better yet how about they take enough for donation and decanter a portion out an do blood testing both to make sure the blood is clean but alsoso the individual is aware of they are free of X

This is already how they do it here (India). They’ll test all donations for a number of infections, and you can give them your mobile number / e-mail / postal address to inform you if they find something.

I asked how much corn or sorghum they eat. None,the children don’t like either.

Isn’t niacin found in meat and fish? What do corn and sorghum have to do with it?

The guy killed by the girl he was trying to rape becoming a symbol of machismo is oddly fitting.

If one person demands sex in return for not harming another, it is called rape and we rightly consider it to be a crime. If one person demands sex in return for not starving the other, many people seem to find it acceptable. I would never dare judge someone for the work they are forced to do by their circumstances, but ‘sex work’ (or whatever you choose to call it) is absolutely not okay. Those trapped in it deserve better.

Things change slowly, then all at once. We are currently facing the same problems that Europe, the US, Japan and China faced and overcame.

Also, have you considered moving to a different part of India? Not all regions face the same issues. The northeast is a lot less creepy and a lot more civic-minded. The west is more industrialised and ‘developed’. The south has better educational systems, and so on.

Being a Mary Sue isn’t about how often you fail / succeed. Your character can win all the time if their victories are entertaining enough (Munchausen), if they are established as being the best in their field (Saitama) or if their wins feel ‘deserved’ (Sherlock Holmes[1]). When they win and the audience thinks ‘ugh, not again’, then you have a Mary Sue. Or if they win at something they should not be good at according to the rest of the story - like Holmes winning a poetry contest or Saitama landing a blow on a mosquito - without any explanation given, you have a Mary Sue.

[1] Yes, I know he fails a couple of times, but again, they’re entertaining, which is the important thing.

If you bought it, and they didn’t compensate you for it, then it is legally yours. (Of course, the work-related data is theirs unless stated otherwise.) If you ask them officially (e.g. e-mail IT support), they have to tell you what, if any, control they have. They can lie, but no one is risking jail term over such small stakes.

As for software, they might have asked you to install some antivirus / security software, that may give them some control over your computer.

Also, as the other poster said, they can control anything you do using your Office account. So don’t use your work e-mail for anything personal. And Microsoft may 'back-up your files to the work account’s OneDrive, so go check those systems.

In general, I don’t think a university would do anything malicious, but they could be incompetent and leak your data to a third party.

You’ll have to be more specific. Who bought the device? What OS is it running? What work software are installed on it?

Depending on the configuration, they can have anything from zero access to full control of the device.

Every word has stress.

In most Indian languages, most words are unstressed. There is a distinction between long and short syllables, but that comes from vowel length, not stress. A few words (like him-AA-la-ya) do have stress, but this is the exception and usually happens due to conjugation.

You probably mean the first phoneme is stressed.

No, kamala is unstressed.

And the “rum” sound you’re looking for is called the “schwa”

Yes.

The Indian (Sanskrit) name is pronounced ka-ma-laa (meaning lotus), with no stress, and no gap in between the syllables. The first two 'a’s are pronounced like the ‘u’ in rum, while the last is the same sound but longer (so like the ‘a’ in calm).

The US Presidential candidate’s name is pronounced the way she likes, which in this case is closer to ko-ma-laa.

Mint has three prebuilt options, Cinnamon is just the default. Beyond that you can also install other desktops.

If we have a lot of cheap energy, we might be able to do industrial-scale carbon capture.

‘Low stakes’ as in ‘the new mayor isn’t sending everyone who didn’t vote for their party to jail’.

If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.

Financial transactions are logged and the logs maintained for a certain number of years. You can definitely use a similar system for voting when the stakes are low - local elections, for example. But an electronic voting system cannot be both secret and verifiable. In practice you make finding out how someone voted as hard as possible, and hope that a future government will not put in the effort to crack your system. All of which is completely unnecessary when paper ballots exist, and can be both secret and verifiable.

Burgerland is slang for the USA.

Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.

any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity

Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.

1796. Anyway, the cowpox vaccine was an improvement on smallpox variolation, which was known to the Chinese at least by 1549.

Doesn’t that already exist in parts of the US? I know the UK and Germany have it.

Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.

On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.