I had never heard of the Babylon Bee and I just took a look at it. Are you saying you think The Onion is the very political one, or did I misread your sentence?
I think the Onion has become very political over the last year or so. When I started following the Babylon Bee, they were already very political to me.
The Onion has always been very political with a liberal slant. I have some of their print collections from the early 2000s and they're similar to today's Onion with maybe a little more edge.
When a company says "cost of living" they mean their own, not their employees. So-called COLA adjustments are for Cost of Hiring, or Cost of Employee Retention.
The distinction is that it is calculated based on minimizing unwanted attrition due to wage competition elsewhere, and has nothing to do with how much rent or milk prices may have increased.
Maybe they did. Do you suppose they got scammed on eBay - which they "perfectly" remember buying it from - or from the Red Cross, which they have an invoice for?
I'm sure it's not the best language learning tool around, but it has taught me enough of three different languages to visit a foreign country, ask for directions, order things, etc, with a number of conversations never falling back into English. And all for the price of free.
It all depends on one's expectations. I have no expectation of speaking a new language correctly or with a decent accent (I'm probably too old). I've being using Duolingo for some time and I complement it with Youtube videos and random texts. My French spelling has improved and I can read Russian news. I'd call it a success. Of course it won't replace a proper course and teacher, but it's not worthless.
Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close to panning out, from what I can tell.
Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.
This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-generated content that helped the platform get to where it is today.
Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise).
Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years).
Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time.
Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue.
At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts!
The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.
Wait, CAPTCHAs don't generate or capture any data. It prevents computer automated systems, which were a huge pain at the time. Google then came around and released reCAPTCHA which was using originally books for Google Translate but later Street view photos for Google Maps. That was when dara collection and learning was introduced.
Yeah, you used to be able to dive into really interesting/useful discussions (pretty much a forum) about nuances of certain phrases/words, usually involving people who have grown up speaking the respective language. It was really helpful to get that extra detail and context on weird little quirks that may not have been obvious by the content built into Duolingo itself.
It was fairly recent, maybe in the last 3-4 months. I know for much of 2023 I would get the mini threads for some (not all) questions, but now I don't get them for any question. I agree it's a shame, because they really were the most educational thing on the app.
In fact, every medical insurance provider I've had for years has tried to push me onto their in-house pharmaceutical delivery service. Traditional pharmacies have been getting squeezed for a long time.
Ah, I see. I always forget that such services exist, probably because they are of no interest to me. And since my local pharmacy is always busy, I'm thinking I'm not alone in this.
They keep opening new branches around here.
They are glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do.
But they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a complicated real estate investment play.
