ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something.
Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians who brought along their particular political tendencies, which included a strong labor movement and a certain brand of pathological altruism (cf. Swedish immigration policies). I'd say Minneapolis is about as distant culturally from Oklahoma City as any two cities in America could possibly be, nor is St. Louis much like either of them.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The Iranian population is much more secular and pro-western than their neighbors, even those that are American allies on paper, and has the human capital needed to support a first world economy, so the fact that they have been languishing under an Islamist theocracy for decades instead of achieving their full potential is a tragedy of similar proportions to Eastern Europe being stuck behind the iron curtain during the Cold War.
This latest round of protests was also sparked by economic problems such as rampant inflation and Tehran running out of water, and not the sorts of purely cultural issues that some here would pattern-match to foreign interference, such as the 2022 protests over the hijab law. Democracy is not what most are asking for; many of the protest chants I've heard are some variation of "Bring back the Shah."
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
That would require a level of industrialization in Latin America that seems unlikely, barring direct American conquest and economic administration (and good luck with that).
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
Economically, the Chinese are far ahead of where the Soviets were relative to the US during the Cold War, and the last time there was a hot war they chased the Eighth Army halfway down the Korean peninsula while at a severe technological disadvantage, so they seem plenty worthy to me.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
My impression is that in recent years the relative status of top American and Chinese universities has flipped in elite Chinese circles, such that someone who went to Harvard is seen as a slacker who ran away because they didn't do well enough on the Gaokao to make it to Tsinghua.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I was given three choices: novocaine, laughing gas, and general anesthesia. When I tell foreigners this they usually make some remark about Americans being a bunch of wimps who need to be knocked out to have their teeth pulled. I assume this is downstream of the more widespread overuse of painkillers by doctors at that time.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
This is for the most part true, however there's a small but growing cohort of younger supporters of unification, in part because they're envious of all the shiny new infrastructure on the mainland, but also because the main pro-independence, DPP-voting cohort has aged out of being the cool young rebels and become everyone's cringe parents or teachers who can be triggered by loudly claiming that you identify as Chinese. This group more or less occupies the same ideological niche that the dissident/extremely online right does in American political discourse these days.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I mean, there's still a significant fraction of Americans (maybe a third of the population and disproportionally older/rural) who always keep their shoes on indoors, and to people from certain other cultures this behavior really does feel like the equivalent of shaking someone's hand after sneezing in it or dipping it in mud, so it's not that surprising.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
As far as I can tell, the rise in anti-Indian sentiment is a Canadian phenomenon (due to their own particular failures in immigration and housing policy) that has metastasized within the online right but not within the wider American public, which still has about the same opinion of Indians (tech nerds who smell funny) as it has for the past several decades. I've spent plenty of time around 1st and 2nd generation Indian immigrants and had very few bad experiences, at least of the sort worth generalizing. There are perhaps some ways in which they are less assimilated to American culture than other immigrant groups e.g. wedding traditions, but that's about it.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults.
In college I noticed that my classmates who had grown up in New York were generally more responsible and less likely to get into the sorts of trouble that a naive suburbanite would. Now, it certainly had more to do with parenting style than the nature of the built environment, but the latter sort of kid was notable for their paucity of life experience and inability to deal with interpersonal conflict. Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
The New Urbanists are having about as much success restricting single family development as Hamas is at destroying Israel.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I have the Orion Scenix 7x50 and they work pretty well for most uses I can think of. Nikon and Celestron are good brands as well. I also bought a pair of solar filters to look at the eclipse last year and they were a big hit at my watch party.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I found that a good pair of binoculars was a better entry point to amateur astronomy than a cheap telescope. They are more portable, you can still get nice views of things like Jupiter's moons or the Andromeda galaxy, and they are handy for other hobbies like birdwatching if you get bored and want a change.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I have relatives who speak three kinds of Chinese. Growing up, they spoke one only with family, another was the local vernacular, and they learned Mandarin at school. In all likelihood I will be the last person in the family to (barely) speak our ancestral tongue, but if I'm lucky one day I will have children who can deploy a few choice insults, like Sopranos characters spouting broken Sicilian phrases. Otherwise I appreciate the benefits of linguistic standardization, up to a point i.e. everyone being monolingual anglophones would be boring as hell to me.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
Multiple countries have changed which side of the road they drive on, adopted the metric system, or switched the alphabet used to write their official language, so clearly such reforms are possible, even if they cause a great deal of temporary confusion. The question is simply whether the inconvenience is worth it and if the political will exists.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
I would eliminate pennies, nickels, and dimes as you suggest, but bring back a redesigned half dollar coin as well. I also prefer dollar coins to bills, and think having both in circulation is silly. The price reform is sensible, but as others have pointed out the $200 bill would mostly just help the money laundering industry.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
China graduates several times as many scientists and engineers as the US every year. Even if each of them is of lesser quality and their future demographic collapse is certain, that doesn't mean they aren't a rival in the short-term.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add).
Apples and oranges. H1-B's are a tiny fraction of the total immigrant population and are selected for education and skills. The process could certainly be made more selective, but in no way does it compare to the kind of mass influx seen in Canada, Europe, or across the southern border.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
If China or India gets their shit together, they'll out-compete us on demographics alone, and it's increasingly apparent that at least China is getting its shit together.
While I agree with your general argument, I don't think this is true of India. The only potential peer competitors of the US are China and the EU, at least this century.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
Or the systematic abuse of H1B that three-quarters of the allotted visas are for Indian nationals?
How it this fact by itself evidence of systematic abuse? India is the most populous country in the world and all of them want to be engineers in the US. The only other place that could provide a comparable number of applicants is China, which is both a geopolitical rival and a much nicer place to live these days, explaining the disparity in numbers.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
I understand that Canada and the UK have this problem, but I've never seen a South Asian ghetto in America. Perhaps a few neighborhoods in Queens come close, but in general Indian immigrant enclaves seem cleaner and more orderly than average, certainly compared to their Black or Latino equivalents. If there's some corner of Silicon Valley where H1-B's are shitting in the street while pretending to work entry-level code monkey jobs, I'm curious to know where that is.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
This is mostly because the brutal KMT crackdown on the Japanese-educated upper classes of Taiwan starting in 1947 made the colonial period seem better in retrospect to those who saw a decline in their social and economic status while their friends and relatives were imprisoned or executed.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
I know the native Alaskans have done quite well for themselves by selling drilling rights on their land to oil companies. Other stories that have come to my attention over the past few years include the Squamish Nation's proposed high-rise housing project in Vancouver and the court battle over whether half of Oklahoma was actually tribal land and outside the state's jurisdiction.
In my experience second generation immigrants don't pick up certain regional accents because they have strong negative connotations among elite circles e.g. Southern or Boston, but they are more likely to when people don't feel as strongly about them e.g. Chicago. New York is also full of people with strange half-regional and half-foreign accents.
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