And then there’s people like my once naïve ass, who just blunder their way through attempted muggings. The first time someone tried to mug me, this guy was asking for money at like 2am, and when I told him I couldn’t help him, he said, “You know, I got heat.” I told him that was good, at least, because my landlord was a dick and my apartment was cold as hell, since they still hadn’t turned on the heat for the building. Got back home, and my wife was like, “You idiot, you know he was telling you he had a gun, right?”

I could excuse this as entirely accidental had the person running over the chicken been the lead car, and the chicken suddenly leapt out into the road. Someone else had stopped to let the chicken cross, and this person either presumed they knew better than the stopped driver and whipped around them, or they simply didn’t care. I doubt people would be looking to excuse the driver’s actions had the first lady been stopped for a little kid who ran out into the the road that our chicken killer wouldn’t have been able to see through an entire car obstructing their vision. At the very least, the second driver acted irresponsibly, if not with wanton disregard for the potential hazards.

Ah, yes, smartphone bad has to be the leading cause. It couldn’t possibly be something to do with the fact that, of young adults who still live with their parents, many have worldviews antithetical to that of their parents, and simply don’t want the headache of repetitive and predictable conflict when their father starts ranting about how the country is going to shit because of goddamn commies like Joe Manchin, or similar nonsense. And for those who live apart from their parents, it most certainly has nothing to do with the degradation of our working conditions, such that many full-time workers have schedules that are inconsistent from day to day, and week to week, and full-time hours are contingent on having 100% open availability to work, making it exceedingly difficult to sync up the meal time schedules for two working adults. I’m also pretty sure the rising cost of living and stagnant wages also haven’t done anything to curtail the ability of young adults to go and eat out with friends. Must be the damned smartphone.

For someone learning English, the first thing I think of is the aunt of a lady that I took Norwegian classes from. My teacher said it’s really common in Norway for families that can afford to do so to send their kids to a summer camp in the UK when they’re around 14 or so, where they only speak English for a few months to really polish their accent and fluency. Her aunt’s parents were a bit behind the ball, though, and all the English summer camps had already filled up by the time they tried booking a place for her, but they found a camp still taking applications in Arkansas. So, all her other relatives speak with posh, British accents, and then her one aunt rolls into the room, talking with a heavy twang that throws everyone off.

Pneumonic plague is a particularly aggressive form of the plague, where you basically need to be treated within the first 24 hours of showing symptoms in order to have much chance of surviving, and you can die in as little as a day and a half. Initial symptoms include fever, weakness, nausea and headaches, aka the same symptoms as probably >90% of the illnesses most of us contract, so I can see how it would be easy to underestimate the severity of it, until you start coughing up blood.

Further, while I don’t know this person’s circumstances, in a country where there’s no guarantee of either universal healthcare or paid sick time and protections for workers who call off work when ill, I can easily see how someone might say “Eh, it’s just a cold, but I’ll tough it out, because I can’t afford to go to the doctor and/or miss work,” when they notice some of the milder and less remarkable symptoms, then wake up the next day coughing up blood and already be screwed.

Here’s the neat thing, though, they can be the least awful party, while still being absolutely awful and ultimately aiming for essentially the same thing as the most awful party. Just look at all the ghouls in the Democratic Party and associated apparatuses coming out of the woodwork to attack Zohran Mamdani for a damn mayoral race, out of fear that he might expose the lie that the Dems aren’t serving the same masters as the GOP and working against the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country. The greatest difference between the two parties, at this point in time, is that the Dems are willing to wait longer to formally install our corporate overlords as our new lords and masters, and they’ll wave a gay flag and pay lip service to the plight of minorities if that’s what’s needed to ultimately achieve the goal. But they will also ruthlessly go after anyone and everyone, within or outside the party, who would threaten to derail their plan and actually represent and advance the interests of the masses, rather than those of the few who aim to sit on thrones made of their own obscene wealth and the human suffering they created to amass said wealth.

You’re a frog being slowly boiled alive, calling out to the rest of us that the water is fine and asking us to jump in the pot with you. No thanks.

They’re going just about as well as they are everywhere else in the US, barring that one guy in Texas that got killed opening fired on a Border Patrol facility the other day. Before you get too snarky, let’s have some examples of the folks in states that always have a hard-on for gun ownership who are actually proving what you’re implying here? Oh, the good gun-owners generally aren’t rising up, but those states are actually welcoming the Gestapo with open arms, since they voted for this? What a surprise.

Keep on living in your fantasy world that the 2nd Amendment bros are going to actually get off their asses and do something about it. Other than cheering it on, that is.

And the Democrats had 4 years they squandered to put Trump in prison for inciting an insurrection, or find a new candidate to run, yet they chose to do neither.

That’s pretty serious.

not caring enough to vote.

Due in no small part to the jackass you’re defending and people like him in the DNC showing that they weren’t actually interested in anything but their own power and money, even if it meant squandering the opportunity to prevent this very outcome. The same politicians who have proven these people right by putting up no real resistance as they rubber stamped Trump’s cabinet picks and policy decisions in Congress, only to wring their hands on TV about how dangerous it is and text me asking for another donation so they could sit on their hands some more.

Get serious.

Ah, yes, the guy who chose to ignore the multiple opportunities presented to him to literally render Trump’s return to power impossible, barring a violent uprising, yet who sat on his hands instead is the real victim here. Shame on anyone criticizing our poor new Neville Chamberlain for appeasing fascists while also refusing to even consider ceding power to anyone who would have been willing to seriously put the screws to Trump. Truly, one of the greatest victims of our times.

If you understand perfectly, you’ve yet to demonstrate this. The ask is to remove superfluous, anti-consumer design elements like always-online connections for single-player games, or shuttering official servers with no mitigation plan for those who wish to play the game after this occurs, and people have asked for changes to these, specific sorts of anti-consumer design choices. Meanwhile, you’re over here big brain posting about “That’s not a design change! Now, turning a 100-player online battle royale game into a single player JRPG, that would be a design change!” It’s no great wonder that you’re being treated as either a troll or an idiot when you’ve manage to misunderstand something so fundamental, while confidently insisting time and again that you alone get it, and everyone is just misguided.

My big question would be what would that add? If you speak Japanese, Spanish and French, 日本語, Español and Français would give you all the information you need. Adding the language name in a second language would increase the work to do, while also not really providing any benefit that I can see. If you manage to change the language to Spanish, or are using somebody else’s device, “English” is no less helpful for you than “English (Inglés)” would be.

I had this for a while, and eventually just got really good at doing math without fully waking up.

You can wind up in some pretty weird jobs just by putting in the right terms off your resume into job boards. When I was looking for jobs a few years ago, “bilingual supervisor” on indeed landed me a two year stint as the supervisor for the night shift in a pharmaceutical plant. I managed to get that despite not simply lacking a degree in a relevant field, but a college degree at all (working on it now), but simply because I was masochistic enough use SAP at work for 5 years and apply for another job that needed someone who could make sense of it, and I could speak Spanish.

If you have a degree, I’m sure there are more options that would open up for you, but you might only find them searching for things in pretty vague terms and seeing if anything pops up as being interesting. The downside is, you’ll probably see a lot of irrelevant stuff, but you also come across some wild stuff. After I got laid off from that job and had sent out applications from normal searching of job boards, I took a look at some less specific searches and came across some weird stuff, like a company that was hiring a production supervisor for their facility making probiotic dog yogurt.

I kind of doubt that Zohran will have the same arc, since he’s campaigning directly against the vested interests of the owners of our major media outlets. I could see him becoming an outside force too large for them to ignore, who ultimately forces them to change tactics, though.

At the moment, he’s an outlier of a candidate for them to try and beat down, and the mainstream media will fight tooth and nail to keep him that way, since him inspiring a broader insurgency of proper leftwing candidates to challenge “progressive” establishment Dems represents an existential crisis for them.

A successful term as mayor for Zohran could well sound the death knell for them if it leads to either a Tea Party style takeover of the Democrats, or produces enough momentum to lead to a proper third party that unseats the Democrats from their position as the GOP-lite party of controlled opposition. Imagine what could happen if those media organizations had to face a properly funded public broadcasting service, for example, that gained broad purchase amongst the public.

I don’t know, you get different vibes in different cities. Not exactly the same thing, but I (a pasty white guy) wear a Brujería hat I bought at a concert around NYC all the time, and the most that will ever happen is somebody asking me if I know what it is/about the band, then telling me how much they like them, or some old religious ladies freaking out about it being the Spanish word for witchcraft. Wearing the same hat in Los Angeles earlier this year, in different subway stations, I had a few cholos just glaring at me the whole time I was there and looking for a fight.

Some cities are a lot more segregated than others to this day, and you get places where you won’t be treated well if you’re not from the right group. Others, people just stick to themselves, for one reason or another. Like, if your car breaks down in Newburgh, NY, or the wrong part of Newark, NJ, you’re probably not getting any help from strangers, and if someone does come to help you, there’s a decent enough chance they’re trying to either rob you or carjack you. In some cities, about the most someone will do to help you out if you’re in trouble is to suggest that you don’t belong where you are, and that you ought to reconsider what you’re doing there.

They aren’t required to fund him, that’s true,

It’s not just about the funding. You also have key figures in the party actively fearmongering against him. A NY senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, did an interview the other day, playing him up as some sort of rabid antisemite and refusing to endorse him. Same with party leadership. If Cuomo or Adams had won, they would have had their endorsements announced and posted everywhere within minutes of the primaries being called, but when a progressive who uses the big, scary s-word wins, they sit on their hands and offer lukewarm statements about how they’ll work with him if he wins the election, but they have reservations and don’t want to commit to endorsing him. When you have Democrat public officials and high ranking figures in the party refusing to endorse “their” candidate, that can do a lot of damage to their chances amongst those who aren’t very politically engaged, or who lack media literacy.

Out of Hochul, Gillibrand, Schumer and Pelosi, I’m not aware of a single one who has actually endorsed him in the race. What happened to the calls for party unity and voting blue no matter who in order to defeat fascism they loved to trot out so much when they recently fielded unpopular, establishment candidates? I guess a little fascism is okay, as long as it’s just one city, now?

These sorts of Dems would rather see Sliwa win and start goose-stepping through the streets of NYC with his brownshirt losers than see Zohran win. They know that Zohran winning and having a successful term would be a damning indictment of their own failure to lead and step up to the moment, and the gears are spinning once again for them to do their best to make sure they don’t have to deal with that.

Edit: misattributed the interview to Hochul, but the point remains with it being Democratic Senator from NY, rather than the governor.

It really depends, there’s just a huge variance in city layout and regional cultures, so going from one to another can completely change things. Someone who likes the way things are in NYC isn’t necessarily going to like living in Orlando, Houston or Los Angeles, and won’t find the same culture. Heck, even within the same state, they can be pretty different.

That’s definitely true for many Republicans, but I think a successful term as mayor for Zohran has potential to really change things for the Democrats. If, after hearing from establishment Democrats for decades that the only way we can change things is so incrementally, not only can we not make progress, but we actually have to accept going backwards pretty often, you have a mayor who delivers some fairly sweeping changes, it could open the eyes of many Democrat voters to the lies that they’ve been fed by party leadership to excuse themselves for sitting on their hands while things fall apart around them.

Depends on how much you mind restoration/cleaning work for fountain pens. I’ve already got all the entry tier stuff covered, so buying new pens at MSRP would probably mean somewhere between 1-3 pens, depending on how fancy I’m looking to get. I already have an ultrasonic cleaner and plenty of repair supplies, so I’d be hitting up auctions, personally. Depending on what’s in the lots and how many people notice the contents, 1000€ would probably get me somewhere between 200-400 pens. Probably another 200 or so if I get to count what I could buy with the proceeds of selling off the ones I’m not interested in.