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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • As an aside, idealistic free market is impossible to achieve without regulation. At the very least, contracts need to be enforced. Free market also demands price forming to happen through bids on the market, needing protection from extra-market negotiations. As an elastic system, it can also be broken by a concerted application of force and needs protection from such actions.

    Whatever is being sold as free market sounds like a myth at best.

    PS: Coop corporations should really become the norm. Trickle up systems create concentrations of power by design, and concentration of power is how you stretch elastic system beyond its deformation limits.








  • By February, Ukraine is gone. They already struggle not to win, but just to exist. European aid is not enough, and Ukraine will disappear from maps. The Baltics are next. Moldova is next. Poland is next. Georgia is next. Finland is next. Taiwan is gone. South Korea might survive, but won’t ever look the same. NATO is gone. Chinese and ruzzian influence in Africa and South America will grow tenfold. There is no superpower to keep ruzzia and china and north korea and iran in check anymore. Worst, when WWIII start, you will be on the Axis side.

    All of that is a win for them. They are not leftist, they are autocratic revanchists. Hurting undesirables was always more important to them than helping others or even themselves, it’s just the definition of “undesirables” that they disagree on with far right.









  • Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.

    Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.

    Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.

    Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.



  • It’s not “people vs persons” but “those people vs they”.

    Conversationally, “those/these” distances you from the group you are talking about, which is humorously weird when it’s your family you’re talking about.

    It’s not the meaning of the words, but habitual (and often fleeting) attribution around them that tripped you up.

    PS: “People” are uncountable, “persons” are countable. That’s basically the whole difference between the two plurals. Although it’s rapidly disappearing, as “ten people” won’t raise a single eyebrow in a conversation.