Do you tell him that Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times with his companies? What does that say about his business acumen? How often has your uncle filed for bankruptcy?

Okay, but at the moment (3 am EST) Trump is also leading by 4% of the total votes. The electoral college may be fucked up, but the society is more fucked up.

I don't know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven't finished. Shows you just how bad it is.

That's one of the nice things about the law in Quebec. Binding arbitration clauses are illegal.

I would imagine that it also has to do with the family registry. If a woman marries a man, she is taken from her own Family Registry and entered in her husband's. I would imagine that upon the husband's death nothing changes for the wife, but she has the option of returning to her own family registry.

I'm not 100% sure that this is how it works, or the reason for this termination, but it seems like a valid one.

Language Transfer is much, much better than Duolingo for learning a language.

I am learning Spanish using language transfer after having learned four other languages in more traditional ways. Obviously, immersion is the best way to learn. But if you have to learn any other way, this is the one. Far, far better than Duolingo.

It's made up of MP3s, usually about 10 minutes each. You just listen to them and respond to the instructor.

You can use SoundCloud, or YouTube, or the simple but practical smartphone app. The whole thing is run by one guy, and there is no charge but he asks for donations. I have been paying $10 per month on Patreon for several years now, and consider it well worth it.

You can learn French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, and Swahili.

Until I saw where it was from, I had absolutely no idea that this wasn't an actual news story.

Fun fact: the character "&" was a way of writing the Latin word "et", and used to be known as "per se and", meaning "the word 'and' itself".

When reciting the alphabet, people would say, "...x, y, z, and per se, and".

Over time, "and per se, and" got shortened to "ampersand".

He himself has one conviction (civil, not criminal) so far, for sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll.

The people around him (Bannon, Manafort, Flynn, Weisselberg, etc.) have many convictions, including guilty pleas. If you include the January 6th insurrection, hundreds of them.

Most that I discovered while living there. I only had two weeks notice about my job, so I didn't even have a chance to learn any language before flying to Japan.

There were simple pressures like being stared at all the time, because I lived in a smaller city that didn't have many foreigners.

Being required to submit my passport to buy travelers checks, even though it was a joint account with my Japanese wife, who didn't have to provide hers.

And ones that were not unique to being foreign, but were still difficult for me to deal with, like 3 hours of commuting every day on one of those packed trains you sometimes see.

At the time, telephoning from Japan to Canada cost about $1.30 per minute, and the internet had not really arrived, so I was somewhat cut off from my family and other personal supports.

There were also difficulties in my marriage and my work situation that certainly didn't help.

I think that some foreigners can be happy living in Japan long-term, but most won't.

I was there for 7 years, and probably should have left a few years earlier. There is a lot to love about the country and its people, but the relentless pressures really do wear you down.

I think that fine documentary, "The Core", explained how to deal with this issue.