Why is “unproductive” in quotes?

I think you need a new keyboard lol. Did you mean ataraxia?

Another word I haven’t heard until now, but yes, I do support this attitude to life. I think I’ve learnt it from my ex. Sometimes bad things happen that are beyond your control and lamenting them is a waste of time, which can be much better spent on trying to figure if there is anything that can be done about the loss or adversity. And if nothing can be done, move on to enjoying other things in life.

I was interested to read that in ancient times, ataraxia was the ideal state for soldiers heading for battle. You can be sure as hell that if I was about to face the prospect of killing others or being killed, ataraxia would be the last mental state I’d be in!

No. I came up with this myself as I was pondering the world, the universe, how there is no evidence of any god existing, and how the best science we have tells us that we are just matter and energy inhabiting spacetime. But matter arranged in such fantastically improbable way that we can feel happiness. Why waste the precious moments we’ve been given on doing anything other than striving to feel happiness? Which of course can come in different forms for every one of us.

I’ve just had a quick search, I guess your message has a typo and you meant Epicureanism? It is similar to how I feel about life, but it seems to say that lack of pain and fear is enough to consider oneself happy. I’d go a bit further and postulate active pursuit of things that positively make you or fellow sentient beings feel pleasure.

Spend your life enjoying it and helping others enjoy theirs. As the universe unfolds, we’ve only got this one brief moment of consciousness before we disappear, we have to make our life filled with as much happiness as we can. And help others fill theirs.

I don’t know whether that’s one of the reasons, but limonene, which is one of the scent compounds in lemon, also happens to be a good organic solvent. We routinely use it for some lab procedures, and not because it smells nice.

I guess the difference between the prohibition in the US and this bill, is that the alcohol prohibition banned it to everyone at once. People who were used to drinking or down right alcoholics had a strong incentive to obtain alcohol from somewhere, so there was a market for the underground moonshine producers. This bill isn’t targeting people who are already addicted to nicotine, but rather aims at preventing people developing the addiction in the first place, so I can imagine the market for underground tobacco growers or smugglers will be much smaller and less profitable. I am optimistic that this approach will be more successful than the 20s in America, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I guess it depends on the company. Mine clearly expects us to work on 37.5 hours per week whether you work non stop from 9 to 4.30 or from 7 to 7 with many long breaks. And any overtime I do during the week makes my day at work on Friday that much shorter.

I think it’s a modern word, as for example it doesn’t figure in Merriam-Webster. But it was created in a classical way, i.e. from Greek words meaning “stumble” and “talking”.

Something I learnt recently and which is rampant on gay social apps: sphallolalia - flirting that doesn’t lead to meeting irl.

I come from Poland and yes, totally. When I started school, and missed lessons because I was sick or whatever, I could just take the phone book and find the surname of the classmate I wanted to get notes or homework from. If there were a few surnames on the list and I didn’t know their father (it was always the man of the house who was listed) first name, I could just go by who appeared to live closest to the school. Or just start calling all the numbers until I got the right one.

You can pretreat flour to make it safe but obviously the question is, did the cookie maker bothered. And raw eggs can be a concern, apparently 1 in 20,000 eggs contains salmonella (inside, not on the shell).

If you travel a lot, Toilet finder.

Edit: and not an app, but a website: Pairdrop - really useful for cross-platform file sharing, especially when you just need to email to colleagues something you snapped with your personal phone, but yoe have overly tight IT systems in place at work that stop you from connecting your personal phone to your email or OneDrive.

Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

What is your 6 year old laptop’s make?

I actually can’t complain. It’s not perfect, but I’m far from being as outraged as the OP. I used to love SwiftKey, it was amazing with text prediction, even when you had two languages on at the same time (I’m bilingual, so it was really handy). Since Microsoft bought it, it started going downhill and when I found that I can’t just transfer my settings when I get a new phone, I switched to Gboard. Again, not perfect, but not terrible either. I will try out some of the recommendation from this thread though.

Could someone ELI5 (if possible) what passkeys actually are?

I’m a molecular biologist, but I’m into so many branches of science! I love maths (arguably not science) - the elegance, the consistency, and pi that pops up everywhere. Physics - the laws that actually govern the universe and it’s most basic level. Chemistry - the science of change where so much emergence happens. Biology - the science trying to solve the actual mysteries of life. Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology - understanding what makes us tick and how it came about. And linguistics - the science of the original sharing app.

Edit: typo.

Yes!

Wait… Did The Onion buy out CNN?

Oh. Ok then, we don’t have them in the UK in the city where I live.