"To maneuver oneself into a dead-end street"

i love translations of phrases from other languages, i can only imagine how english ones sound in german.

i'd say "painted myself into a corner" and people would just be confused and think, why would someone do that?

Well, I'm familiar with that phrase, so when I hear it, I know what it means. It's just that I cant always come up with the best phrase or words when I'm having to produce English myself (whether in a conversation or while writing). But I guess that's pretty normal. I would assume that almost everyone will have a bigger vocabulary for reading comprehension than for phrasing things on his own, in almost every foreign language.

This is effect is even more pronounced in languages where I lack practice. I had French and Spanish as my secondary and tertiary foreign languages in school, but have rarely used them ever since. I can still (very slowly) get through a French or Spanish newspaper text, but I couldnt come up with any proper sentence. Totally rusty after 10+ years of almost never speaking those languages.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 9 2020 07:32am

same here. went to spanish 5 and i cant speak shit but i can work out a decent amount of what im reading.

What's the rest of the world going to do eventually, when they realize the virus is here to stay, reopen the economy or persevere with their lockdowns. Fair question

lockdowns will get more calculated. look how it worked in the US already, calls for a nationwide lockdown, then calls for state wide lockdowns, then county by county lockdowns, then individual businesses and events cancelled in risk prone areas.

hysteria always distills into calculated action as information becomes available. as testing improves and contact tracing improves so can the response. people calling for open business before information started to come out were taking a serious gamble. the very idea of herd immunity was a gamble people were willing to bet their lives on.

"California is going to have to ration water. You know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific, because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish that aren't doing very well without water, to be honest with you. But it's a very sad thing that's happening."- DJT

The world is still betting on a vaccine eventually becoming available. Which is very likely. Even in bad scenarios where all vaccines fail, it can still be expected that the virus will become less deadly over time, and become like another seasonal flu.

But yes, in the exceedingly unlikely scenario where the virus doesnt lose its dangerousness and no vaccine can be found, the people would lose patience very quickly and go full darwinism. There wont be neverending lockdowns, I dont even believe that unlimited mask mandates would find the necessary support. Still, all of this has maybe a 0.05% chance of occuring, so at the current point, debating these hypotheticals is just a distraction.

A recent survey by Gallup finds voters to prefer Trump over Biden on the issues, but Biden over Trump on personal qualities. Additionally, in spite of a huge public health crisis and pandemic-induced unemployment, a higher share of Americans than in previous election cycles says that he/she is better off now than they were 4 years ago:





https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/321650/gallup-election-2020-coverage.aspx

What I wonder is if these results are because a high number of voters genuinely likes the policies of the Trump administration, or if these numbers just reflect the particularly strong cult following that Trump has built.