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.

So I cheated a little, because I’m at a table right now, so I didn’t visualise the table just the ball on the table. It was about tennis size, but no texture, kind of light blue shading into lilac. The person pushing it was really just a hand.

So sounds like the only work I did was imagining the ball. I wouldn’t say I knew in advance, and I wouldn’t say I chose what it looked like. It just appeared and it was light blue.

Edit: the ball started rolling when pushed, but not long enough for me to know whether it fell off the table or not. But the rolling was just a concept. I can visualise things, but I can’t visualise motion. Which I only discovered recently.

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”.

Haha luckily yes!

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

It is.

UK. Cold and hot water coming from separate taps. WTF? I was once told that it is because hot water boilers used to have their tops open to the outside, which meant the hot water could contain some debris, so it was important to use it only for washing and not let it mix with cooking water. But in bathrooms in some modern builds that definitely don’t use that kind of boilers you still get separate taps. I told one of my British colleagues about how it’s been bothering me since I moved here and she said “oh yeah, I never realised that I’ve never seen that in any other country”. She also told me that kids are just taught to wash their hands quickly under the hot tap, so that they don’t run the water long enough for it to turn scolding hot. WTactualF?

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.

As a kid, it was a cartoon - The Little Mermaid. As an adult… It is a cartoon - Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse.

2009? It will expire in 5 years and we’ll be inundated with devices that require you to get up from your seat and yell out the name of the brand to end an ad ☹️

I’ve just asked Gemini about cheese that slides off pizza, it didn’t recommend glue.

Yeah. I took my second-hand car to an authorised dealer and they offered to extend my warranty from 3 to 10 years. For money of course but it wasn’t ridiculously expensive, and had no excess.

New cars. After a car has been owned by one owner, for however short a period of time, it dramatically reduces its price. At least in the UK.

Oh I didn’t take it as such 🙂 I just disagree.

Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!

Edit: typos

“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.

A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.