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Joined 5 days ago
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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • Do you know if there are significant differences between the Korean language of North Korea, and the Korean language of South Korea?

    Or are they still very similar?

    I only really know one word in Korean… I would sound it out as ’ gam zeh hah mee da '.

    I asked some local, older aged, shop owners of South Korean descent how to say ‘thank you’ in Korean so I could thank them with more respect when I shop at their stores… I may be pronouncing or spelling my pronunciation wrong.

    Apoarently it is 감사합니다 in Korean… but that is likely South Korean, and it seems that South Korean and North Korean use different words, or pronounciations, for at least some terms…

    It would be interesting to learn if there are more differences between the two forms of Korean. :D


  • American here:

    About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

    The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

    These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

    Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

    And this will get worse.

    Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.






  • i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

    I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

    1:

    Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

    2:

    There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

    3:

    If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

    I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

    Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.




  • My only quibble is: Great Depression 2.0, not Great Recession 2.0.

    This will be much, much worse than 07 08 09.

    Also IMO absolutely yes, Obama should have let the US auto industry collapse if they didn’t accept being completely nationalized.

    Play stupid games, win stuoid prizes.

    Thats how capitalism works, right, right?

    Oh wait no, its actually uh, bribe politicians to subsidize your inefficient and mismanaged business, and then also fund a bunch of PR to convince people that… that isn’t happening, that isn’t your business model.

    Instead we got basically this situation where US auto mfctrs are stupendously subsidized by the US gov… yet have no accountability to it in terms of high level, long term business strategy.

    That lead to all of C Suite just chasing as much profit as possible by basically just saying… fuck making a reliable cheapish car, everything is now a luxury priced giganto sized pavement princess with horrendous maintenance problems.

    If they’d accepted being nationalized, well then at least we would have kept actual ownership domestic, and the GAO could have just done audits on these entire companies and then everyone would know where all the mismanagement was going on. …

    Same thing with Boeing. Boeing is massively subsidized, is a near text book perfect example of how to do regulatory capture, and wow what a surprise, it was run in a manner to maximize balance sheets at the loss of fundamental ability to actually deliver a reliable product.


  • When the news about that came out, around a decade ago now, I deleted my Facebook profile and tried to tell all my friends/family using FB that … this is pure fucking evil and they should also get off FB.

    They all gaslit me, pretended that news wasn’t real, and acted like I was a paranoid delusional maniac.

    Nowadays we have basically the same kind of conclusions regarding TikTok and other platforms that focus on short form video content… well, actually even worse conclusions… and they come from actual peer reviewed scientific journals…

    But you’ll still get people saying ‘brainrot isn’t real’… when uh, yes thats a clumsy term, but it is basically confirmed at this point that TikTok is as addictive as a drug, ruins your motivation and attention span, fills your with mis and disinformatiin, ruins and warps your self image and self esteem, promotes wildly irresponsible and often illegal financial mindsets/strategies… etc etc…