u/Comprehensive_Tea708

Some weeks ago, some clumsy idiot, which is to say yours truly, didn't put the oil filler cap back on the right way, and at some later time it popped off and fell away, presumably landing in the middle of the road. I've replaced it now, but now I've noticed troubling signs from the alternator, which recharges the battery fine when I drive, and when testing it in my garage at idle (via a multimeter and the battery terminals), it does produce adequate amperage (yielding 14.1 volts in the battery). But if I add an electrical load, the amperage drops significantly. With the lights on the output voltage drops to 13.40, with the AC on it drops to 13.10, and with both together the battery voltage reads 12.43.

Before and after a road test with no accessories or lights running, the battery voltage, with the engine shut off, read 12.45 and 12.70 respectively.

I should mention that on the occasion when I discovered that the oil cap was gone, that wasn't the first thing I noticed on opening the hood. What I noticed first was a considerable amount of oil splashed around the engine bay, although the dipstick didn't read low. I've cleaned that up as much as I could, but is it possible that some oil got into the alternator? Would that cause it to malfunction, and is there a remedy? Will any oil present eventually drip out and everything return to normal? If not, is there a way I can clean out the alternator, or at least make it less oily?

It wouldn't totally surprise me if it turns out I need a new alternator, considering the car's age, though the odometer reading is well below average.

ETA: It's a 2000 Nissan Altima that has about 119K miles on it. I should have mentioned that. (Thanks u/HannsGruber.)

In olden times, "lite" and diet food products were prominently labeled as such. The main front label would proclaim it in bold lettering and you didn't have to study the package like a mathematical theorem to catch it.

Many legacy products do continue their decades-old practice of clearly differentiating low-calorie and regular products. Diet Coke comes in a silver can with red lettering, the opposite of Coke Classic. And the Miller Brewing Company has made "Lite" the actual product name of their reduced calorie product.

Otherwise, however, with many other products today I find that the words "low fat", "lite", "low calorie" are in such small fonts you don't notice it until after you get them home. For instance, I carelessly bought what I thought was regular Dreyer's ice cream (Edy's to you, if you're in the eastern U.S.). I didn't notice that it said "1/3 Less Fat" way over on the side of package, and below that "REDUCED FAT ICE CREAM", helpfully printed in white letters 1/5 of an inch high, on a light blue background. It sucks, because for me ice cream is an indulgence. I don't eat it very often, and when I do I'm not looking for something that's "healthy". I wish this sub allowed images so I could illustrate how far this has gone.

And if you do want the reduced fat version, making that qualification so hard to see doesn't help you either.

Why do manufacturers do this? Don't they want their end customers to be able to easily pick out the right product?

...So you can, you know, find a video of someone playing the piece, to help you learn how to play it.

I open the book to "Fantasia in A" by Francesco da Milano, but which Fantasia in A? I'm having difficulty getting this piece to jell under my fingers, and it would help to find an online video of someone playing it, or even an audio recording.

This composer's fantasias and recercare (a similar form to the fantasia) all have individual numbers that were presumably assigned retroactively by later musicologists, and the numbering is now standardized. Ricercar 16 and Fantasia 3 mean the same thing everywhere, but this music book doesn't tell you what the included fantasias are.

Incidentally, the publisher of this book should have titled this piece "Fantasia in A(nother) Key Entirely" (it turns out to be D). But that's another conversation.

[Note: This is mainly in regard to American native speakers, but I won't complain if anyone cares to add comments about native speakers in other countries

Also, where I mention class below, I'm referring not to current income and lifestyles, but to birth family and background.]

I just finished listening to John Updike's 1971 novel *Rabbit Redux*, and I was struck by the way Updike's mostly lower middle or working class characters seemed to speak better than native-speaker university graduates today. And this is in spite of the fact that not one of them has any education beyond high school. Except possibly for Skeeter, if memory serves you can search the entire *Rabbit* series and not find a single usage like "has ran" "has went", "I seen them things", "could have went", or even "could have saw", the latter of which now seems to be gaining currency¹.

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And it isn't just young people. I had a work colleague about my own age in the 2000s; we were in IT and he'd always say "it's been ran", referring to computer programs or jobs. I used to wonder how he got through college and still spoke that way. It wasn't necessarily because he majored in computer science and not English, if in fact he did; I never asked. But I knew quite a few STEM majors when I was in school, and I never heard "has ran" or "been ran" from them either, at least not with native speakers.

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A different explanation could be that there is no difference on how people speak now versus 50 years ago, and I'm not remembering things accurately.

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1. This was mentioned in a recent NYT piece by linguist and contributor John McWhorter.

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(I hope this is the right place to ask, if not; I apologize.)

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics' inflation calculator, a given amount of money in 1968 would be worth about ten times that much in today's dollars, so something that cost $20 then should cost about $200 now, disregarding other factors like the fact that some types of goods/services now cost much less or much more in real terms.

Yet, thinking back to that time, when I was ten years old, $20 didn't seem like a whole lot of money, while $200 today still does seem kind of like a lot. That's probably partly due to my age. ETA: To be clear, when I was ten years of age, ten bucks was about three times my weekly allowance, so it wasn't like I could spend it without thinking about it, but in terms of how I thought of "grownup money" at the time it seemed like a modest amount.

As a concrete example, at the time there was a heavily advertised Polaroid camera they called the Swinger, which was "only nineteen dollars, and ninety-five!" as the jingle told us. I think it was that year my parents gave me one for Christmas, and although I enjoyed owning and using the camera, I don't remember ever having asked or hinted for a camera of any kind. Today, giving a ten-year-old kid a $200 present seems extravagant, especially if the kid didn't ask for that particular item, but back then it was simply another present under the tree. My family wasn't poor but neither were we particularly rich.

Do you have any thoughts or memories in this regard?

I hate that products sometimes seem to come in containers designed not for convenience and efficiency, but presumably to make us buy more sooner. A container of seasoned salt may be mostly clear plastic, but down near the bottom the label goes all the way around so you can't tell when it's nearly empty, other than by estimating how heavy it is.

The worst examples are those deodorant sticks that become top-heavy as you use them up and also have rounded lids or caps so you can't store them upside down. When the product is nearly gone it'll topple over if a fly sneezes on it.

Maybe this is something that's fading by the wayside, because it's with a couple of my older devices that have this. These days I think they mostly just beep discreetly.

One is a Naxa Bluetooth speaker that we sometimes use to play quiet background music. Whenever we connect it to a phone, we get the following stentorian proclamation. You can hear it through walls and throughout this 2100 square foot house.

THE BLUETOOTH SPEAKER IS CONNECTED UP SUCCESSFULLY!

It makes no difference how we had the volume set previously.

I have a Method Wireless Skullcandy headset that I use once in awhile, usually because I forgot to recharge my newer headsets. This has the same issue, though it just says "BLUETOOTH CONNECTED!"

Does anyone else still run into this, and do you hate it as much as I do?