While obviously you’re correct, this is not necessarily a good thing. The jealousy-envy collapse is clearly an impoverishment of language. These are two different concepts and it’s useful to have words for concepts.
FWIW: the doctrine that “whatever people say is by definition correct and wise” is actually a pretty Anglocentric and modern thing. Linguists didn’t always think this, and you won’t get people saying this for French, for example.
Quick primer. This is not the Parliament. This is the Council, the intergovernmental branch of the EU. Specifically, a meeting of national justice ministers. They sometimes vote but their real objective is to find consensus, since the EU is not a federation and it’s politically hard to pass anything against the wishes of national governments. If they can agree, then it goes to the Parliament, which definitely does vote and is obviously a bit more open to influence from ordinary voters.
From the agenda for tomorrow:
Ministers will also exchange views on the concluding report of the high-level group on access to data for effective law enforcement. At this year’s June meeting of home affairs ministers the Council welcomed the group’s 42 recommendations on access to data. At the upcoming meeting ministers will discuss the way forward now that the group has presented its concluding report.
Grainy things, quinoa, oats, nuts of varied types, dried fruits. Things in jars. Sometimes prepared salads that I buy the same day.
Eggs. Because I am not actually vegan! But it’s the only exception at home. And I also eat out a bit, and sometimes even eat meat!
None of this invalidates my point: domestic veganism is a way to simplify one’s life, ethical issues completely apart.
Lettuce is hard admittedly. Personally I don’t eat it. It’s mostly water, not very nutritious, and also a pretty good vector for pesticides given the edible surface area.
Spinach should keep for 2 or 3 days. Do as they did before refrigeration: put it in a dark, dry, cool (low) place. Shop regularly in small quantities - people alone in apartments tend to be in big cities where this is possible.
Here’s an unpopular one that will have people huffing and puffing with righteous indignation.
Go vegan.
Your food will keep three times as long and you will not even need a refrigerator. I speak with 20 years of experience of living mostly solo in small apartments. Not having to deal with highly perishable and pathogenic food at home is a major convenience.
Correct. This is the reason not to use Revolut.
Choose Wise instead.
Text communication is always going to be a challenge for human beings. We are just not evolved for conversation where you can’t see a face or at least hear a voice. It’s a constant minefield, the potential for misunderstanding is almost insurmountable. To pull off a fruitful discussion by text, especially with multiple participants and group dynamics in play, and have people learn things and feel that they’ve had a decent hearing - that really counts as a triumph, in my view. It is absolutely the exception, not the rule.
The best way to do it? In my view: to take an almost autistic approach. Stick as rigidly as possible to facts and to the topic. Assume good faith, even when it’s hard. Steer clear of humor and second degree. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the most civil, productive virtual communities (Hacker News, for example) are filled with IT types for whom these qualities come a bit more naturally.
Another rule I have: no swearing. At best it looks infantile, at worst it it just raises the temperature pointlessly. (Personally I often stop reading a comment when I see the word “fucking” - this is not a serious contribution that I need bother with.)
And I’ve also learned to try to avoid the word “you”. This BTW is a standard trick used to encourage civil in-person debate, for example in parliaments where people will address each other using the third person or via the speaker. It’s also why so many languages have formal words for “you”, intended to increase distance. It turns out the word “you” functions as a sort of low-level trigger for humans, a bit like eye contact for so many other animals. Best avoided.
As I was saying: text communication is just hard. I think we all need to make more allowances for this fact.
Of course you can. You said you live in Europe.
Unless you live in Russia or the Vatican, that means your country has signed the European Convention on Human Rights, of which article 8 commits it to respecting your privacy.
So, sure, you’re not going to bother suing. It’s not that important to you. But let’s go easy on the helplessness of “In my country you can’t do that”. Yes. You can do it.
No, adding something useful to the discussion should get you a vote. The fact that other idiots agree with you does not magically make your contribution thoughtful, or insightful, or productive in any other way.
Interesting anecdote. Yes I’m aware that the “ht” in http is now basically a historical artifact. It all feels a bit dirty but, as you say, doing things the way the architects intended is probably not worth the effort.
Upside down, as the other comment says. It should rather be forum:// or similar, i.e. a generic self-explanatory term for the type of data. The branded networks like this one would then follow the standard in order to display properly.
Yes, it’s very different from the USA. Campaign spending is tightly limited. In most EU countries, political parties get the majority of their funding from the state, paid on the basis of past election results.
With this can-do attitude, we’re really gonna get things changing!
It’s an intriguing idea and might well be in line with the founding principles of the internet.
As I understand it, the URI is supposed to define the type of data you will find at the address, allowing you to use a client dedicated to that type. So: use a Gopher client for gopher:// data, a newsgroup program for nntp:// data, and of course a web browser for http://.
So the issue here would be to define what “fediverse data” actually looks like. This is quickly becoming quite a technical challenge.
Personally I like the idea of standardizing communication paradigms with a protocol, but you do first have to decide what the paradigms are. A few obvious suggestions:
Since the ActivityPub protocol seems to be the de-facto glue to this fediverse thing, maybe that’s where to look first.
Agreed, it’s definitely a problem. And in fact it’s even worse because it turns out that today’s supposedly progressive and well-informed youngsters in fact get their news from TikTok and tend to vote for authoritarian populists even in western Europe.
Again: downvoting facts, sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and going “lalalalala”, does not make the facts go away. It is an inconvenient fact that far-right parties across Europe are doing particularly well among young voters.
Then run for election. That’s the point of democracy. If our leaders are bad, there’s no one to blame but ourselves.
Obligatory addendum: A downvote does not constitute a counter-argument.
It would help if European voters stopped behaving like spoiled children and voting for wannabe dictators because inflation or immigration or whatever.
The same French of whom more than a third want an authoritarian strongman in power? Personally I would prefer to copy the handful of boring countries where people actually trust their leaders and so don’t feel they need to resort to bloody revolution at the drop of a hat.
The digital euro, as a digital central-bank currency, is the last thing we want from the perspective of privacy.
Sure, that’s fair. And of course the guy on the street is not waiting on a linguistics academy for permission to open his mouth.
But you’re gonna have a tough time persuading me that a change like this is somehow “good” for our language. Languages get poorer as well as richer through use. The envy-jealousy case to me looks pretty clear: most people never learned the difference at school, or didn’t understand it, or just didn’t care, and now the rest of us have to accept that there’s no word for “jealousy” any more. Coz the people is always right, innit? It’s this attitude that is really modern.
So many other examples. “To step foot on” springs to mind. Yes, yes, entirely correct, and logical (foot! step!), and probably already in the dictionary. But to me it will always be what it obviously is, really: a mishearing by a lot of people who never saw it in print because they don’t read.