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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldGenius
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    1 month ago

    There are certainly stories of overzealous enforcement, but the context of Loi 101 and its amendments is worth considering.

    Québecois is really interesting. It has a lot of old, outdated French in it due to the colonial connection with France being severed hundreds of years ago, where it evolved distinctly and the locals made different decisions on what to change and how to adapt to new concepts.

    One could argue the French government has been obsessive about policing language much longer with the académie française.




  • It’d be interesting for one of these games to have realistic planning and permitting mechanics.

    “Your permit is delayed a week because the only person at City Hall who reviews them is on vacation.”

    “To add a 6 ft fence, you need to go before the local planning board and convince them it’s necessary. You can reduce the height to 4 ft to avoid this.”

    “The power company installed the meter on the wrong side of the house. They will relocate it for $10,000, and the earliest appointment is in three weeks. If they don’t, you have to relocate the HVAC unit and reroute the ductwork to account for that. Further, the electrician will charge $9,000 to adjust the wiring for the different meter location.”







  • I’m not sure if there needs to be fewer subjects, but I feel like there should be much more focus on why what students are learning matters. Passing a standardized test is not a goal kids care about. This invariably has to be at the expense of rote information since there is only so much time, though I think that is a worthwhile trade.

    Nobody cares about the exact year that Mehmet II conquered Constantinople. But the impact of that on world history is both interesting and significant. I only had one history teacher before college who told students he didn’t care about exact years; if you could give the general period that was sufficient.




  • That’s fair. The rosiness I always attributed to the fact it’s basically a fancy soap opera with a huge budget.

    The Crowleys are definitely depicted as kind lords, though the show contrasts them several times with other less humane counterparts. I don’t have the education to rate its historical accuracy, however.


  • I got sort of an inverse impression of Downton Abbey. For me, it was about inevitable change, since practically every single truth held by the most conservative characters is at some point bent or entirely overturned, often by themselves. Literally all of the gentry are huge hypocrites.

    It also spends a good amount of time creating parallels in the lives of the different classes that, for me, underscored how there was nothing fundamentally special about the aristocracy besides their wealth. Wealth that they never earned and only held onto because a peasant Irish driver who banged their daughter forcibly removed their heads from their assess.

    It just doesn’t seek to accomplish all this by making the upper class into Disney villains, since that’s rarely how people actually are. But I never got the impression the show was trying to say this is how things should have or had to have been.



  • Yeah it’s one of the most challenging parts. The process of getting therapy is not set up to be easy for the kind of people who need it. Availability is the most limiting factor these days, so if you don’t get a good match, you could be stuck waiting months for another try. I got pretty lucky on my second try a few years ago, but my wife just gave up trying to find someone. It’s hard to blame her.




  • The major reason given is that taxes vary so much in the US by location that it would be onerous for businesses with locations in different areas to print different price tags and advertise prices broadly.

    It’s even an issue online because, until you enter your address, the online retailer has no clue what your tax rate will be, and they have to assess tax based on the purchaser’s location. Postal code isn’t always enough, as they can be shared by different cities with different tax rates.

    Some areas also vary tax by date (tax free holidays), though I don’t think consumers would care if their total ended up being cheaper than they thought.

    A national standard VAT would be the only way businesses might start including tax in price, but there’s no way to do that without a constitutional amendment. States have the power to tax, and they’re not going to stop now even if they receive VAT revenues.