What I think you mean by “natural geography” is just one part of the field. Urban / economic geography (regional dynamics, housing policy, tourism geography, population analysis) and Historical / Social geography (historical urban geography, homelessness, migration, etc) Are big parts of the field of geography. Most of modern geography is interested in both the physical (more geology, climate, biomes, etc) and human aspects, and how they interact.

Oh god, yes. I worked in a call centre for six months and it was dreadful. The combination of dealing with sometimes frustrating situations + the anonymity of a voice only call… People were regularly dreadful. Definitely at least 10% very rude people.

I also took it to be a sign of the ‘banality of evil’, that people having a nice time with their friends, eating some nice food, are generally pleasant. But put them in the privacy of their own home, speaking to a faceless stranger, and suddenly they can be awful. But I tried not to judge them to harshly. The design of call centres, with long hold times and staff with no real power to do anything helpful, is pretty much guaranteed to frustrate the most saintly of people.

Totally agree that eating at a restaurant doesn’t mean you see all the subtle ways people are douches. But the comment above was about people shouting, so I assumed that the “10% of people are rude” was meaning obviously and noticeably rude. If it’s just 10% of people are impatient / distracted / not very friendly / kinda annoying. Then sure, but I don’t think anyone would be surprised with such a mild claim.

And as I said, I was a waiter in a busy restaurant for over two years. And the staff spent a lot of time complaining about the job to each other (as you do) and while many customers were annoying, kept changing their orders, or were a bit drunk and laughing loudly the whole time, blah blah, I don’t remember anyone ever complaining about a customer being as rude as I regularly read / see on the Internet. I never encounter a “Karen”.

I’ve always assumed it is just that Internet focusses on the tiny number of extreme behaviours and makes it sound more normal. But then I hear people say things like 10% of people are awful to staff and it makes me think that maybe there’s a real cultural difference.

Maybe in some places. But when I go out to a restaurant, I’m often surrounded by a few dozen other diners, and no one is acting up or shouting at waiting staff. I have seen customers be obviously rude to staff but it’s very rare compared to the number of “normal” interactions. Sure not everyone is friendly and totally polite, but entitled, shouting or just being an ass is an absolute exception, like less than 0.1%. I also worked as a waiter in a couple of different restaurants over a two year period, and don’t remember any incidents either to me or my colleagues.

When I read comments like this it makes me wonder if I’ve been lucky enough to live and work in decent places, and the USA is just an nightmare hellscape, or if the reality there is much more normal and we just hear an unrepresentative sample of it.

Does it do emoji predictions? I’ve got a few relationships that use a lot of emoji in chats, and the ability tomjusy type ‘salute’, ‘sad’, ‘kiss’ etc and get the emoji without scrolling through a library is what’s keeping me on Swiftkey.

I mean, I agree, I’m not going to be losing any sleep worrying about the unsatisfied billionaires. But what he’s saying is that given the cost (losing 30 years of his life) the ‘reward’ ($35 billion) wasn’t enough. He’s not saying he doesn’t like or want the money, he’s saying its not enough to give up your life for.

If anything, it would explain why rich people keep pursuing money long after any sane person would be content with their millions/billions. Maybe if you just get given a few million you could be satisfied with it, but if you’ve had to sacrifice your life, friends, morality and so on to get it… And you realise it doesn’t actually make you happy, so you keep chasing more, hoping that eventually enough will be enough. Better that than realising you’re an idiot who fell for capitalism’s big lie and gave up the stuff that actually mattered in life to get more numbers on a sheet.

I think it did effect things. SMS is weirdly popular in the US (i think it’s might be cause they didn’t use it much in the 90s?) but people I know in France and UK still use texts for some things, even if messaging apps are where most of communication happens (French people even use mms which is insane).

I know that I managed to convince a number of tech-shy people (including parents) to get Signal by telling them replaced their sms app, so it wasn’t a whole extra app / network they needed to use. It was great for me because I could ditch WhatsApp completely. But when signal stopped supporting sms they went back to just whatsapping and texting, so I cracked and reinstalled WhatsApp to keep in touch with them.