Right now, you probably have a negative reputation, and my understanding is that the system is kind of borked. IIRC, downvoting decreases reputation, upvoting does nothing, and boosting (akin to a Twitter retweet) increases reputation. From other comments, I believe that this is likely to change before too long.
If, like me, you saw a negative reputation after you got on and started to worry that you were doing something wrong, I wouldn't worry.
Well, -8 now ;P It's very weird; nocritter even seems to know what the "boost" thing is supposed to be. Dealing with this is probably on a todo list somewhere, buried under a thousand incessant demands to do with every possible thing and a few things that aren't :-\
I was in the same position. I looked into it a little bit and my TL;DR version is that tankies are people who in general are apologists for the Russian and Chinese governments using fascistic and dictatorial measures. I'm guessing that more broadly speaking this could apply to supporting any government that uses violence against its own people, but it usually comes up in the context of those two countries.
It's trying to simulate tone over text. For situations like your example, the implied question is something like "why do you not know this?" Or "what are you talking about?"
Assume the person is giving you a quizzical facial expression on the other side of the screen, like they're baffled by what you've said.
I am not an auto repair technician, but my father and grandfather were very handy when it came to cars\engines\machines.
My father-in-law had this one shop he absolutely loved and would always take his family cars to, and I could never understand why because the shop would fix the initial problem, but then a day or two or up to a week after getting his cars back, something else would go wrong and it would need taken back, each item with hefty repair bills. He never would take them directly to the dealer or somewhere else to get a second opinion.
I also have taken my car to a different shop when I was younger and never had an issue with them after repair. Now that I'm older I only go to my local dealer that works with my brand of car.
That said, there are a lot of factors when it comes to car repair. Since they don't specialize on a specific brand of cars like a dealership, their mechanics need to wear a lot of "hats" and they could unintentionally bump something, or they may not button everything up correctly after dismantling for the initial repair which could cause something else to break.
I would say though in my first example of my FIL that yes, that shop was intentionally breaking things to keep business drummed up, but not all small shops will do this. All in all, try a shop out and if you're unhappy with the result, take it somewhere else for a second opinion.
It's nothing to do with it being an acronym, it's just because the first sound pronounced is a vowel sound. Similarly, it's "an FPS", "an ATM", and "an SUV", but "a PPV event" and "a USB stick"
As others have already said, you go with the initial sound rather than the written letters. The written word is mostly built around conveying speech, so the rules fit what you would use if reading out loud. There are plenty of cases where writing conveys other cues than verbal, but the core of it still applies to sound.
That actually applies to most punctuation as well, depending on how one defines “most”.
Any initialism is going to be counted as the first letter being a word for the purpose of a/an usage, when said letters are pronounced as letters. In the case of RTS (an initialism), you wouldn’t ever say it as a word, unlike RAM, which is almost always pronounced as a word and is thus is an acronym. That’s the difference between those things, btw. We tend to call all of them acronyms, and that’s okay, but there is a difference.
I think “an RTS” is fine. The ‘n’ is added to an indefinite article if the word after it starts with a vowel sound, not just if it literally starts with a vowel letter.
Merriam-Webster states that “the deciding factor for which of these words should be used is the sound that begins the word which follows the indefinite article, rather than the letter which does.” So “an RTS” or “a real-time strategy game” would both be appropriate.
As a gamer, I’m going to assume RTS stands for Real-Time Strategy. I read somewhere a long time ago that just because a term is in the form of an acronym, that doesn’t change what comes before it. So in this case, it’s proper to use ‘a’ rather than ‘an.’ However, I acknowledge that saying ‘a RTS’ sounds icky, so I tend to use the “incorrect,” ‘an RTS.’
I’d rather see the vowel/consonant arbitrary rule rather than the subjective ‘what does pronunciation sound like.’ Ultimately, written language rules are determined by the consensus of use, not the other way around. In 1k years, the pronunciation will be obscured while the rule will be deterministic and obvious.
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