There are penalties. They require proof of intent, however. So there are no penalties.

Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.

Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.

Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.

Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.

It’s not “people vs persons” but “those people vs they”.

Conversationally, “those/these” distances you from the group you are talking about, which is humorously weird when it’s your family you’re talking about.

It’s not the meaning of the words, but habitual (and often fleeting) attribution around them that tripped you up.

PS: “People” are uncountable, “persons” are countable. That’s basically the whole difference between the two plurals. Although it’s rapidly disappearing, as “ten people” won’t raise a single eyebrow in a conversation.

Occupying a country that size doesn’t take a mere week. So no, it won’t.

Teeth cannot produce enamel. Enamel is not a living tissue and it was produced by cells outside of the tooth in a coral-like manner. In order to grow a new tooth, you need it to be fully surrounded by specialized living tissue for the whole growth cycle.

PS: I honestly expected something like this to come out of bioelectric computation research, but progress seems slower there. Or rather knowledge and techniques in other fields is reaching critical mass, giving us these advances.

Identification != Authentication

As obvious as this sounds, I’ve learned over the years that most people don’t understand what it means exactly.

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It’s called Russia Law because it’s literally a Russian law copied verbatim

Sounds a lot like US House of Representatives, but in this case I don’t see why not.

As we all know, siphoning of the power to the small percentage of people had never happened prior to capitalism.

Problem with money is that money only have value when people are willing to exchange money for goods and services.

The moment that exchange stops, value of money plummets.

A very good analogy I saw in Charles Stross’ “Neptune’s brood” is that money is a concrete representation of an abstract debt. Exchange materializes that debt into a trade, which is where valuation happens. I’m pretty sure I just made a lot of economists justifiably angry though

“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.

There are no frozen conflicts with Russia.

Agreed, we shouldn’t build our plans out of assumption that Putin won’t use nukes offensively if appeased enough.

Not just Ukrainians. Uyghurs, Syrians, Kurds, Georgians, Quirimli, Chechens… the list goes fucking on.

The most vile shit they introduced into discourse around Gaza is the notion that genocide is a competition. “More people dead in n days in Gaza than in n months in Ukraine” is a statement that achieves only two goals: devalue human suffering and reveal the messenger to be a morally bankrupt psychopath.

Tell that to those raped and mutilated by those fucking victims of yours.

Oh wait, you outright dismissed their existence in order to… <checks notes>… not be racist.

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Cool. Here’s to no one starting measuring your solo work time in place of your project completion count 🍺

Moreover, “deep work” is a bullshit claim. Working solo long sessions without communicating is not an indication of… anything, really. The moment “deep work” becomes a trend, some idiot will start measuring it, making it yet another counterproductive way to torture people.

Measure business outcomes and implement changes that don’t fall victims to Goodhart’s law. If a director can think of a way to game a measure, workers will think of ten.

FTL is a weird one.

Speed of light is a singularity in a special relativity theory. Singularities usually indicate model limitations, not reality fundamentals.

The theory happily describes behaviours below and above this “speed limit”, but insists on it being unapproachable from either side, which is weird already. At the same time our other models tell us that matter loses a finite amount of energy when it gains mass and stops moving at the speed of light.

Problem is, we don’t seem to have a vocabulary to discuss ways around this singularity and universe is not so forthcoming with any clues.

It’s a general crysis of physics lately. We know our models have limitations, we often know where they break exactly, and universe just giggles along.

But yeah, it’s highly unlikely that any SF will correctly guess a viable FTL, even if it is possible. Especially considering how seemingly every author thinks quantum entanglement is it.