tal

joined 2 years ago
[–] tal@lemmy.today 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I mean, I don't see the point. You could keep people in there, but the GOP intended to kill off the enhanced subsidies. They aren't likely to go reverse themselves. It's not like spending more time in some conference room is going to suddenly change things.

And I would expect that the Democrats don't have any expectation to get sufficient support to change the situation in 2026, but by having an explicit vote on it, they get to bludgeon the Republicans with having explicitly killed it ("see, they don't get to claim that they voted against it for other bundled policy reasons. They really do want to take your health care subsidies away"). That might be advantageous to the Democrats in the midterms, since they have a nice, clear example of the Republicans doing something unpopular that'll be hard to wiggle away from.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing.

I'm pretty sure that education helps. I used to hang out on /r/Europe, which had a lot of non-native English speakers...but who were generally very well educated (probably because of the sort of people who are going to be hanging out on an international forum and writing in some language that often isn't their native tongue). The quality of the writing was pretty darn good. I'd say that the Dutch users there in particular wrote exceptionally clean English.

That said, it was an interesting experience, because I discovered that there are completely different categories of errors that native and non-native speakers make. For example, I've seen plenty of native speakers here in the US confuse "their", "they're", and "there", probably because they learned to speak the terms long before they wrote them and then kind of mentally linked them in the interim. I virtually never saw that error on /r/Europe, probably because a lot of Europeans learned to write English relatively-early compared to learning to speak it. But I did see a higher proportion of people having problems with some errors that aren't common among native speakers:

  • Words where English has one word that passed through different languages and then entered English as two different words (e.g. bloc and block).

  • Headlines. Until spending time on that forum, I was basically oblivious to the fact that headlines in English use very different grammar, a different set of conventions, than standard English. I'd grown up reading them, internalized them, never thought about it. Then I wound up on a ton of posts with people in /r/Europe complaining that the submitted headline for an article was completely nonsensical or unreadable. To me, the headlines seemed completely reasonable; at first I thought that users were just joking. Took me a while to realize what was going on. I couldn't even find any websites that provided a full summary of all of the headline-specific grammatical conventions, just some that had some common examples.

  • Words that have irregular prefixes. For example, someone might write "uncompatible" or "noncompatible" instead of "incompatible". English has many different prefixes that can mean approximately "not", ("a-", "un-", "anti-", "non-", "in-", "im-", "ir-", "ex-"). Just have to memorize them, kind of like grammatical gender in some other languages. I've rarely seen native speakers not know the right irregular prefix, but that was an extremely-common error to see on /r/Europe.

  • Specifically for Slavic language users, I saw some users having trouble with definite/indefinite articles (something that doesn't exist in Slavic languages and is actually fairly uncommon in languages globally) or using gendered pronouns where one wouldn't in English (modern English has only the tiniest remaining vestiges of grammatical gender).

Also, it was interesting to see where errors did crop up


my impression was that it tended to be with French or maybe Spanish speakers. My guess is that that's because those languages are the other European languages that are also (relatively) widely-spoken around the world, and so by using English, you expand the pool of people you can talk to the least; I'd guess that people who speak these other languages use English less. For Spanish, it's maybe a factor of 3. For French, maybe a factor of 5. Compare to something like Icelandic, where it's something like a factor of 4,000.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 13 points 1 week ago (10 children)

That doesn't sound angry to me, but I suppose things are subjective.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Waterworld for the SNES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVPiwUNtrps&list=PLE2B2D36E13981D26

Silver Surfer on the NES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQlLl2j5THQ&list=RDZQlLl2j5THQ&start_radio=1

Plok

Including the whole game's soundtrack as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSW4M28XQg&list=PL2A1A350EBB242BDF

I forget the guy’s name but he did both OSTs for the above two games and he has a reputation for giving bad games amazing soundtracks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Follin

Some other people mentioned his game music in other games in this thread as well.

EDIT: Parent poster went back and updated post with hyperlinks to all the music plus more music. I wasn't adding them just to add noise, promise. :-)

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