A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
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User ID: 645
"Yeah, I spent some time in the Ukraine."
"You can't say the! It implies imperialism! But Ukraine is a real country not just "the borderland!""
"But that's how we say it!"
"Doesn't matter! Shame on you! Follow the current thing!"
In English "the" often indicates a region: The Rockies, the Balkans, the Mississippi, but we say the Congo for the country and don't say the Livonia for the region. Our ancestors said "the Yemen", the "Sudan", "the Lebanon".
In Russian and Ukrainian there are no articles. Instead it works like this:
na = on
v = in
Note that In English, we have in, on and at. Some words use both e.g. sitting na lake but swimming v lake.
There are many specifics and exceptions:
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na: post office, factory, beach, dacha, city square, stadium, kitchen, East, North, activities (work, lessons)..
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v: used with countries (because they contain you)
But we're talking about places, Ukraine:
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na used for geographic things you are on (islands, mountains) and regions (Caucasus, Carpathians, Kuban)
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v with some regions like Siberia, Polesia or the Carpathian region (uses both)
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v with places ending in -landia (Iceland, Ireland, Curland, Ingermanland, Scottland, Livonia (Lifland) although they're islands
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Sicily and Sardinia use v 1/3 as often as na (from google search hits), Corsica gets 5% (most islands never use v). Other trivia like na Malta country/island, but v Malta a village in Irkutsk...
Ukrainian culture warriors say v Ukraine while Russian warriors says na Ukraine. Others fill the middle ground, squeezed between both, while older literature and old ladies do the darnedest things.
But it goes deeper. Other Slavic languages have the same issue. In Poland, they shifted to w Ukraine in the 90s. But if I ask google translate: na Ukrainie. Asking friends:
if someone says w ukrainie, It's a mistake. it's hard to change because we have many cultural stuff that include "na ukrainie". In the song Hej Sokoly we find the line "Na zielonej ukrainie".
Indeed, the Polish national epic starts: "O Lithuania" here referring to the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. It's title features: na Litwie. With na! (In the verses, w is also used.) Now, Lithuania has many Poles. Anna Pieszko shows how Poles and Lithuanians fight this war:
Poles in Lithuania incorrectly use na with Lithuania, because it implies it's part of Poland like na Kresy. [I highly recommend Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place about the Kresy, to learn a lot about the USSR and nationalism,]
The Lithuanian Algimantas Zolubas believes if "a Pole considers himself a Polish in Lithuania, not a Lithuanian Pole, he's a guest" [not a citizen. An anti-Polish cultural organization Vilnija of course believes usage of na "threatens the integrity of the Republic" in "non-compliance with the constitution."
But Poles also say na Slovakia, na Latvia, na Belarus, na Hungary (Poland's honored brother). Does this imply that Polish na doesn't carry a regional distinction? Either way, the Polish position is continuity with tradition. The New Dictionary of Correct Polish says:
the use of the preposition "na" with the names of certain geographical regions and countries is motivated by a centuries-old tradition, which there is no reason to change, and does not mean treating them as politically dependent territories, and especially dependent on Poland.
Impressive cultural steadfastness. In English we no longer use the article and many Russians have moved to v Ukraine. While we say Germany instead of Deutschland and Türkiye probably won't gain much circulation, Myanmar is gaining on Burma and we have stopped saying Bombay, Ceylon, Siam, Persia (for the modern country), Kiev. (N.b. Peking and Bejing transcribe the same word, just with different systems) And often people don't care: What Italian complains about our Florence, Venice etc.?
In Serbo-Croatian (also outside of Serbia): na Kosovu, but all other culturally relevant regions I could find are u (like the Banat, Vojdovina, Srem, Raška...) except na Balkanu. Friends could not think of more.
The historian Timothy Snyder says names are part of an overreaching colonial process. But how much can it matter? What's in a name? Do Slavs think worse of the Germans who they call mute (Nemcy, Lenard Nemoy's last name means mute)? Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name gives us slave?
Above I wrote "continuity of tradition." What does that really mean across the vagaries of the years of centuries? The Hebrews called Southern Ukraine "Ashkenaz" but as Jews came into Europe (from the Mediterranean Northwards) Northern France and Western Germany came to be the Ashkenaz, Iberia Sepharad and the Slavic lands Canaan. Eventually those Ashkenazi Jews were pushed Eastwards, merging with those in Canaan - the new new Ashkenaz. It stayed this way as borders ebbed and flowed, nations rose, fell and rose again (Poland and Lithuania).
In 1919, the Karaite Adolph Joffe, a Soviet Bolshevist, running negotiations after the Polish-Soviet war with the Baltic countries, found himself negotiating with Max Soloveitchik in Yiddish. Max, the Lithuanian diplomat, asked for what they Jews called "Lita", that is: the whole of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
I recently shared this video with a friend: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AtMdM4j5N20
Or are you saying they just took Tether's word for it?
Yes.
Learn some accounting. They go through significantly more scrutiny when you buy a house. Tether has been shown to double or quadruple count assets in the past. Tether has been shown to literally make things up. Plenty of other friendly actors move 10x the assets into an account then remove it the day after.
From the end of page 1, halfway down through page 2 it lists all the things they did. They checked over the blockchain records, they got confirmation letters from banks, looked for the collateral in the loans... Not what I'd call 'confirming that Tether claimed things'.
That was a hit piece against Tether you know. They investigated it and found large amounts of bs and contradictory flows, not BDO.
Tether published a self-proclaimed ‘verification’ of its cash reserves, in 2017, that it characterized as “a good faith effort on our behalf to provide an interim analysis of our cash position.” In reality, however, the cash ostensibly backing tethers had only been placed in Tether’s account as of the very morning of the company’s ‘verification.’
It disappeared the same day.
In march, Tether claimed 4.96 billion in "other investments (including digital currencies)" when the crypto market was over 2 trillion. After it dropped under 900 million a few months later, Tether claimed 5 billion. The numbers they claim are verifiable bullshit.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
BDO:
Our opinion is limited solely to the CRR and the corresponding consolidated total assets and consolidated total liabilities as of 30 September 2022. Activity prior to and after this time and date was not considered when testing the balances and information described above.
They just confirmed that Tether claimed they had so and so assets on paper - not whence and why. It's literally meaningless. But sure, avoiding an audit for 5 years, and changing their claims of holdings many times is totally a string of bonafide grade-a deeds of trustworthiness!
If you collate redemption events with outside events, it's rather clear most is just drawing numbers down entirely. SBF's plots alone involved billions of Tether which were wiped off the books without fiat appearing. Tether created the tokens out of nothing and then wiped them later. Now, I don't just mean a few billions. Alameda and Cumberland received 70% of all Tether. There are concrete examples like 3 Arrows "redeeming" more than 2x the Tether it supposedly had accumulated around May. Now, in March it continued receiving more Tether - but directly on exchanges instead of its historical wallets.
There are many fun treatments like: https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-investigation-analysis/
not making its users whole due to fraud
And that's half the instances.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Here's a list of ~450 (by line count) exchanges which failed: https://www.cryptowisser.com/exchange-graveyard/
75 exchanges closed down in 2020: https://cointelegraph.com/news/75-crypto-exchanges-have-closed-down-so-far-in-2020
https://coinjournal.net/news/42-percent-of-failed-crypto-exchanges-vanished-leaving-users-in-the-lurch/ lists 94 in 2020 and 81 in 2020... Higher than the others. From my work, there are more than a few which certainly weren't listed in the above. (Some 0 years when quite a few scams occurred.) Note, 42% disappeared without any justification at all.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Tether's story went from "backed 1:1 to dollars" to "holding various tokens" to "we mostly have Chinese corporate paper" all along fighting or failing audits by state regulators and redefining what it's backed by, while printing billions a month without relative inflows.
Where is the evidence for Tether being fraudulent?
Surely you're joking? Google "Tether scam" and there's a deluge of proof, including successful investigations against Tether, which led to Tether providing new reserve definitions.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
dance,
How wealthy are all the people in this video? They largely seem to have huge houses/driveways or are at least in much nicer and more "modern" places than one normally finds watching Indian media, travel videos etc.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
I did best by guessing. 12/20
My framework is basically "quirky/disheveled to lazy bureaucrat" primarily based on interactions with friend's families and government officials. The more disheveled ones would generally be overly helpful - and believe in homeopathy (but could easily be far right, green or christiandemocrat). The others would be more useful/knowledgeable, but difficult to urge into action - and always very by the book (but depending on the location, the book could involve bribery with chocolates or cash).
Trying it with facial structures went slightly worse than guessing.
Hot or not got me 10/20.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Someone else in these circles mentioned that black people see overrepresentation and feel excluded, but when they really look into it and see Jews make up some huge percentage, significantly higher than blacks - but also whites... They fill in the rest of the owl. So we have Kanye who sees black and even white people these days complain about the whites, but what about the elephant in the room? Even the whites are underrepresented!
To respond to your prompt: You can tell kanye that the black people don't have a single monolithic belief structure. There are religious and conservative blacks (more so than white democrats), there are intellectual, n#$@$, old money elite, farmer, atheist, politically mobilized, muslim, new world conspiracy muslim etc. etc. blacks. In the last election 14% voted Republican. That's not 0. In other countries, there's quite a plurality of opinion.
Balenciaga is a huge luxury brand. Most better airports have some shops, the flagships in major cities have big lines waiting to go inside. Although around for a century, their primary innovation you're sure to have seen imitations of was sneakers with overly wide bottoms: https://balenciaga.dam.kering.com/m/30e12220cb4b44c9/Medium-544351W2GA19100_F.jpg?v=3
Over the past decade, short atmospheric art films have been huge in the luxury industry. They did one with the Simpsons: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PZHESOq-Gkw
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
A good friend's been a kept woman for years. We once had a short fling. Years later she opined we were too different as I yearnt to conquer the world, while she wanted to comfortably be, so it's easier for her to be with the malaised. It always seemed very aberrant to me in a modern way.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
No one knows what it was programmed to do exactly but here's a good example scenario:
The missile should fly 400km Westward, but a sensor malfunctioned and miscounted its distance. Once that sensor thought it had been 400km, it turned on the visual targeting system. Normally, this would look for a building of a certain shape - but in the middle of a field, it found no buildings. It went to secondary targets, tanks and so on. It found a tractor and went for it.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
I see this scenario where weird homeschooled kids get surpassed repeatedly to the point where I think that your mindset is pretty common
Can you give examples?
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Musk has already signaled cooperation with the Regime.
Or the key fact that SpaceX has been involved with the government since founding, got hundreds of millions in contracts without having launched a rocket yet, with missile defense friends determining where the money goes etc. Musk is the cathdral, Musk is a big player in the military industrial complex.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Don't we all
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
liked and believed in the idea of psychic history and mathematical formulas and believe most of history resolves around the sun of many forces
Cliodynamics does this and has a healthy amount of publications!
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
"software architect" type people
Could you give more detail? In my (biased) experience, they're normally competentish (if given to trends and overcomplicating things). Generally they've been developing for a decade+ before taking the role, from what I've seen. There are however many PMs or such who misrepresent/get overly stuck to diagrams and i've met some people who managed to become architects without coding at all. At my work, I make architectural mvps with seniors with chunks of the functionality and low effort piping, then tell other juniors how to make everything production ready while seniors work on hard parts we aren't quite sure about.
But fundamentally it's an organizational issue. 10 experts alone could very well be better (and in some projects, I'm able to give parts each to domain experts who write their parts in a week and it's all done (waterfall can work!)). But engineers are normally at the behest of non-tech people coming up with stupid features, who change their minds, or the domain space isn't even properly explored with exploratory test models (so we can't do good engineering practices). But this can be justified, since the tech is supposed to automate away concrete tasks and processes, for people who are paying for it. Path of least resistance etc.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
there would be no Flynn Effect
This is way bigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
quokka
complains of "akrasia" -- an inability to accomplish things, or he struggles with his own failure to live up to his standards of logic. But his problems are grounded, not in his mind, but in his body
Becoming physically strong is the cure for basically every mental illness in men, such as depression or philosophy.
Hit the gym!
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
China is a big player in the Stans which worries Russia.
China and Kazakhstan recently signed broad security agreements, China has troops in Tajikistan. China sells a lot of arms to the region. (Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are skirmishing, like Armenia and Azerbaijan with Russia unable to exert influence.)
The Belt and Road Initiative (which was added to China's constitution) involves land routes to China from Central Asia in order to survive a loss of sea routes. China is the biggest trade partner in the Stans. Kazakhstan's Nurly Zhol and Uzbekistan's New development Strategy have been fused into the BRI. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is replacing the (Russia led) Eurasian Economic Union as an umbrella only missing Turkmenistan. The actual activities are more massive than this:
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China's building a railroad through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to reduce transit times to Europe (the transsiberian was at capacity) (but the planned route goes through Ukraine, which China's not happy about) and allow for direct imports and exports to Central Asia without going through Russia
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Huge investments in gas infrastructure directly to China, sidelining Russia as a transit point besides as a produer: https://eurasianet.org/analysis-can-central-asian-gas-exporters-rely-on-china
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China halted investments in Russia after Russia blocked Kazakh fuel exports - a conflict between China and Russia over Central Asian policy...
Anyway, true geostrategic conflicts are immaterial at this point because Russia is under China's thumb. Chances are, Putin's successors will be Chinese plants.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" is similar: https://youtube.com/embed/_ahvzDzKdB0
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
Paris rains more than London but no one comments about it
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis.
They were talking about a male crisis in the 1800s. Masculinity's always under threat
I considered that academic scoring could potentially play a big role. In the French system, getting a 20 is extremely rare. It'd be like a 14 year old wrote publishable research. A score of 13 or so is considered fantastic. An Iranian friend applying for US PhDs had an issue where enrollment offices just turned her score into a percentage, giving her a 2.something GPA yet a 170 GRE score. Eventually we got it sorted. The UK has a similar thing too, if I remember correctly. Finland doesn't have such a range however. Germany also only uses 1-5 and expects near perfection.
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