Drinking can be a big part of socializing in the US, but you’ll be able to get by without it. Neighbors don’t come over uninvited here, and it’s unusual to have the type of friendships where people come by unannounced all the time (at least, after college).

I might try a few things:

• If you haven’t already, find a local mosque to attend; that’s a good way to widen your social circle with American Muslims, who may be able to introduce you to more people, broaden it further, etc. It’ll be folks who are more culturally familiar, but many will likely be a bit more integrated already and have a wider group of American friends as well.

• Hobby based clubs are great, but they do tend to be a little transactional – think about hobbies you want to be doing anyway (so you’re not JUST there to meet people).

• If you have the time, I’d be on the lookout for volunteering and community service type activities – it’s a great way to meet good people, more committed than a hobby group, and much less awkward to socialize in than a workplace.

• Depending where you live, try and strike up conversations a bit more openly / frequently, and be willing to mention that you just moved here and don’t know many folks. At the barbershop, out to breakfast, in a long line, at the coffee shop, etc. Make conversation, a lot of people will be happy to chat and some will invite you to things. Just gotta be ok with lots of chats.

Yeah, prickly pears are tuna fruit, from the tuna cactus

Ditto

Yeah, I did a bit of poking around, check this out. Till the tuna canneries started showing up in the early 1900s in California, “tuna” was just as likely to prefix “cactus” as “fish”.

Mystery solved I think

There is, yes … that’s the main Spanish name for prickly pear.

Up until around 1907, your odds of encountering the fruit by the name “tuna” were about the same as the fish, when the first commercial canneries started to pop up in California… hence, a habit of clarifying between the two that stuck, even though most folks outside of the southwest had never heard of a tuna cactus.

I order a tuna salad sandwich or a tuna sandwich, but I grew up hearing tuna fish… specifically in reference to the stuff that came in a can.

Both were equally common years ago but over time, “tuna” sans fish has won out… likely because fresh, non canned tuna is very common.

I read an article a while ago that theorized the reason for Americans calling it “tuna fish” was that it rose to prominence as a canned staple good in the 1940s, and many Americans who didn’t live on the coasts had never heard of tuna before. Its light meat, when canned and cooked, was very mild and chicken-y compared with the heavily salted, oily canned fish folks were familiar with, hence both “chicken of the sea” and the precaution of labeling the can with not only tuna, but “fish”.

I think an alternate explanation is probably more likely… the 1919 Oxford English Dictionary describes “Tuna” as an alternative spelling of “tunny”, the old name for the fish (still used in a culinary sense in Britain) … not coincidentally:

• Californians would also have been familiar with the other tuna… tuna fruit, the prickly pear.

• Possessed of both a fruit and a fish of the same name, distinguishing one from the other when canning fish seems reasonable

• The largest canneries of tuna (e.g., the one that ultimately became Chicken of the Sea) were all based in California.

I’ve got chestnut trees in my yard, but they’re Japanese chestnuts – yours might be, too.

My dad has been obsessed with this my whole life. The dude just really likes American chestnut trees.

He’s part of an advocacy organization that is testing blight resistant genetic hybrids, and planting chestnuts in their yards to preserve them in the meantime.

If you, too want to be obsessed with chestnut trees, I believe it’s tacf.org

The shareholders can go and buy a diversified portfolio on their own, by investing in many companies, so they can derisk their portfolio without conglomeration.

If they already own shares of the conglomerating company, its returns will be lower (they don’t care that it’s less risky; they’ve diversified already). Similarly, the returns of the company that is now becoming part of the conglomeration will likely be reduced, which negatively affects shareholders of that company.

The benefit is really only for the people whose prospects are deeply tied to this company, and only this company… its management employees, who are compensated by the company (often in the form of stock that they can’t sell till they leave, or that vests over a long time frame).

I’m a very hairy dude with a thick, thick beard. I use a new blade every other shave. Recommend using a safety razor, it’s much cheaper and better

You’re confusing cause and effect, mostly.

If you’ve:

• Met a bunch of people that don’t look like you or live like you

• Have a high paying job that requires a good education

• Encountered a ton of new concepts and ideas frequently

You’re more likely to be a liberal. These things also tend to occur at much greater frequencies in cities.

Guy wanted me to burn him with cigarettes, but he didn’t smoke and neither do I. After spending 20 minutes looking for a convenience store that was open, the mood was kinda gone.

It’s a good objective, but it would take a lot to make it happen. It’s significantly more challenging for tech workers to effectively unionize en masse for several reasons:

• Tech isn’t monopsonistic, or even close to it; there isn’t a single large employer… even the biggest tech companies employ only a relatively small fraction of the tech workforce. That means separate unionization efforts at thousands of big companies, not at one.

• Tech job functions are much more widely varied than “delivery driver”; job responsibilities differ greatly, complexity and education requirements differ greatly, workplace expectations differ greatly … think of the difference between help desk, front end dev, network security engineering, data science and DBA. Collective bargaining is harder the more varied the needs of the collective are.

• Job mobility is really high in the tech sector … in other words, tech employees (by and large) have access to many prospective employers (especially with the prevalence of remote work), and tech employers to a wide geographic pool of talent. That means if your San Francisco office seems on the path to unionization, you can shift work to your Chennai office.

• It also means that, when the working conditions at a tech company suck, a lot of tech workers can easily jump ship. It’s hard to get a union going when your voters can easily quit and go work someplace nicer, rather than take the more difficult path of staying and trying to force your employer to improve.

Again, I think highly of unions and would really like to see more effective unionization efforts in tech – I just want folks to go into it eyes wide open and intelligently, vs throwing up their hands and saying, “Why don’t tech workers unionize?”

Portuguese, there’s a few hundred million speakers of Portuguese in South America.

I suppose I should have included French and made it four … there’s Quebec, but also Martinique, French Guiana, and so on. Maybe 10-15 million all in all?

Vs. ~450m for Spanish, ~400m for English and ~300m for Portuguese.

Right? People are forgetting that we’ve got essentially three languages in the entire hemisphere.

You speak three languages in Europe? Congrats you speak 12% of the commonly spoken / national languages.

Speak one language in the Americas? Congrats, you speak 1/3 of them!

Sent an application in!

I am blessed, in that I tan easily to become quite dark, and so I don’t burn often.

…but no amount of sunscreen protects my bald head from eventually burning. Luckily, hats!

Exactly. "Pay people enough, " is table stakes. It’s good business strategy and it’s a basic moral duty. "Grossly over pay people, " is probably not good business strategy; even if you do, it isn’t going to make up for being a shitty place to work

Yep. It’s why companies can offer ridiculous salaries and still have crazy employee churn (see: amazon, tesla).

Right… “perform an actual exit interview” would be good