NOTE: sloopy is wobbling, and chugging Vick’s products – Dayquil/Nyquil/ZZZquil – who knows? So, as part of a very Japanese Day here at Glibs…enjoy!
(The following was submitted with the gracious assistance and support of Heroic Mulatto in proofreading and lending his academic understanding of the subject)
The difficulty of learning any language depends on the language or languages which the learner speaks to begin with. For a native speaker of Spanish, Italian is a relatively simple language to learn as they share many characteristics. Learning a language from the same group as your native language is much easier than learning one from a very different language group.
English comes from the group of Indo-European languages, sharing characteristics with Germanic languages (German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, etc.), Roman languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) and Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Croatian, etc.). As different as these languages seem to be from the perspective of a person who might only speak one or even some number of these languages they have much more in common than they do with languages from other, unrelated language groups.
The language group to which Japanese belongs is an open issue with many modern linguists placing it in its own group. In the past it was grouped (somewhat loosely) with Korean and Mongolian. For our discussion we can state that Japanese is very different in many aspects from the Indo-European group.
The word order of a basic sentence in English is subject-verb-object. The word order of a basic Japanese sentence is subject-object-verb. This is probably the first difference between these two languages which the new learner finds out about. Further meaning is added with particle words (in English these are similar to “of”, “to”, “on”, “for”, etc.) and verb suffixes.
Japanese particle words do not correspond directly to any similar words in English. For instance, one of the first two particles the new learner will hear are “wa” and “ga”. There is no word in English remotely similar to either of these particles. The closest explanation for “wa” is “speaking of” with regards to the subject preceding it.
As an example, the sentence “I am drinking” would be “Watashi wa nonde iru”. “Watashi” is “I”. “Nonde” is “drinking”, and “iru” is the Japanese active “be” verb. So a rough translation of this sentence, in Japanese word order, would be “I, speaking of, drinking is”.
So you can see that Japanese grammar is very different from English grammar. But that’s not where it stops. Japanese language reflects the high-context modes of expression of the Japanese culture which means that much of the meaning is inferred from context and not stated explicitly. In standard Japanese conversation it is not uncommon for the subject to not be stated when that subject could be inferred from the situation. So quite often you would hear the above sentence “I am drinking” expressed simply as “nonde iru” since the reference to oneself is pretty easy to infer and thus not stated.
While Japanese is not unique in how it commonly drops the subject from subsequent discussion once it has been mentioned, it can be challenging for English speakers to keep up when a document rambles on for paragraphs, expecting the reader to remember the implied subject back at the top of the first page.
This makes translation into English particularly problematic as the subject is merely inferred in Japanese while the subject is often key in English. When you are explaining a business transaction and the original Japanese text is “it was decided to invest in the venture” without stating who it was who made that decision you have to infer from the body of the text who it was and add that in the English translation even when it is not written anywhere in the Japanese sentence. In translating Japanese to English I often have to make notes to keep track of the subject from one sentence or paragraph to the next. And from my experience, in written Japanese there are no rules against run-on sentences.
The same is common in colloquial speech which is even more problematic as you can’t just refer back to the previous page. I have been in conversations with Japanese native speakers in which one person (not me) begged forgiveness and said they had lost the plot back at “X” (three or four minutes earlier in the conversation).
In common usage Japanese language leaves out huge chunks of words which English speakers depend on to get the full meaning. If I were to translate the content of a normal conversation – only the words actually spoken in Japanese – it might sound something like this :
“Saturday went saw ‘Coriander’
How was?
Fun! Liked scene when main character jumped. Laughed.
Want to go see but wait to download. Expensive.
Make copy for me?
Yeah, give.”
The one saving grace of the Japanese language is the simplicity of pronouncing it. It has only five vowels which are the same as those in Spanish or Italian. The consonants are also very simple and easy to pronounce.
The one point of Japanese pronunciation which many new learners find challenging is long vowels. A long vowel is a vowel which is pronounced as two syllables of the same vowel sound. A common example is the two words for “uncle” and “grandfather”. “Uncle” is “ojisan” (short “I” sound) while “grandfather” is “ojiisan” (long “I” sound). To the neophyte these two words often sound the same while to a Japanese speaker the difference is distinct.
The Kanji. Definitely the most difficult aspect of learning the Japanese language. To be fully literate in Japanese you have to know 2 sets of Kana – Katakana and Hiragana – each with 46 Kana characters, and about 2,000 Kanji. Learning the Kana, if you are living in Japan where you see it all around you, is an almost trivial exercise, particularly when compared to learning the Kanji. Each Kana has only one way to pronounce it – it is always pronounced the same except for a few common exceptions.
- The particle word “wa”, mentioned above, is written with the Hiragana character “ha” (は).
- One other particle word “o” is written with the Hiragana character “wo” (を).
- In writing the long vowel for the “o” sound, the second syllable is represented with the Hiragana character “u” (う). This holds true in the unusual case when Japanese words are written in Katakana (the character set which is generally reserved for foreign loan words) and the second syllable is written with the Katakana character “u” (ウ).
To people who have not studied Kanji they seem to be little more than a bunch of brush strokes at different angles with no rhyme nor reason. In fact, the order of every stroke (which stroke is first, second, next, and on through to the last stroke) is fixed as is the point where each starts and ends, even the flair at the end of a stroke – the direction up, down, left, or right – is fixed. Even the visual balance of the character is important and requires years of practice.
The key to getting started is learning the radicals. Radicals are basic sets of strokes, they are often simple Kanji, which are combined into a single Kanji and generally one of them holds a key to its meaning. There are 208 radicals and once you learn them every Kanji you see is easily broken down into its component radicals. Most Kanji are made up of two to four radicals.
There are about 40,000 Kanji in total but very few people have any reason to learn as much as half of that number. I have met one person who had learned every last Kanji – an Australian with a photographic memory who ran a software company producing digital Kanji font sets.
There are a few Kanji which have but one pronunciation. Most have two or three ways to pronounce them and a number can be pronounced several ways – some of which are unique to a specific usage or a place name.
A large number of words in Japanese are made up of two or three Kanji. In this way their usage is similar to English words made up of Greek or Latin root words like “television” or “invisible” which tell you the meaning by their component words.
As an example, there is a Kanji “Roku” (録) which has a meaning similar to “record”. It is used in the word for “register”: “Toroku” (登録), “record sound”: “Rokuon” (録音), and “record images”: “Rokuga” (録画).
But then, just to twist it further, there are a number of common examples of Kanji pairs which have more than one way to pronounce them with one pronunciation not related to how the individual Kanji are pronounced. There is a Kanji which is pronounced Aki, Mei, Myo, (明) and means “bright”. Another Kanji is Nichi, Hi, Ka, Jitsu (日) and means either “sun” or “day”. Together they can be pronounced “Myonichi” (明日) which means “tomorrow” but the more usual pronunciation for this same Kanji pair is “Ashita”. Note that neither Kanji has a pronunciation that could lead one to pronounce this pair as “Ashita”.
If you intend to really learn Japanese I recommend you master the Kana as soon as possible then start learning the Kanji. Knowing Kanji really supports learning new vocabulary. At first you could learn a number of the simplest characters, then get comfortable learning the 208 radicals. Many of the simplest characters are used as radicals so this study does overlap. A few of the radicals have alternative forms – are written differently – and it helps to understand the origin of these alternative forms.
I recommend writing Kanji repetitively. Get a notebook with grid squares and practice daily. You can also use any number of on-line tools. I still use asahi-net.or.jp to brush up from time to time.
You can take some time to get comfortable with the idea of learning Kanji but at some point you will have to accept the challenge and get serious. Set down a goal to learn a fixed number every week and practice them daily. When I got to this point in learning Kanji I was learning 50 new characters a week. The more aggressive you are in learning, the quicker you will reach your goal. When I was doing this I was focusing on recognizing each character and knowing the pronunciations with a lesser focus on understanding the meanings. The meanings don’t often correspond directly to words in English anyway so learning them in context later seemed to make more sense to me.
Contrast all this to Mandarin Chinese which is much harder to learn to pronounce because not only does it have consonants which are difficult for most English speakers to recognize but also is a tonal language – the exact same phonetic sound will have a different meaning depending on the tone. The sound “Ma” can mean horse, mother, scold, or can infer a question, depending on the tone it is pronounced with.
Chinese speaking cultures are also high-context with a direct effect on how the language is expressed which can be difficult for Indo-European language speakers to get used to.
The easiest part of learning Chinese for English speakers is the fact that the basic syntax is very similar – subject-verb-object. Like Japanese they have no concept for an article (the, a, an) which explains why both Japanese and Chinese have a hard time learning when to put in those particles when they first learn English.
Another point where I say Chinese is easier to learn than Japanese is the fact that about 90% of Chinese characters have only one way to pronounce them. The significance of this hit me on my first trip to China after having studied Japanese for ten years. Walking around the place seeing the characters everywhere reinforced my knowledge of them. I would see a character I had learned and know how to pronounce it even if I didn’t know the context it was being used in. In Japan, with the characters having multiple ways to say them, when I saw a character and didn’t know the word or context it was used in I could never be sure which pronunciation was correct.
Korean is probably the easiest north Asian language to learn if you have to pick one. Its pronunciation is simpler than Chinese while being just a bit more difficult than Japanese. The grammar is very similar to Japanese and it is about the same level when it comes to context. The written system is probably the most phonologically consistent script ever devised by humans and although they do use Chinese characters I understand that one can live there in the Korean language not knowing a single Chinese character and never have a problem with that lack.
Comments
493 responses to “Learning Japanese I think I’m learning Japanese I really think so…”
This is highly unusual and I don’t like it
Domo Arigato
I think that’s pronounced “unrusarrer”.
Fucking weeaboos, am I right?
and their damn anime pillows
*Puts hand in front of mouth and giggles incomprehensibly while making short bows*
Speaking of Japan- I have watched a few episodes (via youtube) of a show called “Begin Japanology”. Good stuff. I watched one on armor the other night. I particularly liked the one about small “factories”. Japanese people make some cool stuff.
Great article Tejicano. I Find the different ways languages operate very interesting,
Same but baffling to me. Without a firm grounding in the basics I’m lost at sea, much akin to higher math or music theory. *kicks pebble and goes to the slow kids’ table*
I’m there with you. One convention that is strange to me is gendered nouns. I learned Spanish but as a native English speaker, I didn’t get much new info from it as I didn’t ever think of things as gendered. The one use case I can think of is being able to talk about two things at once using pronouns.
The gendered nouns don’t click for me either. What determines what gender a noun is? If I create a new noun, how does it get gendered? I’m assuming there’s some rhyme or reason to it, but it just comes across as random to me.
Well what determines it is the articles you use for singular/plural, don’t it?
You have a feminine word like table
O masa / doua mese
You have a masculine one like tree
Un copac / doi copaci
Neutral are the ones with singular masculin / plural feminin like chair
Un scaun / doua scaune
But why is table feminine? Why is tree masculine? And why is chair neutral? That’s the part that gives me trouble. What’s wrong with doi mese or doua copaci? I understand it sounds wrong to a native speaker, but it’s the reason it sounds wrong that eludes me. If I create a new widget, is it masculine, feminine, or neutral?
I blame latin myself.
There is no “why” unless you’re a historical linguist or something. You just learn them and move on.
Why is the past tense of “take” not “taked”? You probably don’t ask yourself that because it’s burned into your brain already.
Or why cant the past tense of “fake” be “fook”?
Because “fake” is a late addition to the English language of unknown origin, originating as London slang, and therefore lacks the strong mutation that other words take in English that survived from its more Germanic origins.
That’s the same reason that foot goes to feet, and tooth goes to teeth, but moose stays moose.
As for grammatical genders, at least the romance languages have the courtesy to generally indicate what gender a noun is; in German you just have to memorize it.
There are ways to make educated guesses in German but of course there are many exceptions.
One cis-shitlords gender everything
I’m there with you Festus. My brain doesn’t seem to grok languages well at all. I’ve never had that light bulb moment where things seem to at least start to click into place. Lots and lots of memorization, and I can at least do blind idiot translation of quite a few words, and lucky guesses at unknown ones from context. But never a time when I’ve felt comfortable doing anything more then basic (like kindergarten level stuff).
Sit me in front of a new computer system, or new phone system, and once I can map the new terms they’re using, I’ll be able to at least have a solid understanding of the system in a day or two.
I took years of French and even went on an exchange program. I can read it, understand it it when spoken but for the life of me I cannot speak it.
Thank you. I find that the topic of Japan and the language comes up here more than I would have expected so maybe a quick description of the language might be useful to some.
When I started learning Japanese 40 years ago I would never have expected it to become so popular or that Japan would have such an influence on American culture.
I lived for 5 years in Okinawa and never went to formal school.
By the end of the first year I could carry on a one on one conversation, by the end of twom or three, I could hang with a group, but my grammar was like a 5 year old with a big vocabulary.
“As an example, there is a Kanji “Roku” (録) which has a meaning similar to “record”.
Must have gotten the word from the name of that machine you use with your TV.
*narrows gaze*
Not quite the post I was expecting in the AM but still a good read.
Weather is racist
Across Baltimore, the hottest areas tend to be the poorest and that pattern is not unusual. In dozens of major U.S. cities, low-income neighborhoods are more likely to be hotter than their wealthier counterparts, according to a joint investigation by NPR and the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.
Those exposed to that extra heat are often a city’s most vulnerable: the poorest and, our data shows, disproportionately people of color. And living day after day in an environment that’s literally hotter isn’t just uncomfortable, it can have dire and sometimes deadly health consequences – a fact we found reflected in Baltimore’s soaring rates of emergency calls when the heat index spiked to dangerous levels.
According to a Howard Center analysis of U.S. Census data and air temperature data obtained from Portland State University and the Science Museum of Virginia, the hottest neighborhoods in Baltimore can differ by as much as 10 degrees from the coolest.
And Baltimore is not an extreme case. NPR analyzed 97 of the most populous U.S. cities using the median household income from Census data and NASA’s thermal satellite images. In more than three quarters of those cities, we found where it’s hotter, it also tends to be poorer. And at least 69 had an even stronger relationship than Baltimore, the first city we mapped.
This means that as the planet warms, the urban poor in dozens of large U.S. cities will actually experience more heat than the wealthy, simply by virtue of where they live. And not only will more people get sick from rising temperatures in the future, we found they likely already are.
Who knew?
OFFTOPIC
Why Swiss, what long teeth you have…
*narrows gaze, bares fangs*
Asphalt gets hotter than grass?
OMFG!
Not to mention, the richest areas are mostly right on the water and there’s always a breeze blowing, well most of the time. Either that or those areas are hilly and forested. The poor areas are like you said, mostly concrete, low lying areas with no trees or waterfront. Again, duh, stupid article.
Their preferred solutions will be expensive and unworkable, and will drive up the costs of housing. Then they’ll be back to demanding expensive and unworkable solutions for unaffordable housing. It’s amazing how progressive policies work out that way.
Moving poor people to rich neighborhoods is the “new” solution.
“a joint investigation by NPR and the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.”
Before I look at the article, I’m going to guess that some of their measurements are expressed with 8 significant digits (I think calculators still display 8 digits).
“Across Baltimore, the hottest areas tend to be the poorest and that pattern is not unusual.”
Translates: Do not have AC. Duh.
Actually, having an AC unit’s heat dissipation system be close to a thermometer is one of the problems woke fucking AGW types like because it provides them with higher temps than there really are…
“As the planet warms…”
There hasn’t been any warming since ’98. It has been cooling slightly since then or staying flat.
If, and that is a big if, it is hotter in poor areas it is likely because more affluent areas have more greenery. Poor urban people tend not to plant or tend greenery because they don’t care and because they don’t have anything vested in those areas. The populations are generally very transient so they see little value in planting and maintaining greenery if they are going to be gone in a year. Poorer areas tend to be lots of bare dirt and concrete.
“And not only will more people get sick from rising temperatures in the future,…”
True to the form of a scam the disaster has been just around the next corner for the last 100 years, at least. Always looming, never arriving.
*face-palm*
Everything is racist!
You mean to tell me that impervious cover makes cities heat islands?
*faints*
I assume this is because the poorest areas have the most blacktop and concrete while wealthier areas have more green space, right?
And these same dipshits want people to live in concentrated housing in urban areas …
Where mah Sportzball go?
http://www.espn.com?
He said sports, not politics.
Don’t watch commieball.
Everton is in 6th. If they would like to cancel the rest of the season, I will accept this position.
I would have gone with this.
#cornholesowhite
An enjoyable article posted on a donation-funded site that AFAIK is no way funded by taxes or the kind(s) of borrowing that is repaid by taxes. Thanks, Tejicano and Heroic Mulatto.
Hey! He just admitted to not paying his dues!!
That is a radical interpretation of the text.
but only one of 208.
Try applying Occam’s Razor and ignoring so-called ‘general semantics’ (which has about as much to do with semantics as fill-in-the-blank justice has to do with justice) to figure out which of the 208 is the correct interpretation.
Try applying Occam’s Razor and ignoring so-called ‘general semantics’ (which has about as much to do with semantics as fill-in-the-blank justice has to do with justice) to figure out which of the 208 is the correct interpretation.
Ok.
You think the site should be banned for improper voluntarism and that we should all be rounded up for insufficient social justice,
also Occam’s Razor is not a logical rule for determining truth, regardless of Occam’s thought about God’s mind. It is a rule for ordering hypotheses to be tested since simpler hypotheses are easier to test.
Just when I’m wondering if my jokes should be more subtle…
Yeah, I got it but then I know all 208 radicals.
What is with the people other than Donation Not Taxation commenting on this subthread? The statement is: “An enjoyable article posted on a donation-funded site that AFAIK is no way funded by taxes or the kind(s) of borrowing that is repaid by taxes. Thanks, Tejicano and Heroic Mulatto.” There is nothing in there about dues, minds of supernatural beings, or banning this site. Try this advice: Stop taking seriously instead of as parody Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. Try laughing at it.
Try laughing at it.
But my hackles don’t get raised that way. Think of the hackles!
Letting Science and Sanity annoy you is better than accepting what Science and Sanity preaches.
I am quite satisfied with Romanian (etc? really?) and English and vague understanding of french/italian and do not really wish to learn another language. I started German (thinking it may help in the engineering fields in Europe) in University but gave it up and did not pick it up again. Japanese is a language I would not even consider really, although back n my amine watching days I always used original audio with subtitles, so there is that.
You’ve never considered Spanish or Italian? I believe they are similar enough to Romanian that it shouldn’t be too much effort (as far as learning a new language can be). They also have a lot of speakers – Spanish in particular – which can be useful while traveling.
STEVE SMITH KNOW LANGUAGE OF LOVE. ONLY LANGUAGE YOU NEED.
And now for a rare scene from a dinner a young STEVE SMITH attended with his mother. (SFW)
Honestly I haven’t. Never was willing to put in the effort because I saw no point, easy as it may be. I spent like 5 months in Italy in University, if I did not learn then…
For now English is sufficient. If some other language would suddenly become dominant I would try to learn that. But, outside of learning well enough to enjoy literature in a certain language, I see no point in learning it.
It is okay for people who enjoy learning languages, I am not one of them.
You seem to have done quite well with English.
English, I would say is both necessary and I started as a small kid so it was easier.
Yeah, it’s the reverse here. We don’t “need” to learn another language so most people don’t. Or like in my case they get some Spanish in elementary school and never look at it again.
When I was living in Switzerland I had an amusing incident while at a touristy destination. Guy comes up to me and asks a question in German, I responded in English. He switched to French. I switched to Spanish. He gave up as we didn’t have a language in common.
There was a joke in Romania.
Two policemen were approached by a tourist who asked a question in English. The cops did not understand. The tourist then tried french, german, russian and italian. Still nothing, so he gives up.
One cop says to the other: Did you see how many languages he knew? The other answers: so what good did it do him.
Same thing…
When traveling through Switzerland about 40 years ago, we were trying to get gas. The station looked abandoned, and we tried to ask a young man nearby (in English) what was going on. He tried German, then Italian, and finally French. I had taken French 2 years earlier and remembered enough to realize he was saying the station was closed.
Then there was the time (also Switzerland) where I ordered a “sandwich du jambon” and the person who took the order turned around and told the server “ham sandwich”.
I know a Romanian who has worked in Barcelona for years with no training in Spanish whatsoever.
As said above, French is the wildcard; my problems are with its Celtic corruptions and obtuse pronunciations.
But seriously now, no one needs 40000 symbols. In my mind that is a sort of primitive writing form. I see no advantages to it over our alphabet. Hell one of the few good things about Romanian it is that is is alphabetic and phonetic.
“But seriously now, no one needs 40000 symbols.”
You know who else was dropped words from language to control people….
The AP style guide?
Heh. Unfortunately they seem to have picked up a few dozen others in the meantime.
Pack it up, Switzy’s won the internets today.
Next comes telling us how many kinds of deodorant we don’t need, how many bullets per clip we don’t need to hunt a deer, the most net worth we need…
Or that no one needs a straw, an AR-15, or a single-page app…
Yes, these are all real-world examples and not just hypothetical.
And all aimed at the same goal.
Maybe there is an article for this site in there somewhere…
I can’t speak for Japanese, but Chinese written with an alphabet would be problematic because most syllables (a consonant-vowel combination, and there are considerably fewer of these than in a Euro-language) have many different characters associated with them. Plug “ma1” into a text editor that allows you enter words by their pronunciation, for example (that’s ma with 1st tone) and you might get a dozen different characters to choose from.
I’m a grouchy Glib this morning. Had to drive home from visiting family in New England yesterday, then pick up my son at the airport at midnight because they evacuated the school and he didn’t feel like sleeping on the gym floor at Clemson for a week.
That sounds like a lot of driving. On the upside, it doesn’t look like the hurricane is going anywhere near New Jersey.
We’re 25 miles inland on the east coast of Florida. My girlfriend’s roommate just took in a college kid from Stetson who was kicked out of the dorm for the storm (she’s a bartender and brings home a different guy every night, sometimes they become repeat offenders). He is in the house 24 hours a day and either ignores us or millennial-splains things that we know are not correct.
Fun!
I cut down a bunch of shit in my yard that I didn’t want to be there anyways and told my wife it was hurricane prep. Its been kind of fun watching her go from anxious to sneering as the storm track moved us out of the Cone of Water Hoarding.
Why do people fight over the supposedly insufficient supply of bottled water a(if news is to be believed) and (if news is to be believed) Publix is having police hang around when the botlled water is unloaded from trucks when there is plenty of water flowing from the tap? Put water in container. If water stops coming from tap, use water from container.
I fill our hot tub and bath tubs. That is used for bathing and toilet flushing. I stock up on some bottled water for drinking and cooking but I also have two water filters that filter out anything down to 0.2 (?) microns. I don’t remember the exact size I just remember all viruses, bacteria and suspended solids are taken out. I also have a bag of activated charcoal that will remove most dissolved junk as well.
In the event of a water outage we are good. I also have a dozen quart sized and 8-5 gallon sized propane bottles filled.
Cooking, eating, bathing and toilet flushing are taken care of.
We have a pretty good stockpile of cases of canned food and a shit ton of batteries and flashlights. A few first aid kits.
I am confident that we could ride out at least two months worth of service interruption.
Before a hurricane I go to the store and buy normal groceries. I am always amused watching people fight over bottled water, batteries and flashlights. Good Lord people, you live in Louisiana. You didn’t prepare before hurricane season? Dummies.
Did not mean to imply that you were among the, as you put it, “Dummies.”
In other hurricane-related pondering: Is it true that Florida, not exactly usually considered proggie central, has one or more “price gouging” law(s) that require charging regular prices for products and services during states of emergency? Wouldn’t legitimate causes for declaring states of emergency lead to increased costs? How much of that water hoarding is because of government-caused artificial shortage?
Yeah I think there is even a hotline you can call to have the state law enforcement apparatus come crashing down on any Kulaks who dare implement congestion pricing. Not the proggiest state in the country, but economic know-nothingism is rampant everywhere, and it’s easy for politicians to pander on helping the little guy, and we just generally have a heapin’ helping of tards.
Florida has a boatload of price-gouging laws. Most other coastal states are following suit.
I have to keep extra paperwork on hand during declared emergencies just in case some schmuck decides I’m charging too much for a generator.
Condolences about the paperwork.
What some linguistics glib should explain to me some times is the deal with synthetic / analytical Fusional/ agglutinative languages. I had difficulty understanding when I though there were clear, distinct categories, each language being one, but then I started to believe there is a overlap and some languages may have characteristics of more than one group.
I believe the only difference between analytic and synthetic languages, despite the big words, is that analytic languages prefer to use auxiliary or helper words to convey meaning, while synthetic languages prefer to use prefixes and suffixes to convey meaning. I think there are hardly any languages that are purely one or the other, although most languages tilt one way.
English is an analytic language, and has become more so over the centuries.
I’m not real sure if the distinction has much use for anybody outside linguistics, including those learning languages, except as a most general indicator of how the language works.
I think I read that Turkish is very close to purely synthetic, but I don’t know if that’s true.
It is. You could if you want form a sentence that’s one word with a verb root and six or eight suffixes expressing tense and other verby stuff, and pronouns.
Synthetic languages are ones that form new words from mutating existing words. Agglutination is the creation of a word by combining morphemes, such as changing theist to atheist by adding the prefix ‘a’. Fusion is when a language changes a word by inflecting a morpheme, think how romance languages handle verb conjugation.
In short, all agglutinative and all fusional languages are synthetic, since those are just subcategories of synthetic languages.
Analytic languages are ones that convey their meaning by various helper words, like particles or prepositions. English is a very analytical language. Best way to illustrate the difference that I can think of off the top of my head, look at the difference between how English treats verbs vs Spanish. In Spanish verbs come differently depending on the subject, so for example mirar changes to miro, miras, miramos, etc, while in English those would be I watch, you watch, and we watch respectively. English requires two words while Spanish combines them into one; that’s because English is analytical and Spanish is fusional.
Hope that helps.
What if you’re allergic to gluten?
Then you have a sad life devoid of bread, and my deepest sympathies.
“In praise of Melania Trump, the first lady treated terribly by the media ”
https://nypost.com/2019/09/01/in-praise-of-melania-trump-the-first-lady-treated-terribly-by-the-media/
Well, she’s not beautiful, classy, and stylish, like Michele Obama is.
One is a grifter who once took a $300k do-nothing job as a payoff for political favors from her husband. The other chose to better herself by relatively honest modeling/sugar daddy seeking.
+ a kajillion she doesn’t talk down to her subjects.
And if she did choose to she could speak down to them in a number of languages.
The best thing about Melania is knowing she won’t run for president after he is out.
But we learned from Hillary that being married to a former President makes you the MOST QUALIFIED EVAR!!111! to be President!
Well there is that but even at her advanced age dat ass still ridin’ high and tight!
“Authorities say the gunman in a West Texas rampage was fired from his job and called both police and the FBI before the mass shooting began.
Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke said Monday that 36-year-old Seth Aaron Ator had been fired over the weekend from Journey Oilfield Services. He said both Ator and the company called 911 after being fired Saturday but that Ator was gone by the time police showed up. FBI special agent Christopher Combs says Ator’s statements on the FBI tip line were “rambling.”
Ator was stopped 15 minutes later by a Texas state trooper on an interstate for failing to signal a lane change. Authorities say Ator opened fire on the troopers and fled, shooting at random passers-by and vehicles.
Police gunned down Ator at a movie theater in Odessa to end the chase.”
https://apnews.com/eef251ac02a74cb7ba195f83a9494c45
“Liberal FEC chairwoman targets online news she considers ‘fraudulent’
New concerns are being raised that online conservative media outlets could face federally imposed censorship going into the 2020 elections.
Years after Republicans on the Federal Election Commission claimed Democrats were targeting conservative speech on outlets like the Drudge Report, the liberal head of the FEC is teaming with an anti-Trump free speech advocacy group to host a symposium targeting online “disinformation.”
The September event is inspired by Russia’s online efforts during the 2016 election and is expected to include Republicans and Democrats as well as big internet firms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Politico reported this week that FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub is hosting the event and summoned the tech giants. Her invitation reads, “The goal of the symposium will be to identify effective policy approaches and practical tools that can minimize the disruption and confusion sown by fraudulent news and propaganda in the 2020 campaign,” according to the outlet.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/liberal-fec-chair-targets-online-news-she-considers-fraudulent
>> Russia’s online efforts during the 2016 election
They got a lot of mileage out of a few Facebook ads that managed to “swing an election”. How stupid do you have to be to believe this?
Fredo level stupid.
That’s racist against retards.
And remember, those Facebook ads were enough to totally counteract the various national media outlets that were in well-documented and totally undisputed collusion with the Democrat Party.
Man. For a bunch of postmodernists they do care about fake news.
“…an anti-Trump free speech advocacy group to host a symposium targeting online “disinformation.”
Alex, what is doublespeak?
What’s most disappointing to me about stories like this is:
(1) How transparently obvious it is that this is a stalking horse for govt censorship;
(2) How utterly simple it is/was to construct a horseshit narrative around “RUSSIAN COLLUSION!!!1!!1!!” and, worst of all,
(3) Get Progs (who claim to be ‘liberals’) to jump right the fuck on board
I can’t decide which of these 3 is the most depressing aspect of all of them.
Republicans won’t complain because they know that as long as Dems keep blaming Facebook they will keep losing elections.
Republicans won’t complain because they are quite comfy as the controlled opposition/minority.
The problem is that Dems bitching about Facebook will get Facebook to tilt even further anti-anything-but-SJW-prog.
“Gyrating ROBOTS debut at French pole dancing club, with the androids performing alongside human counterparts
A French nightclub has caused a stir after it exhibited pole-dancing robots donning high heels.
The gyrating robots had CCTV cameras for heads and were interspersed among their human counterparts at the Strip Club Cafe (SC-Club) in Nantes on Friday night.
The androids moved their hips in time to the blasting music while on elevated platforms, in front of a male-dominated audience.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7418523/Gyrating-ROBOTS-debut-French-pole-dancing-club.html
I don’t get strip clubs. I get robot strip clubs even less.
I don’t think you could have a robot strip club unless robots wore clothes.
>>I don’t get strip clubs.
You walk in with a bunch of money. You leave with less money. Titties and overpriced beer are somewhere in the middle.
And usually the booze is bad and it is full of weirdos.
It is much classier to go to a nice erotic massage parlor. Intimate, you can get a pole dance/lap dance and a rub and tug. For probably same or less $$
In my experience the weirdos are either right up front or hiding in the shadows at the back. (Full disclosure, I had stripper friends).
I never drink booze with weirdos in it.
If her titties are somewhere in the middle it’s past time for her to retire.
You are gonna be sued by some granny catering to the crowd that likes titties to hang down past the belly button…
For a while it seemed like all my male friends were trying to become the kind of guys who go to strip clubs and enjoy themselves, but it never quite took. One of my friends referred to the after-odor of stripper perfume as the “scent of moral hangover”. I went a few times and quickly realized that if I have to be drunk to enjoy something it’s not actually fun. So I took up sports betting as my token degeneracy. At least I wind up coming away with more money than I put in most of the time.
I stopped enjoying strip clubs when my daughter was born.
This guy gets it.
Oh, so like Ex Machina (clicks link) WTF??!!?
The Atlantic is concerned…
Britain’s ‘Brexit Election’ Won’t Consider What Comes After
It seems like a fairly even-handed article, even critical of the radical Labour proposals. This was interesting:
Brexit will force Britain to become Libertopia? From your keyboard to God’s ears. I’m skeptical there are as many free market people in power now as he makes it sound.
frictionless European trade
Only if you ignore the mountain of regulations imposed by the EU.
Fucking Atlantic may as well swim back across their namesake and have done with it.
They still have excellent articles from time to time.
I think they should just give up and stop in the middle somewhere… and sink.
We have reached the point in our civilization where rich countries try to outretard each other. Yes you may think England or Sweeden have the upper hand, but there are many contenders
Teaching children so-called 21st- century soft skills, such as how to think creatively and solve global problems, should take precedence over specific subject areas such as English, mathematics and science, according to top universities.
https://twitter.com/australian/status/1168720269214568448
The #18to8 campaign is asking Canada to lower the voting age to make sure that climate change is on top of the ballot.
https://twitter.com/DavidSuzukiFDN/status/1165974334835499008
8 year olds dude.
“The David Suzuki Foundation is dedicated to protecting the diversity of nature and inspiring Canadians to act with nature in mind.”
Sounds like a pederast.
The TV show Sliders had an episode “The Young and the Relentless” with a parallel universe/alternate timeline/whatever in which the voting age was 9 and MANDATORY retirement was 30.
“Bonk Bonk on the head!”
Given that
1) Most 8 year olds follow in mommy and daddy’s footsteps
2) Conservatives are, by and large, natalists and the anti-natalist forces are all on the left,
I don’t see this working out like they expect. Do they really want the 19 kids and counting family to cast 21 votes and counting? Is that the goal here?
“and solve global problems, ”
Why is it ok to preach this insanity. Teaching people to try to solve problems on a global scale. That’s ridiculous.
Everybody knows the feels are more important than the skills.
For HM or anyone else who knows:
Finnish and Korean are no longer considered to be from the same language group, right?
From my limited Linguistics classes 30 years ago, this was taught, but even then it was tentative.
I would think they would be related if both were mongol in origin… No idea really but doubtful.
Wikipedia says it is in Uralic family, similar to Hungarian. It is in the Finnic group, along with Estonian.
Theories proposing a close relationship with the Altaic languages were formerly popular, based on similarities in vocabulary as well as in grammatical and phonological features, in particular the similarities in the Uralic and Altaic pronouns and the presence of agglutination in both sets of languages, as well as vowel harmony in some. For example, the word for “language” is similar in Estonian (keel) and Mongolian (хэл (hel)). These theories are now generally rejected[67] and most such similarities are attributed to language contact or coincidence.
I dunno man Finnish is weird, Probably Hungarian as well.
But Finnish girls can be ethereally hot, so there is that.
I had thought so too but Heroic Mulatto – in editing the above article for me – told me that this is not what most linguists think anymore. They even group Japanese separate from Korean – which seems puzzling as the people I know who speak both Japanese and Korean have told me that the grammar is very similar.
AOC mocks Straight Pride parade over lack of women, calls it ‘I-Struggle-With-Masculinity’ march
Ouch. But she’s still on the wrong side of history.
“”The organizers of the Straight Pride Parade have long and well-documented ties to white supremacists and anti-immigrant movements,” a protester said. “In general, they are fascists who believe that they are the only acceptable type of being.””
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boston-straight-pride-parade-today-dueling-protests-break-out-city-hall-2019-08-31/
That’s some fine news work there, Lou.
“…what I like to call the basket of deplorables…”
What genius decided it was acceptable for pols to insult large blocks of the population? I think at some point between 2008 and 2016 they crossed the line into thinking dividing the country and sparking either a cold or hot civil war is their only viable path to complete power. I blame Obama. I can think of a thousand things he did that were nothing more than a double middle finger to Americans and American ideals. He emboldened the radicals like AOC. She is one nasty piece of work, that one. I don’t see anything good coming out of this strategy.
They seem to have convinced themselves that anyone not on their side is a mortal enemy to be eradicated, branch, stem and root. It really is unprecedented in modern American history. Delenda est Carthago.
“It really is unprecedented in modern American history.”
Bleeding Kansas would like to have a few words with you.
+ 1 bitter clinger.
I think at some point between 2008 and 2016 they crossed the line into thinking dividing the country and sparking either a cold or hot civil war is their only viable path to complete power. I blame Obama.
The only thing that changed between 2008 and 2016 is that the left convinced themselves that they had a critical mass of voters and could accelerate their destruction of western civ. Obama was simply their blinking indicator to start Project Fuck Up The World.
Blame rests in the original progressive Era. Weimar Era German college students were doing similar racial and gender division.
Bingo. I can’t remember how many articles I saw from the MSM during Obama’s years telling us all about the “demographic inevitability” of one-party rule. The Progs/Team Blue saw Obama as the bellwether of their ascendancy. Herself’s inevitable coronation was going to prove it. I mean, if the Dems could win with such a completely miserable harridan, who couldn’t they elect? Trump’s victory put the lie to all of it and his second election would be the stake in the heart of their presumed electoral inheritance.
This, and this alone, is sufficient to explain the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed, including the talk of MUH POPULAR VOTE, abolishing the electoral college, insulting the voters, invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, packing the Supreme Court, impeachment, etc. ALL of those things are reflective of trying to undo/redo the election. And they still haven’t stopped.
Watch what happens when he wins again.
“A couple of counter-demonstrators scuffled with police and threw dirt and eggs at them.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417287/Alexandra-Ocasio-Cortez-mocks-Bostons-Straight-Pride-parade-tweet.html
Straight Pride Parades are silly affairs, to be honest.
So are LGBQT pride parades. It’s mostly just a matter of who you happen to be sexually attracted to; it’s not an accomplishment to take pride in.
No but if it was something historically shameful, it is not unusual to have something in your face as a thing. Only it should go away after a period of wide acceptance.
Straight PrideParades are silly affairs, to be honest.Though, I can see the appeal for small towns celebrating something like winning state.
“Hey everybody, let’s all march down main street! We’ll get the high school band to play while they walk and old people and kids can watch us!”
I don’t understand the appeal of parades, and I’m the kind of person who will watch reruns of non-major golf tournaments. I just don’t understand why you’d want to stand somewhere and watch people walk for attention.
EF loves to go the local parade on the 4th of July; and the homecoming parade too.
I find them a bore and I’m ready to leave as soon as possible – different strokes different folks.
Parades are simply opportunities for mass shootings, vehicular manslaughter, and tramplings.
This is why I watch them… from a distance.
I think we know that everybody secretly hopes one of the floats will go postal and run over the marching band.
I don’t like parades or festivals either (and I’ve marched in a fair few, being a part of a Boy Scout Troop that could reliably show up on time, in uniform, and able to hold a flag off the fucking ground), but to a large number of people they bring a lot of community-minded satisfaction.
I don’t like parades either, and the only ones I’ve been to are ones I’ve been in (helping my wife who is a local elected official).
“While organizers claimed that the parade had no ties to white supremacy, one person’s sign does include the hand gesture commonly associate with white supremacy”
OK
” commonly associate with white supremacy”
You left out [by morons]. These guys seem like trolls. Making the Same point the “it’s ok to be white” posters did: that even benign everyday statements will be twisted into being bigotry.
The trolling is the entire point here. The intent was to get the media to pounce and unleash more nonsense from the likes of AOC and they were glad to oblige.
Commonly associated by whom? One person’s sign?
The ‘OK’ hand gesture is racist, sure. Could these people be more mendacious?
I’d wager that there were no free blow-jobs offered at the Straight Pride Parade.
TANSTAAFL
She doesn’t get the joke.
Nice job trying to parody a parody.
OT: Could be wrong, but IIRC, Miguel Alcubierre claims that it was because of Star Trek that he thought of his version.
Also, could be wrong, but IIRC, the Morris-Thorne-Yurtsever-type wormhole model was inspired by Carl Sagan wanting reality for that part of his book Contact.
Noted Sex Freak Robert Heinlein also invented the waterbed a decade before the first one was on the market.
But did Charles Hall claim he got the idea from reading, talking to, etc. Heinlein?
Note to other Glibs: A Leap at the Wheel typed about waterbeds hitting the market, not the first waterbed.
There is a good reason that English, despite its flaws, is considered The international language. Not easy to learn but by far the most expressive and flexible. I have heard that French is a better language for literature but for speaking English is the shit.
Not easy to learn – I think it is hard to learn well but it is easy to learn to be understood.
The grammar is simple from that point of view – you will make a ton of mistakes put people will get your point.
You have an uncanny grasp of the language. Your English is superior to most native English speakers I know.
Tell us again, where and when did you learn English?
Yeah, I was quite surprised when I first learned that Pie was not a native English speaker.
Well as I said before, mostly reading / cartoons / movies. A lot of cartoon / movies.
ton of mistakes put people will get your point.
*stands for ovation*
I generally correct internal documents written by some in my department at work and they are all intelligible, especially since spell check exists. The issues are often wrong word order, missing articles, some verb tense errors and not coordinating the verb with the subject (singular/plural)
” The issues are often wrong word order”
That’s the most common mistake I see with English from non native speakers. And it’s not hard to understand what the speaker meant.
Savvy professionals find a way.
I took a French supplier to a German client officed in PDX once, and a bit of the conversation which they were good enough to make in English went something like this:
FR: yes, but such that as requiring new toolings
DE: natural, and the kosten?
FR: fifety fife tousand dollar US
DE: okay, we will do it
I’ve had Mandarin staff communicate with Cantonese mostly in English, and it always sounds like they’re mad at each other.
Chinese people always seem to be angry about something. A surly lot!
I was in a meeting in Shanghai and asked a Beijing native what the Shanghainese were saying. His response was “Fuck if I know.”
I’ve heard it said that describing Mandarin and Cantonese as Chinese “dialects” is like describing French, Spanish, and Italian as Latin “dialects”.
Yup, very much that.
Cantonese has eight tones, I believe, while Mandarin “only” 4 (+ neutral – fucking liars! That’s FIVE!! Just say we have FIVE tones, not four.)
Depending on where we are in the hiring/layoff cycle, we’ve got people from between fifty or sixty countries working here. Lots of different accented English is heard.
At a previous job, I sat near these two Indian ladies who would speak their own language if they were only talking to each other, but there would be random English phrases thrown in like “press F12” and “save your document”. It was strange.
One of the major problems with English is how it is written. They took the simplest way to write a language (phonetic alphabet), scrambled it with spelling samples from a number of languages, then let it go wild for a few centuries without any spelling rules. We pronounce over a dozen different vowels but try to spell them with a, e, i, o, u, and y. And technically speaking, our “r” is a vowel.
English is one of the very few languages where they have spelling contests. Spanish and Italian are pronounced exactly as they are written.
And yet I’ve seen plenty of poorly spelled Spanish signs.
The big problem for English is that spelling was starting to get standardized before a huge shift occurred in pronunciation.
The Other Brother Duo That Brought Us the Modern GOP
Before the Kochs, there were the Pews.
Toxic. Masculinity.
I actually met J. Howard and he gave me a $100 contribution for a conservative college group. I still have a surplus bookcase that he had Sun Oil donated to our scruffy little office.
I wonder what the nice conservative gentleman would say about my subsequent libertarian career?
Enough with the gibberish. This is ‘Murica so we speak ‘Murican. //jk
But seriously, where are the links? I am having withdrawal here even though I responsibly fail to actually read them.
FTA: “NOTE: sloopy is wobbling, and chugging Vick’s products – Dayquil/Nyquil/ZZZquil – who knows? So, as part of a very Japanese Day here at Glibs…enjoy!”
I was kinda surprised to see this posted so soon. No problem with it, I just expected it would be sometime next week.
Circumstances, man….circumstances.
Want some historical wrong-think? A story about Hernando Cortez and his band of heroes (most veterans of the reconquista) taking down a murderous blood-cult and liberating the Aztec people.
Nonsense, I have it on good authority every Columbus Day that all Native Americans were wise philosophers, living in harmony with nature and with each other!
That trope is especially annoying since it’s well known that the Native Americans burned forests, redirected rivers, and used every resource that the ecosystem had to offer. I seriously doubt that their ecological philosophy in any way resembled that of modern Leftists. Every race of humans in history has sought to use the environment for their own well being.
I read The History of the Conquest of Mexico back when I was about 23. A page-turner and a one of the books that swayed me toward you guys.
‘I’m Finally Making Money, But It Doesn’t Feel Great’
Just once, I want the advice columnist to write:” I don’t know, that sounds like a you problem “
“Stop it!”
Newhart was and is one of the funniest dudes evah.
^This
Astonishing comedic timing. He can do more with a pause than most comics can do with a monologue.
Easy. Send a monthly check payable to Naptown Bill, P.O. Box 12345, Annapolis, MD.
It’s like now that I have all this extra money, I feel like I’ve become this whole new person I don’t recognize. How can I go back to being someone who’s fine with mismatched plates and thrift-store items, instead of this trend follower with a perfect house filled with nice shit that doesn’t matter?
Perhaps you’ve always been a shallow consumer, but this was masked by your lack of funds?
Or, maybe you should stop buying trendy crap that doesn’t really seem to make you happy?
That’s right. Spend all your money on non-trendy crap that brings you value to your life. Like cocaine and hookers. What’s the point in having all this money if you can’t send it up your nose from the ass crack of a 19 year old with daddy issues?
I went on something a spending spree this weekend.
I bought (1) some smallish zip up pouches for packing things when travelling (on BOGO sale at Maxpedition) (2) a new karambit (on sale at karambits.com) and (3) some bling for Mrs. Dean’s FJ Cruiser (mileage badges (on sale) and a new fuel door cover). Total spend – a little over $300, nearly half of that on the knife. I can’t remember the last time I spent that much on those kind of “small” non-essentials in a 2 week period.
Don’t get me wrong – we drop some serious change, mostly on (high-end) stuff for the house – furniture, new lighting, etc. That stuff, though, is vetted for the long run – our question is “Will this be the last X we buy, ever?”. If the answer is yes, we go ahead (eventually).
Man, wouldn’t it be easier for the Japanese to learn English?
Nice and informative article, Tejicano! Back in the ’80s when the Japanese were going to take over the world, I knew a number of people who were busily trying to learn the language. Joke’s on them, huh?
“wouldn’t it be easier for the Japanese to learn English?”
They are actually doing what they can to get there.
There still is quite a bit of use in speaking Japanese if you are in a job which puts you in Japan frequently. It kinda depends on what your role is and how many Japanese you have to work with.
Oh, absolutely. I was just kidding around, since it’s apparently the Chinese who will be taking over the world.
I’m betting on the Laotians.
You damn right.
I happened to look at the faculty of my old high school and they’ve now dropped Japanese. Spanish and French continue to dominate with a single German teacher. When I went, the Japanese teacher (among a couple other teaching hats) also tutored Mandarin Chinese.
Young dumb me thought those were way too difficult and just did a minimal amount of Spanish.
My HS German teacher started a Japanese class there in my last year.
Last I checked they’re down to the usual Spanish, French, Latin.
Never had Latin around here. My dad took both Latin and Greek in catholic schools where he grew up.
Meanwhile, the largest school district near me runs Spanish, Japanese, and soon to be Mandarin, immersion schools/sub schools.
It used to be 3 schools in one – one for STEM, one for Classics, and one for, uh, slow kids. Now it’s some “International Baccalaureate” thingy.
I was in the STEM one, all classes were pre-programmed but in the last couple years I had some space to take Latin from the other school. Greek would have been cool af.
What’s the point of an all powerful state, if every four years we give a chance for someone like Trump to take charge. It’s time to talk about outlawing the Republican party.
Just wait until Texas turns blue…
https://abc7chicago.com/armed-mob-demands-chicken-sandwiches-at-texas-popeyes/5510228/
Is that why they’re getting so shoot em up down there?
>>that a mob of two women, three men and a baby were told at the drive-thru
that’s a small mob
If you read the article the right way, it’s almost as if the baby tried to rush the door and then just went back to the car and was like, “Get me my sandwich. No witnesses.”
Great read!
I remember first ‘learning’ Korean. Flashcards ready and was gonna get the alphabet down. After a week or so of practice I couldn’t make it stick. Threw the cards down.
A couple days later I looked at them again and could make all the sounds. I’m a sign reader so that’s how I practiced. Easiest shit to sound out. Still don’t know shit other than basic politeness, numbers (only the set that is used for numbers. The other number set I only know up to 4. I asked a friend why that’s almost always the case with expats. “I never had to order anything more than 4” was the answer I got, and it seemed pretty universal.) Food. Simple shit.
I never wanted to learn Korean other than be able to get around by myself. Tremendously anxious introvert. I spent all day slowing down my language and vocabulary to match by students’ ability. After 9 hours of that I didn’t want or find any need to learn how to speak properly. It’s one of my favorite things about living abroad. No one talks to me. It’s quite lovely.
Job interview tomorrow and freelance work apace. Thankfully in English. My Thai is non-existent.
Good luck with your interview!
Good luck!
“Deleted this tweet because Obama’s Labor Day statements included this language too”
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1168592760389038080
Christ, what an asshole.
If you were asked to envision the kind of millennial hipster asshole who would write for Vox, I think most people would imagine a face that looks exactly like Aaron Rupar’s.
Titty Tuesday, minus the tentacles.
http://archive.is/th3Rz
1 and 7: future ex-Mrs. Qs.
Holy smokes, that’s a good lineup.
#1 kinda looks like this chick I used to work with at a local bar way back in the day if she ditched the angst and the liberal arts degree and decided to take care of herself a bit.
30 is adorable.
28 is in for a rude awakening.
2 is hot but with abs like that you know she’s a pain in the ass to be around.
34 works on many levels.
I appreciate strong abs as much as the next man, but I don’t want to talk about Crossfit or not be able to enjoy french fries in public.
20
Kurt Eichenwald has a sad.
#11
Naked pensioner, 68, caught having sex with a COW as perv is fined just £8
“Sicko Manoon Bunjin,”
Are they syndicating Trump?
I doubt that poor cow even noticed Manoon Bunjin’s affections.
Sounds like a really good practical joke played by his friends…
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on Saturday, August 31, mocked Boston’s controversial “Straight Pride Parade,” and suggested that it should have been called an “I-Struggle-With-Masculinity” march as press coverage of the event showed that it was mostly attended by men.
Their wimmin were home making sammiches, where they belong.
Again, the only people who seem to genuinely struggle with masculinity are AOC and her awful coworkers.
Thicccccc
You’re siccccc
Hey, it’s Mama Cass.
Not enough beer or money in the world but my name ain’t Manoon Bunjin.
“More people than ever are identifying as LGBT.
And this increase is almost entirely found among millennial women…
Are these women simply more comfortable “coming out,” or are other environmental factors influencing these changes?
We’re Getting GAYER!”
https://twitter.com/TheLaurenChen/status/1168696448059416576
“We’re Getting GAYER? Environmental & Genetic Effects on Sexuality | Ep 75”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROzQcXiqA1k
Uh huh. In my day we called these “LUGs”.
Haha! When I worked at the women’s prison, they were “LURDs” – lesbian until release date.
What is this called again? College Lesbian?
“Lesbian Until Graduation”
ah that’s it. Lesbian until it’s time to score a high status husband.
Someone check the frogs!!!
Well, how else can Basic Beckys score some all-important victim cred?
My Ex had a cousin that we were pretty tight with that ventured off to Uni. Do you know how disturbing it it is to see a near “10” with leg and pit hair that put most men to shame? Yeah, she later married a dude and had children of her own. Lives a perfectly normal suburban life. She did turn me on to Ani Difranco, so there is that.
Thicccc af
Nuppin wrong with that!
Look at meeeeee!
Not that I don’t thoroughly enjoy the AM links, but I do love some language articles.
I spent a few years in Ontario as a very young kid–family moved around–and allegedly picked up a good bit of French just by talking to other kids in the neighborhood and watching French cartoons. Later, from middle school through high school, I took French and found it pretty easy, presumably because I’d already had some exposure, or maybe because there’s something to the idea that exposing kids to multiple languages early on makes it easier for them to learn any other languages later. I never quite reached fluency, but I could carry on a conversation. I think had I gone to a Francophile environment I would’ve gotten by just fine and become fluent in short order.
I really loved learning new languages, so I took a couple years of German, Japanese, and Mandarin. After I got out of college I let a lot of that slide, and I’m pretty much back at square one, which sucks. I’ve started in with Duolingo, though, and am brushing back up on French with some success. Spanish is next on the list, I think, just because it’s potentially very useful around here.
Thiccc
Nah, but these ladies are though.
https://nypost.com/2019/08/31/calvin-klein-is-using-plus-size-models-to-reinvent-its-brand/
How did we go from anorexic waif to land whale?
It’s like they’re incapable of conceptualizing a happy medium.
They should hire me as a consultant.
Because all women, no matter how fat and disgusting, are now beautiful creatures to be lusted after.
Right? I think the most attractive women are the ones that don’t look like they’ll need medical intervention within the week.
Round and aground!
I’ll have a large order of vacuous platitudes, with a big bowl of vapid nonsense for dessert
What would a Green New Deal do in terms of ordinary people’s lives? If a person who has a 9 to 5 job that wouldn’t be directly impacted by this sector were to live in a post–Green New Deal society, what would that look like for them?
So let’s just think about a day in the life of an average person in a city. A post-Green New Deal experience would have going to work on public transit or by walking or bicycling because we’ve made investments in walkable transportation-oriented cities. Not engaging in fossil fuel extraction, of course, but engaging in a labor process that produces sustainable commodities. In the community, those individuals might enjoy public utilities that are largely subsidized at federal expense. So that way the brunt of the rate impacts of a rapid transition to renewables is not born wholly upon rate-payers and participating in things like a community-oriented provision like Victory Gardens, neighborhood organizing and the like.
Salon gets an “economist” to validate their delusions about the Green New Deal.
“How do we pay for all this? What a silly question. We just get out our National Checkbook and start writing.”
We’ll all get paid a living wage to become community organizers and urban organic farmhands.
There it is.
AKA “Smash the system!”
Yep. Communism. The surprise ending is so surprising.
I suspect we’ve got a Glib or two who could do a “modern monetary theory for noobs” post. My vague impression is that it may work OK for “money as unit of exchange”, but falls flat on its face when confronted with “money as store of value”. Good money has to do both.
AFAIK, the Federal Reserve and the central banks are legally allowed to do something others cannot. They can just put some numbers on a spreadsheet and claim that it is money.
AFAIK, according to Milton Freidman, there are two causes of inflation. One is the wage-price-productivity spiral (when productivity is constant, this spiral becomes the wage-price spiral). The other is rate of change of money supply exceeding rate of change of products and services to be bought by money. Think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams when making leaves money made everyone money-rich, but how expensive peanuts were, so they were not stuff-rich.
AFAIK, modern monetary theory (MMT) claims that the link to inflation does not apply to spreadsheet money.
AFAIK, the core of modern monetary theory (MMT) is that the preferred economic policy is massive government spending, massive government deficits, and the purchase of government promissory paper (or paperless equivalent) using this spreadsheet money.
Shorter DNT: “MMT is ivory tower idiocy.”
>>would have going to work on public transit or by walking or bicycling because we’ve made investments in walkable transportation-oriented cities.
oh please, Mr. Kommisar, can I take a bus(an extra 40-50 minutes of my time versus driving), walk (too far or too damn cold), or take a bike (freeze to death in the winter plus dangerous ice) to my job that takes 12-15 minutes by car. Where do I sign up for this utopia?
So if a Green New Deal isn’t [passed], what would the consequences be both ecologically and economically?
If it is not passed? To put it bluntly, I think that we’re staring down a “Mad Max” situation here. You know, not to be alarmist, but I do think that our current institutions are not equipped to deal with the scarcity that will emerge due to higher average temperatures, a loss of traditional, arable land, mass migration due to climate refugees, common property value increases or depression and just an upending of the sort of status quo, however bad it’s been, given that current scarcity mindset results in very bad outcomes for most people. I think the rich will have a divine time, like they always do. But I think that for most of us we’ll be facing very lean and scarce conditions. So I tend to… When you ask me “How do you pay for it, how much does it cost?” I tend to to say, “Look, what is the cost to be a company that you can not pass? What are the economic costs of having to face legitimate scarcity, several generations until we’re all dead?”
Let’s turn the country over to the Doomsday cultists.
Because scarcity doesn’t exist right now. We can just print our problems away.
This guy is a retard.
>>we’re staring down a “Mad Max” situation here.
Just walk away.
I’m a bad person: this made me laugh
Hu, so that’s where Laquon Treadwell ended up.
De Blasio logged a 7-hour work month at City Hall
Legend.
A protester in Hong Kong grabs the canisters of tear gas and drops it into liquid nitrogen, turning it into its harmless solid form.
And he makes it look casual.
Asians and their science, man.
Ok, that was pretty badass.
The obvious takeaway to Democrats is that science should only be taught in the armed services.
Well, they did invent kung fu.
You can bet that Taiwanese special forces are in Hong Kong teaching the locals techniques like this. They are certainly helping them point out the facial recognition cameras and the best ways to take them out.
But you can also expect the PRC to be sending in their own people to create false flag issues – make the Hong Kong protesters as violent and out of control as possible.
“Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
I guess someone from the Chinese government got in touch with Twitter’s Truth and Safety Commission.
Looks like Twitter took those pages down. Imagine that, Twitter siding with the Chinese govt or doing their bidding.
reliable source
The future is not looking bright for oil, according to a new report that claims the commodity would have to be priced at $10-$20 a barrel to remain competitive as a transport fuel.
The new research, from BNP Paribas, says that the economics of renewable energy make it impossible for oil to compete at current prices. The author of the report, global head of sustainability Mark Lewis, says that “renewable electricity has a short-run marginal cost of zero, is cleaner environmentally, much easier to transport and could readily replace up to 40% of global oil demand”.
Not counting the billions of dollars we’ll have to spend on it, that electricity is free. I say, let’s do it.
We’re in lunatic territory now.
>>“The competitive advantage is set to shift decisively in favour of EVs over oil-powered cars in the next five years. In our view, this is much sooner than the oil industry thinks,” BNP Paribas says.
yeah… whatever he is smoking…
Sure, but the same can be said for wind-powered transport. It’s the yacht that’s expensive.
“much easier to transport”
Oil pipelines bad, inefficient electricity pipelines good.
The market has been sorting this all out for centuries. But these nitwits want to believe railroads only switched to diesel from steam because government forced them to.
Written by Forbes. Fucking Forbes.
Teeve Torbes is rolling in his grave.
If ‘renewable’ energy is less expensive than $20 a barrel oil why the hell do we need regulations? Just let the market drive the switch. Oh wait, they are lying again.
New Jersey’s ‘Dream’ Mall: 40 Million People and a Traffic Nightmare
Oh, but we will try. Retail will never die! Retail will never die!
I used to (and may again very soon) drive past that shitshow every morning. I can testify that is nestled between some of the most congested and worst roads ever seen. Route 3 is continually under construction but never actually gets any better. The road randomly transitions from 4 to 3 to 2 lanes and back again for no reason other than to cause traffic. My free time and money will be spent staying as far away from there as possible.
I will be asking my “Republican” State Senator who voted for much higher gas taxes for road improvements why the roads didn’t get any better. Then I’ll be voting for somebody else.
New Jersey is progtopia – it will only get worse. I live only a few miles from that abomination of a mall, and you couldn’t pay me to go there.
I will be asking my “Republican” State Senator who voted for much higher gas taxes for road improvements why the roads didn’t get any better
If NJ politics is anything like MD politics, it will take years before the roads get improved. In some sense, the extra money is just there to grease the wheels. All the real work will be done by contractors, and their bids are mostly a function of what it costs to get work done in the state. For example, Gov. Hogan (also a “Republican”) has been in office for 5 years but all of a sudden all of the roads are being worked on, every-goddamn-where, all at once.
That money has already disappeared into the void that is the state budget.
It all goes to public employee pensions, salaries, benefits, etc. Need more and more tax money to keep buying those votes.
It’s not even vote buying so much as a complete lack of opposition. You have state employees “negotiating” with other state employees for more money and benefits, and then having those results get enshrined as the only sacrosanct “contract” in the entire country by yet more state employees (judges). The only oppositional force is the voters, who are at this point so disconnected from the process as to be almost irrelevant, plus they are told the great lie that it is “the rich” who are paying for all these salaries and benefits for the “the workers” in state gov’t (actual work is optional).
Check out this bit of outrageous corruption:
And nothing else happened.
‘Astounding numbers’: 75 sex trafficking investigations reveal tip of the iceberg
Just the tip…
They’ve gone out and busted prostitutes 75 times this year? And they’re proud of that?
Behold the miracle of “sex trafficking.” Transform a questionable law enforcement activity into a noble enterprise with just two easy words.
Weird Treasures Line The Bottom Of NYC’s Murky Waterways
“The problem is going to be it’s so congested that you can’t get there,” said Senate President Steve Sweeney, a South Jersey Democrat.
“Nobody goes there. It’s too crowded.”
Costco opened their first store in China on the 27th of last month.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/costco-opens-china-draws-such-massive-crowds-it-has-close-n1046801
Don’t you wish you were there?
Welcome to Costco, I love you!
China gets a Costco before my town?
You don’t have enough rude cheap Chinese around.
Read by millions — but savaged by critics — the author has a new book on police violence, campus rape and other bleak terrain
We should have canceled this ugly mug years ago, yalls.
Not true – critics hated Chappelle’s special, just like they will hate Bill Burr’s upcoming special, and because of the critical response no one will either view those specials or pay to see the comedians perform.
I’m trying to figure out what that article is about. It seems more of a criticism of the Gladwell phenomenon than a review of his book.
I like his podcast a lot. He usually has an interesting take on things, and isn’t just towing someone’s lion.
I guess it’s not surprising that in the article, it describes his average listener as me, just off by 2 years in age and a few states.
Gladwell is Joe Rogan for the kinds of people with a lot of education, no fucking actual intellect, and no interest in actually learning anything that isn’t spoon fed to them.
Actually, Joe Rogan has a lot more intellectual rigor than Gladwell. He never claimed to be an expert on anything other than stand up and liking UFC.
This is spot on. Gladwell doesn’t come off as nearly intellectually curious as someone like Rogan is even though I would wager he’s more than intellectually capable. Same kind of thing with NPR’s line of exploratory podcast especially say planet money or really any piece that explores an underground economy they don’t ever really go where the interesting questions actually are, they sometimes get really close but they never go beyond scratching the surface to make a truly interesting indepth dive. Even when they have something truly interesting like their recycling two parter several months ago they don’t ever completely deliver even when they have a very interesting subject matter. It’s hard to know if they are just not quite intelligent or they have a deliberate framework they can’t get around. I understand I probably find different things interesting than them but they aren’t even all that curious about basic questions such as profit motive or costs. On a fucking show called planet money.
Sportsball, little things matter edition:
Richy Werenski (who is a GT alum, which is why I know these details, but that isn’t what is interesting in this case) finished 126th on PGA tour this year. Top 125 get the full exemption next year. With one more birdie he would have been 125th.
He played in the Korn Ferry* Tour finals and birdied 2 of the final 4 holes yesterday to get the last spot for a new PGA tour card. The 50 Korn Ferry qualifiers aren’t guaranteed entry into every regular event, it depends on number of spots available due to exempt players not playing. The priority list determines who gets the open spots. He is the bottom of that list.
The next category down is players who finished 126-150 on the PGA tour, so he was top of that list. So he literally moved up 1 spot on the list. That will probably not make any difference. EXCEPT (and here is where it gets fun), With the categories are reordered every so often (its a set schedule) based on performance. Since he was top of previous group, no matter how he performed, he couldn’t move up and could sort down the list. At bottom of new category, he can only sort up.
That little bump in rank may make the difference from being able to play about 10-12 events next season to being able to play a near full schedule (assuming he performs well this fall when there are plenty of spots open).
Golf is already a cruel game, the PGA system can make it even crueler.
*Sponsor replacing web.com, the new name is so awful I will mention it every chance I get.
Korn Ferry’s “about us” page:
God bless consultants.
more than what?
It takes $225/hr to find out.
Only $225/hr?
Pay us to find out.
Rampant starvation and impoverishment. Gloom and despair.
Many of the ills cited by B4IG and the Business Roundtable can be traced to one culprit: Too many companies pay their workers less than a living wage, which means they must forgo basic necessities or fall deeper into debt. It’s nakedly unsustainable, and big corporations are beginning to realize that they can’t continue to neglect workers. Jamie Dimon, chairman of the Business Roundtable and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., which is also a member of B4IG, acknowledged in the Business Roundtable’s press release that, “Major employers are investing in their workers and communities because they know it is the only way to be successful over the long term.”
It’s not just the long term companies are worried about. Some lawmakers are eager to tackle inequality and have already floated proposals to redistribute income to struggling workers, including higher corporate tax rates, a wealth tax, near-confiscatory marginal tax rates for high earners and taxing unrealized capital gains. The cost of those proposals to companies, executives and shareholders is likely to be considerably higher than simply paying workers a decent wage. The Business Roundtable and B4IG are no doubt trying to get ahead of lawmakers’ efforts.
——–
There are other signs that fixing wage inequality is no small task. For example, the median employee compensation at roughly half of the largest 1,000 U.S. companies by market value falls short of a living wage for a family of four. The median household income in the U.S. is roughly 25% less than the amount needed to cover living costs for a family of four in Midwestern cities such as Omaha, Kansas City, Milwaukee or Cleveland, according to EPI estimates, never mind the more expensive locales on the coasts. And the income Gini index, which measures the degree of income inequality, is at a record high, according to the Census Bureau.
Big corporations seem to realize the extent of the problem and that workers can’t continue laboring for less than a living wage. The bigger question is whether executives and shareholders have the will to open their pocketbooks before the government makes them.
Everywhere I go, I am surrounded by the gaunt, malnourished victims of capitalism, desperately struggling to survive one more agonizing day.
*Definition of “living wage” sold separately.
and when a company starts to have financial problems – workers are the first to go.
I’m still trying to figure out where this notion came from that you’re entitled to raise a “family of four” on any job in existence. If you make the legal minimum, what are you doing having kids?!
The median household income in the U.S. is roughly 25% less than the amount needed to cover living costs for a family of four in Midwestern cities.
And the question is whether the median household is a family of four living in town. I’m skeptical.
Most of that cost is driven by housing. While the midwest is generally cheaper than the coasts, the country as a whole is experiencing a long-term inflation of housing prices. This, of course, directly affects the rental market as well. While some of this is due to government and banking policies, a lot is driven by consumer demand. People want bigger living spaces, whether they be fancy apartments and townhomes in the city or larger houses with yards in the suburbs. They also want amenities (esp. Internet access), and they want a modern interior, and they often would rather replace than repair. And, of course, they don’t want to live down the street from a recent murder/robbery/mugging/drug deal etc. The other compounding factor is the belief that houses should appreciate in value, which factors into some of the above expectations (e.g., pay for the reno with a HELOC, demand more at closing on resale).
I think that’s part of it, but not all. Some of the phenomenon is actually a result of greater prosperity, as Sowell pointed out about the household numbers a couple of decades ago. Think about it this way. Let’s say you had an economy composed of one household composed of Dad, Mom, and Junior. Dad is a middle manager making $70k per year and junior just got out of college and is working at Starbucks making $17.5k. So, the “median” household income is $87.5k ($70k+$17.5k). Now, let’s say next year is just amazing. Junior gets a job for $35k and Dad gets a raise to $80k. Now, junior wants to get on with his life. So, he moves out and starts life on his own. Now, you have two households and the new “median” is $57.5 (($80k + $35k)/2). Obviously everyone is doing better. But, the median household income has fallen by 34%.
Now, you have two households and the new “median” is $57.5 (($80k + $35k)/2).
No, now you have 128 million plus one households, and the median didn’t change at all. In a large population, the median doesn’t move that easily, which is why it’s preferred over the mean for this purpose. The population pyramid is more like an obelisk now; it’s basically a straight column until you get above age 65. That means that the relative proportion of “Dads” to “Juniors” isn’t changing over time, ceteris paribus.
The population pyramid is more like an obelisk now; it’s basically a straight column until you get above age 65.
I’m not sure that’s accurate. My understanding is that there are a lot of Millennials (they’re a larger demographic bulge than the Boomers). That would suggest the phenomenon is very pronounced.
There is a small bump (esp. in the 25-29 bracket, as of 2019), but it is not as big as the baby boomers were (10.4% between 20-34 in 2019 vs 12.9% in 1989). The population pyramid is definitely columnar vs. the distinctly vase-shaped pyramid following the last baby boom.
It is reasonable to assume, though, that the aging out and dying off of baby boomers is partly responsible for the median shifting. They were so numerous that their disappearance will cause some shift of the median household down in age.
That having been said, I do think your/Sowell’s argument is on to something. Young people are leaving home, getting jobs, and expecting no change in their standard of living. Mom and Dad were 45+ years old, in established careers, with the income to match. Junior is just starting out, working his/her way up the ladder, or what have you, and won’t have the income of somebody with 20+ years of professional experience. If you want to live on your own at that time, you’ll need to lower your expectations for a while.
Young people are leaving home, getting jobs, and expecting no change in their standard of living.
This, and they seem to expect to have a mid- to late-career level job after only a few years of being in the workplace.
In my meat-space persona, I spend a lot of time mentoring / volunteering with youth. One of the things that I hammer into the other adults is that we need to do a better job of teaching the kids to navigate social hierarchy. Also I need to find a better term for it that normies understand.
But in any case, there is a real deficiency in teaching Youth Today (and its problem with Adults Today that the youth are paying for) how to be anything but the king of the hill. Kids have very little experience being the 6th or 7th man on the basketball team, the bit player in someone else’s story, etc.
Everyone is starting their kid on 3rd and hitting dingers into right field for them. The kids aren’t being trained to start out holding the flash light while the box fixes something, slowly introduced to the task.
as an aside, we’ve been seeing some crazy house prices in my neck of the woods. Moderate homes that would have sold for ~$250-300K ish a few years ago are now asking in the high 400s/low 500s. Neighborhood hasn’t changed but the demand to live here has gone up.
I mean I understand why people would want to live here – great schools, great neighborhood – but you can get so much more house (both in size and land) in a less affluent area or especially in the country.
I’ll note that there has also been some softening in the market – these higher-priced homes seem to be selling slower (or not at all) compared to even six months ago.
New development near me has homes in the $700K – $1.3 MM range – and the fucking things are selling!
I smell a bubble.
Schooling is a good point. One way to drive down the cost of housing, I think, would be to make schools less locality based and more competitive. Currently, your kid is guaranteed entry into the school your house is districted in, so people scramble to live in the districts with the best schools. That increases demand for houses in a limited pool of choice districts. But, if your kid had to compete for a place in the best schools, and more schools were open to people living in an area, the demand side would spread out more.
Flying into Charleston on Friday (hurricane permitting), to finalize housing.
We may have lucked into a great deal. We are going to spend more than I really wanted to to get the area we want, but we might be getting a steal. New construction but the buyers financing fell thru at last minute. Builder has dropped price significantly to get it to move and our realtor was there at right time to get us first in line (we think). If all goes well, we will fly in Friday, check it out, and have the deal wrapped up
Friday evening.
I don’t start my new job until mid-October, but if we can get this wrapped up, we can close in early October.
Bold. Because I hate moving, I have never rented for more than a month or two when relocating for a job. So far, it hasn’t bit me in the ass too much (I usually last at least three years, except one job that lasted a year). But, I know people who have been fired within a few months of starting (not including OMWC). Buying straight off carries the risk that you’ll be anchored without job in a way that renting does not.
Considering we built a house 2.5 years ago and got laid off in May, you think I would have learned a lesson.
I am planning that this is the last time I need to be where my job is. I was going to get an offer for a remote job, probably, but this one was so much better I accepted instead of waiting.
I expect that if I can make it 3-5 years, any future job will be remote and I can move if I want and when I want.
Better answer as to why I am not renting for a year: Happy wife, happy life.
My bad timing story:
We lived in an old schoolhouse that had a really cheap remodel decades before when it stopped being a schoolhouse. We finally were able to do a remodel – total gut job to the studs, including the ceiling.
On the second day of demo, I was informed by my employer that I was surplus to requirements.
Ooh I love Charleston – try to go there once a year. We were planning a trip there for October/November but EF’s new job has no vacation time available for the first 90 days. !
We’ve talked about moving there but North Carolina also beckons.
Anyways – good luck!
The median household income in the U.S. is roughly 25% less than the amount needed to cover living costs for a family of four in Midwestern cities.
If your income is 25% less than your “living costs”, you probably need to reduce your “living costs” by 25%. And if your problem is housing costs, then you need to either move and suck up a longer commute, or figure out how to live in a smaller footprint. You know, like people did until very recently.
The thing is, I’m not even convinced its even that. A guy with a good job out of college probably isn’t making the living costs for a family of four in most cities. That doesn’t make him poor. It makes him junior in the job market.
Commutes have generally been on a rising trend for a while. The growing distance between places that have lots of jobs and places that are affordable to live in makes long commutes a fairly recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things. There are many reasons for this, but it is to my mind a legitimate gripe for many working people.
There are many reasons for this, but it is to my mind a legitimate gripe for many working people.
Outside of a handful of markets with truly extraordinary urban real estate costs, they are choosing to trade off square footage for commute time. People simply used to live in smaller houses/apartments than we do now. Pater and Mater Dean raised two kids in houses of less than 2,000 square feet, and Bro Dean and I didn’t have separate bedrooms until we were out of grade school. And this was in small town Texas.
Mrs. Dean’s parents raised five kids in a house that was probably 1,800 square feet. In small town Wisconsin. If you don’t want to commute and have a couple of kids, get a two bedroom apartment/condo. You’ll be fine. If you want a four bedroom, so everybody has their own and there is an office (which seems to be the new must-have), well, make the trade-off and don’t whine about it.
^THIS.
I grew up in a household with EIGHT people in 1250 sq ft. house. Dad finished most of the basement so we got about 2,000 sq ft of living space and a second bathroom. Drove to work about 22 miles away from home for 30+ years. He COULD have moved closer to work, into a larger house with a larger monthly payment but the reduced commute wouldn’t be enough savings to offset the increased housing expense. Plus Mom and Dad would be farther away from elderly parents which would be an increased expense.
99% of people make these decisions easily and know the whats and whys of their decisions. The other 1% just have a temper tantrum because they have to make a trade-off in the first place.
(I should add that Dad’s first choice was to put an addition on the house but the town refused to allow it. Years later he found out connected developers were in on the “policy” because they had active plans on additional developments. Once those developments were completed and sold, the town policy on additions suddenly changed.)
We’re about to do the latter in the next couple of years, but it’s interesting to see what you’re talking about in architectural terms. We’ve got an old Sears kit house, a Cape Cod, in the city. It’s maybe 1100 sqft. of usable space. When you come in, it’s basically one big, long room that’s the front half of the house, but you can see thanks to a patch in the wood floor where a wall used to be. At one point, it was a separate dining room. My cousin-in-law moved to a similar house three doors down, and in that version they’ve turned it into a bedroom such that the place has two bedrooms on the first floor and two in the finished attic. When this sucker was built, people were cramming three or four kids in there. Now with our second on the way we’re freaking out about the space.
I think that is a valid argument, to some extent. Part of the problem with it, however, is that the older, smaller housing stock is optimized for a job market, and transportation infrastructure, that doesn’t exist as such anymore. The cities have driven out industry, and their taxes are often so high that being right on the other side of the city line is the difference between profitably and closure for a business. Then, bus lines and train lines don’t align with the commutes as much. While interstate highways alleviated the problem for cars at first, the longer commutes by car eventually overtax the roads.
“Then, bus lines and train lines don’t align with the commutes as much.”
This was never a problem until government took over the bus lines and train lines. I’m old enough to remember when the private bus lines kicked the ass of the street car lines in Chicago because the street cars weren’t flexible and couldn’t meet the changing commuter market. Then government stepped in and set bus fares and all the private bus operators eventually went bankrupt.
You can’t blame people for learning that they shouldn’t rely on government-run bus and train lines – relying on government roads is bad enough.
I am spending significantly extra to be within 20 mins of my new job. A commute over 30 minutes is just not viable to me.
Typical asshole journalist. Either refused to do the math or lied on purpose expecting the reader to not do the math.
The median household SIZE is 2.53 persons. So the median household INCOME is high enough for the median household SIZE that they will earn more than they spend.
And that was the point I was trying to raise originally. Thanks for pulling that data point.
I’m really not sure to what extent the complaints are coming from the actual people these sorts of stories are ostensibly about, rather than just from the journalists themselves. I can easily enough imagine a situation where the people are perfectly happy and actually doing well, and the media cooks up these tales of woe by torturing the data.
To coin a phrase, DNC operatives with bylines.
Too many companies pay their workers less than a living wage, which means they must forgo basic necessities or fall deeper into debt.
Or, here’s an idea, they could improve their skills and experience to make their labor worth more.
Those companies are hoarding the money.
Most undoubtedly do just that. And they’re replaced by new people entering the labor force making “less than a living wage”. What this discussion is omitting is that a lot of the largest companies employ a lot of low-skilled entry-level labor. No one in their right mind expects that they’re going to raise a family flipping burgers at McDonald’s, making lattes at Starbucks or bagging groceries at Kroger. They’re the first rung of the employment ladder and most people move on from there over time.
And they’re replaced by new people entering the labor force
Or, increasingly, by machines. Of course, the rising cost of labor due to “progressive” policies has nothing to do with it, no sirree.
If the house hunting shows my wife watches are any indication, far too many young home shoppers consider stainless steel appliances and marble countertops to be a “necessity”.
That, and boutique coffee, and meals eaten out. Making your own coffee and cooking your own meals can drastically cut costs. Just because something is a “necessity” doesn’t mean you are getting it the most cost effective way.
Also, you should be able to learn to cook better than most restaurants for the princely sum of 0 dollars. When my family eats out, its usually for convenience. There aren’t very many places that serve better food than Dad or better coffee than Mom.
This this this, goddamn. I even buy fancy coffee beans, and every cup still comes out considerably less than what you’d pay at StarFucks (it also doesn’t taste like burnt rubber).
And yes, learning to cook in general is a great money-saving skill. Learn how to prepare cheap-ass things like dry beans/lentils, canned tuna, collards, brown rice, etc. It annoys me to hear the “healthy food is expensive” trope. The trendy hipster food like kale and quinoa might be expensive, but there is a ton of less glamorous food on the shelf that is very healthy and affordable. And in most cases, people are just eating too many calories, so that would save you money and make your diet healthier at the same time.
I don’t like stainless steel appliances.
I like to point out to my nieces and nephew that they are buying those fancy appliances on 30-year mortgages, so they wind up paying $4,000 for a $1,000 refrigerator. So when buying a house (old or new) subtract 4x the cost of new appliances from your offer before making the offer. In short – do not pay for appliances that come with the house. Washer, dryer, refrigerator, range, microwave, dishwasher – none of these things will last 30 years and you should not be paying for them. A countertop… well it will last 30+ years but throwing it into the mortgage just increases the amount of interest you are paying.
For Many Teens, the Battle With Opioid Addiction Starts With Wisdom Teeth
Males aged 14 to 22 are at highest risk for opioid addiction after a minimal course of pain management. Sports injuries lead the way.
Let’s flip it the other way. Over 94% of patients prescribed opioids didn’t become addicted vs over 99% of patients not prescribed opioids. Doesn’t sounds quite as sky falling.
I took one of the Percocet or vicadin that I got after the wisdom teeth removal. Didn’t really do much for me. Ordinary Advil was just as good.
I had a little fun with a bottle of Vicodin that I didn’t need after some tooth-work. Then I moved on. Maybe instead of condemning people to pain they could investigate why some people get addicted and most don’t.
That stuff made me feel like crap. I chose pain instead after my surgery.
Had dinner last night with a friend who’s daughter died of an OD a year ago after numerous stints in rehab. Damn shame.
My anecdote is similar, my late niece began her problems with adenoid surgery. Now, her background is an alcoholic deadbeat father and a mother with depression who had no issue taking six aspirin at a time. Niece had digestive issues with aspirin and ibuprofen, Percocet was digestible for her. Took, one, didn’t get relief, took a second the next day. Took the remaining 5 and had to be rushed to hospital and placed in psych ward. Started a whole shitload of problems over the next 12 years as the health care system overreacted due to one incident. I’m not against anti-depressants, but I am wary of the long-term harm they do when prescribed to teenagers; teen angst isn’t the same as a midlife crisis but when a health care professional has only one hammer as a tool, they tend to think every problem is a nail. This is a problematic by-product of increasing specialization – a primary care generalist is rarely involved and a full medical history is mostly skimmed by the specialist with their per-conceived notions.
‘Don’t hide bottles of 5-Hour Energy in your vagina’: Doctors and nurses share the incredibly obvious things they had to tell their CLUELESS patients
Seventeen Barbie heads? Wow! What’s your record?
Still doesn’t beat the guy who had 23 kung-fu grips in his ass.
My mom was a radiologist and worked ER in Sarasota, FL for many years. Sarasota is home to a surprisingly large, elderly, newly-homosexual population (wife is dead, kids moved away, it’s time to let one’s freak flag fly). She once had a fellow present with lower G.I. pain and found a glass Hellman’s Mayonnaise jar lodged firmly in his rectum.
How in the fuck?
Careful examination?
News from the Open Carry Front:
Had my first run in with a crazy person.
In the Lowe’s on Suffolk Main Street, I hear a lady say “You have a gun, Why would you have a gun in here?”
I looked at her, but didn’t reply.
Lady: You don’t look like a cop, I don’t even think cops should carry off duty, but you’re not one, right?
Me: (kind of chuckling) Definitely not a cop
L: Why would you be carrying in here?
M: Personal protection?
L: Guns have one purpose, to KILL!
M: I use mine all the time, never killed anyone.
L: What could you possibly use it for?
M: Target practice
L: Why do you carry it like that, you’re just showing off!
M: (thought about going on rant about permits and how I refuse to get one, but don’t think that would be productive)
L: You’re carrying in here offends me, I”M OFFENDED (she said that really loudly, like it would mean something to me)
M: Why don’t you mind your own business, Lady
L: There’s no need to carry in here, there were two more shootings this weekend
M: If there was a shooting in here, you’d be glad that I was here, wouldn’t you?
L: Something about someone she knows who got shot
M: (decides not to engage further) You have a nice day Ma’am.
Then I just walked away. Told my wife about it and she said the Lady might have been offended, but she wasn’t scared.
The really loud I’M OFFENDED! was what got me, she really thought those words would have some power over me, but they almost made me laugh.
The really loud I’M OFFENDED! was what got me
Given the volume, I don’t think it was meant for you per se.
It’s funny how analogous interactions with young children and with people like that are. My daughter is already pretty clear on the difference between her problems and my problems. It seems like a lot of people never learn that the fact of their being offended, for instance, doesn’t imply a requirement on the part of anyone else to do Jack shit about it.
What city was this?
I don’t see very many people openly carrying here – i choose to cc myself – but I have noticed that it draws very little attention. Honestly, I don’t think most people even notice.
Suffolk VA, been open carrying for 6+ years and this is the first time this happened.
Most people don’t seem to notice or care and all the others who comment on it have been positive.
i cc in progville here in the northern part of our state. if i open carried, it would be a harpy shriekfest. that and i wouldn’t be allowed in practically every single store.
The only people that notice open or cc are people who carry or the very small number of people who don’t but have made a concuss effort to do so. I sat through a lunch with a very conflicted friend (he’s naturally inclined to feel conservative, but grew up as a Cake Eater and it’s outside his Overton window). We had a little chat about his conflicted views on gun ownership (mostly him talking to me, I don’t talk about it at work except with a few people I know who are owners). While we were talking, a husband and wife walk past us both OC’ing 1911 barbecue guns in some really ostentatious leatherwork. No one noticed, including my conflicted friend.
>>concuss effort
JFC I’m gud with wurds
You misspelled KFC too.
And wouldn’t fast food chicken make your hands too slippery to draw?
“Obviously you don’t think I’m dangerous, or you wouldn’t be raising your voice to me, correct? “
I think I would have worded it “Would you be screaming in my face like this if you actually thought I was dangerous?” Slightly different but pointing out that she’s the one losing her shit.
Somewhat surprised you got that in Suffolk. They would flip their lids in Williamsburg, given all of the Jersey retirees around here.
Been to Williamsburg many times, never had an issue.
Are you surprised that you get a reaction when you open carry?
It didn’t sound like he was surprised to me. I open carry sometimes and it wouldn’t surprise me to get this kind of reaction. But then I do look like a cop so I get the feeling that most people just assume so.
Actually, yes, I was surprised because I’ve been open carrying for 6+ years and this is the first time this happened.
Most people don’t seem to notice or care and all the others who comment on it have been positive.
If you have been doing it for six years and haven’t received much of a reaction then I understand. My general sense with open carry is that I assume it would usually generate some sort of reaction, just because it’s unusual.
I haven’t seen many other people doing it, but they are out there.
99% of the people don’t notice at all.
Understood.
If you’re interested I wrote a bad article about OC.
I live in Texas and I have honestly never seen a person outside of a rural area open carry.
In KY, I have seen it maybe once in the city.
Mainly because Louisville and Lexington police will harass you if you do it. Its legal and they know it, but that doesnt stop them from being annoying.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about this bothers me beyond just the only cops should carry guns tripe.
I think it’s some kind of logic disconnect that it’s okay for cops to carry guns on duty because of Bad Guyz, but those same Bad Guyz magically stop existing when the cop stops his shift.
I agree with her on one thing: Off-duty cops should have to follow the exact same rules as ordinary folk. We just disagree on what those rules are.
Yea, I agree with that. Maybe it’s better explained that this like a child’s view of the world*. Evil only takes place at defined times and places where on-duty cops are available and already onsite to handle it; therefore, no one else needs to concern themselves with protection. It’s not even the cops are qualified argument. I imagine this is how Western Europe is run.
*Not my children. My 4 year old already knows to take a stick or the dogs to anything that threatens her and asks me to shoot coyotes.
I wouldn’t have been able to resist pointing out that under cover cops shouldn’t look like cops.
I’m a little surprised you weren’t swatted afterwards. She sounds like one of those types.
You’re carrying in here offends me, I”M OFFENDED
Good for you for refraining from the “Your B.O. offends me, but you don’t see me making a big stink about it.” answer.
The closest I came to really trying to argue with her was “mind your own business.”
“There’s no need to carry in here, there were two more shootings this weekend”
A fine example of progressive logic right there.
Tard Tuesday: Perhaps The Role of The Executive Isn’t To Hobnob With Entertainers
Gary Clark Jr is awesome.
And it has nothing to do with the fact that any artist who goes to the White House gets put on a list of undesirables.
A bit of that I’d imagine and el Trumpo doesn’t strike me as the music loving artsy fartsy type. It’s fine with me that they aren’t pissing away money on that stuff whatever the reason.
It looks like a ton (all?) of these are individual performances from concerts. (no way in hell I’m clicking a DU link to read the article.)
My take on it is that Obama had a regular stream of entertainers rolling through the WH for his personal entertainment and for bloating his own ego.
And it looks as carefully curated as one of his phoney “Summer music lists”.
Who the fuck cares?
You don’t get it, Obama was COOL.
Trump also isn’t going on ESPN to pick his basketball brackets.
Wait, I’m confused. Is Obama living like Louis XVI in Versailles a good thing?
Muh internutz
Hawley is one of a growing number of GOP lawmakers waging a war on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields companies from the enormous risk of hosting third-party content while allowing them to moderate content according to their own sets of standards. It has paved the way for the internet to be a bastion of free speech and information, while still ostensibly offering guard rails against hate speech, harassment or other material that tech companies don’t want on their websites and apps.
But experts and industry advocates say the changes Hawley and others have proposed are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Section 230, and could unravel the internet as we know it.
“A lot of the rhetoric that’s coming out of Congress is almost the opposite of what the reality is,” said Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, an industry lobbying group.
“Section 230 is what enables all user-generated content online,” he said. The category includes the wide variety of information everyday internet users post, from shopping reviews, Instagram photos and Wikipedia entries to dating app profiles, TripAdvisor recommendations and real-estate listings.
——-
“If 230 were eliminated, you’d end up with two extremes,” Beckerman, the lobbyist, said.
“You’d end up with the 8chan-type websites or worse, where literally anything goes and the platform has no intent or interest to moderate the content. All the nudity. All the hate. All the extremism,” he continued. “Or you would end up with the opposite of the extreme where every single piece of content that goes up on a website has to be pre-screened before it goes up.”
Acting without consequences. We all want that.
*head-desk*
“If 230 were eliminated,
Is anyone serious actually proposing this?
a bastion of free speech and information, while still ostensibly offering guard rails against hate speech, harassment or other material that tech companies don’t want
Dammit, misclicked.
a bastion of free speech and information, while still ostensibly offering guard rails against hate speech, harassment or other material that tech companies don’t want
Umm, I think you have to pick one. And this nicely illustrates our current dilemma. They slide from “free speech” by individuals, to “free speech” by corporations (which many of these same people vehemently deny should be allowed). If free speech means letting corporations control what gets published, now its their free speech, with the author’s free speech being incidental.
Josh Hawley.
I think 230 needs updating, no question. It was written before current-gen social media, which is a very different kind of platform than was around at the time.
AFAIK, the problem is the conflating of three principles about how to update 230. Guessing that R C Dean agrees with exactly one of the three.
Telephone service providers (TSPs) need to be immunized from being sued about what their customers say/type/whatever using their service. In exchange, the TSPs do not censor/moderate/whatever the content of the data traffic. Also the high tech analogs of this principle.
Tech companies’ terms of service are not laws passed by Congress, so 1A does not apply to them. Tech companies have a responsibility to protect the public by censoring/moderating/whatever fake news/hate speech/wrongthink/whatever.
Current market leaders are to be protected from upstarts somehow taking away their market share by government intervention.
Tech companies have a responsibility to protect the public by censoring/moderating/whatever fake news/hate speech/wrongthink/whatever.
This is what 230 currently enables, and its waaay too broad. It immunizes the kind of content control that should be regarded as editorial discretion.
Maid of honor wears T-Rex costume after being told she could wear ‘anything’
Midwestern white trash is now being celebrated? We are doomed.
The groom is in rolled up shirtsleeves and sneakers with slacks. I think the dino-maid might be the best dressed one there. Also, would… the bridesmaid with the Chuck Taylors.
I’m not sure she’s of age…
From the her FB page (linked in the article).
D’OH! Never mind.
Epstein is still alive! EPSTEIN IS STILL ALIVE!
The swingset-as-arbor thing is a nice touch.
Fortunately, the bride appeared to take her sister’s interesting choice of outfit in stride.
“My sister is awesome and I genuinely was not kidding when I said she could wear whatever she wanted,”
About the best response manageable. It’s gracious and doesn’t give the maid of honor any clout for standing her up. I’ll give her due credit.
The thing I like about Japanese is how mechanical it is. Yes, you have to learn how to remember all the stuff that came before, but there are almost no irregular verbs and once you learn vocabulary, it is pretty easy to construct sentences.
And the phonemes are easy. I can pronounce everything and hear most things in Japanese. (Korean has been tough because I can’t say/hear some differences).
My only other tip is (if you are a guy) make friends with some Japanese dudes and learn from them. Most of the Marines (me included) learned a lot of pillow Japanese from our girlfriends. The problem is that Japanese definitely has some masculine/feminine ways of saying things. If you only learn from gals, you will be able to converse, but you sound sort of sissylike. For example, everyone learns watashi, but guys tend to use boku instead.
Nothing funnier than hearing some big, strapping Marine speaking Japanese like a gay hairdresser because he learned it from his girlfriend.
Yeah, Japanese verbs do not conjugate like verbs in Indo-European languages do. Basically, it’s “I am, you am, they am, he am, everybody am”.
One of the more difficult concepts to explain is the set of words for “give/receive” because the verbs are different for first person/second person – and quite often (depending on the social situation) you will shift the level of politeness when referring to yourself – which requires a different set of verbs.
When I started carpentry work over there, my Okinawan coworkers had to teach me to talk like a man.
When I met my Korean wife in Memphis I thought I’d impress her by throwing down the Korean I had learned. I forgot that I had learned almost all my Korean from ROK Marines (who speak as badly as US Marines) and young ladies of questionable morals.
Turns out that it was the equivalent of someone who had learned all their English while living in a Mississippi trailer park. What I thought was “do you want some coffee” turned out to be more like “want some coffee bitch?”
Her rule is that I can only use Korean that she personally taught me when we are around her family.
Where the fuck are the links???
Here
Phoenix, I would guess.
By the time I get to Phoenix he’ll be rising
l’ll find the links he left hangin’ on his door
I’ll laugh when I read the part that says he’s a kiddie diddler
‘Cause that creep has made me laugh many times before
Here
You give a man links and he’s satisfied for a day, you teach a man to find links on his own and he’s satisfied for a lifetime.
I didn’t know we had a Glib in the Bahamas.
A true Glib would have had a stockpile and not have to ask for more.
What else is there to do when it’s raining and the power is out?
Tard Tuesday: Starving Is The Only Answer
It’s become a doomsday cult. We need to concentrate on getting them to name a concrete deadline so this can die out after it doesn’t happen.
the deadline is 100 years away.
What a Cheapskate
Geez, what a squishy cheapskate who doesn’t care about the planet. The serious dem candidates have promised to spend ‘all of it’.
Well, that link almost gets you there, I shouldn’t have to do all the work.
My advice for guys who want to learn Japanese.
Make friends with some Japanese dudes and listen to them. Most of the Marines (and myself) learned a lot of pillow Japanese from their girlfriends and that is OK, but it does end up with you speaking sort of girly. Technically you are speaking Japanese, but you sound effeminate.
For example, everyone learns watashi, but guys usually use the word boku instead. Also guys tend to speak much more forcefully and it takes some practice to pick up on what they are saying (especially when you are used to listening to girls).
Oops. I thought my earlier comment got eaten. Nevermind.
If you want to sound manly, you should have a deep strident voice, grunt a lot, and slam your feet on the ground for emphasis. Source: Japanese video games.
I was already married when I was sent to Okinawa, so my Japanese was restricted to arigato, gomenesai, and the directions drunkenly given to the honcho driving you back to your barracks – “Honcho, migi….hidari….”
Teenage boy goes blind after existing on Pringles, white bread and French fries
But Pringles are delicious.
Teenage boy? I’m not so sure the Pringles are what did him in. Did they check his palms for hair?
So, the hurricane that’s near FL right now. It is the most monster hurricane ever. Maybe I’m just confused, but I could swear they’ve said the same thing about every hurricane that has occurred over the past several years?
Those ads aren’t going to sell themselves.
Why are you confused?
Every one is the WORST, MOST DANGEROUS EVARRR!!!!
It helps that there is more than one way to measure the strength of a hurricane. So those goalposts were built on wheels for easy moving.
They’re using teenage slang so they appear to a younger demographic. To my kids, “ever” means about a week. As in, “I don’t EVER get to go out with my friends”, says the kid who went out with friends last weekend.
Hottest year, er, I mean, biggest hurricane on record.
The local news weather lady (who is quite hawt) said the word “catastrophic” repeatedly while discussing the hurricane.
Videostore commercial from the 80s promoting the release of Ghostbusters
Video stores helped make us more than.
I know Nicollette Sheridan sure did.
those FX are MINDBLOWING
Not pictured: getting your big brother to rent you a tape from the little room behind the curtain.
i must have that The Sure Thing standup cardboard ad at the the end!
US factory activity unexpectedly slowed last month for the first time in 3 years — and Trump’s trade war was the main culprit
Looks like 300 executives are triggered snowflakes.
I wonder how many of those executives signed onto that “we should serve a bunch of (political) stakeholders, not our shareholders” nonsense that came out (again) recently. Because if so, they need to explain why their “service to the larger community at the expense of shareholders” doesn’t include the reduction in business from tariffs. Tariffs for which the claimed justification is to support “stakeholders”, mainly mid to low income workers.
No, it looks like they are rational.
Tejicano – I had one of those days at work and finally managed to get to site.
Thanks for the continuing Japanese education lesson. I’m hoping to get another article done in the next week or so.
One of the things that is such a pain in the neck about learning Japanese is that to get better speaking it you need to get better reading it. And as you noted learning the reading part sucks…