In Spain, it's like that. In Latin America, it was always "plátano," but in the last ten years, I've seen a new "global Latin American Spanish" emerging that uses "banana" for Cavendish, some Mexican slang, etc. I suspect it's because of YouTube and Twitch.
I'm curious where you live that this seems so unusual.
I'm in the USA, and any area with a large immigrant population will have a shopping mall or at least a few stores where signage is in English & the language of the local immigrant population.
I was wondering about the same thing as GP. I live in a European capital (one of the smaller ones), and I basically don't ever see anything like this. If there's any signs in other languages then they're almost always in English. (We don't get much immigration from English-speaking countries.)
Interesting! Is that because you don't have large immigrant populations, or is it more cultural where it's seen as important for newcomers to assimilate to the local culture?
In the US & Canada, of course, the vast majority of the population is descended from people who immigrated here. It would make sense for it to be more normalized here for public spaces to cater to those who don't yet speak the local language.
We do have large immigrant populations, but have a fairly active integration policy. It's not a major success, but at least free language education seems to have helped a lot.
There's foreign languages on "call family in your home country" type ads and on various official information (e.g. posters during the pandemic), but very rarely on storefronts and the like.
In most of the southeast you're only going to see English. Even in medium size towns. Texas is completely different however, where you can easily see 3 languages alone set of store fronts.
It's common in Canada for ethnic malls and stores whose proprietors and customers are mostly first- and second-generation immigrants, that they'd have signage in their own language. There's no rule enforcing it and no rule against it, except maybe in Quebec.
Quebec's language laws are fascinating, the newest version "requires non-French signs to be accompanied by French descriptions that are twice the size." Since the goal is "to ensure French predominates the visual field of storefronts," you can have the logos be the same size as long as the tagline is in French.
I think the word you are looking for is "totalitarian". The legal system there virtually guarantees French as the only acceptable language. Even native-born Quebecois who are also native English speakers need to go through a process to be permitted to school their children in English.
Go to any large/well-known US city and you will with almost 100% certainty be able to find an area where this is absolutely common. I live in Texas right down the street from one of many asian street malls/plazas in my city where the majority of the store names are first written in either Chinese or Korean. I'm certain its likely the same in Canada
I grew up here. There's a lot of people in this area (generally non-working members of first gen immigrant families, think gma and gpa) who don't really speak English. My parents took me to these malls for a glimpse of the culture where home is (and to make me practice mandarin). As second-gen immigrants grow up, some have opened their own businesses too, combining aspects of Canadian and Chinese culture. To me now, it feels like home.
The bakery in Denison Square is a clear example of a cultural mishmash - they offer many of the traditional hk style breads like pineapple buns, but also many twists that definitely have a Canadian influence (smoked beef sandwitch with milk bread).
There's many pockets in Toronto with high density of Chinese commerce, the area around Steeles east of the IBM campus is one. Pacific Mall mentioned in the article is only one of the commercial centers in the area. There's also Metro Square a few blocks west, the T&T plaza next door, Skycity on Midland/Finch, and various other small plazas around the area, full of Chinese food goodness.
Not sure about Toronto, but there are a lot of places like that on the BC side. I don't know if it's true or not, but I heard once that leading up to the handoff of Hong Kong from Britain to China there was a lot of immigration to Canada, due to their easier process than that of the US. It could also just be an Asian neighborhood like you'll find in pretty much every major city.
That was one of the major events, but in general there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Japan and China to American and Canadian west coast settlements for the past 150 years or so. As with most diasporas, the way it usually works is that the first people come there because it's cheaper and/or because there's work available, and then once they establish a local community, more immigrants start coming there preferentially because they have friends and family, because there are services available in their language etc.
In BC, Richmond in particular has been a recipient of many of those immigrants from Hong Kong, which is why its population is still majority ethnic Chinese, and even many official signs are bilingual.
That area of Toronto has a huge Chinese diaspora. I have many memories of trekking to Pacific Mall (also mentioned in the blog post) on public transit with my anime-watching friends in highschool to buy pirated DVDs and other merch. A nearby Walmart has bilingual English - Chinese signs inside.
Yes, almost all US cities have at least a couple grocery stores that stock imported products and have signage in multiple languages. most common is Chinese or general “Asian” but larger cities have more specific stores that specialize further on Korean, Vietnamese, etc.
Zoom out can you can zoom into any city and see at least in SF, LA, NYC there are huge areas where you can expect non-English to possibly be common. Sorry it doesn't cover Canada but I'm sure some searching can bring up something similar.
You see names written in Chinese and English everywhere in the USA? Or did you mean something else? Because if that's what you meant to say, that is absolutely not how things are "everywhere in the USA".
Yes, it is very common in urban and even suburban USA to find stores, and in larger cities entire neighborhoods of stores, where names are in both Latin and some other script, and other text is in English and some other language (whether or not both use the Latin alphabet.) It's not too uncommon in, say, California to see this for several different east asian languages (Chinese being the nost common generally, but there is regional variation), Spanish, and maybe Arabic and/or Russian, in a single moderately sized city.
I live in Texas, and have lived in California and New York. In all three of these places the areas with a large Chinese presence will have stores with names in both Chinese and English.
This is absolutely common in the US in pretty much any large city, I can't imagine someone having never seen this before in the US unless they never lived or went to an area that was diverse. And its not just Chinese, many places will have Korean names, Japanese names, and of course on the other end Spanish names accompanied by english but most are more used to this.
As someone who regularly shops at those sorts of places, there is a large part of the US population that ignores or is otherwise unaware of them, most of my family included. I've had multiple conversations where people have been shocked when informed that there's an Asian or Mexican market a short distance away that they had no idea existed.
I see it in Chinese restaurants, sure. And in Chinatowns. (And with Spanish in the southwest.) I don't see it on "almost every store" "everywhere in the US", though.
Nomdep was referring to the pictures in TFA -- the rest of the comments are explaining why a mall may look like that. Not an entire city.
A reasonable interpretation of "you see that everywhere" is "most cities have a mall or neighborhood that would result in a similar set of pictures.
It's incredible how many "hackers" in this thread don't understand how quantifiers work in contexts other than code. How the hell does this industry translate business needs into code without this rudimentary skill?
From what I've seen, it is an established and expected cultural practice for "ethnic" restaurants in US to have bilingual menus regardless of their actual location. It could be a Mexican restaurant in an area that is 99% white Anglos, and it will still have menu in English and Spanish.
Personally I think it's great; it means that you get some exposure to other languages even if you never leave your corner of the woods.
It's like the 21st century "China town". Many new migrants prefer avoiding downtown and the old China towns so have built new ones, complete with huge parking lots.
Not sure how well this holds up. I would very much like to see Scarlet Johansson having very dirty sex. I do not want to watch it if I know an AI created it since it lacks authenticity.
Wanting to see celebrities or coworkers debased is common and perhaps authenticity matters there.
But it doesn't matter much in regular porn usage. I don't see why it would be different for a pedophile. Everything going in your mind still be the same in a pedophile's head, just remove 10 years to the people you imagine.
This is a thing? I don’t know that celebrity and will never see them in real life (probably) (at least not close up), why does anyone care if it’s real or not if it looks real? How does anyone know if any image of a celebrity is real or not at this point? Most of these have been heavily photoshopped/touched up for decades as it is, nude or not; that’s not very authentic either?
I think that a network of trust will be established where "real stuff" can be obtained, but I suspect that the average pedophile is like the average man in that authenticity doesn't really matter indeed.
With the very clear caveat that I'd like to see a world where no one is interested or inclined to abuse children or view CSAM in the first place...
I would like to think you are right. The problem is that we already have a comparable with heroin and methadone. And people still want to take the heroin and not the methadone.
(You can get into somewhat conspiracy theory that methadone is designed to either help someone off heroin quickly or otherwise kill the addict more quickly - either way solving the problem. An addicts of wised up to that and avoid it.)
Following that thought through, won't that make "the real thing" that much easier to hide in a sea of indistinguishable, make it much harder to find and prosecute, ease the restrictions currently on those that want to act out IRL and swap their activities online?
The thrust of the article linked here is that:
the bigger risk is that “AI CSAM is going to bury the actual sexual abuse content,” diverting resources from actual children in need of rescue.
If AI CSAM hides real material in a sea of fake, it means the fake has displaced it and killed its profitability. There will definitely be cases where it will make rescuing victims and persecuting criminals harder, but at the same time it'll rob many of them of the incentive to risk committing the crimes in the first place.
Regardless, I don't know if any of this is preventable. The only strategy that might actually have an effect is for law enforcement to use AI-generated CSAM themselves as a honeypot to periodically "ban wave" consumers and have the hashes of the fakes.
"And if you do happen find a jawbone in your bathroom, my suggestion is first to contact the local authorities. Sure, a fossil in travertine likely comes from hundreds of thousands of years ago. It isn't a crime scene. But depending on your state or nation of residence, laws governing discovery of human remains on your property may be complicated and having the paperwork in order with the police, sheriff, or coroner is the first step for most investigations."
No thanks. I'm not going to complicate my life with paperwork and police investigators because of a small piece of a might-be-a-fossil from Turkey.
Well, I'm not telling you how to live your life, but someone who used to work in a related field, please at least consider it if you ever are in that situation. It's always useful to have more data, and some data will always come from random findings like this.
Maybe AI image recognition is good enough by then to actually determine if it is from a human or some other animal, so that you know beforehand that your paperwork will not be in vain at least. I don't expect that there will be much of a police investigation, the age should be rather obvious in most cases. On the other hand I've heard that there are states where the police get less than half a year of training, so maybe there will be one. But still, think of the potential scientific value :)
If the recommended course of action to contribute here is to involve the police and inform them there might be human remains on your property, then I strongly doubt you're gonna get many people willing at all. If this is a genuine and serious potential source of fact finding/analysis that is of value to the field, then the field needs to find a less... lets call it polarizing, option.
Involving the police for something like that is not a threat to your safety in a civilised country. It is, indeed, the best course of action in any country with a functioning police force.
Well, a functioning police force wouldn't mind if you reach to online communities and paleontologists to verify that those remains are human before reaching to police to file a report, I'd assume.
And so, if the law force action could have serious consequences, then the tiles would be better left untouched, no paperwork needed. And if it couldn't, then it's okay not to file paperwork first.
Yeah, like if they said "call the archeology department of your local university to see if they want to document it", I'd totally do that. But I'm not going to call the police, explain to them what I'm calling about and potentially open a crime scene investigation in my own home.
Though realistically, I don't expect that the police would even come out or do anything at all, they don't bother to come out for car breakins, so I don't see them coming out for "I saw something in my new countertop that looks sort of like it could be a 500,000 year old human fossil"
This is an unreasonable comment even for an American. But in other countries it's especially not a concern. You might have to report it to a different government agency (like an archaeologist or animal control) but you are supposed to report it to someone.
The other reddit category of things you should report to the police (or someone else) is of course people who find old grenades in their house.
Sure, it's different in other countries. But as a dark skinned person in America, this is not unreasonable, but pragmatic. Reporting to an archaeology organization is not at all the same thing as reporting to police.
Correct me if I am wrong, but this was in a cut limestone plate. So if it was a crime, I am sure the murderer is long deceased and probably not even a homo sapiens.
I think the theory is that if you don't tell the cops before anyone else, then when they find out they might try to bust you for failing to report human remains. Even the dimmest sheriff wouldn't try to persuade a prosecutor that a fossil was the victim of a living murderer.
You argue with someone and police makes a visit. Searches your criminal history and sees one line "investigated for murder". Guess what might happen. Nothing right? Because we live in a perfect world.
Seriously overestimating the willingness of police to give a shit about what are clearly _really old_ remains.
The CYA part about talking to authorities (whoever applicable in your jurisdiction, not necessarily police) still applies. There are often laws about human remains. THOSE would show on your record if this is mishandled.
Right back at you with the citation needed. Humanoid is not a taxonomic term anymore. All Homo are humans. Never said modern, which it obviously isn't.
> Although some scientists equate the term "humans" with all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member.
There's no citation for that claim and it would be unlikely for there to be one.
It's just some dude's personal impression about a subjective matter (a word in transition), and carries no more weight than any other comment being made here.
A more meaningful source would be a usage guide like Garner's Modern English.
Actually, it is cited. The fragment you quoted is from the lede, which is supposed to summarize the rest of the material. So if you read on to the section "Etymology and definition", you find that the same claim is cited to Merriam Webster.
As it happens, this citation is useless, because it doesn't support the claim. Basically, I think it's fraudulent to cite that claim to that MW article.
I feel like this is peak HN pedantry, but it seems like there's some controversy amongst anthropologists these days as how to sort of colloquially define human; I've heard some say that any species in the genus homo should qualify.
Perhaps my mind is so open that it's in danger of falling out, but when people say that that's so easy to define and then don't do so, I get really confused. I'm like, have you ever seen a dude who looks like a lady? It's a question that's bedeviled sports for a long time actually - in the 60's the Olympics required "nude parades" to check that competitors were in fact women, but obviously that had some problems. I believe they eventually settled on some sort of hormone ratio as the definition.
In the classical Olympics, as in all Greek athletic competitions, all competitors were required to be nude during the events. You can't compete in clothes.
I mean, who actually cares about things like chafing, sunburns, or the awkward stares of spectators? Let's all just embrace our inner Greek and strip down for the 100-meter dash.
HN really isn't the place for this conversation, but if we ever found a human whose biological sex was ambiguous using a simple checklist with maybe three tests in it, that would be a first. Woman and man are complex, female and male are not. Yes, this includes all known intersex conditions. No, there's no significant disagreement about those criteria.
Funny, I think HN is the ideal place for this conversation, though it's a bit weird to get there on this thread. But it's a subject of fascination for me personally, and it's a shame that it's taken on weird political dimensions.
I was under the impression that Caster Semenya tends to confound simple categorization like you suggest.
> Sex assignment is the discernment of an infant's sex, usually at birth.
The question is not whether you can briefly look between someone's legs and determine their sex. We know (per the article) that this can fail as much as 0.05% of the time.
The question was what is Caster Semenya's biological sex: the answer is male. This is, in fact, clear.
"Humanoid" refers to anything with a human body morphology (i.e., bipedal, two legs, two arms, head). That can be actual humans, human-looking robots, bipedal aliens with bilateral symmetry, or even Barbie dolls I suppose.
That will be a great comfort to know, after the trigger happy local yokel cops shoot you in the head while executing their no-knock warrant because they think that you are reaching for a hidden weapon.
Seriously. People have ended up dead from calling the police about things far less likely to cause concern/confusion than "I have dead human parts in my bathroom"
Maybe "I have dead human parts in my bathroom" is not the best way to explain the situation and one would be served better if they concentrated on how to make the communication convey the intended message the best, instead of being satisfied with "technically correct is the best kind of correct".
You need to read the old internet 1.0 lore "In The Beginning there was Plan" and then consider how communication happens in any bureaucratic organization. (Poorly, intermittently, and with multiple transmission errors)
You tell the dispatcher that you found a fossilized jawbone in your tile, by the time the report makes it's way to the responding officer the story is you found a severed head in your sink.
Like opening with "I'm pretty sure this is a non-issue, but there's a fossilized jawbone fragment in some travertines I just had installed. Do you need to investigate that or are we good?"
Yeah, most people's lives are complicated enough as is. This "suggestion" is asking you to go well out of your way to get buried in some tedious paperwork and investigations. Only those who are into fossils might give a care.
Also notice how smoothly they equate a potential fossil with "human remains". Yeah, technically right.
And misunderstandings about "human remains" somewhere in some complicated cross jurisdictional chain of command could end up with you in handcuffs, or shot.
Or the media could run some poorly researched human interest story about you that makes you sound like Jeffrey Dahmer.
Or something that's never happened can continue never happening. People have found hominid fossils out in public before and it's been obvious they were fossils. The worst that's happened is they're returned to native tribes who then keep them.
Happens every time, that is way we write the "As per our meeting, we've decided that..." emails. Even with those, people still end with different interpetations
They were banned from talking about any sort of politics in the internal chats, not outside. That is something It was consider basic work polite behavior until very recently. Ironically, now that many people only can see some topics as "good vs evil", is when it is needed the most.
That’s why many who attend do it by convincing their company to pay for the the trip and the ticket