Totally. And the staff is also pretty reasonable about how it’s ultimately just a fun way to get food you might not have thought of.
I usually tell them I hate sour cream and they’ll let me know if I should get something else, which is technically against the “rules”, but it’s also just pizza that I’m paying for and not a national secret or anything.

They do ask you to let them know if you have any allergies, and they do tell you what everything is when they give it to you. You’re not at risk for eating something you can’t. You’d have to not tell them when they ask, and then ignore them when they told you the ingredients.

I get people wanting to defend the “traditional” preparation of a food, because otherwise you get into weird philosophical “burrito of Theseus” issues, but… You can just slap “non-traditional” on it and then carry on and enjoy the food. If you feel really strongly or it’s really out there, call it a fucked up ____ inspired whatever.

One of the best pizzas I ever had was at a pizza place near me that has a “trust us” pizza, where you don’t know what it is, but it’s new and definitely worth the cost (they’re not giving you a plain cheese pizza). It was like a strawberry and anduille pizza with a seasoned sweet white sauce. It was weirdly good.

Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there’s less sun.

Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There’s less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
That’s not to say that the differences aren’t real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
For example, I’m nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like “height”, “toe and finger length”, or things like that.
Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.

You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.

For the most part it’s not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It’s an engine for producing text that’s most like the text it’s seen before, or for telling you what text it’s seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I’ve actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I’ve seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn’t doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as “wrong”.

I mean, it’s not because they’re Puerto Rican, it’s because they live in Puerto Rico. Someone from Iowa who moved to Puerto Rico would also not get a vote.
This is because our system allocates votes to land, not people.
US citizens don’t get to vote for president. They get to vote for who their place of residence votes for.

Up until the 60s, people in DC also didn’t get a vote, because by default only states get a vote, and it’s explicitly not a state.

Tails is only partly correct. The state is open about it’s monopoly on violence , and it’s a key argument in the philosophy of government. The state will use that violence against anyone who threatens it.

The state exists to protect the power that enables the state. Protestors object to some organization of the state, and so they’re de facto threats.
Minorities are disproportionately targeted because they inevitably don’t have the power that enables the state.

It’s not the state being pro peace and making exceptions, it’s the state being pro-state, and being structured around that principle. The violence is inherent and exceptions are made if you provide value or benefit from value being defined to include you.

Puerto Rican statehood is more complicated than that. Becoming a state is a contentious issue even amongst Puerto Ricans.

Got any data for that claim, or just asserting?

https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/americans-see-united-states-playing-positive-role-middle-east

It’s why the Harris campaign is consistently trying to thread the needle and support Israel while not supporting the genocide.

Like it or not, a significant portion of the country is in favor of supporting Israel, and so they have to walk the line of supporting Israel without supporting genocide, because if they don’t they also lose.

Republicans can campaign on being pro-genocide, give weapons to Israel on the condition they use them with less discretion, and make a campaign promise to deny asylum to any refugees and they don’t lose a vote.
Democrats have to support Israel and Palestine, which is nearly impossible to do without a degree of “please don’t use this gun wrong like you have every other time”.

If you actually don’t see how a Republican administration would be vastly worse for Palestinians, I don’t know what to tell you.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31114-4?xid=PS_smithsonian

I know I’ve read a handful of things roughly a long these line, that basically it’s probably not universal that humans simplify language for infants, but that we likely do shift how we vocalize to them.

Seems like a reasonably plausible hypothesis to me.

Eh, it doesn’t need to be, you just need to do the work of putting together granular access controls that can account for your risk profiles.

The risk isn’t much different between a company owned telephone and a personal telephone.
They’re both susceptible to most of the same attacks, or being left on the bus.

A totally reasonable stance.

For clarity, the android feature essentially makes a work dedicated partition on the phone. Their management app can manage that partition, and for the purposes of data movement it’s essentially a distinct phone.
If they’ve set it up correctly they can do a remote wipe without touching your personal data.

https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7502354?sjid=18390510946809838606-NC#zippy=%2Ci-own-my-device

In a lot of cases the drive to have users use their personal devices rather than employer owned ones comes from the users, not the workplace. Only needing to keep track of one device is easier in many cases.

I thought the universal part was the tone and cadence people use when talking to small children, and not the actual words or grammar changes.

It’s why you can listen to a recording of a language you don’t know and tell if they’re talking to a baby, but there are also cultures that essentially don’t talk to them at all until they have language.

What county is that? That sounds like the type of discrepancy that you don’t hear about often.

I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.

The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.

Usually about 15 to 20 seconds. I’ve been known to check my phone while standing to pee, it really just depends on what I’m doing It’s not like I’m doing a lot on my phone while peeing.

Depending on the job you can definitely find the time to do so, particularly if your day starts very early. Software engineering for example often can, with a bit of effort, get away with free blocks of time like that.

It’s not bad advice, but… It’s presented like a jackass.