I hear you. On the other hand, it is the Grammar Police thread. There is no possible world where it would have stayed on topic 
I actually don’t see this as politics at all. In my mind, there is nothing more definitively American than criticizing the status quo, when it is broken. Maybe that’s just me.
Japans leading cause of death amongst middle aged men and woman is suicide. Age 35 and up it surpasses the US. The numbers go way up as age goes up. Can’t be that great.
It’s a huge problem. There’s a lot of things here that are culturally broken as well. But that’s completely unrelated to the health care system (except in the sense that mental health could probably use a bit more focus).
I hear you. I’m out of battery and should be practicing instead! 
I would go so far as to say it’s our responsibility to criticize the status quo, especially when it is literally killing people here in the US.
A lesson not learnt is burnt.
Touche. 
Hah this reminds me of the great COVID thread of '21!
What do y’all think of Biden?
@eric that’s far too high a figure, but thank you.
Mr @RuknRole please accept my apologies if I offended you. I think that the USA is a fantastic country. It was just fun. I took your Hulk Hogan picture as a comment on the meathead stereotype. I misjudged your intentions.
I do think it’s important to be able to laugh at yourself and your country. Canada is a great place to live but I’m not blind to its shortcomings:
It has a huge obesity problem, it has a very poor record on dealing with indigenous cultures who were here long before the white guys, the Loonie is in the toilet, it has inflation running at nearly 8%, the most popular coffee chain (Tim Hortons) serves the worst coffee in the world it is absolute garbage, 1 in 5 Canadians is affected by mental illness, nearly 5 million people live below the poverty line. The list goes on.
You can trash talk Canada all day long or Wales for that matter. I don’t care because are all in the same gigantic boat. But jingoism does nobody any favours (or indeed favors). Being told from an early age the you’re the best country in the world just doesn’t stack up when you look at the other metrics. Sorry but there it is.
Education should be free all the way up to University. Tax rich corporations and billionaires to fund this. Having a better educated population has to be beneficial to society as a whole. No?
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Oh and it’s not all bad up here.
While we’re here, could I ask people not to use reach out to instead of contact, or going forward instead of from now on? They really irritate me somehow.
CorpSpeak!
Grrr I hate it when this kind of language bleeds out into the general population. After a while you feel like you’re living in a corporation.
I really think we should lean in to your ask here.
Oh God I honestly think my wife had a work email like that the other day
I used to think I hated verbing, but nouning is way way worse. Ask is NOT A NOUN, dammit. It’s a REQUEST. GRRRRRRR
Ooo I learnt (learned?) a new term there .
I think this may be more of an English language phenomenon? The grammar is much less specific so you can swap between part of speech more easily…
Yeah I think so. This either wouldn’t work in most languages or they have built-in mechanisms to do it in a legit way.
And yet, in the US at least, it’s only used in twitty corpspeak.
In truth it’s been used as a noun since antiquity, and yet I suspect even then it sounded as dumb as it does now.
Apparently it rose to the current corporate prominence it currently enjoys in the late '80s. And I still don’t care, it’s a request dammit
It is definitely a request, absolutely.
But I’ve worked with C-suite types for years, and I’ve noticed that the use of “ask” as a noun is regarded and used as short hand, i.e., a quicker way to communicate. So are acronyms.
Essentially, this type of communication is used all the time because similar business situations recur many times a day, and they often call for communicating the same or similar type of thing over and over again. Determining what the/their/our ask is is merely efficient.
Your ask is duly noted, but the noisome noun ain’t going away any time soon. 
