ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
23hr ago
Even a few months of disuse is enough for them to feel significantly sluggish retrieving words and forming sentences in their native languages, albeit still highly proficient. If they know they'll need a particular one soon (like they'll be traveling to [insert country] next month), then they can review for a week or two and revive the quick access (like putting it in RAM), but trying to keep all of them active simultaneously makes organizing thoughts a bit chaotic.
This is also my experience, but if the question is "how many languages can you have stored in your brain in some form?" rather than "how many languages could you have a political debate in right this second?" I don't think anyone has demonstrated a limit, and seeing as even polyglots have to spend time doing things other than practicing languages it may as well be infinite. Of course, people may have different opinions on what counts as "knowing" something. If, given two days to prepare, I could pass a linear algebra exam by recalling what I learned in college, but I would fail miserably if presented with one right now, in what sense do I "know" the material?
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
New Caledonia
For those of you who don't know, New Caledonia is a large Pacific island territory of France. Proposed changes in voting laws there that would extend the franchise to French settlers who have been resident on the island for ten years, diluting the political influence of the indigenous Kanak people. This has led to violent riots, declaration of a state of emergency, and the deployment of police reinforcements from France proper.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
I assume they're going to be intentionally vague on this, but would fall back to 1967 borders if pressed.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
Two somewhat related examples are liberals who believe that "the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice" being confronted with what in their mental framework are inexplicable political reversals such as the election of Trump or the repeal of Roe v. Wade and (I imagine this one might be a bit more controversial here) economists who don't connect the economic malaise in the US after 1971 with the peak in domestic oil production and subsequent higher energy costs because their thinking has become almost entirely divorced from the actual material inputs that drive the production of goods and services.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
A few miscellaneous stories to start us off:
Peru
The president of Peru has signed a decree classifying gender identity disorders as a mental illness and offering coverage for them under the national health insurance plan.
Thailand
The Thai government is considering building a planned city to relocate the business districts of Bangkok due to rising sea levels, perhaps inspired by the similar Indonesian project to relocate their capital.
Ireland
Ireland is moving to recognize Palestinian statehood, making them the first nation in western Europe to do so, as far as I know. The historical relationship between the Irish and Palestinian nationalist movements means this was perhaps to be expected.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
One interesting feature of this map is that Kurds have a much higher fertility rate than ethnic Turks. I'm not sure how salient this fact is to Turkish politicians, but it is notable that Erdogan has been trying to roll back the Turkish nationalist project started by Ataturk and return to a more pan-Islamic culture that could potentially function better in a situation where Turks become a minority either through internal demographic replacement or outward conquest as in the Ottoman days.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Singapore has a new prime minister, marking the end of the political dynasty founded by Lee Kuan Yew. I don't know much about this new guy, but it will be interesting to see for how much longer the People's Action Party can maintain its current level of centralized control with less charismatic leaders. Given the popularity of Lee around these parts, I figured others may have something to add about the stability of the current system or the future of everyone's favorite Southeast Asian city-state (no offense to Brunei).
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
I think this category of "domestication" is orthogonal to race as we normally define it and is more strictly dependent on the length of time a given population has been living in hierarchical agricultural societies. For example, Han Chinese and Hmong are both Asian, but the former are more "domesticated" than the latter. The same is true for other pairings such as Mayans and Comanches, Persians and Pashtuns, etc.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Presumably in the process of self-segregation where the pod people and the McMansion people move into separate communities and redevelop them somebody is going to have to get pushed out of their home. Once this uncomfortable business is behind us we can all go on with our lives in peace.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
There was some discussion about fisetin a few years back. I recall some said it cleared up their brain fog while others said it had no noticeable effect. If you don't want to buy the stuff you can always just eat a bunch of strawberries and it might amount to the same thing.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Italy and Germany contain multiple roughly equivalent population centers due to their relatively late unification, with each of those cities once having been the capital of an independent nation. This is also true of Spain, which has Barcelona to counterbalance Madrid.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
That depends on the quality of the skyscrapers. High-rises in Taiwan can easily withstand magnitude 7 or higher quakes that had they occurred in Chile, Turkey, or the Philippines would have devastated thousands of one or two-story buildings.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Buildings are torn down and rebuilt all the time as they age and wear out. In the absence of zoning restrictions, homes in high-demand areas would be replaced piecemeal with taller and denser structures over a period of many years. We don't need a massive government intervention to flatten entire neighborhoods and remake them from scratch, we just need to give people the freedom to build what they want on their own property and market forces will take care of the rest.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
This is the origin of the term "brainwashing" in English, being a direct translation of a Chinese phrase coined by Maoists during the civil wars to describe their ideological conversion tactics.
ResoluteRaven
12d ago
I think there's some conflation of the fact that we're living through a geopolitical inflection point when lots of important events worth discussing are happening e.g. the Ukraine War, US withdrawal from the Middle East, the rise of China, etc. and the fact that rising polarization in the West means that what would otherwise be individual clickbait stories can be easily slotted into long-running culture war narratives that make us feel like we have been discussing the same thing forever e.g. anything to do with Trump or woke ideology in schools.
ResoluteRaven
13d ago
Yes, at most public schools in my area you would be restricted to the cafeteria except as a special privilege awarded to certain classes or individuals. Another notable fact about my school was that students could leave class without a hall pass to go to the bathroom and would not be met with instant suspicion if spotted walking in the hallway, something that was touted as a major selling point during our orientation. I understand that to Europeans this all sounds horribly dystopian and to Asians this sounds like a marvel of liberty and independence.
ResoluteRaven
13d ago
I attended public schools in wealthy districts, then a magnet school whose admissions policies are occasionally a matter of public controversy (yes, that one). My high school classmates were without a doubt the smartest people I've ever met, and I say this after having spent years around STEM graduates of elite universities. There was no shortage of advanced coursework to keep us nerds from getting bored, and we were given more freedom than we would have had at a typical school e.g. we could eat lunch anywhere, including off-campus, free periods were provided during the day for clubs and activities, and an independent research project was expected of all students. The teachers were generally competent and reasonable, and a decent fraction of them had PhD's in scientific disciplines.
When I was there the demographics were about 50/50 white/Jewish and south/east Asian, with every other group a rounding error. There was a clear divide between kids with tiger parents who had been pressured into attending and those like me who wanted to be there and whose parents were comparatively uninvolved, with the former having an overall negative experience and the latter loving it. I did not witness a single fight throughout my schooling, which I think would come as a shock to older generations or people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Some kids drank or did drugs (weed and LSD, mostly) but my friends and I were squares even by that school's standards, so I don't know the details. Everyone in my graduating class went to college, so even kids whose parents weren't able to help much with the application process obtained the requisite knowledge from their teachers or peers.
ResoluteRaven
15d ago
Maybe a computer mouse or something like an NES controller for playing retro games? Alternatively some kind of optical scanner that can read barcodes/QR codes for data retrieval.
ResoluteRaven
15d ago
I think The Expanse and For All Mankind fit what you're looking for, and maybe Firefly and Battlestar Galactica as well.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
Japan
It appears as though the value of the Yen is currently in free fall. I can't say I know enough economics to explain the causes or potential implications of this, but it seems concerning nonetheless.
Saudi Arabia
Apparently the Saudis have secured funding for their rather adventurous future city concept, or at least a toned down version of it. While I'm all for innovation in the field of architecture, I certainly hope for things that are a bit more practical.
Armenia
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan are scheduled to meet in Kazakhstan to presumably formalize the Armenian loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and probably handover of some additional territory in return for economic concessions. Or maybe the talks will break down and we'll have another genocidal war on our hands. Hard to tell.
Canada
The Canadian police have arrested three Indian nationals over the killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, continuing the Canada-India dispute that has bemused and disinterested onlookers around the world going "...huh?" and "what the fuck is Khalistan?"
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
I could find similar quotes online by white nationalists planning their own long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean I should assume any policy proposal such people might agree with is being directed by them and must be fought tooth and nail to keep us off a slippery slope towards racial separatism. Playing culture war whack-a-mole makes you look crazy to outsiders and weakens one's position, whether you are a wokescold arguing about Halloween costumes or a conservative grandstanding on behalf of steak and bacon.
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
I mean, some people's language learning goals really are "achieve a phrasebook level in 20 languages to receive social validation" rather than mastering any given language, and aside from that I think it's worth seeing how even quite a low level can get you through some basic interactions and make people much friendlier to you.
I would probably try some harebrained geoengineering scheme to enhance rainfall by renting a plane to seed clouds over the area or create permanent bodies of water by digging canals or planting trees. In some regions near the coast or major rivers this might even have some chance of success. Building some ancient Persian ice houses might be another interesting project, and I could probably come up with a few more if I re-read Dune.
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