I used to be a Honda/Toyota fan but now Chinese EVs are looking like the future on all fronts… Quality, safety, features, range, and most importantly price. They completely wallop every other manufacturer.

Well yeah it’s squashing the dynamic range but it’s also more than that since they aren’t doing it evenly across the spectrum. They bias up the high gain frequencies for human hearing, and bias down the frequencies that are low perceived gain for human hearing.

They even figured out a way to get around decibel laws.

Human hearing is most sensitive within a certain range where we disproportionately hear those sounds louder than other frequencies. Advertisers would boost that range up and cut frequencies elsewhere to lower the average energy in the audio wave to be compliant with advertisement decibel ratings. The perceived sound could be multiple times louder than the intended limit.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just being realistic here… Plus is reviving these old languages in the UK going to threaten English? Absolutely not, which is why it’s allowed. If at any point a secondary language threatened the primary trade language of a nation somehow, there would be policy to resist it. Are Londoners going to learn Gaelic? Well that’s how the Irish felt when they were colonized by the British. The Irish certainly aren’t going to speak only Gaelic. They’ll know English as well, which is good enough for the British.

Also an understated part of this whole debate I haven’t focused on too much is how dialects are culture. Each region or town had its own dialect and local customs even if they were ruled by the same king or emperor in premodern times. It’s not a coincidence that European separatist movements can be divided among dialects of a language, like Catalinian separatism from Spain.

That’s also what lead to literal Balkanization as well. Shared languages and dialects deciding cultural borders when a nation fractures.

Even the revival of Gaelic or Welsh doesn’t undo the destruction of industrialization homogenizing a nation. You’ve already permanently lost the regional or local culture of each town and it’ll never come back. There wasn’t a single “Welsh” or “Gaelic” language prior to English replacing it, just like there wasn’t one version of English prior to industrialization. The concept of a universal national language only practically became a thing with the advent of railroads. Otherwise people didn’t move around enough to need a nationwide common tongue. One of the few exceptions to this is ironically China, which had a strong centralized bureaucracy and education system that taught the Imperial language.

It’s just a natural consequence of modernization. It just happens, and now China is making a concerted effort to accelerate it and guide it. They teach simplified Mandarin so everyone reads and speaks the same trade and work language. It’s what every other nation has done, and it’s going to happen the same as how French, English, German .etc all displaced local or regional dialects and cultures into extinction.

I think we both agree China needs to avoid balkanization and excessive pluralism if they want to remain stable long term. I think that’s the Chinese view of their own situation as well.

Even if you teach the local language people leave due to urbanization and don’t teach their kids. Your community grows smaller and smaller and eventually it’s just hundreds of people speaking that language or practicing that culture, or nobody at all because they all grew old and died.

It is going to happen, it’s not theory here. This policy is a lot more fair than residential schools in Canada or forced spelling and accent training from the French Academy to homogenize France. The end result is broadly similar though and so is the intention behind it.

It’s going to eventually be like the UK with hundreds of dead dialects and a dozen dead languages spoken by a tiny minority of people.

Minorities in China are going to have a choice to speak their language at home in much the same way that I have a choice about being employed.

No international observer found evidence of the German Holocaust either until after the war. Just saying…

The reason the UK needs to try to revive those dialects and languages is the key here. Having a common language is a necessary part of consolidating your land as an industrialized nation, so I’m not surprised China is doing it. You’re right about balkanization happening if you don’t force people to use the lingua franca.

They know exactly what they’re doing and the consequences though. I think it’s disingenuous to say they don’t. The Chinese aren’t stupid so they know even if they teach both languages, when all of the official print, your own work, clients, friends, messaging apps, government forms .etc use Mandarin it eventually becomes the language primarily spoken at home which is where you can begin to break the link between one culture and the next.

Once that happens it’s possible to drop the local language requirement and a minority of people are mad about it at that point (generations later.) Same concept as second or third gen immigrants here in Canada who can’t speak their parents or grandparents language at all unless they pay for private schooling in an immersion school. I’m not saying China will drop the local language 20-40 years from now but eventually they can if they want and people aren’t going to be as strongly opposed once they’re integrated after decades of forced schooling in Mandarin.

They’re following a well tested method for homogenizing their nation. Canada tried and failed at it for the same reasons the Chinese are trying to prevent balkanization. In the end it’s going to destroy these cultures and it won’t be an accident…

Yes I know I’ve read your other comments. It’s the same logic though which is undeniable… The Canadians used exactly the same justifications for setting up the residential schools in the first place to “solve the aboriginal problem” as they saw it. An eerie parallel to China’s domestic “every other culture except Han problem” that they’re solving with this.

This method is tried and true across the world and its exactly how you stamp out other languages and dilute or destroy culture whether that’s the goal or not, just as a consequence of teaching the lingua franca.

The French academy is a good example. Thousands of dialects disappeared because of being required to learn “proper French” as the academy saw it. It worked, which is why there’s far less variation in accents and spelling across France than the UK which took a more organic approach, inadvertently preserving some of the local accents even if the English accidentally wiped out existing dialects due to incentives surrounding employment, along with rail, telegraphy, schooling, and urbanization.

Wiping out competing dialects and cultures is a consequence of industrialization and consolidating the land you have.

Edit: more context and parallels between the residential schools and China’s policy.

Same logic as residential schools in Canada to give native Americans an opportunity by teaching them English…

Literally 40k level mission objectives

They both suck but you’re right that Iran is more right about this than the US. It doesn’t make them good though.

You’re allowed to not like both of them

For those who were confused by Kelvin like me, it’s equivalent to 564.67 Rankine

Well that’s exactly my point! You can have a succulent death cap meal and then die by the pelvis of your Amazonian lover!

You know, I might actually try them if I know I’m going to die from something else. They completely destroy your liver and that’s and excruciating death, so you want to make sure something else kills you first.

And apparently death caps are delicious

Or it’s for an internal Russian story to help keep the country from imploding since they have very little good news to spread around.

“Brave Russian frigate fires restrained warning shot on imperialist NATO yacht with evil intentions”

Or something

He influenced me to hate apple and support right to repair.

I know what you mean but he’s the definition of influencer just instead of selling vapid sponsored products he’s selling 44 minute long autistic rants where his hyper fixation is consumer rights.