• 0 Posts
  • 527 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 7th, 2025
  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•adjectives ruleEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    I won’t claim that “my/his/her…” are purely adjectives, but I will make the claim that they’re as much adjectives as they are anything else.

    Fair, but in that case, when the context is fairly clearly about adjectives as opposed to pronouns, saying “Well, actually…” is just pedantic nerdery…

    And I’m so here for it.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•adjectives ruleEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    They’re their own special class of word, but they follow more adjective rules than noun rules, so you’ll see them called all kinds of things

    Does that make the present participle (progressive) forms of verbs like “writing” adjectives too, because they’re used like adjectives rather than like verbs (“I am tired”, “I am writing”, not “I writing”)? Does it make gerunds (unfortunately identical with present participles in English) nouns because they’re used like nouns (“I like cats”, “I like writing”)?

    They’re each their own class of word, neither strictly verb (despite being verb forms) nor adjective / noun (despite being used similarly) and I think we should treat them as such.

    I learned them in line with the declension of pronouns as analogues of nouns (which is generally less significant in English): I, my, me; you, your, you; he, his, him; she, her, her; it, its, it and so on. In some languages they have adjective-like declensions, but I think calling them adjectives is imprecise, because they’re more than that: They generally don’t make much sense without something they’re substituted for.

    For first and second person, that isn’t immediately obvious, but for third person, you can probably see what I mean: “Her car is rusty. Its tires are flat.”
    We can infer that “Its” refers to the car, but “Her” doesn’t tell us anything useful if we don’t know who that “She” is. That is a trait of pronouns: They’re substituted pro nomine.

    I can say “tired cat” and it is a semantically complete. “Her car” isn’t.

    Hence: I concede that they’re not purely pronouns, but rather pronouns with characteristics of adjectives. Their semantic intention is still to reference some other noun in the context, so I don’t think it’s fair to call them adjectives either.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•A Linux user's nightmare
    3·
    23 days ago

    I’d scale my outrage with the severity of the problem. That’s not to say that it’s a good move, and the law itself must be overturned for everyone’s sake, but regarding systemd, we’re at a weird forking point between “slippery slope fallacy” and the type of gradual accumulation of minor evils that sum up to a great one.

    If the slope actually starts slipping and entry becomes mandatory, I’ll take the L and join the push for alternative init systems. Right now, I just have to ration my energy.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta found liable in child exploitation caseEnglish
    3·
    26 days ago

    I was just highlighting the juxtaposition in length and depth between the two comments by dropping a dumb meme one level deeper.

    I know, I get the meme. I just took it as inspiration for another wordy, serious comment, which I now realise continued the trend. I suppose the apt follow-up would have been some even shorter quip like “OK Boomer”. Instead, you had to make a serious reply of your own and break the chain. Thanks, Obama.

    I genuinely value your post.

    And I value your genuine response and explanation. We hope together.

    Absurdist humour is one of my coping mechanisms for exactly these kinds of topics

    That I can get behind. When confronted with the absurdity of our great ambitions and worries in face of our own insignificance, what else can we do but make memes?

    What better way to bear dark times than to make light of them?

    When life is serious enough, you don’t need to be.

    Live. Laugh. Shitpost.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta found liable in child exploitation caseEnglish
    15·
    27 days ago

    Because limited liability corporations were created to avert liability from individuals. His firm is liable, but no single individual within it.

    Not even the ones making the executive decisions, despite their near-monarchic power. I guess since they’re appointed by a board of directors, it’s something like an electoral monarchy, except the board isn’t democratically elected so it’s a plutocracy by proxy. The ultimate culprit would be - and this is a chorus you’ve probably heard a thousand times on here - the shareholders, and going after them is hard. Particularly when the shareholders are themselves corporations…

    But the CEO is the pin focusing shareholder intent down into decisions and ultimately action. If they were effectively held responsible for their decisions, it would at least provide some counterbalance to the shareholders’ demands. It could also solve the “shareholders are corporations” issue, since you could make the CEOs of those companies liable for demanding illegal measures from companies they control.

    Of course, such a drastic change would be hard to actually push through, as things stand, since it would inhibit (illegal) profit and growth and “the economy” is a sacred cow. It’s still worth pushing for, in my opinion, but building awareness and support takes patience and tact to avoid pushing people into political apathy.

    The alternative I could see (and would prefer, but suspect to be even less attainable) is to dismantle the stock and capital system entirely. What you’d replace it with is a whole separate debate I won’t cover in this comment. Drastic systemic change is difficult to plan and enact, and building and maintaining the new system is difficult in the face of insecurities, old habits, unforeseen challenges that it may not yet have developed effective ways to deal with and generally all the growing pains that come with new things.

    They’re not mutually exclusive, and the first may be a step on the road to the second. Either way, public support is key, and that is rarely won quickly.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•imposteruleEnglish
    8·
    29 days ago

    The things people joke or lie about can say a lot about the way they think. My favourite example is the wife of Octavian Augustus, who was claimed to have woven his Toga herself. Whether or not it’s true or just propaganda made up to make her look good, it tells you something about Roman culture that even the elites would praise a woman for doing diligent manual labour.

    Transferred to this: Even if it was a joke, the fact it’s a thing that people come up with at all indicates the underlying sentiment you describe. The joke wouldn’t work if it didn’t reference a known phenomenon. It would just be a monk out back with a ladder to us.