938 karma · joined April 12, 2021
Plus, let’s be real, end to end encryption doesn’t exist if you’re using any sort of pre-built app. It’s encrypted-looking to most people, but the people who matter always get back door access.
Then I moved to a new middle school that would bring in carts of iBooks for us to do work on. Some things were weird (lack of a right click for one), but other things just felt incredibly natural and the design didn’t scream “soulless device for office drones.”
When my parents got me my first computer the next year, it was a Mac, and I’ve stuck with Apple for 17 years since then.
Look up heat pumps. You can make things hotter by moving heat than you could by directly heating it by burning fuel.
For example, if humanity does something dumb that accidentally makes bees or whales go extinct, having an undo to bring back keystone species that entire ecosystems depend on is pretty nice.
And yes, I know what proper caramelization is, and no, I didn't somehow mess up the time or anything because I keep track of when I finish everything everyday and stick to a strict schedule. I can't eat onions less than fully caramelized without getting severe digestive pain (simply being soft will still burn my stomach), so I'm definitely not cutting corners either.
Think of people living in rural Appalachia (a place I’m from). Most don’t think about how “good” life could be outside of that area where job opportunities are more plentiful and standard of living is higher. There’s a very strong party allegiance that’s almost religious. Caring about other countries extends to knowing just the names of some major economies and not much more. Unlike NK, they’re completely free people, but they’re happy enough being there with many never going more than a few miles from their home town or researching what the outside world is like. Most people there just don’t care. And I’m not implying it’s bad, just not an uncommon mindset.
I guess now there’s video embedding, but it’s the worst embedded video I’ve come across on a major site by far.
We're going to see a repeat of these events 20 years from now when Vietnam's economy grows, thanks to manufacturing relocation, and we're just as dependent on them for various things. Right now the world is hoping and praying that Vietnam will liberalize when money flows in, but it's more likely they'll follow a similar path as China, albeit less powerful.
This frames rape as some thing people plot out and rationalize over a long time.
Rape is like any other crime. Some people think about it critically and finds ways to commit it for their own amusement. Oftentimes it's just people taking an opportunity. Sometimes it's people finding ways to make opportunities and not thinking about freshman psychology power dynamics. A lot of rape involves hormones and alcohol flowing freely without consideration of the consequences or harm.
There are also people who actively enjoy feeling weak or inferior as part of a sexual fetish.
Trying to rationalize it into one group or mindset doesn't work.
Now that it's being normalized that you don't have to be in either of those groups or even try to be anything like them, kids a generation from now might grow up with a different standard. Plus, honestly, despite what people try to say, kids put things into distinct groups. With a growing presence of trans people in media, I do wonder whether kids will grow up with the idea that "this is fine, but different." The trans people simply being the male/female gender they identify as is a social thing that we're taught to accept, which could very well change because the next generation doesn't think of it that way anymore.
See also: America's formerly strict ideas of race. Not long ago, you were white, black, or asian and society decided what you were. Now we accept that there are in betweens and people outside those labels, and none of them are bad identities to have.
But once nobody cares anymore and nobody is bothered by the existence of trans people, I wonder if that's when it'll settle into a separate gender. Things like the issue in this topic with imbalance in sports and other areas might eventually result in another change in social structures outside of a strictly binary system.
Instead of saying trans people are 100% identical to the gender they identify as, they'll be seen as something different. E.g., In Thailand there's the concept of kathoey (westerners refer to them as ladyboys). The Indian subcontinent and culturally related areas have hijra. They're not seen as the same as women, but they're not seen as men either. They're something else, and it's okay.
I've also seen a lot of westerners trying to push their ideas of gender globally and getting enraged when it doesn't fit. Some people get enraged when, for example, Thai kathoey aren't simply referred to as women, but for a lot of those people in Thailand, they don't see themselves as identical to women. So while trying to stop people from misgendering people, they overstep and misgender people who weren't being misgendered.
Natto literally has the smell and slimy, sticky texture of, well, semen. It’s easy to wonder whether someone left a bunch of used tissues out or if they simply forgot to toss out their used natto package.
What? I see claims of Japanese racism everywhere on the internet. A load of people seem to think it's one of the most racist countries on earth.
Yet in my 5 years here, and as someone visibly foreign, I've never been treated differently from a local. If anything, being treated completely normally put a lot of pressure on me early on since the only thing holding me back was my own lack of language ability.
China turns high value manufacturing into cheap manufacturing. That's why virtually every high tech component is manufactured in China. Japan is currently worried that China may snag the auto market from them once they start exporting their tech.
>China is rapidly losing its textile crown as another example of your premise being incorrect.
Textiles are the lowest skilled, cheapest manufacturing in the world. No country cares when that industry goes outside of its borders because the loss of the textile industry is a sign that the country has developed into a more advanced economy. Once/if countries like Bangladesh develop ahead of other countries, they'll dump textile manufacturing as well.
As someone in the manufacturing industry, it's very easy to avoid American components or equipment. I don't even try to avoid it--there just isn't anything unless I'm actively looking for it and willing to pay extra for something that is, frankly, not any better quality. Meanwhile, it is absolutely, and I mean this with no exaggeration, impossible to avoid buying components from China. Whether it be PLCs, cables, plastics, anything--everything has China's hands in it to some extent. And from a cost perspective, it's incredibly cheap, so even trying to actively avoid it, someone is using some component because they're still undercutting Vietnam and other countries.
Vietnam is best at cheap assembly costs. When we go to factories there, they're still using significant amounts of Chinese components and equipment.
No plumber in Indiana wants to apply to a job that ends up being an opening for a brain surgeon in Botswana. Why should companies be able to waste time with wages that are below what applicants are looking for and only tell them after the seventh stage of interviews? It’s disproportionately advantageous for corporations.
If you can make, say, a screwdriver in the US for $2/unit, you can make 50 in China for the same cost. But if the US makes 1 million and one screwdrivers and China makes 50 million, then technically the US has higher manufacturing output since the dollar total is higher.
As much as people like to paint China as a villain here, a very solid proportion would support similar actions in the US.
Knowing a bunch of languages in order to have a proper context for English spelling is surely a higher threshold than memorizing the characters in your own language.
I mean, we all know what a "polar bear" is, right? If those kids know how to say "penguin", and they know how to write the parts, then they know how to write "penguin" in Chinese.
Meanwhile, the parts in "penguin" aren't used in any other word. The "pen" isn't a writing utensil. And what's a "guin"? If you didn't learn how to spell beforehand and were suddenly asked to write "penguin", maybe you'd write "pengwin" or "pengwen", or mishear it as "pengwing" (because birds have wings so it makes sense, right?) English writing is brute-force memorization of spelling with some patterns that often don't hold, just like Chinese is brute force memorization with some patterns regarding sound or meaning that often don't hold.
And we can see that all English speakers still struggle to spell some words that they don't encounter often, and some even struggle to spell words they do use often.
For one, there was already a massive shift that nobody noticed. A few decades ago people complained about how awful and soul-crushing 9 to 5s were. Well, someone decided to reform that. Now 9 to 6 and 8 to 5 are everywhere. I've even known some people who get two 5 minute breaks at work, and now their job runs from 9 to 6:10.
Insanity.
It’s incredibly difficult to get sufficient quantities of B12 outside of meat products or manufactured supplements.