No, I'm going to say that it is very much an American thing. They have to lay the perfectly flat layer of perfectly green grass because otherwise the little dictators in the HOA will put a lien on their property and force a sale because the grass was 3mm too tall, or not green enough in the summer heat because it wasn't watered enough, despite massive droughts.

For some reason, the nation that likes to beat its chest about its perceived freedoms from the big scary Government, seems unnaturally eager to run towards the neighbourhood oppressive dictatorships that HOAs are. All because they're scared shitless of a local municipal government taking out the trash

A ~500,000 UID calling themselves a grey beard ...

Kids these days, pfft.

What do you mean by "actual citizens"? You can only vote if you're a citizen! Someone who took the oath yesterday is, with the sole exception of not being able to run for President, every bit as equal of a citizen as a natural born one.

How long do you propose new citizens wait before they be allowed to vote?
Do you propose that immigrants from certain parts of the world have longer waiting periods?
Or do you prefer to just go back to the time when voting was only for the landowners?

Have you tried fishing out the lint using a toothpick? You'll be surprised how much lint and muck can get in there.

Why are you paying a percentage to transfer money? Depositing cheques/checks is just a transfer with extra steps.

Would that be the same red states that are net recipients of federal funding?
There are 16 states that receive more than $1.00 FROM the Federal government for every $1.00.
Out of those 16, 10 are red states. I.e. Welfare Queens.

So...

A lot of you guys keep harping on about how you need the 2nd amendment to protect yourselves from tyranny.

At what point do those guns get pointed at an obviously corrupt and absolutely crazy Supreme Court?

Also, what's the logic behind the Supreme Court being appointed for life and not voted in?
Seeing as you lot are keen to vote for pretty much anyone from the local dog catcher and up.

What's also with the apparent complete lack of ethical oversight? You've got one judge openly BRAGGING about receiving bribes FFS!

Is this some sort of an American joke I'm to un-American to understand?

In the rest of the world we just popped the SIM into another phone and went about our day.

I live in Australia and adding the surcharge is in fact legal, as long as you obviously detail what the surcharge is (typically 0-0.5% for EFTPOS, 0.5-1.0% for VISA/MasterCard debit cards, 1-1.5% for V/MC credit cards and 1.5-2.0% for Amex).

When you're rung up at the till you see a total of e.g. $10.00, and this is the number that is shown on the card machine; what the card machine however does then is add the surcharge and bill you that, i.e. $10.10. depending on what kind of card you're using to pay for the transaction.

Larger retailers will however typically eat this cost (i.e. include it in their markup).

You should pick your nits more carefully as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland ARE members of the Schengen treaty.

Have you received a refund from your car/travel/health/homeowners/renters insurance companies for not claiming recently?
I'm talking about an actual refund of the whole lot and not a lowered rate.

You have after all been paying for them and assuming you haven't filed a claim that's basically you dropping a lot of money into it and not receiving anything back.

We use Docker at my company for our development environment.

Developing Microservices that each need a few DB instances (Oracle, MSSQL and Postgres), a messaging service instance, document stores for caching, elastic search and kibana as well.

Having every one of those bits of our development environment dockerised meant that rather than spending a week or more getting every one of them up and running by following poorly document steps; I was able to have my environment up and running, and tests passing in half a day.

What used to be a shared instance of all of those services as a development environment, is now completely isolated from everyone else; and it stays on my laptop, so I'm not bound by network connectivity.

This means that if I'm for instance working on something requiring a schema change, however big or small, I don't have to worry about other people working on the codebase, their code will run just fine, as the changes I make won't be propogated until I've committed them, migration scripts and all.

So, like normal German layout then? You can go to the keyboard settings for the German keyboard and select QWERTY and AZERTY if QWERTZ is too hard for you to grok.

Get this, he pays 10c to RECEIVE them.

I am not making this up, I lack the imagination.

Uh, the whole point of the Program Files (x86) folder is precisely for 32bit software. So, why were you trying to coax it into installing outside of that?