Reddit refuge

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It really depends on how the vocabulary got to the language.

    First, you have to start with the fact that English is a Germanic language with a lot of French words in it due to the Normans. A good example is that farm animal names have a Germanic origin typically while the words for meat have more French origins.

    You can also combine it with the fact that English was rather varied in its vocabulary at the time. An example is eggs/eyren. Egg won out as a word, but there were likely thousands of these decisions being made as the language standardized.

    Then, include that a lot of legal and religious terms came from Latin; with the practices using Latin far beyond when English became the dominant language in England. So, for these fields, just use a mangled version of the Latin root.

    Finally, it depends on how a word enters the English language. Maybe it comes from another language, so we just use a version of that word. Maybe the creator of the word just makes something up. Maybe the creator just slapped a word on something that wasn’t typically used; the wiki from Wikipedia comes from the name of a Hawaiian bus.

    It is a strange, made-up way of naming things, but language itself is made up thing.


  • The problem is usually that the tourism economy isn’t a great economy to be a part of.

    Most tourist economies rely on a large staff of low wage workers to provide services. This may be a worse economic deal than other economies, even if the other industries in the area are in decline. Most locals who make money when tourism takes off are usually land owners.

    You also run into a problem where local amenities end up getting used more by tourists instead of locals. So, while costs of living rise, locals experience a degredation of service.









  • It is far worse than that.

    Universities have a lot of metrics that they are judged against that don’t lead to a quality education. Research doesn’t lead to good undergraduate students. A good pass rate just means the curriculum is soft enough to keep don’t students from failing.

    So you have university presidents who are incentivized to increase prestige and they aren’t going to focus on the quality of education because that doesn’t lead to better metrics. If presidents try to defend their universities’ way of teaching, they get replaced by those who follow the system.



  • A lot of consultants and contractors do the work for different governments. A reason why governments like this is that private companies find hiring and firing a lot easier. So, if a company performs poorly, it is really easy to fire them. In some cases, governments can also get individuals working for the consultant or contractor to stop working on that governments’ jobs, effectively firing them.

    It can be a lot easier to get rid of a poorly performing consultant over a poorly performing government worker.