It wants to show you a graph of your air quality.

“Just Google it” was always worthless advice, even when Google worked right. When you look up information on the Internet, you need prior knowledge in order to assess the information. Maybe this is great info? Maybe it’s dumb and whoever wrote it is a moron? Without prior knowledge you don’t know. With prior knowledge you can see what they say about the things you already know and decide from that.

I once tried to configure a Cisco access point, with zero prior experience with Cisco IOS. Simple stuff, but I knew nothing and had to Google it. I found some blog explaining it, but it looked weird. But I also knew IOS is weird, so maybe it’s right? Hard to say! I reached out to an old friend who is Cisco certified to verify, he told me to ignore that thing and showed me what I should actually do. It really made me realize how useless googling something is if you don’t have the prior knowledge to assess it.

I went to a top university in Norway. My tuition was about $80 per year. All in all various student discounts on everything from haircuts to car repairs to housing, my tuition was effectively negative. I spent a good chunk on books, but rarely used them, and honestly could have saved the money. Considering everyone gets a scholarship from the government for the first 7 years (would have been converted to a loan if I didn’t pass enough credits worth of classes), I effectively got paid to study. I still had student loans, because they were interest free while I was a student and cheaper than a mortgage after. I spent some on food and housing, and saved the rest. Like most Norwegians I was not in a hurry to pay it down. Student debt is generally low priority for Norwegians to pay down due to the cheap interest.

Pretty sure it’s always been upfront with that it still tracks you? I always thought of it as a “don’t store history and cookies locally” thing and nothing more. Maybe I read that disclaimer with more cynicism than most?

No, you don’t have a point. You’re missing the point. The point is that America in English is not the same word as America in Spanish. They’re false friends.

False friends is the linguistics term for two words spelled the same in two languages, but with different meaning. For example, the word “glass” means ice cream in Swedish. We don’t tell the Swedish they’re using the word “glass” wrong, we accept that it has a different meaning in Swedish.

Sometimes the false friends are pretty subtle. The word “må” means “may” in Danish, but “must” in Norwegian. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, because unlike the ice cream example above, you don’t get any hints from context. You just have to know.

It’s the same deal with America. English-speaking countries (yes, the UK too), and all of the Nordics for that matter, use a continental model where North and South America are separate continents, and America is shorthand for United States of America. And the superior amount of Spanish speaking countries don’t give them the right to tell English speakers what words should mean in their native language.

In my experience “USians” is usually used by butthurt Spanish speakers who think that because America means one thing in Spanish it has to mean the same thing in every other language.

Do you genuinely think that giving Americans a few hundred bucks caused immediate and persistent inflation? Because I’m more inclined to blame the spike on a collapse in the global supply chain due to quarantining of factory workers and container ship crews, and the subsequent increases on a combination of factors, including interest rates (or, more accurately, what caused the raise in interest rates) and corporate greed.

Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

Maybe she’s Canadian and just being polite. You really can’t know.