second that! rclone is an amazing piece of software! With a few simple bash scripts and rclone, my google drive serves code snippets (albeit without code highlighting) and screenshots!
there are also armhf and aarch64 builds of rclone!
You should be able to get through with basic high-school chemisty.
You need to know there are elements C, H, N, O, P, Ca, K, S, know what an ionic bond and covalent bonds is and be able to look at the structure of a molecule.
I agree with pretty much everything what you've said here!
> I much prefer to try to get us to speak in our own languages, even if it requires effort.
Also, when it does work, we'd get to experience the glimpse of the sense of some shared heritage (e.g. cultural, historical, etc) and at the same time we'd feel good about the uniqueness and differences of our own languages/cultures.
> Otherwise, I prefer to speak Russian if the person I'm communicating with knows it too.
If someone spoke Russian to me, I'd be a) very flattered and b) try accommodating them with their effort as much as possible.
Unless it's a literal matter of life and death to understand what the other person is saying without too much of a delay, it's a pretty asshole-y thing to do:
a) The other person will "immediately" know that you think that their Russian is not up to snuff.
b) They'll know their well intended effort isn't appreciated.
I'm living in a foreign country and speak fluently 3 languages, and known a few things in a forth one. Deciding which language to use with which person is a taxing effort in itself, especially in a group setting. There is no such thing as "asshole-y thing" to use English because each communication setting is different. Sometime the most important thing is to be understood quickly, then using English if there is any friction makes sense. On the other hand, if the goal is to build some emotional rapport, trying harder in the other person's native language is worth doing.
> There is no such thing as "asshole-y thing" to use English because each communication setting is different
Exactly because each communication setting is different, in a number of them, switching to English unconditionally, which is what the parent was suggesting, is indeed an "asshole-y" thing to do.
> Sometime the most important thing is to be understood quickly
Isn't this exactly what I said, "Unless it's a literal matter of life and death to understand what the other person is saying without too much of a delay?"
> Deciding which language to use with which person is a taxing effort in itself, especially in a group setting
In a group -- yes. Else, you just sound lazy at best and like a person who doesn't give a duck at worst.
> On the other hand, if the goal is to build some emotional rapport, trying harder in the other person's native language is worth doing.
The goal is to just be a decent human-being who is at least sometimes considerate of others' wants.
It heavily depends on the goals of conversation, imo. If someone tells me he wants to practice his Russian, I have no problem with that. If I'm talking to a girl in a romantic setting, and she wants me to speak Russian to her, regardless of her understanding of it, sure. But if the goal is to actually exchange information, and their English is more suitable, then I don't see why they would be offended.
Also, there are a couple of nuances:
- sometimes people assume that if I'm Russian I always prefer speaking in Russian. I don't see why I shouldn't let them know when it is to the contrary.
- even if for some reason they want me to speak Russian when the goal of the conversation would be better served by using English, how should I speak to them? The way I normally speak to my Russian friends, or artificially slowing down my speech and choosing simple phrases? Which one is more offensive?
p.s. I see your point though (i.e. not appreciating the effort). I've heard it's common in some parts of France, where people don't want to you speak French if you don't speak it perfectly. Agreed on the "asshole'iness" of that :)
> The goal is to just be a decent human-being who is at least sometimes considerate of others' wants.
Why would consideration of other person wants trump the consideration of the first preson wants? If is a symmetric situation, then preferences of both sides has equal value.
Also, this is not a thing people need to agree on. There is no problem if each side of dialog uses a different language, if each side comes to a different conclusion about optimal language.
My two cents,
I skimmed through a few texts and I can understand 60-70% of what I've read. I'm a native Russian speaker, btw. However, I'd say I'd be skeptical about this whole idea, since I'd still need to invest considerable effort to learn the rest. Instead, I'd rather learn English, even though it's even more effort, still, a cost-benefit ratio seems to be much better in my particular case, as English will pretty much let me communicate with 1.5B people, which probably includes most Poles anyway.
If you live and work in the US, the substantial part of your taxes is spent on invading other countries, killing innocent people and propping up dictators.
> how do you approach that morally? I really want to know the opinion of someone actually working there.
I can vote for the people (at every level) that I think will spend the taxes I am legally obligated to pay in a way I agree with and I can follow up with successively vociferous concerns (letters < community organization < protest, etc), but at a certain point my freedom (or life) can be threatened.
Employers can’t (yet) do the same. I’m under no obligation to them to do what I morally disagree with because I can always quit playing their game.
All I can do to quit my country is uproot from everything I’ve ever known, including my family, to another country that I agree with more that will also let me in.
They’re completely different situations and I’m pretty sure we all recognize that, but I’ll add my own personal anecdotes:
Employer
I don’t like the idea of software patents or generic business patents that can be summed up with “... do it on a computer”. I created some really awesome things for an employer many moons ago that were essentially revolutionizing how people in this very particular niche could more efficiently do their jobs. What did I really do though? I put together some open source tools completely foreign to this niche, glued them together with some nifty ideas and code that I wrote, put a decent unified UI on it, and packaged it up as a virtual machine appliance for our people in the field. My company wanted me to sign the invention away so they could patent it, and were going to put in 5 different applications. It was sign on the dotted line or walk, I walked at significant financial penalty.
Government
My dad’s from Libya. I lived there for a while growing up, and all my dad’s family is still in Tripoli. They all hated Gadaffi, and with the Arab spring uprising- things were getting bad. I joined in some protests across the US asking for intervention. Welp, we got what we asked for but not what we wanted. Turns out governments and geopolitics are tricky.
Whatever country I live in, I certainly didn't choose to be born there, and moving to another country is often more expensive than is possible for most people. I don't see how this compares to actively seeking a job at Facebook. I also don't think that the US doing bad things is an excuse for Facebook to do bad things.
The question was "how does it feel?". Not a really useful or interesting question, but there it is, at the top, and for a lot of people here, the answer is "exactly like what you're doing".
> See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico;—see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it differed one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
Most of us seem to embrace our "weird-sounding English" sooner or later. The truth is that Americans don't care much about our accents, it's our own insecurities speaking. Occasionally you might meet someone who does, but then you wouldn't want to work for them anyways since they'll find a reason to be a bigoted piece of shit to you whether you have an accent or not.
Do I really need all these API keys for s3, sentry, push service, ngrok, etc to run a web app on a home network?