Bruh. I offered a polite correction on an ultimately inconsequential grammatical error you made. You’re the one who doubled down on the error, and then continued doubling down while ignoring everything I said except for specific sentences which you clearly didn’t understand.

“Spewing out ChatGPT levels of text”? WTF is that even supposed to mean? I just quickly explained the grammar at first. Then, when you didn’t get that, I elaborated on the reasoning for it, and linked to like, five different independent sources, instead of just making blanket assertions. You didn’t understand, so I explained­— Jeez, but that’s the real issue, isn’t it? You don’t seem to like that very much.

This is so stupid. Does it even matter? Do you do anything other than moralize down at Internet strangers about petty and incorrect semantics while repeating yourself?

If I was saying that the change already happened I would have said ‘affectED’ past tense, which I did not.

I’m advocating for something to cause change, I’m not saying that change is already in the middle of happening or has happened.

Oh my god. You’re using “change” as an object noun after a transitive verb which itself has no connotation or denotation of creation or causation. That implicitly means you’re saying that the thing it’s referring to must already exist.

I’m advocating for something to cause change,

Yes! That is what “effect” means.

I’m not saying that change is already in the middle of happening or has happened.

Yes you are! “Affect (v.)” already means “change (v.)”. “Affect (v.) change (n.)” means “change (v.) the change (n.)”. That implies that the “change (n.)” must already exist.

It’s like if I said “This salt will really affect my spaghetti”. That implicitly says/presumes that “my spaghetti” already exists, or else it wouldn’t be able to be affected.

I stand by my usage of the word affect, over effect.

🙄

FFS, I explained the grammatical reasoning, and linked to historical usage data, and linked to four different dictionaries to back that up.

You know what, fuck it. I only mentioned “effect” vs. “affect” because I thought that was somewhat interesting and more obscure rather than annoying to point out, but if you’re going to just be obtuse about it I may as well have some fun and point out the various other grammatical and semantic mistakes too…

“The Congress app” should not have a definite article because the app you linked to is, per the app ID, developer info, and first line of its description, unofficial and unaffiliated with the U.S. Congress. “Representative” should be plural, though that’s probably just a typo. The second “despite” should have a conjunction such as “and” immediately before it. “Want” should be conjugated as “wants” after “citizenry”, because the noun it applies to in this case is the singular “majority”. “Affect” should be “effect”, because “affect change” isn’t a thing and is actually nonsense. The clause right after that, beginning with “that’s what the corporations”, is a run-on sentence and should probably be fixed with a conjunction denoting causality or reasoning. The clause after “involved” is also a run-on sentence, and should probably either be its own declarative statement or be semicolon-delimited. The third “to” on the second sentence of your next reply needs a listing conjunction right before it. And in your latest reply, the clause after “cause change” is also a run-on sentence and should probably be delimited by either a full stop or a semicolon instead of a comma.

Now I suppose I’ll wait for you to explain why you “stand by” these other plainly incorrect (and, frankly, inconsequential) errors as well.

It’s funny how you started out pretending to champion political change, and to be against frivolously “commenting about it on an Internet forum”. … I should know better.

Change is to alter something, not to create/produce something.

It’s a transitive verb. “Affect change” places “change” as the object. You’re not saying you’re altering the political situation or you’re altering Congress; You’re saying the change is already happening, and you’re merely slightly altering its direction. “Effect change” means “Make a change”, which is what you’re trying to say. “Affect change” means “change the change”, which is probably nonsensical in most cases you’d use it.

Also, “effect change” specifically is a standard idiom. “Effect change” shows up in the English language around 8X more commonly than “affect change” between 1800 and 2000, because “affect change” is a semantically incorrect misspelling of “effect change”. [1] “Effect a change” is also either explicitly defined in or given as an example usage in many major dictionaries, while the same isn’t true of “affect change”, because, again “affect change” is a generally incorrect usage that doesn’t actually make sense or mean anything outside of potentially very specific scenarios that don’t apply here. [2]

1: Google Books Ngram Viewer.

2: Defined in Collins. Used in example sentences by: Cambridge, Webster, American Heritage

I stand by my usage of the word affect, over effect.

I mean. Feel free to, I guess?

only way to affect change is to lobby

Don’t want to be pedantic, but not American and don’t really have much else to add here.

This is one of the few times when the correct word is “effect”, not “affect”. “Affect (v.)” means to alter, or have an impact on. “Effect (v.)” means to produce, and to create an effect (n.) of.

ABC.xyz?

malware

Actually, yeah, that basically fits.

Don’t say that, @FlyingSquid. You’re beautiful, and when us primates are doing ruining ourselves, you will inherit the earth and fly over mountains and forests as well.

Who is this “God” Person Anyway?

…That’s a salt, though, right?

If you’re counting non-NaCl salts as answers, then basically any “mineral” our body needs would probably be delivered at least partly in salt form. Just reading off some multivitamins here:

• Calcium Carbonate
• Chromium Chloride
• Cupric Sulfate
• Potassium Iodide
• Ferrous Fumarate
• Magnesium Oxide
• Manganese Sulfate
• Sodium Molybdate
• Sodium Selenate
• Zinc Oxide

(I haven’t fully checked all of these are salts­— But I mean, a lot of of them are blatantly chemical analogues of stuff that definitely is salt (E.G. “Potassium Iodide” vs. “Sodium Chloride”), plus they’re metals bonded to ionic groups so they’re definitely not alloys or covalent molecules or ceramics.)

This is probably because in order for our body to absorb stuff, it basically has be water-soluble, which means salts work quite well.

When eating real food (plants, animals, and fungi), I assume a lot of this won’t be in salt form, but rather it will mostly be bound up in proteins and DNA and such. For example, iron should be primarily in hemoglobin instead of ferrous fumarate. But some of it, for example the potassium, will definitely be technically in the form of dissolved salts/minerals in the fluids inside the food.

You can of course also rearrange the compounds around. For example, this can of Windsor-brand “salt free salt substitute” I have here further lists:

• Potassium Chloride
• Calcium Silicate
• Magnesium Carbonate

You’ll note that these are some of the same components as in the list above, just a different combination. I’m pretty sure any ionic mineral that includes at least one ion that our body needs technically counts as “food”, as long as the other half isn’t poisonous— They should be basically the same when they dissolve in the water in our stomachs anyway.

Meats can also be preserved by adding nitrates and nitrites to it, though technically I guess that’s more of a likely-carcinogenic additive than part of the “food”.

Fun fact: Your body sorta knows when it’s low on minerals, and will want to start eating dirt and rocks in order to make up for it! Over 100 different types of primate do it too. So in that case, you could probably argue that plain rocks and soil literally are food, in that they provide vital nutrients the body needs and that your brain is smart enough to know that. …These days it’s apparently considered a mental disorder, but I swear it made much more sense back when the likeliest thing you were going to eat was some mud, rather than lead-contaminated radioactive refrigerants or whatever it is we’ve surrounded ourselves with.

Enjoy, also, this lovely video from a chemistry Youtuber and his friends taste-testing which alkaline-chloride salt tastes the best!

I am not a doctor. Don’t go around eating rocks unless you’re a bird or some other type of dinosaur.

The concept of a “master copy” has been around and in widespread use for around a century. It has nothing to do with either software nor social (in)justice. It’s just the thing you photocopy so you don’t end up making photocopies of photocopies. IMO It should make sense to anyone who, you know, has seen and used paper within their lifespan.

Some terminology, like “master and slave” for IO between devices, did always used to make me really uncomfortable whenever I heard it. But the branch name for software was probably fine.

Git is really inefficient for large binary files because of the decentralization. SVN for media and Git for text-based files makes sense. Otherwise— I only used SVN briefly, and then fortunately only for media— But yeah, Git is probably better and more useful overall.

Wait, what? When did this even happen (in general)?

Ah, screw this. I’ll probably keep “master” in anything that currently has it, and the next time I start something I’ll just go back to calling it “trunk” even though I was too young at that point to actually call it trunk, but it makes the most sense for the organization flow.

Definitely fly both at once, or overlay them tastefully or something, instead of going full pride-version.

Mutilating the country’s flag in order to show your “patriotism”, as certain groups do, is… Certainly an interesting symbolic choice.

Wearing or sporting an American flag gets all the wrong kind of attention. I really don’t want to deal with it. Frightening minorities and getting thumbs up/nods from racists isn’t really my thing.

Then stick it next to a rainbow flag, or a Statue of Liberty, or a peace sign, or the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the symbols that y’all actually do still have for actual freedom.

It’s all about the messaging. Make it clear: “This is the flag of the nation, for everybody in the nation, and anyone who flies a mutilated version of it is a coward.”

There’s a slim chance someone with a regular American flag isn’t a nationalist twat.

Y’all should really reclaim that. It’s a good flag, and it’s supposed to mean some things that are actually quite nice.

Idk. It’s probably morally grey at best, but the military is at least honest that they kill people. Air pollution apparently kills 6.7 million people annually, compared to every war put together killing just 0.1 million people annually over the last decade. But the difference is that if you work in air pollution you get to run slick ads bragging about how clean you are, whereas if work in murder-machines you’re more directly confronted with the reality and the gravity of what you’re doing— The latter may be scarier, but the former feels much more gross.