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Of course it's easier for it to happen in nature than for them to do it in a lab. The way nature does this is that when you kill untold numbers of the ones that aren't resistant, you're left with the ones that are. If you used that method with our actual crops, you would nearly wipe out the crops and cause massive food crises.

Considering that the US and others largely know about this and benefit from the product of this labor, one might argue that they never stopped; they simply outsourced it.

Depending on how it goes today, a fair bit of labour may get shipped out the US shortly.

Every time this sort of discussion comes up, I think back to this satire article: Due to the country’s long history of human-rights violations, WWE cancels upcoming events in United States

https://www.kayfabenews.com/due-to-the-countrys-long-history...

It's obviously worse in some places than others, but world governments are generally complicit and see it as a fair price to pay for continued economic partnership and/or military alliance.


Slightly older Audis (up through 2017-2019 depending on model) had a clickable wheel interface instead of a touchscreen. It's vastly superior, and I deliberately bought a used 2017 A4 to get it.

Yes, nothing will ever beat the old MMI when it comes to ease of use (especially once you got a hang of it and could do stuff "blind" without looking at the screen). Just wanted to say that this one still has more than enough in physical form; I also drive a 2022 A3 every now and again and I'd curse, for life, the person who figured out CAPACITIVE skip/volume/power on buttons are a good idea if I could.

It's in the rules. Emphasis mine:

Fake or False Consumer Reviews, Consumer Testimonials, and Celebrity Testimonials: The final rule addresses reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business or its products or services

If you covertly switch the product, then the reviews shown are from people who did not have actual experience with the product.


I wonder if it would be possible to create an app that, instead of acting as the house, merely facilitates sports bets between friends. Post betting lines, let people propose and accept bets on those lines with their friends, take a nominal cut.

It's probably both illegal for some reason and unfeasible because it deliberately limits its own profits, but it would make for much healthier relationships with gambling than what we have currently.


I suppose this would be "Rickdriving"?


I think this is just literal rickrolling.


They see rickrollin, they hatin, patrollin and tryin'a catch the Bop Spotter.


Ridin' Qwerty


White and Nerdy


Rickrollin on dubs?


While I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong:

1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today.

2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization.

3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words!

3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense.

4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.


The best plural is simply keeping the word the same as the singular. I.e. "octopus". There are many animals using this form, e.g. fish, deer, elk, salmon, buffalo.

E.g. Look at all those octopus.

All the divers I know say it this way, easy to say, understand, doesn't make you sound like an asshole.


That's hardly 'the best'. Recognizable plural is a useful language feature.


This is what I would say.

It does beg the question though, how’d we come up with the list of animals to pluralize like that? Why “five birds” but not “five deers?”


It raises the question - begging the question is something else.

As for the question, it probably has to do with the gender of the noun. I bet 'deer' derives from a neuter-gendered word in Anglo-Saxon, while 'bird' does not.

Noun gender is the system used by many languages to categorize words that have different declension rules. It's atrophied in English, but is implicitly still present in the various "inconsistencies" that pop up.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question I actually had no idea about that distinction, appreciate it.

Noun gender makes a lot of sense.


Note that those are animal we generally hunt/eat. I'd bet this is tied to the language of the ruling/hunting classes of England, back when they spoke French more than English.

There are also some middle-ground words like "Shark". One goes fishing for "shark" like they would "fish" but it is more common to say "several sharks" using a plural as opposed to "several fish" using the singular. But "fishes" is still a word, which likely goes back to ruling classes who ate fish but generally did not hunt them as they would have deer.


"Fishes" is a plural of a plural. You wouldn't likely say "two fishes", but you might say "all the fishes in the sea", referring to many groups of fish (much as you might refer to the "peoples of the world" referring to many cultures). Aside from that, I bet you're onto something.


I think it was done just to make it harder for those languages that do not have a concept of plural. Of course I'm kidding, but it has to be super frustrating trying to learn it as ESL.


> 3a. We are not speaking Latin.

This is why I would prefer say axises, basises, indexes, and matrixes. I mean as plurals of their respective singulars, not as plurals of octopus.


> Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed.

It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules, this is not 'Nam. :) Languages evolve, but you can't just claim something is correct because you think so or you'd love it to be so. It's incorrect in English language, today. Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.

Fun fact: Oxford dictionary changed the definition of "literally" to also mean "figuratively". https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally


> Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.

The future is now. "Octopi" is considered the correct plural by a significant plurality of US adults, and a plurality of all age groups.

https://x.com/YouGovAmerica/status/1749131745893679173


> It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules

> Conversations follow rules of etiquette because conversations are social interactions, and therefore depend on social convention. Specific rules for conversation arise from the cooperative principle. Failure to adhere to these rules causes the conversation to deteriorate or eventually to end. Contributions to a conversation are responses to what has previously been said.

Both parties must agree on those rules. There is no mandate that one must follow another's rules, in the initial engagement. This is helpful to understand, in modern online discourse. If someone doesn't want to play by some basic rules, further engagement is likely futile and unproductive.


This is a strange argument to make against "octopuses". Break from our history; use the English standard; we are not speaking Latin ... therefore it should be octopi!? What? How about this: it's OK to use the traditional form if it's still commonly understood, but otherwise let's try to use a "standard English" form. Those are your choices: traditional for the word, or standard. Since "octopodes" is awkward and not really ever used, we say "octopuses". Why would you convert to a false-traditional version?


> As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way.

I'm guessing "platypodes" doesn't count.


All my friends say “octopodes”.

Some people on the internet keep saying that that's wrong; I find that very strange.

>because we don't pluralize any other word that way.

Certainly we do “platypodes”, “matrices”, “irides”, “clitorides” and “vortices”, are all quite common words.


I had never heard of three out of five of your "quite common" words.


Clitorides? Come on, your pulling our legs.


> 2... It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable.

Octopods - 8 times better than regular pods.


I would prefer "octopoden"


There's "antipodes" though.


Which implies that while the whole of ‘Australia and New Zealand’ can be referred to as ‘the antipodes’, Australia or New Zealand alone should be called ‘an antipus’.


"Antipous" has been used as a singular form of the word in some 19th-century works [0].

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antipous#English


Yes, but 'octopodes' is really neat, and definitely a [nerdy] conversation starter.


But octopi is also trying to be pedantically latin, octopodes though it could be pedantic is at least correct, and entirely descriptive. In practice I wouldn't expect someone to say octopi to my face, but writing weird words online is another matter.


3. “Octopuses” sounds like what a child or English as Second Language speaker would say. Not sure what is stilted about being a novice to the language.


And a child or ESL speaker will often use constructions that sound stilted. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

"Stilted" is a bit of a judgy word, but it's not a value judgment of anyone else's intelligence. Some English speech sounds stilted. So it goes. That's why I don't prefer that pluralization in my own speech.

Lord knows I sound weird enough at times; I'm not here to throw stones from glass houses.


Octopuses sounds like a proper English pluralization, not that nonsense about sticking other languages' grammar rules into English.


Because it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.


I hadn’t thought about that, but that explanation suits me as to why “octopuses” comes off… I don’t know, muddy?… while the 1983 James Bond film named for the vulgar pun rolls off the tongue, even though they use virtually the same phonemes: it’s that the latter emphasizes the third syllable, making it metrical again.

Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!


But "teleporters" or "marathoners" or tons of other words follow the same pattern of stress and sound fine. "Photocopiers" extends it to four unstressed syllables and sounds fine.


We treat words like they have a single stressed syllable and everything else is unstressed, and that's a useful abstraction sometimes, but that's not actually true. "Photocopiers" has primary stress on the first syllable but secondary on the third - PHO-to-CO-pi-ers. The same goes for "teleporters" and "marathoners".

But that also goes for "octopuses", so what gives? Seems like there's something else going on that my brain hasn't accounted for yet. It's probably that the plosives (stop consonants) are hugely unbalanced, with all of them coming in the first half of the word. Plosives, as the word implies, can add quite a bit of oomph to a word, even if they aren't reflected in the stress pattern. So "octopuses" seems to just peter out halfway through the word.


All of these words have informal 3rd syllable stress so work fine.


In that case I say we go with oc-TO-pusses (as in photograph vs. photography).


> Then blame the board imo.

The Board of Directors at most major corporations is made up largely of current or former executives, many of whom come from the same industry. It's in their personal interest to normalize lucrative and exploitable compensation plans.

You would also be shocked to know what people control the lion's share of investment dollars.


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