If you can remember anything more about that I’d be really interested, as langauge reform is a big interest of mine. As far as I’m aware, there’s been no successful langauge reform in Britain, and even the few attempts (George Bernard Shaw’s simplified spelling society and a labour MP in the 50s who failed to pass a bill in Parliament) were all for simplyfing and regularising English spelling (so that ‘give’ would become ‘giv’, because it doesn’t rhyme with five, hive, dive, etc) not re-Latinizing anything.

The last significant change in English spelling I can think of was when Webster introduced his “American” spelling in the 19th century and changed ‘honour’, ‘centre’, etc to their US versions.

I totally agree that this is something that happens naturally, and probably shouldn’t be interfered with by a government. When it has been successful, it has been about giving permission for official langauge to reflect current usage. Telling people they must write ‘hav’ instead of ‘have’ is not going to work because even if it’s illogical it’s such a high frequency word that it is minimal effort to add, and then ignore, the ‘e’. But allowing school children to start writing ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’ might actually work.

Managed to get to the stage with my job, where I just kinda resent having to go to work because I’d rather be doing other things, as opposed to deeply hating it because I’m freaking out constantly. This is a big step for me, I had to leave my last career after crashing and burning, due undiagnosed ADHD. Had a couple of years off getting myself sorted out and correctly medicated, and started back in a new role, but with a genuine question about whether I could have a professional career again.

The first couple of years were really hard, just so stressful and I needed to see a therapist at points to keep going. But I did, and now in my 3rd year I’ve hit a very manageable level of stress that seems normal and bearable. Interestingly, this isn’t because I finally started being organised and stopped leaving things to the last minute. Nope, I just embraced my terrible work habits, stopped beating myself up about them, and changed my expectations for work so that paperwork was minimized and doing all my prep at the last minute was fine. Much less mentally horrific for me and, despite ‘lowering my standards’ the quality of my work probably increased, because I was doing what I could actually achieve not pushing to do something amazing that never materialised.

Quite right! Never trust the English! But what do you mean, they “keep intentionally fucking with their dialect”? All languages, dialects, sociolects, etc are constantly changing in different ways, do you feel like the dialects of England change more than other? Or that they do it more purposefully?

Ahh, I didn’t know that Americans* called dictionaries ‘lexicons’. In most forms of English I’ve heard, and in the field of linguistics, ‘lexicon’ is the complete set of vocabulary in a language, or subject. A dictionary is an alphabetical list of a lexicon, often with definitions.

*I’m presuming it’s Americans because mirriam webster lists the dictionary definition first, while OED and Cambridge only list that as archaic usage.

Yeah, but it isn’t impressive avoiding a letter if you can use any word you want, and it doesnt matter what it means. “Without employing the second most frequent letter of English.” would make sense or “the vowel which is commonly listed first” or some sort of thing. I suspect they just didn’t know what lexicon meant and thought it sounded smart.

In what sense is it the first letter of the English lexicon? Lexicon ≠ alphabet

If it’s a message to the household, shouldn’t the writing face the other way?

Just started playing this again for the first time in years. Trying out the texture upgrades from tfix, and they seem pretty good. Still feels very retro!

I generally play at least one of the Ultima games every year, mostly the late 80s and early 90s ones.

You don’t need to actively kill people off unless you’re in a rush. Just let climate change render parts of the world uninhabitable while enforcing strict border control, and make sure your population don’t have access to decent healthcare and vaccinations so that prevmtable diseases reduce the local numbers.

TBIs are awful. That sleep thing sounds horrible but at least you can still communicate. Hope you’re surviving okay.

My conclusion was that raising minimum wage gave people more money to spend (obvs), and although it could be linked to some increase in inflation, that that cost was borne over the wider economy, so those on MW still saw an meaningful increase in real terms spending power. The evidence for MW rises causing unemployment were mixed, but meta-regression analysis showed that there was significant publication bias in MW studies (preferring those that showed MW raised unemployment) and once that was accounted for, MW was neutral on unemployment. Apart, perhaps for a small effect on teenagers.

But it was a few years back that I had to look in to that, and the studies themselves are often focussed on data from decades earlier. And that’s the problem with a lot of economic research claims, while it is helpful to examine historical patterns and learn from them, it isn’t easy to isolate the confounding factors and get to some general law. I feel it’s closer to history than physics (despite the aspirations of some economists), you can learn from the past, but current society will be different in significant ways that might make things play out quite differently.

Funny meme, and natural part of human nature. But, while disregarding information that doesn’t agree with your worldview can be bad, the reason it’s a intrinsic bias is because most people are right about most things in their everyday life. If a stranger tells you that you owe them 20$, you’re probably going to trust your gut that you don’t, rather than start looking for evidence. Obviously, that breaks down when it’s about anything abstract or complex, and there when we get science involved.

But if you’re somewhat experienced and well read in a scientific area, you develop the same confidence in your understanding that leads you to dismiss some findings as unlikely. This can be bad, and one of things slowing scientific progress (see Planck’s principle), but it’s also a useful heuristic. If you’ve read enough economics papers, you develop a reasonable bullshit detector. Not that the research on the wealth tax you referred to is necessarily bad, but it’s going to be using a model or drawing conclusions from some related data, in ways that (I suspect) would not convince me if I read it. Once you’ve read 30 articles showing that raising minimal wage cuts real spending power vs 30 that show it doesn’t, you see how ‘good economic research practice’ can lead people to very different conclusions.

Most insults are some attempt to link an aspect of a person or their behaviour with a negatively perceived thing. Most powerful insults also include breaking some form of social taboo.

Thus we have mild insults like “your argument is…” “weak-sauce” which associate the argument with the (presumably undesirable) sauce of insufficient strength; “shit” which is mild taboo but so widely used and conventional that it doesn’t hit hard; “loose stool-water, arse-gravy of the worst kind” which is both a bit taboo and reasonably novel (but wordy and pretentious).

If you’re trying to find insults that are going to impact someone, you have to find things that are upsetting / undesirable or them, so that association with that negative thing is bad and they want to avoid it. This is tricky if they have a different worldview, because what is offputting to you might be fine to them (eg. religious people insulting behaviour as ‘sinful’ or ‘satanic’ doesn’t really land for non-believers).

This is extra tricky if you don’t agree with what they find disgusting, because when you use something that disgusts them as an insult you are reinforcing the idea that it IS something to be disgusted by. Making fun of Trump’s ‘Lady-hands’ or ‘micropenis’ might be hurtful to him (or his supporters) but it also telling men that traditional masculine features and penis size are the qualities of real men. But that’s the problem, you can’t use someone’s beliefs against them while also challenging those beliefs as wrong.

So you can just accept that insults are problematic, and continue to call people ‘retarded fags’ because you know that has a negative association to them, ignoring the innocent minorities also hurt by that language. Or you can find things that are universally seen as bad and undesirable (mostly varistions on bodily functions) or that don’t really hurt the stereotyped group (“you’re whining like a little baby” is less problematic than “like a woman on the rag” or “like a little removed”). But these generally aren’t as impactful…

As a certified manflu sufferer, I gave this an upvote. I know that there’s been a lot fun made at guys ‘overreacting’ to colds, but maybe it’s time to listen to the victims. Occasionally, I get a cold where i just feel a bit shit, tired and full of snot. But most of the time a cold shuts me down entirely, I can’t think, talk nonsense, if I try and drive I almost crash. I’m a compete mess. Sure, maybe my body is just overreacting to the virus, but so is anaphylaxis and that kills people.

I’m pretty sure that labour is worse, but…

Think he looks pretty good!

They’re already paying for fossil fuels (7$ trillion worldwide)

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Yeah, I know what you mean. Asking people to join and then not be able post seems a bit shit. Same with the light moderation in most communities, when there’s a comparatively low level of posts, do we really want to be removing posts for being “off topic”?

But I also think that can backfire. I’m pretty close to leaving YSK and mildlyinfuriating because it feels that half the posts are just variations on politics. The tagine of “YSK” is a place for all the things to make your life easier. Looking back through the last 20 posts >75% are to do with politics, bad people and their misdeeds. I hate Boris Johnson, and people should be told he’s a corrupt ass hole, but we have communities for politics which is where that belongs.

Ragebait is always going to do well, it’s how our brains are wired. So if we don’t want all communities to end up being mostly “this is bad, you should be angry and sad” then we need stricter moderation. It’s a mistake to think more posts = more content. If most of the main communities of lemmy are overrun by these kinds of posts, the only new users it’s going to attract are people who want that, and the problem snowballs.

Not sure, but I wonder if it’s seen as an “easy” community to post in? There’s not a strict sense of what’s appropriate, and a lot of posts are just a link to an article, with “YSK” + a rewording of the article headline as the title.

It’s also one of the bigger communities, so posting a random article about a storm or laptops will get a decent amount of upvotes in a few hours.

Given that it mostly seems to be new accounts, I wonder if it’d be worth requiring a minimum age of a week or two before users can create a post?