• 12 Posts
  • 240 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Quotes from the article:

    According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors. “I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”

    and

    The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store.




  • Yeah, so by all accounts i’m the kind of person most likely to love the french language: native speaker, effortless spelling and grammar, avid reader of BD, i even like the flowery and decorative aspects of the language (language soutenu); but then i also speak other languages, and this gives me the perspective that, from a practical standpoint, there’s a lot of issues with french. There’s layers of sediment accumulated over centuries, a lot of rules and spellings are vestigial and serve no purpose anymore other than make it harder.

    Also, a lot of rules and spellings come from grammarians just saying so, and writing prescriptivist style guides to make people spell The Correct Way. To a point, i even think the ability to invent and follow an arbitrary The Correct Way hass been a class signal.

    Even native french speakers sometimes have bad grammar, or at least that’s much more common than english speakers having bad grammar.

    English speakers say the same things about their language, but they don’t know about ô <— this accent and the agony of trying to guess when it should be used or not. It’s supposed to indicate a difference in pronunciation, but this difference depends on the accent and is also obvious from context. I’ve known teachers to dock points for shit like this, and it radicalized me against arbitrary rules despite being completely capable of following them. In my opinion, people use features that have a purpose; if people don’t use it, then it’s pointless.

    And from a global perspective, fewer people speak french than a lot of other languages. On the one hand this doesn’t matter, lots of people speak mandarin, it’s about who you’re likely to interact with; but i’d say your more likely to interact with spanish speakers.

    Unless of course you’re that much into BD. That doesn’t surprise me at all, lots of english speakers learned japanese for weeb reasons, i think it’s completely legit to learn a language for the culture. Actually i find it pretty impressive




  • I’m in France and my cousin married an American.

    Cost of living is high and the language is bullshit, but the standards of living are some of the best in the world. Very old established democracy and rule of law, workers rights, social security, and whatever the complete opposite of political apathy is. Culture is rich with a disproportionate level of global relevance for the country’s size. The location is ideal in the middle of europe, with a good variety of landscapes and climate.

    Internet is cheap and fast, but i don’t know anything about the state of tech jobs.

    I don’t know much about the tax system either but my assumption is you might save money just on the healthcare alone.

    Overall i wouldn’t recommend, you’d be better off in a country with a language closer to english, such as most countries north of France. They’ll have better english proficiency and you’ll learn the language easier.


  • It’s like a graveyard of companies that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Sharing files is one brand name (Sharepoint if i recall), making video calls is another name, planned events is another - every function has a brand name to it, which made me feel like these were the last remaining trace of long-absorbed companies.

    But that’s just my recollection, i haven’t touched Teams since Covid




  • Yeah. Israel gets to colonize Gaza, Putin gets Ukraine, and he doesn’t have to go to war with the USA because there’s a known russian asset as president.

    I agree that Trump will end a couple of wars by making sure that the bad guys win them. Just surrender human rights and dignity, let white supremacist dictators take over, let a couple genocides happen, war prevented, great success.

    Oh, and meanwhile poor people and LGBT are persecuted in America. Doesn’t matter, war prevented.

    The stereotypical image of a Trump voter is an overconfident bully, but let this be proof that you can also vote Trump out of complete cowardice. I, recluse nerd, cannot comprehend being so pusillanimous that you put a dictator in power just because you’re scared.


  • The owner of my laundromat claims that it’s cheaper to do your laundry there than at home. At first i thought “of course a laundromat owner would say that”, but then he argued that his machines are more efficient than the ones we buy and that they are collectively heated.

    I still think he’s fulll of shit because he only argued about energy costs, not including his rent taxes or profit; but it did get me thinking that it would be cheaper and more efficient to wash our clothes collectively.