Another Americanism that wormed its way in is "cheers" to toast drinks. Maybe solely attributable to the television show of the same name.
I'm American, and I never hear anyone use that expression, except foreigners. Maybe it's a Boston thing.
Cookie instead of biscuit is bad.
We have both in America. A cookie is generally flat and sweet and brittle, mostly made of sugar and some wheat flour. A biscuit is a bread item usually made with yeast and is fluffy (maybe flaky) and not very sweet; it's something you might eat with dinner, and normally you put butter and jelly on it. Sometimes they're also called "rolls" or "dinner rolls". "Tough biscuit" wouldn't make any sense at all.
I know a Trump supporter well. According to that person, there's a "deep state" conspiracy against Trump. This is basically the mentality of Trump voters; Hillary may have lost the election, but somehow she's still in control and responsible for everything bad that happens. These people are seriously mental.
If that made sense, then we'd have to use the word "petrol" for diesel, kerosene, and even paraffin.
Gasoline is a specific fraction distilled from crude oil, so it makes sense to use that term, or to shorten it.
If you're going to make the argument that gasoline is much more popular than other petroleum products, that doesn't make sense either: it's only true in America. Over in Europe (and UK), diesel is used a lot more by passenger cars than it is here in the US.
What? I'm no expert, but I do speak a little German, and Dutch is much closer to German than Danish. Danish is very similar to Swedish, a Scandinavian language, and also Norwegian. I can make out a lot of Dutch, but not so much Danish.
Game of Thrones doesn't use only British English; the actors use many different dialects, which is supposed to show that the real fictional characters, speaking whatever fictional language they use (which to us viewers appears to be English because it's better than dealing with subtitles and an invented language), also have many different dialects and regional accents.
India has already set aside those local languages. There's dozens of languages commonly used in India, and they can't agree on any one of them (Tamils and Gujarati refuse to abandon their language in favor of Hindi), so they all use English as the in-between language. This is not coincidentally why so many call-center jobs are in India.
Even though the exact measures may have evolved over time, we got the units' names from the English, so that's why we call them that.
The English still use many of them too, so the name fits. Go to an English pub and ask for a beer; it's going to be a "pint". They express distances in "miles". And they express their body weights in some weird unit called a "stone", whatever the fuck that is (I'm pretty sure it's a whole number of pounds).
Where'd you get that silly idea? Spanish is a terrible language: it's one of the least information-dense languages on the planet, requiring a ridiculous number of syllables to state the simplest of ideas. It's not even a particularly nice-sounding language; French and Italian are much nicer-sounding languages in the Romance group.
Spanish also doesn't have much prestige; Spanish-speaking countries don't lead the world in anything except maybe crime rates (El Salvador and Honduras in particular have the highest murder rates in the world, and are likely more dangerous than Syria). Spain the country doesn't even have a single language (Castillian is one of 4 languages there) and has the "honor" of being the only Western European nation to live under a brutal dictatorship until only recently. Now that the dictatorship is gone, it's splitting apart at the seams. And what does Spain do, anyway? France builds jumbo jets, cruise ships, cars, helicopters, etc. Italy makes famous exotic cars, high-end fashion clothing/accessories, high-end foods, etc. The only things I can think of that Spain makes are olive oil and some wines. Compared to their nearest European neighbors, they're an embarrassment. And the most prosperous region in Spain is one of the autonomous regions that has a different language (though related, like all Romance languages), and which wants to break away.
Even Spain's colonial history is terrible. There's plenty to criticize about how the British treated the indigenous populations in the Americas, but they were humanitarians compared to the utter depraved brutality and genocide that Spaniard Christopher Columbus and the later conquistadors like Cortez inflicted on the mesoamerican peoples.
Are you a fucking moron? Intro physics isn't something that most of the population *needs* to do; courses like that are intentionally designed to weed out people who don't have the aptitude or discipline to get a degree in that field. Marriage is pushed by assholes like you to be the answer for everyone, yet more than half the attempts fail, so it's clearly not the panacea it's been sold as.
yet you think a smart TV is incapable of identifying a movie based on some audio/video signature?
It's quite impossible for this to actually work if the TV isn't connected to the network. The solution therefore is simple: don't give the TV your Wifi password.
Wrong. Trans fats aren't going to kill you, or make you horribly ill, the way e.coli poisoning for instance could. Long-term, they're bad for you, like any other unhealthy food.
Cheetos without trans fats are still not healthy, but they're healthier than Cheetos with trans fats. "Healthiness" in food isn't a binary condition. Some junk food isn't quite as bad as others.
The trans-fat ban is about making our unhealthy foods not-as-unhealthy. It's a good law. It's not as good as somehow getting everyone to eat lots of fresh vegetables and forgo sugary foods (good luck with that), but it will improve public health long-term, and importantly, it's something feasible. There's no reason trans fats need to be in anything; they're only there because some food makers were cutting costs.
That's not true. Many people care about healthy food, but they may not be able to afford it, or they're not educated enough about what foods are healthy and which ones aren't.
And food safety standards aren't about healthy food, they're about safe food. Glazed donuts produced according to food safety standards are relatively safe to eat (they're not going to result in your death in a few minutes), but they're certainly not "healthy". Food safety standards are about making sure your food isn't contaminated with actual poisons, that it isn't spoiled, etc. They aren't about making sure you eat healthy foods.
There's good women out there. The problem is, it's hard to find them, and really hard to find one who's attracted to you and that you have enough in common with, and can really trust (as in, she'll help you bury a body). I can see why some men just give up on it. I've seen that a lot with women too, giving up on finding a decent guy. Personally, I think it'd be better if we all gave up on this ideal of monogamy and formed little polyamorous communities or groupings. A lot of people would probably be happier not having one person monopolize all their time and living situation as you get in a monogamous relationship, where it's basically all-or-nothing.
As for games, I agree completely. 80s-90s games are much more enjoyable than modern stuff.
I bet the entire issue of the disappearing American Grad Student would go away.
Huh? I wasn't aware that there was any shortage of grad students. But if you're saying that Americans aren't becoming grad students any more, what's the problem with that? There's a huge amount of work needed to pursue that path, and little if any reward at the end. It's far more prudent to just take your bachelor's or master's and go into private industry and earn a good paycheck. There aren't enough academic jobs out there to support a decent number of grad students, and those jobs suck anyway ("publish or perish").
Oh bullshit. The divorce rate is proof that marriage doesn't work. Blaming it on the people isn't productive when more than half the people who try it fail at it; it's the institution.
One thing that'd help is a cheap, reliable, and reversible contraceptive for men. They're doing trials of such a thing now that blocks the sperm ducts.
Honestly, I think marriage is just a bad institution all around, for everyone. It worked somewhat OK back in the days when women were 2nd-class citizens, but not any more, as proven by the high divorce rate and the huge number of single mothers and kids with divorced parents. We need to re-think the whole thing.
Also when you try to change someone's culture it takes a whole ass-ton of humility to not get run out on a rail. So, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control missionaries of the last several centuries were plainly a highly suboptimal approach.
What are you talking about? From what I've read, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control fundamentalist missionaries are highly successful in Subsaharan Africa. They're the reason in fact that some countries there passed "kill the gays" laws.
So, other than driving a Prius and moving to a sardine can style apartment in the inner city, what realistically can people do as something against AGW? There is tons of talk, but all of it seems to just be blaming people.
Ideally, there's a bunch we could be doing if we really wanted to:
1) Do the R&D and start building SkyTran systems in metro areas to reduce the usage of fossil-fuel burning cars and the amount of traffic.
2) Push for more electric and hybrid vehicles. Ideally, non-hybrid vehicles should be flatly illegal for new sales; the tech is out there, and even mild-hybrid systems are available and not very expensive to add at the factory and would make a good difference. Better yet, Prius-style hybrid powertrains (or maybe Volt-style) should be standard. Create tax incentives for more battery-electric vehicles: families with two cars should have one that's all-electric for commuting. And incentives for people to dump gas guzzlers (particularly older ones) in favor of something more efficient. Here in the US, it'd help a lot if stupid states and localities wouldn't charge huge personal property taxes on new cars, which just encourages people to stick with old junkers that pollute more and burn more gas.
3) Push for more solar energy adoption: every big-box store and shopping mall roof should be covered in solar panels, and every large parking lot at those places should be too. (As a bonus, shoppers' cars won't get so hot in the summer.) Same goes for large employers with big parking lots and buildings. There's a lot of wasted rooftop and parking lot space that can be used for this to generate power that'll offset the power used in A/C by those big buildings. Solar power of course works best in the daylight, and in the summer, but that's also when you're using A/C the most in the southern climates. In the north, we could be using solar thermal collectors to collect solar heat in the winter to offset heating costs. Various government/tax incentives can be used to encourage all this.
4) Improve other mass-transit systems. Hire some competent management for the DC Metro, contract the Japanese to build Shinkansen trains (particularly in the Northeast Corridor), etc. If you want to see how public transit is *supposed* to work, take a trip to Japan. Why can't Americans work this competently?
5) Encourage people to move to "sardine can style apartments". You make fun of it, but it's a real solution. The problem is that nice apartments like that also cost a fortune, which is why people move to the suburbs and commute, burning lots of gas. There's got to be a lot that government can do to fix this problem and encourage people to move closer to town. I'd rather live right in the city and ride my bike around, and I really don't care about having tons of square footage (but I want more than a shoebox...) but I'm not a multi-millionaire so it's not feasible for me in many metro areas. You shouldn't have to be rich to live ecologically. Perhaps banning ownership by non-resident foreigners, not allowing any one person to own too many units in an area, not allowing people to own properties without actually occupying them or renting them out, etc. could be tried, along with some kind of policies to encourage building more high-rises, and to prevent SanFran-style NIMBYism from blocking construction.
That's just a few things off the top of my head.
The problem is that we're just too dysfunctional to do enough of this stuff before it's too late, so I think we might as well just throw in the towel and maybe some billionaires should start thinking about buying up some cheap land in mostly lawless countries, hiring a private mercenary army, and building big domed cities.
In Japan, that's a real issue. In the US, it isn't. The population here is continuously growing. There's no indication that this is going to change any time soon.
Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
How do they determine what's suitable for kids though? For instance, if cartoons show adult women without coverings on their heads, that's completely unsuitable and pornographic, according to some people. Or if cartoons show kids celebrating Halloween, that's teaching them to worship satan according to other people.
Slashdot Mirror
Another Americanism that wormed its way in is "cheers" to toast drinks. Maybe solely attributable to the television show of the same name.
I'm American, and I never hear anyone use that expression, except foreigners. Maybe it's a Boston thing.
Cookie instead of biscuit is bad.
We have both in America. A cookie is generally flat and sweet and brittle, mostly made of sugar and some wheat flour. A biscuit is a bread item usually made with yeast and is fluffy (maybe flaky) and not very sweet; it's something you might eat with dinner, and normally you put butter and jelly on it. Sometimes they're also called "rolls" or "dinner rolls". "Tough biscuit" wouldn't make any sense at all.
I know a Trump supporter well. According to that person, there's a "deep state" conspiracy against Trump. This is basically the mentality of Trump voters; Hillary may have lost the election, but somehow she's still in control and responsible for everything bad that happens. These people are seriously mental.
If that made sense, then we'd have to use the word "petrol" for diesel, kerosene, and even paraffin.
Gasoline is a specific fraction distilled from crude oil, so it makes sense to use that term, or to shorten it.
If you're going to make the argument that gasoline is much more popular than other petroleum products, that doesn't make sense either: it's only true in America. Over in Europe (and UK), diesel is used a lot more by passenger cars than it is here in the US.
What? I'm no expert, but I do speak a little German, and Dutch is much closer to German than Danish. Danish is very similar to Swedish, a Scandinavian language, and also Norwegian. I can make out a lot of Dutch, but not so much Danish.
Game of Thrones doesn't use only British English; the actors use many different dialects, which is supposed to show that the real fictional characters, speaking whatever fictional language they use (which to us viewers appears to be English because it's better than dealing with subtitles and an invented language), also have many different dialects and regional accents.
India has already set aside those local languages. There's dozens of languages commonly used in India, and they can't agree on any one of them (Tamils and Gujarati refuse to abandon their language in favor of Hindi), so they all use English as the in-between language. This is not coincidentally why so many call-center jobs are in India.
Even though the exact measures may have evolved over time, we got the units' names from the English, so that's why we call them that.
The English still use many of them too, so the name fits. Go to an English pub and ask for a beer; it's going to be a "pint". They express distances in "miles". And they express their body weights in some weird unit called a "stone", whatever the fuck that is (I'm pretty sure it's a whole number of pounds).
Where'd you get that silly idea? Spanish is a terrible language: it's one of the least information-dense languages on the planet, requiring a ridiculous number of syllables to state the simplest of ideas. It's not even a particularly nice-sounding language; French and Italian are much nicer-sounding languages in the Romance group.
Spanish also doesn't have much prestige; Spanish-speaking countries don't lead the world in anything except maybe crime rates (El Salvador and Honduras in particular have the highest murder rates in the world, and are likely more dangerous than Syria). Spain the country doesn't even have a single language (Castillian is one of 4 languages there) and has the "honor" of being the only Western European nation to live under a brutal dictatorship until only recently. Now that the dictatorship is gone, it's splitting apart at the seams. And what does Spain do, anyway? France builds jumbo jets, cruise ships, cars, helicopters, etc. Italy makes famous exotic cars, high-end fashion clothing/accessories, high-end foods, etc. The only things I can think of that Spain makes are olive oil and some wines. Compared to their nearest European neighbors, they're an embarrassment. And the most prosperous region in Spain is one of the autonomous regions that has a different language (though related, like all Romance languages), and which wants to break away.
Even Spain's colonial history is terrible. There's plenty to criticize about how the British treated the indigenous populations in the Americas, but they were humanitarians compared to the utter depraved brutality and genocide that Spaniard Christopher Columbus and the later conquistadors like Cortez inflicted on the mesoamerican peoples.
I recommend returning it. If everyone did that, it would cost the TV maker a fortune and they'd stop doing it.
WTF is a "facebook feed"?
It's the streaming pile of crap you see when you're logged into your Facebook account and looking at it on your web browser or the Facebook phone app.
It's easy to avoid: don't use Facebook.
Oh bullshit, you fucking liar. Go read about it; there's plenty of journalistic reports of Christian missionaries fanning the flames.
Are you a fucking moron? Intro physics isn't something that most of the population *needs* to do; courses like that are intentionally designed to weed out people who don't have the aptitude or discipline to get a degree in that field. Marriage is pushed by assholes like you to be the answer for everyone, yet more than half the attempts fail, so it's clearly not the panacea it's been sold as.
You don't need to tell it your wifi password in order to watch movies.
That may not be correct; I've read about some smart TVs that actually wouldn't work until they were connected to the internet.
yet you think a smart TV is incapable of identifying a movie based on some audio/video signature?
It's quite impossible for this to actually work if the TV isn't connected to the network. The solution therefore is simple: don't give the TV your Wifi password.
Wrong. Trans fats aren't going to kill you, or make you horribly ill, the way e.coli poisoning for instance could. Long-term, they're bad for you, like any other unhealthy food.
Cheetos without trans fats are still not healthy, but they're healthier than Cheetos with trans fats. "Healthiness" in food isn't a binary condition. Some junk food isn't quite as bad as others.
The trans-fat ban is about making our unhealthy foods not-as-unhealthy. It's a good law. It's not as good as somehow getting everyone to eat lots of fresh vegetables and forgo sugary foods (good luck with that), but it will improve public health long-term, and importantly, it's something feasible. There's no reason trans fats need to be in anything; they're only there because some food makers were cutting costs.
That's not true. Many people care about healthy food, but they may not be able to afford it, or they're not educated enough about what foods are healthy and which ones aren't.
And food safety standards aren't about healthy food, they're about safe food. Glazed donuts produced according to food safety standards are relatively safe to eat (they're not going to result in your death in a few minutes), but they're certainly not "healthy". Food safety standards are about making sure your food isn't contaminated with actual poisons, that it isn't spoiled, etc. They aren't about making sure you eat healthy foods.
There's good women out there. The problem is, it's hard to find them, and really hard to find one who's attracted to you and that you have enough in common with, and can really trust (as in, she'll help you bury a body). I can see why some men just give up on it. I've seen that a lot with women too, giving up on finding a decent guy. Personally, I think it'd be better if we all gave up on this ideal of monogamy and formed little polyamorous communities or groupings. A lot of people would probably be happier not having one person monopolize all their time and living situation as you get in a monogamous relationship, where it's basically all-or-nothing.
As for games, I agree completely. 80s-90s games are much more enjoyable than modern stuff.
I bet the entire issue of the disappearing American Grad Student would go away.
Huh? I wasn't aware that there was any shortage of grad students. But if you're saying that Americans aren't becoming grad students any more, what's the problem with that? There's a huge amount of work needed to pursue that path, and little if any reward at the end. It's far more prudent to just take your bachelor's or master's and go into private industry and earn a good paycheck. There aren't enough academic jobs out there to support a decent number of grad students, and those jobs suck anyway ("publish or perish").
Oh bullshit. The divorce rate is proof that marriage doesn't work. Blaming it on the people isn't productive when more than half the people who try it fail at it; it's the institution.
One thing that'd help is a cheap, reliable, and reversible contraceptive for men. They're doing trials of such a thing now that blocks the sperm ducts.
Honestly, I think marriage is just a bad institution all around, for everyone. It worked somewhat OK back in the days when women were 2nd-class citizens, but not any more, as proven by the high divorce rate and the huge number of single mothers and kids with divorced parents. We need to re-think the whole thing.
Also when you try to change someone's culture it takes a whole ass-ton of humility to not get run out on a rail. So, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control missionaries of the last several centuries were plainly a highly suboptimal approach.
What are you talking about? From what I've read, the bible-thumping anti-birth-control fundamentalist missionaries are highly successful in Subsaharan Africa. They're the reason in fact that some countries there passed "kill the gays" laws.
So, other than driving a Prius and moving to a sardine can style apartment in the inner city, what realistically can people do as something against AGW? There is tons of talk, but all of it seems to just be blaming people.
Ideally, there's a bunch we could be doing if we really wanted to:
1) Do the R&D and start building SkyTran systems in metro areas to reduce the usage of fossil-fuel burning cars and the amount of traffic.
2) Push for more electric and hybrid vehicles. Ideally, non-hybrid vehicles should be flatly illegal for new sales; the tech is out there, and even mild-hybrid systems are available and not very expensive to add at the factory and would make a good difference. Better yet, Prius-style hybrid powertrains (or maybe Volt-style) should be standard. Create tax incentives for more battery-electric vehicles: families with two cars should have one that's all-electric for commuting. And incentives for people to dump gas guzzlers (particularly older ones) in favor of something more efficient. Here in the US, it'd help a lot if stupid states and localities wouldn't charge huge personal property taxes on new cars, which just encourages people to stick with old junkers that pollute more and burn more gas.
3) Push for more solar energy adoption: every big-box store and shopping mall roof should be covered in solar panels, and every large parking lot at those places should be too. (As a bonus, shoppers' cars won't get so hot in the summer.) Same goes for large employers with big parking lots and buildings. There's a lot of wasted rooftop and parking lot space that can be used for this to generate power that'll offset the power used in A/C by those big buildings. Solar power of course works best in the daylight, and in the summer, but that's also when you're using A/C the most in the southern climates. In the north, we could be using solar thermal collectors to collect solar heat in the winter to offset heating costs. Various government/tax incentives can be used to encourage all this.
4) Improve other mass-transit systems. Hire some competent management for the DC Metro, contract the Japanese to build Shinkansen trains (particularly in the Northeast Corridor), etc. If you want to see how public transit is *supposed* to work, take a trip to Japan. Why can't Americans work this competently?
5) Encourage people to move to "sardine can style apartments". You make fun of it, but it's a real solution. The problem is that nice apartments like that also cost a fortune, which is why people move to the suburbs and commute, burning lots of gas. There's got to be a lot that government can do to fix this problem and encourage people to move closer to town. I'd rather live right in the city and ride my bike around, and I really don't care about having tons of square footage (but I want more than a shoebox...) but I'm not a multi-millionaire so it's not feasible for me in many metro areas. You shouldn't have to be rich to live ecologically. Perhaps banning ownership by non-resident foreigners, not allowing any one person to own too many units in an area, not allowing people to own properties without actually occupying them or renting them out, etc. could be tried, along with some kind of policies to encourage building more high-rises, and to prevent SanFran-style NIMBYism from blocking construction.
That's just a few things off the top of my head.
The problem is that we're just too dysfunctional to do enough of this stuff before it's too late, so I think we might as well just throw in the towel and maybe some billionaires should start thinking about buying up some cheap land in mostly lawless countries, hiring a private mercenary army, and building big domed cities.
In Japan, that's a real issue. In the US, it isn't. The population here is continuously growing. There's no indication that this is going to change any time soon.
Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
How do they determine what's suitable for kids though? For instance, if cartoons show adult women without coverings on their heads, that's completely unsuitable and pornographic, according to some people. Or if cartoons show kids celebrating Halloween, that's teaching them to worship satan according to other people.
Don't forget the Dungeons n' Dragons role-playing games that people insisted were satanic.