Now get Netanyahu and Gallant for killing 30,000 Palestinians and we might see peace.

Once the leader who murdered 30,000 Palestinian civilians is brought to justice, maybe.

Hail, Caesar

I guess more accurately, Chagos as a culture is founded by slaves who worked the island and were freed. It was originally part of the Seychelles and then transferred to be considered part of Mauritius, and then sold to the British, and then leased to the Americans, but the Chagossian people have never really considered themselves part of Mauritius. Certainly more part of Mauritius than Britain, but still distinct as a culture, people, and language.

For the record, even the Guardians coverage of this is terrible.

1. They are handing control of Chagos over to Mauritius, not back to being an independent Chagossian state culture as it operated before. (Though arguing that it was technically part of Mauritius and illegally separated is the legal justification for returning it, so this was unavoidable given the path taken).

2. They did not consult widely with Chagossians, just the Mauritian government.

3. Part of ‘handing over’, includes a mandatory 99 year lease for the main island of Diego Garcia to the US for their military base.

It’s better than the UK controlling all of the Chagossian islands but it’s a far cry from justice.

I have serve-web running as a service, but that only works well on desktop screen layouts — from my experience, it runs terribly on mobile.

Congrats, if you’re trying to write software from your phone you should be fired as a software engineer.

Again, it is stupid as fuck for any software developer to use VIM. If you have to telnet into some random bullshit server for whatever reason you’re obviously in a different position. But real, good, maintainable software is not written and built by teams insisting on creating learning curves for no reason.

This is either false, or you didn’t understand the environment you were working in.

You have to explicitly turn on the setting to have VSCode reformat on save, it’s not on by default, and when it is on, it’s there for a reason, because having software developers that do not all follow the same standard for code formatting creates unpredictable needless chaos on git merge. This is literally ‘working as a software developer on a team 101’.

Bruh, there’s a whole help page on that:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

I know it has a steep learning curve with no benefit over GUI alternatives (unless you have to operate in a GUI-less environment).

Which makes it flat out dumb for a professional developer to use. “Lets make our dev environment needlessly difficult, slowing down new hires for no reason will surely pay off in the long run”.

Lmao, devs who insist on using VIM and the terminal over better graphical alternatives just to seem hardcore are the worst devs who write the worst code.

“Let me name all my variables with a single letter and abbreviations cause I can’t be bothered to learn how to setup a professional dev environment with intellisense and autocomplete.”

Allow them and if Russia strikes the West then have NATO impose a no fly zone over Ukraine and see how far Russia gets.

Honestly, what is the alternative? Allow Russia to take any territory it wants? It’s fucking absurd to listen to their bluster. At this point it seems literally no different than attempts to appease Hitler.

No, it’s focusing the conversation.

We’re talking about the relative pain of cutting off Chinese imports or getting into a trade war with them. In that context, the fact that we import far more from them then we produce domestically compared with decades ago means that it will be more painful to do so now than it would have been decades ago.

The reality is that while there is a tiny ‘buy American’ push from some people, the vast majority of the American economy and regulations are setup to allow private capital to trade freely abroad and import at will. And it was done intentionally so that rich people could benefit from cheap overseas labour, furthering wealth inequality when middle class factory workers lost their jobs to increase corporate profits with cheaper overseas factories.

The series of free trade agreements the US negotiated with everyone they could would say otherwise.

If you’re producing less per capita, and consuming more per capita, you’re producing less overall for the purposes of the discussion around relative pain of cutting off Chinese imports.

It has not been started in any serious way. There is basically no incentive to manufacture most goods in the US.

You literally can, it’s called construction.

Oh no, it would force us to fix our economy, how awful!

The difference is that Uber’s model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.

Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

If you finish those sentences, it becomes clear why per se is used:

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

In this situation, using per se provides a more natural sentence flow because it links the first part of the sentence with the second. It’s also shorter and fewer syllables.

“Steve’s quite erudite.”

“Steve’s quite intellectual.”

I think intellectual might be a closer synonym, but intellectual often has more know-it-all connotations than erudite which seems to often refer to a more pure and cerebral quality.

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the side by side oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse that is displayed”

For those to say precisely the same thing it would have to be more like the above which doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

“I don’t understand, can you elucidate that?”

“I don’t understand, can you explain?”

Elucidate just means to make something clear in general, explaining something usually inherently implies a linguistic, verbal, explanation, unless otherwise stated.

Honestly, these all seem like very reasonable words to me for the most part. I can understand not using them in some contexts, but for the most part, words exist for a reason, to describe something slightly differently, and it takes forever to talk and communicate if we only limit ourselves to the most basic unnuanced terms.

When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.

It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it.

Artificial diamonds can be made with a High Temperature, High Pressure (HTHP) process, or a …

Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at just throwing out an acronym or technical term that you literally have no way of knowing.

Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers / inner circle and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound like they fit in, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down further.