At best, it sounds vaguely like marica, which is another common slur, but just like my reply ti some dumbass claiming veado and viado are the same in Portuguese, you would have to have some sort of developmental disorder to think Marieke and marica sound the same, or completely ignore Spanish orthography.
It’s only the same if you ignore Portuguese pronunciation, though, this is still some rightwing snowflake shit. Veado and viado will only sound the same if you speak some ignorant, backwater version of Brazilian Portuguese, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Viado e veado não soam igual, mano, esse é coisa de homens frágeis, eu não sei de que você tá falando. Deixe essa porra pros Bolsonaristas. Nem os tugas falam assim.
Meanwhile, I just passed over Europe’s flyover countries yesterday.
Pretty sure their point is that, in aggregate, trains are a much more fuel efficient and cost effective than transporting the same goods a comparable distance in trucks. The amount that some people burn idling is insignificant in comparison to these savings over longer distances and higher volumes of goods transported. Given this, the transportation companies are unlikely to switch away from rail transport any time soon.
Honestly, your problem is just shitty planning by your local community if you can get trapped without means of escape while freight moves through, and they are suggesting you guys might want to invest in building a way around this with some of that fancy bridge, overpass or tunnel technology we have these days. Why would anyone else involved inconvenience themselves and others that rely on the rail to do business, just because your locality refuses to address an issue that just impacts you and the folks that live around you?
This is like arguing against having an electric grid anywhere, just because you frequently lose power in hurricanes when trees knock down the power lines, while ignoring the fact your town could literally just bury them, as they do to address this problem in many other places.
You can do this to an extent with kanji, as well, it’s just something that really only gets easier the more you study Japanese, though. When you start getting more proficient, you can usually have a pretty good shot at guessing the pronunciation and something of the meaning in context, but the difficulty is certainly really front-loaded.
Of course, then you have some kanji that just have 100 different readings and you just have to go memorize those, so there’s certainly room for improvement.
Honestly, it probably comes down to taxes. Many Americans are rabidly opposed to any proposal that will increase their taxes by any amount, regardless of the reason, and a lot of school district funding is based on local property taxes. Coincidentally, home- and business-owners who would have to pay that increased property tax are able to have an outsized influence on local politics. No politician is going to raise that proposal for funding foreign language classes.
As sad as it is, learning to speak another language just isn’t seen as that important by many. They don’t need to use anything other than English in their daily lives, and many citizens don’t even have a passport, much less travel abroad.
In addition, aside from Spanish, many areas just lack the resources you would need to be able to develop your language skills from “I get good grades in my highschool German class” to “I can actually use the language in normal interactions with native speakers.”
Think of your local bookstore and libraries. How many if them have a section of books you can just browse in a language other than English or Spanish? For anything beyond Spanish, how often do you see or hear another foreign language? Would you be confident you could find enough conversation partners to use that language even semi-frequently?
Yes, the internet opens up a lot of doors in terms of resources, but you need to be personally invested in learning the language to make them work. Unless there’s a community with great reading lists at various levels for your target language, just searching and browsing bookstore websites aimed at native speakers is kind of tough for being able to just browse and find something that catches your eye and seems on your level, especially compared to just browsing the shelves in a brick and mortar shop. Also, those books are generally much more expensive than English books, for obvious reasons.
Yes, I would be hyped to learn my local school district was going to start teaching the kids 4 languages from elementary through high school, but it’s just going to be wasted money if you don’t have the auxiliary elements outside the classroom in place, or a plan to at least put them in place while rolling out these classes. Otherwise, you’re just going to get a bunch of yokels coming out of the woodwork to say “My boy don’t need to speak nothing but 'American!” And complaining because little Billy ordered 4 books off Amazon.de and it ran them 120€, only to show up and have Billy realize these books are way harder than he thought they would be and he actually needs to order more books with simpler language to get started.
Yes, little Billy could pirate the shit out of the books and stuff he needs and find a discord chat or forum to get in free practice with speaking and writing, but not all students will be motivated enough and tech savvy enough for us to assume this will be a viable method to get results in general.
One thing many people have surprisingly low comprehension of is that people ≠ government.
Regular Israeli civilians did not partake in the war, did not cause the apartheid, and did not steal the land. They were born there, or went there on a promise of entering a friendly Jewish community - not of murdering people.
People defending this have a surprisingly low comprehension of the fact that Israelis, generally speaking, are literate and educated enough to be aware of the fact that most of the “Oh, we’re just a nice friendly Jewish community” is a lie and their taxes and labor will go towards supporting this stuff. Israelis are not stupid people, they are not incapable of accessing news and information from non-Israeli sources. The longer Israel continues to be such a predatory, imperial state, the less sympathy I have for the civilian population that says “Oh, I don’t actually support this, but my mom and dad live here and won’t move, so I have to stay here.” Well, fuck your mom and dad, and fuck you too if that applies to you. At this point, I only have sympathy for the small portion of the population who are either actively opposing this regime from within, or who are planning on leaving and are still in the process of finalizing their departure.
This is catastrophic when it happens to Palestinians, and not much better should it happen to Israelis.
Considering that the longer we avoid this for the Israelis, more of their neighboring countries are going to experience it, I will once again be unequivocal in saying, screw the Israelis in that case. I would much prefer that literally every resident of Israel gets told to screw off back to where they came from, rather than to see the genocide and displacement of the Palestinians be expanded to the Syrians, Lebanese and other neighboring nations, like Israel has already signaled it’s intent to do.
My sympathy for the Israeli people is directly proportional to their opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, which seems unlikely to change much, considering that this is just the continuation of decades of Israeli policy, rather than some exceptional state that only emerged because they were attacked once by Hamas. Contrary to what Israeli propaganda would have us believe, this isn’t something special that is only happening because the Israelis were shocked by one particular attack.
Ont the food shortage front, North Korea kind of got hit by a perfect storm of problems that might not have been so severe, had they not all occurred in short order. In brief, over the span of several years in the 1990s, the DPRK managed to lose their greatest backer and trading partner with the collapse of the USSR, which in turn meant that flaws present in some already failing internal policies could no longer be ignored, and were, in fact, exacerbated. Then they had widespread flooding that devastated domestic agriculture, making a bad situation worse. International sanctions would have also impeded efforts to turn to international markets temporarily to purchase additional food and necessary supplies to turn the situation around. While the US did supply food aid starting in 1996, much like how the US weaponized the embargos on Cuba and sanctions on Iran in a way that worsened their situation during the Covid pandemic, George W. Bush severely cut US food aid, and in some years, it was eliminated entirely.
There’s a whole article on the subject on Wikipedia that is a good start for understanding it. While there are certainly plenty of things to criticize North Korea for, I think the general “Hurr durr, communism is bad, look at all this nice food I have,” take that has become widespread in the US is a pretty reductive bit of anti-DPRK propaganda. Also, I don’t know how much of their relative success before that point was due to the USSR propping up an allied state and how much could be attributed to Kim Il Sung’s capabilities as a statesman, but his successors don’t seem to be his equal either in finding strong parties to ally with or in their statecraft. It’s also entirely possible that they are simply the Juche version of failsons, slowly dissipating their father’s legacy for their own gratification after having grown up fairly privileged and viewing the enterprise left to them (or state, in this case) purely as part of their inheritance to plunder for personal gain.
From what I’ve seen in other articles about the same case, it’s basically nothing special. The North Korean applies under a false identity that isn’t associated with North Korea, and they have (or at least claim to have) relevant education and experience that would make them good fits for roles like programming, then they apply for remote jobs where they can continually work at one job without having to go in and interact with people face to face.
I kind of doubt the problem is being suspected of being an operative, though, so much as ex filtration of corporate secrets and potentially falling afoul of sanctions against North Korea if they continue to employ someone in their company once they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is a North Korean national working under a false identity. They would be helping the North Korean government to maintain a steady inflow of foreign currency that they need, which I’m sure could land them in trouble. Aside from that liability, I would imagine they would beore concerned about company IP and tratedsecrets this employee would have access to being available to the DPRK to do what they will with, as well as others in the government being able to use their credentials to potentially access and compromise systems on the company’s network that this employee could access.
“Am I interested in other DEs?” and “Will I install them?” are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn’t the new hotness anymore, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I’d rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.
Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.
Then again, I never saw a 6 pack of large bottles of coke until I came to Norway, where every grocery store seems to sell 6 packs of the 1.5 liter bottles, so Europeans are not exactly without their own Coca Cola habits to support.