VoxAdActa

2-10 minute videos are the worst. The information takes forever to get to and is super shallow, and most of them are going to be an advertisement for the youtuber I'm currently watching. A 30 minute video is fine. An hour long video, I'll watch happily. Hell, I've watched movie-length videos on cool subjects with no problem.

But if I have to sit through 90 seconds of "smash that bell, thanks to my new subscribers whose screen names I'm going to read one at a time" before getting a nugget of content that can't be more than a few seconds to a couple of minutes long, yeah, I have no attention span for that shit.

How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.

You can't. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.

I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.

If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.

If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say "JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.")

As for the bit about speech, you've lost me. I've never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I've lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the "and". Maybe it's different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.

I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.

I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin," I read it exactly as I'd say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read "We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin", the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.

Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn't exist there? I wouldn't know, I can't even begin to fathom how "JFK and Stalin" could be read in any way that doesn't mean they're the strippers.

I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.

And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. "Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others." Is "bone fusing and bedrest" one item? We have another item in the list that's a combination treatment with "and", is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford "and"? It's very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask "What did you mean here?" because, as the editor, I can't just assume "oh, they don't like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine". There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing "and" will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.

So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn't important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might "look ugly" and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it's kind of important.

I gotta imagine much of them weren't actually successful.

You're right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy's perspective (and I assume Imgur's), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that's still a baby dragon's worth of a horde every 30 days. And I'm sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

Why does this headline read like some kind of clickbait advertisement?

It doesn't help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.

About the only thing we can do is unsubscribe from and block the dozen or so "Reddit Sucks" communities/magazines, and report the "We Still Hate Reddit" threads that pop up elsewhere for being posted in the wrong place (like Technology or Gaming or wherever).

Can we please keep the Reddit spam in the specific Reddit-centered communities? I'm trying to stop paying attention to Reddit.

Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with "it's not a lie if you actually believe it," in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like "Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing..." is so gross. It's like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.

It's a shark. They knew what they were getting into. If they didn't want danger, they'd have bought a duck or something.

It's 2030. The world has changed. Russia has fallen. Ralph Nader's reanimated cyborg-corpse is president. Britain is back in the EU. And Lemmy is known everywhere as "The Poop Site".

I was leaving the Wal-Mart parking lot about a year ago and there was a man with a cardboard sign at the traffic light. I was about to ignore him, and then I thought: "I just spent $50 on a toothbrush. I spend $5 on this guy."

After that point, I started thinking. I'd always been told these guys would "drive away in a BMW at the end of the day" and/or "they're gonna buy drugs", and I never really thought about those claims.

The BMW thing turns out to be a Bigfoot story; everyone "knows a guy" or "has a cousin" that saw that happen once, but in a world where everyone's got a phone in their pocket and a camera on their dash, I have yet to see such an event being documented. God knows the insufferable pricks who trot that line out would die happy if they could make that kind of evidence go viral.

And the drugs... I mean, maybe? I guess? But then again, I could give my kid money for his birthday and he might go out and buy drugs with it, too. I have no way to know that. I shouldn't give anyone money ever, I guess? Fuck, as far as "giving out money" goes, I'm giving Wal-Mart money that they're going to use to increase poverty, fuck the environment, and lobby Congress for bills that will inevitably have an actual body count. Giving money to a guy who's looking to score a joint doesn't even rate on that scale.

Not to mention that, as far as I know, there's an equally likely possibility he's going to take that $5 bill and use it eat something for the first time in two days. So yeah, that's a gamble I'm willing to take.

And why are we more likely to give money to a guy shittily playing a guitar with a hat on the ground? Because we feel like he's working for it? What a shitty way to think about people. Entertain me, poor person, and if you're good enough, I might give you a pittance.

Or maybe it's because you can just drop some change in the hat and don't have interact. As an introvert, that does kinda sound like a selling point. But I'm cynical, so I'm pretty sure it's more the previous thing.

If I've got more than an insultingly small amount of cash on me (that is, I'm not going to grab a couple of quarters out of my cupholder), and the circumstances line up so it doesn't put me in any danger or at risk of any real consequences, yeah, I'm gonna give someone cash.