Viewing profile — panglott

We just need a better place to show our parents pictures of their grandkids. Is that such a hard ask?

Yep, Chengdu is a huge, dense city, with about 10 million people. Now I'm feeling nostalgic, I was only there for a few weeks, but with the parks, teahouses, and food, it was my fa…

The lie flies and the truth walks =/

This is framed as "respectful", but it's another way to mark the person as an outsider.

It's not helpful advice. The post above attacks the author's writing credibility due solely to its emotional tenor. That's essentially an ad hominem.

This is just ad hominem.

How does tone policing the author offer any insight into the argument at issue here?

have never been more on board with breaking up McDonald's. ;)

A lot of the infrastructure of capitalism is oriented around generating and sustaining small- and medium-sized businesses, and while large corporations will always want to increase…

The whole business model of Silicon Valley is finding companies that can grow to become abusive monopolies, and then growing them into that. Cut off one head and two will take its …

People aren't mad because Facebook runs a social network or presents users with a newsfeed or provides a messaging service or stores users photos. Lots of companies do those things…

Language learning courses and tools are just ways to kickstart normal language acquisition, so you don't have to go through the years of gurgling like a baby has to. Learning to co…

Oh, absolutely. But I think they're going to be more specialized tools to work on different skills. For example, I used to use the perapera-kun plugin and I guess yomichan does a s…

The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signal…

Sometimes people just have fear of an event occurring, and disaster preparedness is a way to help calm that fear and gain a sense of control. I'll confess that the threat of a nucl…

The problem with this article's defense of firearms for disaster preparedness is that firearms are among the least urgent disaster-preparedness items. If what people were really co…

The linked article is about rationales for possessing rifles such as the AR-15.

English is way too hard to learn and they have an irrational fondness for their spelling system.

Why not just give users more power over their newsfeed, instead of assuming that the site engineers can get the balance right. A user could be able to specify "I want 50% of my new…

Putting Japanese at such a low complexity shows a lot about the author's criteria and bias. Japanese numerals are quite easy, but when it comes to actually counting things, it is q…

Apparently the person who compiled this has never tried to actually count items in Japanese, to figure out which of the two number systems to use and which counter words to use.

Shorter: Just write dialogue.

"The Language Instinct" is almost 25 years old, and it has not fared well IMO, although linguistics is a multidisciplinary/multiparadigmatic field with lots of disagreement. That b…

There's a deeper argument here, too. Growing inequality is an indicator that the iron law of oligarchy is taking hold. The book "Why Nations Fail" divides societies into those with…

The book "Trekonomics" has some interesting discussion about this, comparing it to status- and prestige-driven competition in academica. However, even if prestige-driven competitio…