hakeberio

gnarly bug! what's the name of the paper?

Definitely. It reminds me of Orwell's Newspeak in 1984- although the novel itself shows that having a "clean" vocabulary doesn't completely prevent "unclean" thought deemed by the authorities, having a censored set of language can "nudge" people to certain propaganda.

I use Wireguard regularly when I'm out to access my home LAN where I have some VM's running various things like pihole (DNS server to block ads), mail server, hobby dev server, etc.

Wireguard is very light (cf: OpenVPN) and easy to setup/use- highly recommend using it.

Developed/rich countries "kicking away the ladder" from developing countries is a well-known concept- there's an interesting book by the same title by Ha-joon Chang.

To be clear, I'm not saying that any of these actions are justified.

Seems useful! Curious about your business model- it seems like your payment processor takes 0.5%/payment; do you charge some percentage on top of that? If so, how much? Adding a "what is our business model" section in the about/faq page would make things more transparent.

On the operations side of things, I assume your site acts as an intermediary, drop-shipping the item?

Looking from a different angle, I can see few valid reasons for using cosmetics:

1. Cosmetics often includes medical/dermatological products which are essential for some people.

2. Cosmetics can be used not just for "vanity" but to cover big scars and other unwanted-attention-invoking skin conditions; similar to how plastic surgery may be life-saving for some folks and enable them to live a "normal life".

3. Seeking beauty/aesthetics is not a bad thing in itself

I assume, though, most cosmetics are used for nugatory reasons, and we should always questions whether these above use cases really justify killing millions of animals.

Similar theory I have is that it's acceptable for most children to learn their language full-time; whereas for adults, usually it's a side thing on top of their full-time work.

If given the opportunity to immerse in language learning full-time for 3 years (time it takes for most children to speak somewhat coherently) and with an open mind, adults can react fluency, I think. Maybe even faster than children, since adults have more context to bind and commit new information to long-term memory.

As a kid, memorizing vocabulary words was a brute force task because I had no relevant context (Latin/Greek, history, etc), but now I can pick up words, even foreign words pretty quickly because I have "hooks" in my mind to which I can attach them.

Learning a new language is often accompanied by the very real feeling of your "mind expanding." I think that's because being able to understand/speak another language is almost like experiencing a whole new world; another rich set of culture, people, literature, etc different from yours suddenly become very much accessible.

The Wittgenstein adage

> The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

rings true for me.