Yes, all languages are made up. But some are more made up :-)

One of the reasons that I love free / libre / open source is its high acceptance of Esperanto as an interface language. I myself also helped translate bunch of them (now I am searching for money to pay others to translate them :).

Facebook had a program of volunteer translations years ago. I helped a bit by rating existing translations. Then some law came that prevented for-profit corporations to use volunteers as translators and the program was shut down. Similar with Google, who still has parts of interface in Esperanto. Rumors go that Gmail was once fully translated into Esperanto, but the political decision went to not deploy it…

Heh, I am pretty deep embedded in the Esperanto community. I have started 18 years ago and during that time made a lot of friends, some enemies, some love partners (really, we talk together in Esperanto!). In fact, I have founded a nonprofit nongovernmental organisation that support volunteers to write better Wikipedia in Esperanto - and I love the work and it even pays me sometimes. And because of my activities, I have travel around the planet. I live in Europe, and once I have traveled in one month to Seoul, South Korea and Benin and Togo in Africa to Esperanto meetings. That was crazy! During that month I have fulfilled my 2 childhood dreams - to climb a bamboo and to eat a sugar cane ;-)

So, yeah, it enriched my life pretty drastically. I would say that the the biggest long term benefit that I get was wast widening of my horizons. The world became “smaller” for me / more of it became “my home” and I have become more “world citizen”. It may sound cheese but it feels great :-)

There are many local groups over the planet, some event practically every day, many Telegram groups with pretty active community. On Lemmy, there is mostly !esperanto@sopuli.xyz

Beside obvious recommendations from other posts (visit a doctor, do exercise, eat healthy, sleep well etc)…

The truth is - aging is a bitch! It starts probably even before birth and start clearly manifesting itself usually in 30s. So welcome!

And the “best” part is - currently we do not have a medicine to reverse it, so at some point at the age of around 80-90 it will most probably kill you unless something else kills you first, or unless we develop effective cure. I don’t want to be morbid here or spread anxiety. I am writing this to accent the seriousness of aging and the need to tackle it. You can request your government to provide grants to researchers to reverse aging or if you are European propose researchers to apply for already existing grant call from EIC, propose your medical universities to participate in XPRIZE Healthspan, etc.

As you are quite young, if you are generally healthy, the best thing you can do really is doing the basics (as your mom told you) AND ESPECIALLY campaigning for development of aging-reversal therapies! Those are the only hope to be still kicking well in 80s in good health, and beyond.

If you are more interested, there is a community !longevity@mander.xyz and I also recommend the book Ageless by Andrew Steele, which provides great balance between scientific rigor and entertaining approach to public.

Totally!

And probably a multi-tier EU would be great too! Imagine Ukraine being able to join it’s next tier already next year instead of waiting for 3-5 ears to get the full membership.

Absolutely! The videos that helped me to understand English was podcast-like. I am a big fan of audiobooks and podcasts. Mostly to give some rest to my eyes, and to consume them while I am walking outside to protect my physical health.

I learnt it since I was 3. I was literally forced to do it instead of playing outside with my friends. And always out was hard…

Then I found the language Esperanto, that is supposed to be 10x easier to learn and use. I tried it and I can conform that to be true 😊

But I needed English for my (volunteer) work in a social movement, so I slowly learn it. But still had big problems to understand spoken English. Then I found English videos about topic that was very investing for me. I was trying hard to understand and finally I did.

Long story short, I still prefer to speak Esperanto, and much more people should, IMO.

The fact that power of speakers matter is very valid while those speakers are centered on the ethnocentric level of care, or lower (see eg Integral theory by Ken Wilber: Loevinger; Spiral Dynamics etc). But when society as a whole develops, they care more about other groups and humankind as a whole. Then it is much easier to do adopt a lingua franca than serves them all rather than just forcing smaller nations to use language of the hegemon of the time.

While it is definitely true that in such case English would be quite fair inside of EU, it also puts EU in worse position in outside world where USA have those advantages…

Beside that there is a viable alternative. Remember that Izrael has revived its ancient language, and Indonesia created a new one based on language of one of their small islands. That language united nation of hundreds of millions!

We can use Esperanto. It is artificial in origin, so no one nation speaks it natively (native individuals do, but not nations). It is designed to be easy to learn and use (I personally confirm it - 2 years of autodidacticly learning Esperanto was equivalent of 15 years of school learning of English). So even people who never heard about it can very quickly get to very usable level.

And possibly the best part is that it can serve as a language that units humankind as a whole. We all can preserve our national language for national communication and use Esperanto for international communication. This will not happen tomorrow, but with political support it can happen quickly. Until then, many people, as me, use it daily and support it’s spread.

Yes.

Sounds like Elon Musk who tries to buy old Russian ICBM, but without the nuke 😅

Eliminating privacy in order to “protect children”. The old discussion and misuse 😬

I am still amazed by the English thing in EU. Only 2 EU nations, and even quite small ones, speaks English natively, and not even as their only one language. In the same time, who speaks English natively? One country that left our club, one country that wages economic war against us, couple of great partner countries outside of Europe, and couple of others.

When we wanted to unite more, we promised to abandon our national currencies and adopt euro. But we still play small when it comes to language…

I personally also stopped buying F-35s.

It is hard to imagine just from those photos. And that is probably a good thing 😬