chrisbaker98

Pronounced "foo-chee-BOW"

something nearly unheard of even after all these years

It's not "nearly" unheard of, it's completely unheard of apart from in Pelé's case. He remains the only player ever to have won three world cups.

How often does that happen though? I'm straight and I don't recall ever being asked about my family or love life in a job interview. Not that I'd keep it secret if asked, but why the hell would they be asking?

I'm far more experienced with React function components than with class components, so I'm curious, what are some of the problems with class components and how did hooks solve them?

Am I the only one who had no idea until now that "peloton" is an existing dictionary word and not just a brand name?

Ideally we'd wait until we have evidence of who did it and what their motivations are, rather than just jumping to whichever conclusion fits our existing biases.

In the UK, if you want to kill yourself by overdosing on paracetamol, then you're forced to visit several different shops (because you can't buy more than two packets at once) then spend a long time tediously popping each pill individually out of the blister pack before you can swallow them all. (The pills don't come in bottles because bottles make it too easy to quickly pour a fatal overdose of pills into your mouth).

These measures won't stop a truly determined person, but they stop a lot of people. It's well understood that erecting even a minor inconvenience in front of a suicidal person can be enough to keep them alive. Popping all your paracetamol out of the packaging takes enough time to give you a chance to reconsider the whole thing.

By forcing someone to do something, we prevent them from doing something else.

It's accessible in that you don't need to be terminally ill or get your doctor's permission. If you want Dignitas to kill you, they will.

Okay, I'm not Canadian, and I'm not going to pretend to be intimately familiar with how things work there. But then I read appalling anecdotes like this one:

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/10/13/medical-assistance-de...

“I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die,” shared Farsoud.

One doctor has already signed off on his euthanasia and he only needs one more.

I don't know how common this kind of story is but it shouldn't be ignored - and it's the exact kind of thing that all those scary right wing monsters warned would happen if we didn't listen to them.

On the other hand, I have a loved one who struggled with suicidal thoughts for years and told me that if they'd lived somewhere like Switzerland where euthanasia is easily accessible, they would almost certainly have used it. Now they're no longer suicidal and are very happy that they're still alive (as am I!)

That's the kind of personal experience that makes me feel much less in favour of legalisation.

I’d rather there be some cases of coercion than people who want to die being denied the chance.

No-one is "denied the chance" to die if they wait long enough and I'd much rather let a few more people die natural deaths if the alternative is coercing people into suicide.

Anyone who would consciously sacrifice another human being for something inanimate like "infrastructure" is sick in the head

You need to read more history.

I'm glad someone else shared this.

I used to be very much in favour of legalised euthanasia but I'm a lot less certain after reading about what it's actually looking like in practice in Canada - where the results seem horrifying.

Your death affects other people.

The blanket statement is obviously untrue. For example: people are forced to obey the law.

But if you only want to talk about suicide: we already "force" suicidal people to stay alive via suicide prevention measures (nets under bridges, restrictions on drug purchases etc.) that make it harder or less convenient to kill yourself. These measures reduce suicide rates and I'd say they're moral.

Okay, so what if we're only talking about "assisted" suicide? If someone really wants to die, should we let them? I get where you're coming from, but let's not pretend it's always this simple. Suicidal people aren't famous for thinking rationally, and just because someone says they want to die that doesn't mean we should take it at face value. There are already cases in Canada of people seeking euthanasia not because they're terminally ill but because they're poor, and see suicide as preferable to poverty/homelessness:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanisin...

There's the "slippery slope" we were warned about.

PS I'm not sure what you think "bad faith" means, but my post was not written in bad faith.

It's already happening in Canada: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanisin...

Sometimes the slope really is slippery.

It's immoral to force someone to do something they don't want to do.

It's trivially easy to think of counterexamples to this statement.

America and the west as whole is not actually significantly different from China with stuff like this.

As someone who has spent many years of my life living outside "America and the West": this is not remotely true.

Switched to Elixir/Phoenix a few years ago and have never looked back. Absolutely a 100% improvement on Rails in every way (except the availability of work!)

I don't get what you're saying. It's not obscure at all that black ink denotes profits and red ink denotes losses - "in the black" and "in the red" are well-understood English phrases.

All I'm saying is that this particular meaning of black/red doesn't appear to be the origins of the name "black Friday", at least according to Wikipedia, but I really don't care about this enough to investigate any further.

"Spade" can mean "black person". Although I'm not sure whether it's considered offensive and I've never heard anyone use it to mean "black person" in real life... was it more common in the past?

Edit: I just remembered one place I've heard it: in the lyrics to the song "Everyone has AIDS" from the movie Team America. "The gays and the straights and the whites and the spades / everyone has AIDS!"

Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

That's a good story, but according to Wikipedia this etymology was invented after the fact and isn't the real origin of the term (which is somewhat obscure.)

Stanford also contains "Ford", a possible reference to the notorious anti-semite Henry Ford.

I propose renaming the institution after a more acceptable historical figure, one whom most undergraduates don't think did anything wrong: Stalin.

Can you give a link to "Heavyweight"? I searched for it in my podcast app but there are loads of results - I'm not sure which one you're talking about

The tweet you link to doesn't show LOTT doxxing anybody.

A possible etymology is that it means not a game played with the feet, but a game played on foot.

As opposed to all those other popular ball games which are played sitting down?

Corbyn is a lifelong Eurosceptic who voted against every expansion of EU power that came before him in his entire ~30 year career as an MP pre-2016. He only "opposed" Brexit in 2016 because he had to.

Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.

I remember people saying Trump hadn't got the faintest prayer of winning in 2016 too.