Not even slightly surprising to me. Mention China, directly or indirectly, and the fee fees of American neocon thugs get hurt and the downvote brigade comes out to fight as only they know best to fight.

I thought Kissinger used violence to dismantle democracies, not TikTok?

I try to have a piece of fresh fruit (whatever’s seasonal: right now it’s mangoes) about an hour before I go to sleep.

snort

The downvoting brigade is out in force I see.

Terrified, are we, about an alternative to the current broken system?

Who said anything about GPS, though? It could easily be those “bluetooth beacons”, right?

Yes, let’s just ignore almost a century of research on perception and go with that, shall we?

Yes. That’s exactly what “elitism” means. 🙄

There are a whole lot more threats than cars at crossings that you might like to be aware of.

(And before people straw man this, it’s an example selected for comedy potential, not a comprehensive list of all possible environmental hazards you might want to keep aware of.)

Just unnecessarily redundant ones for those of us not so addicted to our phones we can’t last 20 seconds without looking at them.

I know! Maybe they need traffic lights built into phones! As you approach a traffic light, they link up with the intersection and tint your screen green and red depending on the walk/don’t walk status! You’d never have to look up from your phones again!

I have my eye on a guqin. I’ll never be able to play one, but they look gorgeous and I’d want one as a decoration for my wall.

Weird. I just pay attention to my surroundings myself.

Oh, I fucking HOPE so! The thought of all those assholes dying horribly of radiation and/or starvation on the trip or on Mars proper just fills me with joy.

The “deal” may be a dictation the way things are going.

I don’t put short-term jobs on my CV. Problem solved.

I didn’t keep track of them. (I kept track of the programmers. They were nice and they landed on their feet.) But it would not surprise me, actually, if they landed in jail.

Oh, this predates cryptobros by decades. No, they were “consultants” who were making a “CASE tool”. Except their programmers sat me down and had a very long talk showing me their “product” and mentioned they already had other jobs lined up and were just waiting so they could give their 14-day and walk into the new job. So I handed my resignation in promptly.

For your issue, it is sane to wait until you get paid before resigning given the number of companies who routinely “forget” to pay the final paycheque and generally make it a pain in the ass to collect.

Started in the morning. Resigned by noon.

As far as I was concerned it wasn’t a business I was working for, but rather a criminal enterprise (the crime being fraud), only a really incompetent one.

They were a “tech firm” but their product changed literally daily, depending on who they were trying to sell to. They had no actual product. They had a couple of programmers who would be told every day what the product actually was today who would gnash their teeth and cry. Then they didn’t even have that much. Which didn’t stop them trying to sell it anyway.

• cerulean is a word that just has so much more class and gravitas than “sky blue”
• gravitas is a word that simply has no other word providing such … well, gravitas (dignity, solemnity, etc.)
• charlatan is a word we need to apply every time a politician or a CEO or such speaks
• the Holy Triad: whence, whither, wherefore
• nubivagant is a word that doesn’t mean anything like what it looks and sounds like
• niggardly is another word that doesn’t mean anything like what it looks and sounds like (and can get you fired if you have uneducated colleagues)
• frippery is just fun to say

I would also like to see some further German words imported into English like we imported “Schadenfreude”:

• Backpfeifengesicht as an alternative for ‘a punchable face’
• Fremdschämen to express being embarrassed for someone who’s done something cringe
• Weltschmerz is a word I’ll let you look up so you can see how it might be super-appropriate for this day and age

There’s also a Chinese word I’d like to bring into English and make common:

• 三观 (sānguān) which is pronounced kinda/sorta “san gwun”, means literally “three views”, and means idiomatically the alignment (or lack thereof) of worldviews, values, and ethics between individuals

Surely you mean Star Period 4?