FriendOfDeSoto

I fear this has the potential of becoming the copied standard unfortunately. Fear of terrorism is like think of the children. All it will do is force people who need visas into having squeaky clean innocuous public profiles and operating anonymous accounts with actual opinions. Terrorists will do the same. So this privacy infringement will only catch really dumb people.

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?

You are judging work by somebody who doesn’t feel compelled to follow guidelines made by other people with those very same guidelines. Those other people looked much more closely at flags for geographical entities, not movements, to come up with their guidelines. No one is required to follow them or retroactively abide by them. They are a great style guide but not the law.

Every flag serves a purpose. This flag’s purpose is to show representation by color and design for everyone in the community. It’s was the point to be busy.

Why don’t they just stick with the rainbow flag? Because the idea of the rainbow encompassing everyone was made at a time when gay and lesbians came out with pride but many of the letters that abbreviate that community today were still marginalized more harshly, maybe even within homosexual circles. They weren’t all suddenly anthropists and free from discriminatory points of view. Development of ideas and communities takes time. And that’s why an artist took ideas from many different flags that were created over time and combined them into one. It is eye catchy and instantly recognizable, even at a medium distance still.

I don’t find the result aesthetically pleasing either. But I recognize a) that wasn’t the point of it and b) I’m not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If from within that community a movement rises to change the flag into something else, by all means. Other than that my design opinions - and I suspect many other ones in this thread - are largely academic and frankly irrelevant.

Good flag bad flag is not the gospel. Take it as a starting point for new designs but don’t scrutinize all existing flags by it.

I think both Apple and fictitious closed Android would be way more interchangeable and data from within would be more portable. Developers would get more of a cut. The saving grace for Google in the real world is that they can do Apple shenanigans while pointing at the open-source availability of Android and not get dumped in hotter antitrust water. If we only had two OSs and both were closed especially regulators in Europe would hit both of them much harder. And like tougher environmental restrictions on cars became the de facto US standard for everyone, the forced equal playing field (the EU guys LOVE an equal playing field) would over time make shit better for all users everywhere.

If there was no Android I think we would have a long list of failed attempts to build one that all fail because every company wanted to build their own walled gardens, and didn’t get enough traction. iOS probably would have succeeded thanks to Apple marketing budgets and their somewhat cultish follower base. But I suspect it would have followed more the initial Steve Jobs idea of doing most stuff in browser; the app revolution wouldn’t have happened. So there would be a big iOS share and then the lower 30% or so would be fractured into other walled gardens for poor people. One result of that would be an earlier agreement on a RCS-like texting solution and not just in the States but everywhere. Because more players would have a stake in seamless communication because stuff like WhatsApp (a reaction to high texting rates, mostly in Europe) and blue/green bubblr iMessage did not happen.

If you have a garage, at home. You might want you drop more details to get better answers. E.g. location.

… how pervasive the new Global Language already is …

I’m going to challenge you on this point. First of all, what’s Chinese? I’m guessing you refer to Putonghua aka Mandarin, the erstwhile variant of Beijingnese prescribed for official use within the PRC by their political leadership.

And second, how “global” is it? It’s useful primarily in one contiguous area of the world. Even there a large chunk of people kind of learn it as a first semi-foreign language because they speak something different at home. Cantonese, Shanghainese, or a language that cannot be written in Chinese characters.

Which brings me to my third point: a language that requires study of a script this idiosyncratic will not rise to a global language. Vietnam has gotten rid of hanzi, Korean pretty much as well. Ironically, the north has already completely abandoned it. By comparison, the Latin alphabet was spread by cavalry and cannon boat into all parts of the world for centuries. It spread so far that it is now used to teach pinyin to PRC schoolchildren. And while it is not without its own problems, the simplicity and adaptability of this phonetic alphabet to any language makes it far more useful than Chinese characters. And I’m not shitting on the cultural value of them: that’s unimpeachable. It’s just too complicated.

The alphabet spread with English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese all over the world. I’m not saying that’s a good thing but it’s already happened. Mandarin cannot have a similar success today unless the PRC starts colonizing at gunpoint fast.

Most Chinese as a foreign language speakers outside the PRC learned it for economic reasons. Economic ties have become somewhat dicey. If anything I suspect interest in learning Mandarin to wane.

There is also the tonal aspect. Any atonal-native language learner is going to have a much harder time than trying to remember the non-sensical English orthography.

More people on this planet learn English as their first and possibly only foreign language - if they learn one at all. The forum you asked this question on is in English. The internet cements the use of the alphabet.

I’m in Japan where foreign language education is notoriously sub-par overall. English is the first foreign language. Some private high schools offer Mandarin as an optional, I haven’t seen anything substantial in state-run schools. At college level, most people chose between French and German as a second foreign language. Like we’re still in the Meiji Era. I’m a big proponent that they abandon this tradition in favor of Russian, Korean, and Mandarin. It always helps to learn the language of your neighbors. Language schools advertize k-pop-trendy Korean more.

Most people who say that do so for dogmatic reasons, not because they arrived at this conclusion after careful analysis. It’s the political point of small government.

These are the same people who will probably be first in line shouting for government intervention when their drinking water is full of chemical waste.

You can try to reason with folks like that but you probably won’t change their mind. Just try not to shout at them.

But FSBhub is!

I would think the sandwiches would be delivered before any declaration of independence.

Language isn’t logical in a mathematical sense. Every language develops its own logic over time as an unspoken consensus that only after the fact gets codified as orthography and grammar.

The big mother language to most languages in Europe, Protoindoeuropean, has its origins millennia ago somewhere in Ukraine. Linguists have pieced together what this language most likely sounded like. It’s a game of probabilities and good educated guesses but it’s fascinating. If you’re a nerd. One theory is that at the earliest time when this language was formed, most if not all verbs were what we would call today irregular, think know-knew-known or sing-sang-sung etc. Small language communities have no problem with insane and arbitrary grammar like that. You learn it with your mother’s milk so to speak. Very few outsiders have to deal with it. And life just goes on.

English is a true mix of stuff. The Germanic invadors after the Romans left had to deal with the native celts. They were themselves invaded by Vikings from Scandinavia and some 300 years later by Vikings that had become French. Both brought their own languages with them and influenced English. Both invasions caused situations where adults were put in a situation of having to learn another language. What kids soak up like sponges, grownups have a harder time with. So they take shortcuts in their speech. They didn’t struggle too much with sing-sang-sung because that’s a typical protoindoeuropean vowel change that exists just like that in many European languages to this day in versions of this particular verb. But some of the other verbs were just too hard to remember! Let’s just whack a -t or -d sound at the end and Bob’s you uncle. And that’s how English lost a lot of its irregular verbs. Over time this became -ed in most cases. But, as I said, we don’t follow a mathematical Boolean logic here. It allowed for hangers-on, regional varieties, and new formations of irregular forms. Burnt/burned hung on, fucked/fuckt did not. The reason is the flow of history.

I would think the same so-called AI that told us to eat rocks regularly, or that thinks it’s still 2024, or that “hallucinates” other stuff will make conquering our planet harder. Particularly, if these aliens are unaware of the concept of deception.

People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.

I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there’s a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids’ backs.

If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn’t know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That’s a silly stereotype but I like it.

Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.

Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.

Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don’t produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.

The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn’t get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn’t print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.

The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it’s not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.

So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It’s Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn’t just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It’s splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn’t pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.

Of course, I didn’t think far enough. Thanks for setting that straight.

I think there is data on it. Back in school I remember looking at the population pyramid. It’s a visualization of the number of men and women (x-axis, going both left and right) per birthyear (y-axis). In ye olden days, that formed a triangle. Many babies at the bottom, fewer olds at the top. You could tell a lot from the shape this took. You’d get dents on the male side that will correspond with armed conflicts, like the world wars. And then in the 1960s the pyramid with war chips in it massively narrows. At least in countries where the pill became readily available. It turned the pyramid into a tree with a big head at the top and a wide but thinner stem growing under it. I suspect now 80 years later we’re at a much narrower elongated triangle shape again. So you can probably count the shift in numbers there and put a number on “prevented accidents.” But you would have to account for other factors as well, improvements in medicine, vaccinations, etc.

Were all births accidental? That’s a question you could only ask in hindsight. Humans have always looked for ways you prevent conception because we like to party but without reliable success. It’s only in the second half of the last century that we have come up with measures that the Catholic church really doesn’t approve of. Before that, children weren’t really planned in today’s sense. They just happened. They were expected to happen. And with most women being relegated to raising them and running the household, there wasn’t much else they could do. The concept that a wife could be raped by her husband is sadly fairly new. The patriarchy was strong. Abortion was a gamble and many women died from bad jobs of them. Most of the time, if she got pregnant, the decision was made, end of story. If you weren’t married yet, shotgun wedding. That’s how it went until we developed contraception that actually works. I wouldn’t call any kids before that accidental.

Sure, you could remain abstinent. But we like to party.

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.

Did he really do them though? The reason why this is within the scope of belief is the fact that there’s no conclusive evidence that removes reasonable doubt by contemporary standards.

Let’s say it’s all exactly as it says in the four different versions that are somehow considered canon and none of it is a millennia old game of telephone: did he choose to do them? Did his dad force him? Could he maybe not have had free will in this regard? Do we know about all the miracles? Maybe there were more! Would it be fair for us today to judge him based on incomplete records?

You should maybe indicate if you’re critical of this exploitation or in favor. If it’s the latter it would be easier for the mods. And if it’s the former you would lessen the inherent yuckiness people feel when reading this.

If you enter into starting a family, adding kids through whatever means, and you think this should not alter the relationship, you have another think coming. Kids are hard work. First your focus is to keep them alive and out of trouble. And over time this gradually shifts towards them not becoming a-holes. This takes energy and time, a lot of it. And that’s the most common reason why some couples have much less bedroom fun. They’re exhausted. They’re stressed. People behave differently when they’re exhausted and stressed. Raising kids is a marathon, not a sprint. Ideally, it’s a series of never ending gut wrenching crises until they move out. And truth is it doesn’t even end there. Some relationships handle this better, some don’t. None stay the same. If you think that your current childless relationship is any indication of how this would work with children, and you measure it by loving attention and how much sex you’re having you’re looking at the sky to measure the sea level. Get your head out of the clouds. You have to look at how you handle problems under pressure together. How you can support each other and not look at it as transactional. If that works, you stand a chance of a less bumpy transition into a functional family life.

Of course, every relationship is different. There are many other factors that will play a part and make shit even more complicated. I’m fairly confident though that I’m more right than wrong here with my generalizations.

You couldn’t survive such a radical personality change? Yours changed too. You will probably not win any argument on the assumption that your partner changed into a version is their folks while you stayed the exact same. You’re just the frog in the pot who didn’t notice it got hotter.

I’m a still married father of two.

How does confidence factor into this? I’ve been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn’t work. You now don’t have a country any more.

If the Golden Shield really worked it’s a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you’d have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that’s ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren’t currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we’ve gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We’re already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.