Our spelling rules are obtuse and absurdly disconnected from the underlying phonemes. A better system for spelling would have a clear 1:1 mapping between the graphemes and the phonemes with a simple and concise rule set.
[1] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-th...
The joke originated as "Meihem in Ce Klasrum" [1] in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction [2] by the satirically named Dolton Edwards, and was reworked into a British variation in a 1971 letter to The Economist [3]. We had a thread about this not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507
[1] http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html
[2] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof...
Good on being proactive with the email, too :)
Everyone who can read even a tiny bit of English can make sense of -ise and -ize endings, so it's not really an issue in that regard -- it doesn't change the meaning of words, and the difference is inaudible. Things like "through trough though dough doe doff tough" are far harder (tougher, one might even say) for non-natives, and fixing those kinds of messes is a lot less obvious.
As people stop having kids, our economy will begin to depend on immigration. We need to make America the easy choice.
How exactly do we benefit from other people occupying our old territory after we've died out?
That's a multi-faceted problem too. You need young workers paying into social security, you need an economy and marketplace that makes fixed income tractable, you need doctors and all other sorts of workers.
We want to avoid becoming Japan.
But that describes all of zero people.