WTF Bites
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@Luhmann here too, but also many thousands in fines + maybe suspended prison sentence.
Edit: all that for the employer, of course.
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@Gąska
Oh yeah definitely and a big chance of the government coming back after the judgement to collect extra taxes.
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
@DogsB There's one of those crappy local TV stations in my area. I remember as a kid one day the TV program suddenly disappeared and the default Windows XP desktop appeared. Then the cursor started moving, opened a Word document and printed it, then several minutes of nothing happening, then the program returned to normal.
Someone must have hit the wrong switch.
Back in the 90s the TV listing channel of our cable system spent an entire weekend flashing an Amiga Guru Meditation Error. Someone finally got around to rebooting the poor thing early Monday morning.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x9Vado0S7M
Prevue Guide: Your Cable Company's Secret Amiga
In the '90s, the Prevue Guide—the scrolling spreadsheet of a cable channel that told you what was on the air—kept the Amiga alive way after Commodore died.
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rock-solid stability of C++
Colleague in the office working on another project is writing some services that mainly bounce around JSON packets over REST APIs, writing some bits to the database and filling in others from there. The customer (where the architects and some developers are; we are subcontractors) decided they are to be written in C++ (using libuw for event-loop and a very ugly in-house wrapper over rapidjson that fails to make the json parsing type-safe and declarative and just makes it more verbose)…
The client, which is also part of that project, is also in C++, but that has historical reasons as it's 20 years old MFC application. But the services are brand new. And they don't even need high performance, because the clients can't handle (and don't need to) more than a few messages a second and even big end customers (who have dedicated set of servers each) probably don't get over thousand clients. So it would be perfectly fine in Node/JS, Python, Java or Go, take maybe third of the time to develop and be more stable. But no, the folks at customer are apparently completely oblivious about any technologies created in this millennium.
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@Bulb It's the rock-solid stability of the Jello Tower in downtown SF during the Big One.
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In Europe, written contract is needed to establish employment relationship, which grants you 19437954 additional rights from Employment Code even if they're not explicitly enumerated in the contract.
Well, ehm, so I was not employed there for some 6 years?
In case some of you might misunderstand the situation: with the exception of some shits of signed paper, everything was correct according to employment, social security, tax, etc. laws.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
In Europe, written contract is needed to establish employment relationship, which grants you 19437954 additional rights from Employment Code even if they're not explicitly enumerated in the contract.
Well, ehm, so I was not employed there for some 6 years?
In case some of you might misunderstand the situation: with the exception of some shits of signed paper, everything was correct according to employment, social security, tax, etc. laws.
I think you can observe the pattern: written contract is required in the "eastern" countries (and this is deinitely not limited to employment contracts). You know, the ones that are usually described as "less regulated" on this forum, for some unfathomable reason.
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@Kamil-Podlesak IIRC @BernieTheBernie is Czech, so not much less eastern than Poland.I done goofed. Nevermind.@BernieTheBernie what I meant is, Polish law literally says that written contract is required for employment (art. 29 § 2 k.p.) I always thought it's the same across Europe. TIL, I guess.
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Went to Amazon and tried to watch a movie trailer.
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Went to Amazon and tried to watch a movie trailer.
Were you trying to watch that movie with your Lynx browser?
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@BernieTheBernie is Czech
Hm, let me czeck that out.
Long ago, when some Karel was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, reigning from Karlstejn castle near Prague, the village where I was born was part of the province Bohemia.
Some when shortly after 1945, some czech nationalists wanted to get more territory in the west and wanted to integrate my home village into Czeskoslovensko.
Well, I guess, I am not so czech.
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I always thought it's the same across Europe.
My understanding is that the lack of written requirement was done for backwards compatibility with existing labor without contracts and that later it was never added just because it acts as a fail safe. Employers are very much inclined to provide a written contract or they will have a hard time convincing a judge in any dispute regarding the employment.
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I always thought it's the same across Europe.
My understanding is that the lack of written requirement was done for backwards compatibility with existing labor without contracts and that later it was never added just because it acts as a fail safe. Employers are very much inclined to provide a written contract or they will have a hard time convincing a judge in any dispute regarding the employment.
Here in Poland, it's to fight those evil capitalists who don't want to pay due taxes. If it walks like an employment contract and quacks like an employment contract, it's an employment contract. A one-time gig to work on a single project, but you have to show up at 9AM? That's employment. You're hired as a temporary HPC for several projects and you're free to work whenever you want, but your manager tells you which project to work on right now? That's employment. You're self-employed in your own registered business but have only one customer? That's employment and your "customer" better pay all your social security that's due.
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I always thought it's the same across Europe.
My understanding is that the lack of written requirement was done for backwards compatibility with existing labor without contracts and that later it was never added just because it acts as a fail safe. Employers are very much inclined to provide a written contract or they will have a hard time convincing a judge in any dispute regarding the employment.
Here in Poland, it's to fight those evil capitalists who don't want to pay due taxes.
Wait, I though that it's the Western Europe that's socialist, Poland is ruled by god-abiding righwingers!
If it walks like an employment contract and quacks like an employment contract, it's an employment contract. A one-time gig to work on a single project, but you have to show up at 9AM? That's employment. You're hired as a temporary HPC for several projects and you're free to work whenever you want, but your manager tells you which project to work on right now? That's employment. You're self-employed in your own registered business but have only one customer? That's employment and your "customer" better pay all your social security that's due.
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution? Nah, what am I saying - peasants must be kept down. Same taxes for everyone would be communism or something.Actually... is it possible for employee in Poland to deduct work-related expenses? Like commuting cost, dress (if needed in the job), relocation cost, home office costs, etc?
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution? Nah, what am I saying - peasants must be kept down. Same taxes for everyone would be communism or something.It's because there were cases where all the employees of a company were encouraged to be “self-employed” to reduce taxes. I know the practice got smacked down hard here in the UK as well, as it passed the judicial sniff test for tax fraud.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution? Nah, what am I saying - peasants must be kept down. Same taxes for everyone would be communism or something.It's because there were cases where all the employees of a company were encouraged to be “self-employed” to reduce taxes. I know the practice got smacked down hard here in the UK as well, as it passed the judicial sniff test for tax fraud.
That does not really explain the reason, that is just another example of the effect: "self-employment" reduces taxes --> it is used for tax fraud. So, why do employees pay more taxes?
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It's because there were cases where all the employees of a company were encouraged to be “self-employed” to reduce taxes.
.. and bypass labour laws & agreements.
A few years ago (perhaps still), it was a pretty common story that companies had hiring freezes, but could contract consultants. New graduates (and jobseekers in general) were either referred to an existing consultancy company or "encouraged"/helped to set up their own. Ending (or, rather, not renewing) a contract with a company is a lot easier than firing somebody, except that the end result is technically the same when the person in question is the single employee of a "business" with a single customer.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution? Nah, what am I saying - peasants must be kept down. Same taxes for everyone would be communism or something.It's because there were cases where all the employees of a company were encouraged to be “self-employed” to reduce taxes. I know the practice got smacked down hard here in the UK as well, as it passed the judicial sniff test for tax fraud.
That does not really explain the reason, that is just another example of the effect: "self-employment" reduces taxes --> it is used for tax fraud. So, why do employees pay more taxes?
The employer has to pay a bunch of social stuff. With self employment you have to pay you own way. Many fail to account for this and doesn't charge enough.
In reality, buying manpower instead of hiring should be more expensive, not less. If for nothing else then because of the increase in risk for the worker.
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You're self-employed in your own registered business but have only one customer? That's employment and your "customer" better pay all your social security that's due.
Technically they already can prosecute for this. They just don't for political reasons.
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Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-personI dunno, there are good reasons for it. When you're self-employed you're taking on all the risk associated with managing your own income, holidays, sickness etc, and you're expected to plan for that. When you're employed you aren't expected to do all that, your employer is responsible, and that means there's a cost overhead which is a lot more explicit.
(It's not really 'tax' in the UK, it's NI contributions, the idea of which is to pay for these statutory employment benefits, though in reality NI is very close to a tax.)
The problem is that employers can pressure employees to be 'self-employed', when in reality they are working for that company, pushing all the risk onto the worker (but none of the normal benefits of self-employment). That's what IR35 rules and the like are about.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
If it walks like an employment contract and quacks like an employment contract, it's an employment contract. A one-time gig to work on a single project, but you have to show up at 9AM? That's employment. You're hired as a temporary HPC for several projects and you're free to work whenever you want, but your manager tells you which project to work on right now? That's employment. You're self-employed in your own registered business but have only one customer? That's employment and your "customer" better pay all your social security that's due.
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution?Employee's social contribution is a percent of their salary, business owner can pay whatever they feel like (and have their benefits scaled accordingly), as long as it's at least as much as they'd pay on minimum wage.
Actually... is it possible for employee in Poland to deduct work-related expenses? Like commuting cost, dress (if needed in the job), relocation cost, home office costs, etc?
Not sure about details, but there is this thing called "costs of earning income", but AFAIK it's very limited compared to deductions you can do as a business. There is a "standard deduction" of 250zł/month, or 300zł/month if you work outside your town (used to be 111,25zł and 139,06zł respectively until October last year) - it's only if your costs are higher than that that you have to document anything. From what I heard, it's mainly used for commute costs. Quick googling indicates that costs of dressing yourself up are explicitly excluded from allowed deductions.
Of course, it wouldn't be Poland if there wasn't anything grossly unfair about income costs for one particular group. You see, if your income is from copyrightable work - say, you're an actor, singer, composer or painter - you get to deduct 50% of your total income as your costs. That effectively reduces your owed tax by half. Ostensibly that's to promote culture or something. But wait - you know what else is copyrightable? Computer programs. Yes, yes. Programmers get to use that deduction too. For their entire income - even when they're salaried employees and making software with zero creative value. The entire IT industry in Poland pays half as much taxes as everyone else, thanks to this one weird trick.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution? Nah, what am I saying - peasants must be kept down. Same taxes for everyone would be communism or something.It's because there were cases where all the employees of a company were encouraged to be “self-employed” to reduce taxes. I know the practice got smacked down hard here in the UK as well, as it passed the judicial sniff test for tax fraud.
That does not really explain the reason, that is just another example of the effect: "self-employment" reduces taxes --> it is used for tax fraud. So, why do employees pay more taxes?
The employer has to pay a bunch of social stuff. With self employment you have to pay you own way. Many fail to account for this and doesn't charge enough.
In reality, buying manpower instead of hiring should be more expensive, not less. If for nothing else then because of the increase in risk for the worker.In Poland, self-employment usually results both in higher income for the employee and lower expenses for the employer - even after paying the social shit. And that's before you even account for the fact that, as a VAT payer, you effectively get 23% off on cars, laptops, coffee, and a bunch of other stuff you'd have to buy for yourself anyway.
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@bobjanova said in WTF Bites:
The problem is that employers can pressure employees to be 'self-employed', when in reality they are working for that company, pushing all the risk onto the worker (but none of the normal benefits of self-employment). That's what IR35 rules and the like are about.
Same here in NL. Also the compensation for a self-employed contractor may be higher than their wage, and probably enough to cover required insurances, but not always enough higher to compensate for the additional optional insurances, buffer for sometimes not having a contract, etc.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution?Employee's social contribution is a percent of their salary, business owner can pay whatever they feel like (and have their benefits scaled accordingly), as long as it's at least as much as they'd pay on minimum wage.
Yes, and they wonder why are people abusing that. Sure, you can try to scare people "wooo, if you wont pay social insurance, you will get shitty rent" but somehow that is not working (because who beleives believes in non-shitty rent in 2050).
Actually... is it possible for employee in Poland to deduct work-related expenses? Like commuting cost, dress (if needed in the job), relocation cost, home office costs, etc?
Not sure about details, but there is this thing called "costs of earning income", but AFAIK it's very limited compared to deductions you can do as a business. There is a "standard deduction" of 250zł/month, or 300zł/month if you work outside your town (used to be 111,25zł and 139,06zł respectively until October last year) - it's only if your costs are higher than that that you have to document anything. From what I heard, it's mainly used for commute costs. Quick googling indicates that costs of dressing yourself up are explicitly excluded from allowed deductions.
Trivia: All these things are valid employee expenses in Germany. Of course, there are limitations, with lots and lots and plenty of rules.
Of course, it wouldn't be Poland if there wasn't anything grossly unfair about income costs for one particular group. You see, if your income is from copyrightable work - say, you're an actor, singer, composer or painter - you get to deduct 50% of your total income as your costs. That effectively reduces your owed tax by half. Ostensibly that's to promote culture or something. But wait - you know what else is copyrightable? Computer programs. Yes, yes. Programmers get to use that deduction too. For their entire income - even when they're salaried employees and making software with zero creative value. The entire IT industry in Poland pays half as much taxes as everyone else, thanks to this one weird trick.
Trivia: Poland is not the only country with this system (I think it's quite common among the east-EU countries). Actually, the "copyrightable work" is quite a harsh limit and 50% is rather on the lower side. Sadly, I cannot find any convenient comparison table, that would be quite interesting.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
I am not so czech.
so ... it doesn't czech out?
I heard there was a big scandal in the school system there, teachers were giving good grades to students who didn't deserve them. They were accused of passing bad Czechs.
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Here in Poland, it's to fight those evil capitalists who don't want to pay due taxes. If it walks like an employment contract and quacks like an employment contract, it's an employment contract.
That's also how it works in France, partly for tax reasons (as always, if the state can get some money...) but also for the numerous protections that the "employee" status guarantees (paid holidays, pension contributions etc.).
There is relatively little in the law, but the jurisprudence has clearly defined an employment as a triple subordination to the power of the employer to give orders, control how (and where etc.) they are executed, and sanction failings to execute them. This came back in a very recent ruling about Uber by the top court that said drivers were employees (strictly speaking, in one specific case they ruled that a driver was an employee...), but there is nothing new in this jurisprudence really (an article I read mentioned cases from the 80's about "independent contractors" in building works that were not at all "independent" and were ruled as being employees).
A one-time gig to work on a single project, but you have to show up at 9AM? That's employment. You're hired as a temporary HPC for several projects and you're free to work whenever you want, but your manager tells you which project to work on right now? That's employment. You're self-employed in your own registered business but have only one customer? That's employment and your "customer" better pay all your social security that's due.
I suspect that would be the same here, yes, because those special conditions would reveal one of the three "subordinations", although of course it would depend on all the details of the situation, whether it's systematic in your way of working or not etc.
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If it walks like an employment contract and quacks like an employment contract, it's an employment contract.
Isn't that the case everywhere? If you can make a contract that effectively works like an employment contract but is not legally one, workers' rights laws become pointless.
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WTF of my day: So, this may be hard to translate. So, some explanations first:
The German language has this property where the ending of a word determines its gender. "Der Schüler" is a male pupil, "Die Schülerin" is a female pupil. This, of course, leads to sometimes annoying effects where you have to write both versions in order to be inclusive. Sometimes you simply do it by writing both words "Schüler & Schülerinnen", sometimes you capitalize the I ("SchülerInnen") or you use a * (Schüler*innen) and so on. It's called "gendern".
It's a bit of a mess but, well, it's not the end of the world. For me, at least.
For others, it's the Harbinger of Ragnarök, will usher in Felwinter and lead to the Desolation of All The Things.
Case in point, a politician of our AfD (henceforth called Alliance for Dipshits) was frothing at the mouth due to an article. You see, the male version of a driver while driving is "Der Fahrer" while you might call the female pendant "Die Fahrende". (Highlighted the pertinent end for you)
Which resulted in this:
Translation:
The daily gender idiocy: Now even driving lanes (Fahrspur) are gendered. How about using the good old Duden dictionary instead of left-green ideology?
He obviously thought "Fahrspurende" to be the female version of the word "Fahrspur".
First of all, we Germans only use gendered words for stuff which actually can be gendered (a traffic lane is most definitely not one of those!), secondly, he fell prey to another German property: The habit of simply attaching words after words to yield unwieldy word monsters (Infamous example: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft - a company for steam boats on the river Donau)
A simple hyphen will make clear where he went wrong:
The newspaper meant a "Fahrspur-Ende". The end of a traffic lane.
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@Rhywden But what about the Frau? Did she fährt in Baustelle or what?
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@hungrier Yes, sie tat exactly das.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
I always thought it's the same across Europe.
My understanding is that the lack of written requirement was done for backwards compatibility with existing labor without contracts and that later it was never added just because it acts as a fail safe. Employers are very much inclined to provide a written contract or they will have a hard time convincing a judge in any dispute regarding the employment.
Here in Poland, it's to fight those evil capitalists who don't want to pay due taxes.
Wait, I though that it's the Western Europe that's socialist, Poland is ruled by god-abiding righwingers!
If it walks like an employment contract and quacks like an employment contract, it's an employment contract. A one-time gig to work on a single project, but you have to show up at 9AM? That's employment. You're hired as a temporary HPC for several projects and you're free to work whenever you want, but your manager tells you which project to work on right now? That's employment. You're self-employed in your own registered business but have only one customer? That's employment and your "customer" better pay all your social security that's due.
Seriously, though:
are the "due taxes" different for employee, and for self-employed business-person, especially if they do the same job? Maybe removing this discrepancy would be simpler solution? Nah, what am I saying - peasants must be kept down. Same taxes for everyone would be communism or something.Actually... is it possible for employee in Poland to deduct work-related expenses? Like commuting cost, dress (if needed in the job), relocation cost, home office costs, etc?
Not as a rule, no. Taxpayers earning income from own labour (for simplicity's sake: such as are employed based on the Labour Code) may deduct fixed monthly/annual costs for tax purposes , depending on the number of employers and whether they reside in the same locale as their employer (annual caps may be lower than 12x monthly cost, per employer, if more than one employer is involved).
Things are different if you are a Civil Code-based contractor/service provider (which isn't the same as self-employed). Here you have a choice of 20% of pre-tax income as cost (50% if copyrights are involved; again simplifying) or actual documented costs, if higher.
A truly self-employed person (IOW, a sole proprietor), may deduct all documented costs of business. They will however be liable for the entirety of their Social Security contributions (for employees, these are split between the employee and employer). A sole proprietor also has more options wrt how they are taxed.
Employee's social contribution is a percent of their salary, business owner can pay whatever they feel like (and have their benefits scaled accordingly), as long as it's at least as much as they'd pay on minimum wage.
This is false. The declared calculation base may be no lower than 60% of forecast average remuneration (published every year) for pension, disability and accident insurance (as well as the voluntary illness insurance) and no lower than 75% of the average remuneration in the business sector (term of art in Polish national statistics), including shares in profit, for Q4 of the preceding calendar year.
Needless to say, nearly all business owners subject to this payment schedule pay the minimum amounts (which may be out of any proportion to their actual earnings). Pretty much the only reason to pay more is if you expect to be eligible for benefits in the near future (which will be dependent on contributions paid). Proving that your higher payments aren't simply a dodge to get more out of the system than you're putting in may take some work.
Of course, it wouldn't be Poland if there wasn't anything grossly unfair about income costs for one particular group. You see, if your income is from copyrightable work - say, you're an actor, singer, composer or painter - you get to deduct 50% of your total income as your costs. That effectively reduces your owed tax by half. Ostensibly that's to promote culture or something.
The reason is that copyrightable works typically involve a high up-front cost that is difficult to quantify. Say you take half-a-year to write a novel which you then sell to the publisher. Clearly this involved a significant cost to you (in terms of opportunity cost, the equivalent of six months' salary you could have earned doing a job), but how much is that in actual money? The 50% deduction is a simplification in a high-investment, high-risk situation where the amounts that can be earned are hard to quantify.There have been numerous attempts to carve out standard ways for taxpayers to exploit this, at the cost of certainty of law. I often get asked to opine whether a particular contract may be subject to the 50% deduction or not.
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It's a bit of a mess but, well, it's not the end of the world. For me, at least.
For others, it's the Harbinger of Ragnarök, will usher in Felwinter and lead to the Desolation of All The Things.What's your opinion on singular "they" (grammatically singular - "they is going home")? For me, that's an ultimate proof that grammar is dead and a sign that total linguistic anarchy is coming soon. I'm okay with semantically singular "they", but I can't stand the mix-and-match of grammatical forms some people push on us. So not quite #2 there, but close.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
Well, ehm, so I was not employed there for some 6 years?
In case some of you might misunderstand the situation: with the exception of some shits of signed paper, everything was correct according to employment, social security, tax, etc. laws.IANAL, but in the US, I think this would just fall under the original contract as if it had been extended.
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@Gąska It would be much easier if we had something like the Finnish language has in that case. "Hän", as I understand it, is completely neutral.
Though I can safely say that we don't need the rest of the Finnish grammar...
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Not allowed to visit this site unless you allow notifications... and they would like you to believe it's an anti-spam measure.
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@CarrieVS Yeah that's called malware and tricking users. You got redirected by a malicious ad. In the past they offered you a .exe and called it a Flash Player update.
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First of all, we Germans only use gendered words for stuff which actually can be gendered (a traffic lane is most definitely not one of those!)
When I was young, my school offered the choice of studying a foreign language so I chose German, and I was introduced for the first time to the concept of "gendered words", which I still find quite strange. Apparently native German speakers have a bit of trouble with it as well.
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
@CarrieVS Yeah that's called
malware and tricking usersstandard practice on the web.
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Oh, gee, is the $1900 headset better than the $400 one?Edit: I guess it's showing market price not MSRP. Which makes me think this whole article is auto-generated. That and the fact that it's all line items and numerical comparisons, with no prose summary.
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
@CarrieVS Yeah that's called
malware and tricking usersstandard practice on the web.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska said in WTF Bites:Employee's social contribution is a percent of their salary, business owner can pay whatever they feel like (and have their benefits scaled accordingly), as long as it's at least as much as they'd pay on minimum wage.
This is false. The declared calculation base may be no lower than 60% of forecast average remuneration (published every year) for pension, disability and accident insurance (as well as the voluntary illness insurance) and no lower than 75% of the average remuneration in the business sector (term of art in Polish national statistics), including shares in profit, for Q4 of the preceding calendar year.
Okay, you get your
. But the amount is roughly the same as minimum wage social contributions (I did the math, although maybe the numbers got out of sync recently.) And anyway, my main point was...Needless to say, nearly all business owners subject to this payment schedule pay the minimum amounts (which may be out of any proportion to their actual earnings).
...this.
Of course, it wouldn't be Poland if there wasn't anything grossly unfair about income costs for one particular group. You see, if your income is from copyrightable work - say, you're an actor, singer, composer or painter - you get to deduct 50% of your total income as your costs. That effectively reduces your owed tax by half. Ostensibly that's to promote culture or something.
I'd be much more interested in you
ing the part that you cut off, where I talk about salaried programmers on regular employment contracts with monthly payments taking the 50% deduction too.There have been numerous attempts to carve out standard ways for taxpayers to exploit this, at the cost of certainty of law. I often get asked to opine whether a particular contract may be subject to the 50% deduction or not.
It's been conclusivelt settled by countless administrative decisions and court verdicts that salaried programmers are eligible as long as they actually produce code (and can prove it).
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What's your opinion on singular "they" (grammatically singular - "they is going home")? For me, that's an ultimate proof that grammar is dead and a sign that total linguistic anarchy is coming soon.
It's been dead for a long time, then :
The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they. It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since then and has gained currency in official contexts.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
What's your opinion on singular "they" (grammatically singular - "they is going home")? For me, that's an ultimate proof that grammar is dead and a sign that total linguistic anarchy is coming soon.
It's been dead for a long time, then :
The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they. It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since then and has gained currency in official contexts.
I think (but I’m not completely sure) what @Gąska is talking about is the difference (for a single person of unspecified gender) between “they are doing...” and “they is doing...”
The latter gives me a minor stroke.
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@Zerosquare The first paragraph of the article you posted draws a distinction between the singular they as used with an unknown antecedent (which has been around for a long time) and known individuals using
pronouns, which has not.Put me down for "They is going home" as reflective of linguistic anarchy.
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First of all, we Germans only use gendered words for stuff which actually can be gendered (a traffic lane is most definitely not one of those!)
When I was young, my school offered the choice of studying a foreign language so I chose German, and I was introduced for the first time to the concept of "gendered words", which I still find quite strange. Apparently native German speakers have a bit of trouble with it as well.
Most European languages have gendered words. It's just that German is the only one where genders aren't obvious by just looking at the suffix.
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How telling is it that the "recommended" apps on this Linux store thing are never five stars?
Not even the really popular shit has five stars!
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@Gąska The jurisprudence is that the law pertaining to transfer of monetary rights in copyrightable works is lex specialis with regards to costs of employment. Who am I to argue with that?
The changes I mentioned (tightening up the law) specifically qualified programming as eligible for the deduction, so... works as intended.
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@GOG the problem is in what's intended.
Singular they - Wikipedia
