I think she learned it as a kid because it was the language of where she lived, but she didn’t use it much in the USA. The reason we met was actually because she wanted someone she could practice speaking it with.

Once an hour sounds awesome but I suppose a person dying of thirst would think that a person drowning was having a great time.

I have never had a woman hit on me, but a gay man did once and the memory of that warms my heart. (I’m not gay.)

My native language is Russian and I have met a black woman who speaks Russian better than I do. (I haven’t been there for over thirty years so maybe there are some black people living there now, but I never saw one before coming to the US.) Her parents are diplomats and she is fluent in a couple of other languages too because her family lived in several different countries when she was growing up.

I have been exposed to hospitals as a guy who worked on their software, as a friend to a doctor, and as the relative of a patient. What I have seen is that hospital staff are generally well intentioned but extremely overworked, to the point that they can overlook obvious signs of a life-threatening illness. You can’t just assume that if you’re in a hospital then you’ll be taken care of. The doctor can be too busy to pay attention to you or too tired to think clearly about your condition. The doctor might even just forget that you’re there. You have to make sure that you’re getting a doctor’s attention, even if that means acting in a way that makes you feel like an entitled jerk.

My grandmother went to the hospital a couple of years ago because every few hours her heart would stop for several seconds. After she was in the emergency room for a day without receiving any treatment, some hospital employee came and wanted to discharge her. She and I refused so she ended up in a hospital bed for a couple of days, still with no treatment. Finally my sister came from another state, and my sister is less shy than I am. She actually found the cardiologist and made sure he looked at my grandmother’s condition. Once he did, he immediately sent her to surgery. She had a pacemaker put in and recovered.

(In case anyone is curious, my grandma says that when her heart stopped for long enough that she lost consciousness, she felt a wave of heat go through her body, her vision faded to black, and then she passed out. It didn’t hurt. In her case, her heart started again on its own but I suppose that for someone less fortunate, that would have been what it felt like to die.)

It’s worse with context.

The article does say

stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year

and it’s true that those particular stocks have gone down, although I wouldn’t call a 4% drop a “plummet”. The headline is still a deliberate lie and most people just read the headline. Shame on the New Republic.

Also, Pfizer’s market cap is about ten times bigger than Moderna’s and Moderna’s is about ten times bigger that Novavax’s. In other words, Pfizer is more than one hundred times bigger than Novavax and putting the two in the same “biggest pharmaceutical companies” category is bullshit.

Man, this hits close to home. Just yesterday I decided to get in touch with an old friend from college and I found out that she had died in a car accident years ago, not long after I lost touch with her. Don’t put things off, folks.

Why not both?

How big does a human hand thriving in the UK get?

There’s precedent for it, with West Virginia. The problem is that the way that the Senate works makes what could have been a local issue extremely national.

Yes. Good for him, and for everyone who got to use his road too!

Note that

Despite the Kelston Toll Road not being approved by the local council, Watts hadn’t committed a crime.

The road was in use for 14 weeks before the council asked for retrospective approval and the nearby highway A431 reopened early.

He stopped because there was no longer construction for drivers to avoid by paying his toll.

What fraction is under 18? It’s hard to tell by looking at the graph. I want to calculate what ratio of combatants to civilians killed a number of 70% implies.

Many senior Democrats were calling on Biden to resign long before he got covid, but he repeatedly made defiant announcements that he would never resign (and Harris supported him). He’s the guy who said that he would only resign if God told him to! His covid infection appears to have been mild (lasting less than a week), and he resigned not because of it but because pretty much the entire Democratic establishment (led by Pelosi) told him that he must.

There are two components to this question. Did many in the working class feel that Democrats had abandoned them? And is Trump’s economic policy actually better for the working class than Harris’s? I think the answers are “yes” and “probably no”. However, voters don’t listen to economists. If they’re not happy with the status quo, they vote for disrupting the status quo even if experts tell them that that’s a bad idea.

I suppose Sanders thinks that the working class would have supported a Democratic candidate who proposed a leftward (as opposed to Trump’s rightward) disruption. My guess is that that isn’t true and socialism is still a dirty word in America, but who knows?

If the quotes are accurate then I think my original reply still stands, just without that first paragraph. I don’t understand how anyone could argue that the Israeli army has already achieved all its objectives in Gaza. Maybe it should withdraw because the remaining objectives are impossible to achieve, but that’s a different matter.

Petty leftists weren’t even a significant part of the problem, IMO. Biden is very unpopular, people didn’t want more of the same, and Biden’s vice president looked like more of the same. However, the Democratic party was too hierarchical to nominate the sort of candidate that they needed to nominate.

Hell, they nominated Biden himself even though his age could have given them a perfect excuse not to nominate a sitting president. He was only forced to step aside once his inadequacies were undeniably obvious to all, and even then he was like a child throwing a tantrum. History is going to remember him as the emperor with no clothes.

I see. That makes this hard to interpret, given that a lot depends on the specific language that he used.

I’m not sure that the problem was going too far towards Republicans rather than not going far enough, because I expect that the leftists staying home stayed home in solidly blue states. I think that the political positions that many people here on Lemmy wanted Harris to take would have been extremely unpopular with the electorate.

With that said, it might have been impossible for Harris to move to the right convincingly, because she couldn’t plausibly distance herself from Biden’s unpopular policies. I wish the Democrats nominated someone who could have criticized Biden in a way that Harris could not.

There’s no quote of Gallant saying that the army has achieved all its objectives in Gaza. It’s just something an anonymous source said that he said. What the article quotes him saying on the record is

He reportedly told the families that the idea that Israel must remain in Gaza to create stability was “an inappropriate idea to risk soldiers’ lives over”.

and

“The IDF commander and I said there was no security reason for remaining in the Philadelphi corridor,” Channel 12 reported him as saying. “Netanyahu said that it was a diplomatic consideration; I’m telling you there was no diplomatic consideration.”

That’s strong criticism but far from “nothing left to do”.

(I’m not sure how fighting this war but then withdrawing from Gaza without creating stability would be in Israel’s long-term security interest.)

“Don’t talk about politics on the first date” used to be a thing but now even as a man I think I would need to know someone’s political views in detail before a second date. It’s not enough to just vote for the same candidate. Plenty of people who despise each other’s ideology voted for Harris. I’m even afraid to talk to some old friends about politics. I know they’re Democrats but it’s still possible for one of us to say something that would seriously damage the friendship.

It’s like being Goldilocks. This one is too far right, that one is too far left…