squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on MFW I wake up to find Lemmy feeds full of USA stuff 5 days ago:
I’d be fine with “no US politics”. It’s so annoying that !politcs@lemmy.world is specifically and only about US politics. Because apparently, US politics are the only politics relevant for the world.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
Yeah, that’s totally true. If you speak Serbian and you move to the Netherlands, nobody would (or could) switch to Serbian for you.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
That’s why I said, everyone needs (or has incentive to) learn the global lingua franca, the regional lingua franca, the language of the country they live in and their mother tongue.
As someone from the UK living in the Netherlands, these four languages are English, English, Dutch and English, so you’ll likely learn (at least to some degree) two languages.
If you are from the UK and stay in the UK, all four languages are English and thus you likely won’t have a need to ever get to fluency in a second language.
(Of course, there are some special circumstances, e.g. if you are from the UK and live in the UK but work as a French teacher, you do have a need to know French, but I’m talking about the general case.)
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.
Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.
Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.
Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.
Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.
If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.
If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
I can speak English quite well.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 days ago:
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
- Comment on Give me some good ones 1 week ago:
I don’t have one in English, but I have some in German for those who understand.
My Granddad had a female coworker that was higher in rank than him. He would always greet her with “Meine Allerwerteste”. It’s a word play because “Meine Werteste” is equivalent to a very formal version of “my dear”. “Aller” is a superlative form, so basically “My very dearest”. But “Mein Allerwertester” (so the male form of what he used) means “my ass”.
The other one is to use terminology like “Er versucht immer sein Bestes zu geben” (“He always tries to give his best”). In Austria, you are legally allowed to ask for a work testimony from your employer when you are looking for a new job. There is some legislation that prohibits negative speech in these work testimonies so that your employer cannot make you look bad in front of your potential new employer (which makes the whole concept pretty useless, but it is what it is). So to get around that, employers adopted a kind of “secret” code where e.g. “tries to” means “fails to”. So you can use the same kind of terminology to deliver something that sounds like a compliment, but for everyone in the know (which is most people by now) it’s clear that you deeply offended the person you are talking about.
- Comment on Clues by Sam 1 week ago:
I was stuck at the same one.
First take Peter’s hint. It says that one of Sofia and Wanda is innocent, one is criminal. That means in Column B we know there are two innocents, two criminals and Bruce.
Now take Gabe’s hint: there cannot be three criminals in Column B.
If Bruce were criminal, there would be three criminals in Column B, so Bruce cannot be criminal.
- Comment on Clues by Sam 1 week ago:
I was stuck on the same one.
Take Peter’s hint: It says that either Sofia or Wanda are criminals, so there’s exactly 2 confirmed criminals, 2 confirmed innocents and Bruce on Column B.
Now take Gabe’s hint: There cannot be 3 criminals on Column B, so Bruce needs to be innocent.
- Comment on World's Video Game Companies 2 weeks ago:
According to this source Microsoft has $23B revenue for gaming only.
- Comment on World's Video Game Companies 2 weeks ago:
Also, I’m not sure if they really fit the bill, since probably most of their revenue comes from providing infrastructure, not games.
- Comment on How Are You Guys Handling This? 2 weeks ago:
If you are buying new, $575 isn’t going to get you a lot.
But if you buy used and don’t mind lurking on second-hand platforms for a while to find a good deal, you should be able to get something decent for that amount.
- Comment on The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020 2 weeks ago:
People look the other way with literally everything.
They happily shop at Amazon, even though they are the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
They play Minecraft even though it’s been developed by a white supremacist.
They use Windows even though Microsoft is complicit in a list of all sorts of horrible things too long to list here.
They use Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta VR even though this corporation has done more for the errosion of democracy than any other entity so far.
They buy Nestle, even though it’s going so far as to cut off local populations from their water supplies.
The list continues on and on. Name a single corporation where people en large have done a real, long-term boycott for moral reasons. The only thing I can think of that kinda happened was when Tesla sales fell a little bit for a few months after Musk did a literal Hitler Salute on the largest stage he could find, but even that wasn’t a lot and it’s pretty much over already.
People, by and large, don’t prioritize morals over comfort. They will always choose the best deal they can get, no matter what the long-term or moral effects are. People who put morals over comfort exist, but they are very rare.
And in most cases, people who shout for boycotts the loudest were never customers to begin with (e.g. me, who has never bought a Tesla, saying I will never buy a Tesla because of Musk. Well, I wouldn’t have bought a Tesla anyway).
- Comment on The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020 2 weeks ago:
I guess you don’t care about a lot of the other categories either.
- Rank 1, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16 are developed/published by a patent troll that stifles the whole games industry with frivolous patent suits and milks their audience dry while investing hardly anything into their games.
- Rank 5 and 6 are published by a corporation widely known for their leadership being extremely misogynistic and exploitative.
- Rank 17 is published by a corporation that’s known for being extremely exploitative.
Btw, most of the corporations on the list donated to Trump, spy at their customers, use anti-competitive tactics, overwork and exploit their developers, employ psychologists to squeeze as much money out of vulnerable customers (e.g. those with psychological issues) and so on and so on.
And you apparently don’t care about any of that. The only thing you care about is that a game that actually includes a trans character is based upon a 20-30yo book series that contains no anti-trans content, but was written by an author who later went on to post some anti-trans garbage years after the series was done and dusted.
- Comment on The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020 2 weeks ago:
If you ranked by budget, none of them would be on the list either. Monopoly Go would just take up rank 1-20.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot shuts down after reproducing the gesture of its human operator removing their headset 5 weeks ago:
What’s being sold is the illusion that the robots are completely autonomous based on AI or something.
Buy it now, get the full AI self-walking update in
twothreesevenfifteensome years.It worked for Tesla cars, so why should the same strategy not work on the same idiots with robots?
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, that sounds seriosly painful.
- Comment on Popcorn Ceiling Removal 5 weeks ago:
Ceiling dust. Don’t breathe this.
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 5 weeks ago:
It’s not about condemming him.
What he did was basically kick off the whole genre of research. And for that he is still credited and well-known.
But it seems you missed the context of this thread. It started with someone sarcastically joking that cocaine is “famously good for your health”, to which someone sarcastically mock-backed the claim by referencing that Freud did back cocaine.
There’s no need or point in defending this very debunked claim.
Btw, Freud recommended cocaine as a medication against alcoholism. He administered cocaine to an alcoholic friend of his, and it did nothing against his alcoholism. In fact, the friend died soon after off a combined alcohol-cocaine overdose. This did not stop Freud from claiming that cocaine is great. He even got his girlfriend hooked on it.
Freud did start the whole field of research, but his own research has been debunked a very long time ago. There’s basically nothing of his research left that still counts as “state of the art”, but sadly many uneducated people still repeat his nonsense.
It’s kinda like believing that Carl Benz’ earliest car patents still have any relevance in modern car design. We credit Carl Benz for kickstarting the research in combustion engine cars, but nobody would be stupid enough to think that early research in that field has any relevance to today’s practice.
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 5 weeks ago:
Actually, masturbation as treatment for “hysterical paroxyism” had its peak during victorian times.
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 5 weeks ago:
That is true, but that still doesn’t make any of his advice correct.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Trust a random studio with some long-dead IP in the hopes of making a little cash? Not so crazy imho. Nothing to lose.
- Comment on This, a pen, and coffee 5 weeks ago:
Nostalgia is a hard drug. I replayed Pokemon Red easily 10 times over the years. I tried Pokemon Gold (an objectively much better game) probably about the same amount of times, but I could never get through it, because I didn’t play as a kid and thus have no nostalgia for it.
I have more nostalgia for Keitai Denjū Telefang, which I played in bootlegged form mis-labelled as Pokemon Diamond (that was before the real Pokemon Diamond was released), and even though this bootleg is horrible in quality, it’s easier for me to play than Pokemon Gold.
- Comment on Insulin 1 month ago:
You haven’t provided a single source that backs up your claim. I will continue to talk with you once you did.
- Comment on Insulin 1 month ago:
You haven’t provided any sources at all, you just ignored anything I said. So go, your turn. Post a source that says that transferring the patent to the university in 1923 was the wrong decision.
If you know better than the lawyers they consulted back then, prove it. Back it up with something more than just made-up hot air.
- Comment on Insulin 1 month ago:
I did not run out of arguments, I posted a contemporary source that said everything I talked about all along.
- Comment on Insulin 1 month ago:
Tbh, I am surprised that you seem to know the exact legal situation in regards to patent law in Canada of 1923, and that you have such a strong opinion on that matter.
I would recommend you to read the corresponding Wikipedia secton where all the thinking that went into that decision is laid out quite well.
I would venture to say that legal experts of the time at the time understood the patent law of the time a little better than some random users on Lemmy.
- Comment on Anon asks out a girl 1 month ago:
In what world is it not creepy to butt into some strangers’ personal conversation after overhearing details that were clearly not addressed to you?
Have you ever been in a social situation before?
- Comment on Insulin 1 month ago:
Of course, but an university owning a patent gives them the responsibility to defend it, and also incentivizes them to do so.
- Comment on Insulin 1 month ago:
That logic applies identically to a valid patent.
The difference is that in the case of transferring the patent to the university, there’s a legal department at the ready to defend the patent. The same is not the case for a disclaimed patent.