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[return to "I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]"]
1. hiAndr+JZ1[view] [source] 2024-01-28 11:36:25
>>onnnon+(OP)
I never worried particularly much about climate change, but just to hedge my bets for my kids I moved to northern Europe. For the most part it's just equated to milder (= bearable) Winters and nicer summers up here.

I guess we also spend a fair bit on moving to renewables up here - Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. If I were an ideologue in either direction I'd probably say "that's the real reason I moved" or "can't believe they're waiting my tax money on this", but I'm not, I'm just a guy who likes hedging his bets. The nuclear is especially nice because cheap electricity is the true backbone of society, and we've seen the market prices go straight up _negative_ a few times due to overproduction.

Self recommending! Come to Finland and help us build a stronger democracy, whatever that means to you.

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2. hrudud+Og2[view] [source] 2024-01-28 13:53:55
>>hiAndr+JZ1
And yet I never saw people tracking the daily electricity spot price until I moved to Finland :). Miten menee sun suomi, on kiva oppia sitä.
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3. hiAndr+BC2[view] [source] 2024-01-28 16:20:04
>>hrudud+Og2
Minulla lemppari urheilulaji :D se kehittyy hitaasti mutta varmasti.

I actually maintain several online Finnish learning resources now, including a flashcard deck of the most common 10,000 words from the YLE study way back [1], a command line lemmatizer [2], and a website whose permissions I need to refresh ASAP which archives Selkouutiset with YYYY/MM/DD URLs [3].

Indeed building these tools were what got me back into software development as a profession, after a long absence.

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470

[2]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

[3]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/

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4. zestyp+or3[view] [source] 2024-01-28 22:00:29
>>hiAndr+BC2
I love languages, but I've been scared off of Finnish because I have heard that it has impossibly complicated grammar. Is this true? Or is there a logic to it that can be easily understood?
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5. hiAndr+hB4[view] [source] 2024-01-29 10:14:09
>>zestyp+or3
There is indeed a logic to it, and I'm currently working on an edutainment game meant to focus on drilling this part in particular.

Finnish has 15 noun cases, but it's probably better thought of as 4+6+5 cases. The first 4 are pretty straightforward, except for the partitive, which is kind of a catch-all case. The middle 6 correspond to certain spatial relationships. Very roughly you can imagine these as {inside, outside} × {unmoving, moving closer, moving further}. Huone = room, huoneessa = in room, huoneen = into (=moving closer to the inside of) room. That kind of stuff. The last 5 have niche, special uses. That's how I mentally imagine them at least, there are a lot of details you only pick up by reading a lot.

The trade-off is that Finnish has virtually no prepositions, which English has a lot of, and which are similarly very confusing for beginners and even intermediate English speakers. There are a few post-positions, but even these are mostly things you can pick up by ear.

Verbs have a similar story. If you've ever learned Latin, Russian or Spanish you'll feel right at home with Finnish verbs, which pack a lot of info into the conjugation, but with the benefit of requiring fewer actual words per sentence.

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