Sure, but you can say the same about any law, rule, legal or moral guideline. The matters of degrees are all-decisive.
One thing this is, is great for Ireland. The north remains part of the single market and is now uniquely positioned with access to both EU and UK. And the south is now the only country in the EU with English as a first language. Investment that would have gone to Britain is now going to come here instead.
I’ve had you people in classes (and even did a group project with)... I think ‘English-Adjacent’ is more appropriate for what y’all speak.
Native speakers of proper English outnumber ALL those from minor dialects (Englandian, Canadian, Australian, ‘Irish’, ‘Scottish’, etc, etc) combined. By over 2-1. At some point we should just rename it American and cut out all the confusion.
Ooooh! I can answer this! This is actually really common. There's generally two reasons for it: 1.) The machine that the PC is hooked up to is really expensive and built in such a way that swapping out the PC isn't practical because of how the PC is installed in the machine, or the connectors on newer PCs aren't compatible with the machine and adapters won't work. So, you've got a machine that would cost a significant amount of money to replace, and the only reason that you'd be thinking about replacing it is the ~$600 PC hooked up to it can't run the latest version of Windows. Yeah, that's not going to fly. 2.) The software on the machine is proprietary and the company that wrote the software (assuming it was a company and not an individual) is no longer in business. Sure, you could probably spend tens of thousands of dollars (at least) to have the program rewritten so that it works on newer machines but why? It costs you nothing to keep that old PC running, and even if something on it breaks, finding replacement parts on eBay is pretty easy (not to mention cheap).
There's an auto repair garage that's still using a Commodore 64. The first machine shop I ever worked in (circa 2004) had a CNC machine that was running Windows 3.11. I've worked in other machine shops that were running machines that had been built in 1918. There's a tile shop in Nashville that has a machine that was built in the late 1880s or so. There is (or was, I don't know if they're still around or not) a printing company in PA that was still using the same presses in the 21st Century that they were using to print campaign literature for Abraham Lincoln. They have newer machines, but for some print jobs, it makes more sense to use the old machines than the newer ones.
Getting through UK customs used to be a breeze. We've not only fucked everyone we deal with, we've fucked ourselves.
Brexit, a pandemic, and a Tory government: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-covid-biggest-economic-decline-in-300-years/
Ha! Turns out the US has more speakers of Spanish than Spain. Second only to Mexico. I wonder if there are other languages like that. [edit: I mean in the US. Brazil and Portugal would be a good example of another county and its parent language.]
It's quite shocking how poorly informed the idiots who voted Yes were about the ramifications of their decision - which is probably just what people like Farage wanted - as there's stories like this everywhere