How the UK and London misread their hand

[kool maudit]

I don't think Truss was using a US model so much as an earlier UK one. She thought she could do what Thatcher did for the City in the late 80s.

[kool maudit]

The EU is a dead letter. Brexit was an Atlanticist move, not a populist one, despite the sentiment.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Yuri

German was very strong in academia too till the 1930's.

Per Wikipedia, only 4% of American students are learning German, but it's still somehow in third place behind Spanish and French since everything else is less than 1%.

My home town still has a public school with daily German language instruction:
https://www.cps-k12.org/domain/1576

Language-specific public schools are pretty rare but there are still private/Catholic schools around that emphasize Latin or another language.

My high school that offered Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Latin. I just checked their website and they dropped Russian at some point and replaced it with Mandarin Chinese.

The Latin curriculum has been altered to include a year of Greek and they are also now offering two years of Portuguese as electives.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Scotland has oil, natural resources, good universities, tourism and fairly high HDI. I don't see why it wouldn't thrive if part of the EU. Lots of EU countries are small, with limited assets.

Scotland's economy was more heavily integrated with the rest of the UK than with the EU, which means the economic impact of independence would be worse than Brexit.

Of course, the EU would be there to help prop them up economically, but still.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Per Wikipedia, only 4% of American students are learning German, but it's still somehow in third place behind Spanish and French since everything else is less than 1%.

My home town still has a public school with daily German language instruction:
https://www.cps-k12.org/domain/1576

Language-specific public schools are pretty rare but there are still private/Catholic schools around that emphasize Latin or another language.

My high school that offered Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Latin. I just checked their website and they dropped Russian at some point and replaced it with Mandarin Chinese.

The Latin curriculum has been altered to include a year of Greek and they are also now offering two years of Portuguese as electives.

Hmm, I would've expected Mandarin to be third place now.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Hmm, I would've expected Mandarin to be third place now.

Mandarin is seriously overrated as an international language.

It's really only useful if you deal primarily with China which admittedly is huge.

But globally French and Spanish, and Russian and Arabic, and maybe even Portuguese, have more reach.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Just don't call it Londonderry.

You know me well enough to know better.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Scotland has oil, natural resources, good universities, tourism and fairly high HDI. I don't see why it wouldn't thrive if part of the EU. Lots of EU countries are small, with limited assets.

For a smallish European country, Scotland would have a much higher than average ratio of natural resources to population.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Mandarin is seriously overrated as an international language.

It's really only useful if you deal primarily with China which admittedly is huge.

But globally French and Spanish, and Russian and Arabic, and maybe even Portuguese, have more reach.

Agreed. the number of non Chinese that speak Mandarin is vanishingly small. I don't think it will ever gain traction outside of "greater China".

French and Spanish have very bright futures. From what I understand, very few people speak fluent Arabic, as most so-called Arabic speakers converse in the vernacular dialects, many of which are apparently mutually unintelligible.

Russia will persist, but only in the Russian sphere of influence.

[Don't Be That Guy]

Originally Posted by TempleGuy1000

Making sense of a United Ireland

Many people, at least in the US, believe the time is now for Ireland to unite as one.

Americans cosplaying as Irish is one of the dumbest enduring cultural quirks in the NE USA. Your families haven't been "Irish" in over a century.
Let the Irish figure out what they want to do in terms of unification. Based on the economics of it, I doubt the Republic is really itching to take on the burden of NI. It would wreck their economy.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Don't Be That Guy

Americans cosplaying as Irish is one of the dumbest enduring cultural quirks in the NE USA. You're families haven't been "Irish" in over a century.
Let the Irish figure out what they want to do in terms of unification. Based on the economics of it, I doubt the Republic is really itching to take on the burden of NI. It would wreck their economy.

Has nothing to do with foreign cosplaying. There's strong Irish support for Irish reunification.

Also, these decisions are almost never based on economics. I mean, why the hell did West Germany absorb the economic disaster of East Germany? What were they thinking? It should have wrecked their economy.

And the economic argument misses the point that NI is presently economically stunted largely bc it's a forgotten "island" of the UK.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Hmm, I would've expected Mandarin to be third place now.

It's about 3% in college, but much lower at the high school level, per this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._United_States

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

It's about 3% in college, but much lower at the high school level, per this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._United_States

damn, spanish is now at nearly 75% K-12 in the US.

though i guess i shouldn't really be that surprised as my two elementary school age kids are both learning spanish.

bi-lingual america here we come!



and "wow" looking at that higher education chart through time at the bottom.

french went from 37.9% in 1960 down to 12.4% in 2016.

and german went from 24.2% in 1960 down to 5.7% in 2016.

talk about a cliff-fall for those two former big guns.

[eschaton]

My daughter has taken Mandarin since kindergarten. She's in 8th grade now, and still not really conversational (which more has to do with how the U.S. teachers foreign languages than anything) though she writes Chinese characters pretty impeccably.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Don't Be That Guy

Americans cosplaying as Irish is one of the dumbest enduring cultural quirks in the NE USA. Your families haven't been "Irish" in over a century.
Let the Irish figure out what they want to do in terms of unification. Based on the economics of it, I doubt the Republic is really itching to take on the burden of NI. It would wreck their economy.

That's so bizarre and silly!

In Brazil, White people are usually ridiculed for emphasizing their Italian/German roots (Portuguese/Spanish in a lesser degree), but it doesn't compare to the level of Americans doing it.

The average "Irish" Americans are not Irish and they're completely ignorant about British Isles (or any place abroad whatsoever).

Originally Posted by Acajack

Mandarin is seriously overrated as an international language.

It's really only useful if you deal primarily with China which admittedly is huge.

But globally French and Spanish, and Russian and Arabic, and maybe even Portuguese, have more reach.

Even Italian has way more enrolled students than Mandarin in Brazil: English (by far), then Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and only then Chinese.

No one speaks Mandarin as a foreign language and nor will in our lifetimes.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Mandarin is seriously overrated as an international language.

It's really only useful if you deal primarily with China which admittedly is huge.

But globally French and Spanish, and Russian and Arabic, and maybe even Portuguese, have more reach.

Spanish is probably the second most useful language to be fluent in besides English. But Mandarin has to be third. Mandarin is an extremely useful language to know for a number of industries (tech, manufacturing, accounting, to name a few).

[eschaton]

My grandfather was one of those "proud to be Irish" folks, despite being 1/4th Swedish and all of his Irish ancestors having lived in the U.S. since the 1840s.

Used to go to lots of "Irish fairs" with him as a child, where he always made sure to drop some money in the collection box for "the cause."

[homebucket]

Spanish > Mandarin > French in terms of usefulness.

[Centropolis]

Spanish is the main language of the people of the western hemisphere, while English is the most important. Some level of Spanish should be mandatory in U.S. schools.

[Shawn]

Originally Posted by Don't Be That Guy

Americans cosplaying as Irish is one of the dumbest enduring cultural quirks in the NE USA. Your families haven't been "Irish" in over a century.
Let the Irish figure out what they want to do in terms of unification. Based on the economics of it, I doubt the Republic is really itching to take on the burden of NI. It would wreck their economy.

Plastic Paddies and their Dropkick Murphys behavior are cringe.

But don't be mistaken - there are plenty of Irish-Americans in greater Boston and New York with direct, first or second degree family in Ireland. I've visited my cousins (and their kids, who treat my kids/nieces/nephews as first cousins) in Roscommon close to 30 times over the last 40 years. I'm even part owner of some property there.