FriendOfDeSoto

Everybody draws their own vague red lines in the sand. There is no universal law. If you like it and it doesn’t feel icky, go ahead and like it. If it feels icky, don’t. Or make sure they get no money out of your enjoyment.

Flip a coin or start both on Duolingo and see which one interests you more. This is only a hard decision in your head. If you’re not planning to move to somewhere where they speak either, this is just a hobby.

They are both romance languages so you’ll find mental handholds in either language that can help you with the other. Similar conjugations, spellings, irregularities, etc.

The French you’ll learn with internet resources or most text books will most likely be French French. As a learner, that will probably still make understanding the Quebecers an extremely hard task. It’s like somebody from a Louisiana bayou talking to a Scottish highlander. On paper, they are both able to speak English but there are accents and differences in vocabulary that increase the level of difficulty, even for native speakers.

No one here can tell you for sure what’s wrong with your cable. So no one can answer if it will be good or bad over time. Slow (normal) charging is better for your battery than fast charging. A wobbly wire might stop and restart the charging process, which might be detrimental to the battery over time.

But it could also be that your port is so clogged up with pocket lint that the contact in your phone is affected and that’s why fast charging no longer works. Something could be broken in the brick you use and that’s why it won’t work any more. It could be that the cable was bent so many times it’s broken. It’s probably that.

You could try to narrow down where the error lies. If you use a friend’s cable does the same thing happen? Friend’s fine-working cable in your power brick? If you got a phone repair kiosk in your neighborhood, maybe ask them if they could clean your port. If they’re friendly, they can probably help you narrow down this problem also.

If your approach at dating hasn’t materialized in anything, perhaps it is time to change your approach. For me, the best things happened when I wasn’t trying at all. Be social, be courteous, be nice - and as the owner of a penis: non-threatening.

You have self identified a problem of anxiety. If your next step is to criticize all “females” as being difficult in terms of dating, you’re missing a beat here and making a bad word choice. The problem may be more of a you-problem than a them-problem. Also, no matter the primary sexual organ situation, people can pick up on both an air of entitlement or the scent of desperation.

Also, all cicadas shout for sex but not every cicada gets laid.

If there is no checking in place, like an airport security check and/or check for devices emitting radio waves. Also, the producers know where the candidates are at, don’t they? If they spot regular drone flights in the area, I think the game will be up as well.

There is no accounting for taste.

They are the epitome of the adage that their earlier stuff was better. For me, they jumped the shark when Roman Catholic bells were ringing.

What’s wrong with these people? The rabbi had time to sink to the floor, the priest is clearly passed out on the floor, why is the pastor still walking into the bar? Are they all blind and deaf?

The deeper message must be that just out of shot an imam and a Buddhist monk are looking at each other puzzled exchanging remarks like “They really cannot learn from each other, can they.”

(I do get the bar joke, internet. No need to well actually me. This was very much tongue in cheek.)

Maybe 10 years ago I tried designing a font in Inkscape. It was possible but more of a gimmick. I then installed Fontforge and very quickly decided I wasn’t going to learn how to use it, didn’t have the bandwidth. But the tools are there. Both methods have a learning curve but I think have enough instruction resources online.

Das war Englisch.

No.

The rise of progressivism has nothing to do with corporations decorating themselves with the relevant messages where it suits them. That’s just marketing. You see that in companies who championed the marginalized during the previous administration and dropped it near instantly when 47 came in. That’s corporate opportunism.

We have seen the rise of representative democracy, of fascism, the rise of communism in the past. I don’t think we have seen anything that deserves a similar label with regard to progressivism. There is a general sine curve thru the ages of left-leaning and right-leaning politics. And thru the swings from one side to another we have still abolished slavery, enfranchised women, built social security nets, decriminalized abortion (or at least permitted it in some cases) and same sex relationships, etc. A lot of it was built on political movements but I dare say none that rose to the top and stayed there. So a rise of progressivism is as non-sensical to me as a rise of conservatism. They are just opposite ends on the political scale and we dance from one side to the other and back again.

It’s difficult 2 transpose what u can do in English just 2 other languages written in the Latin alphabet for centuries. English has a remarkable and quite confusing amount of homophones that is absent from other indoeuropean languages. The apostrophe as a letter skipped marker is fairly universal. But beyond that it’s already a different ball game in other more similar languages. 2 to too, 4 for, r u - that’s very English only.

Simplified Chinese characters are a hint at what they did on the Chinese mainland to cut down on writing time. Beyond that (and I don’t speak the language so 🧂) there are single character abbreviations for countries. 美国 is America and 美 suffices as shorthand, which means beauty otherwise. Your example phrase is “R u coming 2nite?” In English we use the present progressive tense here, which doesn’t exist like that in Mandarin. It would be phrased as “Come tonight?” The question mark could be replaced with the character that functions as a question marker by itself. And I think you can do this in 3-4 characters and I think they might just beat you to it in a bilingual texting competition in terms of speed.

The mainland population may also be more adept to obfuscate their speech especially online. So similarly pronounced character combinations take over the meaning of a term the censors are actively looking for.

The Japanese like shortening stuff, mostly loanwords, to unrecognizable words. The word for part time work is アルバイト (arubaito) taken from the German for work (Arbeit). Cool kids have whittled it down to baito. A remote control has become a リモコン (rimokon) in normal parlance. Overly long Chinese character combos like 自動販売機 for a vending machine get shortened to 自販機 dropping characters that can be inferred (if you speak it).

I also want to add that text speak is heavily influenced by restrictions on text length and charges for each text. Non Latin script characters take up more than one Latin character per Chinese character for instance. It’s probably 5+ in decoding per character. So you reach 160 letters quite quickly and that’s why SMS in China was very cheap and quickly adopted a system where message threads would be sent and put back together on the recipient’s phone. In Japan they used email from the start, even in dumb phone T9 texting days. They had no Twitter-like restrictions on text length so they didn’t need to be shorter than what their thumbs could successfully fumble together.

I think what you’re not picking up on is the whole Ms. Moos vibe on CNN. She is basically satire. She always jumps on the most outrageous stories and narrates them in that annoying pseudo journalistic voice and has done for decades. The stories may be actually true but you should never assume that they are. They are a knock knock joke for people who watch 24h news channels.

I don’t know anything about this case more than having watched the CNN video. Mr. Fir-lung and his doctor needn’t be actors. He could’ve really had it in his lung but played up the “haha, maybe I breathed in a seed” line because it got him attention on TV and paid interviews. And he doesn’t mention how he was in a landslide being chased by a bear 5 years ago and that’s when he accidentally inhaled the debris. The doctor may just have mentioned in a subordinate clause that it looked as if the sprig was growing in the lung but never actually claimed it did. Or he also believes in homeopathy. Or he also got paid for the interview. There are a thousand explanations why we get presented the story like that. But the biggest red flag remains that Jeanne Moos was reporting on it.

Are you getting inundated with JFK was anti Israel posits and hot takes? Because I sure aren’t.

If illegal immigrants were possible to be identified easily by the IRS, ICE would have taken them over already.

The problem is two-fold. A lot of the immigrants who fall into this “illegal” category are not on the books, they get a brown envelope, and pay little to no taxes at all. And the more “sophisticated” ones look just like your average American. So if you taxed them more, you’d be affecting a lot of the “legal” population as well.

Also, the American economy is full of jobs that no “non-deportable” would like to do. Agricultural jobs come to mind. The current regime’s idea of eradicating all illegal immigrants runs contrary to a lot of economic interests (and I read that they’ve done a lot less deporting on the farms recently. Curious …) Even if you could just tax them more, you’d still mess with those interests as well.

And while I’m not a tax lawyer, I’m gonna go out in a limb here and say it’s not going to be easy to make a tax law like that that isn’t going to be heavily scrutinized in the courts because it is unabashedly discriminatory.

Gaslighting

Art is a message. It has a sender and a receiver. The sender aka the creator has an idea and their synapses create the piece of art. The receiver - even when privy to the thoughts of the creator because they talked or wrote about it etc. - consumes it and has a response. It could be along the lines the creator had intended but it doesn’t have to be. Both sides could be equally happy with their side of it while thinking completely different things.

So an artist can try to attach a certain meaning to their artwork but it is no guarantee the audience will see it that way. Is the person in Munch’s The Scream screaming themselves or holding their ears to block out screaming they hear? I read what the artist intended and I can tell you I thought the other thing.

So far I’ve been talking about a single artist and a single consumer. That’s not how this works. There could be a group who have differing ideas about the art they’re creating, like a song. So it means different things to different people on the sender side already.

It gets really messy on the receiver side because ideally the art will be consumed by hundreds and thousands of people. In that group you will have opinion leaders tastemakers and they in turn will influence other recipients. History also filters artworks. I don’t think Leo thought his postage stamp size portrait of a smirking Italian merchant’s wife would be the most famous painting in the world if experts hadn’t endorsed it, it hadn’t forcefully changed owners, hung in Napoleon’s apartment, was stolen and recovered. So there are biases built in and it isn’t as clean cut as saying everybody interprets it their own way in most circumstances.

“They say those who can’t play coach. It seems those who can’t coach stand ten rows back shirtless shouting obscenities.”

You are making it seem like this is a new problem. And it isn’t.

Centuries back it was weavers who were displaced by the industrial revolution and automated spinning machines. Coal mining went unfashionable from the late 1970s onwards and miners had to find new work. Industry in the US closed up shop and moved to China. These are just three examples of workers being made redundant in their then capacity. Two out of these three went by without much loss of life, the majority of the workforce found new jobs over time, and only some of them were screwed on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately, that’s the shitty bell curve of these changes. But another thing that’s been proven again over time is that we always think these miners or these factory workers are completely unhireable and it turns out the majority isn’t. People thought MS Excel would eradicate the entire bookkeeping profession. And they are still around and I think actually grew in numbers because they are free from pencils and calculators and could do more interesting stuff instead. Don’t fall for the so-called AI will replace everything talking point. The people who say this are either invested in so-called AI companies or drank the koolaid. All we hear for the moment is how theses models do a good a lot of the time and then break catastrophically bad somewhere. Humans still need to have a look for the time being. And thus a new job is born: chAIperone.

The problem these days is how the state responds to massive shifts like that. Social security nets have a finer mesh in the developed world outside the US. It’s much easier to go from no job to living in a car to living under a bridge in the US. A lot of people in this thread call for UBI, which is sensible but isn’t even likely in the more socialist Europe. UBI is a good answer though. Education is another one, e.g. free training programs or college classes for long term unemployed. None of that seems likely under 47.