yeah it fuckin sucks. you dont need to believe it or not, I swear to you (it also happened to my wife, Im a US citizen and she isn’t) this was in the dublin ireland departures when you go to the states. you actually go through immigration when youre still in ireland. so you go down an escalator to a specific part of the airport thats sectioned off from the rest for this. walking up to the desk, before i had a chance to take my passport out of my bag, while I was still about 10 feet away, he TSA agent said “hello [name]” they did the same thing to my wife. its disarming as youre not expecting it. there’s no knowing where in the line the facial recognition already took place. the idea you can consent/not consent is almost certainly purely theater.

I had a TSA agent say my name as I walked up to the booth. They 100% scanned me before I was in earshot of the agent.

My older neighbor got a call from a guy who called her “mom” and said he’d been in a car accident, and there was a problem with his insurance, so he was in real trouble if he couldn’t pay cash for the damage, the other guy was gonna call the cops, and he needed $2,000 to give to the other guy for the damage.

She said “Tim?” and the guy said "yeah mom its Tim and kept repeating he was gonna go to jail for not having insurance cause it lapsed just this week and he needed to run to the store and he was in an accident.

She withdrew 2k from the bank and some guy came and said he was Tim’s friend and he needed to go right then the cops were gonna arrest Tim.

Apparently, he snatched the money out of her hand and ran to his car and left. She felt very foolish.

thats right. letters are just arbitrary little squiggles, and if you look at any of them too long they lose the heuristic you associate with them and the fact that theyre just little squiggles becomes visible.

I dont think one word or another is more or less likely to cause this effect.

yeah, no, of course. I get it, I just think statements like that are completely unhelpful

I’m not sure saying its typical of Russians is helpful. I know two Russian people and neither of them are blackmailing kids into performing terroristic acts.

I’m not defending Russia’s government nor the attitudes of many of the country’s civilians. I also have my own biases and prejudices that I’ve been working most of my life to extinguish.

I just don’t think it’s helpful to go on the internet and write “typical X, X’s are all the same” in essentially any situation.

this is your moment, bro, enjoy it

I’ve never seen any yungling here. there are some people who order “black and tan” at a bar (stout and ale mixed) and Ive seen a guy from west belfast get pretty pissed off that they said the term at