• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • the traditional platform of the Republican Party - smaller government, lower taxes, economic/fiscal responsibility, family values, religious values, etc.

    TBF, the GOP didn’t hold many of those values either. They wanted to increase government control over people, lower taxes only for the rich and therefore increase the national debt, values only counted if they were christian and straight, etc. The main differences with MAGA is they say the quiet part out loud and they’re more comfortable with nazis, fascists, and kings than the GOP ostensibly was.










  • Yeah I’m sure it’s not as difficult as I’m making it out to be but it never seems to stick. It’s just as simple as 2 numbers: “million = 100 ten thousands” (hyaku-man) and “billion = 10 hundred millions” (juu-oku).

    Let’s just say there a lot of frustrations I have with the language even after decades of studying.


  • Somewhat related, but I have the worst time trying to convert numbers in my head from long scale in Japan (used to be used in the UK as well) to how it’s used in the current English speaking world. So basically they put four zeros per comma as opposed to three, and the names of the numbers reflect that. 1, 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 are all unique number names, but after that comes 10 ten thousands, 100 ten thousands, and then 1000 ten thousands before a new number name at 1,0000,0000 (or 100,000,000).

    It wouldn’t be so bad to just memorize that 100 thousand is “new number name” if that’s all it was, but numbers like that in daily life are pretty much used to talk about money (or somewhat less commonly populations). So once I get the actual number I have to divide by about 100 (or 150, depending on the strength of the yen vs dollar) to think about what it actually means in units I’m used to, like seeing an article saying a government project costs 1.2 billion yen doesn’t mean much until I think about it like 800 million USD instead. So I can never really use big numbers in conversation without manually counting zeros in my head.

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