Netflix to their credit does let you switch audio language and subtitling to any version they have available for the most part as far as I can tell (with some hilarious results, as for some shows the dubbing and subtitling does not always match well - my son noticed this with anime shows where the English audio and subtitles often say entirely different things)

Though I also wish they'd let me set better defaults. They let you give a list of languages you prefer, but that's too simplistic. E.g. I'd prefer to always get original audio, but subtitles matching the audio in a handful of languages I know well enough to follow if I can read but not only by audio, and falling back to English.

Instead you need to check for each series what is available, or set it broad and change it per program accordingly.

Sadly depending on which country you're in, some shows on Netflix won't have all the audio/subtitles available. No idea if this is Netflix's fault or yet another unfortunate result of copyright hell.

Globalization for Me and Not for Thee, S36E571

This happens fairly often on German Netflix. When the program's language is neither German nor English, often there are no English subtitles available.

International licensing is obviously complicated, so it's hard to say whose "fault" it is, but my suspicion is that some rights owners will only license the service to use the local language to prevent end users doing digital geo-arbitrage.

For example, the Swedish series "The Bridge" is available on German Netflix, and the trailer has English subtitles, but the actual episodes only offer German subs. AFAICT in the US market this show is only available for streaming as a purchase from Amazon.

I’ve found that with the plugin https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/ I tend to get a longer list of options both for audio and subtitles. It also let’s you do fun stuff like displaying two sets of subtitles simultaneously—although that didn’t really work for my brain.

+1 for LLWN! Fantastic Chrome extension, especially for language learning. They also have one for YouTube.

However, the language options offered beyond those already provided by Netflix are machine translated. This is good enough to follow along or fill in gaps in your knowledge of the officially subtitled language, but is a subpar representation of the program.

> for some shows the dubbing and subtitling does not always match well

It is very common for languages other than English. I'd say most Netflix content has the French audio and subtitles not matching each other. They have the same meaning but not the same wording.

Give us up the bomb!

And the US, sadly, becomes more like the developing world, every time I visit...

Public infrastructure, decent wages, national health care, public transport, and such ain't "beyond the pale" guys...

Though, to be frank, European politicians are influenced by this and want to bring more of it here faster. Private profit of the few above people, and let the suckers believe in wealth "trickling down"...

The homeless crisis in Seattle parallels the progressive rise to prominence in the city politics. All the city positions are occupied by progressives. Nobody else even bothers to run.

LA has had every flavor of mayor over the last century, and Skid row has been Skid row ever since it was first named such in the early 1900s.

Skid Row's origin is from Seattle, where the logs were slid down "skid road" to the boats.

Skid is another word for shipping pallet and it’s called skid row because it’s next to the freight train lines into downtown. Pallets would get stacked high along the streets, hence skid row. There are plenty of cities across America with their own area called skid row. The name has nothing to do with the current homeless population.

It is common for poor industrial areas to end up with large transient populations, but that’s a case of convergent evolution.

It's not named after homeless people, I'm saying the character of the place has been the same since like the 1890s. That part of town has always been full of transient and destitute people no matter the flavor of local government, is the point I was trying to make. The OP comment was implying some false correlation between homelessness and progressive government. Lest we forget it was progressive government initiatives that ended the great depression and both peace and wartime public works projects, not private corporations, that finally got people back to work decades ago.

That is indeed the progressive interpretation of those events. The other interpretation is FDR's progressive policies extended the Depression into by far the longest in US history.

The banking runs were caused by the fixed exchange rate between gold and fiat money - in 1929 one could double one's wealth by buying gold from banks at the official exchange rate. This naturally caused endless runs until the banks either collapsed or FDR (correctly) suspended such sales. The banks remained crippled for lack of money because the Federal Reserve Bank (not a free market bank) failed to understand what the problem was.

The country came out of the Depression late in the 30's because of vast quantities of money flowing into the country from foreign countries buying arms.

If you're going to correct someone, isn't it worth spending just a few minutes doing due diligence? Skid row comes from logging roads where the logs were skidded down the road.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_row

And the larger the safety net holes get, the more progressives will be elected, hopefully.

That’s a pretty dubious implication of causation.

Capitalism extracts work from wealth gradients the same way a Stirling engine extracts it from temperature ones. The higher the gradient, the more efficient it becomes.

Haha, I wish this wasn't such a STEM-y analogy so I could mention it to my friends, it's great and describes so much in so little.

Is it a pro and anti capitalism point, i cant tell.

By that logic it was most efficient with slavery? And the next best thing with serfs?

It’s not pro or against. It’s an observation. Slavery and serfdom is not as efficient because the motivation to work is extrinsic and needs work to maintain.

It's worse than that. Slaves will actively sabotage the work, even at the risk of execution when caught.

I went for the most morally neutral analogy I could find. Systems and models are not inherently good or bad - what gives that quality is how we use them.

There's nothing morally neutral in exploitation.

So visit a different part of it. As someone whose parents grew up without electricity in their home that's nonsense and tone deaf. We don't need an "America bad" melodrama on every thread, especially one about European culture. Turn off the news and talk to real people. You have no idea how positively we brown 1st and 2nd gen immigrants view America, and the pages I could write on how far ahead of the "developing" latin and South/Southeast Asian world it still is. And yes Ive been to 20+ countries I'm not missing "perspective". Europeans have certain benefits explicitly defined by law and we don't because the US is rooted in a libertarian understanding of what a "right" is but we get them anyway and to keep it brief I will say that the recent hyper-focus on the US' flaws and fixation on what other countries "promise" their citizens make people myopic to how it actually plays out in the real world. I've met many entrepreneurial Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, French, and Australian friends abroad on the nomad circuits who start their own cafes and training centers and studios in other countries and tell me about what they lack back home and went in search of outside of the EU. I'm much more appreciative of the opportunities the US still offers after having traveled.

The US is definitely doing better than most developing worlds. Except of course for minor things like lifespan, health, crime etc. However doing better than developing worlds is quite a low bar.

“ what they lack back home and went in search of outside of the EU. ” that’s a very heavy selection bias. The Americans I’ve talked to in Europe doesn’t represent those that I’ve talked to in America. There’s a reason people both leave and stay.

>So visit a different part of it.

With this mindset soon there wont be any left.

>As someone whose parents grew up without electricity in their home that's nonsense and tone deaf. (...) You have no idea how positively we brown 1st and 2nd gen immigrants view America

It's easy to view the current status positively if you start from a low bar.

But sure, the US has electricy AND running water. I'll give you that. Well, mostly ( https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/26/how-texas-tough-winter-expos... ).

Second-generation Americans almost universally didn't start from a low bar themselves. Many first-generation Americans didn't start from a low bar, either, but that's maybe a different point.

Wealth is not "trickling down" mainly because of high taxes in Europe. Corporations have incentive to transfer profits outside and spend it only when absolutely necessary, otherwise any bigger project wouldn't be economical. So not only those corporations act like a hoover of funds, the void that is created has to be filled with something - and here comes progressive tax, that ensures middle class cover what otherwise those big corporations would have to pay and also ensures that if someone comes from a poor background they almost never go up in the class ladder. This will eventually create a society where everyone cannot afford anything to buy, but they will be able to scrap money together to pay for subscriptions and big corporations will become de facto governments and all parliaments will focus on protecting that status quo rather than serving the public.

> Wealth is not "trickling down" mainly because of high taxes in Europe

it's not trickling down anywhere.

While it might be in most corporations best interest to have consumers that can afford to buy all the thing they are selling, it's also in their own immediate interest to squeeze as much money as they can, and keep it for them self.

And each year laws get passed (or reverted) that help corporations , and they get better and better at squeezing.

Look at the trends, middle class is disappearing, and more and more wealth is captured and kept at the top. (corporations are getting bigger and bigger, and rich people are getting richer)

and it's happening in USA even faster than in most of Europe. Pretty much the only place where middle class is growing is China (and other developing countries), but that is because they are still catching up.

So it can't be just the EU taxes.

Trickle down is nice theory, too bad it doesn't work in practice.

And no I don't even pretend to know what the solution is.

I just think that lowering taxes for corporations, will just make even more money for corporations, make them more powerful and not really help anyone else.

While there are obviously major problems, if you rank countries by the social mobility indexes, or by GINI (income inequality) indexes, the top ten or so are all high-tax European countries.

Mind you, there's more to it than that; just setting the high-income-band taxes high won't do it. Efficacy of taxation and control of corruption is also important. Ireland's an interesting case; in the 80s its income tax was quite high (and it was a substantial net beneficiary of EU funding) but its GINI index was the worst in the EU (it was actually worse than the US for part of the decade). Today, income tax is still quite high (though not as high), and it's a donor of EU funding, but the GINI index is middle of the road European, far better than it used to be. The main thing that changed, beyond overall economic development, is reduction of corruption; there's no point in having big high-income-band taxes if no-one pays them.

"Corporations have incentive to transfer profits"

They will always have incentive to movw money into a tax heaven, their rate is zero

Only if the money can be freely moved.

“Trickling down” economics has been completely disregarded by serious Economists for years now. If it actually worked, the US would be in a much better position today than it actually is.

Large corporations like Google, Amazon etc. pays zero tax. I hope you enjoy your percentage of those non-existing “trickling down” $.

A great thing about America is you can buy stock in corporations and get your share of their profits. It also gets you the right to attend shareholder meetings and vote on corporate business issues.

> And the US, sadly, becomes more like the developing world, every time I visit...

But Biden has the "once in a generation infrastructure plan"!

Not at all. As a European, I am still shocked when I visit the US. The disregard for people suffering in the streets, the trash and crumbling infrastructure, the disillusioned and depressed people, the open usage of drugs, the bullying attitude of anybody wearing a uniform, the carefully carved out areas of smug entitled rich people feeling they are better than anybody else, the “we are better than anybody else” attitude that has no relation to reality etc. etc. I used to enjoy visiting the US but nowadays I prefer to go somewhere else. Very sad.

> Germany, England, etc., become more like the US every time I visit.

As a German: In what ways?

1. McDonald's everywhere. These were non-existent in 1970.

2. I recently was in a shopping mall in Stuttgart. The design, parking garage, mall exterior, interior, looked exactly like an American mall. The displays and signs inside were nearly all in English. You could not tell you were in Germany.

3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.

4. English everywhere.

5. More American style clothing. Less Lederhosen (in fact, I can't recall seeing any Lederhosen after 1970).

6. American brand names everywhere.

>3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.

I'm not sure how long ago you were in the US, but it was ubiquitous here a couple generations ago, and the shift away from smoking seems to be a global trend associated with wealth - in Mainland china, I see much less of the younger generation smoking nowadays.

I was in Berlin recently and can attest to the English signage anecdote though, even if your experience seems to be an exaggerated version of mine.

As a Brit who went to Amsterdam a couple of years ago, I was really surprised at the number of smokers on the streets. It's definitely regional.

Germans smoked heavily everywhere in the 1980s. This all vanished by the 2000s.

Smoking largely ended in the US by the mid 70s. Not completely, but in the 1960s I recall every office building stunk of stale smoke. This disappeared by the mid 70s.

Just to address your first point - You can't visit a major American city with out finding an IKEA or even two. The world globalized, it didn't americanize.

Step into any IKEA in America, and there's no hint it's a European company. Step into a McDonald's in Germany, and it's like you stepped into America.

Besides, McDonald's are everywhere in Germany. I even ate at one at Checkpoint Charlie. An obvious triumph over communism :-)

I'm sure there is an IKEA around here somewhere, but I don't know where. I know where all the McD's within 10 miles are!

Shouldn't the BLAHAJ and GODIS SKUM signs in Ikea be a hint? The cafe likes to sell its Swedishness too.

> 3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.

Eh? How is stopping smoking a "US thing"? Surely it's a result of public health campaigns and regulations slowly introduced over decades?

And these laws were passed in some European countries before the USA introduced them

The US was about 20 years ahead in pushing smoking to the margins.

Just to play the devils advocate.

USA has double the smoking rate (per capita) than in my country (2017).

Germany was very,very early with anti-tobacco campaigns: “in 1929 (presumably too late to be included in the handbook) the German physician, Fritz Lickint published a paper in which he showed that lung cancer patients were particularly likely to be smokers. He then went on a crusade against smoking, and antitobacco activism actually became widespread in Germany.”

Hollywood was one of the main proponents of marketing cigarettes.

See also the newish American trend of vaping.

America is the forth largest producer of cigarettes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigaret...

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-smoking-rate-what-wor...

The fact remains, in the 1980s in Germany if you walked into any business office there was a choking blue haze like in 1960s America. It was inescapable.

It was starkly obvious if you traveled back and forth between the US and Germany in the 1980s. In the 80s US businesses had done a good job of pushing the smokers out on the porch.

I never thought that would work, but it did, and smoking became generally recognized as the filthy habit that it was.

My '72 Dodge hasn't seen a cigarette since the 1980s and still smells like smoke :-)

There are Chinese restaurants everywhere in the US. So obviously the US is becoming Chinese then? Using your arguments? Or perhaps the US is becoming English since everybody is using mobile phones with an arm designed CPU? Or perhaps Mexican because of all the Mexican restaurants in the US? Or Italian? The US sure loves eating pizza? Using your arguments I could make all of those claims.

You can argue whatever you like. I lived in Germany in the late 60s for 3 years, and visited occasionally in the decades since. For someone living there the whole time, the change might be gradual enough to not be noticeable, but I notice it as discontinuous jumps.

Re 2 & 4: All signs here (pop 200k city) are in German. Only some very rare exceptions are in English (and other languages as well), like Corona behavior signs. The only English I normally see is the atrocious Denglisch (Portmanteau of Deutsch (German) and English) like "Back Factory" (Baking factory…) or single words like "sale".

The Lederhosen are the American equivalent of the hick bib in the South.

Those are just form Bavaria and nowhere else.

You woudn't see a cowboy dress in NYC.

I lived in Wiesbaden in the late 1960s. It was commonplace to see boys and men in Lederhosen on the street, and not just as a costume during Fasching. They wore them like jeans (not with the suspenders).

So did we the Basques with the fisherman/peasant custome but nowadays that dress it's just used for holydays as a folkloric tradition.

> You woudn't see a cowboy dress in NYC.

Well, there's the Naked Cowboy. But I guess he's missing the "dress" part of it (aside of "keeping the hat (and boots) on").

QAnon comes to mind ;) More serious: The unquestioned total power of intelligence agencies.

Homogenizing geographically but dehomogenizing in some ways both iffy such as alt right vs woke and also into specialist groupings such as HNers I guess.

English subtitles would be awesome but Netflix for some reason want to force users to use closed captions. There's always a long list of subtitle languages and then one in English with closed captions.

Aren't subtitles and closed captions the same thing?

There are two types of subtitles: for the hearing impaired and normal subtitles. English subtitles are usually for the hearing impaired, which means that they also add information about the sounds of the scene, like the phone is ringing or the music is playing.

I think closed captions include description of noises, music cues, etc.

CC subtitle tracks often show up with the name "English (SDH)" (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of hearing).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

Thanks, I wondered what that implied. Though I don't really understand what the point of [music] would be to a deaf person.

I’m not deaf but I watch a lot of video content with no sound and only CC captions. Usually with my own music playing instead.

When the CC is good it can communicate the mood of the music that is playing, sometimes it even shows the lyrics.

[ominous music], [workout montage music], [knocking on door], [Rachel clears throat], [music: Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd]

Usually there tends to be a description connecting the music to a specific kind of emotion, but it could also be a generic music symbol that leaves the person to imagine something in its place. Deaf people can still feel a subset of the vibrations that sound creates (usually the low end bass frequencies played with a higher power output). So a subset of such deaf people may be able to relate to certain sounds with certain emotional content too. The number of humans who cannot hear is a union of two sets – those who were born without the ability to hear and those who could hear but lost it at some point in life. The closed captioning indicators for music leave it to the imagination of the person.