>can you dig a well anywhere and hit water

Just about. Usually just a question of how deep. This is how "water dowsers" usually work just FYI. They don't actually do anything it's just kind of hard to fail.

The courts decided that if the IRS did not give you a way to report the income, then the IRS can not take you to court to try and get their cut, and that you would not be guilty of not paying taxes on the income.

The IRS is only allowed to turn over your tax info when ordered to do so by a court. As an example, look at how difficult it was for the Ways & Means committee to get Trump's tax info. It took 3yrs, and went all the way up to the Supreme Court before they finally got the info.

The form doesn't ask where the money came from.

Doesn't have to be God, to be clear. Just the belief that whatever happens is fated to happen and there weren't any alternatives.

Edit: Wait, that description of Nihilism is completely wrong. Nihilism denies an objective "fundamental truth about the universe" source for morality and significance; they're not incapable of identifying morality and finding significance.

TIL they came to tell a fawn to wash in fences. Beef or an axe you alt-elephant.

Ohh… I always thought it was because “Peking” is close to the Cantonese pronunciation of Beijing (bak-king) and the historical European trade routes were through HK and Guangzhou. Then after the Communists made Mandarin the main dialect, the spelling was changed to reflect the pinyin of the Mandarin pronunciation of the capital which is Beijing.

Until 2020 savings accounts in the US were limited to 6 or fewer transactions per month. So debit cards would never have been tied to them for payment.

Not and get results.

Au contraire, "communication speed" absolutely is an issue. IT is the payload size("amount of data") that is not an issue. Communication speed (data transmission Round Trip Time aka RTT) doesn't change based on payload size - it is a constant based on the laws of physics.

A RTT across the continental US will take minimally 70-80 ms (plus remote processing time, which is the actual time hog since database lookups are S-L-O-W compared to data transmission) whether you send a single 64-byte packet or thousands of 1500-byte packets (to be more precise the larger packets take slightly longer in parts of the network that are not packet switched, but the difference is on the order of a few milliseconds, unperceiveable by humans).

See what /u/saywherefore said above for the most likely explanation based on actual response times.

They would hire a water witch who would walk around with a forked stick AKA dowsing. It's basically a superstitious practice to try to find ground water ... which just doesn't hold water.

It's not where to dig for water, but how deep you have to dig to find water at any given place.

In addition to the above translation issues and playing telephone, I'd like to take this opportunity to quote terry pratchett, who has a quote for every situation.

​

The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called – in the local language – Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund. The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland, they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Yeah I'm aware there is a difference. Having had shots of gin, I can say with confidence there is nothing about a gin and tonic or gin by itself that I think is appealing, hence my astonishment when someone enjoys it or calls it their drink or choice.

Beijing means North Capital in Chinese.

Specifically, fluids are substances that cannot resist a shear force, which are gasses and most liquids.

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It’s less than 4%. Between 380 and 450,000 slaves were transported to the US. Over 12 million were transported from Africa with ~10.5 million surviving the journey.

Side note, more slaves died during the voyage across the Atlantic in the 300 years that route was active than were taken in the Barbary trade.

Oh man. Sorry. It was hilarious

I can see that. But gin... Phewwwie

This only started happening to me after I moved out of the US. When I lived in the states the debit card was only tied to a checking account. In Canada the card lets me choose checking vs savings

Fatalism is an attitude to life that says, "Whatever happens is God's will." It can be psychologically healthy to stop worrying about things, and in practice is consistent with working hard, or with finding significance in things.

Nihilism is a refusal of all values. You do not believe it is bad if people die, for example. Nihilism gives no reason to work hard, and no possibility of finding significance in things.

I was not

Lol

Agreed on many points. The fixation on North America in many ways downplays the sheer scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This was a massive movement of people from one hemisphere to another. It's on a different geographic scale from the Barbary slave trade.

Yea but even with with the chip in the machine it takes about 5 seconds before the transaction completes where on contactless I can hover it over the reader for half a second then it processes in 1-2 seconds then it's done.

There’s also a lot of false narratives surrounding the Atlantic slave trade. Such as the vast majority of slaves being sold to Europeans by African rulers, not “kidnapped” by Europeans. The slave trade to what is now the United States made of a tiny proportion of slaves moved across the Atlantic. Approximately 12.5 millions Africans were transported across the Atlantic between 1525 - 1866, with approximately 10.7 surviving the voyage.

Of those 10.7 million about 388,000 ended up in the North America. The rest ended up in The Caribbean and South America. Over 4 million to Brazil alone. The United States was the only country where the slave population grew. In every other country the population dropped continually due to extreme disregard for their wellbeing and the work they were forced to do (mining, plantation work in areas with high rates of malaria, yellow fever, etc.).

This is in no way a defense of the slave trade or the suffering that was imposed on every individual that was forced to leave everything they’d ever known and robbed of everything. That includes those taken to North America. We need to understand the numbers and full tragedy of what took place, with most of it taking place outside of North America.