Whenever I go to the US I’m astounded by the lack of credit card security. Here we can use tap for very small purchases but anything big requires a PIN. I was shocked to be still sliding my card through machines reading the magnetic stripe in a lot of places, can’t remember the last time I did that in Canada. Mostly now though I use Google Pay since that requires me to unlock my phone (higher security than just a 4-digit PIN and I don’t have to worry about card skimmers/cameras) and I believe the store also does not get my real credit card number that way.
My mom is in her 80’s, read the Hobbit in school, has read the Lord of the Rings multiple times as well as watching the movies. She would not only know there are 4 but would be able to name them all.
It doesn’t help that there is a shortage of proper science journalists these days so the public reporting of these studies is done by people who don’t have the background to understand them or the context. Combined with the difficulty of doing good dietary studies – you can’t really do a randomized double-blind study where you assign people different highly restrictive diets, and if you did you’d probably get in all sorts of ethical trouble if one of your study groups had a higher rate of death, heart trouble or cancer than the others.
I refuse to let bad people appropriate everything. It’s getting so if you display a flag you’re assumed to be an extremist nutjob. If we say we aren’t going to fly a flag or give an OK symbol we are effectively ceding these to racists and I’m not willing to do that.
I remember going to a movie with some friends probably in about grade 9, I think at the time you had to be 14 under the rating system back then. They let all my friends in no problem but weren’t going to let me in, took a bunch of persuading that I was old enough. The kicker was, I really was old enough (I was short for my age), but I was the oldest of the group and none of the guys they let in unquestioned met the age limit.
When I was a soccer goalie (stopped playing when I hit 50 since I was getting too many injuries) I used to have to touch both goal posts before the game. I’m not otherwise superstitious at all but I think playing goal does weird things to you :)
Whenever I go to the US I’m astounded by the lack of credit card security. Here we can use tap for very small purchases but anything big requires a PIN. I was shocked to be still sliding my card through machines reading the magnetic stripe in a lot of places, can’t remember the last time I did that in Canada. Mostly now though I use Google Pay since that requires me to unlock my phone (higher security than just a 4-digit PIN and I don’t have to worry about card skimmers/cameras) and I believe the store also does not get my real credit card number that way.