Thanks, MB
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Is Redondo pretty safe too?
Most places that are not obviously extremely sketchy are safe. Itâs a huge city, crime can happen anywhere, but there arenât many places Iâd consider legit unsafe.
Check the r/losangeles and r/lalist subreddits, there are often sublets on there. Just based on stuff I see, I think $2K/mo for a studio will work in most neighborhoods, just not the absolute most desirable ones like Venice/Santa Monica etc.
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I was thinking youâd have a hard time finding a place for $2k in Redondo (other than maybe North Redondo which is pretty separate). If you can get anywhere near the ocean in Redondo, that is good. Itâs not real freeway convenient, but good.
This is very small and right at your $2k limit, but is certainly a good neighborhood.
https://www.apartments.com/424-s-broadway-redondo-beach-ca-unit-b/fsfvgdr/
This is worth a look too. Perfectly good neighborhood. Couple hundred dollars cheaper. A little further from the beach, but itâs a quieter area. Big complex that comes with pool/spa/fitness/laundry stuff.
https://www.apartments.com/milano-apartments-torrance-ca/z288pry/
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Yeah, that one is actually on my list after you suggested Torrance.
If youâre going to be in LA during the summer, being within a mile or so of the beach is big. It almost never gets really hot, unlike where LFS lives or most of LA. (Torrance is fine. Like Upland is hella hot.)
Yes.
For LA in general, if thereâs no bars on the windows youâre fine.
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When you consider that no one has ever learned a language using Duolingo, maybe itâs not so bad.
Incidentally, I translated Japanese for nearly two decades. I saw the writing on the wall a few years ago and moved into a different field while many of my stubborn colleagues kept insisting that capable machine translation was still decades away.
I have no doubt that today many of them are searching frantically for their next career alternative.
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Is machine translation really that good now? google translate on random web pages is still terrible as far as i know.
Not yet perfect, but getting massively better. Try out a site called Deepl, which is a kind of AI translation site. Far better than Google, which as you say is terrible.
And ChatGPT does a respectable job and will only continue to improve, as weâre only scratching the surface of what AI will ultimately be able to do.
Translators as we have known them will largely become a thing of the past within the next five years. Maybe only very literary and other very specialized fields will still require humans.
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The way voice recognition is proceeding, weâre going to have Universal Translators in 5 years.
One night I told my google smart speaker to play white noise and it made fart noises.
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This is actually a little short sighted imo. We wonât need voice recognition if the computers can just have the conversations for us.
We use Deepl to translate documents to French most of the time instead of sending them to our translation bureau. Can confirm itâs excellent.
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Duoâs not a smart way to learn a language, but Iâll defend language apps as a low-barrier, low-impact way for casual learners to get the basics. This seems like a classic example of enshittification: Duolingo was putting out a service that people liked for years, now that itâs got people pot-committed Duoâs been shedding features and options (whereâd the community notes go?) and now this. Iâm jumping over to Busuu.
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All the things I wanted to be when I was 18 are being phased out. I loved everything about learning conversational Spanish
My career is instead what I wanted to be when I was 4, and everyone said 12 years ago that it would be gone by now
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This basically exists now? Canât find it right now, but someone recently did a demo of live translation of a video call, with video editing for lip synch.
I admit to being one of the few pro-Yglesias people here, but I thought he wrote an excellent column today on why dentists (more accurately, the dentistry industry in the US) are bad.
The problem with dental insurance is that because itâs not regulated particularly stringently, you canât typically buy a product that insures you against the risk of catastrophically high dental bills. Instead, you get plans with relatively low annual maximums, which defeats the purpose of having insurance. What you are essentially doing is pre-paying for routine dental care, which doesnât make a lot of sense conceptually â you end up paying an average payment $47 per month, when an uninsured tooth cleaning runs about $80-$100 on average. For the record, $47 times 12 is $564. It doesnât pencil out.
One of the best-polling proposals from Build Back Better was to have Medicare include dental coverage, which would make sense because itâs actually possible to deliver real insurance value in that context. Whatâs more, the government could take advantage of Medicareâs massive scale to push the per unit cost of treatments down. But of course dentists donât like that idea, so the American Dental Association lobbied against providing seniors with dental coverage. But itâs not like dentists would be out in the street, impoverished, if they had to accept lower fees.
Itâs something that has mildly annoyed me over the years, as I unthinkingly choose to continue my dental coverage during Open Enrollment each year. But this is an incredibly dumb system and should absolutely be rolled into regular health insurance!
He also gets into the shady practices of dentists recommending completely unnecessary treatments, which is something that drove me away from my last dentist, who acted like more of a used car salesman than a health provider.
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