Hapankaali

So in fact, the term "dog" meaning "sausage" does likely originate in sausages sometimes containing dog meat in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog#Etymology

However, corn dogs are newer than hot dogs themselves, and it's unlikely many of them ever contained dog meat.

That was a Camus reference, though if your response was as well somehow - well played.

If you didn't get the reference, I'd recommend reading L'Étranger, which is a decently good book anyway.

Don't care for it either way...

Okay, "most" of the world, sure, but that is not a very high bar. Yes, Americans are much better off than people in the Central African Republic, Myanmar or Venezuela.

You prove my point. In fact, US people working a minimum wage job have a much lower net income (including transfers) than those living on the lowest possible unemployment benefits in top-tier economies, who by the way also have access to adequate health care, top-tier education (without bullshit class-based admission procedures or segregation), much better public transport, etc.

Hanlon's razor, Trump edition: never attribute to cold and calculating self-interest what can be adequately explained by malice.

The focus on petrol prices and inflation are, to me, also curious aspects of American culture.

For one, one of the major problems in the US economy is that petrol prices are too low. In general, to optimize productivity one should aim to subsidize those activities that generate positive externalities, and tax those that generate negative externalities. The use of fossil fuels - a heavily polluting activity - should then be adequately taxed. No top-tier economy has petrol prices as low as in the US, they are closer to 10 USD a gallon (in freedom units). The undertaxation of fossil fuels has also led to greater sensitivity to price fluctuations on the global markets.

Inflation is a curious fixation since the US, unlike many other countries, never experienced hyperinflation. So why the obsession? I suspect one factor might be that the US has few collective wage negotiations, whereas here inflation is more or less automatically priced into wages. What then happens is that workers who stay in their job have their wages steadily eroded (i.e., their employer simply pays them a lower real wage over time), but then if they switch jobs, they attribute the wage increase to their career advancement rather than inflation, which increases the price of labour just as it does the price of goods (if due to money losing value).

No, he's saying that the EU budget should be lowered, and that poorer EU nations should contribute a larger share of the budget.

I think there are two main reasons. The first is that things simply haven't gotten bad enough. It's true, there is a health care crisis killing tens of thousands a year, rampant human rights violations in ICE concentration camps, brazen corruption in the administration, etc. But for most of the uneducated and uninformed middle class, these things don't directly affect their daily lives.

The second reason is that the mass indoctrination campaign concerning American exceptionalism has been immensely successful. So while many Americans agree some things could be improved, they are unsure of what those things are because they also still believe the US is one of the best places in the world to live, even as the US has steadily tumbled down the quality-of-life rankings and now arguably ranks below the likes of Estonia and Slovenia. The belief in exceptionalism has fostered a rather meek and servile attitude towards the government.

Merz isn't calling for the EU to have the right to directly tax its citizens.

On the other hand, the pronunciation in van Gogh's local dialect would have been quite different from the standard Dutch pronunciation (with a "hard g").

Then again, assuming this name refers to the town of Goch, the locals there (just across the border in modern-day Germany) pronounce it differently from both of these, which would likely be different from the way it was pronounced in van Gogh's time (some Low Saxon or Low Franconian dialect, I'm guessing).

However, none of these pronunciations are anything like the absurd American or British English variations.

Who knew wars could be so complicated?

The "race" to lose as much money as possible when the bubble bursts.