Well, that’s some luck you’ve had.

I’ve actually thought about looking for an old TDI, since it’s a bit different, more resistant to American trade issues and possibly in my budget. If you’re in a rural area it actually is greener, too.

Got an expensive leather jacket as a kid, for far more money than I had paid for clothes before or have since. Assumed it was indestructible being leather. It was not that kind of leather jacket, and I managed to tear it wide open in maybe a couple weeks.

This kind of question coming up a lot is why I chose the name, haha.

Am I annoyed at her? (Obviously I’m not, but she often assumes I am)

I mean, it’s not really obvious. Instant feelings don’t always make rational sense.

Like they’re setting the bar even higher for how bad I have to feel about my minor mistakes, because I’m also kind of like that.

Obviously, that doesn’t apply if you’re not.

How did you change?

Oh, nevermind, haha.

Yep. The concept that there’s a symmetry between countries is a few degrees of separation away from many Americans, I guess. It’s not weirder to have an Australian Idol than an American one. I’ve also had conversation where they assume people in other countries are patriotic for America. Like, even in the first world we all sit around wishing we were American.

Famously, many (most?) of them can’t even identify the continents on a map. I’d be interested to see Chinese tested the same way, since I’ve heard they’re on the same level of insularity, being another massive superpower.

Wait, is it just called “Idol” there?

Months ago I would have said “yes, it’s possible”. Now, it’s become pretty clear LLMs are a dead end. They’re trained to simulate the internet and can’t do other things with any reliability.

It’s still possible with whatever the future approach to making computers smarter, though. Natural intelligence exists, and we’re made out of the same stuff as everything else, so artificial intelligence must also be possible. And, without the limits of recent evolution, it could probably be made far better than us.

Don’t forget that pandemics used to be a goofy sci-fi trope, too.

Americans for the most part are only dimly aware there’s an outside world in the first place. The amount of covering up that needs to be done is minimal.

That show would have been way darker if Perry had ever employed the fact he’s a venomous mammal.

Actually, it was a missed opportunity not to go with a female Perry and have an egg-hatching subplot. Their version of the platypus really didn’t do much.

Weirdly specific question, OP.

I kind of feel like anything gets grosser as it ages. IIRC urine also start to break down and have more ammonia, which has a smell.

That feeling when you survive the apocalypse only to get stung by a platypus and regret that you survived.

I’d expect them to stay out of it at this point, actually. They want to expand into the pacific, and the US and East Asian democracies want to stop them. Meanwhile, Australia also has affinities with now-distinct Europe, isn’t directly in the way of any of that, and depends heavily on China for trade.

And, even if it did become involved, dealing with a Chinese occupation isn’t going to be as hard as a nuclear winter or the total breakdown of modern civilisation.

I did split the question in two.

They are not in NATO, actually. That requires proximity to the Atlantic. They’re Western though, that’s true. Being in a city could be a bit of a risk.

In South America or southern Africa you’re going to deal with waves of people trying to expand in from the north. No way of life escapes that unscathed. Not to mention, the projections for food scarcity on other continents aren’t nearly as rosy, if there’s soot in the upper atmosphere, maybe because of the higher population to start with.

And then there’s poverty as a whole separate dimension of things. Here or in Australia I’m pretty sure the capacity to build things like generators will continue. In the third world there’s absolutely no guarantee.

Where would you move to ride out a potential WWIII?

Australia. There really is no better place in the event of nuclear war. It’s a continent-island, meaning easy to defend, it grows and can build just about anything, and being in the southern hemisphere it should be safe from nuclear winter.

Specifically, a rural property somewhere agricultural. Maybe Queensland or Tasmania.

If you could move anywhere to minimize the impact on you of the worldwide rise of fascism…

That’s almost a different question, though. Whichever European country is the most securely democratic. There’s lots of non-war ways fascism can suck aggressively.

Yeet is from a Vine (that’s like TikTok from 2010). I’m pretty sure it was only surreal at the time, just as the action of throwing the bottle into the crowd was in the first place.

One big thing I notice is that the youngest speakers all use [ɹ̈] for “r”, instead of the more traditional [ɹ], which means it’s formed in the back of the mouth now. I have to think that will change the trajectory of the whole phonology going forwards if it holds up, since dropping front-of-the-mouth r is a major tendency English has had.

Use of “like” as a hedge is the most famous change for young speakers all over the Anglosphere. It’s just handy, honestly, to have a quick way of conveying degrees of certainty in this highly complicated world. If future English grew that into a full mood system it would actually be great. At the other end, the last vestiges of grammatical gender have been on their way out for centuries, and are leaving at an accelerated rate now.

I think young people are much more comfortable verbing nouns than older generations. English is noted for doing this, but usually the words that can be used either way are fixed. In the absence of a better verb I’ll often improvise one, and be understood no problem by speakers my age, but I’ve never heard an older speaker do this.