TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
As an aside, I only realized a few years ago that Yoda, in Japanese translation, has no distinctive way of speaking.
Mind blown.
TitaniumButterfly
19hr ago
Work hard to give God something to work with on your behalf.
Oh I like this one.
TitaniumButterfly
19hr ago
City is undoubtedly showing its age but it had a big effect on me.
TitaniumButterfly
19hr ago
Just as an anecdote, I do personally know a female former competitive gymnast who is now horribly sad because she's permanently infertile due to the physical stresses she was put through as a teen. Her husband's not in a great place with it either.
Definitely changed my perspective on encouraging my daughters to take up seriously-demanding physical activities.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
I always keep taxes pretty clean because paying a bit more is worth avoiding the stress of fearing an audit, but this did occur to me as well. Even so my expectation is that within the next few years the IRS gets a big upgrade through AI agents and I don't want those digging into my dodgy filed returns down the road.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Fun blast from the past. Haven't thought about that since I read it at the time. :)
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
I don't have the source handy but I definitely read a book which described human sacrifice on the Mississippi. Apparently when a chief of a certain tribe died all the babies under a year old were buried with him, as well as a lot of other people.
EDIT: Found it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692870660
Fascinating book and I've had several great conversations with the author.
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
Year and a half and it still feels like new. Really pleasant chair. Feels great, glides smoothly in all the places you'd want it to.
Looks like you can save $10 by getting the white version but I'd recommend against that. Keeping it pristine would be a nightmare. Or maybe that's less of a problem for you; I get regular visits in my home office from hordes of children with all kinds of crazy things smeared on their hands and faces.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XTSHLD4
I like this one a lot though it's $230.
Previously I was using a similar one for about $180 but it fell apart after about a year, so I got another one and that also fell apart after a year.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
This story irritated me because every part of it is at least one degree from anything which might be considered even slightly interesting, and yet I enjoyed it nonetheless. Unusual niche here.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
It occurs to me that I still don't know any trustworthy media organizations which cover matters in-depth enough to satisfy someone who wants to understand a situation.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
I'd settle for authentic taquerias catering to Mexicans! But no, to get lengua I have to go deeper into immigrant territory.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
There can be. I live in an affluent white area with a strong Hispanic presence, and all the Mexican food around here is terrible, which I've verified with lots of real live Mexicans. It's a mystery.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
I think it's "I'm not serious but would like to be and use the guise of irony while fishing for the truth."
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
They don’t get the prestige of doing a really tough job, because the women are there as well.
Outside of healthcare I'm not sure this is the case at all. If it is, it's a much smaller problem than 'tough jobs' being replaced by mechanization and automation.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
I think we are working from radically-different premises and should probably not share a government.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
The question is whether those things would 'infuriate anyone' and the answer is clearly not.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
Hopefully you can see why that would infuriate anyone, much less liberals
I wholeheartedly support every single bullet point you have here, and so do a whole lot of people in the US.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
Macedonia, surely.
The problem is that English today isn't the same as "English" circa AD 1000, so it's not clear to me why there would be a long lasting coherent selection pressure.
Selection doesn't require a thousand years. It happens in each generation. And particularly with industrialism and a shift to an information economy, it's going hard. Besides which, English and Chinese are a lot more like their thousand year old selves than they are like each other. So, sure, call the matter directional.
In fact, English today is a result of changes made to the language by its speakers over the past thousand years, so it's really not clear which way causality even runs.
Statements like this freak me out. Of course it's both! You might like this: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0610848104
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
I'm in the "economy is coming down either way" camp and when I expected Harris to win my thought was that at least she'll take the blame, but here we are.
Re: Trump's direction, it's complicated. On the one hand it's amazing to see what it looks like for an administration to go all-out. On the other hand so much is happening so fast that it's dizzying in a way that's closer to scary than fun. Have they made a ton of missteps? You bet. I'm chalking that up to cost of actually doing something.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
I'm on a server with him so pinged him for you, but in general yeah I think the guy is just incredibly busy and tbh I'm amazed and a bit humbled at how much love he still has to keep this site afloat.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
Inasmuch as 'being good with a given language' is under selection pressure, populations will evolve to be better at that language.
Check this out. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00229-7
To summarize, this study revealed the genetic basis of Chinese and English abilities in a group of Chinese bilingual children.
There's more research on this sort of thing but it's difficult to find and often gets disappeared.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
Something I have no idea how to gauge is whether the layoffs will themselves have a substantial economic effect. Seeing all those houses for sale around DC was kind of shocking but perhaps only matters locally.
Yes, that's good too. Thanks.
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