> The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).
You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)
I don't think your examples apply though. The dog example is just dog meaning sausage, sometimes with a temperature quality added (or ignored), but always a sausage with no other connotations.
The pepper one, maybe a little, though according to Etymonline [0] pep is short for pepper, so it's all the same really.
That’s a different word. And it’s a word that came long after “slop.” It only makes sense if you know what “slop” means. I don’t actually understand why you’re linking me to this.
Mail in ballots don’t get rid of secrecy, unless the system has been tampered with, which you could also do with illegal cameras at in-person voting etc. Anonymous envelope-within-envelope is a pretty standard way to keep secrecy, and many states do it, like mine.
Is that really a problem? Since there will be lots of evidence and criminals tend to fuck up quite a bit this should be well documented. Unless you think that those election fraudsters that buy tons of votes from civilians have better opsec than drug dealers and the like.
Not in my experience. I see it almost every time I end up in a reddit thread from search results. I've recently started demoting it in Kagi. It's just not as good as it used to be. Newer threads tend to be full of junk and bots.
No, that’s describing permanent DST, which was tried and failed, not lack of DST. Most people in the world live without DST and it’s fine. (The article also mentions this.)
> This increase in capital requirements stamps out the visa mills.
No, it doesn't. The rich people abusing the system just deposit more money and get their checkmark. Small businesses cannot raise and float this kind of cash quickly.
Also, the policy change is being applied retroactively to visa renewal applications that had already been filed, before the policy change was even announced. So if you filed a few months ago, before any of this was announced, now you're getting rejected and sent home. If the govt was actually interesting in getting rid of illegitimate businesses, they could just go to them and see if they're real or not. All businesses that qualify someone to get a business manager visa have to be in commercial spaces, with signs with their name on it, and accessible.
No, that's not required for this visa. The capital requirement is the major change. Also, foreign restaurant owners are already fluent in Japanese, because they deal with Japanese customers every day. The language requirement change is for other visa types.
The rich people abusing this visa as second home have no trouble depositing a bit more money to meet the requirement. It only affects legitimate businesses that can't raise and float that kind of cash. It's performative punishment to appease the growing far-right sentiment. If they wanted to verify businesses were real, they can go there and foot and inspect. (They already have the right to do this, and all businesses that qualify for this visa must have a public office or commercial space with a clearly listed sign that can be accessed easily.)
Also, they enacted the change and applied it retroactively to existing visa holders who were waiting to have their visa updated. So people are now being rejected on new rules that were announced and enacted after they had filed to update their visa (which you must do every 1-3 years.)
Japan is not a theme park for foreign tourists to gawk at. It's a real place where people live and work.
Struggling to see where you contradicted anything I said besides calling it performative.
There's also the "far right" pejorative in an attempt to make your viewpoint seem not fridge while brushing aside the legitimate concerns of the citizens of the host country whose families have lived there for centuries and made it the place that it is.
Do you live there? I can see how some Japanese would then view such a POV as entitled and insulting. It would only increase the sentiment to boot such gaijin out.
It was more obvious before you edited the comment (and in principle we appreciate it when people edit their comments to dampen or remove personal attacks), but the bit that begins "Do you live there?" and ends "boot such gaijin out" is still saying much the same thing. You can make your substantive points without getting personal like that.
I'm at a loss here tbh because that sentiment is what the article is about. But yes I did edit the comment to make it less personal and more about the sentiment that has led to these changes in the VISA requirements.
So sad to see the comments here from people who don't know any better cheering this on. They don't know what is actually happening. The rules change was applied retroactively to people who already had renewals filed (which you have to do frequently) but not yet approved, and are being rejected based on the rules change that was announced after having already filed. The new rules are being used as a way to visibly punish the (already very small, 3%) immigrant population in Japan to appease the growing number of people with far-right anti-immigration sentiment.
There is a Japanese-led movement attempting to raise awareness of this issue, at least as far as it affects ethnic restaurants, which I suppose is the most visible effect of it to regular Japanese people: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260529/p2a/00m/0na/00...
As they point out, the stated goal of this policy change was to clamp down on rich people from other countries buying a "second home" with a visa in Japan. But the policy change to increase the capital requirement does not stop this. It only affects legitimate business. Because the rich people just deposit more money and meet the requirement. As the people in the link above point out, if the government was actually serious about this, they could instead verify the businesses are real by going there.
The people running small businesses, especially restaurants, cannot raise that kind of cash very quickly. And floating that amount of money in cash is just a bad idea.
The people here cheering this on, saying "Japan should throw out more foreigners to preserve Japan" need to realize that Japan is not a theme park. It's a real place that people live and work. And this policy change doesn't even do what it claims to do.
More and more things require having a smartphone. Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border. Install the app to use the street parking in this city. Install the app to board the bus. Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz. I admire your spirit of rebellion, but avoiding using a smartphone in daily life in most places will result in a lifestyle contorted specifically to avoid using a smartphone, and will cut you off from activities that were previously doable without smartphones 20 years ago.
> Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Government offices in many developed countries don't realistically answer the phone any more. You either use the official app on your phone, or you log into the official website using strong authentication that requires a phone. A luddite workaround might be a registered letter by post, but you might wait a long time for an answer.
I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines. To my knowledge there was no other way to get the required approvals.
My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone, credit card tap or with a reloadable transit card. To my knowledge, the only way to reload the card is to use their app or travel to a handful of authorized agents to have them reload your card.
I can call my government office and wait on hold for an hour, ultimately probably needing to schedule an appointment in person to handle my issue or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
>I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines
That's good to know. Me and my family will definitely never be visting the philippines. My phone doesn't have mobile data enabled at the provider level. Would have been an award search for Wifi.
>My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone,
It's baffling to me that anyone would want to link payment to their phone. This is one of the least intelligent self-owns of the last decade.
>or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?
I take your point but I'd say that most people don't put much value on their freedom if they'd trade it for a couple of hours of convenience.
Could you expand on this? What happens at the national border? What happens if your phone just won't do a QR code? I'm not arguing with you or disagreeing with, I'm just curious what the process is.
Not true at all. Even small, insular, just-a-few-hundred users PHPBB-style forums have to run Cloudflare or Anubis to try to stem DDoS-style scraping, and have a constant patrol of moderators to stop AI spam posts.
Not true. You can also make your code fast enough so your server doesn't get overloaded by three requests per second. Then you can just handle the requests.
There are multiple facets to the problem. Technical site performance is a very small part of those.
The disruption, manipulation, and most of all erosion of trust which bad-faith actors create (AI or otherwise) are the most serious issues in my experience. The concept of "evaporative cooling", in which a platform starting to go bad sees an accelerated departure of well-intentioned, high-value participants.
I agree with you that the PHP forum software is not fast at all. But, try hundreds of requests per second, including requests that require text searches.
Also, uh, how does speeding it up that help with the AI spam? (Sorry, I should have emphasized that part of my most more, since that's mostly the topic of this sub-thread I was replying to.)
This happened to me. I was able to notice it from network activity lights and stop it by disconnecting the network. Other people I know weren't so lucky.
