That discussion is what prompted me to go back and write the original

This is a very clever idea.

However, I realize that I would never want to use something like this that would change over time. E.g. if I ran it every 6 months and last year "db" produced "debug", while this year it produces "database". Because talk about messing up my muscle memory and habits. And the language I write changes very much over time.

So I'd actually be much more interested in a "universal" version of this -- if you ran it across books and e-mails and text messages from thousands of authors covering diverse backgrounds and contexts, then what would most reliably help everyone?

E.g. expanding "t" to "the" seems like a no-brainer, just like "st" to "something". Is there a minimal set of, say, 200-500 of these that could simply be turned into a "standard keyboard" that everyone could learn?

On a historical level, I agree it's unfair. The Chamorus should never have had your land taken against your will. However, there are now a lot of Americans born on Guam, and it's to the point where it seems like it would also be unfair to kick out those people born there, with their families living on Guam for decades & who are now the majority.

I'm not arguing against you, necessarily. It's a hard situation and maybe Americans leaving is the better solution.

How far "back" do you think it's fair for decolonization advocates to go? Do you think the same argument you're using here, applied to other places (ex. the continental U.S.) is also correct?

-

Addendum via Wikipedia: "The United States Department of the Interior approved a $300,000 grant for decolonization education" in 2016[0]. No idea what to make of this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guam#Government_and_politics

I have no particular opinion on Guam or its governance, but if Chamorus are a minority of the people living there (& a minority of the people born there?) it feels kind of unfair for them to unilaterally make major decisions and remove the majority group from the area.

Ex. obviously what American settlers did to mainland Natives was heinous and should not have happened, but it's less clear that Natives of the current generation should be able to unilaterally vote to remove Americans that are born here now.

Is there a dissimilarity with Guam I'm missing?

Maleffa yu ni kostumbren taotao tano, kon todo i lengguahe; mampos Amerikanon pao asu yu pago...and yet any way I looked at it---whether as an ethnic native of the Marianas who grew up with wideband exposure to what definitely seemed like a pronounced bimodal economic distribution; or as a veteran who eagerly and proudly served for a decade; or as an assimilated American who benefits from the resources and opportunities the mainland has to offer---this article managed to stir up some deeply repressed emotions that brutally ripped my heart into three.

This works really well for me too. I built a task tracker tool (tasktxt.com) that has built-in timers for each task so you choose a task, then press "start" and now you feel more committed to doing that one particular task. It helps me focus on one task at a time.

>it's not really worth fighting, I don't think.

Absolutely.

Yet it's hardly a secret either and something you would expect someone who graduated university writing for a relatively well known newspaper to be able to get right. It's trivial to most readers of English whether they got it right, sure. It's also trivial to get it right and they did not. It looks bad and casts bad light on the newspaper for accuracy and getting details correct. Needless to say there are plenty of details that may not be as trivial to get right but are non-trivial in their effect of your understanding of the story. How does something as batshit simple as this winding up smeared on the WSJ's face in such a nothing story affect the readers' estimate of how often they get important details wrong? That assessment is up to each reader but I'm pretty sure we can all agree it probably doesn't help much.

I hate these people. It’s the wrong way to live. Life is not about getting a high score in productivity or financially. I pity the people in their lives who are being optimized like some kind of machine/chore. It sounds so loveless