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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • restaurants that are identified as an outbreak for food poisoning get immediately closed and investigated.

    I’m not sure that’s accurate, though I’m willing to be shown I’m wrong. Certainly investigated, but I don’t think they always get closed.

    Restaurants can get closed if they’re failing to meet health code standards, but I don’t think an identified contamination of an ingredient shutters an otherwise compliant restaurant.

    Look at McDonald’s other restaurant, Chipotle, and the frequency with which they have to stop selling spinach because spinach suppliers have E. coli issues.


  • Any other restaurant would have been closed down over this.

    What?

    Jack-in-the-Box was undercooking their meat, IIRC. They infected over 700 people with E. coli. Four children died. 178 others were left with permanent injury including kidney and brain damage.

    They’re still around.

    It sounds like McDonald’s is dealing with an onion supplier issue. Their slivered onions used in the quarter pounder apparently come from one supplier. And apparently the issue is only with the slivered onions, not the diced ones.

    This isn’t a McDonald’s issue, this is a regulatory body issue, failing to keep up inspections on suppliers. Just like the listeria outbreak hitting store shelves.






  • I opted out as an organ donor a few years ago and it was after reading comments like yours where people described the process of organ harvesting. I find it to be pretty dehumanizing.

    You opted out of potentially saving lives because you feel like the necessary process of rapidly removing and preserving quickly decaying organs doesn’t treat the cadaver with proper respect?

    That’s a really strange stance.

    Additionally I wish I could control where my organs went

    I’m glad you can’t. I realize the system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the absurd complexity of letting the flawed and uneducated person dying decide who gets them. Imagine, for example, bigots demanding no black person or gay person gets their organs. Screw that. Continue to improve the system, but a system needs to be in place.






  • I said oldest English plural. Octopi is the oldest plural in English for the English word “octopus.”

    We took a word that sounded to us like a second declension Latin word and gave it a second declension plural. This wasn’t accurate in Latin, since it’s actually a third declension noun with weird Greek endings (as a word lifted from Greek).

    But English doesn’t use declensions the same way Latin does. We just know that many words that end in -us get pluralized as -i in English (alumnus -> alumni, etc.) and so “octopus” as “octopi” sounds right to English-speaking ears.

    Then some people were like, “Nah, it should follow English plural rules” and said “octopuses.” Then others were like, “Well, as a Latin word FROM a Greek word we should be using the proper third declension Greek ending plural from Latin” and we got to “octopodes,” which matches up with the Attic Greek masculine plural, «ὀκτώποδες» but pronounced differently because Latin didn’t differentiate the same way between Ο and Ω. And then we bastardize the pronunciation in English to blend the Latin and the Greek and our even further weakened English vowel to the point where we almost say “ah” for omega. (Which is why I wrote it that way.)

    Anyway, the point is we shouldn’t be prescriptivist about the plural of the word octopus in English. Just let octopi and octopuses and octopodes live in peace with one another.





  • The Harris you’re thinking of would say Israel has every right to kill women, children and American journalists unconditionally and that to argue there should be consequences is antisemitic.

    Kamala Harris has to walk the political tightrope of not being accused of antisemitism in a nation that has decided speaking ill of Israel’s misdeeds is antisemitic.

    She has very specifically not said Israel has every right to kill women, children, and American journalists. She has said that they have every right to defend themselves, which is of course a safe non-answer. It doesn’t condone genocide, which is by definition not self-defense, but it also doesn’t oppose Israel, which would likely be suicidal in a national election as bafflingly close as this one.

    Ideally she would stand up for Palestine, but I think that, broadly speaking, Americans are ill-informed about what’s happening in Gaza. I’m guessing her team knows that if she were to speak out vehemently in opposition to what most people don’t realize is a genocide, it would likely lose her more support than it would gain her in key states like Pennsylvania. Yes, she’d get support from many Palestinian-Americans in Michigan, but that may also turn undecided voters (in an election like this one, “undecided voter” means “uninformed voter”) against her. And she desperately needs those undecided voters, because the electoral college means she has an inherent disadvantage in this election.

    She and her strategists are banking on people opposed to Israel’s genocide being smart enough to know that Donald Trump would be even worse, and to understand that political realities are complex in a way that is often very distasteful.

    We can be disappointed that she isn’t decrying the actions of Israel, but to pretend that Harris is in full-throated support of genocide is disingenuous.

    As much as we would like it to be, the world is not simple.



  • That U is becoming more and more a joke…

    Importantly, it’s universal compared to having parallel and Serial and PS/2 and the old joystick port and FireWire and whatnot.

    How annoyed everyone is/was about Lightning sticking around should be pretty good evidence of how universal USB is. Especially since Lightning still used USB-A or USB-C on the host end.

    Sure there are different versions of USB, but they will still work. They might not work at their best if they don’t have compatible higher-end features, but they’ll still communicate.


  • The most successful Kickstarter in history (so far) was Brandon Sanderson’s “Secret Project.” He had written four novels during the pandemic which were not written for or promised to any publisher, so they did a Kickstarter to publish them through Dragonsteel, his company, and added on things like monthly loot boxes, digital editions, etc.

    Raised over $40 million dollars (some of which they used to fund almost every publishing project on Kickstarter at the time, which was pretty cool).

    Other than some snafus with manufacturing (getting the fancy colored pages from the printer to the binder took longer than anticipated, so the first book didn’t reach people until a month or two late, and instead they moved up the boxes planned for February to January, March to February, etc.) the delivery went really well. I have my four high-quality hardcover copies displayed proudly in my living room, and I have various Cosmere-related merch all over the house.

    Of course, Sanderson already had an audience and a company. The Kickstarter let them do something they hadn’t done previously, but he obviously would’ve been able to publish those books through one of the publishers he works with regardless. Still, it was fun to be a part of community funding for something I was excited about.