The Off Topic Topic

[The Larch]

Macron has just announced that starting next year in France condoms will be free in pharmacies for all 18 to 25 y.o. people.

[Josquius]

Macron has just announced that starting next year in France condoms will be free in pharmacies for all 18 to 25 y.o. people.

This shit ruined my early sex life.

[grumbler]

Macron has just announced that starting next year in France condoms will be free in pharmacies for all 18 to 25 y.o. people.

This shit ruined my early sex life.

Your sex life isn't going to start until next year?    And aren't you a bit old to try to pass for under 25?

[Josquius]

Macron has just announced that starting next year in France condoms will be free in pharmacies for all 18 to 25 y.o. people.

This shit ruined my early sex life.

Your sex life isn't going to start until next year?    And aren't you a bit old to try to pass for under 25?

Other countries have had this for decades

[Admiral Yi]

How did free condoms ruin your early sex life?

[Josquius]

How did free condoms ruin your early sex life?

The free ones are low quality and small

[Eddie Teach]

So pony up for good ones then.

[Threviel]

Small? A condom stretches over your head if you want to, how absolutely gargantuan is your equipment?

[Josquius]

That doesn't sound accurate. The balloon material may be able to stretch but the band at the bottom necessarily needs be tight. In the case of the shitty free ones - painfully and blood flow restrictingly tight.

So pony up for good ones then.

1: I can afford that now. When a student money was not easily available

2: I did not realise there was any problem and this was how condoms were meant to be.

[celedhring]

If you couldn't afford enough XL condoms, then I'd wager your sex life wasn't quite ruined 

[Threviel]

That doesn't sound accurate. The balloon material may be able to stretch but the band at the bottom necessarily needs be tight. In the case of the shitty free ones - painfully and blood flow restrictingly tight.

So pony up for good ones then.

1: I can afford that now. When a student money was not easily available

2: I did not realise there was any problem and this was how condoms were meant to be.

I would have thought splitting girls in half would be a larger problem in that case.

[The Brain]

All these years I thought Jos was just weird but turns out it's BDE.

[garbon]

All these years I thought Jos was just weird but turns out it's BDE.

 

[Sheilbh]

To some extent, I vaguely feel the British system maintains *some* of that collegiality between people of different specializations (at least, that's what I get from colleagues) - even if it's not immune to these trends either. And there are still quite a bit of curious, quirky people out there, fortunately.

On curious, quirky people, I wonder if there is an angle of internet culture/globalisation about it so the preoccupations and focuses of a few elite universities set the tone more than was the case in the post-war?

I was reading a piece about Stuart Hall and he's not a historian, but a key figure in British cultural studies - part of that, from what I've understood, was universities that weren't Oxford or Cambridge (in the UK - I imagine Ivy League in the US) taking more of a risk and distinguishing themselves by opening up to different areas of studying/acadmiec focuses. So I think Hall gets to start a centre studying contemporary culture. I think there was something similar with EP Thompson doing his work and setting up centres for study of social history in Leeds and Warwick.

Perhaps pre-internet there were the dominant universities but it was possible to work against them or in a separate tradition from other research universities - with the internet speeding up discourse and communication that there's less space for other bits of academia to be alternative centres?

[The Larch]

All South Koreans to become younger as traditional age system scrapped
June will mark end of system that deemed newborns to be a year old, with a year added every 1 January

South Korea is to scrap its traditional method of counting ages and adopt the international standard – a change that that will knock one or two years off people's ages on official documents but could take time to seep into daily life.

South Koreans are deemed to be a year old when they are born, and a year is added every 1 January. The unusual – and increasingly unpopular – custom means a baby born on New Year's Eve becomes two years old as soon as the clock strikes midnight.

The complications do not end there: a separate system exists for calculating the age of men entering national service and the legal age to drink alcohol and smoke. In those cases, a person's age is calculated from zero at birth and a year is added on New Year's Day.

The tradition has attracted criticism from politicians who believe it makes South Korea, a big Asian economy and global technological and cultural power, appear behind the times. The president, Yoon Suk-yeol, has criticised the multiple methods for calculating ages as a drain on resources.

The confusion should end in June – at least on official documents – when laws stipulating the use of only the international method of counting ages take effect.

"The revision is aimed at reducing unnecessary socioeconomic costs because legal and social disputes as well as confusion persist due to the different ways of calculating age," Yoo Sang-bum of the ruling People Power party told parliament.

Jeong Da-eun, a 29-year-old office worker, said she welcomed the change, since she always had to think twice when asked her age when overseas. "I remember foreigners looking at me with puzzlement because it took me so long to come back with an answer," she said. "Who wouldn't welcome getting a year or two younger?"

The system's origins are unclear. One theory is that turning one year old at birth takes into account time spent in the womb – with nine months rounded up to 12. Others link it to an ancient Asian numerical system that did not have the concept of zero.

Explanations for the extra year added on 1 January are more complicated. Some experts point to the theory that ancient Koreans placed their year of birth within the Chinese 60-year calendar cycle, but, at a time when there were no regular calendars, tended to ignore the day of their birth and simply added on a whole year on the first day of the lunar calendar. The extra year on 1 January became commonplace as more South Koreans began observing the western calendar.

The national assembly, which approved the change this week, said it would "resolve the social confusion caused by the mixed use of age calculations and the resulting side effects".

While some people are expected to continue using their "Korean age" in daily life, others said they were delighted by the prospect of turning back the clock.

"I'm getting two years younger – I'm so happy," one tweeted. "I turned two years old so soon after I was born, as I was born in December. Finally, I'm about to get my real age back!"