Then again, I never saw a 6 pack of large bottles of coke until I came to Norway, where every grocery store seems to sell 6 packs of the 1.5 liter bottles, so Europeans are not exactly without their own Coca Cola habits to support.

Meanwhile, I just passed over Europe’s flyover countries yesterday.

Pretty sure their point is that, in aggregate, trains are a much more fuel efficient and cost effective than transporting the same goods a comparable distance in trucks. The amount that some people burn idling is insignificant in comparison to these savings over longer distances and higher volumes of goods transported. Given this, the transportation companies are unlikely to switch away from rail transport any time soon.

Honestly, your problem is just shitty planning by your local community if you can get trapped without means of escape while freight moves through, and they are suggesting you guys might want to invest in building a way around this with some of that fancy bridge, overpass or tunnel technology we have these days. Why would anyone else involved inconvenience themselves and others that rely on the rail to do business, just because your locality refuses to address an issue that just impacts you and the folks that live around you?

This is like arguing against having an electric grid anywhere, just because you frequently lose power in hurricanes when trees knock down the power lines, while ignoring the fact your town could literally just bury them, as they do to address this problem in many other places.

You can do this to an extent with kanji, as well, it’s just something that really only gets easier the more you study Japanese, though. When you start getting more proficient, you can usually have a pretty good shot at guessing the pronunciation and something of the meaning in context, but the difficulty is certainly really front-loaded.

Of course, then you have some kanji that just have 100 different readings and you just have to go memorize those, so there’s certainly room for improvement.

3 seems pretty reasonable to me, assuming you start the lessons much earlier in schooling than we currently do now. Perhaps not mandatory, but I think requiring 2 and having the option for more is reasonable enough. There are plenty of countries that begin English lessons in what would be elementary schools, then add a second European language in middle school alongside continued English classes, and have the option to do a 3 language for students who are interested/would need them for their academic plans.

Of course, if it was just two years of four different languages, that would be a waste of money, IMO. If kids started doing Spanish in 4th grade and were expected to keep that up through high school graduation, and could add German or Russian or something in middle school, it seems reasonable enough to me. You won’t be cranking out kids fluent in several languages that way, but I would expect you could get much better results than we currently do in the first foreign language, plus give them a decent foundation in the second, should they need it/decide to continue learning after 6 years of classes.

Honestly, it probably comes down to taxes. Many Americans are rabidly opposed to any proposal that will increase their taxes by any amount, regardless of the reason, and a lot of school district funding is based on local property taxes. Coincidentally, home- and business-owners who would have to pay that increased property tax are able to have an outsized influence on local politics. No politician is going to raise that proposal for funding foreign language classes.

As sad as it is, learning to speak another language just isn’t seen as that important by many. They don’t need to use anything other than English in their daily lives, and many citizens don’t even have a passport, much less travel abroad.

In addition, aside from Spanish, many areas just lack the resources you would need to be able to develop your language skills from “I get good grades in my highschool German class” to “I can actually use the language in normal interactions with native speakers.”

Think of your local bookstore and libraries. How many if them have a section of books you can just browse in a language other than English or Spanish? For anything beyond Spanish, how often do you see or hear another foreign language? Would you be confident you could find enough conversation partners to use that language even semi-frequently?

Yes, the internet opens up a lot of doors in terms of resources, but you need to be personally invested in learning the language to make them work. Unless there’s a community with great reading lists at various levels for your target language, just searching and browsing bookstore websites aimed at native speakers is kind of tough for being able to just browse and find something that catches your eye and seems on your level, especially compared to just browsing the shelves in a brick and mortar shop. Also, those books are generally much more expensive than English books, for obvious reasons.

Yes, I would be hyped to learn my local school district was going to start teaching the kids 4 languages from elementary through high school, but it’s just going to be wasted money if you don’t have the auxiliary elements outside the classroom in place, or a plan to at least put them in place while rolling out these classes. Otherwise, you’re just going to get a bunch of yokels coming out of the woodwork to say “My boy don’t need to speak nothing but 'American!” And complaining because little Billy ordered 4 books off Amazon.de and it ran them 120€, only to show up and have Billy realize these books are way harder than he thought they would be and he actually needs to order more books with simpler language to get started.

Yes, little Billy could pirate the shit out of the books and stuff he needs and find a discord chat or forum to get in free practice with speaking and writing, but not all students will be motivated enough and tech savvy enough for us to assume this will be a viable method to get results in general.

“Am I interested in other DEs?” and “Will I install them?” are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn’t the new hotness anymore, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I’d rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.

I don’t hate it, I just never got into it. I watched a few episodes which didn’t really do it for me, and I just didn’t really feel any need to continue it.

Mainline SMT games are a rather different beast. They don’t have any of the social sim elements of the Persona games, and tend to be old-school first-person dungeon crawlers, with an emphasis on exploration, the acquisition and fusing of demons, and developing a balanced team of demons to face off against the enemies and bosses you encounter in the dungeons. They also frequently feature a good/neutral/evil alignments that offers different endings, including different final bosses, depending on which alignment you wind up with as a result of the choices you make throughout the game. They’re a lot of fun if you’re into those sort of things.

That, or they’ve recently moved from somewhere much colder and still haven’t acclimated to the new temperature range. I was this guy for a solid year after moving back home when I’d spent two years living much further north and getting used to a far colder climate while I was at college. 15 years later, my feet start getting cold if I don’t wear heavier socks and boots when it dips below 20°C, but I also don’t feel like I’m sweating enough to flood my apartment when it starts pushing 40°C in the summer any more.

A few months ago, the local dispensary was out of the vape I would normally buy, so I tried a new one instead. Took a hit, thought “Well, guess I’m going to bed right now, then,” and laid in bed. That thing hit me so hard, at one point I had to check the news on my phone to confirm whether there’d been another earthquake, or if I’d just ripped a massive fart and not realized.

I came to the realization recently that most of my books I read are just as much disposable entertainment to me as watching sitcoms is for my parents. I’ll feel bad about forgetting the details of some light novel I read a month ago when they can provide a detailed summary of the rerun of Two and a Half Men or whatever it was they were watching a month ago.