Regardless of what this dumb party is, it’s first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the “generous” donor might be pushed or bought out.

The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you’re considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.

I don’t use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It’s my experience that if you’re using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you’ll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.

The most obvious answer is shrinkflation. They may have sold units with more pills in them before but economic pressures put them in a pickle: increase price for all or keep price the same and reduce content. It’s possible they had ordered a gazillion of these pill bottles and have them in storage now. They gotta use them. It would be economically and environmentally mad if they put a million of these bottles in a landfill and ordered smaller replacements.

But then its different from the sample Japanese text here. The orientation of all the characters does not change whether the text flows left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. Rotating the ABCs will actually worsen legibility in my opinion.

If the monks in The Name of the Rose times had come up with a vertical cursive script that stuck, maybe it would be different today. But that didn’t happen.

I wouldn’t have put “you just haven’t found the right one yet” in the discrimination category. That strikes me as helpless and ignorant rather than structurally evil. But I guess it’s the repetition of it.

The “good fucking” one I’m with you. That’s awful. And the pride-internal groupthink is discriminating too.

Thanks for broadening my horizon.

If we leave some of the more scandalous headline making stories to the side, people on Lemmy tend to be the de-googlers of the world. And when they sign up for Proton, they discover Proton is a quarter Google in a trenchcoat. They want you in their ecosystem and they want you to stay there. So you wake up one morning and you’re out of the Google frying pan but into the Proton frying pan. So some of the hate is disappointment.

Because we are herd animals that tend to pick on those we perceive as different?

That being said, are they discriminated against? Can you give examples?

It is possible for languages written in the Latin alphabet as well. It’s just a pain in the ass to read. You can write cursive Chinese characters top to bottom; there is no vertical cursive script for the Latin ABC. All the connecting nodes are on the horizontal axis. The majority of people are right-handed. So tradition and convention has us reading left to right, top to bottom.

So there is a court ruling that the mother had sole custody. And the father tried to take the kids out of the country, possibly without the mother’s knowledge. That is probably illegally moving your children abroad. The fact that they are your own flesh and blood is superseded by the mothereffing courts. Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. So you have to stuff the kids into a big suitcase like any upstanding CEO of an automobile conglomerate or just not leave the country.

There is a lot of meat on the Japan has catching up to do in regards to international custody battles bone. They favor the Japanese national, often unfairly, I think - although that’s a topic for debate for people who are more knowledgeable. However, you can’t take the law into your own hands just because you don’t agree with the decisions. And CPS could talk to the Japanese authorities if they want to (and can manage). But they can do eff all. The better point of contact would be the US embassy in Tokyo. They may not be able to do anything either but if anybody can intervene it’s them.

You’re going to have to vaguely doxx yourself here. There are plenty of places on this planet where you can’t legally get a “burner” without providing ID.

You moved to Lemmy to ask this question on an account called Ahmed? You sound like a customer service bot?

This is not the reaction of a human being struggling with porn addiction. Let’s just say you have not succeeded in allahing my skepticism.

A new account, all written in bold, with a potential rage bait about religion and jacking it? I smell bravo sierra.

“Western” languages? There is no such thing. There are Turkic ones, Indo-European ones, Uralic ones, Afro-Asiatic ones. They and more are all west of wherever Chinese characters are used.

You are picking a small number of Chinese characters that bear a distant resemblance to the meaning they carry to this day in languages that use them. Most of them have been abstracted to hell. Or simplified beyond recognition, I guess not just in the Chinese mainland. And that 火 means 🔥 was not obvious to me when I learned it. You need somebody to tell you to imagine a person with their arms on fire to see it. So the abstraction has progressed too far. Where you see a mountain I see a fork also. Therefore, I challenge your premise to the extent that this is obvious without being instructed.

I can also teach you pyr(o) means fire and maniac is an obsessive crazy person. You can get to the meaning of pyromaniac from there too. That as a learning process is not too different from 火山 equals volcano.

A lot of these images you presented strike me as linguistic retconning to aid children (and foreigners) learning the characters.

The point of the Latin alphabet is not to tie meaning to the letters but to the sounds they represent in the language that uses it. So even if, hypothetically, you could trace back the letter O to a symbol representing a window in Egyptian hieroglyphics this has no bearing on how the letter is used today.

It’s also noteworthy to me that any language using Chinese characters have invented a syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japan) or use the alphabet to an extent to teach the language (pinyin in the PRC, complete latinization in Vietnam). Korean adopted a syllabary that has a similar look and design but actually makes sense. There is a strong appeal to the utility of being able to read what’s on the page without having to think about anywhere from 1000 to 100000 abstracted characters.

Radio playlists are a science like marketing. Half the budget is wasted, you’re just never sure which half.

Stations have a target audience. They will have focused grouped this. They know their favorite music, how long on average they listen, and how much they will expect to hear certain artists. The DJs are mere announcers, they have little to no choice in what they play, and they are grateful to have a job. So like anybody working in retail during Christmas, they can tune out the music in their heads.

BUT IF YOU READ IT YOU WILL FIND OUT THAT PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED OVER THIS ISSUE. SO THERE IS NO CONCLUSIVE ANSWER.

Have a read through this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_and_no_one_is_around_to_hear_it%2C_does_it_make_a_sound%3F

If we only look at content available on DVD until about the mid 00s still torrenting about the ether today, I’m sure the majority are ripped from rentals. I had friends who basically bled a rental place dry.

On Lemmy you’re your own algorithm. I assume you already know what you’re thinking.

You are going to run into a self defense deadend there.

Bootleg records were a thing in Europe in the days of reel to reel tape as the only alternative. It wasn’t so much that people did it privately but people would try to make a buck through re-sale and especially on flea markets where oversight by the law was virtually nonexistent. Rare records have always been a thing. Bootleggers tried to profit off it.

I was bequeathed my parents’ record collection of about 200 LPs. One was a bootleg they kept, some rare Beatles stuff. Other ones were thrown away because the quality was bad or would have been deteriorating to a point where it became unlistenable.

How can you live anonymous? Off the grid maybe in a log hut in the woods. If you’re in a vehicle, you’ll need license plates. If you buy land there needs to be a name on the deed. You can obscure those maybe behind company names if you make the effort. But there will be a paper trail.

If you buy land, you might as well invest into a more comfy tiny house with solars on the roof and dig a nice pit for the toilet. Keep chicken and grow veggies or something.