He also doesn’t care enough about the institution he heads to respect it, hence appointing his car, or a car in general, to the position. Like Caligula and his horse, who I can only imagine Trump looks up to hah

A ridiculous car would be the best to appoint to a high-level government position, honestly.

I figure he’d look up to Caligula.

Unless you ask for no/less ice, yeah, most of the volume is ice. I’d wager that for the typical fountain drink, they’re probably pretty close to the same amount of sugar syrup. Now, is the ice any better for you? No, that shits FILTHY, but that’s a story for another time.

Hard men make soft men. Soft men become hard men… What were we talking about?

Countries don’t exist in vacuums. A big part of geopolitics is figuring out how to manage not getting attacked while being able to build up things other than war machines. For instance, if you have allies you trust, your COMBINED force projection would need to be enough to prevent attacks, leaving each with more room to focus on their economies. If you want to be completely isolated, sure, you have to be able to individually defend yourself, but we live in a world where we really CAN’T be completely isolated, so it only makes sense to try to work together.

I call that effect “baader-meinception”

Honestly it’s just the Internet. Tech is fucking awesome, as long as it’s decoupled from anything and anyone else trying to control, monitor, impose, or otherwise fuck with the tech that’s mine, bought or built fairly. And also the untold psychological torture the Internet is just constantly inflicting on us.

Does addiction excuse the abuse, or merely explain it?

IDK Ozzy actively tried to kill Sharon, that seems pretty abusive.

We’re just getting to the oldest linguistic debate. Is a linguist’s job to describe, or to prescribe? I lean very heavily towards describe.

That’s literally how accents and dialects work. People in a bubble developed different linguistic shifts. To them, and to to broader world as a whole, they are speaking a correct form of English, and yet some thick accents are practically unintelligible to people who haven’t practiced hearing the accent. We only recently began worrying about being understood beyond our narrow in groups. For the majority of history, these “bubbles” are just what we called cultures.

There are those constraints around written/spoken word, for sure. I’m more referring to how close it is to the “raw” thought.

We evolved the ability to think. In order to allow our thoughts to reach others, we developed spoken word. In order to allow those spoken words to be passed through time, we developed written word. Each refers back to the previous “layer” of communication.

Even someone who has a speech impediment, for instance, is still using the same written language as someone else in the same culture. And that written language was developed specifically to try and evoke the words someone in the culture speaks.

Words aren’t “endangered”. There are literally an infinite number of potential words, if we need to reinvent a meaning, we can quite easily(see: synonym). Further, the original meanings still exist. You can still use “awful” to mean “inspiring awe” and you’re correct, you just won’t be understood.

Gotteeeeeem!

That evolution has happened SO many times. Why does “literally” give you fits when “awful” or “terrific” do not? Perhaps because it’s the shift you happen to be living through?

And “6 7” is a shibboleth, a linguistic phenomenon that’s been going on for as long as we have written history, essentially, it’s just now that it’s the youngins doing the thing, it’s bad. Yeah, you right, pretty shitty take.

Written word is a facsimile of a facsimile of what we’re actually communicating. We go from nebulous thoughts, concepts not bound by language, to sounds that roughly convey those concepts, and then to squiggly lines that roughly convey those sounds, and then back up the chain in the other person. Really, it’s a miracle we understand each other at all.

Any tips on finding an insurance company in your state that doesn’t have shareholders? A big part of the insurance issue is that you have to practically be an industry insider to navigate… Anything in insurance, really.

Honestly it sounds like we’re describing the same driving style, and I’m just pointing out nuances to the specific wording of the law. And, ultimately, it boils down to, as you said, the driving habits (more than the actual laws) of the area you’re in. I do, in fact, live in the states, where those kinds of rules aren’t really enforced, and people weave through lanes more or less however they want. In that environment, minimizing your own lane changes is maximizing predictability.

For what it’s worth, I don’t ever foresee a time where I’ll be driving in any other countries, but in that event, yeah, I’ll have to adjust a bit, probably.