forgotmyoldname

> who in my opinion looks like a Chinese double-agent, or someone bribed by China to be their mouth-piece.

Are you an authority on the subject or are you making an unfalsifiable claim?

> but supposedly this is done "the good of all humans" what is just another communist party slogan.

Keep in mind research done there was an international effort. Some things being strongly funded and supported mostly be other countries.

I think part of that is due to nuclear power primarily being in decently wealthy areas with very strict regulations and high amounts of security measures being taken. Coal plants are in even the poorest, most run down areas and run by just about everyone. They’re the baseline for energy.

I support expanding nuclear energy in areas that are capable of doing so, but there are some places where nuclear would be an absolute disaster far beyond what coal could ever be.

I’m one of those fools who took a few years off before college, after college, and decided to up and move to a faraway country while I was young.

It’s very likely I’d have more money if I went straight to work while I was younger instead of goofing off. I could probably have paychecks twice as big as I do now.

But you know what? My worst days in the place I live now are better than my best days in my home country. My money goes farther here. I feel like the things I do actually matter now. I had time to develop personal skills and I feel like a better person for it.

Want to pursue money and prioritize your last 5 years of life (and ignore the very real possibility you’ll die or become disabled before then)? That’s fine. But you’re not going to be a failure if you forgo that unless you’re defining success as purely moving up a massive corporate ladder.

Just looking around my town, new houses in Japan are also dramatically larger and higher quality than older ones.

Older homes were one floor with single pane windows and basically single plane plywood walls. New ones have double paned windows, 2-3 floors, and some degree of insulation in the walls.

I’m not sure if that’s the sole factor driving price increases, but I imagine it’s one thing. Houses are generally treated as something to rebuild every 20-40 years here. But I could see newer homes being a buy once, keep your whole life deal.

This is precisely what outsourcing is. The idea that a company can get more for less. It’s pretty often criticized.

That sounds like a great policy, honestly. Instead of devaluing workers in other countries, they treat them as equal to local people. It also means they’re looking for talent on a level playing field and not trying to skimp out by hiring “cheap” workers.

A license key alone is about as useful as a key in real life. If someone decides to change the locks, you're out.

Decentralizing that doesn't change anything. Crypto is once again just trying to solve something through burning coal and oil that was solved decades ago far more efficiently. Want to reclaim your game? Fire up a torrent. No need for a ponzi scheme.

At the same time, there are people who lost their wallet and RIP to all that potential wealth. And then there are people who had their computer stolen/broken and then just downloaded Steam on a new device and had their games and saves ready to go.

Not that I'm defending centralized services like Steam, because I'm very well aware that companies have happily wielded their power to randomly lock people out of their accounts (like the main subject here). But crypto isn't solving anything either (or at least not yet).

What's the tangible difference between this and email confirmations that you made a purchase?

If you lose track of the NFT that proves you bought it, that's no different than losing the email evidence. You're boned.

It's like saying you don't need to wash your hands because the food is cooked and hot.

That's fine, but in some places, that's basically saying you're the type of person to walk through dirty streets barefoot. No matter how #freethefoot and for personal choice you may be, people won't want you bringing your dirty feet and whatever they carry into their home.

Japan under-tested a lot pre-Olympics in a desperate attempt to salvage the event. After that point they had no more reason to hide the data. Tests that have been carried out since show very low positive rates, so there likely aren't too many hidden, untested cases out there.

Well, discord is async. You come and go and respond whenever you want to.

It's the same as old IM/chat room applications. The big difference being that it allows voice chat if you want it and some embedded file sharing.

I really don’t get why big companies buying ads are apparently morally trapped in 1950.

Nobody who was actually going to buy your product is going to care if it appears alongside someone saying “oh shit! Cool!” But we consistently get policies that punish people just for saying simple words, like YouTube apparently demonetizing anything with “foul language” in the titles/first minute or so of the video.

Most people also won’t care if a portion of the website has boobs or something. 99.999% of people won’t decide to never again purchase your soda because it advertised on a site that had a bare nipple on a certain subsection of that site. But policies are enforced like this is true, and it ends up killing platforms once they reach a size mainstream enough to sell fast food and soda ads.

If other countries start banning everything, isn’t that just as bad as what China is doing here?

People have been paying money for food and beverages forever. The cost of labor is a big factor in it. It's the foundation of the economy.

> then why should we use their frameworks and tools?

Because job postings demand X years experience in Y framework instead of looking for actual skills, and many investors look for hot things that are jumping on Z hip new tech buzzword and not all look at what they actually solve.

Plus to a certain extent they can be used to get a project off the ground faster. Although at a certain point a good number of projects that are successfully taking off would benefit from a nice rewrite--but that's not as sexy and marketable as adding another new feature in that same time span.

Every product in the world sells itself as being as cheap as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea "so just pay it, cheapo". If that excuse actually worked, nobody would be drinking tea or coffee because we'd have spent our money on random apps and services.

It's necessary to prove an app brings more joy than a good $5 drink does--most products fail to cross that threshold.

I've had people from virtually every country randomly start racist discussions with me. I've been in Paris waiting for a train, and had some white Canadians come up and say "Hey, are you American?" (presumably my bad fashion made me stand out) Then suddenly start complaining about black people just because I said "Yeah, I am" as if that was an OK to be racist. I don't use that to say "yep, Canada's bad."

I've also dealt with countless people who've said "You've been to China? Oh, let me tell you how they justify racism" and seeing zero irony in their statement.

Bizarre. Seriously

And people somehow take any claim of saying "China is decent" to mean it's flawless and attack it. People don't do this with any countries unless they're East Asian, and they specifically get angry about China these days. You can't even mention enjoying Japan without someone online saying "oh they're all racist. I would know because I had dinner with a Japanese man." It's tiring.

I mean, I've also got friends there and speak the language to some extent now. It's not like I walked in on some sanitized tour for a day and left.

The country has problems. But it's not a prison camp of 1.4 billion like the internet would make you think. Most people are pretty happy living there, even people who've been to other countries.

It's definitely not a good place to be a political or religious activist. Most countries outside of the EU aren't and China is definitely on the worse end when it comes to that issue, but it's pretty nice for most people.

A few hours in some towns were more than enough to make it very clear that I'd never want to go there ever again.

It's weird how people come out and complain about this with only one specific country. Nobody gets angry when they say a trip to somewhere else was enough to make them enjoy a place.

After two years and seeing just how crazy society can be, you really think drafting random people and telling them to put IVs in someone's arm with minimal training is a good idea?

Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.

I mean, I have. I've been to a few provinces and seen small towns and big cities. It's way better than I was led on to believe after reading daily reports about it being hell on earth--the low expectations made it way better. I'm not saying it's utopia or anything. Just not even 5% as bad as the wild stuff reddit or news sites would try to make me believe.

But people on the internet are way too into the Red Scare Part II and think literally anything against their personal opinion is someone paid by a state actor specifically to attack them on the internet. It's, quite frankly, nuts, and an unhealthy way of looking at the world and seeding visible increases in racism.

It's really wild that people are so crazed that they think everyone is a paid shill. There's medical terminology to describe people who think everything is a grand conspiracy and make unfalsifiable claims about anyone who opposes them.

But good luck with that issue, dude. Maybe you should try visiting countries sometime. Anyone can claim to have lived in a country for 30 years. :)

I used to think China was some North Korean-style hellscape and hated the country.

Then I had a flight transfer through China and decided to take a couple days there just to see how bad it was. Ended up realizing most internet comments and news articles are posted by people who are absolutely obsessed with China and only get their information through seventh-hand sources--it's that insanely distorted.

Left loving the country because everything was so contrary to my conditioned expectations and went back for a few more trips.

Pushing a super hard anti-anything narrative in this age is bound to backfire, because finding information contrary to it isn't hard.

Corporations and political organizations freely spam our inboxes with emails and real mail garbage to milk us for money. I can't possibly get angry at citizens spamming them once in a while. Seems like just a 21st century form of protest--at worst, it inconveniences them.

Financial incentives to "get everyone in" are very much not a good thing.

It wasn't too long ago that ADD/ADHD panic was absolutely massive. Half the boys at my school were on ADHD meds. Any time a boy acted out, teachers at my school would make a call to their parents to persuade them to see a doctor and get some ritalin or whatever else they handed out by the bucketful. I was a quiet kid and sometimes--maybe once a week--would have goofy moments and that was enough to have my family get a call. 10 year old boys aren't meant to be chained down to desks all day--meds and ADD panic were a way for people to solve a "problem" of energetic kids and someone was glad to make money off it. Some kids do legitimately have disorders and need help, but some things we just grow out of.

This stuff shouldn't be for profit. Someone, somewhere, is all too eager to get people hooked on the idea that they have a problem and the only cure is what they're selling. Digital marketers and tech investors in particular are eager to jump on this. They love preying on the vulnerable and making them feel more vulnerable.

Lemon pound cakes were the best. Loved eating those as a kid, as well as the spicy cheese paste.

Another fun thing as a kid was lighting the gas on fire that was emitted by the chemical heaters.

In East Asia, Japan in particular, most "old" buildings are reconstructed fairly often. They might reuse a lot of the old supplies, but many are very much a Ship of Theseus. Roman structures are, for the most part, preserved as they were--not fully disassembled and rebuilt.

One thing is that most places with extremely old structures have them far and few between. A 2000 year old building that wasn't rebuilt from the ground up is often a symbol of national pride for a country and seen as somewhat of a miracle that it's still standing. What makes Rome unique is the city alone is full of such structures, and it's a living, active city. In other countries that had a Roman presence, many of their oldest structures are remains built by Romans.

Most Egyptian structures were buried under sand for millennia and well-preserved as a consequence of that. I have to wonder how they'd hold up if they were in a different climate and with humans bustling about constantly into the modern era.

Either way, Romans were clearly doing something special.