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The Last Man on Earth To Speak His Language (axios.com)
From a report: An elderly man in Peru named Amadeo Garcia Garcia is the last person on earth to speak his native language, Taushiro, the NY Times' Nicholas Casey reports in a remarkable long-read. A combination of disease and exploitation have led the Taushiro, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, to the verge of extinction. In the last century, at least 37 languages have disappeared in Peru alone, lost in the steady clash and churn of national expansion, migration, urbanization and the pursuit of natural resources.
... what did you say?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If a spoken language "goes extinct", if there was no written language that accompanied it, the main "problem" would be, "how would I be fluent enough to communicate with these people when I use my time machine to visit them when they spoke language X?"
The written language, and the history written in it, that is a bit more of a problem for future of that culture. Assuming there are written histories, working with this "last native speaker" to build a base for translation would be a good idea.
If he's the only one who speaks his native language, how can anyone know that he actually speaks it? He could just be babbling in complete gibberish, and everyone would be standing there going ... aww, how sad ... nobody else speaks his language any more ...
You can call it a tax cut till your blue in the face, it raises MY taxes, along with many others, so its a tax HIKE.
Note: I make roughly the median national salary and I don't live on a coast.
Then there will be nothing to stop Menendez style Democrat corruption from sweeping the country and it joins its neighbors as a corrupt and impoverished shithole.
Diversity is strength. Wildly different people all together are the best. When everyone speaks the same language and is on the same page, that is a terrible loss of culture. It is incumbent upon us all to keep these languages alive and breathing, and keep these cultures from being annihilated by the Western behemoth.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No, we'll mutate into grumpy little elves who eat your pets at 3am.
Table-ized A.I.
https://livinglanguages.wordpr...
This estimation can be wrong in many ways, but the point remains: languages do die all the time.
im not rich by any means. and im going to save about 2 grand a year under the new plan. over 80% of americans are going to save money. the only ones who are not are those rich folks in states that have high property taxes. and thats hardly the fault of the feds, take it up with your state. if your house costs more than 750K or your property taxes are over 10K.... you ARE rich, and now you will be paying your fair share. isnt that what the left wanted???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
if you are getting a tax increase due to property taxes, you cant blame the fed on that you blame your state for having horribly high taxes.
as for the increases after the cuts expire... well, get congress to make the cuts permanent. the only reason they arent is because the democrats refused to allow it to happen. if 8 democrats voted yes, it could have been made permanent but they didn't. so blame them for that
stop trying to blame the republicans who actually got something accomplished here when its the democrats who put in the road blocks (And its the democrat states that have the high property taxes, so complain to your local politicians to lower property tax rates)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
But how much diversity? I can accept that if everyone spoke one language that we might not advance as a species as quickly. But there's a difference between losing one of the 7,000 remaining spoken languages and everyone speaking one language. What if we were able to reduce the number of spoken languages to the current predominate 20. Would that provide sufficient diversity?
Yeah, everybody knows why they speak Spanish in most of South America. It's because the Spanish brutalized most of the continent for the better part of three centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.mesacc.edu/~thoqh49...
You are welcome on my lawn.
European languages and dialects die all the same.
A small language next to me (Livonian) went extinct in 2013.
They should teach him to program in BLISS or COBOL, just to add some irony.
Do you have ESP?
The blatant trolls don't work as well here.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The janitors who run this site can't be bothered to fix some unicode text bug. It is literally the only website on the internet where I've seen this happen. Probably a five minute fix.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
OH, now you want to balance the budget after 8 years if 1T deficit?
8 years? Try 30+ years. We've been running huge and increasing deficits since the Reagan administration. And no the annual increase for the last 8 years was about $500-600 billion - roughly the amount we spend on defense annually. They've recently become bigger because the Bush administration decided to start two wars in the Middle East and didn't raise taxes to pay for them. Then there was all the stimulus to keep the economy running after the crash in 2008 with again, no taxes to compensate because republicans break out in hives if you mention the words "raise taxes" even when it is the responsible thing to do. So we continue to borrow to keep everything running with no end in sight. Right now the federal debt stands at around $18.9 trillion which means every man, woman and child in the US owes approximately $63,000. Lowering taxes will not lessen this problem.
Except that for an average of $55k a year income which is the country single average you get a savings of $200 annually stretched out over 52 paycheckes means your paycheck goes up a whopping $3.85
You can't buy a Whopper for that much.
Those who beneifit are the wealthy who save Tens of thousands of dollars.
Look up and do the math. It isn't hard and the actual numbers will scare you.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
you keep saying this but you are just fear mongering.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
there are no scheduled increases, this is a lye. the tax cuts will expire (thanks to the democrats all voting no) but there are not any tax increases over the next few years that is pure FUD
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
And with his dying breath, he whispered one word..."covfefe".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Everyone speaking the same language AND being on the same page is a HUUUGE assumption.
The Declaration of Independence alone proves your assumption wrong.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I can accept that if everyone spoke one language that we might not advance as a species as quickly.
Why not?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Another six thousand or so and we can dump unicode.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
By all means, feel free to go over there and learn one or more of these languages. I'm not clear how else you expect to realize your imperialist vision of 'keeping these languages alive', unless you mean forcing someone else to learn them.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The Slashdot team is disincentivized to fix character encoding issues because last time they improved character encoding support, the result was moderation score spoofing through bidirectional overrides. If you want Unicode, you could always give SoylentNews a try.
You do understand that what happened was a tax CUT, correct?
If you think this was a tax cut, then I guess if I put $10k on my credit cards next year you would consider that a $10k raise. At best you could call this a stimulus plan. It certainly isn't a tax cut because many people will be paying more. But the vast majority of people will see their taxes reduced slightly for the next decade, and then the vast majority will see their taxes increased slightly after that. That said, it doesn't take a hard look to see the distribution of this stimulus is heavily skewed towards the wealthy who see a greater net benefit and percent reduction in this plan.
Considering giving money to the wealthy has a poor fiscal multiplier effect, as compared to giving money to the poor and middle class, it is clear the goal of this bill was not to stimulate the economy. The average $50k-75k income household will see a 1.8% reduction in taxes, while a $1M+ household will see a 3.3% reduction. In real dollars that is a difference between $870 in savings and $69,660. Considering stimulus money given to the middle class has a much greater fiscal multiplier than giving money to the wealthy, it is as I said clear that economic stimulus was not the intent of the bill.
This bill was nothing more than a tax cut to wealthy donors paid for in small part by upper middle class blue state voters and in larger part financed by federal debt. Around $50-$100 per month was given to working and middle class families so Republicans could misleadingly claim that everyone benefits from the plan by ignoring it is only a minor gain in the short term. Kind of like paying for a more lavish lifestyle with credit card debt. The real long term gains go to the wealthy.
Most people are never going to look at the bill in enough detail to know specifically how this bill screws them in the long term. For the average person as long as they understand the bill is a massive tax cut for the wealthy paid for by increasing wealth inequality, they are at least well informed enough to vote in their own interest.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Is culture defined by language, is language defined by culture or both?
The Sapir-Worf hypothesis is that English and Klingon are not "sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality."
That is the "best of all possible worlds" fallacy. In other words, for someone living in a cage or a basement, learning to swim or ride a bicycle is not "important" enough.
Tribalism has nothing to do with language or culture.
Rwanda is probably the only country in Africa where everybody speaks the same language and dialect, and has the same culture. That didn't prevent the most horrible genocide from happening just there.
The same with Bosnia in Europe.
The fact that Unionists and Republicans in Ulster speak the same language didn't bring them together; the level of distrust and segregation is ridiculous and mind-boggling, even for a third-worlder like me.
Most Catalans, Ukrainians, Irish, etc aren't really speaking their languages in everyday life anymore (despite being forced to learn them in school); and that rather exarcerbated nationalism instead of preventing it.
Most French of "foreign descent" that are populating the depressed "banlieues" are not able to speak any other language than French (and neither were their parents). But that doesn't mean they're accepted as full-fledged citizens; they're still 'Arabs' for all intents and purposes.
So people are rushing to pre-pay 2018 taxes for fun?
Technically even people who see their taxes go down in 2018 can get a big tax break by paying their property taxes early this year. The higher standard deduction coupled with higher child tax credit will cause many people who currently itemize to save money by taking the standard deduction next year. But since they won't deduct any property taxes (not even the $10k maximum amount), then deducting them on their 2017 taxes would save them big.
I for instance will have my base taxes go up about $800 next year, but will now get $4000 in child tax credits because of the increase to both the amount and the maximum income to qualify (my MAGI is above $110k). So my taxes are going down by about $3200 next year. But if I pay my 2017 property taxes early, that is potentially $12k in extra deductions reducing my taxes by an additional $3360. So in this case I would benefit in both 2017 and 2018.
In truth I am already hit with alternative minimum taxes, so I cannot deduct extra property taxes in 2017 anyway. But there are plenty of people who don't have as many deductions and personal exemptions as I do who can save thousands this year by paying hteir 2017 property taxes early.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
as for the increases after the cuts expire... well, get congress to make the cuts permanent. the only reason they arent is because the democrats refused to allow it to happen. if 8 democrats voted yes, it could have been made permanent but they didn't. so blame them for that
No, the tax cuts are temporary because the Republicans wanted to pass the bill with no Democrat involvement. You cannot have a bill which is 100% partisan and then expect Democrats to vote for it just to make a few peanuts for the middle class permanent. The Republicans had the ability to make middle class tax cuts permanent and wealthy tax cuts temporary and they chose to do the opposite. Republicans are 100% responsible for every line of this tax bill.
Ultimately this approach of passing sweeping legislation in a partisan manner most likely benefits Democrats in the long run. It is politically harder to take benefits away than it is to give them, which is why the Republicans couldn't dismantle Obamacare. In three years the Democrats are likely to take back control of government, and with reconciliation they could take those $1.5 billion in tax cuts and give them all to the middle class without raising the deficit one penny. Then the next time Republicans gain power they will have an even harder time giving the wealthy tax breaks without even more massive deficits, or significantly raising taxes on the middle class.
If the Republicans had been able to hold strong and only give tax cuts which are revenue neutral, or only gave tax cuts to the working/middle class, they could have held onto their talking points of being against federal deficits and for the little guy. That ship has now sailed for at least a decade until this bill expires.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Some 75%% of all extant languages today, some 4000 of them are in the high lands of Papua New Guinea. Every tribe fights with every neighbor constantly, and they tell each other by language. Every grammar every syntax every linguistic device used anywhere in the world is found there. And some found there nowhere else. If, and when, Papua New Guinea becomes peaceful, we will lose anout 4000 languages.
In my home state the love for our mother tongue runs deep. We sing anthems for Mother Tamil. Name children Tamil-princess, Tamil-gem, Tamil-music. Only time Tamil Muslims disagree with Islamic orthodoxy is when Arabic is placed above Tamil. Only time Tamil brahmins disagree is when Sanskrit is placed above Tamil. National parties pledged to make Hindi the national language of India do not even garner 10% of the votes in my (former) home state.
Language is fundamentally divisive. Winners, military or economic or cultural will drive to extinction loser's languages. We started with one language 75000 years ago. We seem to be heading towards 100 languages in about 100 years.
(Pardon typos, typing on a phone.)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
when the cuts expire...congress can (and should) make them permanent. stop fear mongering
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
i might take you guys more seriously if you were not all anon cowards. no sources, and all FUD
stop fear mongering
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
As an interested Brit, who has never spent any time in the USA, how do you categorise your status as lower-middle or upper-middle class?
I guess in the context of this conversation we are talking income levels (which in itself is different from how us class-loving Brits do it), but what sort of income levels are the categories based on, in your opinion? (I guess it might differ from state to state?)
My opinion, colored by the fact that I live in a place with a very low cost of living compared to most of the U.S. (Cleveland, Ohio area):
Lower-class means you really have nowhere near enough resources to guarantee the survival of yourself and your children. Typically you live either in a very violent inner-city area with barely half of the average life expectancy because of crime and drug abuse, or in a very rural area without access to jobs or opportunities of any kind. It is not considered a pejorative. I spent about half my life in this class.
Middle-class means you have the basic essentials of life, you probably have a decent job, and could probably survive a month or so of unemployment. You probably have both some savings, though not necessarily enough, and also long-term debt. You may vacation from time to time. You can afford some luxuries although they must be carefully planned and budgeted. It is possible for a middle-class person to drown under the weight of mortgage, student-loan or medical debt. "Lower-middle-class" are those who are more likely than not to do so at some point in their adult lives; "upper-middle-class" people fairly unlikely to do so, although many people move fluidly among these classes and subclasses. Traditionally this was the largest class in the U.S., and arguably still is, although economic changes have thinned it out considerably. I consider myself lower-middle-class at present; I have a better than average income, but spend way too much and save way too little, because of the demands of my family. It is my ambition to pay off debts and then to save more, which would make me arguably upper-middle-class, but I've never been quite there yet and am not sure I ever will.
Upper-class means you will not likely ever need to worry about the mere essentials of life, and you don't. You can probably afford anything you are ever likely to need or want, although probably not everything. You probably live in much more expensive and safe neighborhoods than most others, and are much more likely to live and work in or near NYC, LA, Chicago, or other very large cities. You may have personal assistants such as maids or drivers, although even among the wealthiest Americans this is much less common than in other parts of the world. You can and most likely do travel anyplace in the world anytime you wish, and probably need to because of your well-paying but probably very demanding job. You likely inherited at least some portion of your wealth, but enough social and economic mobility still exists in the U.S. as to have produced many self-made millionaires. I have known and worked with many people in this category, but have never been close to it myself.
These are not rigid, unchangeable categories, but fairly fluid ones. Very wealthy people become very poor all the time, although they rarely stay that way unless it was due to very bad life choices such as becoming addicted to opiates, a scourge that affects every class, though not necessarily equally. Poor people also become wealthier all the time, and typically do not slide back into extreme poverty except for those same reasons (poor life choices, often, as in my case, taking on excessive debt). But many people, myself included, do not aggressively pursue a state of great wealth. I would be content if my debts were paid off and we had both modest savings and the ability to give more to help the less fortunate.
On the other hand, there are mechanisms which, intentionally or otherwise, work to lessen class mobility. One is that government schools, which most people use, are funded largely through taxes, and vary dramatically in quality, with the crappier ones typically found in poorer places and the better ones in wealthier areas. Another is that American neighborhoods, while no longer rigidly segregated by race, *are* rigidly segregated by income. Poor people tend to know mainly poor people; wealthy people mainly wealthy ones. Cultural, moral, and ethical values tend to vary based on class. Family
Nonaggression works!
The specific provision in question is the elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. People are paying their 2018 property tax now so they can deduct it, which they won't be able to do on next year's return. Given that change in the tax code, paying the bill now rather than next month is sensible.
For many people who are affected by that change and by the reduction of the deduction for mortgage interest, Trump's tax plan is a tax increase, not a cut. And that's before the tax cuts for the middle class expire in a few years, unlike the tax cuts for the rich that are permanent. (Well, as permanent as anything in US law ever is, as the law can get changed again.)
Language does affect mindset. I can see how certain advancements, like certain mathematical principles or technological advancements, would take longer (if at all?) with a population all having the same language. The languages you speak do shade how you look at the world. I am in no position to claim that given enough time, all known advancements would happen under any language - nor am I claiming that one language will have a monopoly on all advancements - but it certainly seems like some languages do lead towards outside of the box thinking in different ways than others.
We're assuming it's languages affecting mindset. I'm not saying it isn't, but my truly non-professional gut feeling says language is affected by culture and environment, not the other way around.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)