I’m conflicted in this: is having bad taste something one is born with?

For a moment there I actually imagined a washing machine with a rolling drum full of dishes and glasses it …

Gotta leave your comfort zone to grow.

Might as well declare himself the Queen Of Sheba.

Obviously it’s needed to refuel the Nuclear Subs on their way to Russian waters.

Exactly.

Anybody still there has been complicit with Fascism for years and loudly saying “I’m leaving X” now isn’t the Taking A Moral Stand some want to pass it as.

Sorry mate, but I was in the Finance Industry back then and the ZIRP policy came from the FED during the Obama Administration following the 2008 Crash.

Further, that Administration’s response to the Crash was basically Save Asset Owners No Mater What And Have Everybody Else Pay For It.

Frankly that was when I went from hoping Obama meant change to concluding he was even more pro-fatcat than previous US Presidents.

And yeah, those things were lauded by Republicans and are behind the shit state of America now and I suspect even behind Trump’s wins, especially this last win, because they led to a complete total crash of social mobility in the US and spiked inequality to a level not seen since the Guilded Age, creating a lot of desperate poor working class people many if not most of whom easy prey for Trump’s style of swindle.

Don’t let Trump’s profound Evil mixed with the two-sides brainwashing so prevalent in America mislead you into thinking Obama was any good for most people - Trump is harvesting a field that has was plowed and even fertilized by his predecessors as POTUS.

Interestingly I read somewhere (from a Behavioral Economics book, I think) that people who pay in cash in average spend less than people who pay by card.

Paying cash involves literally giving out something physical which you own, whilst paying by card is just a number in a screen that you say yes to, and it’s theorized that the actually parting with something physical like cash makes people more wary of spending because of the higher unpleasent feeling of losing something.

Certainly looking at myself, actually counting and giving away €100 in notes does feel more unpleasant that merelly saying yes to a screen showing the number 100.

All this to say that for poor people it actually makes even more sense to pay in cash.

More in general, “American support” isn’t necessarily a positive thing in the mid or long term, especially in Latin America and even more in the present age when Fascism is normalized in American and Fascists get elected to lead the US.

For her it risks being like a drowning person getting a nose to put around her neck to be pulled out of the water.

Yeah, I’m surprised that she actually asked the Nobel Comittee about it - just give Trump the medal and shut up whilst he loudly harps about how he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s not as if that guy cares about objective reality or rules (or even has a fully adult mind) - having the shiny token is more than enough for him to go around showing it and saying he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

The most logical option for her is just giving the medal to Trump, telling him he now has a Nobel Peace Prize and letting his infantile mind twist that into him feeling like a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

I don’t see what’s the problem with that.

It’s not as if, after giving one to Kissinger, the nobel peace prize is anything more than a bitch to political propaganda.

Oh, I do think they value their own lives more than soccer, which might have some impact in the number of visitors to the US purelly because of the constant news about how even Europeans are getting treated there.

Mind you, you are absolutelly right that most won’t put the lives of others (or, more broadly, any kind of ethics, moral or principles) above soccer.

In my experience living in a Football crazy country, Football fans’ almost invariably secondarize moral or principles (in they have any) to their love of the game or whatever team they’re fans of.

I really don’t expect anybody but a handful of people to boycott the World cup as a question of principle, though given the stories coming from there it’s possible that a sense of self-preservation will see many people refrain from going to watch games in the US, but that will be purelly driven by selfish reasons rather than “taking a stand for what is right”.

Football is one of the greatest sources of tribalist identity around and for most people tribalism sits above any and all moral, ethics or principles (as is obvious for example in how MAGA types are defending those Pedophiles who are “chiefs” of their tribe, or how many people take their moral stand on the Gaza Genocide from whatever their favority party leaders say, rather than it being purelly based on the inherent morality of the actions commited there).

Yeah, ok, that makes sense.

I suppose the only part that my post adds is that in my experience for native English-speakers the tendency to learn the language of the country they live in is less than for non-native English speakers who are also not locals, because - thanks to English being the global lingua franca, almost everybody finds it easy to switch to English when confronted with a person who doesn’t speak their local language well but does speak English well, which makes it a lot harder in the early stage to learn the language of the locals (you need to be really assertive about wanting to try to speak the local language).

Certainly that was my experience in most of Europe.

If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.

Well, sorta.

In my experience with British colleagues when living in The Netherlands (were you can definitelly get away with speaking only English), whilst some of them never really became fluent in Dutch, others would become fluent in it.

You see, even with English being a lingua franca, many if not most of the locals (how many depends on the country and even area of the country - for example you’re better of speaking broken German with the locals in Berlin than English) are actually more comfortable if you speak their language, which make your life easier. Also the authorities will often only communicated in the local language (in The Netherlands the central authorities would actually send you documents in English, but for example the local city hall did everything in Dutch).

That said, if you’re an English speaker you can definitelly get away with not learning another language even when living elsewhere in Europe plus I’ve observed that in the early stages of learning the local language often when a native English speaker tried to speak in the local language the locals would switch to English, which for me (a native Portuguse speaker) was less likely, probably because the locals could tell from a person’s accent if they came from an English-speaking country hence they for sure knew English whilst with me even if they recognized my accent they couldn’t be sure that I spoke English.

All this to say that whilst I think it is indeed much harder for native English-speakers to learn a second language to fluency levels even when living abroad, it’s not quite as bad as “likely never”, though they have to put some effort into it whilst non-English speakers are far more likely to naturally end up learning a bit of English in addition to their own language (but for any other language, they too have to “put some effort into it”).

I am from Portugal - which is a very peripheral region in Europe, bordering only Spain - but do speak several European languages, and one of my most interesting experiences in that sense you describe was in a train in Austria on my way to a ski resort, an intercity train (so, not even a long-distance “international” train) which was coming from a city in Germany on its way to a city in Switzerland just making its way up the Austrian-Alps valleys, and were I happened to sit across from two guys, one Austrian and one French, and we stroke up a conversation.

So it turns out the French guy was a surf promoter, who actually would often go to Ericeira in Portugal (were at a certain time in the year there are some of the largest tube waves in the World, so once it was “discovered” it became a bit of a Surf Meca) only he didnt spoke Portuguese, but he did spoke Spanish.

So what followed for a bit over an hour was a conversation floating from language to language, as we tended to go at it in French and Spanish but would switch to German to include the Austrian guy and if German wasn’t enough (my German is only passable) we would switch to English since the Austrian guy also spoke it, and then at one point we found out we could both speak some Italian so we both switched to it for a bit, just because we could.

For me, who am from a very peripheral country in Europe, this was the single greatest “multicultural Europe” experience I ever had.

That said, I lived in other European countries than just my homeland and in my experience this kind of thing seems to be likely in places which are in the middle of Europe near a couple of borders and not at all in countries which only border one or two other countries.

In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.

Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.

So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).

That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).

Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).

The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.

Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they’re similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.

As I see it, the more languages you know, the more “hooks” you have to pick stuff up in other languages plus you’re probably training your brain to be better at learning new ones.

That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.

Whilst I have no evidence for it (it’s not like we have an alternate timeline to compare to), I believe that the changes to Intellectual Property legislation in the last couple of decades have actually slowed down innovation, probably severely so.

Certainly in Tech it feels like there’s less of a culture of tinkering and hacking (in the original sense of the word) nowadays than back in the 80s and 90s, even though with the Internet and the easy access to information on it one would expect the very opposite.

Instead of countless crazy ideas like in the age of the generalisation of computing, open source and the birth of the Internet, we instead have closed environments gatekept by large companies for the purposed of extracting rents from everybody, all of which made possible by bought for legislation to stop users from breaking out and competitors from breaking in.

I mean, outside the natural process of moving everything done before from analog to digital-online (i.e. a natural over time migration to the new environments made available by the inventions of computing and the global open network from the late part of the XX Century) the greatest “innovations” in Tech of the last 30 years were making computers small enough to fit in your pocket (i.e. smartphones) - a natural consequence of the Moore Law - and a digital parrot/mediocre content generator.

Now wonder that China, with their “we don’t give a shit about IP” posture has powered through from Tech backwater to taking the lead from the West on various technologies (first solar, now EVs) even though (from what I’ve heard) their educational systems doesn’t reward innovative thinking.

So in my view only if Europe ditches the IP legislation pushed by the US in Trade Treaties does it have a chance to be part of any upcoming Tech revolutions rather than stagnating right alongside in the US whilst trying to extract ever diminishing rents from the tail ends of the adoption phases of last century’s technologies.

In my experience everybody (myself included) is prone to the Dunning-Kruger Effect in domains outside their expertise.

It doesn’t mater if you’re a outstanding expert in any one domain: you just look at a different domain and go “yeah, that looks easy”.

I’m actually a lot more generalist than usual because of my personality and still have that same tendency to underestimate the complexity of different domains, but because of being a generalist I sometimes for one domain or another go down the route of genuinelly practicing it professionally, and one or two years later I’m invariably thinking “This shit ain’t anywhere as simple as I thought!”.

And, lo and behond, generative AI is just about good enough to handle the entry level stuff in a domain - the ultimate Junior Professional (not even a very good one) with just about enough “competence” to look capable for domain outsiders or even hobbyists whilst at the same time being obviously mediocre for domain experts.

As most people don’t really think about their own knowledge perception in these terms and thus don’t try to compensate for it, the reactions described in this post totally make sense.