Software developer by day, insomniac by night.

  • 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle




  • And her opponent is a misogynistic chauvinist who mocks people with disabilities, diddles children, cheats on his wives, openly talks about sexually assaulting people, has open ties with Putin and Kim Jong-un, honestly I’d be here all day if I tried to scratch just the surface.

    Yet voters were okay with him over a milquetoast career politician. She was held to a much higher standard than Trump ever was, hell she still is given that she is somehow being blamed for the farce that is Trump. Why don’t people blame him instead?







  • What I think is interesting about the word flea market is that it’s a calque in pretty much all languages.

    The Swedish word is “loppis”, which is a cutesy colloquial term for “loppmarknad.” Loppa, meaning flea, and marknad meaning market.
    Flohmarkt in German also means lit. “flea market.”
    Marche aux puces is French, where “puce” means flea, I think this might be the origin of the term.
    Japanese has the casual term フリマ (fleama), short for フリーマーケット, which is just the English term “flea market”, there’s also the term 蚤の市, just meaning “market of fleas.”

    I believe Portuguese calls it a “thieves’ market”, but Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, and Mandarin all use their own native words for “flea market”; mercado de pulgas, mercato delle pulci, Блошиный рынок, Bit Pazarı, Vlooienmarkt, 跳蚤市场.

    For all of the concepts and such that are identical across cultures, few things have universal names. Typically they enter the language as loanwords as well (e.g. karaoke, from Japanese ‘空オケ’, hollow orchestra), so the term “flea market” stands out to me. I’m sure there are lots of other similar things I’m not aware of though.


    Edit: It’s worth mentioning that other than Swedish (native), English, and Japanese, I don’t speak any of the other languages. I’ve asked a Russian-American friend about the Russian term, and a friend in Taiwan about the Mandarin term. Otherwise I’ve checked dictionaries and the like. Don’t take my word as fact, I’m not a linguist. It was just a pattern I found interesting, because the term itself is so particular. Any and all corrections are more than welcome.

    I’m also delighted by the discussion this has sparked! 💖


  • I mean it’s not bad to have alternatives though.

    My roomie is a trucker, and the idea of an electric truck is laughable, at least in my country, because of how trucking works here. Unless the truck is out of order, being loaded, or being refuelled, it’s always on the road; they just swap drivers around like a relay race. Unless a truck came with a swappable battery it wouldn’t be feasible to operate like that, they’d have to at least double their arsenal, (at which point we can already start to question how environmentally friendly that is), and that’ll increase the overall operating costs, which will ultimately end up on the consumer; everything will get more expensive because that’s what they transport. Another problem with pure electric is also that the batteries weigh a shit ton, so the trucks end up being able to transport less because they have to lug the battery around everywhere.

    Biogas is an alternative, and as far as I know it works alright; they already use it. They end up not as powerful as diesel trucks though.

    Something I wonder if it might be applied is something like Toyota’s hybrid system, with regenerative braking etc. I wonder if it scales. My roomie recently had to leave his Golf at the shop for a week, and got it swapped with a Yaris. It cut his fuel consumption by three quarters.





  • “Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.

    You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”

    It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.

    At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.