+1 to using it as opportunity to listen to a podcast.
I consider it some of my best podcast listening time. Somehow I’m more tuned in when doing house chores vs. trying to just sit and listen, or while walking outside where I have to pay attention to traffic when crossing the street and such.
To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold.
The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.
A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.
Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting.
I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).
Reading the parent comment, I assume their use of 'freedom' more closely aligns with being undisturbed by a government.
It's a very common usage in America, focusing on "Freedom from X" rather than "Freedom to do Y", the latter of which often needs some sort of societal protection, most often provided by said government.
Indeed. I don’t understand why they cant just make medical expenses tax-deductible up to a certain amount. The effect would be the same. Why do I need a separate account for it, and why do I have to guess how much I’ll need every year (as you pointed out)?
I guess at least part of the answer is that the companies administering FSAs make money out of this system. Sigh.
The issue is that it only kicks in when you itemize your deductions and it has something like a $10k cap. The standard deduction is 15k for a single and 30k married.
Unless you have a bunch of other things to deduct, it's often the right choice to just use the standard deduction.
Not so much anymore. The standard deduction for a married couple is now above 30k. It would take a large mortgage to pay that kind of interest in a single year. (Principle is not deductible; only interest)
Somewhat kinda related: I grew up in a Brazilian town that borders one of our many Spanish-speaking neighbors. We used to make fun of the folks across the border for pronouncing pizza like piça (“pissa”), which on our side of the border was a vulgar word for penis.
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
Do we really need to do this with each comment adding another rule and another reply from someone breaking it?
I live in Berlin with my wife and 2 kids (who were born lived their whole lives in Berlin). We all bike and take transit. Neither me nor my wife even have a driver's license. We're doing fine. We know plenty of other families with multiple kids in the same situation.
ok, if we’re hypothetically thinking of someone that wants to have lots of sex / kids, then yes! A larger home makes certain things _easier_ for sure. No denying that!
But it may not be much “better” long term because you’ll be buying mini van(s), paying for gas, car insurance, higher property taxes, etc. All that extra cost adds up and could easily be put toward upgrading to a larger apartment instead.
And remember, 3+ kids is FAR from the norm in 2025. It’s not 1970s…so this is a really pointless argument.
This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.
I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.
Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.
Far more relaxed. They have their own times and those are based on the region you work on. They are very respectful of the job/project. Tunisians are very amicable people.
Depending on the zone, they do have shut downs that overlap with American and European times, with 50 Celsius at times, they have to stop for hours.
On a related note, I don’t know how Apple has managed to mess up so badly the idea of storing your own information like address, phone number, etc.
Every time I’ve moved, for months afterwards I keep having to fix my address when using Apple Pay or setting directions to home, etc. because it seems like they keep multiple copies of that information all over the place, instead of referring to a single piece of information.
Places I can think of where I’ve had to update my address one by one: each credit card I have associated with Apple Pay; Maps; my own contact that I can share with others; subscription information; shipping address for Apple Pay.
I get it that some people use separate billing and shipping addresses, but for the vast majority of people the use case is “I have a single home address where I want to direct Maps to, be billed at, and ship stuff to, please update it all at once when I update my address.”
Yes it's extremely dumb and annoying. It's everywhere in Apple products, for example your Health ID cannot get your weight for your latest recorded weight in the app. I mean, it's even the same app, it's like the devs can't be bothered to make a smart product.
I think this is because of the way they silo everything, the way they are paranoid about privacy/security (mostly for their marketing, they don't care that much) and the culture that isn't very competitive anymore.
It finally hurts them because the experience isn't coherent and very frustrating for the user. It's funny because the marketing is all about the "ecosystem" but in reality, the coherence is mostly about how things look.
The rumor of a big redesign isn't surprising; instead of working on how things actually work (they wouldn't need to back off some marketing choice and that seems impossible) they will put a coat of paint and make people focus on good looks.
The last redesign was terrible and it took an awful lot of time to get things back to half-decent.
It's just one more motivation to not renew for an iPhone I guess...
I consider it some of my best podcast listening time. Somehow I’m more tuned in when doing house chores vs. trying to just sit and listen, or while walking outside where I have to pay attention to traffic when crossing the street and such.
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