The inherent difficulty is that, with English being the international lingua franca, it makes it harder for native English speakers to be functionally bilingual without constant exposure. Western Europeans can manage it, because not only is English-language education required in schools, people are surrounded by…

Americans typically have a poor understanding of the world outside of their borders—and, I hate to say it, it’s bipartisan when you consider all those proudly calling themselves “socialists” when the vast majority are, at best, European-style social democrats (just like Scandinavia).

It’s the New York Times—of course, these people are rich. They don’t write positive lifestyle pieces about poor people.

The only quirk, besides missing security patches, is that websites might eventually stop working well, since a lot of common web development libraries only support recent versions (the latest Bootstrap library supports iOS 9 and above); and, of course, there will come the time when apps stop supporting it.

It’s dumb, but I got used to it. Yes, turning it off permanently in Settings is a tiny annoyance (essentially three taps instead of one swipe and one tap), but it re-enables all the same with the usual Control Panel icon. I use Bluetooth maybe once a month and feel no need to leave it on.

I’m one generation behind you with a 6S. I pretty much didn’t install iOS 11 on it until towards the very end. Unfortunately, 11.4 turned out to be a turd with a major battery life bug, but the last version (11.4.1) fixed that, and it turned out to be faster than iOS 10.

This is a rip-off.

I believe the Vatican would say to “let nature take its course” and let the miscarriage happen on its own.  Of course, both of us are quite aware that there can be very serious, potentially fatal complications doing that, but that just underscores how their teachings on sexuality haven’t kept up with science.

Catholicism is against contraception and abortion, so your only technical options are abstinence or the risk of pregnancy.

There is no such thing as a “national referendum” in the U.S. All it will require is the standard legislative process.

The answer, years ago, would have been to never indulge Trump in the first place. No constant news reports of all his gaffes and foibles, no late night interviews, no appearances on SNL—Trump was very much a fringe candidate until the media made him a big deal. American media just cannot resist a circus. FOX News…

Heh...well, I think I wanted to emphasize “Trump” more than his followers, who, as “strong” as they think they are, are mostly weak narcissistic supply.

Anyone who knows how narcissists think would immediately have known that this wouldn’t shut Trump up, because they will never, ever admit they’re wrong and will constantly shift the goalposts to stay “right.”

U.S. evangelicals are also wreaking havoc in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Bernie Sanders may not be a card-carrying Democrat, but he ran as a Democrat and didn’t run as a third-party candidate. Michael Bloomberg, however, threatened to run as a third-party candidate if Sanders won. Clearly, our plutocratic class has zero problem with splitting the vote if they don’t get their way.

Party identification is meaningless when it is independents that largely decide elections today. In fact, Sanders’ independence is his main selling point with a lot of voters. There are legitimate reasons to vote for and against him, but this one isn’t it.

Democrats need to start taking notes looking at how the opposition works in parliamentary democracies, such as in Canada and Europe. They don’t often have the power to affect change either, but they have a strong duty to “oppose” and do it loudly and publicly.

And who also carried a ton of baggage, in addition to being a bad campaigner.

A lot of mental illness operates on a spectrum with shared symptoms. If he’s been previously diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, I see no reason to question it. I’d add, however, that he probably also suffers from a heavy dose of situational narcissism by nature of the fact that he’s a rich and famous celebrity.…

The ultimate problem is that I’m not sure that any of the current crop of Democratic/Labour centrists are a match for nationalist Republicans/Tories, and rather than see this as an opportunity to regroup and rebuild, they’ve spent most of their time both trying to undermine their progressives—again, the very same…