"One language you don’t receive much input from is Esperanto. So imagine my surprise – and delight – when I discovered trilingual Polish-English-Esperanto information boards ....." Which immediately took me back to secondary school and my language "studies". I first studied Latin, at which I ingloriously failed. Since successful study of a language was required for graduation, a kindly teacher/counsellor told me that she'd signed me up for a yearlong class of Polish! The rules were simple: 1. Sit in the last row of the classroom. 2. Never open my mouth. 3. Take no tests. 4. Pass the class.
It worked! Thank Buddha for the kindness of some teachers.
You want good news? I'll give you good news! "In 2012, Hostess, the iconic American bakery giant behind Ding Dongs, Ho Hos and Twinkies, was bankrupt, with plans to slash more than 18,000 jobs and close its doors for good amid a crippling nationwide strike.
Then, in 2013, a snack-cake savior appeared. The Missouri-based sweets maker was bought for $410 million by a partnership between private-equity giant Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulos, a billionaire turnaround artist known as "Mr. Shelf Space" for his revival of brands like Vlasic, Hungry-Man and Chef Boyardee.
Now, the iconic dessert titan is resurgent, selling its golden, cream-filled Twinkies across the world under the name Hostess Brands and turning down $2 billion offers from a pack of hopeful buyers. On Tuesday morning, the company reached its latest peak when Reuters, citing anonymous sources, suggested Hostess would head to Wall Street with an initial public offering that would value the company at around $2.5 billion."
Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-08, 18:10:29Where I grew up you paid for a dial-up connection by the second as if it were a regular phone call, not by volume. Here we had to pay for a pulse each 3 minutes. After all, volume mattered.
Since I don't like either candidate, I'm going to write in my choice, Queen Elizabeth II. She's not likely to win, but it will make me feel better about my vote.
But of course there isn't a single company that'll pay too many taxes. Accidentally paying too little though.
Odd, isn't it? Myself? I pay my taxes and add $1200 to the total. I used to think everybody did that. Trump ? He doesn't pay any...at least that's what Hillary says.
Nothing new will arrive, both clowns are the different faces of the same coin.
I wish you a local Trump.
I can live with Hillary, but Trump would make a move to Canada, the home of my ancestors, necessary. Have you heard that if Trump wins Canada is going to build a wall and make the US pay for it?
So, Jimbro: If somebody is doing well, all's right with the world? (Mind you, your definition of "the multiverse" is logically deficient…) Would you argue that?!
American Exceptionalism: (Hacked from somebody's site) "Signs of supposed progress in expressions of American violence often disguise profound continuities. For example: The era of highly visible public lynchings, which is estimated to have claimed some 5,000 lives, has passed. Yet since then we have moved on to an institutionalized death penalty regime, wherein states that previously had the highest numbers of lynchings now have the greatest numbers of black people on death row. Both per capita and in raw numbers, America’s prisons warehouse more human beings than any other country on the planet, and its police demonstrate a clear pattern of racial bias in killing their fellow citizens at a rate stratospherically higher than that of any of its supposed peer nations. U.S. soldiers are deployed in some 135 countries, and the number of troops actually engaged in combat is almost certainly much higher than authorities are willing to admit."
Trump 
