Ioper
19d ago
I think you have that backwards. International students are subsidising native students. For cost to come down other things need to happen. University services, wages and administrative bloat needs to be reduced.
One might still believe you have little to gain from them and that they might be bad in some other way (culturally or a security threat).
The characters are interesting enough, although I found most of them to be two dimensional rather than three dimensional, although this may change in the later books.
It does not, Sanderson is not good at writing characters and this is an issue that becomes worse as the series goes on due its length and what he tries to explore with the characters. The characters are flat and the more you're exposed to them the more obvious it becomes.
Friends have told me his writing improves over time, which bodes well for my future reading experience,
This was true until about the Way of Kings but I would say that he peaked there and even started to decline a few books after, possibly due to his insane schedule.
Ioper
22d ago
For literary vocabulary i could see that this might be an issue but isn't most technical vocabulary imported words from English and German?
Ioper
23d ago
Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation
I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent. Many of the more famous examples are clearly distinguishable, to the extent that I feel like "homophones" is a misnomer. Regardless, I don't think need tones for disambiguation and nor am I aware of that they ever had tones, unlike the more mixed situation in Korea.
Ioper
24d ago
Plenty people are and its trivially easy find information about this online.
For instance, in 2016 there were 306 persons in France alone that were convicted of apologia for terrorism and 232 of those were sentenced to jail.
Ioper
24d ago
He has claimed previously that grammar isn't really a thing in Chinese.
Do not trust this man.
Ioper
24d ago
That is more of an artifact of how logographs work than evidence of that the languages are the same or even meaningfully related.
The characters are pronounced differently in the different languages and and used very differently grammatically.
You could write English nouns with Chinese characters, that doesn't make English Chinese.
Is your coworker perhaps a Han supremacist?
I'd argue that Korean and Chinese are more separate languages than Italian and French.
Chinese is a tonal language and Korean is not, and they have different writing systems.
Italian and French have nothing that divides them to this extent, either in spoken or written language.
As for Chinese and Cantonese I have no idea, I'm not terribly familiar with them even if I've studied some Mandarin. My general rule though is that languages are separate if they aren't mutually intelligible.
I genuinely don't understand why your coworker put spoken Korean and spoken Chinese in the same bubble, they're mutually unintelligible and come from different language families, even if they used the same writing system for a long period. This on its own makes the rest of your coworkers claims suspect to me.
Take the Nordic languages: Swedish and Norwegian are clearly the same language as they are easily mutually intelligble both in written and spoken form. With Danish it's a bit murkier but seeing as the written form is clearly mutually intelligble with both Norwegian and Swedish, as well as large amounts of the local dialects, even if it can be a bit difficult, I would still put it as being the same language but at the outer edge.
Icelandic on the other hand is its own language seeing as both written but especially spoken Icelandic is not really mutually intelligble with the other Nordic languages.
Broadening things to the Germanic languages it's easy to see that German is separate from the Nordic languages. It uses mostly different words and even has different grammatical structure, it's clearly a separate language even if there are overlaps and a common history.
Ioper
24d ago
Yes they can. There are just valid and non valid causes for firing. Going to jail for glorifying terrorism is one such valid reason.
Things could of course change but he has said that he planned for 6-7 volumes (and has repeated that recently) and he just finished the 6th.
Ioper
25d ago
In addition to what you said I find monotonous physical activities relaxing, like hand-mowing the lawn or chopping wood. The activity itself makes me mentally unwind and the physical excertion makes be relax physically afterwards.
Also Sauna.
Ioper
26d ago
It also isn't completed. Although it is closing in on the end and I don't really think it matters much.
The first novel is pretty much self contained and arguably even works better as a standalone, so it doesn't have to be a big commitment to read it.
Nice animation though.
I bounced off it because i thought it was poorly directed, even though parts of it were well animated.
Would you recommend powering through or just reading the novel?
Ioper
26d ago
It's a million small things. Everyday values, behaviours, interests, language used, food eaten, what is high/low status etc. It's in every aspect of their lives, just like my culture is in every aspect of my life.
It is hard to sum up because it's all pervasive and at the same time not that big of a difference. The middle class and the upper middle class are not worlds apart after all.
A lot of it comes down to being less confrontational and more dignified. Also, they spend more time and effort on social signaling and maintaining a social network, outside of closer friends.
Ioper
27d ago
Culturally middle class, economically upper middle class.
My wife is solidly, multigenerationally, UMC and I can feel the difference.
My take is that its the fragmented regulatory, consumer and financial markets that are the biggest problems here. It's not that there is a ton of regulation its that there are 20+ versions of the onerous regulations.
It's too difficult to scale a business in europe because despite efforts and the goal of the EU it is in no way a single market. When you want to scale your business rather than just export consumer products this becomes a massive issue, which is why every notable new company in europe usually starts in their own country (and perhaps very similar neighbours) and then rather than expanding into Europe they launch in America and eventually list themselves there, and only then start expanding into the rest of Europe.
Ioper
27d ago
And the equivalent to the pixel 9a in 2013 was the nexus 5 that cost 350$.
I can not get a phone that works similarly well today for 350$, regardless of what the system specs say, the software requirements for the same programs with the same functions are higher for no goddamn reason.
I mean "killing" them by eating the talent. They didn't disappear, the quality is just shockingly low.
Ioper
27d ago
Also, is the American Music industry that disproportionately successful? Especially compared to Britain. For something like movies America clearly is dominant but for music it doesn't feel as clear to me.
Perhaps things have become lopsided since I greatly cut down on listening to new music some time in the early 10s.
Inversely, it feels like the "tech industry" is eating American software and other areas of the economy are often left in sort of a software desert. We come in as Europeans and think we have garbage solution and surely noone in America could ever want our garbage, only to discover that it's somehow, unfathomably, even worse in the US.
Obviously the tech industry is fabulously financially successful but sometimes I wonder if it would be better if it was a bit less profitable so American software talent could be spread a bit more evenly throughout the economy.
The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.
If you're talking about compute specifically then that is true in a sense but cheaper computers aren't really available and it's not really an option to buy them from a user perspective anyway because hardware requirements rise just in line with hardware improvements. I was fine with 2013s smartphones and I'm using them identically today, but those aren't available anymore and even if they were they'd probably not be usable anyway.
Ioper
30d ago
I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really
Yes, you are.
Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...
And yet you fail to see the even greater dysfunction in the places you visit. You're just richer there man. Your analysis of the places you visit is just plain wrong, egregiously so.
What conclusions can we draw from your post? It's nice to be rich and the housing market is fucked.
Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.
SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.
Clearly they're doing something quite a bit better than the nations you profess are clearly superior. It's fine to say that you prefer Thai food to Japanese food, I certainly do, but I don't really believe it's healthier. For instance, it might not be immediately obvious but thai cooking uses a lot for sugar.
You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.
Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional. That tells us very little about the productivity of society in general, just that it extracts money from young people and gives it to old people. It might even be that having a dysfunctional housing market makes the economy more productive because it forces young people to work more. If a house cost 300k rather than 1.5m then people with decent salaries might very well choose to work less.
You also have to realise that this situation is even worse in Thailand, with housing affordability and household debt a far higher than in the US.
It's the first book.
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