I wonder how the built-in Google and Apple IMEs compare.
That's basically what Arlington National Cemetery is. The union government seized the land of Robert E. Lee, and planning for if they couldn't keep it after the war, decided to turn it into a cemetery to basically make it useless as a farm/estate. Lee's heirs eventually sued and won the land back, but didn't have much use for it, so they sold it back to the government.
BUT I don't tear down people for choosing that life, urban living isn't for everyone.
My contempt for small town and rural America comes from living in it for about 5 years, and then regularly visiting it for another 3 or 4 years. I'm glad I live in a walkable city now. But I don't really criticize people for living that rural life, except in defense to someone else attacking my own lifestyle.
When this song came out, I remembered joking with my Army friends (many of whom are from rural areas, and definitely shared the experiences of getting stationed in rural areas) that it's weird the song! didn't include stuff like "find decent sushi" or "attend an NFL game" or "order pizza after midnight." Or if I'm feeling particularly mean spirited, I'd throw in "find a six figure job" or "hold hands with a white woman in public."
Realistically, though, something like 60% of Americans live in suburban America: close enough to a major city that they can go in for events, but far enough that they can feel that they're isolated from crime or whatever. Nobody actually likes rural living, but some residents of suburban America likes romanticizing rural ideals while still living in an environment that gets the benefit of the economic engine of a nearby city, and the density to support a variety of restaurants and stores and activities. There's an entire subculture of people who own $80,000 trucks and $3,000 guns, who have $200k+ jobs in the city but say their heart is in the country or whatever.
Stop arguing semantics. We're done here.
Compare to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that's all.
Yeah, if you want to make up your own definitions to the words you use, and then order those around you to stop arguing semantics, then you're basically not having a conversation at all.
Your comment was confusing because you don't seem to understand what is or isn't part of an operating system, and the mere mention of the operating system was pretty far removed from any relevance to your own point.
It's a proprietary service, and if you want to argue that companies can run proprietary services in a closed manner, denying access to third party clients, cool, that can be your position, but it would be an incoherent position to claim that only OS developers should have that right.
I'm raising kids in a walkable neighborhood.
At this point, my biggest concern is still that they'd get hit by a car. At their current young ages (under 5), they're just not good about understanding where danger comes from when crossing the street or a driveway/alley entrance. Even later in life, I'm wondering how old they'll have to be before I'm comfortable with them riding their bikes on city streets.
At some point, I expect it to pay off (they'll be able to go to hang out with friends and bring themselves to school long before they turn 16). I'm just hoping I'll be able to stay in a walkable neighborhood when they're at those life stages, so that they can take advantage of the good stuff that this neighborhood has to offer.
An appreciation post for Pixar's Elemental: one of the best stories about immigration and raising families in a new country
So I got to watching Elemental over the weekend, and wow. I'm the U.S.-born child of Asian immigrants, and really didn't expect to see a kids movie tell a story that resonated so well with me.
This movie was basically mismarketed as some kind of cross-cultural love story, about a couple that defies the odds to get together despite a society that doesn't approve. And yes, some of that does exist in the movie, but mainly as a plot point about the relationship at the core of the movie, between an immigrant father and his adult daughter, and the decisions he made early on to build a life full of opportunity and potential for her.
I thought the themes were genuinely beautiful:
- The sacrifices made by the older generations, and how the challenge for younger generations of showing appreciation for that sacrifice without necessarily being boxed into the expectations that might derive from that sacrifice.
- The struggle to "belong" when tugged between multiple cultures.
- Prejudice and how it affects people long term, decades after these key moments, and how it manifests in unhealthy and unfair behaviors.
- Different cultural values not just creating conflict, but also providing valuable background for thriving in cross-cultural environments, as well.
I thought it was valuable to have these moments play out in a way that could evoke my own memories of growing up in a diverse city, being raised by parents who loved me but didn't always fully understand the society they'd chosen to raise a family in, little bits of racial or ethnic tension, whether small or large.
My 3-year-old didn't get any of this while watching. But she loved the movie at a superficial level, and I'm hoping when she's older we can have those conversations about these themes and the stories of her grandparents and the family history that brought us where we are today.
And who knows, maybe I'm overstating the primacy of the immigrant story over the love story. It's just that I don't normally get to see depictions on television and film that focus on these themes.
Anyone else get these feelings from watching this movie? Any other television shows or movies evoke similar feelings for you?
‘Get Down’ From the Car. ‘Make’ the Line. Is Miami English a Dialect? (New York Times)
A linguistics professor found that even Miamians who aren’t fluent in Spanish use or understand phrases that are direct translations.
(Gift article link, doesn't require a subscription to view without paywall.)
This article, from a few weeks ago, describes the linguistic phenomenon where a highly bilingual community starts incorporating direct translations of phrases from Spanish, to where those non-standard phrases get adopted by English speakers who don't even speak Spanish themselves.
I thought it was interesting, because I've seen this very same phenomenon play out in Chinese American communities, where certain Chinese idioms or phrases (especially of prepositions) tend to show little remnants in the English translation of that idea.
Have you seen this in your bilingual community? What are your favorite examples?
the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths
This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn't until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).
And maybe I'm jaded because I'm a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don't think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that's a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don't know.