If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
Very few people would agree that red hair is "abnormal". Why do you think that people in general are more likely to describe homosexuality as "abnormal" when the prevalence of homosexuality is roughly on par with that of red hair?
> If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
I mean why do people even post something like that? It takes 2 seconds to look up the definition of abnormal. It's it really not knowing, it's is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed "neutrality"?
> Abnormal - deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.
> "[...] is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed 'neutrality'?"
Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").
What’s the normal distribution here? If attraction to men forms a normal distribution, it makes the argument weaker. If you are making things up, at least make them up well.
Yes, the analogy to the bell curve doesn't fit this use case very well, I didn't noticed it before. But the point still stands: non heterosexual behaviour is a tiny minority compared to the norm. So, abnormal is a perfectly good word to describe non-heterosexual behaviour. Once again, it doesn't make it bad per se. I just can't stand word police, which is just another facet of thought police.
"Abnormal" has a very specific meaning. It is not used for everything that is just uncommon. It is used for behaviours that are non-normative. If you have an idiosyncratic way you use this word, ok, but communication is supposed to require and assume a common understanding of a language. So there is no point to discuss if abnormal refers to frequency of a behaviour in a population or in a normativity-related judgement of it, because in common usage it refers to the latter, because either we do not speak a common language or I have to assume disingenuity here (and leaning towards the latter in this case).
If the topic is about whether homosexuality is non-normative and heterosexuality is normative (with the actual, common meanings of the words), we can have a philosophical discussion on that.
Abnormal = non normal / non normative. Words have meaning. If for you it causes a bad reaction to it, you are the one that needs to deal with it. That's excatly the problem, normal people are tired of being called bad for seeing the world through normal, reasonable lenses. When a behavior does not follow the norm, it's abnormal.
I used to assume that the average Joe would be amazed at the way my Youtube/Facebook/whatever looks and works, with no ads and with a lot of annoyances removed. Then I saw, more than once, people complaining that THE ADS were gone, and then I gave up. The average of the whole population of humans is a very dumbed down version of what I always imagined the average would be.
Not a "guy novel" at all. I read it around 20 and just thought it was a waste of time, nothing happened, just wandering around aimlessly like 90% of my buddies on their teenage years. The whole beat movement was just style over substance, pages and pages of nothing.
I guess I liked it because I was living in a small town and eager to see more of the world and people, get away from "small-town mentality". And hang out with "the cool guys" of course. I still think they were cool.
It did to an extent, they built the old copper network in tiers. I don't know the exact numbers and I'm sure they varied by area, but the general idea was - your home phone would connect to a local exchange, which served just dozens of local homes, and that exchange would connect to a bigger exchange somewhere higher up the network over a bundle of circuits. And that architecture repeated for a few layers.
But it wasn't 1:1, so you would have lets say 100 homes connected to a local exchange, and that local exchange would have say 20 lines to the next exchange in the network. That placed limits on the amount of concurrent connections you could have from one area - if 21 homes all tried to call people in the next city over, at least one of them would get a signal that all circuits are full and they would have to try again later. It drastically reduced the amount of lines you need between local exchanges though.
I guess it helped that phone calls were quite expensive, so people generally made very short calls. I haven’t really thought about this before but one of the main reasons for the pricing system could have been the facts that you mentioned.
In Sweden, the pricing system was tiered. Same area code (roughly: same municipality) = lowest rate. Neighbouring area codes = higher rate. Outside of that = highest rate. The rate was halved after 6pm. A reason for lowering the rates in the evening might have been that there were far less business users calling after 6pm.
One of the reasons I remember the pricing system is that my parents would not be happy if I dialed in to a modem pool before 6pm :)
Before I was born, the telephone company in Sweden (Televerket, later Telia) started to upgrade their system to use digital telephone exchanges (AXE). But there were of course still some kind of hard limit for how many concurrent calls they could handle, so I guess that’s why they kept the pricing system for a while.
This is partly speculation on my part, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Yep, that's right. The long distance trunks were a more limited resource so the telcos charged more per minute to use them. After digital exchanges came around it was less of a factor, but I think the pricing structure stuck around for a while.
You'd think that at least initially, individual towns would stand up fully connected (albeit small) but isolated networks. That before very long, the idea of connecting one town to the next would occur, and it would be realized that you only need a relatively small number of "long distance" lines, connected between the existing switchboards. At which point, if you were wiring up a city, you'd follow that pattern; tiered layers, as you say. It stands to reason then, that Stockholm's system must have started very early, and had absolutely explosive growth, to get to a situation like that tower.
They mostly did, but the limit on distance is pretty tight - according to Wikipedia [0] local loops were limited to 5 km in length (without extra equipment). I imagine that Stockholm's system here both started early and was in a very dense neighborhood of Stockholm, where direct wiring like this was still a tenable solution.
The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.
For fixed radars, at least down here in Brazil, RadarBot is a lot better than Waze. For cops on the side of the road, maybe Waze can be better. RadarBot updates it's list of fixed spees cameras really fast.
All banks in Brazil now use the Google Play Integrity api. I've been on rooted phones for almost 15 years, and I'll never not main a rooted phone. But for a couple years now, I have to keep a separate phone just to be able to use tha f*cking banks.
Even though I very much dislike WhatsApp, it does not require having full control over "your" device, and does not make itself an arbiter of what you can or cannot install on "your" hardware.
I can't see them changing this in the foreseeable future, major parts of their userbase run the cheapest phones one can buy, and they're much more interested in as much data as possible, so near 100% device coverage has to be important for them.
Last time I tried to use WhatsApp (in 2024), it was also basically unusable, because after I gave it the barest amount of information during installation (using its own dialog screens !), (in particular not willing to share my contacts), it regularly locked me out (IIRC as not a 'real' user).
Brazil is screwed beyond belief but WhatsApp being popular is the least of our problems. It's got enough end-to-end encryption to defeat judges. It's much better than some parallel universe where people are using SMS or Facebook Messenger or whatever. I'll count my blessings.
A little bit overkill to use a dependency to just show a dialog. I agree that Google ia making Android less and less free with every new release, but show a damn dialog, no need to use this.
If it was 2023 I would say someone just vibecoded a trivial android piece of code. But nowadays Android studio comes with Gemini agent integrated, and I doubt it would produce such terrible redundancy on a code so simple.
