deleting my account

When the 25lb bag is mostly weavels?

90% of Spotify is trash. Much like Audible, it’s just choking on AI generated content and similar worthless vanity projects

Collapsing industry so houses can’t continue to be built

Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday showed that nationwide residential housing starts fell 19.9% year-on-year in the first 11 months of 2025 to 392 million square meters, while new home sales dropped 8.1% to 658 million square meters.

So demand is off it’s peak, but they’re still building about half a Cleveland’s worth of homes this year.

I wouldn’t consider that an economy which has forgotten how to build housing.

Violating other countries sea borders isn’t undefined.

Whose borders?

Yes, monsters when they kidnap dissidents and call them terrorists.

Does murdering your pregnant girlfriend make you a dissident?

In my experience, there’s an impulse to eat that can be curbed if you aim for foods you can chew on without outpacing your calorie count.

The classic is celery. Carrots, apples, and other crunchy foods all work pretty well, too. I can nosh and sate the raw impulse to eat without feeling like I need to starve myself at actual meal times. Just having vegetables you enjoy on hand to indulge in is a good for you generally speaking, even when you’re not aiming to lose pounds.

For bigger meals, soup is a favorite dish. Lots of fluids leave you full. You can have the flavors you enjoy without housing an entire slab of meat or a bunch of carbs. I also try to avoid sauces (which often means avoiding eating out generally speaking). All that stuff is packed with sugar, which makes everything more expensive to consume. Dry fried meat and veggies, spices and rubs for flavor, and grilled food rather than fried or stewed keeps me away from excess junk.

For my sweet tooth, Japanese candy tends to have less sugar than the American stuff. Mochi is better than a candy bar. Pocky is better than a box of popcorn.

I straight up cut soda and beer out of my diet when I’m focused on losing weight. (Really, just ditch soda entirely, or go to the flavored seltzer water - it’s awful for you).

After that, it really does help to count the calories. When you know what you’re eating, your logical “is this worth it” brain can temper the base impulses of the “I just want it in my mouth” animal brain. I hate counting calories, because it’s annoying. But making the things that are hard to count annoying to keep track of also helps to focus my diet back onto foods I’ve got memorized and are low calorie.

I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.

A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.

But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic “don’t let your kids eat jelly beans” or “do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain” hookum?

I think that’s where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer’s Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it’s colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.

On the one end, there’s supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.

I’ve found the best way to deal with a fear of needles is to scream slurs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Public_trust

There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.

Some of this distrust is earned as with Tuskegee, the bungled Anthrax vaccine, the Reagan Era response to the AIDS epidemic, scandals with weight loss drugs like Fen-phen and Redux, Oxycodone, etc.

Some of it is purely manufactured, with the CIA-sponsored agitation against the Chinese COVID vaccine being a major font of modern day anti-vax Truther Lore.

But to no-sell skepticism as just “you’re a little baby who is scared of needles” really under plays the shift in attitude nationally. We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza. Now we’re more terrified of kids getting the shot that gives you bad grades in school than getting measels.

Success

Why China’s property crash must be kept top secret

Cheap Housing… Bad?

Peaceful?

This analysis contends that China’s aggressive actions represent a deliberate violation of international maritime law and the South China Sea Code of Conduct.

A South China Sea code of conduct has been under discussion for over two decades.

You broke a set of rules we haven’t even defined yet!

Not doing terrible things to their citizens?

China signs police patrol agreements with nations

In 2016, an Italian police official told NPR that joint policing would “lead to a wider international cooperation, exchange of information and sharing resources to combat the criminal and terrorist groups that afflict our countries.”

Those monsters.

Roman Pagans were famously awful for women’s rights. And the New Atheist movement is full of sex pests on both sides of the Atlantic.

Toxic Masculinity exists independently of religious doctrine

Requires a fully funded and staffed public postal service in a county that’s dismantling, privatizing, and outsourcing core components of public sector package shipping

Seems like I touched a nerve

The Battle of Algiers

Going to gouge all the midstream businesses in the long run. Hardware retailers, PC assemblers, all those little companies selling custom cases and overclock kits and fancy cooling appliances.

The lack of cheap but crucial components will have some ugly coat tails for the rest of the industry.

I’ve heard “unrecoverable” for decades. I don’t see unsolvable problems, I see intractable people.

Protestors burned alive in their APC by the nefarious CCP Street Clothes division

the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.

I would argue COVID did more damage to international trade, travel, and diplomacy than any '25 US foreign policy.

The pandemic era quarantines/economic contractions and their reactionary backlash polarized nations along the axis of preserving life versus growing the economy.

Modern Trumpism lives downstream of that crisis.

It doesn’t matter. Folks see a foreign country doing foreign things foreign-ly, rather than toeing the NATO line, and they’re evil incarnate.

Meanwhile, NATO allies - from the Brits to the Saudis to the insanely corrupt Philippian government - go fully under the radar of liberals.

China’s biggest crime right now is their success. They aren’t being crippled by sanctions like Cuba, gunned down like Venezuela, or systematically genocided like Palatine. So they must be doing the most nightmarish things imaginable to their people - and to the rest of the world - in order to no-sell American foreign policy.

Too bad China kills good people.

He wasn’t killed, he was court marshalled and released five years later. He died in '21 at the ripe old age of 85

The US media was heavy handed in reporting the Federal response but deathly quiet reporting the mob violence and killing perpetrated by the rioters.

Talking about Tianeman while fixating on Tank Man is a bit like only referring to J6 by holding up photos of Ashli Babbitt taken the day before. Or reporting on the LA Riots exclusively from the perspective of the Roof Koreans. Or holding up photos of Iranian girls in swimsuits any time someone mentions the '79 revolution. Or quoting Elon Musk on White Genocide In South Africa. Or doing the “Haitians are eating the dogs and cats” line to explain our modern immigration policies.

It’s the same right wing propaganda liberals seem to recognize in their own backwards, but refuse to accept could have been applied to poison them against another country’s people.