I live in Portland and it’s the same here on the Columbia and the Willamette. We don’t get the giant container ships because they can’t cross the Columbia Bar, but we do get midsize grain ships headed for Asian and South American markets.

Also it’s cheaper to ship grain from the upper Missouri region to the Columbia Plateau and then down the Snake and Columbia on barges where it then gets loaded onto freighters in Portland, Vancouver and Longview and shipped to Asia and South America. By volume the Columbia is the second largest watershed in the US. Obviously all of the Columbia Plateau grain gets shipped down the Columbia as well, which is a lot, since it’s a major grain producing region.

The downside is crossing the Columbia Bar which is also known as the graveyard of the Pacific, but there are highly paid Columbia River pilots for that.

As an Oregonian I took an embarrassingly long time to figure this out.

This is how democracies die. Fascists come to power when their opposition fractures. I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just telling you how it is. Choose wisely.

Nothing beats cannister for your truly murderous discharge.

True, but Chromebooks are a type of Linux as well.

Right?

I feel like it’s something we might want to run with, like bring back gendered English!

English also used to be much more case-based as well. We still do the same things in modern English, but we don’t do it with grammar and instead use syntax which isn’t as cool.

That’s fair. My mom passed away last year which just means that you’re even that much more correct.

That said, I’m in my 50s so both my parents are dead which is pretty regular at my age.

I’m still getting used to not having parents, but at my age it’s to be expected and probably easier than it would be were I younger.

Nope. Never. Every time people are easily able to figure it out in a matter of seconds.

In the grand scale of things it’s probably one of the least important things I can think of.

Same with feet and inches for distance.

Because they’re teenagers. In the real world nobody actually gives a fuck. Call me weird, but the different formats have never caused me a single instant of confusion in my entire life.

The problem is that speaking different languages is not even remotely the same thing as knowing anything about linguistics. People have no idea of how little they actually know about the use of language.

Again, the difficulty of language acquisition is determined by how similar the new language you are trying to learn is to the languages you already speak. There isn’t any kind of objective measurement of language acquisition difficulty.

For whatever reason people are often very resistant to this fact, but just speaking several languages fluently doesn’t mean you actually know shit about linguistics, and this is a very well-established concept.

So a native Mandarin speaker would probably find English and German equally difficult to acquire because they are both so unlike their own language.

Fun fact about English; Old English was even more grammatically complex than modern German but it got stripped down over the years and now accomplishes through syntax much of what it used to do with grammar.

There are also a couple of very odd qualities to English that may have come from the Celtic languages, but the idea is still pretty controversial.

Languages are “easier” or more “difficult” based on how similar they are to your native language. There isn’t some objective measure of difficulty across languages.

The first too is misspelled. It should have two Os.

Fun fact; English used to have three genders --masculine, feminine and neuter-- like most of the other Germanic languages, but they got stripped out over the years for historical reasons having to do with the Danelaw and the Norman conquest and are gone by the time of filthy old Chaucer.

I don’t, but I’m not very popular around here either. My country is far from ideal, but I still mostly like it.

Well I have to admit that I’m a little intimidated, and I ain’t even European.

The overwhelming consensus among credentialed historians is that Jesus was a real person who did in fact live during and in the when and where described in the Bible.

For some reason this consensus makes a lot of atheists angry. As an atheist myself, I’m not sure why. The fact that he’s almost certainly a real historical person doesn’t hurt my feelings at all and has no bearing whatsoever on the ways in which I arrive at my atheism.

You say that as if you think it hasn’t been tried before.