I know you just copied the headline of the article, but that headline is doing some serious heavy lifting in terms of saying the US has no control over its actions.

“Oh no, we bumbled our way into a war again! Couldn’t be helped, not our faults. Whatever are we to do?”

I’m curious about the scalability of this method, but it’s a bit outside my experience. Seems like it would take a lot of energy to implement?

I’m running arch on mine.

Ah, that’s probably why you like it. I’m talking about a Win 11 machine managed by our institution. I’m sure if I could get away from how we have Win 11 setup, I probably would only complain about the power location and the weight, but those are very minor.

You really like them? I got issued one for work and am not a fan.

The power button on these things is in the least intuitive spot and I’ve had lots of weird driver issues causing hardware to fail intermittently. Specs look good on paper, but the experience has been really lacking. The moment I can swap, I think I will.

Sometimes everything is paid for by the research group, including salaries, and utilities and facilities management is also charged back to the group by the university. The way those funds are allocated varies by institution and some are stingy as fuck, running “like a business.”

They usually don’t know about institutional indirect costs and how they often run around 50% of the research funding in the US.

For those not in the know, that’s an extra 50% that you need to add to the funds you apply for that will just go to the college to use for whatever they want. Research groups often don’t see any of this invested back into their facilities and grad students often need to apply for their own external funding to make a high enough wage just to scrape by.

The real world is wild enough without fantasy.

Perhaps this is a case of the kettle calling the pot black? Have you even considered what I said could hold some truth? I can say I have considered yours and told you I thought there was merit to it.

Does it make sense to go to the extra effort to learn a new language when they could just go to Instagram or lemon8 like many others have done? That is the path of least resistance for feeding an addiction, not overcoming a language barrier.

I agree with your assessment of why people get hooked on these social media apps and what would drive them from switching to TikTok to another app that fills the same role, but I don’t think that’s the only thing that is going on here.

My original comment was framed the way it was because yours seemed to be implying addiction was the only thing driving people’s behavior in this specific instance, but the article your comment was replying to is showing that while people are switching from TikTok to Rednote, there was also a corresponding increase in US users who are seeking resources to learn Mandarin. This implies that more is going on and is where your “people are only being driven by addiction” analysis falls apart.

Sure, I can see people switching apps to continue chasing an addiction, however, the uptick in US interest in learning Mandarin implies that people are interested in communicating with people who speak mandarin. If you looked at how Rednote is currently functioning in English, you can see that it’s not necessary to learn Mandarin to use the app the same way they did on TikTok. People are finding more than just a way to fill a social media addiction.

The fact that they are seeking out ways to better communicate with other users on Rednote suggests they are looking to become closer with that subset of users, which is an action driven by a desire to build a community with them. You don’t go learning a new language because of addiction.

Seconded. HelloChinese is so much better at teaching than Duolingo and it scratches the same game-like itch.

People searching for a means of connecting with a community is a negative thing since when? Better to look at the source of their feelings of alienation outside of the internet and point the finger at that instead of flippantly dismissing people using social media from a social media platform.

Agreed. The general trend of switching to natural gas has led to the release of a lot of methane, which is notorious for leaking during drilling, transport, and storage.

This is much worse than carbon dioxide and has been going on for decades. Methane will continue to rise within the atmosphere and cause further warming for decades even if we stopped releasing it today.

Got it figured out, thanks!

A shit, my bad. I didn’t scroll far enough, thank you!

Still getting a mostly blank page. Similar to what I tried earlier with archive.ph and archive.today.

Is it just me getting no text content?

Archive.ph and removepaywalls.com aren’t working. Does anyone have a way around the WaPo paywall?

I have a boss who will remote to a meeting that takes place right outside his office, then come in-person to the next meeting that immediately follows in the same room. People like the flexibility.

The article is listed on ResearchGate.

For anyone looking for an alternative to Sci-Hub (the GOAT), you can make a free account on RG and send a request to the authors for a copy of their paper (about two clicks to perform).

Most researchers will send you a copy within a day, maybe two. If you copy the title or the DOI link into a search with “ResearchGate” it usually shows up in most search engines.

I think we have more pressing issues in certain airplanes at the moment, but that’s a good point.

For sure. It can be useful for others, even if the person you’re interacting with has a rock for a brain.