BillyClark
@BillyClark@piefed.social
- Comment on Missing Letter 1 day ago:
From the picture, we can tell that even if they knew their letters, they still didn’t know how to spell “birthday” in any case.
- Comment on The new Voyager game was pretty bad. 2 days ago:
Sounds like the Voyager game is worse than the Voyager show.
- Comment on Stubborn, maybe, but if it ain't broke 3 days ago:
My impression is that carnivores need teeth that pierce and rip, so they can’t do much ruminating.
- Comment on Under the most ideal circumstances, how 'clean' is drinkable tap water by the time it reaches our taps? 3 days ago:
Also, whatever few microorganisms there are won’t generally do very well because there’s not much for them to consume.
But there are some, which is why you should always use distilled water instead of tap water when it’s important to avoid microorganisms such as with nasal irrigation.
- Comment on Fat labrador topilogy 5 days ago:
I think a dog’s nose has two separate nostrils that connect somewhere along the way on the inside. That’s not a sphere. It’s a torus.
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 6 days ago:
They’re still scamming the shit out of businesses with their corporate software. Oh and they have Azure which I’m guessing makes money.
- Comment on Nomenclature 1 week ago:
That would surprise me, also. But it takes all kinds. Maybe the average ornithologist tends to think that birds are “cute”, while the average herpetologist tends to think that reptiles are “cool”? I’m sure that whatever the group as a whole tends to think, there will be many counterexamples.
I was just thinking about chess, and how one of the most famous chess players, Hikaru Nakamura often refers to chess pieces as “juicers”, for whatever reason… maybe the shape? Lots of people have nicknames for different pieces, like “ops” for “bishops”, etcetera. But then there are some who take themselves entirely seriously, and never joke around.
- Comment on As ICE Buys Up Warehouses, Even Some Trump Voters Say No 1 week ago:
If your biggest complaint is that children might see the evil things that you support… I mean, to me, that even suggests that you fully comprehend the bad things you’re doing.
- Comment on As ICE Buys Up Warehouses, Even Some Trump Voters Say No 1 week ago:
Ms. Bradley, the co-owner of Woodlands Elite Cheer, said she worried that a detainee could escape, or that protests could break out. The children who train at her gym are as young as 3 and could see “people in shackles” next door, she said.
So this article is about NIMBY people.
- Comment on Is there a culture/country that doesn't have sarcasm in its language? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve done a little bit of language studying and one thing I heard about repeatedly is that people tend to mistakenly believe in their own exceptionalism.
Like, their own native language has idioms, and they just assumed that other languages didn’t have idioms.
But we are all humans and languages are all going to exist in support of human communication. Therefore, you should assume that all languages have all major features of expression, including idioms and sarcasm.
Similarly, cultures are made from humans and to facilitate human interaction, so you should expect that things like sarcasm will exist in every culture.
- Comment on No way!.. 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know about Islamic texts, but the Bible doesn’t really say much about hell. If you want to learn about hell, you have to go to preachers. Fire and brimstone is their bread and butter. The more they talk about hell, the more money they make.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 weeks ago:
maybe the ppl think repeating this discussion again is boring and they dislike it.
See? You don’t honestly believe that’s the reason for the previous comment being downvoted. The person I responded to was arguing the other side of that argument. If people were simply tired of the boring discussion, they’d have downvoted the parent, as well. You can use that same service I linked in the previous comment to see exactly how many people voted like that. This is what I’m talking about coming to the discussion in an honest manner.
btw mastodon and bluesky don’t have downvotes. i think ppl who are here instead on those, decided this way is better. i for one left mastodon in favor of lemmy.
I originally came from Reddit and never saw any appeal in Twitter or Twitter clones whenever I tried them out. Regardless, I don’t think the argument makes sense. Either it’s a good idea or it’s not. If it’s a good idea, then there is no reason why it shouldn’t be used on both platforms.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 weeks ago:
I do think downvotes are universally a terrible idea, but for the part about reposting from xitter, which is the only point you made with any small merit, that is only relevant to post downvotes.
If they got rid of comment downvotes and left the post downvotes, you’d still have enough data to sort. People could still vote for comments strategically.
Comment downvotes are a clear case. If you’re making a valid argument, and talking about the topic, then the only people who would downvote you are raging assholes. Here’s the list of people who voted for my previous comment. As you can see, it’s got the full public list of downvoters. Strange. One of those usernames looks familiar. One might look at that and come to the conclusion that certain people here are not coming to this discussion in an honest manner.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 weeks ago:
The mods were on .world. The accounts were from several different instances.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 weeks ago:
Do you know what else helps with sorting? Upvotes.
Do you know what else helps with hiding spam? Reports.
If you have upvotes and you have reports, then you already have all of the information you need as a platform. Downvotes are unnecessary.
Plus, speaking of sorting, accounts that use downvotes get double the votes for sorting than accounts do that only use upvotes. Yet, the types of people who downvote a lot are…. well, they’re the assholes. So, you give assholes more control over the platform than good people by having downvotes.
So, downvotes are unnecessary and they give extra power to assholes, making the entire user experience worse.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 weeks ago:
I complained about this downvoting behavior in the past (on a different account), pointing out specific accounts, and the admins and mods don’t care. They told me not to complain, instead.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
This is counterintuitive to me, because 303/2800 is .108, which is between 1/9 and 1/10. But 97 out of 400 is less than 1 out of 4, so it shouldn’t be able to interfere more than twice in a 7 year cycle, on average. But your math looks correct. I must be missing something.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure I’ve smelled a dead fly before, but not like Lee Mack.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
That can’t be correct, can it?
They would have a rotating 7 year schedule, but it’s messed up by leap years. You have the seven calendars you’re thinking of and 1-2 leap year calendars mixed into those 7 years. It would have to be somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 9, wouldn’t it?
- Comment on Silver linings? 3 weeks ago:
One of the things that’s generally effective when I feel nausea is to wipe my face with a cool cloth. I imagine that spraying water on your face might do similar.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I must not be that old because the docs always tell me to alternate heat packs and ice packs.
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 3 weeks ago:
Although I speak some Japanese, I am not an expert in Japanese. I have never heard anybody say nii-kun. It’s a common failing of people in my situation to think that because they personally haven’t heard it, that it doesn’t exist, so I’m not going to say that, but even if it does exist, I don’t think -kun would be used.
“-kun” like you said indicates closeness and familiarity, but it also is commonly used for a business subordinate. Like, if you were at work, your boss might refer to you as “pivot-kun”, even if you weren’t that close. I don’t think Big Brother could ever be seen as a subordinate.
With my limited knowledge, if they wanted to use a Japanese word and not an English loanword, I think they’d use aniki or maybe ani-ue (although I’ve only heard these words in anime, I think people might actually still use aniki? It sounds like a Yakuza sort of word to me). These convey a respect that I think would be necessary for the mental image of Big Brother.
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 3 weeks ago:
The primary reason that I’d put forward is that Japanese people place a lot of importance on social hierarchy, to the point that even between twins, it’s important to know which is the older sibling. Because it’s used in everyday conversation and in referring to one another (although not quite as much with twins, I just brought that up for emphasis).
The point is that the Japanese version of these words are used a lot more and have a lot of extra meaning compared to the English phrase “Big Brother”. So, it’s actually a worse fit. Japanese people use enough English loanwords that they probably understand the English phrase, anyways. So, the meaning gets through without the extra unintended baggage from the translation.
It’s one of the many pitfalls of translation. Often, there are words that mean “the same thing”, but they still aren’t the right words because either the extra connotations in the original language or the extra connotations in the target language can throw off the translation.
I think the Japanese translation is fortunate that, in this case, the Japanese language already has so many English loanwords… although I’m not sure whether that was exactly the same case when the book was first translated. It was published in 1948, I think. My recollection is that the English loanword boom started after WW2, so that would be somewhat contemporary.
- Comment on Taste the flavor 3 weeks ago:
On second thought, maybe I don’t want tastebuds just inside my asshole.
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 3 weeks ago:
“-chan” is a diminutive suffix that indicates affection when used. These two factors mean it would never be used in the context of Big Brother.
Even with little knowledge, you should at least come up with alternatives like nii-san, onii-san, onii, nii-sama, etc. Those still wouldn’t work well. I’d think that a lot of people would also think of aniki, which is getting closer. But it’s definitely the best option to just to what they actually did and just use the English “big brother” like a loan word.
- Comment on Top of the world, ma 3 weeks ago:
There are a lot of vegans and vegetarians who don’t make it their raison d’etre, so I’m sure there have been some who climbed Everest in the past, even if we don’t know about it.
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 3 weeks ago:
Japan is a shoes-off country, but they often have slippers that they wear indoors. They just change their shoes like Mr. Rogers, but with less singing.
- Comment on 50ohm goes brrrrrr 3 weeks ago:
They can’t wait anyways because they do not experience the passage of time.
- Comment on Nope, not visiting that 4 weeks ago:
lame-ass party
Since the time traveler would be from the future, he’d have already known that nobody went to the party.
- Comment on Do it for your country's debt! 4 weeks ago:
If the government has more income, that just means they have more money to give to corporations and wealthy people.