sparksbet's recent activity

  1. Comment on Social Democrats in Denmark suffer sweeping election losses – PM Mette Frederiksen's centre-left party loses control of Copenhagen for first time in more than 100 years in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    even just reading the news coming out of Denmark it's reassuring to know they're not center-left. If "we will forcibly evict and relocate non-white people out of any neighborhood with more than...

    even just reading the news coming out of Denmark it's reassuring to know they're not center-left. If "we will forcibly evict and relocate non-white people out of any neighborhood with more than 50% non-white people" is a center-left policy, I sure don't wanna know what right wing policy is in Denmark!

    8 votes

  2. Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Absolutely agreed on this re: the disparity in learning pre-reform English.

    Absolutely agreed on this re: the disparity in learning pre-reform English.

  3. Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science

    sparksbet
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to...

    If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to argue it's that much of an improvement for them, is the thing. Especially since these splits affect huge swaths of the language, not just rare or obscure vocabulary -- the cot-caught merger is incredibly widespread throughout the US but far enough from universal that not distinguishing the two in writing will also alienate plenty of speakers. Do we distinguish merry, Mary, and marry in spelling? Different speakers distinguish different subsets of those words. And that's just changes that differ regionally within the US. Include even standard Southern British English and you've got the father-bother distinction, the trap-bath split, and many more differences that speakers without those distinctions would simply have to memorize.

    And, of course, the main issue is that choosing one dialect to base a standardization on inevitably privileges that dialect and its speakers over others (especially in the educational system -- we see this often enough already in that context). And of course the prestige dialect is not chosen in a vacuum. If more educated, richer speakers are able to "write how they talk" but poorer speakers with histories of discrimination and less access to quality education are forced to memorize how to spell words based on how those privileged speakers talk, we're widening the gulf that already exists there compared to now, when everyone has to memorize a bunch of weird arbitrary rules.

    I think most of the good arguments against English spelling reform are fundamentally more practical than this -- it's just not politically or socioculturally feasible to actually accomplish that switch even with the perfect system. But the perfect system also doesn't exist, in large part because of English's being such an influential, global global language.

    EDIT: forgot to address my efforts, but I'll scrounge around for my notebook. my spelling reform efforts were principally based on frustration with a famous conlanger's similarly lighthearted non-serious spelling reform proposal, which I disliked a number of the principles of because they didn't take advantage of methods common among other Germanic languages to indicate certain vowel quality/length distinctions through context (i.e., the existence of rules like doubled consonants indicating the previous vowel is short, or things like the silent -e rule in English). These rules make it much easier to handle the huge vowel inventories in Germanic languages and are present even in much more phonetic systems (like how Standard German is currently written, which is quite regular), though a unified approach to vowels still really isn't possible if you don't want US and British English to have separate systems. I gave up when trying to finagle vowels got more annoying than fun lol

    3 votes

  4. Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different...

    Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different places. Spelling reform that allows the same system or even a mostly-similar system to be used between even just "standard" General American and "standard" British English would not be able to be a good phonetic representation across both dialects. The vowels in particular are so, so different -- even more different than you think if you haven't tried doing this (which I have in my free time before.) With spelling reform like this, you either need to force everyone to write in one dialect, which will force speakers of other dialects to write in ways that deliberately don't reflect how they pronounce those words and involve memorizing how to spell many words as a result, replicating the current issues, or you come up with a system that reflects dialectical differences and speaker write how they talk, in which case standardization goes out the window even within the US and definitely within the UK, much less between the two countries, and the systems for different dialects would end up being so divergent that you'd need to learn them separately.

    And that's before getting to the practical issues with reprinting everything ever written in English, physically and digitally.

    I agree that English spelling is a mess and its inconsistencies when it comes to pronunciation make literacy harder, but I've tried to make even pretty conservative spelling reform proposals for fun in my free time because I have that flavor of autism, and it's very difficult to make a system that doesn't require a large subset of speakers to write differently than they speak even if you focus on just US American English -- doing so in a unified way for English as a worldwide language is pretty much impossible.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on US hemp industry plans next move after Donald Trump signs THC ban in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I think the bigger issue that they were trying to draw attention to was your throwing out health claims that you yourself admit you don't have more than a bare minimum surface-level understanding...

    I think the bigger issue that they were trying to draw attention to was your throwing out health claims that you yourself admit you don't have more than a bare minimum surface-level understanding of (re: diabetes) after being called out on an attempt to equate selling food that contains nutrients we need to live with selling unregulated synthetic cannabinoids.

    Frankly, I'm already sick enough of how some people on Tildes constantly parrot claims about diet and nutrition unsolicited in threads about completely different topics, since I find that type of discussion triggers disordered eating and similar negative thought spirals (which, ftr, don't help me eat more healthy or even lose weight, in case people want to justify it on that basis), but I can only block tags that relate to the topic, not comments in threads on a topic that is more or less completely unrelated to dieting or obesity. On reddit I unsubbed from some subreddits because they had a tendency to constantly talk about obesity in the comments of even barely-related posts, but since the culture here on Tildes isn't really different across groups in the same way, that doesn't work as a tactic, and it's not possible to block any particular other user who does it often here either.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Libertarianism is dead in ~humanities

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Calling this a "branch of libertarianism" is incorrect. "Libertarian socialism" as described in this wikipedia article is a branch of socialism that's libertarian in character under the broader...

    Calling this a "branch of libertarianism" is incorrect. "Libertarian socialism" as described in this wikipedia article is a branch of socialism that's libertarian in character under the broader more international definition of "libertarian" within political science. Left libertarianism, one of the articles listed as a potential disambiguation at the top of the article you linked, is closer to what you described. However, even referring to left-libertarianism as a "branch of libertarianism" in a conversation that is otherwise dominated by use of the term "libertarian" to describe the specifically right-wing political movement present in the US is also misleading, as left-libertarianism as seen elsewhere in the world is not a subset or branch of the right-libertarianism described by the word "libertarian" in a US political context.

    9 votes

  7. Comment on Libertarianism is dead in ~humanities

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I'm a communist and I think you're being a little harsh on liberalism here. Or at least you're woefully misdiagnosing its issues by excluding the parts of liberalism you think are good from your...

    I'm a communist and I think you're being a little harsh on liberalism here. Or at least you're woefully misdiagnosing its issues by excluding the parts of liberalism you think are good from your definition of liberalism by calling them socialist. I realize it's a trend for leftists to call everyone who isn't as far left as them a liberal, but you're erring in the opposite direction here in a way that I don't think really reflects the pros and cons of liberalism super accurately.

    15 votes

  8. Comment on Israeli military's ex-top lawyer arrested as scandal over video leak deepens in ~society

  9. Comment on Body time and daylight savings apologetics in ~life

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    UTC is already an accepted standard and can be used for the international scheduling purposes you describe currently without abolishing local time zones. There is absolutely zero advantage (and a...

    UTC is already an accepted standard and can be used for the international scheduling purposes you describe currently without abolishing local time zones. There is absolutely zero advantage (and a bevy of disadvantages) to abolishing local time zones and forcing people to talk about time using UTC exclusively even in non-international contexts, even if it were possible to force people to do so practically (it's not).

    5 votes

  10. Comment on Body time and daylight savings apologetics in ~life

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    This won't work and is a bad idea. To quote the "in summary" portion as a tl;dr:

    Just abolish timezones alltogether and stick to UTC.

    This won't work and is a bad idea.

    To quote the "in summary" portion as a tl;dr:

    Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

    • causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable
    • necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
    • convolutes timetables, where present
    • means "days" are no longer the same as "days"
    • complicates both secular and religious law
    • is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
    • makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
    • does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
    • is not simpler.

    As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

    6 votes

  11. Comment on Tips for becoming a tea person in ~food

    sparksbet
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    While you can definitely get as fancy as OP seems to be with their coffee (and more so) with tea, do not underestimate how deep the rabbit hole can go for coffee fanciness. I'm at about the same...

    you can get just as (if not more)

    While you can definitely get as fancy as OP seems to be with their coffee (and more so) with tea, do not underestimate how deep the rabbit hole can go for coffee fanciness. I'm at about the same coffee fanciness as OP and while I'm "the coffee person" among my friends, I'm an absolute baby normie compared to real coffee hobbyists. There's some truly unhinged depths you can go to with it.

    Honestly, as a coffee person who occasionally drinks tea, I've actually tended to prefer fruity blends that may or may not contain actual tea. I think part of this is because it's taste-wise much farther away from coffee, actually. But I also think part of it is because I have a sweet tooth and it takes a lot less sugar to make a fruit tisane sweet lol. I've enjoyed my fair share of teas and only ever buy looseleaf, but that's about the limits of my tea fanciness lol.

    Fun fact: unlike tea, there are actually multiple different species of coffee! Though the vast majority that people drink is one of two species, with different cultivars existing for the truly obsessed to dig into.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on Signs of introspection in large language models in ~tech

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I understand why they do it from the perspective of their own material interests. I just dislike it.

    Yeah, I understand why they do it from the perspective of their own material interests. I just dislike it.

    5 votes

  13. Comment on Signs of introspection in large language models in ~tech

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I desperately want to at least triple the number of scarequotes used in this article. The constant needless anthropomorphization only contributes to common misconceptions about these models (but...

    I desperately want to at least triple the number of scarequotes used in this article. The constant needless anthropomorphization only contributes to common misconceptions about these models (but they're misconceptions that benefit companies like Anthropic, so probably that's a plus for them).

    13 votes

  14. Comment on What are your favorite low cost main dishes/meals? in ~food

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Unlike many other nearby countries, Japanese cuisine is not remotely spicy, and their curry is not an exception. Even the spiciest variant of that curry roux is barely hot by American standards....

    Unlike many other nearby countries, Japanese cuisine is not remotely spicy, and their curry is not an exception. Even the spiciest variant of that curry roux is barely hot by American standards. The medium one isn't really hot at all.

    3 votes

  15. Comment on Charlie Kirk's murder reveals a cultural sickness (Just Asking Questions podcast episode) in ~society

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    This is true of most conservative Christians who share Kirk's views, as I can attest from having grown up in that environment myself as well (though luckily not as isolated as I would've been in a...

    I bet if you could ask Charlie Kirk, his response would be something like "I don't hate you, I hate your sins and want you to wash them away with the blood of Jesus" or something.

    This is true of most conservative Christians who share Kirk's views, as I can attest from having grown up in that environment myself as well (though luckily not as isolated as I would've been in a rural community). But I think you're underestimating how inflammatory Kirk was more generally. I wouldn't necessarily bet against you on this, but I don't think it's as safe a bet as you think it is.

    (Also shoutout to my mom for accidentally being woke in advance by not letting me read Harry Potter as a kid lol)

    13 votes

  16. Comment on People with a very good memory: does that make it harder to forgive? in ~talk

    sparksbet
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    idk I have ADHD and have a similarly bad memory as you, but I still have a fair few grudges lol

    idk I have ADHD and have a similarly bad memory as you, but I still have a fair few grudges lol

    6 votes

  17. Comment on Announcing the Backlog Burner event for November 2025: Shrink your unplayed games list this coming month! in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Might or might not participate in November but put me on the list regardless

    Might or might not participate in November but put me on the list regardless

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Travel essentials: eight items to pack for your next trip – and what to leave at home in ~travel

    sparksbet
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    By far the biggest upgrade to my travel has been my steam deck, ngl. It's not exactly small, but the amount of space it takes up in my carry on is more than made up for by how much of the boredom...

    By far the biggest upgrade to my travel has been my steam deck, ngl. It's not exactly small, but the amount of space it takes up in my carry on is more than made up for by how much of the boredom of flight time it alleviates compared to most other options.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Travel essentials: eight items to pack for your next trip – and what to leave at home in ~travel

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I think the utility of a pillow for the plane (neck or otherwise -- the principle advantage of a neck pillow, for me, is that I can walk around the airport with it on my neck rather than taking up...

    I think the utility of a pillow for the plane (neck or otherwise -- the principle advantage of a neck pillow, for me, is that I can walk around the airport with it on my neck rather than taking up actual carry-on space) depends a LOT on how long your flight is and which class you're seated in. For shorter flights it's indeed not worth it, but on longer ones when you're in economy the utility goes way up.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Looking for low-cost ways to replace industrially processed foods in ~food

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Soy beans definitely are items you wouldn't typically find in grocery stores where I live, though. Even if we include specialty stores like the local Asian supermarket that stocks many things that...

    But all you need for Tofu is soy beans, water and gypsum/vinegar/limejuice

    Soy beans definitely are items you wouldn't typically find in grocery stores where I live, though. Even if we include specialty stores like the local Asian supermarket that stocks many things that aren't typical grocery store fare, the fresh chilis that are needed to make the pickled chili paste I use simply aren't sold here at all, but you could get them incredibly easily in China. What counts as stuff you can typically buy at the grocery store is a problem with a definition of "ultra-processed" that relies on that as a criterion, because I don't think it's all that rigorous.

    But yeah I think we're ultimately on more or less the same page when it comes to the practical implications here.

    2 votes