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Nick Nicholas’ answer to Can you write an English sentence, phonetically, in another script without changing the language?

About as little as it is doing to stop it on Upwork, of which Quora is an enterprise client (they’re still recruiting question writers there):

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is Quora just a site where shills ask questions anonymously so they can answer them and promote themselves and/or their companies?

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?

And it looks like 50c an answer is the rate there too:

I’m looking for someone to search for questions about how to play/train on Baseball/Basketball/Golf/Swimming on Quora and to post answers related to the questions by referring to what a company’s online solutions can offer. A Quora account and sample of answers shall be provided. Pay Rate: 20 answers for $10. NOTE: You should be familiar with the sports as in how to play/train or coach a sport, not the spectator part of it (news, teams, views, etc). We’re looking for those that know the following sports.

50c?! Cf. John L. Miller’s answer to Will (and should) Quora ever pay its content creators?

If I give you a computer because I like giving people computers, that makes me happy. If I give you a computer because you’re paying me $50, I no longer have the joy of giving AND it is worth more to me than $50 (even if no one else will pay anything for it), so I’m losing money and unhappy.

50c… is not going to motivate me to do the kind of answer I do for free. FFS.

I read with some… puzzlement the following answer:

It’s a win win (x2) for all the parties involved.

A freelance writer gets money.

A company gets exposure.

Quora establishes itself as the go-to place for quality content.

Users get their answers from a professional and get to discover companies related to their interests. Maybe they can even get their problems solved.

Does that 50c an answer question sound like it’ll be quality content? Does it sound like anything but spam?

One would think, at any rate, that spam prevention would be better than spam cure. Then again, one would think that Quora would take a dimmer perspective on Do My Homework questions too.

Upwork is awash with people paying freelancers to do their homework, btw. Behold: the programmers of the future. And weep for the species…

Do read this in conjunction with:

Stefan Hill’s answer to Why didn’t the Byzantine Empire have ethnic conflicts like the Ottoman Empire did?

Ethnicity was not important in the Medieval world. Common people did not have to communicate with the state. They were supposted to work and pay taxes. The best they could hope for was to be left alone.

In the 19th century that changed.

The flashpoints in the Early Byzantine Empire were religious and doctrinal, but those often ended up being closely correlated with ethnicity—particularly with dyophysitism vs monophysitism (to use each side’s pejoratives). The bulk of the peoples lost by the Empire to the Caliphate were not native speakers of Greek, after all.

After Chalcedonian Christianity, “heresies” remained a flashpoint, but you do also start seeing more clearly ethnic-based conflict. I don’t know what else to call the Uprising of Asen and Peter, for instance:

The Uprising of Asen and Peter (Bulgarian: Въстание на Асен и Петър) was a revolt of Bulgarians and Vlachs living in the theme of Paristrion of the Byzantine Empire, caused by a tax increase. It began on 26 October 1185, the feast day of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, and ended with the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled by the Asen dynasty.

In fact, the victorious brothers raised a church to the same St Demetrius whose cult site was in Salonica; in other words, they asserted religious continuity with the Empire, but not political allegiance:

After their return, many of the protesters were unwilling to join the rebellion. The brothers Peter and Asen built the Church of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki in Tarnovo, dedicated to Saint Demetrius, who was traditionally considered a patron of the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki, and claimed that the Saint had ceased to favour the Byzantines: “God had decided to free the Bulgarians and the Vlach people and to lift the yoke that they had borne for so long”.

Erica Friedman’s answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

I was able to get there a little early and meet some of the Quora Staff and speak with them. It’s very easy when one is removed from the gears of a community to imagine that nothing is being done when, in fact, a great deal is being done, just not all of it working the way we want. I came away from those talks excited and energized about the direction Quora is taking.

I’m going to do some backgrounding on this for people not blessed enough to have delved in the waters of Greek.

English makes a distinction between active and passive voices of a verb.

Homeric Greek made a distinction between active and middle voices of a verb. It distinguished between you actively doing something to the world, and you just sitting there. If you were having things done to you (passive), you’re just sitting there. If you are doing things to yourself (reflexive), you’re just sitting there. If you two are doing things to each other (reciprocal), you’re just sitting there. And if you are doing things for yourself, you are still just sitting there: in all these instances, you are not actively doing something to the world, outside of yourself.

The distinction puts some instances that in English would be active into the middle voice. The verb for sleep is in the middle voice. So is the verb for work.

So, in that division of the world, the middle voice of ‘love’ can mean all of the above: “I love for myself”, “I love myself”, and “I am loved”.

In Homeric Greek, you occasionally have a verb form in the aorist that looks somewhat different from the middle. This ended up extended to the future tense in Attic (in a very morphologically awkward way), and it was supposed to be the emergence of a distinct passive voice in those tenses, whereas the future and aorist middles kept their middle meaning (“just sitting there”, including reflexives, reciprocals, and self-benefit).

That’s the theory. In practice, you will still find aorist passive forms with middle meaning, and aorist middle forms with passive meaning: they were easily confused, and Greek writers really did confuse them. The legacy is that in Modern Greek, we only have active and passive forms in the aorist…

… and the passive forms have the same range of meanings as the Homeric middle: the forms have switched, the underlying meaning hasn’t. Remember: the middle/passive distinction only ever happened in the aorist and future, and even there it was garbled. In the present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect, Greek continued to use the one voice for both middle and passive, throughout. Greek simply got rid of the outliers in the aorist: it kept the semantics the same.

So, if I may introspect on the modern verb αγαπιέμαι: in the plural, it would be interpreted as “we love each other” (αγαπιόμαστε), and in the singular, it would be interpreted as “I am loved”. That’s not about preference of one meaning over the other, that’s about context and plausibility. Other words have different default interpretations. An inanimate subject of κλέβομαι “be stolen” is passive; a human subject will be interpreted as reciprocal (we stole each other = we eloped).

And there is the possibility of confusion between middle and passive still. I once used the middle of self-benefit with reference to shopping: I announced to my cousin that ψωνιστήκαμε “we went shopping (for things for ourselves)”. My cousin told me to shut up, because the idiomatic interpretation of the verb “to shop” in the middle/passive voice was not self-benefit, but passive: “we were shopped for, someone went shopping to buy us”. Which applies to street prostitutes.

Well, you need to know What’s Bendigo, Australia like to live in?

You need to know that Bendigo is a two hour train ride from Melbourne, and a smidgeon longer as a car ride.

You need to know that there are good foodie options to be had in Bendigo, that real estate is affordable, that the town has a visible history (it was its Victorian architecture that made me fall in love with it), and that it is large enough for life to be pleasant with all the expected modcons.

You need to also know that it is still a country town (population 100k), and that there are things you can get or experience in Melbourne that you can’t in Bendigo. But again, Melbourne is two hours away. Not six, like Mildura is.

You probably need to know that Bendigo was a flashpoint recently of conflict about whether a mosque should be built there. There were Bendigonians who were passionately against; there were also Bendigonians who were passionately for. Country Australia is relatively whitebread compared to the cities; but Bendigo does have a significant presence of overseas born residents, including refugees: a large number of Karen refugees, for example.

Oh, we Aussies, we’re a defensive lot. Not the first time I’ve seen this on Quora. And I did appreciate Alap Arslan’s answer.

Lemme have a go.

casual swearing (cursing)

Yes. I don’t think it’s uniquely Australian, but we certainly pride ourselves in swearing; the subreddit Straya • r/straya seems to use cunt as every third word. We have defined ourselves (mythologically) in opposition to British moralising, and we find American avoidance of profanity ridiculous. (I was astonished, living in California, when two delivery guys said they were looking for a restroom. No delivery guy in Australia would say anything more genteel than toilet.)

Is this uncivilised? Well, it certainly is not genteel, and it prioritises egalitarianism over respect (positive over negative politeness—in this regard; compared to Southern Mediterraneans, Aussies are still a bunch of emotionally unforthcoming Poms). And there is a special boorishness in the business elite, with none of the noblesse oblige you might see elsewhere. But as others have said on this thread, we find scepticism about deference a healthy thing. Just like Israelis do.

excessive drinking

Yes, one of our less helpful inheritances from the UK. An outbreak of drunken violence in Sydney has led to an early curfew there—and to Melbourne gloating about it.

informal culture

Much more so now than thirty years ago. People used to dress up for classical concerts or dinner; they rock up to both in jeans now. Can be seen, again, as egalitarian rather than uncivilised, but it does mean that there is less of a sense of occasion or solemnity. Australians don’t do solemnity. In fact, when I tried to solemnly launch my departmental working papers as a postgrad, I was heckled.

… Well, rephrase that. They don’t do solemnity, unless it’s one of their sacred cows. A Muslim activist raised the plight of detained refugees during Anzac Day, and got attacked for it universally.

disrespect toward or suspicious of authority figures and authority generally

Overstated. Yes, people are contemptuous of politicians, and routinely vote informal. Yes, people are suspicious of ceremony, and are reluctant to offer deference. Something they again are quite proud of, as you’ll have seen here.

On the other hand, their obedience of laws and norms is distressingly reflexive. I had a friend from Eastern Germany, who was aghast at how unquestioningly Australians obey the law; “social consensus” happens very quickly here, and the nanny state finds fertile ground among the citizenry.

sports obsessed

Yes, there is a big sports culture, and sports chews up a disproportionate amount of public discourse. Australia isn’t really unique in that; and Australia does at least have a culture of public participation in sport, which is rather healthier than just collecting stats about it on the couch.

arrogant

Well, yes. Australia is compensating now for generations of cultural inferiority complex and tugging the forelock to The Mother Country, by truly believing they are the best country on earth, and deflecting criticism. (As again you will have noted in this thread.) The post-Howard brand of nationalism is much more po-faced and prickly than the understated wisecracking about God’s Own Country that went on before Howard. And I don’t think most Australians really believe that they have anything to learn from any other countries.

Necrologue: at least 100 followers. No exceptions. Well, one exception I made on April Fool’s Day, but that was a Let It Burn kind of day anyway.

Argologue: no restriction.

Trebizond is derived from the Ancient Greek Trapezous (genitive Trapezountos, hence Modern Greek Trapezounda), meaning ‘table-like’, and referring to the mountain formation in the area.

Per People and Culture: Trebižat River,

There are two theories on how the river got its name. The first one says that it was named “Trebižat” because it escapes from the surface three times. According to the second theory, the name comes from the Italian “il trebizatto”, meaning the river is rich in eels.

So, unlikely, and I wouldn’t have thought there’s a clear reason why you’d name the river after such a far-off city anyway. Especially when the river gets a different name each of the nine times it resurfaces above ground to begin with (Trebižat (river) – Wikipedia)—so none of the originally named instances were particularly long or, I’d have thought, widely known.

It’s a comparison you hear often (“Australia: a combination of the best parts of California and England”), and it’s not unfounded:

• Both are warmish—by Anglosphere standards
• Both are informal—by Anglosphere standards (insert “by Anglosphere standards” in all the following)
• Both are outgoing and friendly according to their own self-perception
• Both prioritise a relaxed lifestyle
• Both promote a beach culture
• Both have discovered winemaking
• Both have had (at least historically) a sense of optimism about the future
• Both got established through gold rushes

Having lived in both, California is still much closer to the American norm than anything in Australia, and I think the similarities are on the superficial side. For example, both are outgoing and friendly, but I still found Californians to be too in-your-face for me.