My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that’s because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those “nastier” blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.

Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: “two thousand, five hundred and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable (i.e. “two thousand” + “five hundred” + “two and ninenty”), whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of just memorizing 100 numerical language expressions we had to do it with 1000 or more.

(If you’re not a French native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting “quatre-vingt” as “four twenty” to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)

It’s not the first and it’s not going to be the last.

Most EU members are small and easy to bully for a country the size of the US if on their own (and in fact many were bullied by the US before becoming EU members) and even the mid-sized ones could be pushed around, but a block of 470 million people with a larger GDP than the US cannot be pushed around just like that, so it’s absolutely in the best interests of the elites which control the US and a very large fraction of its Economy (and hence stand to gain the most from any bullying by the US of other nations) to want to dismantle any association of small and middle sized countries that makes them capable of dealing with the US as equals.

Why do you think it was wealthy Americans who funded the Leave side of the Leave Referendum in Britain (for example, by paying Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to manipulate people into voting Leave)?! It’s just that, no doubt to their great disappointment, removing Britain from the EU did not significantly weaken the EU, only Britain, and they already had vast influence in British politics so don’t really gain much from Britain leaving the herd to go out all on its own.

This is also something I (luckily, I like to think) realized many years ago on my first trip abroad by myself (well, I went and met with a cousin of mine who is the same age as me) when I was 19 - when you’re focused on collecting pictures of everything (as he did to a level I jokingly refere to as “photographic diarrhea”), you’re not just living the moment.

Mind you, looking at any of the handful of pictures I made back then does bring me back to the memory of the whole thing (though the wierd details such as how the top floor of the WTC back then - pre 9/11 - was basically a large food court of fast food brands aren’t in the photos), but then again me thinking about it right now does the same.

I keenly remember how one of the things the Leavers were pushing as a benefit of leaving the EU was to be able to get closer to the US. Oopsie…

Yet another in a long line of bollocks from the Brexiters, swallowed by a large percentage of the British Electorate (not just in the Referendum but even in Parliamentary Elections after it where they repeatedly voted the Leave leaders into Government).

Mind you, as somebody who left the country after that (I was an EU immigrant over there for more than a decade) I still look at Britain as guide for the rest of Europe, since they seem to have been 10 years ahead of most of Europe in their sliding towards Fascism (their version of it is led by millionaire/billionaire posh boys rather than nouveau riche construction magnates like in the US, but it’s still the same kind of ideology)