Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I actually teach German, and especially for students who have a good language sense for English (so if “I singed a song” immediately sticks out to you), tenses are mostly (with some obvious exceptions, like present progressive and preterite/perfect) pretty similar.

She’s probably trying to get your brain to recognize an irregular verb so you don’t have to learn each verb anew, but that’s a problem you’re less likely to have as an English speaker (for example, you’d say “Morgen singe ich, gestern sang ich, heute habe ich noch nicht gesungen,” which is pretty intuitive after English).

Fwiw, you do retain it longer if she sets it up so you can draw your own conclusions, but you also learn more slowly. And if you’re highly motivated, you’ll probably remember it well enough either way.

Yeah, I feel similarly. I would very much just like to be seen as a robot/friendly ungendered alien by society. I’m happy wearing super gendered lingerie when I feel it’s called for, but that’s private. I’m also happy wearing a binder at home, but don’t want to wear one in public.

Unfortunately, the least gendered choice is sometimes the most marked. Like, I would have had to answer a question about it every time someone saw a wedding photo of me if I’d worn a suit, so I wore a dress. I didn’t care much, and it was so much easier to just go along with expectations.

I teach immigrants the local language, and students are never grateful to be taught a language. Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.

That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it’s not. There are thousands of words that people use in common conversation, tens of thousands that you can find in standard newspapers and normal literature, and even more if you want to read academic or specialized literature. When I teach the meaning of one word, that’s giving the students a fish. When I teach them how to break down prefixes or give them advice for increasing their exposure to language input, that’s teaching them how to fish.

The problem is that it only works for students who care. That’s fine by me, because I teach adults and they can decide whether they want to learn or not.

I don’t know how k-12 teachers navigate that, because it’s not exactly the student’s choice- we’ve decided as a society that kids need to learn certain things, whether they want to or not (basically), and that means that schoolteachers need to be able to teach students who don’t care or actively want not to learn (at least about a given subject). Just teaching them to teach themselves doesn’t work there, so you have to teach them some facts, because otherwise they won’t learn any.

It sucks, but I don’t know if it can be fixed. It’s reasonable that students don’t care about every subject, and it’s reasonable that there are things we’ve decided they need to learn, regardless of their interest. Teachers can’t always make a subject interesting to everyone, so sometimes you have to teach the base facts.

I do actually have (some, rapidly eroding) pity for the people that fox has brainwashed into acting against their own interests by preying on their fear.

Lindsey graham understood exactly what trump was and he decided to sell us all out anyway.

Yup. This is why I can’t tell if I’m trans or if I just want to be unmarked.

I love this for you. It’s a beautiful response.

Oh, I’m into hucows, lol. I’m just also autistic

Not if you’re stealing it. I almost went down a whole rabbit hole allegory, but I actually think that’s pretty clear. They didn’t consent to giving milk to you, just like the cow does want to give milk (at least at first), just not to the farmer.

I’m honestly not sure it’s evil enough. I just scrolled through his wiki to find the year, and it’s like he chose the worst possible position on every issue. He was on the side of the tanks in tianamen square!

Maybe that’s why they’re so bumbling :(

Oh yeah, I was a worrier before working exclusively with people who got the worst result from the dangers constantly around us, but I try not to let it spiral.

I also used to be a smoker, which weirdly makes it easier to dismiss worrying about other things.

Kissinger advised trump in 2016 and 2017, infuriatingly

Yeah, that’s absolutely fair. It was fully banned in the EU in 2005, which is still way too late, but much better. Several individual countries had banned it earlier, but I don’t know how many or how effective that actually is in the single market.

I was handling all types of latent claims with long term exposures which aren’t exclusively toxin based, but it was mostly environmental/workplace poisoning, like lead paint, asbestos, printing chemicals, or radiation. One of the things I realized is that we’re either all fucked, or we’re more resilient than we expect, because most of us have a lot more casual contact with serious carcinogens than we think we do.

I try to lean towards the latter while still taking appropriate precautions, but none of us gets out alive. If I loved working on old cars, I’d probably do it despite the risks (but I’d definitely do a wet clean with as fine a mask as I could find and a disposable smock, then I’d immediately shower and get rid of my rags afterwards), because I think it’s better to use your time in a way that makes you happy than preserve a life that doesn’t fulfill you.

Anyway, that got very off track from the original diversion, but it was a fun chat. And now I’m going to throw a pair of dishwashing gloves in my trunk.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but asbestos was banned in brake pads in the US in 2024. There were restrictions in the type and processing of asbestos in the 80s, and most manufacturers stopped in the 90s, but it’s definitely still out there, especially if you’re working on a classic car, a junker that someone chose the cheapest parts for, or any kind of industrial vehicle (the last one isn’t likely for non mechanics, but most people I know who work on their own cars are working on one of the first two).

That said, I don’t think a few exposures over a lifetime are likely to cause mesothelioma. I hesitate to even say that, because it could happen with one fiber, but the vast majority of people who develop mesothelioma had multiple exposures, either very early on (eg. children of mechanics who did the laundry every other day for years), along with comorbidities (smoking, drinking, using a wood/peat stove, etc.), or on a daily basis for years and years.

I’m not saying that it’s not a danger or that you shouldn’t treat it very, very carefully (almost as delicately as you’d handle an open vial of fluorine), but I do always wonder if it would be better for everyone to do themselves it every couple of years instead of giving all of the risk to mechanics. They should have better PPE and knowledge about how to handle it than lay people, but A) we won’t really know if the PPE was effective until people have been using it for forty years and then do or don’t develop mesothelioma, and B) there is unfortunately a lot of pressure on people, from both peers and employers, not to advocate for best practices and sufficient PPE, which, along with a culture of machismo in many trades, means that people aren’t actually as protected or careful about disposal as the industry reports that they are.

But then again, given that these are brakes we’re talking about, I absolutely don’t want lay people fucking up their brakes and endangering everyone. The best solution imo would for 60+ year old mechanics to volunteer to do it (or even for the government to create a program for retired mechanics to work one day a week part time for as long as they’re capable/willing without any impact on their retirement benefits/social security). It takes several decades to manifest, so they’re almost certainly to die of something else first.

Nah, I have a very low tolerance for a patronizing tone, but a pretty high one for being ignored, and the language barrier makes me seem even less knowledgeable, so it’s a recipe for condescension if I’m the primary communicator. My husband would love it if I let loose on them in English, but that feels like giving up a little.

We just laugh at them together afterwards and if they’re too awful, we find a new place.

Yeah, I’ve helped others with brake jobs, and it’s no fun. That and my experience with handling asbestos claims are also probably pretty big factors

I’m not that into or familiar with cars, but I can do what I consider the basics: replacing lightbulbs/wipers, changing oil, changing tires, jumping/replacing a battery, etc. I moved to a new country with a different language, where very few people do their own auto work.

I’m a woman who doesn’t know any of the vernacular for mechanical issues, and so they just completely ignore me. My husband seems like he might be into cars, but he was astonished when I changed his headlight for him while we were dating. Now we just go together. They only talk to him, but I make the decisions (he used to pay €200 for the headlight replacement, which he considers normal and which I find profoundly overpriced- I won’t do my own brakes, because I don’t want my last thought to be about how I shouldn’t have done my own brakes, but it’s very easy to figure out if you did the light right).

Oh, that’s some old school antisemitism :(

Not your comments, others on the post.

A) that’s what editors are for. Journalists need to be persistent, observant, and fearless, not to know every case of English compound words being joined together or not.

B) Only one of those is a mistake, the other is just language being language. They could say maxing (or even maximizing), but that won’t let the reader find more information as easily, so it would be worse journalism.

His body was found at the bottom of a lake, though. It could be something other than drowning or foul play, but that’s unlikely.

Though I imagine his body would not have reacted well to it long term, either.