7, let alone just to browse lemmy.

If OP is asking such a question, y’all are probably making your answers too complicated.

Unmanaged switch: All the ports are equal. Plug anything in anywhere, it works, done.

Managed switch: There is a world of options to control how data moves in and out of those ports. You can really go nuts!

Your basic home or business user only needs an unmanaged switch, good enough.

A home user that wants to learn, build a home lab, managed switch. A business with more complex networking and security needs, managed switch.

As to the expense, managed switches are stupid cheap on eBay. If you want to experiment with networking, that’s the way to go.

One more funny note, if you end up with a managed switch, but don’t need or care about the options, reset to factory and it’s now an unmanaged switch! (You can still program it of course, but you don’t have to in order to make it fly. Just plug stuff in.)

Finally figured out why retailers keep moving up the date on Christmas stuff. Consumers are only going to spend $X on decorations and the like. If you’re late getting those on the shelf, that money has already been given to your competitor.

So, it’s not greed, it’s, “Want the sale or not?”

Seen North Korea from space?

Hell. No.

My wife is fighting for her 10-year green card right now. It’s a fucking nightmare.

It’s not fabricated, these people honestly think one can live the “welfare queen” lifestyle. Reagan said the words and it resonated with the Republicans, Fox News ran with it. But really, this isn’t some master plan. Unless you’ve been through it or tried getting welfare, you can’t know how hard it is and how little you get. I’ve talked to many people like this.

You have to earn below 130% of the poverty line to get food stamps. More you make, less you get. I will say that when I first moved here I was getting a ridiculous amount for a single guy, and they just kept sending it, no questions asked for 6-months. Those days are long gone.

God knows what you have to do to get an actual check, but you have to be worse off than merely needing food stamps. And those checks are paltry. Unless you’re renting a room in someone’s house, you’re not making rent.

Unemployment is a fucking joke. In Florida, employers have to pay $7,200 when you first start, and they have 6 months to get it all paid into the unemployment fund. I would have got a MAX of $4,200, then it’s over. That was less than a month’s pay from my last job.

There is a gauntlet to be run to get a single penny. And you have to keep running that gauntlet, over and over again. I could go on and on, but I figured out 3 decades back that it’s easier, less time consuming, and more profitable, to work a shit job 40-hours a week.

Aight! I want to heart from people thinking this is normal, or not, and if you can actually see pictures in your inner space. I feel a doctoral dissertation could be written here.

Closest thing I can think of in my life was the Mexican chick downstairs bringing her cute young friend over one Saturday night. I was utterly hammered on vodka, so I was clueless until I looked over and saw Maria deep in her friend’s pussy. And away we go!

Been in all sorts of freaky sexual situations, but that one could have been filmed as a porno.

Epstein was allowed to kill himself. Someone whispered in his ear that he should do the right thing, hint, hint, or face monstrous consequences.

For symptoms:

Mom made me a shot of whiskey, honey and lemon juice as a child. (We did not drink in my household. Ever.) Works a charm.

My wife makes me hover over a steaming bowl of salt water, towel over head. Does seem to work well. Can’t hurt to expand your lungs with the heat and get some salt air in there, right? A trip to the beach, especially in the water, cures a great many ills.

The cure:

What breaks my fever is curling up in bed under a ton of blankets and knocking myself out. When I get to dreaming heavily I’ll wake up soaked in sweat. Not mildly moist, I mean to say soaking wet, really gross, have to get up and towel off. That’s how I know I’m on the other side and getting better.

So why didn’t Conservapedia take off? If it’s unbiased truth, no liberal agenda, it should have blown Wikipedia out of the water a decade ago. Funny that.

That site is bugfuck nuts, and not just because I disagree with most conservative positions. Bug. Fuck. Nuts.

I do not sense a wrongness in your post so I will not disappear you. :)

You got the original explanation, but grok was taken up by computer nerds way back in the day. It’s not merely understanding a thing, in the book or the slang. To grok means to completely wrap your head around the subject, not merely surface level understanding, really feel it down deep.

As to Musk’s obsession? He wants to be seen as the cool kid, the smart hacker, the guy who groks what’s really going on.

Honestly it’s a great name for a search engine or AI. And now he’s actively ruining it like everything else he touches.

BTW, Stranger in a Strange Land is an excellent book. I laugh when people call Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers. “So, how about that hippie book?” Heinlein’s books examine various government and economic systems, “What if it worked this way?”

Have you never voted before? That’s a perfectly typical form. Of course the candidates have no text description, there is nothing non-partisan one could put there. Of course the propositions have text descriptions, they always do.