weak aptitude for language learning
This is such bullshit. As a Brit abroad, our problem is weak language education. We are taught to such a poor degree and we are not taught how to learn a language. It's been the biggest struggle of my adult life trying to get conversational and after a year I am still way behind my cohorts - it's not some genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning, but a lack of language infrastructure in childhood.
Fun fact! Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer - yes, it works and has been independently verified. No, you can't have it because embargo.
EDIT: vaccine here isn't actually what I thought. In this case it is a treatment to be used for certain kinds of lung cancer, not a preventative measure as we are used to thinking of Vaccine. Thanks to the comment below for going through it and pushing me to do proper research.
While my initial take was a glib link to a wikipedia page and not thoroughly researched, I do sill believe that the embargo has directly caused this treatment to come to market in the west as the levels of cooperation are non-existent. It has been used for 7 years in Cuba but is only now entering Stage 3 trials in the US.
Cuba have also became the first country to have 0 mother-child transmissions of HIV.
But the US has decided that working with Cuba to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (in the States alone) is less important than causing "economic dissatisfaction and hardship" to the Cuban people.
It's not just America though.
Where I'm from:
UK average income before tax) £34,963 - £27,911 after tax (assuming NO student loan and NO pension) (for context: a band 3 nurse with 3 years experience makes £24,336 before tax or £20,631.51 after with no pension)
England average house price: £375,131
Approx ratio after tax: 13:1
Minimum deposit: 5% - £18,756.55
Tax: 0% on first time buyers
Fees: about £1,000 - £5,000
Total cost to get going: Approx £21,750 - nearly a years wage.
Now let's look where I live: Spain!
Turns out Spain really is a load of countries wearing a hat so getting unified stats is not easy. Let's try Barcelona:
Average income before tax: €33,837 - €25,470 after tax
Average house price: €376,399
Approx ratio after tax: 15:1
Minimum deposit: 10% - €37,639.90
Purchase tax: 10% - €37,639.90 (plus 1.5% for new builds)
Fees: 2 - 5% - 7,527.98 - 18,819.95
Total cost to get going: €82,807.78 - €94,099.75
Turns out treating housing as a market to speculate on might just be the problem all along.
We have to learn from Germany's mistakes: armed resistance is legitimate in the face of fascism.
Yeah but Charles is suffering from a short reign penalty. He should really execute some prisoners; high dread means fewer factions.
Source: I play a lot of Crusader Kings
The privileged Russians, you mean. I know a few people in Russia, good people, that have no prospects of ever getting out.
Being able to pick a country to reside in is a privilege most people can't afford, and that's before you factor in only 5% of Russians can speak English and that's makes up 80% of the foreign language speakers in Russia and you've got yourself a very immobile population.
The idea that a government can instruct the courts to ignore human rights legislation shows how fundamentally broken the liberal "democracy" system is.
This from the government that just made saying "I am intolerant towards the idea of liberal parliamentary democracy" an example of extremism but saying "foreigners don't deserve human rights" is not extremism.
The rise of the worker co-op is definitely something to watch! I'm currently exploring a worker co-op for a tech start up. Biggest problem? Funding. No investors want to touch a co-op.
Same thing that happens when other slaves are hurt or killed on the job.
Not a hell of a lot.
Been using tidal ever since Spotify's Joe Rogan debacle. Main reason? They actually pay the artist. But the sound quality is a nice bonus as well! No regrets...other than people trying to share music with me by sending a spotify link!
And in Europe we're charged 50c a sachet 😞
You literally sent that from a FOSS platform...
Unless there's an emergency.
The way I read it, this is ensuring everyone has the most effective analogue radio in their car because that's how emergency broadcasts would go out. Seems sensible to me.
Loving all the Scots embracing the United Kingdom in this thread by describing England as a part of their country 😉
It's true, but at least half the artists I listen to I would never have found if it weren't for streaming. Something is, after all, better than nothing.
And compared to the competition, Tidal's payments are good:
~30% more than Apple Music (0.01c)
~300% more than Spotify (0.003 - 0.005c)
~500% more than Soundcloud (0.0025c)
~1000% more than Pandora (0.00133c)
Gnostic Gospels is where it's at! Oldest surviving (non metal/stone) books in existence!
Making $60k in Quabec your take home is: $44,428
Making $140k your take home is: $91,713
Using this example, all they're going to feel is their take home pay more than doubling.
EDIT: Source: https://turbotax.intuit.ca/tax-resources/quebec-income-tax-calculator.jsp#
Kinda like the Imperial measurement system, if you are being compared to Myanmar then perhaps stop?
With all my knowledge in tact? Hell yes! I'd keep all that bitcoin instead of spending tens of thousands of it (about £100) on Silk Road in uni.
Considering how much of the web is AI-generated now (with it predicted to rise to 90% by the end of 2026) we've managed to turn a tool for connecting people to a tool for chatbots to talk to one another.
The fact we have an idiom "sent to Coventry" meaning to deliberately ostracise someone should tell you all you need to know.
I went to uni in that city; there isn't enough money in all the world to make me go back there. City of 300k people with over 3k homeless. Utter monstrosity of brutalist architecture (the university library is based on a panopticon prison, I kid you not). And the ring road! Taking your life in your hand just merging into it!
Absolutely insane amount of crime, with one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the country (for context, it's crime index is about 20% higher than London's). And I've never seen so many street walkers in my life! Plus they charge, I am not joking, £20 a go.
Well, they are using white phosphorous to burn innocent civilians...
You don't have to give either money and there is the option to give both money.
Found my wife on Hinge - it actually felt like an app to match with people you'd like. Having to actually comment on the profile instead of swipe left or right based on the feel really helped.
Fascist and populist are not mutually exclusive.
Library books aren't free. They are paid for by the library and the author gets a payment per lend (called Public Lending Rights). Not sure how it works for games, but I would be shocked if it's not a similar system.
You're conflating liberal parliamentary representative democracy with all types of democracy - I was very specific in my post as to which I had the problem with (and it is equally as specific in the UK's new definition of "extremism").
I have no problem with democracy and do think it's the best system. I have a problem with the idea that electing our overlords from a curated list with little to no fundamental difference (i.e. liberal parliamentary democracy) to then dictate to groups tens or hundreds of millions of people strong is democracy.
To add to this, the rule of thumb in the UK is your maximum loan is 4.5x your salary.
The average worker could borrow about £157,000.
I knew someone would say this, which is why I also used Spain where the houses are as expensive, the pay is worse, and the tax is higher!
It doesn't matter where you go in the West, the dream of liberalism is dead
How true is this or are we doing the same thing "generation killed industry/way of doing things" that the boomer media is so fond of?
It's a matter of scale. For co-op where we are, you can get "investor loans" but they tend to have a fixed return. Capital wants to gamble more than they want a 5% APR for 10 years.
What we're currently exploring is an angel loan from someone sympathetic that has historically lived higher up the corporate ladder and we're applying for some government grants, but Credit Union may be a good idea!
There's a reason the average black male spends 1/3 of their life in prison in America.
And then has the right to vote taken away when they get out....
I don't think the judges would like it, but what recourse would they have if the government passed an act such as this in Canada? I could see a judge saying this act breaches X treaties, but then just withdraw from the treaties (edit: which this act is likely a precursor to).
The system of parliamentary liberal democracy is an inherently flawed system.
Nah, in the UK it's the midlands. Coventry, Birmingham, Leicester, and Loughborough can all go in the bin.
Work laptops in particular suck, I find. My first one was lagging, freezing, and crashing within months. The second one is three times as expensive but the same brand and is still not happy.
I also use Windows at home and haven't had the same experience. I think it's really manufacturer dependent
Lol it's a lyric from dead prez, wouldn't get bent out of shape about it. Literally written in 2000 - I can't even find stats that old 🤷
AbeBooks was bought by Amazon in 2008.
If I had the money to pay for music twice I would 😅
"We invented a new kind of calculator. It usually returns the correct value for the mathematics you asked it to evaluate! But sometimes it makes up wrong answers for reasons we don't understand. So if it's important to you that you know the actual answer, you should always use a second, better calculator to check our work."
Then what is the point of this new calculator?
Fantastic comment, from the article.