From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster.
I disagree.
As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don’t remember much
:-/
There’s a real dark irony in a book about a young boy quite literally coming out of the closet to discover his true self written by a woman who might as well be a Dursley.
“I am a very real woman who is talking to you on the internet and I am sincerely interested in sending you naked pictures with no plan for catfishing or upselling”
Seems legit.
Debunking three myths about the end of presidential term limits in China
using the justice system against any and all rivals!
It’s always dizzying to see western liberals insist the Chinese state is riddled with corruption, then blow their tops the moment anyone in China is identified and prosecuted for corruption.
I keep coming back to Guo Wengui, an outspoken Chinese billionaire ex-pat who claimed he was being persecuted for his liberal politics and not involved in a string of high profile scams. Six years after his arrival, he was up on charges in New York for the exact same set of fraud charges he’d fled Beijing to avoid. And - almost on reflex - Guo went back to the same playbook, insisting that SDNY prosecutors were pursuing him for his political views and not his defrauding of clients. Changpeng Zhao has a near identical story.
This is a tale as old as time in western politics. From Fulgencio Batista to María Corina Machado and Reza Pahlavi to Wernher von Braun, y’all vacuum up the trash. The US, the UK, and France absorb foreign crooks under the auspices of political refugee status. And then these slimeballs go right back to defrauding people in their new host nation.
I wonder how many more Chinese dissidents Keir Starmer and Donald Trump will rescue after this latest purge.
I mean, imagine a Chinese publication leaping to the defense of Henry Cuellar, Bob Menendez, Eric Adams, and George Santos.
So much of the US news really does boil down to a handful of senior editors having this burning hatred for the sitting Chinese President.
presidents for life
He’s been in office for 13 years. Angela Merkel served for longer as PM of Germany. Narendra Modi has been in office nearly as long, as President of India. FDR served for longer. Calm down.
Unrelated, but I have a bridge to sell someone as wise and discerning as yourself!
The thing about your type is that you only know how to bomb bridges. You’ve forgotten how to build them.
We need organization, certification, and oversight of projects.
A random assortment of freelance hobbyists is very different than a horizontally organized Plumber’s union.
Imagine a president who found corruption in his administration and decided “corrupt officials aren’t useful, they should be removed”.
No doubt there’s some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I’ve found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can’t even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
Damn, setting aside the China Bad hysteria, this is pretty big news
China expels second-highest ranking general, 8 others over corruption
According to the ministry, the Central Military Commission (CMC) Discipline Inspection Commission, the PLA’s top anti-corruption body, investigated the officers and found they had violated Party rules and were suspected of serious crimes involving large financial misconduct. The offences were described as having an “extremely serious nature and egregious impact.”
Imagine living in a country where top officials actually get investigated and removed for wrongdoing.
Must be nice.
Idk, man. This reads like something I’d get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools’ demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they’re young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don’t actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they’re going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won’t leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That’s before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
Finally going to separate Utah and Arizona with a hard border.
Not sure how I feel about Nevada 2, though.
Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold.
You also trusted that the supply of gold would not suddenly increase and devalue gold as a commodity. Or that demand for the specie doesn’t collapse because… let’s say, hypothetically, the world’s largest economy stops keeping it as a reserve currency.
The former happened in the second half of the 16th century, in an event known as the Price Revolution.
The latter was part of the Nixon Shock, following the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.
Incidentally, Nixon exiting the Gold Standard could more rightly be pinned on Charles DeGaulle.
In February 1965, French president Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to redeem U.S. dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. By 1966, non-U.S. central banks held $14 billion in U.S. dollars, while the United States had only $13.2 billion in gold reserves, of which only $3.2 billion was available to cover foreign holdings.
In March 1968, the London Gold Pool collapsed.
In May 1971, West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, unwilling to sell further Deutschmarks for U.S. dollars.[10] In the following three months, the U.S. dollar dropped 7.5% against the Deutschmark, and other nations began to demand redemption of their U.S. dollars for gold.[10] On August 5, 1971, the United States Congress released a report recommending devaluation of the dollar in an effort to protect their currency against “foreign price-gougers”.[10] Also in August, French president Georges Pompidou sent a battleship to New York City to retrieve French gold deposits.[11] On August 9, 1971, as the dollar dropped in value against European currencies, Switzerland left the Bretton Woods system.[10] Pressure intensified on the United States to leave the Bretton Woods system. On August 11, Britain requested $3 billion in gold be moved from Fort Knox to the Federal Reserve in New York.[11] As Paul Volcker, then Undersecretary of the United States Department of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, later put it:
Will they be sued out of existence after their meat substitute mushroom burger left in the sun for too long comes alive an eats 9 customers and and a minivan?
Idk if I’m going to pick a fight with a restaurant chain that can harness that kind of firepower.
It’s not the same principle because it’s always one Big Mac.
Big Macs used to sell for $.50 and now they sell for $8. So one could argue the coins are actually a hedge against inflation.
Incidentally, US Forever Stamps serve a similar purpose.
our money has no value anymore since it was taken off the gold standard
Our money has value because it can be redeemed to pay down US-based debts, particularly tax debts. This is - and has always been - the real value of any currency. Go ask David Graeber for the details. But the TL;DR; is that we use coinage as a form of extortion. “You need to give us stuff to get coins which you can then pay us to avoid the threat of state violence.” Roman soldiers working overseas were paid in coins, while they were charged with collecting these coins as a tax, in order to integrate conquered economies into the Roman Empire. You had to provide goods/services to the soldiers so they could take them off you every taxation period.
Literally, money is a protection racket.
Also, who the fuck wants to eat a Big Mac? That shit’s disgusting.
Turns out that hardboiled detective was the woman’s son this whole time.
With planned obselecence they might as well
It’s a generic critique of any fantasy novel protagonist. Potter isn’t any more of a Mary Sue than Aragorn or Rand Al’Thor.
And “The plot was bad, I don’t even remember what happened”. Bro, what do I even say to that?
The story wasn’t so bad that it failed to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.