Would you say that’s relevant then to this discussion?

Scots a full brother. And where in Europe do they speak Guyanese?

The Dutch have the highest concentration of Frisian speakers. But there are other people along the cost as well, thinning out towards the North. Hence, a minority language.

That’s not a great statistic. Future diplomats will have college degrees. They will have pre-existing language knowledge. That’s too narrow a sample if you ask me.

And they wouldn’t teach them Frisian anyway because it’s a minority language spoken on the mainland North Sea coast from The Netherlands to Denmark.

They say that both French and German are “closest” to English but still different languages

Who are they? Because they are wrong. The closest step cousin to English is Frisian. Dutch is closer to English than French, I’d argue.

Novel ≠ novel. It would have to be contemporary and not written in overly complicated language. Novels are mostly not written for learners to read. Even people who are fluent will miss stuff because culture doesn’t come in a dictionary. So can they understand everything at that level? Nope. Can they understand enough? Probably. Arguably more so in German because it doesn’t fuck with a version of the past tense that only shows up in literature.

They date whoever they want. Probably not you though. Thanks for rage baiting with us today.

and then fix the new mistakes it made while trying to fix the old ones and

Regardless of what this dumb party is, it’s first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the “generous” donor might be pushed or bought out.

The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you’re considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.

I don’t use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It’s my experience that if you’re using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you’ll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.

The most obvious answer is shrinkflation. They may have sold units with more pills in them before but economic pressures put them in a pickle: increase price for all or keep price the same and reduce content. It’s possible they had ordered a gazillion of these pill bottles and have them in storage now. They gotta use them. It would be economically and environmentally mad if they put a million of these bottles in a landfill and ordered smaller replacements.

But then its different from the sample Japanese text here. The orientation of all the characters does not change whether the text flows left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. Rotating the ABCs will actually worsen legibility in my opinion.

If the monks in The Name of the Rose times had come up with a vertical cursive script that stuck, maybe it would be different today. But that didn’t happen.

Are you using an app or a browser? It looks like a browser to me and maybe there is an extension messing with it? Maybe somebody is pranking you? Just a thought.

Time?

I wouldn’t have put “you just haven’t found the right one yet” in the discrimination category. That strikes me as helpless and ignorant rather than structurally evil. But I guess it’s the repetition of it.

The “good fucking” one I’m with you. That’s awful. And the pride-internal groupthink is discriminating too.

Thanks for broadening my horizon.

If we leave some of the more scandalous headline making stories to the side, people on Lemmy tend to be the de-googlers of the world. And when they sign up for Proton, they discover Proton is a quarter Google in a trenchcoat. They want you in their ecosystem and they want you to stay there. So you wake up one morning and you’re out of the Google frying pan but into the Proton frying pan. So some of the hate is disappointment.

Because we are herd animals that tend to pick on those we perceive as different?

That being said, are they discriminated against? Can you give examples?

It is possible for languages written in the Latin alphabet as well. It’s just a pain in the ass to read. You can write cursive Chinese characters top to bottom; there is no vertical cursive script for the Latin ABC. All the connecting nodes are on the horizontal axis. The majority of people are right-handed. So tradition and convention has us reading left to right, top to bottom.

The drinking age was 18 in some states. But then IIRC the federal government tied funding on the condition that it be raised to 21 again.

The US has had a weird relationship with alcohol. Exhibit A: the 18th and 21st amendments.

It used to be different for men and women too. That’s after the women got the vote in the first place. Switzerland famously only did that in the 70s. With some women being against that. But I digress.

For men, voting age was closely linked to legal adulthood once it wasn’t tied to land ownership or similar any more. Societies the world over have sort of agreed that 20-23 is about the age for that. With social progress since the 70s, it was lowered to 18. In the US because of Vietnam where 18yo were old enough to die senselessly in Nam but not old enough to elect the government that sent them there. That was unfair and addressed. In Europe, a lot of countries changed everything to 18 (drinking, voting, driving - don’t do it in that order though) from the 60s onwards. And some subdivision elections (local or state level) are today from 16 in the EU.

So the question is more like why are you an adult at 18 as far as the law is concerned. That’s a compromise societies have arrived at over time and often copied from one another.

So there is a court ruling that the mother had sole custody. And the father tried to take the kids out of the country, possibly without the mother’s knowledge. That is probably illegally moving your children abroad. The fact that they are your own flesh and blood is superseded by the mothereffing courts. Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. So you have to stuff the kids into a big suitcase like any upstanding CEO of an automobile conglomerate or just not leave the country.

There is a lot of meat on the Japan has catching up to do in regards to international custody battles bone. They favor the Japanese national, often unfairly, I think - although that’s a topic for debate for people who are more knowledgeable. However, you can’t take the law into your own hands just because you don’t agree with the decisions. And CPS could talk to the Japanese authorities if they want to (and can manage). But they can do eff all. The better point of contact would be the US embassy in Tokyo. They may not be able to do anything either but if anybody can intervene it’s them.

I don’t think it’s enough just to point out that we’re doing society wrong. Unless you’re Earnest Hemingway, you need to do it in an appealing literary way, language and structure and characters and that sort of thing.