Random thoughts 1: Just Sayin'

[sophie]

There is the odd grammatical imperfection yes.

As in the subtitles aren't accurate to what is being said? Or as in you find the Black Baltimore dialect unintelligible?

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Watching The Wire without subs is... interesting.

I'm not a native speaker at all and have never been to the US or any English-Speaking country for that matter, but never had any problem understanding the ebonics in "The Wire".

I think you just have to listen to enough Hip Hop to get the gist. A useful compendium of ebonics that were used throughout the '90s:

 

[Snerk]

I would not have been able to follow some of the plots without the aid of subs yes. Weather it was the urban dialects, or just all that mumbling. Or perhaps the mumbling is the dialects. I dunno.

 

[Takhisis]

Weather

 

[Snerk]

You noticed

 

[yung.carl.jung]

It comes out of the Black nationalist movement. The anti-integrationist wing of the civil rights movement started to reject the newly-popularised term "African-American" on the grounds that black people had never been participants of America, merely residents within its borders, and should not desire to become participants in America until such time as white America could demonstrate the tangible benefits of such a status, which they were sceptical was likely or even possible. At the same time, the growing Marxist influence on the movement lead to a wariness towards "African" identity, which smacked of a bourgeois romanticism detached from the realities of black life.

As a result, they began to develop a concept of black people in America as a group which were not simply victims of economic and cultural dispossession, but which had come to be defined by it. "Black" was therefore not simply a descriptor, but could become an identity in its own right: on the one hand, the lack of explicit national or cultural associations expressed the historical dispossession of black people in America, on the other, the unapologetic identification with the physical features that marked them out to white America represented the self-possession and confidence which they aspired to impart on black people. "Black" became a proper noun, and thus like other proper nouns, merited captialisation.

The language and symbolism of black nationalist remained powerful in black radical circles, even when the politics themselves were largely abandoned in favour of a greater emphasis on community activism. The increasing admission of black people in to higher education brought this language in campus politics, and the recent prevalence of "Intersectional" politics has meant that it gets lumped in, along with a dozen other vocabularies, some of them quite contradictory, are synthesised into a single unwieldy mega-jargon. As a result, you find decontextualised scraps of that vocabulary turning up in places you wouldn't expected, written by people who probably don't understand it, but who know that it is the Correct way to write, and humans being humans, that's usually considered more important.

The tl;dr is, black radicals have been calling themselves "Black" for decades, and the campus-slash-internet left treat radical vocabulary like magpies treat shiny rubbish.

I get a feeling you would enjoy "To Pimp a Butterfly"

I would not have been able to follow some of the plots without the aid of subs yes. Weather it was the urban dialects, or just all that mumbling. Or perhaps the mumbling is the dialects. I dunno.

I have to admit the mumbling was pretty intense at times. Though mumbling is not exclusive to that dialect :~)

Dang.

 

[Cutlass]

Noticed that it's a holiday today in the U.S. and that Better Call Saul won't be airing. That sucks but it brings me to my question: Is Memorial day kind of like our Canadian Remembrance Day on November 11th? I thought you guys have a day like that in November too but maybe I'm wrong

We have to screw with the international holidays. Because, reasons. So Labor Day, different. Remembrance day becomes Veterans Day.

 

[sophie]

Noticed that it's a holiday today in the U.S. and that Better Call Saul won't be airing. That sucks but it brings me to my question: Is Memorial day kind of like our Canadian Remembrance Day on November 11th? I thought you guys have a day like that in November too but maybe I'm wrong

Today's Memorial Day in the U.S. It originated as "Decoration Day", which was a holiday to commemorate those decorated for their service in the Civil War. Originally it was a major major holiday with 4th-of-July-level parades featuring all the local Civil War veterans, but over time it morphed into a more general "all troops commemoration day," particularly as the last of the Civil War veterans died off in the 20s and 30s, and so was renamed to Memorial Day. The US also celebrates Remembrance Day, but we call it "Veterans Day" and it doesn't have quite the explicit Great War associations that Remembrance Day has in Canada and Europe.

 

[warpus]

Ahh okay, I knew there was another day you guys had for that, thanks. I quickly googled what holiday today was and it sounded awfully like Remembrance day so I got temporarily confused

 

[uppi]

Well that's why I was wondering if I could build some kind of trap for the heat as a place for it to be relocated. I would only need it to work for 8 hours a day.

This falls into the category: possible, but impractical.

What you would need to do is to take the exhaust of the air conditioner and put it through a heat exchanger that is in a well-insulated tank containing enough material with high heat capacity. The exhaust air would be cooled within the heat exchanger and come out with a temperature only slightly above ambient, so you would get a net cooling of the air in the room. The heat would be stored in the insulated tank and you could have some way to break the insulation after 8 hours to let it cool back to ambient temperature. However, the efficiency goes down the more heat you store in the system, so you would have to make the tank big enough to limit the increase in temperature to something like 5K. And here is the problem: By volume you cannot get much better heat capacity than you get with water and to let a moderately sized portable AC unit run for 8 hours you would need something like 6 tons of water. Even if you are inside of a massive building, getting an exhaust pipe to the outside is probably easier than building an insulated swimming pool in you office.

 

[Mouthwash]

So, um... is this forum just full of bots? It's super creepy, in any case.

 

[warpus]

So, um... is this forum just full of bots? It's super creepy in any case.

It's probably some guy who sells beauty products trying to drive his websites higher in search engine rankings by creating fake content on a fake forum.

But maybe I'm not giving the posters enough credit here and that's just how people in the skin care community communicate

 

[Commodore]

Thanks for all the replies guys. Looks like I'll have to find some other solution. Or maybe I'll just make a discreet hole out to the hallway and use that to vent the exhaust and hope no one notices.

 

[warpus]

That could be your farting hole too

 

[Hrothbern]

Why is Trump all the time complaining about US citizens buying too many German cars ?
Happened again on the last G-7.

Is it unfair pricing ?
I live in Europe and have no clue how US prices are.

 

[warpus]

The people who voted for him think that "buying American" is good and something that more people should be doing. Trump is pandering to them by suggesting that there will be more American cars for sale in the U.S. and not so many German ones.

Yeah I get that it doesn't make much sense, considering that from what I understand most German cars sold in the U.S. are manufactured in the U.S....

 

[Samez]

You are right
E.g. BMW is the largest exporter of cars manufactured in the US.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Is there something inherently wrong with a white majority population in a country?

 

[Gori the Grey]

It gets antsy and does dumb stuff when it starts being concerned that's on the verge of losing that majority status.

 

[warpus]

The exact same thing that's inherently wrong with an asian majority population in a country like say for example Japan