Yeah, blame the victims, go ahead.

Sort. Your. Own. Shithole. Country. Out.

I feel like you should sort your own fucking house out before worrying about anyone else’s.

The days of Yanks getting a free pass to lecture everyone else are long gone.

No idea why the downvotes here.

I mean, someone up there just unironically called someone else a “class traitor”.

This is not a crowd that’s hanging straight on its hinges.

A brigade of yanks with “you just can’t understand how many solar systems fit in Texas, though” is incoming…

Thank you! I see it has a Linux version, so I will genuinely check that out - as soon as I get home. (As I write I’m waiting to board the first of 13 hours or so of flights - that’s why I happened to be checking out gaming reviews yesterday ;-). I’m hoping the 7th Guest remake will keep me sane…)

Genuinely, thank you both for the suggestions. I’m just wary of falling down the YouTube rabbithole - I refuse to even log-in to the damned site - so if I start watching one of them it’s going to have to be one I can remember the name of to search ;-).

(I thought Facebook was a bad idea from the get-go and never signed up, quit Instagram when FB bought them, quit Twitter when that asshole bought them… Lemmy and (sorry to say) Reddit are literally my only social media, and I question both of them fairly regularly. I do not claim to be normal ;-).)

The only reason I make an exception for Yahtzee is that having had a Steam account since Half-Life 2, Steam nevertheless remains comically bad at recommending games I’d be remotely interested in. Yahtzee’s reviews I often don’t agree with, but they do at least give me a hint of things I should check out.

Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I’m bored, to watch Yahtzee’s reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I’ve not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.

I thought “sounds curious, maybe I’ll search for some full reviews of that to see what it’s like”…

Ho. Lee. Hell.

There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.

On the bright side, my “never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos” commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I’m old enough that this shit wasn’t ubiquitous when I was impressionable.

Be fair though, “saving from a GUI app” is not exactly Linux’s strong point either.

Click “save”; wonder which badly written save dialog this app is going to use; is it the one with the save button at the top? Or the bottom? Will it actually appear, or will it pop up below the window for Reasons, making you think the dammed thing has crashed? Maybe it’s one with a list of favourite locations in the left maybe it’s not… Maybe they’re actually my favourite locations, or maybe it’s an entirely different set of the developer’s. If I’m lucky, there’s a way to navigate to my home directory without going all the eay to the root and working up from there, more than likely not…

Best of all, it’s one of those Save dialogues that thinks it’s smart to enumerate the entire goddamned filesystem, network mounts and all, before it will respond to any input at all, leading to the window manager eventually fretting that maybe the application has crashed… Or perhaps it’s one of those ones related to Dolphin that thinks it understands WebDAV mounts better than davfs, except that it actually doesn’t and you end up saving to a temporary directory just so you can move the file where you actually wanted it from the commandline…

aaaaaargh

Don’t get me wrong, I use Linux on all my machines and have been a Unix user since NetBSD 0.8 (33 years, fml…) But clicking “save” or “open” is one of those things that has me shaking my head thinking “how can it STILL be this bad” every time.

😘

Oh Christ. You’re that guy.

Yes, yes, everybody only uses Didi. Please, just use Didi. Nobody wants to share public transport with the “freewheeling extrovert” gobshite… Just use Didi.

State school.

(Or you might hear “comprehensives”, but they’re just a subset of the state school system.)

ETA:

State school, or just school: what almost everyone goes to

Private school: fee-paying non-state schools

Public school: prestigious high fee-paying non-state secondary schools. “Public school” is the Ivy League of private schools, essentially.

Well no, not really. If they’ve turned their savings into a house, and they still have a house, and they could still move house if they wanted, they’ve lost nothing if the notional value of that house goes down.

(Just as most people don’t actually get any richer when the notional value of their house goes up - once you have a house you tend to always need a house; selling up to move into rented accomodation is something you do in distress, not a sign the housing market has played you a blinder. That means the only way anyone tends to realise that supposed value is - you guessed it - by getting into debt by borrowing against it.

Speculators and landlords of course - they benefit. But “won’t someone think of the parasites” is not a desperately compelling point of view.)

The value of housing is something to obsess over in countries where everybody is up to the eyeballs in debt secured on it. Where that is not the case, it’s far less important (and as it is essentially just the entry fee for independence, ideally it’s low, not high.) A fear of house prices ever actually going down, because of what that would mean to mortgage holders, is the reason the UK has a major housing crisis that it can’t do anything about (for example.)

To be honest, this nonsense tells me more that you have struggled to actually make any friends in China and are living in a bubble of your own making, than it says anything about China itself.

I suspect you’d have similar problems anywhere.

Most people in China are buying with savings, not debt. Something like 80% of homes there are owned outright with no debt hanging over them.

The problem you are describing is a problem of consumer indebtedness, not house prices per se.

I don’t know where he’s been, but the cities are perfectly walkable in my experience. They in general are far more walkable and have far better public transport than any significant city in North America (yes, any,) while probably not being as cosy as European cities.

Most of his complaints are basically “Asia” though. With the possible exception of Singapore - one of the dullest places on Earth - you’re not going to get far anywhere on this continent if you hate noise, scooters, traffic, humidity, and far too many people in too small a place.

Which is fine, it’s an acquired taste. I for one love it, Asian megacities are glorious to me - but if you hate it that’s OK too, but it’s hardly a China problem.

No, it was not. He tried to make it about that, true.

Show me where it says “and now let’s have a conversation about some wet who got scared because he went to China, that’s the only thing that’s relevant now?”

I don’t mind the story about his poor, sad daddy, everyone gets to share an anecdote. But to suggest his father being pathetic is on-topic but US citizens being massively hypocritical isn’t is weak sauce.

I’m sure the US’s ICE concentration camps are happy-fun-joy-camps, they probably even have Burger King for all I care, but that doesn’t change the fact that you lot lost the moral high ground long ago, and one story about a wet who got scared doesn’t change that.

I’m not sure why you think your dad is the fucking topic to be honest.

So like ICE, then?

Tbf, I’d move to China permanently in a heartbeat, based on more than a decade of working there. If China ever lets foreigners buy property, I’ll be first in line.

I wouldn’t touch the US with a hundred foot pole, on the other hand.

TBH webbed toes have never done it for me, but no kinkshaming from me