Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages - "a monolingual speaker of Cantonese cannot understand a monolingual speaker of Mandarin and vice versa. There is zero intelligibility between the two languages. In fact, even within the huge collection of speech forms that fall under the umbrella of "Mandarin," there are many varieties that are more or less mutually unintelligible... The old canard that "when the dialects are written down they are the same" is simply untrue, since what gets written down are not the regional variants but standard Mandarin (and in earlier times Classical Chinese, a dead language for at least two thousand years). If one, as a tour de force, does contrive to write unadulterated Cantonese or Taiwanese, for example, they will be as hard for a reader of Mandarin to understand as spoken Cantonese or Taiwanese is for a speaker of Mandarin to understand."
Michelle Fullwood's answer to How are written Mandarin and written Cantonese different? - Quora - "Cantonese and Mandarin sometimes use different words to represent the same concept. This is often the case among high-frequency closed-class words. In this case the written word in Cantonese often has a specific character that is either not part of the standard Mandarin set.
佢 keoi5 "he/she/it", c.f. Mandarin 他/她/它 tā
My favourite example of this is 冇 mou5. Take a guess as to what it means! Here's a hint: 有 jau5 (C) / yǒu (M) means "to have". Answer: since it doesn't have the two horizontal bars of 有, it means "to not have", and is the equivalent of Mandarin 没有 méiyǒu.
Another large class of such words are borrowings from other languages like English. For example, in Hong Kong, the English word for "taxi" was borrowed as: 的士 dik7 si2 "taxi", c.f. Mandarin 出租车 chūzūchē lit. "hire car"...
Mandarin and Cantonese sometimes share a word that descended from a common Middle Chinese word, but whose pronunciation diverged. In this case, they both use the same character(s) for the word. But Cantonese always uses traditional characters, while Mandarin is written with simplified characters in China and Singapore.
我 ngo5 "I", c.f. Mandarin 我 wǒ
個 go3 "generic classifier", c.f. Mandarin 个 (simplified) / 個 (traditional) gè
Mandarin and Cantonese have different grammar. For example, in Mandarin ditransitives (e.g. using the verb "give"), the word order is verb–indirect object (recipient)–direct object, while in Cantonese the word order is verb–direct object–indirect object. In this case, the written Cantonese will usually reflect the Cantonese word order.
畀嗰本書我 bei2 go2 bun2 syu1 ngo5 "Give the book (to) me" (source: Wikipedia), c.f. Mandarin 给我那本书 gěi wǒ nà běn shū "Give me the book""
Nat Turner with the burner on Twitter - "The “dictatorship” of the democratic people’s’ republic of North Korea has done more for the liberation of marginalized people than this country you’re definding. Fuck every aspect of this country and it’s disgusting tool, the military. I wish that “dictatorship” won the war."
This self proclaimed Marxist (and also "secular humanist"?!) lives in Detroit/DC. Imagine hating your country that much. Why don't these peple all go live in the Communist countries they love so much?
Comment from elsewhere: "Years ago I was arguing with an American Maoist about fuck knows what. Doesn't matter. Probably something to do with the importance of freedom because he said something foolish like "yeah I'd rather be in prison in China rather than free in America". And I was like "wow, you know you can prove this right now by flying to China and immediately getting yourself arrested, because it's really easy to get arrested in China. You can live your dream life in a Shanghai prison."He stopped responding and eventually blocked when a few people agreed with me. I can only assume he chose shitty freedom over awesome prison."
Marx-y Marx and the Funky Bunch☭ on Twitter - "Kim Jong Un is objectively a more moral person than every single member of the US government"
He lists his pronouns in his profile. Communist countries would not tolerate his degeneracy of course
이름없음 on Twitter - "If you equate both titles “Supreme Leader” and “Prime Minister” with the descriptor “head-of-state” but think one sounds more ‘totalitarian’ than the other as if “Supreme” is not simply just a synonym for “Prime” and “Leader” a synonym for “Minister” - then you might be a racist!"
Its profile: "I have pronouns." Hurr
This person lives in New Zealand and used Jacinda Ardern as an example
‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens. - "The unprecedented explosion of their use in response to the pandemic has launched an unofficial social experiment, showing at a population scale what’s always been true: virtual interactions can be extremely hard on the brain... group video chats become less collaborative and more like siloed panels, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Because each participant is using one audio stream and is aware of all the other voices, parallel conversations are impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can’t recognize how non-active participants are behaving—something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision.For some people, the prolonged split in attention creates a perplexing sense of being drained while having accomplished nothing... That’s why a traditional phone call may be less taxing on the brain, Franklin says, because it delivers on a small promise: to convey only a voice... If you’re feeling self-conscious or overstimulated, Normand recommends you turn off your camera. Save your energy for when you absolutely want to perceive the few non-verbal cues that do come through, such as during the taxing chats with people you don’t know very well, or for when you want the warm fuzzies you get from seeing someone you love. Or if it’s a work meeting that can be done by phone, try walking at the same time.“Walking meetings are known to improve creativity, and probably reduce stress as well”"
So much for the hype about online learning
Hero Creates AI Doppelgänger of Himself to Get Out of Zoom Video Meetings - "To build his bot, Reed recorded himself in Quicktime looking quizzical, confused, opening his mouth, and smiling, and took screenshots. When these images cycle through, it almost looks like Reed has a poor connection—and he programmed his bot to say as much"
Tiananmen Square Massacre: How China's Millennials Discuss It Now - "Twenty-five years after June 4, 1989, even China’s educated youth have only a foggy understanding of the incident, and they’re skittish about discussing it openly. Textbooks don’t mention the violence that left hundreds, maybe thousands, dead in the streets of Beijing. The Chinese Internet has been scrubbed of all but the official accounts. (The first result on the search engine Baidu is a short article from People’s Daily concluding that the incident “taught the party and the people a useful lesson.”) The Chinese government has arrested dozens of people in recent weeks for planning or participating in events related to the anniversary, and police have warned foreign journalists not to cover the story. Still, most young Chinese people I approached were willing to talk—as long as they could remain anonymous. Awareness of the Tiananmen incident among young Chinese tends to correlate with education level, exposure to the world outside China, and general curiosity... Most Chinese parents don’t talk about politics with their children, said Amy, a bright 26-year-old from Guangdong province who works for a tech company in Beijing. But she was an exception: she heard about the incident from her father. “He hated Deng Xiaoping,” she said. “He thinks Deng caused China to have no morals, no beliefs. I asked why, and he said, ‘Deng Xiaoping ordered tanks to run over college students. Do you think that’s what a good person does?’” Later, when she was attending a top university in Beijing, one of her professors showed photos and videos from the protests. “The teacher told us not to mention it outside class”... Everyone I talked to knew the basic outline: Student protests, government crackdown, innocent civilians shot dead. But they weren’t all sure why the protesters were so upset. Jenny, a sharp 25-year-old legal expert living in Beijing, guessed it had to do with corruption. Several people suggested that the students were being manipulated by outside forces, particularly foreign governments... You can’t blame them for being confused. The 1989 protesters themselves didn’t know exactly what they wanted. They complained variously about high inflation, corruption, and a lack of democracy... Even if they’d agreed on a set of goals, they couldn’t agree how to achieve them: Some wanted revolution, while others pushed for incremental change... As Louisa Lim writes in her new book The People’s Republic of Amnesia, “moving on—not dwelling on the past—has become a key survival tactic, perhaps the most important one.”... She believes that even searching for forbidden key words could get her in trouble, she said: “They can track you down within minutes.” They were pessimistic that the next generation would know any more about 1989 than they do. The post-’90s generation, the oldest of whom are now graduating from college, prefer American TV shows and Korean pop stars to social issues, said Amy. Susan argued that most young Chinese are too focused on getting by to worry about grand political issues. “They don’t care, as long as they have something to eat and a place to live,” she said. “We’re just walking dead.” Between the quest for material goods and the squelching of her own curiosity, Jenny said, “the government succeeded. We’ve been brainwashed.”"
Coronavirus news: Foodora Is Ditching Canada Two Months After Workers Win Right to Unionize - "After five years in Canada, food delivery company Foodora is pulling out of the country in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement comes two months after its workers won the right to unionize... Foodora "has been unable to reach a level of profitability in Canada that’s sustainable enough to continue operations"... The timing of the announcement raises questions because there’s been a reported increase in demand for food delivery services, which are considered an essential service during the pandemic... Foodsters United, the union representing workers, said in a statement that it is “saddened and greatly disappointed” in Foodora and Delivery Hero for their “poorly thought-out decision.” Foodsters said restaurants and couriers will only have two weeks to find alternate ways to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic. “This demonstrates a complete disregard for the wellbeing of us workers in an already extreme and uncertain time”"
Presumably this is the fault of capitalism and nothing to do with unionisation increasing costs and making an already loss-making business model only subsidised by venture capitalists' money even more unviable
The Millennial Lifestyle Is About to Get More Expensive - The Atlantic - "To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income... I don’t know if it makes sense, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last. Is there a better epitaph for this age of consumer technology?... It’s easy to spend all day riding unicorns whose most magical property is their ability to combine high valuations with persistently negative earnings—something I’ve pointed out before. If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent... To maximize customer growth they have strategically—or at least “strategically”—throttled their prices, in effect providing a massive consumer subsidy. You might call it the Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship, in which consumer tech companies, along with their venture-capital backers, help fund the daily habits of their disproportionately young and urban user base. With each Uber ride, WeWork membership, and hand-delivered dinner, the typical consumer has been getting a sweetheart deal.For consumers—if not for many beleaguered contract workers—the MLS is a magnificent deal, a capital-to-labor transfer of wealth in pursuit of long-term profit; the sort of thing that might simultaneously please Bernie Sanders and the ghost of Milton Friedman. But this was never going to last forever. WeWork’s disastrous IPO attempt has triggered reverberations across the industry. The theme of consumer tech has shifted from magic to margins. Venture capitalists and start-up founders alike have re-embraced an old mantra: Profits matter.And higher profits can only mean one thing: Urban lifestyles are about to get more expensive... Am I getting ripped off by these companies, or am I kinda-sorta ripping them off? In many cases, the answer is the latter... The meal-kit company Blue Apron revealed before its public offering that the company was spending about $460 to recruit each new member, despite making less than $400 per customer. From afar, the company looked like a powerhouse. But from a unit-economics standpoint—that is, by looking at the difference between customer value and customer cost—Blue Apron wasn’t a “company” so much as a dual-subsidy stream: first, sponsoring cooks by refusing to raise prices on ingredients to a break-even level; and second, by enriching podcast producers. Little surprise, then, that since Blue Apron went public, the firm’s valuation has crashed by more than 95 percent."
