flomble
My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not is not part of the contract.
So no theft has taken place. If you want to claim that's it's unethical to take the free money that they're offering, you need to provide a justification for why that is. The onus is on you.
The only way I can see you attempting to justify it is by saying that it involves taking advantage of unforeseen consequences of the contract. But as has been pointed out, they fully intended to lose money, so that doesn't work.
I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verbs, for example, I now understand more information about every sentence (e.g. omitted verb subjects and tense/mood information). It will still be necessary to listen and read extensively in order to internalise the formation and meaning of the verb forms, but it skips a lengthy process of reverse engineering. Ditto for producing your own sentences, which I think is also fundamentally important for learning a language.
> Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.
This is absolutely true; when using flashcards or spaced repetition, it is vastly better to have a full sentence with the target word blanked out compared to only having the definition.
Based on what you're saying here, are you arguing for a kind of Scholasticism?
Finally, your criticism of a "radically egalitarian" view is somewhat perplexing to me. Would you mind expanding on that point?
This is incorrect. Europe is quite unique in that since the advent of Christianity there has always existed a church separate from the state acting as a counterbalance thereto, and offering an alternative foundation of moral authority. Despite this, brutal suppression of all dissent and criticism of the political structure was almost always supported by the Church, which generally allied itself with dominant regimes (i.e. feudal rulers).
It wasn't until the flurry of neoclassicist-inspired philosophising of the Enlightenment and the emergence of monied elites in a position to pressure the state to grant them rights that said rights were slowly granted. They often couched their arguments in terms of Christian doctrine, but this is just the incidental result of the dominance of the Christian religion in society at that time.
For example, selling a hamburger would have been an obviously political act in the Soviet Union. We don't see it as such because vanishingly few people believe that commercial transactions between private parties should be forbidden. But whenever someone advertises a hamburger, depicts the purchase of one, or leaves a review of one on a website, they are engaging in an act that we only view as apolitical because of the status quo that we inhabit.
Facebook created ReasonML, which is just a different syntax for OCaml (I think the AST parsed from it is interchangeable with one parsed from OCaml), purely because it's less alienating to people who are used to writing C-style code.
I'd say though, that generally, people who are interested in "niche" programming languages are less likely to be put off by syntax than people who have only been exposed to the more mainstream languages, which is why their preferences are less likely to be the ones reflected whenever mass adoption is a goal of language designers.
In particular there's evidence for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...
It's frustrating on several levels. One, there is an element of the naturalistic fallacy; many people feel that homosexuality being "natural" (e.g. occurring in many animal species or being immutably determined by genes) is a strong defence of it (as opposed to the preferable argument of "it's not hurting you, so you have absolutely zero grounds to object to it"). Two, many people want to be able to point to a single gene as the causative factor, when genetics is rarely so simple, and other prenatal factors may contribute (e.g. something that happens during gestation).
"Unfortunately, we won't be renewing our contract with you"
or
"We regret to inform you that we will be going with another candidate"
Changing those to the simple future makes them sound much harsher to my ears, so I would venture that the progressive is a mechanism for softening the impact.
Old style: "If I had tried, I would have succeeded."
New style: "If I would have tried, I would have succeeded."
The extra "would" style used to be restricted only to adding strong emphasis, as in "if you would just LISTEN to me...". Slowly, this extra "would" has crept into other areas, like replacing the subjunctive as in the example:
Old style: "It would be great if this were done."
New style: "It would be great if this would be done."
The new style is "incorrect" English as of a couple of decades ago, but its usage is increasing. It still sounds terribly wrong to my ear, but what determines whether grammar is "correct" is the way in which people actually speak.
Tell your wife you're using a proven comedic technique.
I'd say that the way I conceived of it, I was making a distinction between events that were determined by antecedents (physical or otherwise) on the one hand and events whose outcome was uncaused, or random, on the other. In my mind the two are dichotomous and exhaustive.
Empathetic understanding of others should make one hesitate to tell them that being primarily focused on doing what they're passionate about is "self-centred crap", rather than using a less needlessly excoriating phrase. It touched a nerve for me specifically because I feel I, like most people, have prioritised doing things that other people need and are willing to pay for, and then felt attacked for my wish to be doing something I actually enjoy and have an aptitude for.
Edited: to be more empathetic to others.
The final sentence of the article is somewhat nonsensical: "feelings are exactly the things that distract us from our wantings". "Wantings" are feelings!
Taking physicalism to be true, imagine that determinism is false. What is non-determinism but randomness? And how can one's actions being partly random be called "free will"? So regardless of whether one's actions are pre-determined or not, they're not "free" because that notion breaks down under close examination. Either actions are determined or they are wholly or partially random. This is the case if you're a physicalist, but also if you're a dualist. If the mind exists in some realm other than the physical world, that realm operates either deterministically or partly or wholly randomly. The same line of argument applies to neutral monism.
Emergentism is the only one that works differently, but I don't put much stock in gesturing vaguely at the morass of mind and matter and saying "the explanation is somewhere in here". In any case, if an emergentist can give a description of a component of mind that isn't reducible to matter, the same argument will apply to it.
You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書).
Sure, you can make distinctions between "classifiers" vs. "measure words" vs. units of measurement, but it feels like the same construct to say 一位人 ("one person"), 一群人 ("a group of people") or 一斤人 ("half a kilo of human"), as grisly as the last one may be.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't pass muster anymore, when there are abundant examples of strongly typed object oriented langs which don't exhibit these flaws. C# avoids getter and setter boilerplate with `get` and `set`. Kotlin and Swift, unlike Java, actually are strongly typed, because objects aren't implicitly nullable. And the many conveniences afforded by modern language features add up to improved productivity, provided the programmer using the language doesn't rigidly refuse to learn to use them.
The question is whether tax revenues could be raised by raising tax rates to the point that revenues exceeded current expenditure. Whether or not that is possible is uncertain.
Partly, it depends on whether the debate over nation status is a merely one of linguistics and categorisation or whether we're making ethical arguments.
When Japan annexed Korea, did the Korean people cease to constitute a nation? When Japan annexed Taiwan, did Taiwan cease to rightfully belong to the Chinese government of the time?
(As an aside, I think that no-one talking about the Taiwanese company's involvement in IP theft is a pretty good example of how the press is incentivised to lead with a sensationalised narrative that inflames sentiments, how people focus on facts that fit a pre-existing narrative, and a general bias against China).
Is that still a nebulous statement?
Actually, it is not "their nature". The nature of people on the spectrum is to have difficulty understanding social conventions. Having a system whereby social conventions are explicitly spelled out in detail is likely to help people on the spectrum adhere to them, because they no longer have to be inferred.
People on the spectrum deserve understanding (like everyone else) when they break social norms or say hurtful things due to not understanding that they're doing anything wrong. When they know that what they're doing is not acceptable, they are as responsible as anyone else who knowingly acts like a jerk.
I'm also highly skeptical of the idea anyone outside of a tiny minority would be unaware that "garbage" is an intentionally insulting term, especially given that it is a metaphor. Even "completely fails to meet standards" is vastly better and more descriptive (outside of the emotional content of "garbage").
Delightful.
I think you get right to the reason for the distinction in language. The two things weren't unified in your conception until you were inside a cloud, which until recently was impossible except by climbing to high altitudes. Fogs and clouds are usually experienced in very different ways, so it seems natural to me that people came up with different words for them.
A(B(C)) would be `a (b c)` or `a $ b c` or `(a . b) c`. The first is the most vanilla way, the second is convenience (basically "evaluate everything after $ first, then plug it in") and the third uses the function composition operator `.`.
Human beings are animals, and thus the product of evolution. We are not blank slates, but highly specialised machines with innate tendencies and potentials. Almost anyone could, with minimal difficulty, list any number of phenomena universal to any human society: pain (and aversion thereto), communication, laughter, anger, etc. It is avowedly extremely difficult to separate ourselves from our inculcated norms when reasoning about human nature, but that does not refute its existence.
Of course, suggesting that human beings have no natural tendencies evolved for their survival ignores an overwhelming preponderance of evidence accumulated by biologists over the past century. But you know that, having clearly studied the field.