I have a new post up on my blog. Trying to experiment with writing faster and shorter so I can get more regular content out—which in this case means it’s only two thousand words and only took me a week to publish.
Do you find it risible when I say the name...Bigolas...Dickolas?
You do? Good. That is why I chose it.
its an interesting choice that link is mute from the players perspective but clearly conveying ifnromation, seemingly verbally, to other characters. i think the implicaiton is that link is speaking, we just dnt know what hes saying. i guess to make him more of a "blank slate". im not sure.
Mario does this also. Nintendo thing. Very interesting I actually like it a lot.
It's a pretty common video game thing! Especially in earlier games. Link and Mario are always mute. But like Crono is also mute. In the Golden Sun games, whichever character is the protagonist at the time is mute. (And the Pokemon protagonists are mute, but that's Nintendo again.)
In general if you want one character to be a standin for the player, it can be helpful for them to have no literal dialogue; the menu selections the player makes are "your dialogue". That's why modern pokemon games give you a bunch of dialog prompts where you can choose between "yes" and "of course" or some shit—the point is not to give you a choice, it's to give you a line.
That doesn't work well with modern voice-acted games, so it's died out of those. But with a purely text-based interface it's often the most reasonable choice.
my other, more grounded argument against “data” being plural is that “agenda” is also a plural form used as a singular, and you’d sound like a lunatic if you used a plural verb with “agenda.”
also “video” isn’t even a noun in Latin, it’s a verb, and we don’t restrict it to first-person uses (’he watches a video’ is no less admissible than ‘i watch a video’) even though it’s a first person singular verb
But like, “agendum” isn’t really attested in English, right? I have used it, but only as like playful/joking behavior. “Datum” is a real word!
a fairly rare one–you talk about geographic datum(s) occasionally (and look! i have to use a different plural there to emphasize that i do not mean “data” in the generic sense!), but “data” in the usual sense isn’t differentiable into individual components
you would talk about the “data” an experiment yields even if that “data” was a single number.
But I would totally say "but this one datum was extremely weird". Now this is partly because I speak Latin, but it's a real use.
I decided to go check the OED. Surprisingly to me, they have "datas" attested before either "datum" or "data" as a mass noun, so ew. But it does site
Course Math. (ed. 5) II. 350 The omission of a material datum in the calculation..namely, the weight of the charge of powder.1841
But then it turns out that “agendum” is also attested, so... Maybe I should start using it unironically.
i hate the phrase "these data" so much. data is not a count noun! it is a mass noun! thus "this data" as in "this water" or "this stuff"
If it's a mass noun, why does it have distinct singular and plural forms?
i would argue that in common usage it doesn’t; based on usage, “data” and “datum” are two different words that happen to be traceable to a common source, like “word” and “verb”
that’s a slightly snarky answer, though; but i think the common usage of “data” really is as a (mass) noun that takes a singular verb, and we should only consider being beholden to the latin pluralization of words if they retain anything like their latin meaning--which neither “data” nor “datum” do
(even then, a language’s original pluralization strategy is a suggestion at best for loanwords; there’s a reason a roundabout in Swahili is ‘kipilefti’ in the singular, but ‘vipilefti’ in the plural, and not ‘kipileftis’)
though i would be remiss if i didn’t point out mass nouns can have a plural, or at least usually have an alternate count form used in some contexts, like “where the waters of the sea and river meet.” but words can have a plural form that’s the same as their singular in english (cf. “the sheep sitting on the hillside” can be singular or plural). so my proposed compromise is this: you can use “data” with a plural verb, if you’re talking about different kinds of data.
Yeah like, empirically in my idiolect I _mostly_ use singular verbs with "data" but sometimes use plural verbs. But I do genuinely have the word "datum" in there as a singular. And once I've already used that, I'm way more likely to treat "data" as a syntactic plural.
my other, more grounded argument against “data” being plural is that “agenda” is also a plural form used as a singular, and you’d sound like a lunatic if you used a plural verb with “agenda.”
also “video” isn’t even a noun in Latin, it’s a verb, and we don’t restrict it to first-person uses (’he watches a video’ is no less admissible than ‘i watch a video’) even though it’s a first person singular verb
But like, "agendum" isn't really attested in English, right? I have used it, but only as like playful/joking behavior. "Datum" is a real word!
very high net immigration rates (the per capita ones) simply are not possible for large countries. fun number trivia: to have a net immigration rate as high as luxembourg’s, the US would have to import all of Italy or France every 10 years. to get a net immigration rate as high as Qatar’s, the US would have to import all of the Netherlands every year.
this is a good thing, though! it means big countries can absorb comparatively more migrants with less short-term disruption–the US has tons of small towns and cities people can move to, form immigrant communities in, and start living their lives.
you could turn the question around and ask, ok, but what would the US look like if it suddenly had a huge amount of immigration from poorer countries? wouldn’t it be poorer itself? well yes, on average, it would. because moving to a new country doesn’t instantly give you a salary that’s average for that new country. but the people already living in the US wouldn’t become poorer–they would probably become richer, because immigration is a net benefit to the economy. and the people moving would become richer over time. so the actual amount of wealth available to everyone would increase, even if on paper the US per capita gdp went down. obviously the wealth of new immigrants would go up faster if there was a UBI available to them, and in that respect, a UBI could be an important equalizing tool between old citizens and new citizens, a valuable source of capital to start new small businesses or to invest in education.
So the question (in the context of the original post) is: in an open borders situation, what actually imposes the limit? Especially in an open borders + UBI situation.
Like, the US is really far away from open borders right now. We could (and probably should) double or triple immigration while still being really far away from open borders. And that’s because so goddamn many people want to immigrate. Gallup says 150 million people would move to the US if they could. (And that’s without the addition of UBI as hypothesized in the original post!)
And obviously that would be fucking unmanageable over a few years. So like one response here is to say yes, we’d never allow a hundred million immigrants in a five-year period. And that is true. But that’s denying the hypothetical of “open borders”.
So if we did move to an actual open borders situation, how many people would actually move here? It probably wouldn’t be 150m; talk is cheap. But would it be 50m? 20m? Honestly, 20m over five years sounds manageable. (There are currently about 750k green cards per year, so that would be quintupling the flow.) But 50m definitely isn’t. Would the inflow be self-limiting? What would create the limit?
keep forgetting that we do italics like this and not like *this* here
Markdown editor sucks. (I keep trying to use it, but it sucks. It doesn't even fully implement Markdown!)
(On the Old Post Editor, the markdown editor randomly deletes all your line breaks on posting sometimes.)
But I've always been confused why Markdown allows *this* to be italics. That's obviously bold! _this_ is italics.
(In my Markdown code I use _this_ and **this** so everything is unambiguous.)
I've always known _this_ to be underlined, and /this/ to be italics.
Underlining is just italics for handwriting, right? That’s a big part of why I’m used to that convention.
keep forgetting that we do italics like this and not like *this* here
Markdown editor sucks. (I keep trying to use it, but it sucks. It doesn't even fully implement Markdown!)
(On the Old Post Editor, the markdown editor randomly deletes all your line breaks on posting sometimes.)
But I've always been confused why Markdown allows *this* to be italics. That's obviously bold! _this_ is italics.
(In my Markdown code I use _this_ and **this** so everything is unambiguous.)
iirc about 75% of your household income in Germany goes towards your expenses, but in the US that’s more like 85%. if you take the median incomes of both countries (~46k in USD in Germany, around 70k in the US), it is very nearly a wash, with Germany slightly edging out the US in terms of the disposable income/money left over to spend on other things
this doesn’t contradict the point that the US is obviously a developed country (on which we agree), but i know you and i have talked about in the past the extent to which median income figures represent actually greater wealth vs just differences in cost of living in Germany and the US, and my subjective sense that because of subsidized healthcare, childcare, education, etc., smaller household incomes go as far or further in germany than they do in the US, and i wrote down this statistic when i ran across it in case it came up again
This actually mirrors an argument I had in Discord last week: I think that we should care more about the income than the disposable income, and apparently not everyone agrees.
So like first, yes, costs of living are different between the US and Germany. That’s why I’m using PPP, which adjusts for that: that puts the US at 69k and Germany at 57k. (Nominal has the Us at 70 and the Germany at 51; so doing the cost of living adjustment does close a big chunk of the gap, but not all of it.) Now PPP adjustment is highly imperfect, but let’s stipulate for the moment that this adjustment basically works.
But your figure points to another factor as well: “expenses” are bigger in the US. So what does that mean if it’s not just cost of living? I assume it means that Americans spend more on, like, housing and food and transportation. But importantly, they still get all that stuff.
Like it’s a real social problem that America basically imposes minimum house sizes, so you can’t free up some cash by downsizing your house. You have to buy the nicer, bigger house. But you do, in fact, still get the nicer bigger house. We eat out more, which is partly because lifestyle drives that but also eating out is nice. Etc.
(Or like, imagine your job gives you a huge housing allowance. That’s not as good as getting that as actual income, but it’s much better than not getting it!)
So my impression here is that we eat more food, live in bigger and nicer houses, drive newer and bigger cars, and still have as much cash left over as the Germans do. (And like the houses thing is definitely true: German houses appear to average like 1500 square feet, with an American average at like 1900. When I look for numbers I find wildly different estimates, but this is the closest-together estimate I can find.)
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Now I think I said last time around that I’m guessing Germany has basically equivalent, maybe higher, quality of life. Germans are somewhat materially poorer, but they have more security in various ways, a smoother-functioning bureaucracy, less violence, and shorter working hours. Those are all valuable things to “spend” the excess money on! I think a lot of people would take that trade. But there is a trade there.
begging people to understand that the territory between the post cold war cross-party neoliberal consensus of the 1990s when the two parties just seemed like minor aesthetic variants on the same basic political formula and a complete rupture of the political order that results in a shooting war between two significantly-sized armed factions is vast, and the midpoint is not “a mob with no plan and no organized elite support breaks into the capitol building and one of them gets shot in the face.”
Yeah I think that like
If you live in a modern liberal democracy, it’s easy to underestimate just how much space there is at the bottom. A shitty mediocre dysfunctional state today is so much better than, like, 90% of everything that’s happened. I’m not talking about the US, I’m talking about like Central American countries that have persistent gang violence problems and large areas of the country that can’t be policed; that’s still above the historical average, right?
This is, honestly, the big intellectual reason I am small-c conservative. Things are not as they could be, and there are ways to improve them, and that’s important. But they are so much better than the, uh, “baseline”, that we really need to maintain an appreciation for how much we have, and not wreck it in pursuit of perfection.
If you could flip a coin, and heads the US becomes a social democratic utopia that’s richer than Luxembourg and more egalitarian than Sweden, but tails the US becomes a genuine failed state like Somalia, or for that matter a median successful sate as of like 1600, you should not flip that coin.
>no trains
>no healthcare
>no democracy
>fundies everywhere
>staggering levels of violent crime matched only by police brutality and corruption
some "developed" country
sorry, but the rhetorical tic where people treat “developed country” like it’s a value judgement rather than a renaming of the category “first world country” (which definitionally included the US) is dumb. yes, the US is an outlier in a number of respects, yes it has particular problems, but its per capita gdp places it solidly in the “developed” category (ranked 13th), and it is more democratic than the overwhelming majority of most countries on earth (ranked 30th). "the US isn’t a developed country” is a reflexive self-hating sneer popularized by american progressives on twitter, not a reasonable assessment of the category “developed country.”
Sure, but wait, what are the actual criteria of a “developed country,” why is “some rich people there are getting even richer and they’re already very rich” used here as an inherently valid metric that should be accepted without explanation. Like, what’s the argument for having GDP and (someone’s) determination of how democratic it is be the one set of factors to rule them all?
AFAIK “developed country” doesn’t have a strict definition. the terms first, second, and third world were originally purely political descriptors, describing the US/NATO bloc, the Soviet bloc, and unaligned countries during the cold war. the expression “third world” came to denote “poor, often undemocratic, often politically unstable countries” in this time period because a lot of the third world countries were post-colonial states dealing with the common postcolonial issues of, well, poverty, authoritarianism, and political instability
but after the end of the cold war the term “third world” was even more incoherent, so it fell out of use, and people have been groping for a substitute ever since. “global south” is another, but since it includes countries like australia and new zealand south of almost all countries in the “global south,” it’s not quite reached universal appeal. “developing country” contains a certain hope/ideological implication that the countries it’s applied to just don’t have mature markets and industries yet, but they will get there for (whig history|application of neoliberal policies|gradual spread of technology) reasons.
because it’s a functional replacement for “third world,” “developing/developed” isn’t a purely economic dichotomy. some people definitely use it as a drop-in replacement for what third world sometimes meant, which was a straightforward sneer aimed at countries largely populated by ethnic groups they dislike. but its common usage certainly seems to focus mainly on economics; the tops of lists like per capita gdp and the HDI certainly seem to closely correlate with what people usually mean when they say “developed country,” with some small outliers like Brunei and Qatar being notable exceptions (both countries with rich petroleum sectors but a lack of economic diversity)
if we want to use a vibes-based definition, we could easily accuse norway of being a developing country (petrostate), or britain (years of austerity + decimation of the NHS), or italy (run by fascists). but this is why replacing the function of descriptive terminology with vibes-based definitions used to indicate disapproval of current political conditions is a stupid way to conduct political discourse, that fucks up your ability to understand the world. if you’re going to call the US a developing country, you have to explain why it’s the only developing country that’s also a military superpower and the largest economy in the world, and sure, maybe you can construct a definition of developing country that consistently includes both the US and, like, Sierra Leone, but it’s not going to be a useful definition for anybody, except for maybe the Qataris sitting on their pile of oil money looking down at everybody who lives in a country with a lower per capita gdp than them (which is all of them).
I also wanted to call out something that athingbynatureprodical said which I think reflects a common misapprehension.
some rich people there are getting even richer and they’re already very rich
Yes, the rich people in America are very rich and getting richer. And the median person in America is also very rich and getting richer. According to the OECD, the US has a higher median inceom than basically anyone except Switzerland, Norway, and Luxembourg; switching to median drops Ireland a ton (as expected), and more surprisingly to me bumps Austria, Canada, and Australia up above Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden (I would not have expected Sweden to do worse on median than on average).
I’m having way more trouble finding 10th percentile figures. This link has the US slightly lagging Canada, Germany, Britain, and Australia in 10th percentile incomes, but only barely!
Playing around with this site, an income of $12000/year puts a family of three at the tenth percentile in the US. That would put you in the bottom 9% in Germany or France, the bottom 8% of Sweden or Luxembourg, and the bottom 10% of Canada or Australia. (But I’m not sure how much I trust these numbers.) The US is so rich that our bottom ten percent are competitive with other countries that are much, much more equal than we are.
(I really want to find numbers that adjust for taxes and transfers but I genuinely have no idea if these do.)
>no trains
>no healthcare
>no democracy
>fundies everywhere
>staggering levels of violent crime matched only by police brutality and corruption
some "developed" country
sorry, but the rhetorical tic where people treat “developed country” like it’s a value judgement rather than a renaming of the category “first world country” (which definitionally included the US) is dumb. yes, the US is an outlier in a number of respects, yes it has particular problems, but its per capita gdp places it solidly in the “developed” category (ranked 13th), and it is more democratic than the overwhelming majority of most countries on earth (ranked 30th). "the US isn’t a developed country” is a reflexive self-hating sneer popularized by american progressives on twitter, not a reasonable assessment of the category “developed country.”
Yeah, "no healthcare" and "no democracy" are wild exaggerations that obscure way more than they reveal. Like, the modern United States is one of the most democratic societies that has ever existed in history; even taking the "ranked 30th" at face value, like, that's in the top 20% of the world today and easily at the top of, say, the world a hundred years ago.
But I also wanted to amplify on the "GDP per capita" thing, because like, saying it's "ranked 13th" wildly undersells how rich the US is. I'm gonna use World Bank data because it's easy for me to get and a bit more comprehensive than the IMF data; the World Bank has the US at 11th in PPP terms and 12th in nominal terms. (I looked at a few lists and couldn't find one that had the US at 13th but I totally believe there is one. This list keeps us relatively low because it's more comprehensive.)
But then let’s look at those countries that outrank the US. In PPP, the list is: Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Qatar, Bermuda, Norway, Switzerland, UAE, Cayman Islands, Macau. Now first of all a couple of those GDP numbers are basically fake because they have to do with bank routing, but again let’s take them at face value. If you add up the populations of all ten of those countries, it’s a little less than 40 million people. The USA, of course, has 330 million people. You have to go down another eight places on the list to hit a country that’s even vaguely in the same weight class as the US (Germany, which is 20% poorer per capita but has some real advantages that compensate for this, partly in reduced working hours.)
Like yeah, living in Norway or Switzerland seems like a sweet gig, but those countries are, relatively speaking, tiny. I think Noah Smith put it that the US is the biggest rich country and the richest big country, and neither of those contests is close.
Like, I think a lot of people would want to put Spain and Portugal in the “developed country” bucket. Portugal has literally half the GDP per capita that the US does. Spain is at like 4/7. Japan, which is probably the second-biggest rich country and arguably the second-richest big country, is at 60% of American GDP per capita. The US is just wildly off-scale for most reasonable comparisons here.
morbidly curious about who trump might select as his running mate this time. the only people who might be willing to take the job seem like they’d have to be even crazier than he is.
He is allegedly considering Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Kristi Noem.
I have no idea how seriously to take those reports.
Last night I went back to playing KH: Birth By Sleep, and I did the (first) Vanitas fight in Ventus’s storyline.
And god is that fight a collection of every single thing I don’t like in KH fights. He constantly breaks your target lock. He can one-shot you from across the field, which means you can’t back up and get a breather and recharge. He can break out of basically any combo whenever he wants.
He has lots of iframes where your keyblade just goes through him, which always feels unfair to me. And he has them in a stagger animation out of a big attack, which means you can dodge his attack, attack him to punish, your attack just phases through him, and then he hits you. It sucks!
I died like thirty times (with like four different builds), and then decided I wasn’t having fun and stopped. That fight is awful! It feels a lot like the Terra fight from KH2FM. But the Terra fight is the hardest superboss, not a story fight in the first third of the game.
I could grind a bit and it would be easier; it would be nice to have damage above the floor, and also it would help a lot of I get either Leaf Bracer or Second Chance. (Or any of the abilities that speed up my recovery.) But I like to play by no-grinding to make the game an interesting challenge.
Or I complained about this on a stream and someone told me a cheese strat. And I’m really tempted, even though I hate that. I try to play blind, so even knowing that strat works isn’t something I’d want. And I just don’t like doing the cheese, if I didn’t figure it out myself. I’ve only done that for one KH fight so far. Which was, again, Terra.
It turns out this fight is much easier if you’re not wildly underleveled, and do more than chip damage.
I normally play with zero-intentional-grinding, but I decided to break that rule and suddenly the fight was easy. Which is, of course, the problem with grinding.
my total layman's perspective on latin is that meaning seems bizarrely underspecified. its like toki pona. maybe because in the modern age you mostly see like, pithy quotes and mottos which select for shortness? but theres somehting here. like the extremely free word order. maybe itd be more obvious if i knew all the inflections, and the ambiguity is being resolved in there
maybe itd be more obvious if i knew all the inflections
you could not be more painfully monolingually anglophone if you tried
yeah but like. inflections are stupid. this is known. doing grammar structurally is way better
Gotta side with Summer on this one. The Latin cases resolve some of the ambiguity but are *way* less fine-grained than normal prepositions. Of course you can use normal prepositions if you choose but you have expanded options to be vague and pithy, which helps for quotability.
not to be a morphology simp, but--a lot of the use case for cases is to distinguish different uses of prepositions! ablative vs accusative “in” for instance. that’s two prepositions for the price of one! and don’t tell me English prepositions are more specific, when a preposition like “to” gets used for seventeen different things. the latin dative is only used for like eight
Well again it’s not quite that you can’t use proposition but that you can forgo them. An ablative can mean basically anything you want, if you believe in yourself
in practice cases uses are pretty well defined, though! this page lists nine different uses of the ablative, for instance, which is a lot (the Latin ablative collapses a couple distinct PIE cases), but they’re in four or five broad categories, and some are very specific. and it’s still much less overloaded than the English preposition “to”
I gotta say, I really hate the classification of the ablative like they have in that page, though. It’s the ablative of ablativity, because that’s an ablative-feeling concept.
Obviously you can’t teach it that way, but if you understand the language, if you actually speak it, that’s how you think about it, right? And one reason I stopped studying classics in college is that I could translate all the stuff correctly but I lost points on tests for not being able to tell you which Official Dative Classification that noun was in. It’s the Dative of Giving, you assholes!
Now, Summer is essentially right that Latin is like uncomfortably compact compared to English. It wants to pack a ton of meaning into very few words. (More so than Ancient Greek, even though we compare those languages in a lot of ways and Greek arguably has more available inflections.) But that compactness doesn’t make it especially ambiguous, because the inflections pack a ton of meaning into those words.
(Also to be fair we’re regularly exposed to Latin that is functionally poetic, and poetry uses ambiguity and elision in a way normal speech doesn’t.)
But the other thing is that, as someone commented on some other branch, that making different distinctions isn’t the same as not making distinctions. But you look for the distinctions you have in your native language, and not for the obviously weird and artificial ones that only exist in your second language.
yeah i mean sometimes the classifications grammarians make for the uses of a construction feel sort of arbitrary--wiktionary lists the use of English “to” + infinitive as separate from “to” + implied infinitive, and that’s pretty hairsplitty
on the other hand, the Latin ablative really is historically a merger of the Proto-Indo-European ablative, instrumental, and locative cases, and its uses reflect that, and it’s helpful to know that (or I find it helpful to know that) when people wonder why it seems like it has such varied meanings that have nothing to do with one another
If they’d told me that in school it would have been way more helpful! Like, “instrumental, locative, away-from” is a useful classification and also historically accurate.
But we were taught it’s the “garbage can” case which has like twelve unrelated uses. But in high school they didn’t make us identify which thing off this list it was in any given sentence, and in college they did, so I stopped taking the classes because that was annoying.
Like, here’s the list for the Dative in Attic Greek, which is the one I actually took in college and the one I’m directly complaining about. And you can tell that, like, the Greek dative got IE dative, locative, and instrumental (the genitive got true ablative). But this list is more than that, and I didn’t like tests that asked me to remember that “the Ethical Dative” is a thing and is distinct from the “Dative of Advantage”.
Okay so has tumblr turned on some weird auto-reblog thing? I've seen a few posts now show up as my own reblogs that I remember seeing but definitely didn't reblog on purpose.