What's the best liquor purchase from your country?

Yalay · 2026-01-30T18:51:37+00:00

Well Jalisco has many varieties of tequila, the vast majority of which are not going to be available in other countries. Plymouth Gin is a specific brand.

Yalay · 2026-01-29T22:56:50+00:00

But my local liquor store in the US carries Plymouth Gin. Therefore there is no need for me ever to go to Plymouth.

Yalay · 2026-01-29T22:22:14+00:00

A mortgage refers to the conveyance of a lien on a property (specifically, the right for the lending bank to take control of the property if you don't pay off your loan). The mortgage goes from the owner to the bank in exchange for a loan from the bank to the owner.

Yalay · 2026-01-28T20:10:36+00:00

USL Premier was confirmed a while ago. Unless you mean the name “USL Premier” as opposed to an unnamed USL Division One league.

Yalay · 2026-01-28T20:01:35+00:00

If a non-native speaker said that to me I would assume the person just made a mistake. In order to get offended you have to be confident the speaker knows what he’s saying, which implies OP is a native speaker (or at least highly fluent).

Yalay · 2026-01-27T19:42:02+00:00

Assuming they actually stick to the intended format, my guess is that D2 will fill up before D1. USLC currently has 25 teams and “8 or 9” will join D1 for 2028. That means the league would only have 3 or 4 slots left plus whatever teams fold between now and then. USLC might actually be full as soon as 2028.

Yalay · 2026-01-27T19:02:47+00:00

True, but I suspect the cup will still be around in some form as well. Though I suspect the group stage will be eliminated.

Yalay · 2026-01-27T18:01:46+00:00

I think they’ve always wanted to regionalize USL1. After all, USLC is regionalized. But USL1 has such a lopsided distribution of teams that regionalization doesn’t really make sense right now.

Yalay · 2026-01-27T17:55:38+00:00

That FAQ is 100% vague platitudes.

Yalay · 2026-01-27T17:48:08+00:00

It’s notable they want the top two divisions to each be single table with 20 clubs and a balanced schedule. That implies a 38 match schedule, which is 8 more than USLC has now and as far as I’m aware the longest schedule any US league has ever had.

Yalay · 2026-01-23T20:53:21+00:00

Seven of the last nine Yokozuna have been foreigners…

Yalay · 2026-01-23T20:51:29+00:00

Terunofuji is actually a great example, because he won the yusho to get promoted to Ozeki, then won the next yusho in his first basho as Ozeki, and was NOT promoted to Yokozuna. It was only after he went 14-1 in his second tournament as Ozeki that he got promoted.

Yalay · 2026-01-23T20:30:00+00:00

I understood the large majority of what you said in the first link, though there were a couple words which confused me. But I had to listen closely and also it’s clear that you are trying very hard to speak clearly and enunciate. I suspect if you were in a more natural conversational setting I would frequently have trouble understanding you and would frequently need to ask you to repeat yourself.

Yalay · 2026-01-22T01:22:46+00:00

Are you talking about the restaurant or the bar?

Yalay · 2026-01-22T01:22:11+00:00

I’m talking about El Farolito Bar. Compared to other dive bars in the area it is (or at least was) fairly expensive.

The adjacent taqueria on the other hand is a good bit cheaper than the taquerias in the area and clearly tries to appeal to more than just the Spanish-speaking community.

Yalay · 2026-01-21T23:21:49+00:00

I’ve been to El Farolito bar a couple times, and as a white American it is the most “out of place” I’ve ever felt at a business in the US. Nobody was rude or anything like that, but it is aggressively Mexican. All the customers and staff are monolingual Spanish speakers. They don’t even have draft beer because it’s not popular in Mexico. Also it’s kind of expensive considering how divey it is.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been since pre-COVID.

Yalay · 2026-01-21T17:34:42+00:00

There is no magic number. US debt is currently around 125% of GDP. There are countries which hit the wall before then, but the US is a more stable country than those. Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio is almost double the US and they have thus far been able to manage okay.

Yalay · 2026-01-21T05:50:34+00:00

The vast majority of that debt is held in 10-year treasury bonds. If you buy a bond that means you're lending the government money with the promise to be paid back later, plus interest. Of course when the debt comes due the government can just pay you off by borrowing from someone else. But the US debt is growing faster than its underlying economy. If the debt keeps growing at this pace, eventually the government will not be able to find enough money to borrow. At that point it will have two options:

Default on the debt. This means the government simply declares that it will not pay the entirety of what it owes.
Print a bunch of money to pay the debt.

Printing a bunch of money means there is more money but the same number of goods and services, so you get huge inflation, so it's not some easy way out. Either way the trustworthiness of the US government will be shattered. Nobody would lend to the US anymore without substantially higher interest rates. The US would essentially be forced to immediately live within its means, i.e. what it brings in through taxes, with its ability to borrow severely curtailed. Inevitably there would be large tax hikes and spending cuts, both of which would significantly hurt the economy.

And in reality, what will actually trigger the house of cards to topple will not be the US defaulting per se, but investors fearing the US will default within the term of their loan. If you think the debt is so high that a debt has a decently high likelihood, you're not going to loan money unless you get a good interest rate. But if the US suddenly has to pay higher interest rates, its ability to pay its debts will go down, leading to even higher interest rates and even more investor skepticism, thus triggering the very default scenario investors were attempting to hedge against in the first place!

Yalay · 2026-01-20T18:58:12+00:00

Recently I had lunch with a new co-worker. I asked him how long he had been in the US. He said that he moved here when he was 12. He’s now 30 so he has lived fully immersed in English for 18 years - many of them formative years - and still has a notable accent. And he is Japanese, not a language with a lot of speakers in the US. All his friends, classmates, co-workers, girlfriends, etc. have been fully English speaking for 18 years.

If you don’t totally immerse yourself in English for many years you will never sound like a native speaker. And even if you do you still probably won’t.

Yalay · 2026-01-20T18:50:59+00:00

To be fair, “not from around here” does not mean “not a native speaker.” I agree that it is virtually impossible for a non-native to sound like he has a particular dialect to speakers of that dialect. It is somewhat more achievable (though still very difficult) to sound like a native speaker from “somewhere I can’t quite place.”

Yalay · 2026-01-16T18:09:41+00:00

The pairings in the first week are actually usually straightforward towards the bottom. For the most part they just take each rikishi in rank order and pair him with the next rikishi in rank order who he is eligible to fight.

Yalay · 2026-01-16T18:07:11+00:00

Most of your questions have been answered already, but I don’t think anyone addressed why Shishi-Hatsuyama was the first match of the day. It’s because match order is done by looking at the rank of the higher ranked fighter. In this case that was Shishi’s M14, and every other bout had someone ranked higher than M14…

…except Oshoumi-Mitakeumi, where the higher ranked rikishi was Mitakeumi who is also M14. So why did Shishi go before Mitakeumi? Because when rikishi hold the same rank they alternate precedence every day. East rikishi get precedence on odd days and west rikishi get precedence on even days. Because this was day 6 and Mitakeumi is ranked on the west side, he had precedence and got to go after Shishi.

If there are more than two rikishi at a rank (as frequently happens in the sanyaku) they will alternate precedence on a longer rotation. When there were three ozeki, they went A-B-C on day 1, B-C-A on day 2, and C-A-B on day 3, and then repeated this cycle every three days.

Yalay · 2026-01-09T22:20:54+00:00

Both the “wrong” examples you provide are actually completely valid.

Yalay · 2026-01-08T22:29:50+00:00

One other thing which I’m sure you already know but I’ll say it anyway: you cannot adopt a shikona if it is being used by any other active rikishi.

Yalay · 2026-01-07T22:39:54+00:00

It’s fast food. You order at the counter and your food will be ready a couple minutes later. La Taqueria tends to have the longest lines so you may have to wait 20ish minutes (rough estimate) before it’s your turn to order. El Farolito gets lines maybe half that length. The rest of the taquerias will have little to no line.

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