This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 9th, 2021

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  • Persuasion itself goes from neutral to negative, depending on your moral standards. (They’re partially individual, partially cultural.) Because at the end of the day it boils down to “I want you to believe in this, because I benefit from your belief.”

    And you definitively see some backslash against this aspect of advertisement; same deal with personal communication, a person being excessively rhetoric for their own benefit is immediately labelled distrustful.

    Then over that propaganda adds further layers of nastiness, like:

    • Often, the one doing propaganda is supposed to defend your interests. Not their/its own.
    • You’ll usually need to omit and lie far more for propaganda than for other things. Because it’s usually a complex matter that involves society as a whole, not just your personal decision.
    • Since the political landscape changes, the discourse being propagated may flip 180°.

  • At the very least, I’d recommend you:

    • gloves - because you’ll get really close to that gross shit. You don’t want to touch it.
    • a sponge - it doesn’t need to be new; your old kitchen sponge is enough, just don’t use it again in the kitchen. Use the yellow side to spread the cleaning agent, and the green side to remove obnoxious grime stuck to something. (Do it gently, and only with a really old sponge, to avoid scratching the surface.)
    • a bucket - mostly to mix some soap and water.
    • a dry rag - mostly for finishing/drying. A cringey old shirt that you won’t be using again is usually enough.
    • toilet brush - don’t use the sponge to clean inside the toilet bowl; you’ll be spreading the bacteria from your shit and piss to the rest of the restroom.

    Everyone has the cleaning agents that they swear upon, so look for something that works for you. For me it’s

    • alcohol vinegar - to get rid of that brown crust in the sink (water in my city is hard as a brick) and around the shower drain. I usually apply it, wait a few minutes, then use the sponge to scrub it a bit. Then I remove the vinegar with the rag.
    • bleach - exclusively used inside the toilet bowl. I squish some bleach there, then scrub it with the toilet brush, then flush it off, making sure that there’s no bleach behind.
    • disinfecting agent - I squish a bit of that inside the toilet bowl and just leave it there. It smells good, and it gets rid of the bacteria.
    • an ammonium-based cleaning agent - I squish it on obvious grime on the walls (except the above), then scrub it with the sponge.
    • soap and water - to “wash” the walls with the sponge.
    • plain water with some disinfecting agent - to rinse it. Then I just remove the excess water with the rag and let the restroom to dry naturally (with closed doors otherwise my cats will step on the bathroom, step outside, and now I got to clean the bathroom again plus the corridor and furniture).

    Important detail: do not mix any two of the cleaning agents that I’ve mentioned. Specially not ammonium and bleach.

    For reference, the disinfecting agent that I use is called “pinho sol”, but I have no idea if it’s sold outside Brazil. You probably have some similar product wherever you live.




  • [Note: this is my personal take, not Chomsky’s]

    We can recognise colours and things even without properly labelling them. (Colour example: I have no clue on how to call the colour of my cat’s fur, but I’m fairly certain to remember thus recognise it.) However, it’s hard to handle them logically this way.

    • if you are outside and it is raining, then you get wet
    • if you get wet, you might get sick
    • so if you are outside and it is raining, you might get sick

    And at least for me this is the main role of the internal monologue. It isn’t just about repeating the state of the things, it’s about connecting pieces of info together, as if I was explaining the link to another person.

    Perhaps those without verbal internal monologue/dialogue have a more persistent innate language, that is not overwritten by common external language?

    Possible; I don’t know, really. It’s also possible that the “innate language” doesn’t really exist, only the innate ability to learn a language; but that ability is already enough to structure simple reasoning.


  • Apparently my method is a mix of those listed in the text.

    I’m in a similar situation as OP, some of my income is irregular. So my monthly budget isn’t directly based on the last month income, I use the average of the last six months, relying on a checking account for that. (I keep it with enough money to last me one or two months.)

    Then I split that budget into four categories:

    • savings - I aim for 25%. Into the saving account it goes.
    • monthly fixed expenses - periodic, somewhat predictable, monthly. For example bills, cornmeal and rice, cat food, etc.
    • variable expenses - they’re necessities like the above, but there’s some wiggling room. Like, if necessary I don’t mind eating eggs four lunches a week and walking instead of taking a bus, but I’d rather not to. Usually split into four weeks, so I expend it gradually.
    • “fluff”*¹ - avoidable expenses that I still want for some reason like “it improves my mood”. Things for my hobbies, going to a restaurant, buying nicer clothes or hardware, etc. Unused fluff gets transferred to my savings account in the following month.

    Then here’s how I address some complexities:

    • periodic expenses for things that I buy every few months (e.g. gas canisters) - I include a fraction of them into the monthly fixed expenses, and only remove the money from the checking account when buying it
    • erratic but large expenses (e.g. house repairs) - I usually “borrow” this money from the savings, then “repay” it in the following months, as a fixed expense*².
    • high income multiple months in a row - I cap the budget and send the overflow to the savings.
    • low income multiple months in a row - cut down fluff, then reduce variable expenses, then reduce monthly fixed expenses, then reduce savings, in this order.
    • really low income multiple months in a row - if really necessary I borrow from the savings, keeping in mind that I’ll need to repay myself.

    Notes:

    1. The actual name that I give to this category is “imposto das lombrigas”, or roughly “roundworm tax”. That’s from from my family jokingly referring to cravings as "to have roundworms for [something].
    2. Some people might use a credit card instead for that, to build credit; that also works, but it depends a lot on the government that you pay taxes to. I do have a credit card but I tend to avoid it, as often there are discounts for paying things in cash.

  • Chomsky’s concept of UG (universal grammar) is able to handle this. Since there would be a chunk of language that is innate (universal), that feral child would share it. So, as a conclusion from that, even if the feral child isn’t expressing it through vocalisation, since they lack an “application” of the UG (like Nahuatl, Mandarin, Quechua, English, Kikongo etc.), they’d still have some rather simple internal monologue.

    …that said I think that Chomsky’s UG is full of shit. I do agree with him that the faculty of language might have developed first to structure thought; but my reasoning resembles a bit more yours, the role of language would be to formalise thought. Thinking without language is possible in the same way as moving across a village without roads - it’s doable but clunky, and you’ll likely take far more effort than with proper roads/ a language.

    Not to challenge Chomsky on his own turf

    Don’t worry. Everyone and their dog challenges him. Including himself, he’s often contradicting his own earlier statements.




  • It depends a lot on what you consider “toxic”.

    If it’s just about intrusive off-topic political discussion, then I fully agree with you: it’s far more common in Lemmy than in Reddit, and sometimes it reaches a point that even people who’d otherwise enjoy discussing politics roll their eyes and say “not this shit again”.

    However, if “toxic” includes other forms of undesirable behaviour, then Lemmy is probably less toxic than Reddit. For example: while sometimes you do see here disingenuous and deliberate stupidity, “waah TL;DR!!”, the “I don’t understand” conveying disagreement, or passive aggressiveness, in Reddit they pop up all the time.

    So, what do you consider toxic? Depending on that, the other users’ experiences might be really similar or really different from yours.