Kind of crazy that it has Swahili but not Portuguese.

I listened to the start of the Swahili course and it mentions that Swahili was the first one to be "commissioned", which I understand to mean that someone asked for it and paid for it specifically. It also said there was information about commissioning on the web site, but I couldn't find it. So it's a bit mysterious.

Commissioning a language course might be spare change for some government agency but I don't know whether they're allowed to spend money that way. They might be forced to put it out to tender and prefer domestic bidders or something like that.

I remember that somebody made a Language Transfer Portuguese course, but it was heavily criticised and never relaunched

Not crazy at all. Swahili is the Lingua Franca of Africa.

And while they don't have language like we do, dogs can understand basic commands and they aren't even the smartest animals.

Seems dumb that we change the time to an offset rather than changing from 9 to 5 to 8 to 4.

Yes the correlation is there but it doesn't really matter. There are hundreds of millions of kids growing up with stable healthy parents and a handful of prodigies.

There are a only handful of prodigies regardless of what we're talking about, but I think that is a misguided way to look at the situation:

If my GP comment is true to some significant degree, it matters for people who are prodigies. It matters for the world, which benefits from the prodigies.

But I don't want to underemphasize the first or overemphasize the second. These are human beings, which is the overwhelming issue. They have the same needs and same importance as everyone else. That means we don't want to disregard their needs either because they are unusual and therefore more expensive to nurture, or because the world benefits from them and and doesn't care about their individual needs or thinks their needs can be sacrificed.

And on a similar basis, it has strong implications for all the other kids in the world, who need stable, loving, nurturing family.

> Regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.

This depends on what definition of freedom you are using.

Take this definition.

> the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do

Being able to walk down a street because there is a regulation restricting cars would enhance my freedom.

A regulation permitting me to swing my fist into your would restrict my freedom, and damn your nose

It amuses me how the "land of the free" makes it a crime for people to cross the street without doing it at regulated locations.

Yup this needs an answer.

It is so depressing that teams won despite being worse than pretty much every other chat application just because MSFT bundled it with office.

From outside as consumer. The end problem is that these product do not compete on price. A chat app on enterprise at the scale of customers they have should probably be 1€ a month. Not 10 or 20€.

That might not be multi billions a year business, but maybe chat app should not be one.

I think a big factor is generational. Bigcos are led mlby generations that are phone or email first. Chat is an afterthought. For orgs like that, Teams is great if chat is your least important collaboration method.

You mean, with Microsoft 365 Copilot App (there’s no more Office)

Jobs was right.

The one guy who owns everything.

So confident yet so wrong.

Education, health care, housing...

These have all fallen massively in price, too. Many billions more afford education than was possible before. Economies of scale have brought manufacturing costs for housing down, and now people live in larger, better structures than ever before.

Then you have the US, which artificially constrains the supply of new doctors, makes it illegal to open new hospitals without explicit government approval, massively subsidizes loans for education, causing waste, inefficiency, and skyrocketing prices in one specific market…

Fortunately fewer than 4% of humans live there.

Yes, some things go up in prices. Would you conclude from that fact that no prices go down? Because that's the claim I'm responding to.