sparkle

sparkle , 8 hours ago

Tech is pretty relevant to climate change. Technology experts are definitely not the only relevant people to it though, of course social/political experts are generally more important, considering the current state of capitalists' handling of impending environmental catastrophe...

sparkle , 8 hours ago (edited 7 hours ago)

Chimpanzees are likely going to be extinct 2-3 decades from now. Bonobos will be extinct in 4-6 decades. Orangutans will go extinct within 10 to 20 years. Most animals closely related to humans (including most apes & monkeys) are projected to become extinct within a few decades. I do not want to be alive when gorillas go extinct

This is mostly due to the meat trade (apes and monkeys are often killed for meat which is eaten by locals or traded), being affected by the wars in the Congo/Africa, being kidnapped & sold as exotic pets, and habitat loss from human resource harvesting/logging & development. Humans are effectively displacing, enslaving, slaughtering, and cannibalizing their distant cousins

sparkle , 5 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

Uh, yeah they would. Republicans and their general... hatred of mankind are already a pretty good motivator. It's not like there's any leftists to compete with them either, Americans are scared of those.

sparkle , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Congress passing the Taft-Hartley act and then overriding Truman's veto of it to enact laws to cripple unions (which made important union activities illegal, like solidarity strikes, jurisdictional strikes, and mass picketing) and basically completely fucked up unions, before Reagan went ahead and fucked them up even more than previously thought possible again

McCarthyism

Citizens United v. FEC

sparkle , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

It's the most expensive if you don't already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it's going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn't have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear's cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.

Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.

sparkle , 2 days ago

pretty sure i remember just pressing ctrl-c/ctrl-v on the android studio emulator

sparkle , 3 days ago

That's painful to look at, I can't agree that it's easily readable

sparkle , 3 days ago

I feel as though the "human trafficking" part is more important than the bourgeois dog, why isn't that in the headline? Or specifying the work hours or exact pay (under $8/hour)?

sparkle , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Chomsky's work undeniably transformed (cognitive) linguistics, but a large portion of Chomskyan linguistics is heavily debated/controversial.

His universal grammar, although debated, at least contributed a lot to Sapir-Whorf linguistics generally being recognized as wrong, which is nice. Unfortunately, a lot of laymen and even a tiny minority of linguists still believe linguistic determinism because it's more interesting than reality. But that goes with all fringe, usually nationalism-driven, beliefs; like "Hungarian isn't Finno-Urgic, it's Turkic/isolate!" or "Tamil is oldest language and all other languages came from it!" or other crazy shit. Or Altaic, but that one isn't crazy depending on which variation of it you pick, even if it's likely wrong or unprovable.

sparkle , 4 days ago

You know, I think there's a word for both this and the image in the post, and I'm pretty sure it starts with a "p" and ends with "archy". Not "plutarchy" or "polyarchy" though

sparkle , 4 days ago

Do people in cities have planes circling them 24/7 or something? I see like a few planes every month maybe and I live not far from a city with an international airport.

sparkle , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Vintage clarinets can be very beautiful, but modern more standardized clarinets are also often beautiful (I'm quite partial to a lot of the Backun designs, but I have an old Selmer I really like too)

I can't think of any instruments that aren't made as "beautiful" as before. The only differences are that modern ones are just made... better, like way better. A $200-400 guitar now surpasses the quality of a guitar costing thousands of dollars from a few decades ago, and there's way more diversity in the designs.

That being said, I don't see what the point of musical instruments that aren't "utilitarian" would be. It's not a sculpture, it exists to make sound, there's no reason for an instrument that sacrifices sound or design quality to have fancy aesthetics, unless it's for a movie/play or something and the sound doesn't actually matter.

sparkle , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Off the top of my head, a lot. @FlyingSquid, @The_Picard_Maneuver, @AngryCommieKender, @captainlezbian, @DragonTypeWyvern, @Cryophilia, @masquenox, @jimmydoreisalefty, @SatansMaggotyCumFart, @BonesOfTheMoon, @1984, @Cryophilia, @Nurse_Robot. Some of them just have very memorable or kick-ass names (Nurse Robot? Why didn't I think of that???), and some of them are unavoidable on the site.

I also usually remember the active conservative and "centrist" specimens on this site, like intensely_human, IsThisAnAI, TubularTittyFrog, SpaceCowboy, Melvin_Ferd. I tend to strongly disagree with them a lot.

sparkle , 3 days ago

Have we ever seen a third party candidate this close to the election getting almost 20 percent in multiple states like RFK is?

Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 got 27.4%, George Wallace (the segregationist) in 1968 got 13.5%

sparkle , 4 days ago

I get your point, I agree that the US has ample healthcare budget already; the US spends government significantly more budget money (proportionally) on social programs than the EU and most countries with universal and/or free healthcare, but has significantly worse outcomes because capitalism moment. I also agree that the US should value its ability to fight wars. We don't need to lower our military budget in order to get better healthcare, we need to get rid of liberal capitalism and replace it with heavy regulation or (preferrably but unrealistically) socialism...

That being said, when our military supplies are being used to bomb Palestinian kids, it's harder to feel justified in giving the military money that could go towards our extremely broken social welfare, which is where others are coming from

sparkle , 4 days ago

We probably would have an extremely robust universal and free healthcare plan by now if it weren't for certain crucial legislatures being filled with conservatives; Truman tried pretty hard to give America universal healthcare, plus civil rights and the best social welfare in the first world in general, but he was stopped in his tracks by a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans. Obama also likely would have gotten us universal healthcare if a portion of the Democrats under him were less conservative – he went for the ACA because he knew that would pass, even if it was sub-par.

It's a shame how Truman couldn't achieve his goals in office, otherwise I feel we would probably be far better off, and leading the first world in social welfare. Truman was dead-set on bolstering New Deal policies including extremely progressive taxation and better social programs – the same policies which were the foundation of America's greatest economic success, which is a big part of why recession hit after his conservative Republican second legislator came in and started opposing him. We likely wouldn't even have had Reagan if it went differently – his election was mostly a reaction to the perceived failures of Carter (which were in reality mostly a result of the policies of Nixon and Ford, combined with the 1970s energy crisis) and progressive Democrats as a whole at the time. We might have not even had Nixon, since Truman's progressive policies being implemented and succeeding likely would drag the Democrat party, and Americans in general, more leftwards; which is important considering he was elected due to McGovern being considered "too liberal".

sparkle , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

The anime fandom is extraordinarily sexual. It makes sense when you see that in general, anime is one of the most casually extremely objectifying/sexualizing/tokenizing things you can find... specifically towards women and queer people. Even yuri (lesbian) animes tend to be shounen (aimed at young men) and often are very fetishistic, and anything that resembles queerness is usually used in shounen animes specifically as fan service to their male audience.

There are MANY animes that I guarantee you only exist for the purpose of porn (more specifically, designed to get popular from people making & spreading porn of them). Rampant and unavoidable horny fan service is a plague

sparkle , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

A clean room re-write of the books probably wouldn't cost too much if the company that owns the copyrights to these textbooks don't want to sell the rights for a reasonable price.

That's a long way to say that you're completely maliciously ignorant on endangered languages & language preservation, fascist bootlicker. Move to some other site to spread your corporatist-compliant "enlightened centrist" propoganda, it's disgusting to see your comments littered everywhere like trash on a beach. Or at the very least, don't shill on the behalf of greedy fucks who are abusing a group's vulnerability and the law to exploit a nearly-dead culture for money. It's a language with like 2000 fluent speakers, mostly old people who will be dust not long from now. You are, quite plainly, deflecting responsibility for them taking the work of a vulnerable group and claiming ownership of it to make money, against the knowledge and wishes of the group whose labor they practically stole.

And now you're making a point of gaslighting the victims and the people who are rightfully against the exploitation, by comparing the work of the victims to basic facts of the universe that are observed in nature, while also using it as an attempt to defend your favorite shitty economic system/ideology. Like seriously, do you think languages are just something that exist in the wild outside of the confines of living beings? Do you think these people just observed some feral Lakota words and grammar the same way that Newton observed the laws of the universe? No, they obtained everything almost exclusively via the work of the speakers of the damn language, and despite being a "nonprofit" used it to profit a ton while depriving the native speakers of the records of their own language and oral history.

I am a linguist, and I can say with confidence that a strong majority of linguistics researchers and language preservationists find this, and practices like this, despicable – linguistics is a field where the overwhelming attitude is that knowledge needs to be open (even when facing the challenges of science journals being exploitative as fuck and not open at all, researches still put considerable effort into getting around that), especially in the context of an endangered or dying language/culture. You don't just exploit a population for profit and refuse to leave, and still talk about how you're doing a good thing. What these people do – and continue to do – is a disgrace.

Legally, using someone else's non-recorded spoken language to make a profit without their consent is a gray area assuming you can prove that they got it from you (obviously these people can), but considering written language and recorded spoken language are both protected by the same copyright laws as any other tangible medium (and indeed, it would be a very clear-cut case if what these people provided to the consortium was plainly recorded), it's obvious that what the LLC did was wrong and it's very reasonable to say that they infringed on the Lakota peoples' IP, considering that this was a collaborative work where the actual content came nearly entirely directly from the tribespeople themselves. This is fundamental ethical linguistics 101, even dictionaries of more widely spoken languages (like English) involve a bunch of explicit consent, consent forms, contracts, etc. from the speakers & contributors they use the labor of (or from the whole community that they use the labor of when it's an endangered language), for both legal and ethical reasons.

I hate to come off as this aggressive, but this capitalist apologia & acting like this is acceptable behaviour in modern society is really crossing a line for me, considering how close the topic of dialectology and language preservation is to me – it's the whole reason I began to do linguistics.

sparkle , 5 days ago

Can confirm, trans-exclusionary gay/bi people are fucking everywhere in (rural) Georgia in the US. I think the ones who are out who are "anti-trans" outnumber the normal ones.

sparkle , 5 days ago

In Italy, you have to travel to whatever city you have residence in to vote. A lot of (mostly progressive) people have to fly across the country to cast their vote, apparently it sucks for them

sparkle , 7 days ago

Average work experience for a woman

sparkle , 7 days ago

Speaking about culture, women who are confident in their engagement/initiative and take charge, or simply don't let themselves get talked over, are generally seen as "bitchy" or something similar (when a man doing the same thing is seen as normal or a good trait). Women being not allowed to "speak out of place" has morphed into it being seen as bad when they're dominant or demand anything, even respect; they're expected to fit a certain archetype of being submissive or extraordinarily "pleasing" to the others (especially men) they work with. Women are talked over all the time in meetings, but it'd be a problem if they expressed issue with that or if they talked over others.

Even superiors who are women will often refuse to give other equally-performing (or even better-performing) women employees raises because of the non-explicit but powerful social pressure of male peers, or how it would reflect on them to their male peers. Society encourages "competition".

My elaboration of your comment would be that "two people who are otherwise the same that have different external traits may be seen as having unequally agreeability, and therefore, have unequal mobility in a given hierarchy", which conveniently applies to more than just gender and sex but anything else that affects appearance (body shape & color, voice, even clothing/cultural presentation to an extent), although I'd say in the workplace sex is more important than other "innate" characteristics (ethnicity/name discrimination might be up there though); but that doesn't roll off the tongue...

sparkle , 8 days ago

Hellfire trigger manipulator demonstration

On an unrelated note, here are clips of people bump firing pistols and M1 Garands

M1 Garand #1

M1 Garand #2

M1 Garand #3

M1 Garand #4

Mini14

Pistol #1

Pistol #2

Pistol #3

Pistol #4

Pistol #5

Pistol #6

sparkle , 7 days ago

Isn't the context about the overthrow of the Russian Empire by communist revolutionaries? Not modern first-worlders? Am I missing something here? Why would "foreign imperialists" be relevant to modern first-worlders?

That being said, to actually answer your line of questioning, it is the correct solution to change society while ALSO overthrowing and locking up the oppressors. That may involve the elite dying, but those deaths are necessary. Peaceful reformism and strict nonviolence policies never works – unless you consider extremely high amounts of unnecessary suffering for innocents to achieve comparatively minor goals as "success" (cough cough Nelson Mandela). Even Gandhi and MLK (who took most of his influence from Gandhi), although nonviolence advocates, were well aware that violence is often necessary to achieve a better future, and much of the work they did was to the benefit of violent/militant revolutionaries (although of course they're portrayed a lot more neutered/"deradicalized", as well as the roles of complete compliance to nonviolence being completely overstated while violent methods are hidden away as if they didn't exist, not even to be mentioned).

After capture though, death pentalty is not the way to go, but life imprisonment is fine and they may have a chance to be released later, mostly depending on their status/loyalty. I'm sure a lot of "revolutionaries" would disagree with me though, but I'm not an "eye for an eye" believer... I suppose if you're in a situation where the former imperialist rulers would likely have power to directly cause damage while detained or incarcerated, or they're likely to escape or be "rescued", then it would be justified to chop off their heads or put a bullet in their cranium.

The core issue is that these people (the oppressors/ruling class) can not be rehabilitated, and are likely to stir up considerable trouble and disrupt when they have the opportunity, either in a bid to regain their power, or out of a large feeling of loss that makes them go nuts. You can't always reasonably ensure that they won't try to fuck shit up in the future.

That's just my view, but of course there are people other than me who are just bloodthirsty for vengeance (my opinion is that they're not thinking all too rationally and it's the same mindset as parents that hit/yell at their kids, they're convincing themselves it's for the greater good but in reality it's just attempting to satisfy their feelings of anger). Either way, I see their lives as considerably less valuable than the lives of the people they oppressed, not because they have an inherently evil soul or something, but because they are already too far gone and only can bring chaos to the world.

sparkle , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

I agree with what you're getting at, but "conservative" is relative and doesn't actually indicate specific beliefs, so "conservatives should never have any power" can be easily twisted once the conservatives we'd currently think of are gone.

sparkle , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

I don't think there's an all-encompassing term for people who have "destructive"/harmful beliefs considered conservative. Most I can think of is "bigoted capitalists", but even "bigoted" could be interpreted way differently. Plus, that excludes bigoted non-capitalists so it has a more narrow usage...

What I go with, though, is "fascists" and "collaborators". Plain and simple, straight to the point, but most importantly no chance of confusion – that's how I see our conservatives, their supporters, and their enablers. Ultra-socially-regressives (usually religious) who want a system that enforces/maintains a social hierarchy they deem "natural" (or having a religious justification for the hierarchy). Maybe "wannabe fascists" or "social fascists" would be more accurate, since generally people think of a dictatorship when they think of "fascism".

"Oppressors" may also work, and it also can pair with "collaborators". It's more general, but I think here the flexibility may come be an advantage, and it isn't tied to a specific set of political beliefs, it vaguely just means "those who use unjust force/threats of force to control others". Of course, contemporary conservatives follow this definition.

sparkle , 8 days ago

Why limit it to two? I say allow any amount of people in a civil union, or allow one person to have a civil union with multiple people separately. It's mostly for visits in the hospital, parental rights, stuff like that.

Of course, that makes residence/citizenship based on relationships complicated, but that's mostly an issue caused by closed national borders being a fucked up concept in the first place.

sparkle , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

People with ADHD, Dyspraxia (a motor disability), and some type of insomnia disorder have significantly higher rates of car accidents – around 4x more likely for ADHD and 3x more likely for insomnia disorders (driving while sleepy is around as dangerous as driving while drunk). At minimum 25% of all car crashes involve people with ADHD or insomnia disorders (which is why your car insurance rates might skyrocket in some states if you get diagnosed)... I have all of those. Yet, somehow, they still allowed me to get my driver's license, and I got it with single-digit hours of driving experience at the time... very American to give licenses that allow you to drive 13-ton vehicles to people who shouldn't even qualify to drive on public roads.

I still have no reason to waste tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years on a car though.

sparkle , 10 days ago

The way we do education is based on fundamentally flawed concepts, from the grading systems we use to the clear design towards specifically (neuro)typical and more privileged children. This is just true everywhere. Childhood psychology/developmental psychology and education are pretty complicated and poorly understood by most of the public, even educators. And obviously significant social biases also play a part in the education system.

Rich kids without ADHD generally do far better in school and get into far better colleges or professions initially than poor kids or kids with ADHD... there are exceptions, but for the most part, almost all of the kids that fail school either have some form of disability (often times an undiagnosed disorder) or are underprivileged in some way (like being poor). Generally those kids would excel in a better environment, hell usually the "gifted" classes are primarily neurodivergent kids in elementary/middle school (or equivalents).

sparkle , 10 days ago

Melatonin gummies? Those count as "drugs"? I thought they were considered supplements like vitamins and stuff.

sparkle , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

You seem to be (purposefully) construing "the US is a racist country" as "the US is the most racist country". Racism does exist in other countries, and gets very bad in other countries as well, but the US is still fundamentally a racist country that pours a lot of resources into working against ethnic and racial minorities.

"White people would never let a black felon be president" is the point here because it constrasts with the current situation, which is "white people are letting a white felon be president" (at least it's a very real possibility). It's pointing out the discriminatory behaviours/thoughts persistent in American society, a felon being black is given significantly less leniency than a felon being white, and in general a black person is treated far worse and given far more obstacles than a white person for the same reasons. Especially by the majority racial demographic (white people). Any black candidate in Trump's position would be completely ruined and practically out of the race already, not celebrated by half the country.

sparkle , 13 days ago

Would property taxes actually do much? They're so little even in high property-tax states that I think you'd need to do a lot more than that to FORCE rich people to utilize their other properties. High taxes would potentially push more costs on renters. Maybe we should just outlaw having more than 1 or 2 homes... including for real estate companies and banks :)

sparkle , 13 days ago

Codetermination: German law specifically mandates democratic worker participation in the oversight of workplaces with 2000 or more employees. Similar laws exist in Denmark for businesses with more than 20 workers and France for businesses with more than 5000 workers.

Damn that wasn't hard to find

sparkle , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

I can't imagine most Nvidia employees don't make enough to become millionaires within like 5-10 years if they aren't already. Their entry-level software engineering positions have a base pay of $147K and total compensation of $180K. The lowest paying level of senior engineers gets more like $300K... Even the ones who leave before then are highly likely to get a job with comparable pay or benefits considering they have Nvidia on their resumé.

Now, tens-of-millions-aires, I don't think most employees get there.

sparkle , 13 days ago

What in the crispy fried finger-licking fuck are you on about?

sparkle , 13 days ago

LOL'd at the edits of someone linking a neonazi and using that to say "Fascism is actually Marxism!". It was technically in the right section I guess?

sparkle , 13 days ago

The real answer is because he had Zionism drilled into his head when he was a child and was brainwashed into thinking that a Jewish state in Palestine is righteous and that Israel is only able to be the victim (him being born in the middle of WW2 and all), and it's completely impossible for him to stop supporting Israel's genocide of Palestinians or to do anything else that goes against that view, it conflicts with what he thinks about Israel.

Biden has ALWAYS been extremely problematic with Israel/Palestine, he's had this exact same stance for decades and has supported some of the worst crimes the US has ever committed against Palestinians.

sparkle , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

A friend of mine is a poor, jobless, dark-skinned Slavic person in Italy with the whole alphabet of disorders that lives with their family in the middle of nowhere and mostly does language stuff and poetry and all that. What they do is Tinder and Grindr... it works pretty great for them apparently and they've gotten a lot of great friends and people who wanted to date on there, although they're still guaging what they want and who can fulfil it.

Personally I prefer meeting people in third places in densely populated areas, but that's not an option for everyone. Especially if you can travel (like by public transport) to urban areas, there's always options if you look in the right places and try to seem interesting (which basically just means letting go of the concept of "cringe").

sparkle , 13 days ago

The current US Libertarian Party presidential candidate openly running on abolishing the federal education system and completely privatizing/defunding government healthcare...

sparkle , 13 days ago

Anyone who thinks this would happen under Trump is really reaching. What, are the DOJ, DHS, and FBI going to let themselves get dismantled even if Trump and congress hypothetically tried to enact this plan? He's getting his head blown off before that happens.

I think there are far more realistic ways that Trump will achieve fascism.

sparkle , 15 days ago

+1 to this, many Lemmy instance admins and/or community mods will just hand out bans for anything that disagrees with their politics and just slap a completely irrelevant "rule 1/2/4/whatever violation" – e.g. say something negative about Uyghur genocide or China in lemmy.ml, good chance you'll get banned for being "uncivil" possibly along with a note about western imperialism or capitalists' campaign against China or something. Depending on the day, the mod logs range from somewhat reasonable to batshit insane when it comes to admin actions.

I'm a filthy commie bastard, I say communists should be in control of these communities. Just maybe not Marxist-Leninists...

sparkle , 15 days ago

Github Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are different things. Dumb, I know.

sparkle , 17 days ago

me. i'm convinced. i was gonna vote for trump first, but this has persuaded me to vote for biden

s

sparkle , 18 days ago

This is wrong. Decimate can mean the killing or destruction of any large portion of something. E.g. one definition you might see is "To devastate: to reduce or destroy significantly but not completely."

sparkle , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

I completely concur, I had personal experience with this. In my case, rural Georgia.

Libertarians are ultra-edgy conservatives who realized that typical conservative talking points are far too easy to refute and find contradictions in, and that being a conservative makes you look bad. They're people who are close to understanding the ways which authorities/the establishment work against the people, but are too brainwashed with conservative/anti-worker/bigoted propaganda to be able to adopt a more mature worldview – as long as they participate in/agree with culture war garbage like transphobia and anti-feminism/anti-SJW propoganda, they'll never be able to "agree" with any sort of leftist ideology. Plus they've never actually had taxable income so they really buy into all the false information & propoganda about taxes.

The conservative -> conservative libertarian -> ancap -> social/environmental libertarian -> socialist pipeline is VERY real, and it's usually 1:1 with middle school -> early high school -> high school -> new-fledged adult -> experienced adult, for suburban white kids growing up in a conservative area. The less you're shielded from reality, the more you start to agree with leftist ideas (even hardcore brainwashed conservatives completely agree with leftism in practice as long as they don't know it's leftism).

sparkle , 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

I don't think any of the tankies I've seen on this site have been Zionists – they usually use Israel as an example of Western imperialism actually. I'd find it kind of weird for them to be Zionists, since that part of the Middle East has a LOT of socialism – the PLO is made up of mostly socialist & social-democratic entities (led by the left-leaning Fatah party), and is the "legitimate" Palestinian West Bank government, although they're the opposition coalition in the territory's legislature, which is dominated by Hamas since the country's last election in 2006 (the next election was supposed to happen in 2021, but it was and still is postponed by Hamas due to Israel continuously blocking Jerusalem's Arab residents from voting; the recent genocide has seen a sharp drop in Fatah's popularity since they primarily advocated for peaceful means of resolving the conflict).

Tankies ARE definitely genocide deniers in another sense though (Uyghurs) so it's not much better. I remember a lemmy.ml comment I posted getting me banned from the site, since it was maps of countries' foreign investment amounts from China, countries' economic reliances on China, and countries that voted against recognizing the Uyghur genocide (a China-enjoying commenter was arguing that predominantly muslim countries' governments didn't vote for condemning the Uyghur genocide in the UN, therefore it's unreasonable to say that there is one; of course, the governments in question were almost all relatively poor/impoverished/struggling/corrupt countries heavily funded by China that also relied a lot upon trade with China, which would suffer greatly from making diplomatic moves against the CCP – it also aligns relatively well with countries that don't have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, of course).

sparkle , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

21% of US adults are illiterate in English, mostly coming from rural areas and predominantly Spanish-speaking areas (Spanish speakers account for only around 1/3 of those illiterate in English on average). My state (Georgia) has an adult English illiteracy rate of 23.6% :)

And yes, I have known PLENTY of people who write like this (or worse than this), I have too much first-hand experience to immediately doubt this

On the other hand, it shows how a primary language having very inconsistent&non-phonetic spelling completely fucks up the literacy average... in a language like Spanish, Polish, or Finnish, being poorly literate makes very little sense, at least in the sense of "correctly associating written words with spoken words"; for the most part it's a binary can or can't, if you know the basics then you can write everything you say and say everything you read with few exceptions (and even with these exceptions, it ends up being close enough to easily recognize still). You know your writing system is fucked up when spelling contests exist for it.

sparkle , 20 days ago

... is this a copypasta?