Hung around with a couple of guys from there. One of them has a mullet.

The economy in war torn Europe was shit. Even before the war ended, people traded stuff rather than currency. Like instant noodles are the de facto currency in some prisons today, nylon stockings were as good as money back then. Same with cigarettes. So if they didn’t need it to survive in the rubble, they could trade it for food with a well meaning local.

You’re not here to f@ck spiders going by the TLD on your handle. The average yank wouldn’t know what that meant.

“Native English speaker” is not adequately complex as a label. I think you have to be more specific.

When you have some time for introspection, you’ll find good characteristics and bad characteristics within you. That’s normal. If you dig deep enough every saint can be an asshole sometimes and the person who just bombed to death 110 girls in a school can be a caring family man. We are complicated monkeys.

There are two views on this: language creates grammar after the fact, those are rules, we need to stick to these rules, and this be the hill I die on.

The other view is more liberal. Native speakers don’t care about these rules and naturally deviate from some. Not all, not all at once, and not always to an extent that is recognized by the majority of speakers. But occasionally, certain uses make it. The use of the past tense in constructions that by the laws of grammar should require the past participle is a feature of Black American English. The popularity of hiphop and rap have spread this all over the world. With the now much derided term “woke” it has even reached other languages.

By heart I’m a narrow minded stickler for the rules myself. The nonsensical use of “literally” still makes me mad. But that horse is so far out of the barn you can barely see it on the horizon. Fighting the fight for clean past tense/past participle separation may be one against windmills.

English as a Germanic language comes from a protolanguage that probably only had irregular verbs in the vein of sing-sang-sung. Over time, and probably out of desperation by people who needed to learn it as a second language via migration and mingling, the verbs we now consider regular (team -ed) came about later. Language changes. English is living proof with its spelling making no sense at all and clear influences of Viking and Norman invasions and the spread around the world via the Empire. American English made spelling changes. Indian (Asia) English developed its own unique characteristics that may deviate from the King’s version. There is such a thing as EU English where you can see what happens when mostly non-natives go to town in it.

Grammar came after the spoken version. It’s like a constitution that can be changed by quiet, gradual consensus.

In a word: no. That’s not how a representative democracy works.

Name a public service you cannot live without. I’m going to say the ambulance service. So when I crash my Ferrari into a concrete pillar, they take me to the hospital and I survive. It would be a shame if the service had been closed due to a lack of funding. All because a group of entitled, predominantly male libertarians had run a campaign to withhold tax money for this supposedly useless service based on the fact that they never needed an ambulance in their life.

Because he is always playing golf. He would be doing that if he wasn’t wrecking the economy as well.

Thank you for your rage bait post. It’s a very good one. So well done, you!

Posted by a new account. Perhaps you could link to a few of those interactions under the account you experienced this lack of kindness and tolerance on. Because so far this is not just not a showerthought but also a claim without receipts.

We’re not interested. Yet.

• Aliens

I have a feeling if he had always turned into a Tarkasian bear for battle, fans would have complained that he is too much like the Hulk.

I think they landed on this idea and the sufficiently large budget for the CGI too late but the tentacle throwing golden blob is an interesting battle form.

Isn’t it funny how the production technology informs the storytelling? I heard that TNG in the first two seasons had a price tag of something like 5000 dollars per hand phaser beam so they used almost none. In S7 they shoot 100 times willy nilly in Gambit and hit almost nothing, no problem. Odo in S1 morphs in the pilot and then almost never on screen for a long time. And by S6 or 7 they’re like, sure, morph him into fire, fog, or an emu, wgaf!

Corrected, thank you.

The easy way would be to find your local, state, and federal politicians and post on whatever social media they’re on. That’s a couple of old school Google searches away.

Local governments has meetings, some of which will allow petitioning for action. I think the rules will differ there by region, as they do for state level, would be my guess. Maybe somebody else could point you at the right place. Your reps in DC tend to have phone lines to voice your opinion. All of them receive mail by USPS. Chuck all your f-bombs at me before you write them;) you want to sound reasonably frustrated to them.

I am going to go all Goodwin Godwin (edited) here: I just yesterday heard a snippet of a voice recording of Hitler discussing the Finnish winter war with their PM. The recording wasn’t supposed to happen, somebody forgot to hit stop on the recorder and then stashed it away. The man sounded like just another guy at the bar.

To varying degrees this probably applies to all heads of state and government. If they don’t derive any advantage from being the bully in the interaction and they’re reasonably sure only trusted ears are listening they talk normally.

I remember Obama being caught on a hot mic at a summit talking with then Russian president at the grace of Putin, Medvedev, saying something like: “I have the midterms coming up. Tell Vladimir that after that I can cut him some more leeway.” That’s the kind of horse trading we’re not hearing about normally. But it happens, and in normal language.

Dictators may have a much smaller circle of trusted ears. So Putin and Kim probably don’t go full locker room: “So, Vlad, my homie, you’re really running a fucking meat grinder in the donbass, aren’t you!” - “Fuck you, your starving dwarf soldiers are also ending up in the sausage, motherfucker.” And then they laugh and pat each other on the back and order shots. But I’m sure they make fun of the orange.

I think it’s called “no strings attached.”

You call this parking. It’s a bottleneck. There are solutions. Underpasses. Overpasses. Better rail infrastructure. Unfortunately, higher taxes.

Write up your frustration and take it to your local, state, and federal politicians.

I think it’s that or we nuke ourselves into oblivion as a planet.

I think the solution will be a separate device. Even if you tampered with the one you’re given, you’re still running on their network. Even if you wanted to just chat over Bluetooth mesh with your fellow Winston Smiths, this doesn’t seem like a good idea.

In the border regions with China, some people who want to communicate with the real world, have phones that connect to the Chinese networks. A satellite able device would be better but probably too expensive.

The premise of the question is wrong. Trains need fuel like every other means of transportation. They can help consumers and logistics operations save on their individual fuel cost if they make use of rail rather than roads. A great passenger network saves fuel over all because people share a large passenger carrier rather than individually driving mostly empty cars, especially SUV tanks with only a driver behind the wheel.

Trains also don’t “park” on open lines. There is a reason why it stopped and it’s most likely safety. So it doesn’t hit another train or runs into rail damage, construction crews, people, a shrub fire, etc. Since you say this happens regularly, It’s likely the train infrastructure is old. Maybe it’s a combination of those problems with too tight running schedules creating a bottleneck. Bring this to your local political leaders, complain to the train companies.

I don’t know how hot it is there. What are the rules on not idling your engine while waiting in traffic jams and at railroad crossings? And if drivers are supposed to turn their engines off, this may be a clusterfuck caused by a train but blame must be disturbed. Even if it was hot (and unless I had infants or infirm folks in the car), I would switch off my engine these days because of your president’s adventures in Iran.

English? Yes.

If we apply strict rules that both parts have to be directly linked, i.e. no space, I suspect English will have fewer examples of this. Because it doesn’t always write combos without a space. Lighthouse vs. house light, but horserace vs. racehorse. I think the “proper” Germanic languages, i.e. unencumbered by Norman invasion, will probably have more.

German has shit like:

Fußballverein (football club) and Vereinsfußball (football organized in clubs, differs by one letter). Hausboot (houseboat) and Bootshaus (again an extra s). Turnhalle (school gymnasium) and Hallenturnen (indoor gym class, annoyingly an extra n this time), etc.