Wealthier people are by far the most difficult customers. They think they’re entitled to everything because they’re “rich” and “above” wage slaves, so they get pissy and aggressive the moment something doesn’t go their way (and sometimes they’ll just make a ruckus for fun). Source: I worked in a few fast food restaurants in the south before

It was crazy for me working at a mexican restaurant and the only people who got argumentative over the $13 for a burrito with just 4 oz of meat (total rip-off) were the ones who could definitely afford it, while the poorer people just accepted it. And the wealthy people always came in again (usually regulars) and expected it to be more every time.

Is that a fucking T-55

“Kursk gas pump #1”

where M1 at

Yea but it’s inefficient. USB-A has a significantly lower transfer rate than USB-C so it’ll bottleneck

Objectively disgusting. How can one connector be so chunky while still being asymmetric?

a slave-master dynamic

please don’t use that term, every time i see it i immediately verge on orgasming. you’ve already made me ruin 2 undergarments today. i have a serious bdsm kink and this is not funny.

Well for the most part if we want to have a less context-dependent measure, with some caveats – “left” is advocates of a socialist (or communist if you wish to separate them) economic system and social equality, and “right” is advocates of a capitalist or fascist economic system and social hierarchy. Around the center would be where social democrats/capitalists who want strong social safety are, or in other words people who want a mixed-economy/regulated capitalism and are for the most part socially progressive.

Also it’s hard to tell what you mean by “pure libs” but in most of the world that implies extremely free-market capitalist and pro-discrimination under the guise of “free speech” – very to the right. They’re usually called “libertarians” or “ancaps” in the US.

If by “pure lib” you mean a principled American “liberal” then there’s not really much to differentiate that from a social democrat – in practice America’s liberal politicians are either social democrats, or corrupt politicians who suck up to corporate money and stand in the way of social democrats – the latter definitely not being centrists. Same goes for “social liberals”.

Either way there is no chance that democratic socialists are as extremist as national conservatives. Democratic socialists are barely left of social democrats, so much so that social democrats label themselves democratic socialists all the time. The ideology is dependent upon reforming a fundamentally capitalistic system in an attempt to achieve socialism, while more lefty ideologies are focused on forcing the ruling/regressive capitalist class to comply (and some just outright skip to purging all the aristocracy who are anti-worker).

An accurate-ish description may be “socialist” and “syndicalist” vaguely can be anywhere on the left, so 5.5 to 10; “communist” and similar adjectives like “ararcho-communist” encompass 9 to 10; “anarchist” contains ideologies between center and fully left, so 5 to 10 (although most anarchist ideology is very far to the left, a lot of them are communists); “democratic socialist” is 5.5 to 7; “social democrat” is 4.5 to 5.5; the American “left” is mostly anywhere between 4 and 6.5 nowadays, although a decade ago it’d be more like 3 to 4.5, with actual social democrats being considered fringe or “extremists”. US “conservativism” (or “conservatism”, pick your poison on the spelling) is pretty much entirely “sounds kinda like fascism” to “fascism” at this point, so 1.5 to 2.5, with some politicians in the faction maybe squeaking it out to 3 or 3.5. Full-blown Nazis are 1. Libertarians/classical liberals are harder to classify in this sort of system, as in practice they’re usually as right-wing and reggressive as American conservatives, but their ideology is theoretically supposed to be more like a 3.5. Ancaps are just straight up 1 to 2.5 though, a complete lack of law applying to corporations & companies in general, being anti-government funding except when it’s military or police (except some of the farthest right of them believe even those should be completely private). They’re on par with fascist in terms of the scale from left to right.

Assuming decimals are out of the question, let’s just truncate everything higher than 5 and round up everything lower than 5.

Generally, the American public (or rather, the white majority) hovers at 3 to 4, with younger people being more like 4 to 7.

What’s fucked is most people think of prominent historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela as at a similar position in a political spectrum as American liberals, when in reality they were literally full-blown revolutionary socialists/marxists and belonged to communist organizations. And figures like Gandhi and Orwell were openly reformist socialists. I mean it’s intentional rightwashing by the government to get rid of any and all semblance of left ideology from now-near-legendary people, and it’s not surprising at all, but it’s still fucked. This is the framework of thinking Americans have when they try to categorize ideologies on a left-to-right spectrum; the most leftist historical figures they know that aren’t Stalin or Mao or something are all rightwashed into oblivion, portrayed to be liberal in the American sense, which tricks people into believing the farthest left you can go before you cross the centrist line is Bill Clinton or something.

If we take “left or right” to “how far one acts to accelarate towards progressivism or regressivism”, though, then I could see your proposed comparison working decently, with the caveat being that democratic socialists wouldn’t be anywhere near communists in that regard either.

If that were the case anymore, it would’ve happened after the 1912 election when Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive party got more votes (27.4%) and electors (88) than the Republican Taft (23.2% of the vote and 8 electors). But it didn’t. Things went back to normal after that. That was also the election where the Socialist party gained the most votes (6% of the vote and 0 electors).

The Republicans and Democrats are here to stay until our voting system is overhauled.

Well, the largest group in Texas is Latinos… idk how many of them can vote and how mant would actually vote blue though.

The fact that we have people getting paid multiple times the average wage for fucking marketing and advertising is proof our economic system is a complete and utter failure

The term AGI has been used since more than 2 decades ago, and AI never specifically implied something with human intelligence (maybe in the 40s-50s when it was just being invented, but not after that). “AI” has always refered to things like Siri and the YouTube algorithm and pathfinding AIs and trackers for anti-air systems and whatever else.

I remember that before I started programming I’d get annoyed at machinery like 3d printers for the “stupid AI” not working. Then I’d probably bang it or something to try to get it to work lol

I mean… it’s pretty compatible with leftist ideologies. Especially a moneyless form of socialism/communism

they’re filthy communists i tell ya

Small/Medium-sized Business

You’re just flat out lying at this point lol. 21-23% of the entire Israeli Jewish population is first-generation immigrants; 30-35% is second-generation, direct offspring of immigrants; 30-35% is third-generation; 10-15% is fourth-generation; under 5% is fifth-generation or beyond (which would include Jews who lived there since before Aliyah). These are numbers are from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. There’s also statistics that rather say 40-45% are third-generation with much less being fourth-generation or beyond, but with around the same amount or slightly less being first and second generation – I find the former estimates far more reasonable though. It’s estimated around 90-97% of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants since 1900.

A majority of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants of several Aliyah (immigration to “Zion” from outside of the lands of Palestine/Israel, practically starting from 1882 but mostly ramping up around the start of the British/Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the region in the early and mid 1900s). Even the most conservative estimates say that around 50-70% of Israel’s Jewish population growth since 1900 came from immigration, with most of the rest of the population growth coming from recent immigrants having children. And those are really conservative estimates, the actual amount is likely much higher than that.

A significant portion of Israeli Jews came from immigration in the 90s, especially from the Soviet Union after its collapse – 1.4-1.6 million Jews (compared to Israel’s total current Jewish population of around 7.4 million) immigrated to Israel following the collapse of the USSR. Over a fifth of the entire Israeli Jewish population in just the span of one generation. Yet second- and third-generation Israeli Jews make up like 3-3.5x as much still.

It’s crazy for you to try to state that modern Israelis aren’t primarily (nearly exclusively) descended from relatively recent immigrants who displaced (and outright genocided) the native population. You straight up just made that up without consulting any history/statistics, not even Israel’s own statistics lol. Palestine faced a colonization and replacement by Jewish immigrants – according to the Jewish Virtual Library, 8% of people in the region were Jewish in 1882; then 11-13% after the end of WW1, after the adoption of a Zionist policy for Palestine and occupation by the UK (see the Balfour Declaration); then 32% in 1947 after several Aliyah; then in 1948 – the year the Israel was formally established and immigrants were shipped in from all over the globe, and the year European immigrants to Israel started all-out total war and genocide against Palestinians – that number jumped to 82%. It is not Jews’ “indigenous land”, 93%+ of people in the region were Arab Muslims at the time of the first Aliyah, hundreds of thousands compared to the 9,000 Jews and even less Christians. Jews hadn’t been the majority in the region since the 4th century, Arabs & Muslims have been the majority since before the Magna Carta, the Crusades, European Feudalism, they were most of the population when France just started to exist.

Considering the actual facts of the situation, your justification basically becomes “colonization and apartheid in the modern day is okay because some other people they identified with lived there 1,500-3,000 years ago”, in which case I have some bad news for like, 95% of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Asians, who all exist on lands which were someone elses in that same time period. Ethnonationalism with feeling you have a “right” to certain land you have no actual connection to based on some ancient “predecessor” civilization that had those lands stolen from them before Hindu-Arabic numerals existed is a strong hint that you’re in the wrong (see: Nazism). Modern Jews are about as indigenous to Israel as the modern Japanese are to Korea, or modern Turkish are to Mongolia.

Zionism is modern-day ethnonationalism and colonialism by predominantly non-Levantine peoples (more than half of those being primarily European in ancestry). Its purpose is creating and justifying an ethnostate where Jews are superior and have rights that other groups don’t have – and such things are cemented in the Israeli constitution and law. To exist, Israel requires relegating non-Jews to second-class personhood and requires (or required at some recent point in time) commiting acts of genocide towards certain non-Jews; abolishing that would be abolishing the concept of Israel and Zionism as a whole. There is no real moral defense of the state of Israel.

Even worse, because the Kingdom of Israel stopped existing 3000 years ago. Modern Israelis have zero connection to ancient Israel

Usually the best resources you can get online for free for language learning as a beginner or intermediate is mostly pirated photoscanned books, with some online pages or YouTubers mixed in as another supplement.

For example, for Japanese, I pirated the 3rd editions of Genki 1 & Genki 2, plus the workbooks for them. I also owe a lot to the YouTuber Tokini Andy (who has videos going over the updated Genki textbooks and explains a lot of things missing/poorly explained in the book, he’s pretty great). There’s also an interactive quizzing website for Genki someone made. For definitions and stroke order I used jisho.org, and for etymology I used Wiktionary, hanziyuan.net, and dong-chinese.com. The only other website/app I regularly used was Renshuu (a spaced repitition learning app for Japanese), which was pretty great and was a good supplement for drilling in what you learned from other resources – although you have to modify the settings quite a bit to really “optimize” it. A lot of people use WaniKani which is kind of similar but I think more Kanji-oriented and used more for students studying before a test. Oh and to learn the Kana, I basically just tested myself writing down the characters in the standard order for a few days until it got drilled into my head, I also used the Tofugu Hiragana learning resource thing but it only helped for a few mneumonics. Other than that, although I’m not exactly a weeb, I tried to force myself to watch anime (in Japanese) any time I wanted to do something like watch a show or play a game, and I’d look up all the stuff I didn’t recognize. Anime isn’t exactly representative of how Japanese people speak at all, and you’re going to get your shit kicked in (by that I mean disapprovingly stared at) by Japanese people if you speak like an anime character, but I suppose it’s like learning English off of Sesame Street and SkyDoesMinecraft…

For German, I heavily utilized Deutsche Welle’s learning resources, especially Nicos Weg. I also had people to practice the language with. My German still sucks though… for whatever reason, I had the absolute most difficult time with trying to learning German out of any language. The word order magic fucked with my head especially, but I just kept mixing up basic words.

For Russian I used Memrise at first, which worked for vocabulary and got me familiar with the most very basic vocabulary, but the features locked behind monetization eventually got too disruptive so I spent pretty much all my time on (pirated) beginner Russian learning textbooks and very technical grammar books (I was a very learned linguistics major so learning from linguistics-heavy books was significantly more feasible for me than it is for the average person). I probably had the least frustrating time with Russian out of any of the languages I self-studied. I self-taught myself Cyrillic when I was like 8 because I thought slavic stuff was cool so that didn’t really require any time…

I learned passable French in high school (despite my ADHD ass not paying attention 99% of the time and basically just not being present mentally for all of French 3), which then degraded a lot in my ability to use it since I never used it and was preoccupied with other stuff, but I can still read it fine, and I can understand it spoken depending on how they speak and my state of mind. I didn’t even study outside of school or anything really, I just had a teacher from France (she was my favorite teacher). Actually thinking of the words and grammar I’m trying to say though, I’m pretty fucked in that department unless I go back and practice it. French is my 2nd language.

I self-studied Spanish after school, not very seriously though, I could already grasp it pretty well enough because of my French knowledge. I got conversational in no time – still, randomly not being able to recall random words is a pain in the ass (that goes with English too I guess). I did a bit of Duolingo at first but then just started listening to podcasts and videos and stuff, and looked up the words I didn’t know (beforehand and during the time I was already doing a lot of Spanish linguistics work so I already knew “about” the language and its phonology/spelling to pick out the things I heard). This was really only possible because, again, I was already able to understand pretty much all the French you would encounter in daily life.

For Finnish I mostly used pirated books and YouTube learning resources. The first books I used were from Leila White, “From Start to Finnish” and “A Grammar Book of Finnish” which are both great. I would definitely suggest that anyone who wants to learn Finnish goes through those books – the second one’s a reference rather than something you’re supposed to go through from beginning to end though.

I tried (and failed) to learn Arabic a reeeally long time ago. It didn’t extend much past a few obscure and not-very-helpful learning internet resources plus Duolingo (which was kind of useless for Arabic, even moreso than Duolingo typically is useless for languages). I had an unusually hard time with the script for this one (is it racist to say the damn squiggly lines all look the same), and reading it without vowel markers is very difficult to me.

slovake.eu was a helpful resource for Slovak when I was doing the necessary stuff for citizenship – I could’ve probably gotten by with only English (despite doing it myself and without an immigration lawyer) but I felt it only made sense to at least try to learn the language. It… definitely happened… I basically learned much of the core vocabulary and some grammar quirks, and played fill in the blank with Russian/Polish words except how I thought they’d be in Slovak for words for ones I didn’t know. Would not recommend doing that, but if you DO do it then just know that Slovak is the absolute best slavic language to do it in, they will probably understand you if you outright are speaking a different slavic language.

Right now I’m using this book online for Italian that’s only in Italian which is basically like, introducing grammar & topics in the language with no actual instruction or anything, it’s just a bunch of Italian sentences with images and stuff to get you to remember the grammar based off of context. It’s sick as hell, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now.

After a long time (around B2 or maybe B1 level probably) you have enough comprehension to start learning well while watching content made for natives – e.g. you can watch YouTube videos or a TV show in the language and can learn from looking up the (still large) portion of words you don’t understand.

I was originally a monolingual English speaker – only 1 native language, I didn’t have like 2 or 3 native languages like most of the world (shout out to all the kids who acquired English solely off of TV and YouTube as a kid). On one hand, being monolingual definitely makes you more ignorant to other languages and your first language might be a little bit harder (but honestly it doesn’t get much easier from there, you will still writhe in pain 4 hours a day trying to learn any subsequent languages), but on the other hand being a monolingual ENGLISH speaker opens you up to way more possibilities (resources) than not being an English speaker, so I guess overall I was pretty lucky in that regard.

I have really bad ADHD and Aphantasia which is (for the most part) a hinderance to language learning – my working memory is extremely bad, I can’t visualize SHIT and ADHD makes my non-visual memory go kaput. Language learning takes significant time, energy, it’s frustrating as fuck, and most of this comes down to a lot of it just being brute forcing memory. There is no cheat to language learning, there is no “lern basque in 23 dayz”, it is just putting thousands upon thousands of hours of very regular, very (inter)active focus and memorization methods into it until it’s drilled in your head. It can be more challenging than any job you’ve ever done and you’ll want to cry due to how little progress you feel that you’re making despite the great amounts of time and energy you put into deciphering this mess.

On the other hand, I know Autistic people with Hyperphantasia and Synthesia (specifically, the kind where you see colorful words appear in your vision when you hear, read, or think about language) and they are SIGNIFICANTLY more capable at language stuff than anyone else, although it’s still a lot of effort to put in for them of course.

Language is pretty much about constantly pushing back against the force inside of you that says “you can’t do this, you’re not improving, it’s tiring” and managing your breaks/scheduling well. It’s easy to turn a “break” into just not touching the language again. You have to be motivated a LOT to learn a language (including being motivated by pressure/necessity, go get locked up in a country with speakers of your TL or something) or else you’ll just quit as soon as you hit your first wave of roadblocks.

Chimpanzees are likely going to be extinct 2-3 decades from now. Bonobos will be extinct in 4-6 decades. Orangutans will go extinct within 10 to 20 years. Most animals closely related to humans (including most apes & monkeys) are projected to become extinct within a few decades. I do not want to be alive when gorillas go extinct

This is mostly due to the meat trade (apes and monkeys are often killed for meat which is eaten by locals or traded), being affected by the wars in the Congo/Africa, being kidnapped & sold as exotic pets, and habitat loss from human resource harvesting/logging & development. Humans are effectively displacing, enslaving, slaughtering, and cannibalizing their distant cousins

It is a nuanced topic that requires explanation of certain history. There is no TL;DR