manxu

I've been to Montpellier in France, where residents never have to pay for public transport, and it's amazing and beautiful how full the trams and buses are all the time. The weird thing is that it benefits the remaining car drivers a lot: if the people in public transportation had to drive around in cars, traffic would come to a complete standstill.

Also counterintuitive: while free public transportation sounds like it might attract the poorest, it does the opposite and reaches into the middle class. The poor never had any other option, but for the middle class it became the better option. Which I think is important, because the middle class has a lot more in common with the lower class, but media prevents one from seeing the other.

That's just the start. After the tax cuts start working their way, there is going to be a massive shortfall in public funding, and then the, "Who could have seen this coming?" will start and then the real Tightening of the Belt.

Well, yes, of course! I mean, for a hundred years Harvard hosted foreign students, but NOW they are a security threat.

It must be really hard to be a lawyer or judge facing these cases, knowing that if you laugh you are going to become the next national security threat.

I just had to learn French in middle age, and it's been fun. They key takeaways from my experience:

1. Contact is everything. The longer you spend listening, reading, speaking, just in general interacting with the target language, the better. Doesn't matter what you do - Duolingo or PeerTube videos, novels or comic strips.
2. Communication is the goal, not fluency. You can get the gender of a word wrong and people will still understand you. You can use the wrong tense and that's usually okay. Don't try to "sound more like a native" or "learn slang words that everyone uses," because heaven knows nobody is going to take you for a native. But if you can get the point across and can understand what people are saying, you win.
3. Speaking is 10x harder than listening or reading or even writing, because it involves not only forming sentences in an unfamiliar language, but also saying them, which involves your muscles. At first, it's really hard to say the sounds of the language that don't exist in your own language, and I found that very frustrating.
4. Language and culture are different, but interconnected. You don't really speak a language if you don't understand the culture it's attached to. For instance, at first I didn't know what the cashiers were asking me at the checkout, until I learned that they want to see the bags you brought from home to make sure they are empty. The problem with missing cultural references is that everybody around you knows them, and they don't understand why you don't, or what there is to explain.
5. One of the very few great use cases of LLMs is, in fact, talking with a chat bot. You give it a good prompt (look for them online) and you are forced to talk in the target language. If the bot can understand you, a native speaker probably will, too. A good tip is to try an AI conversation on the topic of something you are about to do in real life, like applying for an apartment or having a conversation about cheese.
6. Personally, I found that my language skills drowned completely under certain, specific circumstances. For instance, for the life of me I cannot understand voice messages, at all. Even phone conversations are really bad for me, both in talking and listening. I can have a perfectly fine conversation with someone, but when I have to talk with them on the phone, it's like I never learned the language.
7. The tool you use is not as important as the time you spend. Duolingo was really meh: too much useless vocabulary, not enough grammar and pattern recognition, lack of ability to specify areas of interest, down to always on animations even when you had them all turned off. But, despite the heavy focus on the words, "chouette" and "trousse," I sort of learned French to the point where I can follow everyone along and can speak and be understood. Took a year to the day and the entire tree.

As strange as it seems, Trump's highest approval ratings can be found in his handling of immigration. So, yes, there was a chance that these dramatically illegal and unconstitutional acts might be pleasing to some of the voting population. It's the shit timeline we live in.

A while back I watched a video about jaywalking. The idea was that, before cars were very common, people would just walk around the street and cars had to go around them. As cars became more common, car owners wanted to get rid of the people on the street, so they invented the term and offense jaywalking. Take something that poor people do (like walking instead of driving) and turn it into an offense.

This is basically the same thing. Make the parents responsible for what was a driver's fault on a road that shouldn't have been built the way it was in what must be a residential area - given that the kids just crossed the street from house to store. You have to turn the victim into the perpetrator, because looking at facts makes the wrong people look guilty.

Made you click, that's all that matters in modern journalism.

We really need to do better.

the man [...] had called on French people to seek out and shoot people of foreign origin.

This happened near Fréjus, on the Cóte d'Azur, one of the most touristy places on the planet. It's crawling with Brits and Americans and Germans and Poles and any place far and wide. But of course, to a diseased mind like this man's, it's only "foreign" if it is the particular shade of skin he doesn't like: Middle-Eastern.

Remember when German was the language of science and technology, and then suddenly it wasn't?

There is no better of faster way to irrelevance than fascism.

Conservatives are genuinely such disgustingly cruel, depraved monsters. It makes me sick.

Why do the beautiful souls have to leave us, and not the ugly ones?

Ironically, the reason she refused the pardon is a reason to pardon her.

I mean, the law firm executive orders read like they were written by a first-year who flunked Constitutional Law three times in a row. If a law firm can't appreciate how easy they would be to defend against, and what great PR a win would be, then they can't be helped - and worse, can't help anyone.