we should make fun of americans more. why dont their shops include tax in the price tag. like how much does this item cost? its a surprise 🙂
Honestly, tea. I’ve lived here my whole life and I have never once known what my total is gonna be at the register. Total fucking mystery.
im an ex-american living in new zealand for the past two years and it still never fails to blow my mind that i can take a $2 coin, walk up to a counter with two $1 items, and perform the expected transaction
Reader Chris passes along an article about differences in American Sign Language usage between white and African-American signers. Researchers investigating what they call Black ASL found significant variations in signs, signing space, and facial cues. They explain:
Black ASL is not just a slang form of signing. Instead, think of the two signing systems as comparable to American and British English: similar but with differences that follow regular patterns and a lot of variation in individual usage.
They hypothesize that these differences began in segregated learning environments, and continue to evolve in Black social spaces. The whole article is worth a read.
Thanks, Chris, and remember — you can submit Wonk-worthy links through our ask or via email!
ETA, 9/24/12: Many of you have brought up the use of the word “mainstream” in this infographic. Better choices definitely exist, since this word rings of othering. We appreciate your nuanced and attentive readership!
There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters
“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying
“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.
hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters
“The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.
I don’t think people quite understand how much money a billion dollars is, let alone 600 billion every year.
So the US military spends 600 billion dollars a year. That averages to about 20,000$ every second.
The US college board estimates that state public colleges cost an average of about 10,000$ per year. The US military budget could pay for 60 million people to go to college. The United States has about 50 million total people of college age. If all of those people went to college for free the amount of money left over would still leave us with the second largest military budget on the planet.
The Nembrotha aurea is a wonderfully pigmented dorid nudibranch that lives in the western Indo-Pacific ocean. Like other Nembrothas (which happen to be my favourite nudibranch genus), this species feeds solely on ascidians (sea squirts). This nudibranch typically grows to be 3cm long.
The Chaos Bitches 