In exchange for what government services?

Police who will come to your store and arrest trespassers and thieves comes to mind.

If Apple doesn't want to pay taxes, then there shouldn't be any penalties for people who steal from Apple's stores.

You're allowed to discriminate based on age when you're discriminating against younger (under-55) people. There's tons of communities in the US where you either can't rent or can't buy a house if you're too young, and it's completely legal.

>> The only part of crime that matters is the dollar amount, silly!

> Says someone that's never ever had to worry about violent crime or been a victim of same.

Says someone with a completely broken sarcasm meter.

You're a moron or a liar, or both.

Most European cities don't have any smog problems and those that have them aren't caused by diesel engines.

Wrong. Diesel engines produce high NOx emissions, which lead to smog.

Diesel engines may produce a little more smog than petrol engines, but they produces far less volatile organic compounds and fewer particulates, both of which are much more important to smog formation than NOx.

You're a liar. Gas engines don't produce significant particulates. Any idiot who's been around a diesel bus as it pulls away from a stop knows that diesel engines produce high particulates. Fuck you and your lying. Why are you lying?

Ah, yes, European companies like Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Nissan, Suzuki and Mazda....

You don't know about VW's dieselgate scandal?? Again, fuck you and your lying.

Since most American truck makers are owned by European companies, there are probably quite a few in trucks near you, too.

Why are you lying so much? Cummins is not a European company, and Ford makes their Powerstroke diesels here in the US.

Even "scone" differs. The scones we have here are typically triangular-shaped items of dense and very sweet bread, and are really quite recent; I don't remember them at all prior to 15 years ago, but now they're common in coffee shops. My understanding is that English scones are very different from this, according to Wikipedia at least, and are really a lot like our biscuits.

Here's an article that discusses the differences between British and American scones.

I don't know what part of America you visited, but I am American so I'm quite sure I'm familiar with the term. A biscuit isn't tough at all, and no, it's not always a breakfast item. KFC even commonly includes "biscuits" with its fried chicken (though it's the flaky kind, as I referred to before, not so fluffy as a dinner roll).

As for old cookbooks, food has changed a lot in America since before WWI, so the terminology has changed too, and most people aren't going to be familiar with older usage.

Gas means LPG. A gaseous product often used to power cars.

It's also short for "gasoline", a fraction of petroleum used to power cars. (And a different fraction of petroleum than diesel, also used to power cars and trucks, and again different from kerosene and the closely-related jet fuel.)

Americans appear to be incapable of making diesel engines that are any good, so its not surprising they don't use them much.

Bzzzt, wrong. Rednecks love diesel pickup trucks, and those American-made engines are quite reliable (a lot more so than the rest of the truck).

And it's a good thing that Americans don't use diesel nearly as much as Europeans in passenger cars, or else we'd have all the nasty smog problems that European cities have. Our air these days is much cleaner despite us driving many more miles per person. Diesel engines have a huge problem with NOx emissions that gas engines don't have.

Also, you seem to forget, it was the Europeans who fraudulently and criminally made diesel emissions that cheated on the emissions tests. Where are those "good" diesel engines you speak of? All I see is shitty ones from Europe that were made by liars and swindlers.

I hear "that was real hard" instead of "that was really hard"

That sounds like something you'd hear a stupid Southerner say.

and the word "irregardless" when "regardless" is what is meant.

This one is definitely something that only uneducated Southerners say.

Don't take Southern English to be representative of America overall.

the most common are not knowing how to use apostrophes (or should I say apostrophe's)

That one is really annoying. I'm not sure who to blame there, but it does seem to be pervasive.

and a liberal use of capital letters to begin words that are not at the beginning of a sentence and not a proper noun but are just plain old common-or-garden nouns.

That's not an Americanism, that's a few particular idiots.

People even talk about dressing-up for Halloween (trick-or-treating).

Good, it's a great tradition and holiday. It's the only time of the year when adult women can dress up in sexy, slutty outfits and not be ridiculed for it, and men don't get in trouble for ogling them. We need more holidays like that, and it's about time other countries adopted this tradition.

there is a sinister side: The right-wing party has been anti-welfare for a long time and it resulted in a not-so-young politician demanding Reagan-esque policies of welfare-bashing and gifts to the rich. ... I dread the thought of my country becoming a corporate-driven plutocracy.

I'm no expert on British politics, but I don't think this is anything new. Wasn't Margaret Thatcher basically a female version of Reagan?

The -ize spelling is the correct British spelling. It's actually called the Oxford spelling as it is used by the Oxford Dictionary.

One really funny word in American English is the word "fuse". In British English, the spelling is "fuse". In America, the word is spelled "fuse" (the same), if you're a civilian, but if you're in the military and it's something used in munitions, it's spelled "fuze". Outside the military, no one spells it with a 'z'. (I'm not sure how the military spells it for electrical fuses.)

Another Americanism that wormed its way in is "cheers" to toast drinks. Maybe solely attributable to the television show of the same name.

I'm American, and I never hear anyone use that expression, except foreigners. Maybe it's a Boston thing.

Cookie instead of biscuit is bad.

We have both in America. A cookie is generally flat and sweet and brittle, mostly made of sugar and some wheat flour. A biscuit is a bread item usually made with yeast and is fluffy (maybe flaky) and not very sweet; it's something you might eat with dinner, and normally you put butter and jelly on it. Sometimes they're also called "rolls" or "dinner rolls". "Tough biscuit" wouldn't make any sense at all.

I know a Trump supporter well. According to that person, there's a "deep state" conspiracy against Trump. This is basically the mentality of Trump voters; Hillary may have lost the election, but somehow she's still in control and responsible for everything bad that happens. These people are seriously mental.

If that made sense, then we'd have to use the word "petrol" for diesel, kerosene, and even paraffin.

Gasoline is a specific fraction distilled from crude oil, so it makes sense to use that term, or to shorten it.

If you're going to make the argument that gasoline is much more popular than other petroleum products, that doesn't make sense either: it's only true in America. Over in Europe (and UK), diesel is used a lot more by passenger cars than it is here in the US.

What? I'm no expert, but I do speak a little German, and Dutch is much closer to German than Danish. Danish is very similar to Swedish, a Scandinavian language, and also Norwegian. I can make out a lot of Dutch, but not so much Danish.

Game of Thrones doesn't use only British English; the actors use many different dialects, which is supposed to show that the real fictional characters, speaking whatever fictional language they use (which to us viewers appears to be English because it's better than dealing with subtitles and an invented language), also have many different dialects and regional accents.