It's the rate that women are getting pregnant. Circumstances and societal conditions can certainly curtail and slow the willingness of otherwise capable women to have families.
Do you just refer to fertility as 'South Korea's Fertility' when referencing the ability to conceive?
I mean, it's not incredibly shocking that a country half the size of Florida, essentially an island nation with a population of 50M, are deciding not to have children.
When I plug in population densities and fertility values of various countries from Wikipedia, the Spearman's correlation coefficient of the two variables is roughly 0.26.
From that, I gather that population density is a contributing factor (perhaps due to its relationship with cost of living) but not enough to explain the whole story behind what's going on in South Korea.
South Korea is not half the size of Florida — it’s the other way around. FL is less than half the size of SK. Also it’s not an island nation — it’s on the Korean Peninsula. If you mean it’s an island nation in terms of connectivity then most nations in the world are islands too. Brazil for instance is culturally disconnected from its neighbors due to language.
Chicken and egg problem. Cars are necessary because businesses/places to work are far apart, but they got to be the distance they were because cars are around. The US is a huge place, there was plenty of space to go around and the current situation is what follows from it.
Partly, but it doesn't explain people's obsession with large, heavy, low MPG vehicles and the entitlement people have when it comes to fueling these cheaply.
The chicken-egg explanation is a normal consequence of not having anticipated the consequences when urban planning for car travel got going in the 50s. Unfortunate as it may be, but it's catch-22 that can be broken out of.
The unwillingness to break out of it, is because of the fetishization of car technology. This is a completely pathetic for adults to do, and is this toddler-mindset which is the biggest impediment to meaningful change today.
> The unwillingness to break out of it, is because of the fetishization of car technology.
Careful tossing that first stone. This is Hacker News. Surely most people here have made some technology purchasing choices moreso for coolness than for practicality. Cars are simply one particular sort of technology.
English being a mess may be one of its charm points. Many languages in a trenchcoat, full of flavor and exceptions to its own rules and a headache to learn.
That same exceptions may cause an increased difficulty for dyslexics. The design of a language has effects on the society that speaks it.
"So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other?
The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system.
“The English writing system is so irregular – print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one,” Brunel University London’s Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Prof Taeko Wydell, recently told the BBC radio documentary Dyslexia: Language and childhood." https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-dyslexia-17144/
> print to sound or sound to print translation is not always one to one
You don't say!
It's almost always not one-to-one. The "ghoti" joke parodies this.
English language derives from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin vulgate, celtic languages, and colonial imports from e.g. the Indian subcontinent. The spoken language has moved beyond those roots, but the spelling hasn't. I appreciate those old spellings; I like to see the origins of words in their spellings. Sometimes these spellings become apparent in the way words are used and pronounced in regional dialects, and I deplore the steady homogenisation of English.
All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.
Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written.
English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.)
Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.
(Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.)
So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF?
Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.
It is. A "rooter" is a piece of network equipment; a "rauw-ter" is a machine for finishing a hole in a piece of work, such as a drill-hole.
I'm perfectly willing to accept american pronunciation of technical terms in IT; IT tech-talk is a kind of jargon that most non-techs are bewildered by. There's little benefit in clinging to customary pronunciations.
But the machine for cleaning holes isn't in that category. If I were talking to e.g. a woodworker, and referred to a "rooter", I expect that would result in some mirth at my expense, for exposing my ignorance.
> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.
Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.
I have recently been pulled-up by a fellow native speaker over my pronunciation of the word "poor" ("poo-uh"). She pronounces it the same as "pore" or "paw". Many other words have exhibited the same shift: e.g. moor/more, boor/bore. My natural accent is RP, but I think the distinction I like to draw is not RP. Most of the people I meet that draw this distinction are from the North. Scots, in particular, seem inclined to draw the old distinctions more than southerners.
I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.
I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.
Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm confident in first.
I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone.
I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.
Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.
I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.
Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.
Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.
Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent.
Wrong, Korean writing is morpho-phonologic and has complex rules for transforming letters to actual pronunciation. And those rules applies at three different level (whatever position in the syllable, across syllable boundaries or not, or just within syllable).
But even then, the rules are fairly consistent and mostly logical. And even then the transformations are not drastically different from the consonant’s “base” sound.
Some of those transformations are a byproduct of hangul losing a vowel and a handful of consonants, and Korean itself going through a change similar to Middle English > Modern English over the course of Joseon’s 400+ year history.
I would say Hangul is regular, not phonetic. Sounds might change depending on their position when written, but I wouldn't call it particularly complex, certainly not compared to English orthography.
That wasn’t a fork though. Qwikster was Netflix separating itself into two distinct businesses with very different offerings (movies by mail vs streaming).
Reminds me of Yik Yak a bit, the user count dropped like the Titanic because they attempted to pivot away from the main reason people were using the platform to begin with (in this case anonymous posts).
Not only did Tumblr activity collapse after the NSFW ban, but in the subjects I follow, activity seems to have settled on a niche of transwomen blogging about hobby or interest X, where their posts are mainly about being a transwoman interested in such things and not the hobby or interest itself. I understand that Tumblr has value for those transwomen wanting to express themselves and build community with others, but it has become a network relevant to only a tiny, tiny percentage of the population.
No, it’s just that intellectual subjects on Tumblr always attracted a certain share of neuroatypical people, and once the majority of users left Tumblr, only the neuroatypical remained.
Tumblr has plenty of discussion about hobbies, TV shows, anime, video games, etc. If you like a certain thing, tumblr is a great way to be exposed to people discussing it, making text jokes about it, making fanart about it, etc. That has been literally unaffected by the NSFW ban in the many fandoms I follow on it.
There are people like you describe, but it doesn't dominate the platform imo. It's easy enough to get a lot out of tumblr.
If that means all the weirdos with genitalia in their profile pics are gone and stop messaging me randomly (which is who actually left as far as I can tell), then good!
The remaining MAU might actually be the users they wanted to keep.
But as someone who never used tumblr for porn, I've seen no evidence that tumblr is dying for anyone other than aficionados of porn.
Did you even look at your link? Almost all the bar graphs suggest tumblr is doing great. If doing as good as Facebook is your bar for success, then you've just defined almost all businesses as failures. Those numbers beat owning a restaurant, and every startup I've ever worked at (which are all profitable).
So anyways, the tumblr that's basically the same as it was 10 years ago (unless you used it for porn), that's also still growing, is dying according to you, but not the numbers. Interesting. This is kind of like reading about your own death in the newspaper.
Who cares how it's doing financially? I'm not an investor. If the VCs who gave them money are never made whole, I do not care.
If their loss results in decades of free tumblr for me, all the better! I really doubt the site is gonna disappear tomorrow. And every indication so far is they aren't going to ruin it in the name of monetization.
You’re forgetting that those metrics are hugely important to tumblr because those metrics are hugely important to tumblr’s customers: advertisers. The reason they claim the policy change was necessary in the first place.
I don’t know what you mean by “business boy hat” - could this be a typo?
well they had the indirect effect of making the product better for their (unpaying) users.
When it comes to tumblr, I quite frankly don't give 2 shits about their advertisers. Why should I? Maybe the site will be shut down someday? You'd think that ship would've sailed.
I am talking from the perspective of a user. Those metrics have 0 impact on me as a user (outside of the company going under - or ruining itself in the name of more money.) There's no delusion here.
The users that remain on tumblr seem pretty happy about the effects of the nsfw ban. The people that left due to it weren't the good ones for the most part.
I don't think you understand how online businesses work. Social network companies like tumblr need advertiser dollars in order to pay for server and employee costs. Tumblr exists to generate revenue, user metrics mean revenue. If users aren't using the platform, advertisers stop paying as much and thus tumblr can't continue to exist.
Whether or not you like it now that porn is gone doesn't matter.
? why are you talking down to me? As if I don't know business 101? You sound like a wannabe VC.
Why do I need to align my values of good and bad with market forces? You literally cannot make an argument that your "objective" value system about business is the only True one.
I'd bet tumblr will continue to exist and I'd get to enjoy it for free (modulo ads) for at least another half decade if not more. And I bet throughout that time the company won't do much to monetize their users beyond what they already do. The userbase has long since proven it doesn't give tumblr money beyond a stray click. But it'll continue to plug along - "failing" the whole way.
There's as much or more tumblr activity for my dashboard & on my blog. I get way fewer porn spam bots following me now. And people generally seem to be happy with the website & are continuing to use it to talk about the stuff they like.
You are right. I'd bought some gems with my Google Opinion Rewards money, and the only use someone has for gems is for costumes and backgrounds - all cosmetic changes, nothing that affects the gameplay. IIRC you can use gems to change your class if you wish, but you get an Orb of Regeneration at Level 100, so you can change your class for free at that point.
>Almost nothing is an emergency situation requiring your elevated tone of voice or physically rushing towards them.
Those are of course situations where immediate action IS necessary. It's a judgement call, but the point seems to be that if it's not a mortal danger, then don't overreact.
