I don't think it will be a big win for the Palestinians. One reason why this hasn't happened in the past is that there is no reliable, functional government in place that governs over all of the territory. You had Hamas in Gaza and the PLO in most of the West Bank and they don't see eye to eye. This hasn't changed. It will be difficult for these established governments to cooperate with a a fractured non-functional one so the benefits for the Palestinian people will only be patchy and homeopathic.

So I fear recognizing a Palestinian state is actually an impotent, diplomatic gesture - like: "we see what's going on there, it's horrible, and we don't have the resolve to do anything else to bring Israel back to the status quo ante." It's finger wagging at Israel more than actual support for the Palestinians. It's a gesture that can easily be reversed as well, like the orange one moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. And I think that's why these announcements of recognition fall on very deaf ears in Tel Aviv. It's political theater for the audiences in the countries whose governments have announced this. "Look, we are doing something! (But we're doing not that much really, we could do other things as well, isolate the Israeli government and/or cut it off palpably from necessary economic and military supply chain support. But we won't. It's a complicated conundrum, that Middle East. And we're not quite ready to jeopardize the existence of Israel over this.)"

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Become active in your local politics. That's where this urban design sausage is made. I'm gonna go ahead and doubt that your post here will reach many decision makers and urban designers.

The reason why you can't angle that parasol is because it will cost more money. Anything the public can use will be abused and then broken. We cannot have nice things.

Fixed typo

It's difficult 2 transpose what u can do in English just 2 other languages written in the Latin alphabet for centuries. English has a remarkable and quite confusing amount of homophones that is absent from other indoeuropean languages. The apostrophe as a letter skipped marker is fairly universal. But beyond that it's already a different ball game in other more similar languages. 2 to too, 4 for, r u - that's very English only.

Simplified Chinese characters are a hint at what they did on the Chinese mainland to cut down on writing time. Beyond that (and I don't speak the language so 🧂) there are single character abbreviations for countries. 美国 is America and 美 suffices as shorthand, which means beauty otherwise. Your example phrase is "R u coming 2nite?" In English we use the present progressive tense here, which doesn't exist like that in Mandarin. It would be phrased as "Come tonight?" The question mark could be replaced with the character that functions as a question marker by itself. And I think you can do this in 3-4 characters and I think they might just beat you to it in a bilingual texting competition in terms of speed.

The mainland population may also be more adept to obfuscate their speech especially online. So similarly pronounced character combinations take over the meaning of a term the censors are actively looking for.

The Japanese like shortening stuff, mostly loanwords, to unrecognizable words. The word for part time work is アルバイト (arubaito) taken from the German for work (Arbeit). Cool kids have whittled it down to baito. A remote control has become a リモコン (rimokon) in normal parlance. Overly long Chinese character combos like 自動販売機 for a vending machine get shortened to 自販機 dropping characters that can be inferred (if you speak it).

I also want to add that text speak is heavily influenced by restrictions on text length and charges for each text. Non Latin script characters take up more than one Latin character per Chinese character for instance. It's probably 5+ in decoding per character. So you reach 160 letters quite quickly and that's why SMS in China was very cheap and quickly adopted a system where message threads would be sent and put back together on the recipient's phone. In Japan they used email from the start, even in dumb phone T9 texting days. They had no Twitter-like restrictions on text length so they didn't need to be shorter than what their thumbs could successfully fumble together.

Wow. It's like they have discovered the concept of biases. A coffee table book of umbrella pictures would've had a similar effect no doubt.

For their next study they will surely test dihydrogenoxide in its liquid aggregate state for wetness.

This pretty much applies to all search engines. Because of that I don't see the point of it being posted in this lemmy.

Who thought it is a good idea to let George Lucas edit Trek? It's like an Odo shot first kind of situation. And I think Odo never used a phaser.

Is this is the guy that Scotty shoots in the end? If so, I've only ever seen the version with that scene and the bad Mission: Impossible face mask reveal. And I owned this movie as a VHS bought in Europe as part of a set released before VII came out...

No, it isn't. They may already like you but how will they know you care if you don't offer an array of easy to misunderstand signals?

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 2 months ago

Discrimination in hiring happens every day. Be it conscious or subconscious. If there isn't a hard, unavoidable quota no one can force anyone to hire people they don't like. The laws may just forbid them from being this forthright.

Never attribute to malice what you can more appropriately attribute to stupidity. The people who coded this may be young and not even on their first divorce yet. To me, that's what this family plan business falls under. To leap from that to organized discrimination of folks being born out of wedlock seems a tad too conspiratorial from my POV.

This may be a fryable fish. Yet I see much bigger fish elsewhere.

What may also hold back development of functional patchwork family plans is legal hot water. Not every split is amicable. The Googles and Microsofts may simply have decided they don't want to be put in a situation where they need to adjudicate between two warring ex partners whose bitterness is overriding their child rearing responsibilities with petty disputes. And building a system where maybe new partners can gain access - even just by mistake - to their spouse's kids accounts also has very bad PR potential when it turns out the step parent is abusive.

Nevertheless you should let them know about your feedback. Patchwork families are quite common and they can probably do more in that area.

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 4 points 2 months ago

You've discovered the birthday problem.

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 2 months ago

You read the story. They said he died of exhaustion. It's the Daily Mail. It doesn't have to be true what they say.

I think if your mind is sufficiently obsessive you can override all the natural countermeasures your body uses to get you to r&r. You pass a point of no return and you fall asleep but that's the end. Not allowing people to sleep is a form of torture that can kill. Much like starving someone.

This guy allegedly also smoked and drank like an idiot. That couldn't have been helpful under the circumstances.

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 3 months ago

By European standards nothing to write home about. By Asian standards, a Mount Everestrian protrusion.

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 5 months ago

You can consider yourself anything you like. Time is relative. I'm older than you and would say 24 is young. A nineteen year old might look at you as an antique. The trick is to know your audience. Don't openly call yourself young if you're among the elders in the room.

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FriendOfDeSoto

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