this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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I have a YouTube account that I use only for Spanish language videos (to help learn Spanish), and saw this. Translates to: "China is already living in 2050 but, at what cost? This is Shenzhen, the city of the future."

I really need to get started learning Mandarin and hope to god "at what cost" isn't a thing there too

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[–] CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net 11 points 23 hours ago

In my experience the right-wing anti-china people in lat-am are so focused on crime that they are, if anything, pro surveillance. It is the achilles heel of the ambient US worship engineered by the jakarta method as applied to our hemisphere.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago

At what cost? solidarity How are we going to pay for it?

Club 'No one gives a shit.'

[–] WhatDoYouMeanPodcast@hexbear.net 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

"At what cost?" is the English version of ですね (desu ne). It's a sentence stopper with a little Chinese-accusatory inflection at the end. It's a tense in American English. You have the cop violence tense which is ascended passive tense. Then you have Chinese-accusatory tense which is jealous present tense.

The US has like a military and private panopticon by the way. They use one to see if you'd make a good mass shooter and the other to sell you things the moment it looks like you're sad.

[–] SummerIsTooWarm@hexbear.net 20 points 1 day ago

Isn't UK the place with the most cameras deployed by the government? And in the US it's done by private companies like Flock and Ring. Not even to speak about the giant privacy invasion done by social media

[–] Dort_Owl@hexbear.net 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The argument that China is always watching you with cameras loses impact when western social media collects and shares peoples biometric data every chance it can.

[–] Elysia@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

As a proud American I want to pay a Ring subscription for the police to spy on me, my neighbors and anyone passing by! No government handouts! frothingfash

[–] Dort_Owl@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You'll give your jizz sample to the private market and you'll like it!

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

And you'll bet on Kalshi about its sperm cell/microplastic ratio

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)
[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've learned Spanish on my own I really want to do Mandarin next but man is that a daunting one

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's a good way to avoid doomscrolling, like any other hobby. I still manage to do both tho

(My comment is a word by word translation which is most likely unnatural/incorrect but that's the joke)

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Yeah for sure. For a while I did nothing but watch Spanish videos during all my free time. I'm gonna take an exam in the next year or two hoping for C1 level and if I get that I will really start looking at Mandarin.

I'd definitely be doomscrolling 小红书 and calling it language study though lmao

[–] Vampire@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Spanish and English are only kinda-sorta 'different languages'

[–] moss_icon@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not really. English is a Germanic language whereas Spanish is a Romance language. They borrow some words from each other but overall they’re quite different both in translation and structure.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

English is weird because even though it is a Germanic language it has such a huge lexicon borrowed from Romance languages which can definitely help when learning one from the other. But yeah beyond that they are very different.

[–] Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

English is a bastardized language. It has everything. Just like the British Museum.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 8 points 1 day ago

I mean, compared to Mandarin for sure. But they're still quite different and it takes years for a speaker of one to learn the other.