[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Brains transmit/change state (a.k.a. think) using electricity. It's basically a flesh computer. You can't read thoughts without being able to measure the brain's electrical/chemical activity. If you had any theoretically possible mind-reading (and by extension mind-controlling) technology, it would still need to physically connect to your neurons or something...

That being said, I don't imagine it'd be too hard for sci-fi future folk to stick a chip in every newborn's brain from the get-go. But that's a future too far from now, we'll all be dead by then probably.

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

For real. I wish it were these people killing themselves with their stupidity, not others...

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Feminism means gender goes into the shredder. No gender. FUCK gender, punk ass bitch ass social construct. Burn it at the stake!

Note: many feminists may or may not disagree

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 5 points 3 days ago

can i get two cocks

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 8 points 3 days ago

Why would you wish that

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago

Haha yeah. Soon after becoming a linguist your first realization is how little everyone else knows about or cares to know about linguistics. Btw I edited to add a little more information if you're interested.

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Þorn was in use since Fuþark (Germanic runes) but wasn't used to write Anglo-Saxon until around the 8th century. It died out after the printing press came into use, usually imported from France (or Germany or something occasionally) and not using some characters found in English at the time. Because of the lack of a Þ/þ key, typers started to use "Y" as a substitute (which is why you see e.g. "ye olde" instead of "the olde"). Eventually þorn just disappeared and people used the spellings using "th". A similar thing happened to Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), where it was substituted for by "Z" (With e.g. "MacKenȝie" yielding "MacKenzie" instead of "MacKenyie") until it disappeared and spellings using "y"/"gh" (or "j"/"ch" when appropriate) replaced spellings using "ȝ".

Ðæt (Ð/ð/đ) was mostly replaced by þorn by Middle English so it didn't get to be slain by the printing press. Wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) was replaced by "uu"/"w"/"u" by Middle English too. Ash (Æ/æ) didn't die off, in large part because it was available on many printing presses of the time due to its usage in French and Latin, but it became obsolete for English words and was mostly used to replace "ae" in loanwords (especially from Latin and Greek).

There were some other funny things in Old English & Middle English orthography; like omitting n/m and writing a macron over the preceding vowel to indicate the sound (like "cā" instead of "can"), in the same way that it occured in Latin/Latinate languages which lead to "ñ" and "ã"/"õ" in Spanish/Portuguese/Galician.

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 71 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

JCPenney tried changing all their prices ending with .99 to the round dollar amount. It was catastrophic for their sales, so they changed it back. It was a part of a larger plan by Ron Johnson (former senior VP of retail at Apple) to get rid of the "pricing game" of stores and to stop deceiving customers with fake sales/markdowns and deceptive pricing. It caused JCPenney's stock to halve and then some, and got him fired within 15 months. Here's an ad they showed that apologized to customers for using accurate & honest pricing instead of deceiving them, and begging them to come back

The power of the number "9" isn't confined to the cents column, either. One American clothing retailer experimented by changing the price of a dress from $34 to $39 dollars and increased sales by over 30%.

Consumers are fucking idiots. Humans are stupid dumb animals that like patterns too much for their own good and short circut their brain immediately after seeing minimal information to fill in the blanks. If you like patterns so much, why don't you marry them? Hmmm???

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 36 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

exaggeratingly avoiding eye contact and making a stupid mouth expression is what overly dramatic/narcissistic people do to emphasize the hotness of their take, the sheer disagreeableness they presume their words or actions have

it's like "sorry not sorry" as an expression. it is pretentiousness incarnate. i think it's more of an adult pop-culture and person-with-radical-political-beliefs thing than a white person thing, it's the result of watching way too much american reality tv

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 40 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Pick the victims randomly

Even better, pick the highest-paid rank-and-file workers (which usually have the highest pay for a reason), so your entire workforce is made up of inexperienced juniors unfamiliar with the things they're working on, who have little to no reason to stay at the company for long. That always works out in the company's favor long-term.

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 34 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Japan is an ultraconservative hellhole, their law & justice system is probably the most backwards in the first world. Their crime management is pretty much just fascism many times, extremely out of proportion punishments for the crimes, and if the government accuses you of something and it goes to trial, you're basically toast. They all but torture you while you're being processed, often times they use harsh treatment to try to force a confession out of you before trial. The state prosecutor also has no legal obligation to present all the facts, they have a lot of freedom to cherrypick and withhold information relevant to the trial in order to make the defendant look as guilty as possible.

They have a 99.8% criminal conviction rate.

Japanese inmates are often treated inhumanely, the way Japan treats prisoners regularly would be considered a human rights violation in most western countries.

Imagine how Republicans treat criminals, and multiply it by a hundred. Japanese society/government HATES anything that's out of order and does all it can to stamp out any "deviance" from norms. This usually results in them treating financial crimes, theft, drugs, etc. extremely harshly, but doing pretty much nothing about crimes like sexual harassment & sexual assault, which are kind of culturally prevalent or even slightly acceptable in Japan. Legally rape victims are treated far worse than rapists. You'd even probably be treated leniently for DUI as long as it wasn't a taboo/illegal drug (i.e., if it's alcohol).

The reason urban Japan seems so nice and orderly is similar to the reason that the streets of Pyongyang seem so clean and behaved. Extremely terrible treatment of people who step out of line, except in Japan it's mostly culturally than politically. There's a reason they're known for suicide and hikikomoris.

It is a very common misconception that Japan is very progressive because of anime and the extremely rampant sexualization/objectification of women in the form of cute/funny things like panty dispensing machines and wacky television game shows and cat girls, and in general Japanese stuff just being very bright and bouncy and all that. But it's very misleading, their culture obsessed with cuteness/"kawaii" stems from an attempt to radically and rapidly distance their cultural image from that of Imperial Japan. They definitely succeeded in changing the world's perception of them, but they didn't address their deep societal issues which were in part caused by the US basically controlling their politics after WW2.

I should point out though that not all Japanese prisons are dystopian torture chambers. But you still get very few rights and freedoms while imprisoned, even socializing may be completely forbidden.

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The same reason people hate leftists, feminists, trans athletes, "gamer girls", people on welfare, blacks, etc. An image the right cultivated of the group, out of convenient easily-hateable annoying people in it that they could use to create a generalization/stereotype out of. It's something that's able to happen to any group, I could portray any hobbyist or activist in this way the same exact way as these "annoying" groups are portrayed, but the right is particularly willing to just flat out lie, slander, and cheat their way into making countercultural/anti-status-quo groups look as absurd as possible, to the point that the majority of the population falls for it (even those that don't consider themselves to be conservative).

I'll make a comparison. Conservative/"anti-sjw" thumbnails often have a picture of some angry-looking rainbow haired woman, usually the same few, in order to be like "look how irrational and crazy these feminazis are, she must hate men so much" and like 4 out of 5 of those times it's a picture of a woman that was protesting a literal neo-nazi gathering or something, not some sort of radical crazy man-hating feminist. But the internet has conditioned the average person to look at someone like that and immediately think they're an irrational "feminazi", and conservatives showing these pictures everywhere and making 100 videos on the same person makes people subconsciously believe they're rampant and have a massive (and bad) grip on society.

Same kind of thing happens with vegans, you have the same 10 or so internet vegans people use to portray veganism that conditions people to think poorly of the concept "vegan", and when these influencers are confronted about it they say "I don't hate veganism, I just hate the annoying vegans" then they go onto Twitter to complain about the vegans and how they're irrational for not eating meat and their brains must be de-evolving or something. They know what they're doing, but they can hide behind plausible deniability, and the majority of viewers fall for it.

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sparkle

joined 3 months ago