They don't have to go to work when sick if they don't want, so they are less likely to spread colds to other rich people.
Shower Thoughts MK2
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
- Start date
How did the phrase "gloss over" come to mean to dismiss, omit, or trivialize potentially important details? I've never worn make up, but I was under the impression gloss was meant to enhance and accentuate details. Seems "gloss over" should mean the exact opposite to how it's used, i.e.: to be hyperbolic or exaggerate.
I doubt the phrase originates from lip gloss. I would think it comes from applying varnish or something similar to wood.
Actually here, I think this definition on Dictionary.com clears it up:
You are covering up or trivializing the flaws by glossing them over. Even cracks in wood look good when filled with varnish.
Ah, makes a bit more sense in that context. I've never used it in reference to outright deception; I've always used it in reference to someone "glossing over" key details that are more important to the story they're telling than the ones they are offering. Example: "Do you have an antacid? This morning, I had eggs and bacon, and the bacon was really greasy, and when I went to shoot up the local high school, I had really bad indigestion the whole time. Oh, and the eggs were a bit runny for my liking as well." Like, great; I get how you prefer your breakfast, but did you just "gloss over" the fact you shot up a high school???
Given you (in theory, depending on your religion) could have been born into any period, and not necessarily as a human, being a person living now is like winning the lottery.
Absent
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The world is still physically a bit large. So, you could have a few atom bombs explode, a few major capitals absolutely razed, and you wouldn't notice it. The day would go as usual, for you. For hours, or days. Until you check the news and see what happened abroad, you'd have no idea.
Even if you don't watch the news, it's likely that others will and society around you would change rapidly, though. When 9/11 happened, everyone was immediately talking about it.
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It depends on how much you socialize. The most probable is, you're at work, doing your stuff, and just check the news when going home (although people sometimes slack compulsively checking their smartphones or their escapist forums). Less probable but possible, you're on some remote hiliday, trekking for the weekend, or something like that.
Point is, I often feel that if some ww3-sized event was to happen in, say, ukaine, I'd know it instantly, feeling the ground rumble under my feet or something. But the reality is, I'd have to open a "news" channel for that - idling online, checking the news, or chatting with a coworker who did. Until then, full unawareness.
I never expect something huge when, say, I check the news in the morning. Because, intuitively, I think that if it was so huge, it would have affected me in real time. Asteroid-crash-like (and even with that, the tremor would be minimal until the various types of devastation waves truly arrived).
"the truth is probably somewhere in the middle" is just lazy psuedo-intellectualism, as is its application upon political identity often self-referred to as "enlightened" "centrism." It means little more than they can't be arsed to look into anything further.
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Saw some people making fun of a "Wooden Vlogger Playset" and it got me thinking:
pop stars influencers, but camera operator is a no-go.
- I've seen toy (non-functional) webcams before.
- I've seen toy camcorders. And not just the ones every April O'Neil toy came with, but child-scaled (again, non-functional) replicas.
- I've never seen a toy studio set camera, the ones that have a pedestal with a steering wheel and focus/zoom levers. Or at the very least, I've only ever seen them in playsets for small figurines, never as scale replicas. Odd.
These forums are kind of funny. You would expect most forums to mostly deal with the content that the main site produces, but I feel like here we are almost completely disassociated from the Escapist proper. Personally, I watch ZP and EP and that's it, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people here did less. I've often thought about making a poll thread asking whether people here actually went onto the Escapist proper, but on the other hand I'd prefer not to have that sort of thing proudly displayed for months on the front page of OT for management to see if my suspicions are correct.
There's a kinda "self-help" "motivational" type of rhetoric far too many marks still fall for, epitomised by the above quote. Utterly meaningless, breezy, buttock-huffing nothingness, too vague to actually help anyone unreceptive to placebos. If you want to vibe, just vibe, don't dress it up in pretentious commodified twat-waffle, unless of course you're consciously grifting your intended audience. Pro tip: anyone talking that sorta shit is either looking to scam or impress you with minimal effort and investment - you're better off putting on your favourite energetic fist-pumping song/album instead, or discovering new energetic fist-pumping songs/albums! Much cheaper, less time wasting, less looking like a twat... everyone's a winner.
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Surely the most obvious solution to greenhouse gas emissions is to put the carbon back in the ground. We should mulch up fast growing trees and other farming refuse (corn stalks etc.) and pump it back into empty oil wells. I suppose that there isn't any money in doing something like that, though, which is why it isn't done.
There's move to do that, my father was a scientist at CSIRO (Australia's government funding science agency), and he did work on CO2 sequestration, taking carbon dioxide from factory exhaust and pumping it into abandoned coal mines. Coal is very absorbent (like charcoal, which is why activated charcoal is used as a filter). But there was political pressure from the Greens to abandon the scheme.
As for burying biomass, that's also been considered, but it's just a hell of a job to get any meaningful amount. There's also similar moves to use wood in building materials, in the hope it stays in buildings indefinitely. But it's one of the problems with planting trees to absorb CO2, you have to bury the trees or something later or it gets back into the atmosphere.
Would lions make good pets for giants? I mean, lions wouldn't be good pets for normal humans because they are big and scary, but if you were much bigger than they were, could you domesticate them like normal cats?