Viewing profile — koralatov

A big downside of IKEA’s modular shelving is that they periodically release a new range and discontinue the old one. This happened to me with their ALGOT shelving system about 10 y…

Same. I have one that’s about 15 years old, lived in a cupboard its whole life, and it’s slightly yellowed but still going strong.

An out-of-fashion generalist kind of blog, hosted on an out-of-fashion platform, Tumblr. Updated only sporadically: https://koralatov.com

Arguably the people who value free over everything else aren't good customers and aren't a good foundation to build an actual sustainable business on.

I have a cheap pair of polarised aviators I got from eBay that have the same effect as these glasses. I'm guessing when they were made, the lens material was oriented wrong during …

Common Scottish English usage I encounter daily: "that bin reeks", "my dog rolled in fox poo and she reeks", "I was reeking of sweat", "that place reeked".

In the case of Scots and Scottish English, there's a lot of blurring and the distinction is of questionable actual value -- though I would make that distinction personally. I speak…

You're right: "reek" does mean "smoke" in Scots. In modern usage, by speakers of Scottish English, it means "smelly". I'm not 100% sure, but I'm confident that "reek" in this conte…

I would take that with a huge pinch of salt. Census data is self-reported, and most people don't know that Scots is a distinct language from Scottish English, albeit one sharing th…

In school it's likely you were speaking Standard Scottish English. Received Pronunciation (RP) is an accent , not a dialect -- though most RP speakers speak Standard English, so th…

Here's a repost of an earlier comment[1] I made on the relationship between Scots and English, which also applies here: I think you're confusing dialect with language here. Scots a…

Linguistic flattening had been going longer before the Second World War -- the introduction of railways helped it a long a bit, but radio really sped up the process. My grandmother…

Small world! My email is in my profile if you fancy discussing where to buy the best rolls.

Canada has the highest number of Gaidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) speakers outside of Scotland. Nova Scotia -- literally "New Scotland" -- has strong ties with Scotland, being originally…

I think you're confusing dialect with language here. Scots and Scottish English are distinct from one another. The latter does borrow some from the former which leads to confusion.…

The green-topped bottle in the linked piece is 20g sugar per 100g, but I've seen some in the UK that are 25g or even 30g. I don't eat the stuff myself, but know a lot of people who…

I don't disagree with you, but how do we decide which structured data format to use as a replacement for plaintext? I have the sneaking feeling that a large part of why we still us…

I can't tell if this is satire or not.

That's one way of doing it, but means that if the majority of your stock is held by foreign nationals residing abroad, the U.S. gets much less income, even though the majority of t…

Oh, I absolutely realise I'm oversimplifying it, but the point stands that, in most cases, it's in Facebook's interest to massively underreport value as part of that negotiation. F…

It would definitely need a lot of careful though to get the balance right. As it stands, the UK's maximum capital gains tax rate is 28% vs. 45% for the top rate of income tax. This…

Out of curiosity, what's a better idea than income tax for corporations? Assuming we do away with it, what's the more efficient and fairer way you'd propose?