I too find his explanation on each click soothing.
Except when he got challenged to open a “difficult” bike lock in under 2 minutes by another locksmith he was dead silent the entire time and opened it in like 20 seconds.
I was surprised to see Expensify's revenue growth was only 8% YoY from 2019 to 2020. For comparison, Asana and GitLab had ~85% year-over-year growth on their S-1.
Granted, Expensify grew 60% over the last twelve months, but by their own account it was 'primarily due to a pricing change implemented in May 2020, which led to a gradual increase in per member price for our paid members"
Makes me wonder if they are being hit hard by the new entrants like Ramp, or if the pandemic had such a major impact on all expense management platforms as people travel less - especially on business?
If anything, based on these numbers the email increased their sales. I highly doubt there’s an actual causation, but personally speaking having a CEO take a stance I agree with would have made me check out their product.
3) Part of the Euro zone (less important than #1 and #2 to be sure).
Given the OECD tax agreement there are fewer low-tax destinations for companies to pick from. And because of Brexit there are no other English-speaking EU countries.
Companies in Ireland aren’t going anywhere and it remains a pretty good option for any new HQs looking to expand into Europe. Ireland is just making more money off of each of them.
Of course. Cartels are always about reducing competition. Even if a cartel between countries like OPEC or this agreement. Irland just killed the competition
I'm a non-native English speaker, and I've been working with an accent coach to improve my pronunciation. The IPA chart has been instrumental teaching tool, and after about two years it's finally starting to sink in.
It's really helpful to understand the theory behind the pronunciation, instead of just repeating words and attempt to make the same sounds as my coach. As in "this is what your tongue should be doing, but you're doing this other thing instead."
You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong. For example, there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English. It's just something that never crossed my mind before starting to work with a professional.
I'm a native Hebrew speaker. We basically have one way to say each vowel. It took practice for me (not with a coach but with some training videos etc) to even hear the different ways English speakers pronounce them, my brain just wasn't tuned to hear them, let alone pronounce them.
Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity - sheet/shit, peace/piece/piss.
As a speaker of fairly standard British English, I would say they are homophones; I tried but couldn't find any natural way in which I could pronounce them differently.
They are identical. I think he was making a distinction between {week, weak} on one hand and {wick} on the other (but I was also initially confused by the way he put it). This is a big hurdle for native Spanish speakers as well, because i in Spanish is always pronounced as "ee". There seem to be a lot of embarrassing word pairs around these vowels; sheet, beach, etc.
In German, the vowels between schwül and schwul were really difficult to do for me as an American English speaker. I couldn't ever hear the difference between rounded and unrounded vowels. American English vowels are only rounded in the back. u and o (and in the East the au in caught).
Peace and piece are really quite close. Even week and weak are too. At least to my Canadian, native English ears; and I've done enough French, Russian, and Greek to hear the difference between what other Canadian English speakers would consider to be the same sound.
I had this realization during one of my later linguistics classes. It was a syntax class, so didn't really have anything to do with pronunciation; but it was an upper level class, so it was a safe assumption that everyone knew IPA.
In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times).
Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty.
(For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)
(Going off of memory here, I probably butchered the pronunciation anyway).
/ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English, and for whatever reason it was incredibly hard for me to perceive it there.
There was probably other more subtle differences between the two that did not make it into the transcription (e.g., his native name was pronounced with his native accent instead of his English accent)
Oh aha, that's very interesting thanks! It's amazing how hard it is to parse things that you aren't primed for. I sometimes don't even recognize my native language for a while if I'm in an English-speaking country and hear it out of the blue without context.
I'm giving up my search for it, but I once read a research paper on categorical perception.
If you compare [ta] and [da], you find that the only difference is the time between when you make the consonant, and when your vocal chords start vibrating (voice onset time). In theory, VOT is a contimum, with any value being possible. However, in English it forms a tri-modal distribution /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/. The experiment artificially edited a sound to vary between /t/ and /d/, including with VOTs between the two that do not occur in English. What they found is that people put all of the sounds in 2 boxes, and were unable to distinguish between sounds in the same box, even if their VOT varied considerably.
However, when test subjects were played the same sounds, but told they were listening to rain drops, this effect disapeared, and they were able to distinguish between sounds in the same box.
That is along the lines of what I was thinking, but does not make the point as cleany (they end up combining the speach-primed and non speach-primed data because participants said they percieved it as speach from the start.
They also used an ABX methodology, which forces the subject to put sounds into boxes by essentially asking if X is more like A or B, not if X is different from both.
The one I am thinking of used an odd-one-out methodology, where the subject was presented with AAX, and asked to pick which sound was different from the others (where the others were genuinly the same sound).
The one I am thinking of also found a priming effect, which yours apparantly didn't.
> /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English
I never noticed that until now. While it's obviously not an English word, plenty of English speakers have discussed French explorer Jacques Cousteau. I can't think of any other examples.
New Zealand English (through Māori influence) has this, in names like Ngaire and places like Ngaio. This said, a lot (perhaps most, though it'll be regional I expect) of speakers will pronounce it as though the 'g' isn't present.
A couple of years ago I had a geology class in which the lecturer (albeit a non-New Zealander) consistently pronounced Ngāuruhoe with initial /n/. Interesting to know that New Zealanders pronounce it with /ɡ/ instead. (I, of course, pedant that I am, insisted on pronouncing it with an initial /ŋ/.)
I was once in a classroom in India attempting to teach English to Hindi speaking kids (I don't speak Hindi, but at that time I more or less knew the devanagari script). Someone told me a Hindi word and I wanted to write it on the blackboard in an example.
There are (at least) 3 different consonants in Hindi that just sound like "T" to me. So it took me 3 attempts to spell this Hindi word correctly. The kids all absolutely lost their minds with laughter at this - they were all yelling (what I heard as) "no not tuh, TUH" and just couldn't understand why I couldn't tell the difference.
The same happens with foreigners learning Mandarin Chinese. The consonants are easy, but each vowel can be pronounced with one of 4 different tones (or 5 if you count the 'neutral' tone).
If you get a tone wrong, sometimes people will understand the erroneous word due to surrounding context. But pretty often you'll just elicit a blank stare. This is especially the case for short phrases, e.g. when you're asking for directions.
I wish.
My teachers have no problem telling apart my j and q, but I rarely hear the difference despite all the cosonants in my native language coming in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs.
This chart is awesome. I agree about understanding the theory. My best friend is Hungarian and I could not get the 'gy' sound in his name (Gyuri) right until I read up on just how it's articulated. I read up on Finnish before I visited there a few years ago and it seemed a lot easier, although I'm not sure I understand the 'o' vowel correctly.
I found Fluent Forever's minimal pair Anki training decks to be extremely helpful for my German listening and pronunciation. I'm native to American English, and I've been told by multiple native German speakers that my accent is a 2 in strength on a scale of 1 to 10.
> You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong
There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.
They did do an inspection and sealed the containers right after. The "swap" to painted rocks happened only after the inspection. Supposedly, they also had an insurance until it turned out 6 out of 7 of their insurance contracts were forged.
To me this screams like an inside job. How is it possible that the thieves can get into the ships at night, spend hours hauling copper and paving stones and nobody notices.
I would guess it would be easier to load up the bogey container with rocks, and since the authorities are in it, get a copy of the seal affixed to the bogey container (the article even mentions fake seals).
The article also mentions shipment. Does it mean the containers were already on the ships, or just on its way on the back of a truck? It would be "easy" for the truck full of copper in a sealed container to leave a place, and a different truck to show up at the port with a container with a label that says "Copper for Mercuria, destination Qinqdao" and a "good" seal. Or if it's all at the port, just pay off the crane operator to load up your bogey onto the ship, and load up the real stuff onto your truck.
In many cases you should try to bill everyone out of the same billing system. For example, you can still invoice customers out of Stripe - you just disable the option to pay with a credit card.
Or are you saying you do that already and it still shows up as churn?
I had exactly the same experience driving from Baltimore to Seattle this June.
There were a good amount of masks in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio and Indiana it was as if pandemic didn't exist. Hotel employees didn't understand my reluctance to squeeze into a small space to pick up a to-go breakfast, and made snarky comments along the lines of "am I far enough for you sir?"
Madison, WI was much better, but starting from La Crosse all the way through Minnesota and North Dakota plains it was as if you were living in a different reality.
This may have been true in 2016, but since then, I’ve seen CEOs raising multimillion dollar rounds using Google Sheets, financial modeling software, and Excel alike.
There’s certainly still some preference towards Excel in 2020, but in no way using sheets will mean that you’re not “financially savvy.”
This is a good point. It started off with a bit of a "toy spreadsheet" reputation (fair or not) and that may have biased some people for a while. It shouldn't matter now.
Agree with your method of boiling the water for a longer period of time, but this doesn’t have much to do with handling milk.
You generally don’t want to bring milk to a boil as it creates a film on top and modifies the taste. Instead, you heat it to 162F / 72C to kill the bacteria and cool it down as quickly as possibly. There isn’t a “traditional” method going back generations, since it was only in the 1860s when Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization.
You are totally right, but for the milk you just bring it to boil and stop. Quickly, 3 times in a row.
We know very well that you theoretically just need to cross the 68°C boundary to cook the proteins of the bacteria.
But if like me you happen to have been raised where the family had cows, you also know very well that in the morning at 4am, you do not play Pasteur. You want fast and secure.
Except when he got challenged to open a “difficult” bike lock in under 2 minutes by another locksmith he was dead silent the entire time and opened it in like 20 seconds.