Yeah, I understand why it’s currently happening like that, but it’s still annoying to call at 2am and be like, “they were so hard to get on the phone!” Seems to be a recurring problem so might be worth it to have a contingency plan for winners within certain time zones, even if you just quietly inform them a few hours earlier that they should make sure they’re available at that time.

The Nobel committee also hit a roadblock trying to reach Brunkow – both researchers are based on the US West Coast, which is nine hours behind Stockholm – but eventually got ahold of her…

In 2020 the Nobel committee had similar difficulties in contacting the winners of the prize for economics. When Bob Wilson’s phone rang in Stanford in the middle of the night, he unplugged it so the committee had to call his wife instead.

When the committee couldn’t reach his fellow winner, Paul Milgrom, either, Wilson had to go and wake him up.

This is annoying to me. Is there seriously no better way than to call older people in the middle of the night and then act surprised when they are not immediately available?

Yeah, exactly this. I have a mortgage and a car payment so I’ve got lots of debt, but I wouldn’t consider myself “broke” by any stretch. I don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck, I put 10% away for retirement, and I can afford to spend money where I want without stressing about it. Overall, pretty charmed compared to how a lot of folks are struggling these days and it’s honestly kinda wild to act like it’s comparable to anything they’re going through.

4th largest*

So tragic, jesus. Also, it was obviously stupid, but in his defense he probably went into fight or flight and wasn’t thinking. Unfortunately he paid for it with his life.

Right, and Irish-Americans have more knowledge and understanding about Irish-American culture.

The other poster was making it seem like American culture is homogenous or like descendants of immigrants can’t still retain distinct cultural traditions and identities outside of generic American. Whether or not those traditions are the same as the original country of origin is immaterial. Nobody is claiming that it is.

What I don’t understand is why Americans portray themselves as Dutch when coming to the Netherlands.

Do they, though? Are there really that many Americans who think or try to pretend they are actually Dutch, instead of Americans who are have Dutch ancestry?

It honestly sounds like they are just trying to connect by sharing a commonality and something that is (probably) important to them in some way. It’s an expression of appreciation. Even if the cultural traditions carried on in the US are different than in the modern-day country–so what? It doesnt make those cultural traditions less important to the people who celebrate them. I fail to understand what is wrong with acknowledging or appreciating where those traditions originated.

Is it just a matter of semantics and an objection to the label itself “(whatever nationality)-American”?

The level of authority that you’re speaking with about another country’s culture while clearly only having a surface-level understanding is actually wild. Maybe accept that the Americans who are telling you otherwise have more knowledge and understanding of their own culture.

Yes, that reminds me of when Florida(?) started requiring drug testing for welfare recipients and ended up spending more on the tests than whatever they saved uncovering fraud.

The Mountain Goats

For real, I thought he was going to name something of actual consequence even if it wasn’t true like, “it makes your head explode.” But, “it wanes”??? Uh ok, it wanes so some people might get measles anyway. Isn’t that just problem solved then since you think infection is good? Completely nonsensical.

Very different these days. The beauty of the status bubbles and messengers of past is that you would catch each other when you both had time and desire to chat and then you’d have a back and forth conversation until one of you disengaged. You also almost never have people sending offline messages. It was more akin to an in-person interaction where you’re either visibly there and someone can approach and talk to you in real time or you aren’t.

Texting is generally of a blend between real-time messenging (but you can’t tell if they’re available) and short form email where everyone interacts differently and has their own ideas about “proper” etiquette. It’s probably somewhat cultural but in my experience, people just use messaging apps in the exact same way as they would text, so status bubbles don’t mean much.

I do this to my mom as a way to be very low-contact with her. It’s a huge relief.

I used to love texting when it was only a handful of friends but these days I hate the pressure of it being ever-present in my pocket and the social expectation to answer in a relatively timely manner. (This has led me to being a horrible texter, sorry everyone.)

I miss the old days of AOL instant messenger. Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.

Tony Hawk

My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me 😭

Yup, I had the same thought. I met my partner of 5 years on okcupid, but it also took me years of messages/dates/flings before we found each other. Dating and finding a good match is complicated and so much of it is purely a numbers game. Online dating apps are just a vehicle to expose you to more/different people. They aren’t some binary that either does or does not work.

Why would anyone want to wrap their gifts with campaign logos?

Whenever we would hear “Crimson and Clover” growing up, my dad would comment how Tommy James (the singer) killed himself in the 70s. Cut to like 5 years ago when I see Tommy James, in his 70s, still kickin’, on some random public access programming lol.

My dad has been repeating this “fact” for so many years that there’s a solid chance he’s forgotten it isn’t true and still says it whenever he hears “Crimson and Clover.”

This is a complicated topic for me. I’m 35 so my experience is obviously different than today, but I self-harmed from age 12 into my 20s. Finding community and understanding in self-harm & mental illness-focused communities was transformative for me, especially in my younger teens. Many days/months/years this community felt like the only reason I was still hanging on.

Obviously I am not in favor of the “encouragement” of self-harm, but I also wonder how much nuance is applied when categorizing content as such. For example, is someone who posts about how badly they want to self-harm “encouraging” this? Or are they just seeking support? Idk. I have no answers. I just think about how even bleaker my teens would have felt had I not found my pockets of community on the early internet. On the other hand, sometimes I do wonder if we subconsciously egged each other on. Perhaps the trajectory of my mental health journey would have been different had I not found them. That’s not something I can ever be sure about, but I think given my home life and all the things I was going through already, if anything, my mental illness might have just manifested itself in a different way, like through substance abuse issues or an eating disorder or something. (And to be clear, I was hurting myself before I found the community, so it might have just been business as usual.) Like I said, I don’t have any answers, it just feels more nuanced to me, as someone who has lived some version of this.