We can have room in our hearts to hate more than one monstrous US president.

Sugoi! This is the kind of thing I was looking for. Thank you.

It’s been really bewildering and concerning seeing all the crazy consumer crazes online. Maybe this was unfounded, but there was a while where I thought we were starting to wane on consumerism but I guess I was just wrong about that. The internet has just supercharged it. We now have turbo consumerism. Forget about keeping up with the Joneses, you now scroll past 100 of them in your feed and half of them are human billboards influencers.

I can appreciate people enjoying fashion even if it’s not for me. What I don’t understand are the things that are just regular ass items like a tee shirt, but they printed the name of a brand on it and charged a crazy price for it. Nothing else. No actual design or special manufacturing quality. Just the name of a fashion brand that’s famous for… being the name of a fashion brand that sells clothes that… have their name on it. IS EVERYONE PULLING A PRANK ON ME? WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON?

I’ve seen some variant of this advice in a few places, but I don’t really understand how it’s meant to work at the start. If I don’t understand anything being said, how do I begin to start translating and learning? I’ve been watching anime for years and while I know a handful of really common words or phrases that tend to get said in isolation, I don’t know anything about the grammar or most vocabulary that isn’t neatly isolated from the rest of a sentence. If you asked me to try to say even a basic sentence or listen and understand one, I’d be lost. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I even know some of the basic touristy phrases like how to order food or ask for directions. Most of the things I do know seem quite useless in real life. (SUGOI!)

I suppose technically this is how we all learn our first language as a child but… that kind of just happened at a time I can’t really remember. I have no idea how to replicate that as an adult.

So do you have any insight on how to do this?

Right, but I do need some teaching material to start, and I don’t know what are good sources vs scammy subscription services.

Thanks. Bookmarking this.

It might be nice to try traveling there, but I’m not sure how much I can gather from that as a tourist. Like when I went to Japan on vacation it seemed like a nice place, but that’s because I wasn’t exactly going to check out the salary men/women working themselves to death in an office.

Thanks though. You’ve given me some things to think about.

I suppose it would be the employment stuff and how to learn more about the culture/meet people before I go. I suppose for the latter there’s not much to be done before I can learn the language though.

Without knowing more, I think the place I’ve been most interested in has been Vietnam. There are some youtube channels I’ve watched that talked a lot about life there. But obviously there’s only so much that can be gleamed from that.

how would you fare teaching in a classroom of students young, or older at high school age?

I’m not sure. I think I’d probably do better around children than adults. I’m pretty ok with my younger cousins at least. I have had someone suggest that I might be a decent teacher, but I’ve never looked into it. I’ve got some CS skills from taking various classes in college and I did well at them although I didn’t end up managing to get a degree. I do sometimes wonder if I’d ever go back to finish that if I sort out my health issues. But perhaps teaching could also be a route to look into.

What are some good ways to learn about this kind of stuff?

Yeah I figure that would be a big hurdle for a lot of places.

It was in labor relations and I briefly went to grad school for CS, although I didn’t finish it because that’s around when the psych issues really got to me.

I’m sort of on the edge of this. I grew up going to older forums, but those were still moderated and I can’t really remember a time without google. Honestly I don’t even remember how I found the sites that I used. I guess some were just forums for games I played, but less sure about other places.

Politically, I’m pretty firm in my anti-capitalist stance and I think I’ve learned enough to be justifiably confident about that. But I’m relatively a lot less educated about the specifics of future socialist alternatives. There’s a bunch of reading out there, but it’s hard to keep my attention focused long enough to do that kind of reading without more structure behind it like I had when I was in school.

You need to enjoy your life. Otherwise what is the point? If buying the thing helps you accomplish that and it’s not going to ruin your ability to acquire the basics, why not?

I guess the one pitfall to avoid is trying to evaluate if you ACTUALLY want it. Is this actually satisfying some desire beyond random consumption? Could you fulfill that desire more cheaply or for free? If you do get it, are you going to use it or are you going to forget about it and move on to another thing to fill the void?

I go back and forth on having either end of this problem. Sometimes I will spend somewhat recklessly to try to overcome boredom but the things I get don’t really do that and then I end up spending more to keep trying to fix a problem that clearly isn’t getting solved by what I’m doing. Other times I will get so unwilling to try or commit to new things that I stop myself from getting anything even though something might make me happier.

Also, your enjoyment of things isn’t static over time. For example, when I was a kid, getting a new piece of technology, a phone, a new computer, a tablet, a console, etc. was super exciting. It was shiny and new. It opened up all of these new possibilities to me and I had fun both with the things I could do with it but also just fiddling around with the tech. Now? I get a brand spanking new computer or phone or whatever and… it just feels normal. Sure it might be faster, but I can more or less do the same things I used to do. I’m sort of just getting it to maintain what I already had. So now I’m not as quick to go get the new shiny thing. I pretty much hold on to what I have until it’s borderline unusable.

My philosophy is that languages are made up to make communication easier and they change all the time anyway. So as long as you are understood, that’s more important than getting the grammar to be perfect. Getting it like 80% right is plenty and that last 20% consists of a bunch of obscure or ambiguous rules that would take up way too much of my processing power to keep track of while communicating, thus hindering the purpose of using language in the first place. Also, English is a stupid mess of a language. I don’t have enough respect for it to follow all of it’s rules.

That said… what DOES bug me a little is people who make videos who regularly misuse words. Not because I think it’s that big of a deal, but… come on… this is your job and you have complete control over the work at every step of the way and have so many opportunities to correct mistakes. You write the script. You read it. You watch it again while doing editing and could easily re-record bits that are wrong or awkward. Although perhaps this is less about the language specifically and more about leaving mistakes and bloopers in videos in general. That’s what editing is for. We have more advanced editing tools available to the average person than ever before. USE THEM!

The problem is that most of our problems aren’t really science problems. Or at least the thing holding them up isn’t the lack of practical applied scientists. They’re political ones. We’ve known what we needed to do about climate change for decades but their are capitalists who stand to lose from doing anything about it, so we don’t. We have plenty of housing, it’s just being hoarded by people who do nothing with it but extract free money from people who are desperate to have a place to live. We have amazing medicine, but corporations are able to abuse IP laws to price gouge people who need it to live.

A scientist or engineer could come up with some amazing sci-fi tech that has the potential to save us and capitalists would find some way to make it bleed us dry.

You have to understand the backing behind these parties and how that informs how they operate. They both are largely funded by capitalists, often the same capitalists. So there are a core set of interests which they both protect. There are issues that don’t fall within that space where they can be different, some issues that affect different donors differently, and they have different strategies for managing to achieve those shared interests, but when push comes to shove they are still going to do what will be good for the capitalists and the power of the state to represent those interests.

For a narrow example from this meme: Most US presidents have presided over truly awful crimes, some actually illegal, some merely morally criminal, or perhaps criminal on the world stage but not for the US. A just society based on rule of law, as the US claims to be, would prosecute these people for their crimes, whether that be for war crimes, abuses of power, corruption, etc. Ideally while they are in power in order to stop them, but at the very least you’d think that after they leave power there ought to be more political will to go after them, if not for legal or moral reasons, at least for cynical political ones.

But they basically never do this? Why not? Because those crimes help uphold the interests of capitalists and/or the state. They are mostly part of the set of things that the parties agree on. The next president would like to be able to continue to get away with those or similar crimes, so holding the previous president accountable for their actions risks setting a precedent that would come back to bite them.

There were criminal proceedings against Trump, but they were for things that are small in the grand scheme of things. Obama didn’t go after Bush for lying to get us to go into an illegal war, or for using torture, or violating civil liberties, etc. because he was doing the same things. Trump didn’t go after Obama for any of this because… he kept doing the same things. Going back to the most famous example of this, Nixon literally did what Trump did in terms of trying to subvert the “democratic process” and Ford pardoned him.

Basically if you’re president, you can get away with whatever the hell you want as long as it’s for rich people and/or the next guy wants to be able to do the same thing.

Idk, sounds to me like it did a good job mimicking humans. :P