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The most fair thing to do, oddly, is to leave the seat in the opposite position it was when you got there; everybody flips it once, it may be before or after you use it. Fair.

I’ll remember this one, I love it when people are actually logical about things.

Reminds me of canal locks. The etiquette is to always close the doors after you leave, and people get angry when you don’t. But it’s infuriating because it actually creates more work for everyone. If you leave the doors closed then the next person always has to stop their boat to open them, but if you leave them open there’s a 50% chance the correct set of doors is open for the next person to sail right in. If you’re in the unlucky 50% it makes no difference, because you had to stop to empty the lock anyway and afterwards you get to sail off without closing them.

People also think closing them saves water, which is another can of people-not-understanding-physics worms.

There’s a generation of internet debate guys who seem convinced that correlation disproves causation

The dude who owns the election server won’t be able to manipulate results in any way.

Sure he will. He can just ignore votes for one candidate and not add them to the chain. Blockchains are only resistant to manipulation if they’re distributed and people agree on the canonical version. Even then if enough people agree to manipulate them they can, like they did with Ethereum.

What makes a language easy is its similarity to a learner’s native language, or other languages they’ve already learned.

Don’t believe this at all. English is far more different to Chinese than any to any European language, yet I was able to communicate in Chinese much better after a few weeks of learning than after months or years of French and Spanish, because the grammar is simpler.

Familiarity with cognates, word order and grammar rules can’t beat simply never having to use an article, agree gender or conjugate a verb for the subject or tense. Tell me a Chinese verb and I can talk about anybody doing it at any point in time. Tell me a French verb and I’ll have to study declension tables all week.

However, if you learn english words through text and then try to use them vocally, nobody will understand you. (looking at you “beard”, who isn’t pronounced at all like “bear” for some reason)

If someone pronounced beard like bear with a d on the end I’d understand them fine. Particularly since the rest of the sentence would probably be perfectly grammatical since the grammar is so simple.

People might understand “Le baguette sont fraîche”, they might not. How do they know which words you got right and which you got wrong? They just know nothing agrees. Either way you will sound like a total moron. And you need to learn 3 different grammar rules to fix it, not just one pronunciation.

There is absolutely no correlation between spoken and written english

Come on, this is silly. I’m looking at your comment and almost every word has regular pronunciation. Any incorrect pronunciations would be easily understood. The specific examples you give are just regional differences.

English is easier. So the spelling is irregular, so what. You’ll be bad at spelling for a while. It’s just not comparable to having to memorize arbitrary gender for every noun in the language, learn complex verb conjugations, polite and impolite forms and make every verb and adjective agree with the nouns in gender and number.