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Sucrose posted:Considering there never were slave plantations in Rhode Island, this is incredibly stupid. Also a Rhode Islander, and the controversy is pretty dumb. At the time it was named, plantation just meant a place where trees, crops, etc. were planted rather than naturally occurring. The idea of using slave labor for farming in New England is laughable on its face anyway, since why the gently caress would you want to feed, clothe and house your labor force year-round with such a short growing season? What are you going to have them do over the winter, shovel snow?
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Feb 9, 2013 15:38
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Inu posted:I don't want it to be that way, but sometimes I wonder if WWIII isn't going to start here in East Asia. It totally won't break out over territorial disputes between China, Japan, and South Korea. There's so much trade and economic cooperation going on among the three that going to war would be more trouble than any minor territorial gain would be worth. There's two main reasons for vigorously defending your territorial claims, regardless of the strength of the claim itself or the value of the territory: it makes nationalist at home happy, and you can't just make more land whenever you feel like it, so nobody is inclined to just give it away, considering the way it figures into airspace and territorial water boundaries. It would be a different story if say, Japan was claiming territory on the Liaodong Peninsula that was ceded after the First Sino-Japanese War, or China was pressing a claim on the Kyoto-Nara area because they used to pay tribute back in the 6th century. Basically, none of the governments of the three parties (leaving aside Taiwan) involved is actually insane enough to make a claim on anything important enough to start a war over.
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Apr 29, 2013 10:40
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Kem Rixen posted:This data doesn't seem right I'm from Mass and there is no way its 2nd least likely to curse, I believe second least courteous, but the cursing one doesn't seem even close to being right. Yeah, with the way you guys drive, there's no chance in hell that 2nd least likely is even remotely accurate. Also as a Rhode Islander, it's probably just that they couldn't understand the accent and so didn't know when people were cursing.
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May 17, 2013 10:04
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Teddybear posted:This explains so much of modern antisemites. "drat Jews and their general tidiness" A lot of modern antisemitic stereotypes actually have pretty deep historical roots. The whole stereotype of the avaricious Jewish loanshark is grounded in early banking creating a market niche for providing credit for profit that most Christians couldn't fill. The Catholic prohibition of usury (also prohibited in Islam) meant that it wasn't possible for Christians to get involved in lending for profit without some creative legalese and enough political clout to keep Rome off your back. There was even a practice of having a Court Jew in many royal houses who served as a personal banker and financial adviser. Italian banking houses were the main competitors with Jewish financiers during this period, and the Shakespearean character Shylock is an example of the stereotypes and prejudices of the time. It's a great example of a smear campaign against competing businesses.
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May 24, 2013 10:39
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Patter Song posted:For the most part, the peasants weren't a very productive source of money and most definitely weren't where most of the Medieval loans were headed. Because the Papacy had mandated that Christians weren't permitted to lend money, Jews were forced by circumstances into the money-lending trade because of the huge societal gap there. As such, there was a bizarre societal idea of Jews as agents of either the king or the Pope and, indeed, many of the Medieval attacks on Jews were examples of people taking out their frustrations with either Pope or King on targets that couldn't fight back. Yeah, a surprising number of incidents of European persecution of Jews are connected with irresponsible borrowing by those with more political power than cash on hand. There was no system that would facilitate the financing of wars by monarchs through bonds etc., so they tapped the aristocracy directly with an implicit promise of a share of any spoils, and/or they took out a loan. Protocol 5 fucked around with this message at 12:13 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 12:09
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Japan ought to be the same shade as South Korea while we're at it, since their enforcement of equal rights laws is a lot more than just spotty.
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Jun 28, 2013 22:50
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Peanut President posted:Thanks to union busting by the states, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to make subarus in america than it is in china. The only final assembly done by Japanese automakers in China is for vehicles to be sold in China. The big trend in recent years by the Big Three in Japan is localized development, production, and marketing, which reduces costs in the long term by reduced labor and logistics costs, as well as the benefits of developing products targeted for the local environmental regulations right from the concept stage. Parts are sourced from all over the place, though more and more from Thailand, India, and Indonesia. The thinking behind this strategy is that it will end up being more profitable to localize everything that can be localized than take a top down approach that will result in massively overspeccing for certain low cost markets, making the product unaffordable due to the high aggregate costs of the technologies necessary to meet the most stringent environmental standards. A salient point is that this is rather unethical in terms of environmental impact, as is intentionally building to lower safety standards.
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Jul 8, 2013 19:45
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Teddles posted:From the last page, but this map is pretty cool; unless I've got something horribly wrong, the characters for America literally read a-me-ri-c(k)a, with north- and south- added in the appropriate places. I can confirm that it does. Japanese also used to do this, before they switched to writing everything in a phonetic syllabary typically used for foreign words. You'll still see abbreviations based on the old phonetic kanji transliterations in places like newspapers where space is at a premium. For example France will be abbreviated as 仏 from 仏蘭西 (Furansu), or Germany as 独 from 独逸 (Doitsu, ie; Deutsche). Interestingly, this shorthand is used these days mainly for western and East Asian countries. For most other Asian countries, as well as Africa and South America they just go with the phonetic approximation of the English all the time. Some of them end up sounding pretty funny due to differences in pronunciation, like Zimbabwe being rendered as Jinbabue.
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Aug 5, 2013 20:09
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Teddles posted:I'm actually taking that from Japanese, not from Chinese. Using the Chinese pronunciation of the Japanese characters (the pronunciations which were imported to Japan along with the characters and stands alongside the native Japanese pronunciations), we get A-???-RI-KA, which easily extrapolates to America. I'm not sure what you're getting at. I speak Japanese fluently and know all about onyomi and kunyomi, and I'm saying that the phonetic kanji transliterations in Japanese are similar but not identical to the ones from Chinese, and have mostly fallen out of use. 亜米利加 is the Japanese way of writing it this way, and the modern Chinese is 亜美利加, with variant forms of 米国 and 美国 respectively. The pronunciation that Vegetable gave above is for Mandarin, while in Cantonese it's closer to A-mei-li-ca. It is similar in a sense to the way that Japan is called Japon in some languages, which has its own convoluted linguistic history.
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Aug 5, 2013 21:27
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Teddles posted:I meant that I can't read/speak Chinese, but I can read/speak Japanese, and I saw that on the map taking the onyomi of the kanji over America gave A-???-RI-KA. I wasn't really trying to make a statement, just saying that I used Japanese to read a Chinese map which appeared to incorporate Western names, rather than assigning America a different name. Though if the map was made by a westerner, it makes sense I suppose. Ah, gotcha. They first ever heard of the Americas from Westerners, so they'd have no reason to come up with their own name for it anyway. Same thing with 煙草 for tobacco and 珈琲 for coffee in Japanese. Never heard of it before, so just slap some vaguely appropriate characters on there and call it good.
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Aug 6, 2013 05:17
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Rhesus Pieces posted:
why_new_englanders_hate_CT.jpg
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Aug 9, 2013 04:04
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GreenCard78 posted:Nihon? I thought it was Nippon? Are 'p' and 'h' similar in Japanese? The written 日本 is of Chinese origin and combines two characters with multiple ways to read them, and the readings Nihon and Nippon result from these slightly differing readings for the same characters. There are probably thousands of examples of this, particularly for place names and personal names. Nippon always refers to the country itself and properly should never be used in adjectival syntax to refer to people, culture, language etc. The actual original Japanese names for Japan are either 大和 Yamato, or 和国 Wakoku, though this properly only describes the region around what is now Kyoto, as there were several coeval independent kingdoms in other regions of the archipelago such as Azuma or Okinawa with distinct cultures, governments, and languages (or at least dialects). As for the similarity of p and h, I will drastically simplify some things here for brevity, but in early Japanese orthography using derived Japanese script, H, B, and P syllables were all represented using the same characters (ie; ho, bo, and po would all be written ほ, for example) with the correct reading understandable via context. They later introduced something similar to diacritical marks to clarify, so you ended up with ほ for ho, ぼ for bo, and ぽ for po. An easy way to conceptualize this is something like I and J, or U and V in roman script. There's a much longer explanation than this that goes into the details of how basic pronunciation conventions mutated over the centuries leaving artifacts of archaic pronunciations littered throughout modern Japanese with little rhyme or reason. Ultimately, this is not really the place for that, and I am too lazy to actually consult my references and write everything out. EDIT: Beaten on some points, but it's funny as poo poo how we all used ほ for the example since は has all kinds of special baggage that isn't really relevant and would just confuse people. Protocol 5 fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 04:48
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Poizen Jam posted:This doesn't seem at all right. I was most surprised about Japan actually; I was to believe they had a reputation for xenophobia toward foreign nationals living in Japan (as opposed to tourists or visitors on workterms, but the map specifically asks 'lives') The number of foreign nationals living in Japan is so comparatively small, that it rarely comes up, so I'd imagine that the top answers were stuff like "burakumin" or "Yakuza" instead of "foreigners". It would be like someone in Kansas worrying about people living next to people from Vanuatu. (Yes, I am exaggerating)
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Aug 14, 2013 07:01
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Killer robot posted:While this is not entirely untrue, the activity in North America seems to map really well to population density, so I think that's the most relevant point. You can see this really clearly in Japan as well. If you know what you're looking for, you can easily pick out Tokyo-Yokohama, Osaka-Kyoto, Nagoya, Sendai, and Sapporo. Since the population is so heavily concentrated in major cities, there are a few patches that have really activity 24 hours a day. For the US, Seattle is really easy to pinpoint.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:17
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So what you're saying is that it doesn't matter to you when the sun is shining outdoors?
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Aug 23, 2013 21:37
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Rebel Blob posted:The map is of nitrogen dioxide levels, to quote the ESA "Nitrogen oxides are produced by emissions from power plants, heavy industry and road transport, along with biomass burning." Here is another map of fine particulate matter, another type of air pollution. If anyone is wondering why there's such a huge band of red going across Eurasia and North Africa, it's that particulate matter includes not only stuff like smog and ash, but also dust and silt as well. Eastern China is so insanely dark red because of both coal-burning power plants and huge amounts of airborne silt from riverbeds that gets blown up during the dry season. A few years ago, it made the news when prevailing winds were blowing it all the way to western Japan.
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Sep 15, 2013 20:47
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Just speculation, but I imagine it has more to do with South American Spanish-speaking countries than Spain itself. I mean, maybe kids you want to be able to get by when they're old enough to go to Ibiza, but it seems more likely that people have a general idea that being able to speak Spanish could help them land a job that lets them take trips to tropical locales.
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Oct 12, 2013 20:55
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Yeah, there are a fair few Portuguese speakers in RI. Benefits include easy access to delicious Portuguese food and a cultural festival in the summer with good music. EDIT: Actually, wouldn't some of the area near Boston be Vietnamese? I remember there being a pretty sizable immigrant community around there.
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Oct 14, 2013 14:47
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Raising cattle for milk and meat never caught on in Japan until the late 19th to 20th century because they didn't really have the land to spare for grazing land or growing feed when all the best arable acreage was devoted to rice cultivation. Once they had stable access to imported food, fertilizers, and modern farming techniques, it became a major industry in northern Japan, especially Hokkaido, which was largely undeveloped at the time.
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Nov 1, 2013 05:58
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Faber posted:
People in Japan also flipped their poo poo about street view and got the government involved and Google eventually ended up having to redo large areas of the country with the camera at a lower height to avoid photographing peoples' backyards over their walls. They got in trouble again the year before last for tracking Wi-Fi activity data, which led to MIAC sending a curt, yet veiled warning to knock it off and purge their records or face legal action for non-compliance with the telecommunications secrecy provisions of the Telecommunications Business Act.
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Nov 22, 2013 21:37
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Fojar38 posted:China isn't going to destroy the world with only 240 nukes. More importantly, some stupid loving rocks in the middle of nowhere are not worth going to war over for any of the parties involved in the disputes, never mind potential oil/gas fields, EEZ borders, fishing rights what have you. The insane cost of a war both diplomatically and economically due to disruption of trade dwarfs any potential gains any of the concerned parties could stand to receive. The only way you could reasonably be worried about a war over these disputes is if you believed the governments of China,South Korea, and/or Japan were run by lunatics. By keeping their status in a diplomatic limbo, nobody wins, but nobody loses either, hence no one loses face, and business goes on as usual.
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Dec 10, 2013 15:43
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Bishop Rodan posted:I'd like to see something like that for the entire world. I'd imagine that decent chunks of Africa, North America, and Eurasia would be underwater, along with almost all of Australia. Well, the vast majority of the world's population lives in cities near either the coastline or a river for obvious reasons, so large swathes of every landmass would be missing. The population distribution in Japan is totally unremarkable for a such a mountainous country.
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Dec 14, 2013 23:17
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Golden_Zucchini posted:Maybe I just need to pay more attention to what my friends and I are actually saying, then. What trips up a lot of people are things like "Bob Smith is a man you can trust." Bob Smith is a specific person, which makes ESL speakers assume that it should take the definite article, but the intent is to include Bob is a group of non-specific persons that share a particular attribute, making the indefinite article correct. Another frequent area of confusion is that the indefinite article can only be used with singular forms, and it is replaced or omitted entirely when dealing with plurals. (eg. "I had a meeting today." "I had three meetings today." "I had meetings all day today.") Conversely, you can use the definite article with plurals just fine. (eg. "I met with the client today." "I met with the clients today.") This inconsistency confuses the poo poo out of people who aren't familiar with the conventions.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:29
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A huge number of people in Connecticut either hate the winters and want to go some place warmer, or wish they could afford to live in the City.
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May 1, 2014 23:49
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Rah! posted:I'm kinda late here, but I'm from Newport, so maybe I'm not qualified to speak for the rest of the state. That said, the most common complaints I hear are about the terrible corrupt government, high tax burden, crumbling infrastructure, lack of good jobs, harsh winters, and (for big summer towns like Newport) tourists. Which is not to say that they are envious of other states; they're just realistic about the state's problems.
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May 3, 2014 16:02
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Sheng-ji Yang posted:Didn't realize Thailand had such a big aids problem. Sex tourism. That's not a bad joke at Thailand's expense, but one of the actual major reasons.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:28
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