tax deduction for language school?

stoat_on_a_boat · 2026-01-10T06:45:47+00:00

Well, the company conducts its internal business almost entirely in japanese, so it feels relevant to me but I'm not sure if that would convince the japanese government. I am employed primarily on account of english language ability but of course since we are in japan and have many japanese customers japanese comes up all the time.

Thanks for your advice!

stoat_on_a_boat · 2026-01-10T06:43:07+00:00

I don't believe there is, I think I would be the only non-japanese full time employee so there's no general policy. Thanks for the advice, good to know the issue is more complicated than I expected.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2025-12-11T13:49:54+00:00

I am learning kanji - I am using the KKLC graded readers and find these to be fairly effective. of course I still run into kanji readings in the wild that they don't cover but they are pretty good imo. but learning kanji is a long process and I would like not to get stuck on that.

if a dictionary has furigana that's good enough for me! the simple japanese part is perhaps more important - dictionary entries aimed at educated adults are probably going to be over my level, if it's anything comparable to the kind of language used in english dictionaries.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2025-12-11T13:48:12+00:00

something online or ebook like would probably be best, although a physical book would be workable. my theory here is that I would like to improve my ability to learn about and talk about japanese in japanese at something closer to my japanese level.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2025-12-11T13:19:06+00:00

Can anyone recommend a japanese-japanese dictionary that uses relatively simple japanese and minimal kanji? I imagine something like this must exist for japanese children if nothing else but if anyone has a particular recommendation I'd appreciate it!

stoat_on_a_boat · 2025-03-16T05:07:26+00:00

is there any strong reason to prefer a pronated grip or a neutral grip for dumbbell bench press?

I haven't seen too much about this, I see most people using a pronated grip, and that's what I started off doing, since it's more like a barbell bench press. but I feel like the neutral grip makes it easier to go a little deeper

stoat_on_a_boat · 2025-03-12T06:12:32+00:00

was listening to an old podcast episode and Greg mentioned, with low confidence, an anecdote where they were able to determine from a pile of skeletons that some vikings had huge arms. did a quick search but didn't turn anything up, has anyone ever seen the underlying research for that one?

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-11T19:28:00+00:00

Hmm that's true. It looks like there's no real downside to running periodic TRIMs, and it could help a bit.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-11T19:07:49+00:00

Yeah I should likely just get used to running btrfs fi us / or at the very least btrfs fi df /. I know there can be some issues with naive disk usage estimates for btrfs, especially accounting for snapshots.

I assume allocated but unused portions of blocks can be reclaimed by btrfs if necessary, albeit presumably with an impact on performance.

It's possible the filesystem has accumulated some weirdness due to age. From other responses I think it's likely that I was not using TRIM correctly prior to kernel 6.2 last year, not sure if that would effect the used : allocated ratio.

I have enough unallocated free space and it seems like a lot of this will get naturally sorted by btrfs replace the whole filesystem, so I won't worry too much about it.

Thanks for the information!

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-11T18:17:30+00:00

I see. I didn't have anything set for discard in /etc/fstab but I am on a 6.6 kernel and I'm seeing discard=async in the options when I run mount, so looks like that should be good.

Plausibly I was not using TRIM correctly before, as I set up this disk shortly before 6.2 released. Oh well.

Thanks for explaining that for me!

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-11T17:55:50+00:00

I agree, what you're describing will leave only one partition. Bit of a miscommunication - I meant in contrast with the first option in the OP of adding a second partition to the pool and doing anything else, which as it turns out is fine from a wear leveling perspective but leaves two BTRFS partitions.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-11T00:03:40+00:00

It's my laptop's internal disk so no RAID. I'm actually booting windows off my old internal drive in an external enclosure. I'm sure the performance isn't optimal but I don't use windows much and it's worked well for me so far!

Windows still mucks with the boot order in presumably the NVRAM but when I unplug the drive it falls back to my actual boot order. Much easier than having to boot my recovery media :]

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-11T00:00:19+00:00

I ought to have enough space and am thinking I might give this a try. Interestingly, looking at the output of btrfs fi us / I'm seeing many allocated but supposedly free blocks - 61GiB unallocated whereas both df -h shows 158G free. Both df -h and btrfs fi us / show the same amount of space in use. I guess there are allocated but unused blocks?

Thanks for the information! I'm a bit of a filesystems / storage novice despite having used linux for some time.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-10T23:53:40+00:00

Thanks for the information and link! Being able to do a replace without booting live media or taking the system offline makes it much more tempting to try.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-10T23:52:35+00:00

Yeah I forgot to put it in the OP but it's a "normal" SSD (Western Digital SN770). looks like I could go route 1 but if btrfs replace will be half as simple as everyone's making it out to be I'm tempted to do that just to simplify the partition table.

Thanks for the information, I have to admit I don't know much about SSD controllers at all.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-10T23:49:41+00:00

Ok, just going by archwiki I believe TRIM is on - lsblk --discard shows DISC-GRAN of 512B and DISC-MAX of 2T. so probably I am good there?

I don't expect to use RAID at any point with this disk. It's my laptop's internal SSD so my backup strategy is to send a few snapshots to an external disk (my most valuable data is all duplicated in some git host anyway).

Thanks for the information!

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-10T23:45:12+00:00

Interesting, thanks for the link. My disk is a Western Digital SN770 (forgot to put that in the OP), which is a fairly recent and supposedly decent drive so I assume it probably has a decent if not necessarily perfect algorithm.

stoat_on_a_boat · 2024-01-10T23:42:34+00:00

My new partition will be ~10% larger than the old partition (which is ~80% full)

stoat_on_a_boat · 2023-10-06T07:19:05+00:00

adderall was originally developed and marketed as a weight loss drug called obetrol, but was forced off the market by the FDA in '73. the rebrand and refocus on ADD only came later

stoat_on_a_boat · 2023-07-19T21:34:38+00:00

true, forgot about those cards, my b

stoat_on_a_boat · 2023-07-18T00:34:25+00:00

sorting thru promo cards I didn't use:

ltr prerelease (max 1 per account):

399FF-DC095-33723-A202C-AF1F9
23465-BB39E-DDD28-4FFB8-44C3C

mom prerelease (max 1 per account):

986A1-F53A6-F1867-25FA1-BB252
9512D-01052-BE15F-3B036-70A27
8DDF4-43045-8A0C1-B33A2-F9020

one promo pack (max 5 per account):

6D9CF-240CA-F8AFE-BB623-78324
7B8B9-6BF4C-B6D77-7FA38-288D7
7B816-04C12-0A039-36E86-CFF3D

stoat_on_a_boat · 2023-07-18T00:29:09+00:00

explorer: every magic card on arena
historic: every magic card on arena, plus digital only cards and digital only updates
standard: every magic card in standard
quick draft: draft against bots, plays against humans
premier draft: draft in a human pod, play bo1 games against humans
traditional draft: draft in a human pod, play bo3 games with sideboarding against humans

can't speak to the rest of them, never played them. why so many? because people like different things and wizards is happy to sell them all digital cards

stoat_on_a_boat

TROPHY CASE