ZDL

Manosphere whining detected.

Shields engaged.

I do. That's why I'm Team Bear.

Dr. Collier is one of the people I love best on Youtube!

… and I mean, look at me right now, talking about them to the faceless internet🤦‍♀️ …

Let me cut that off right now.

You're not gossiping here. You're mentioning third-party people without name or any identifying characteristics that anybody not already in your social circle would recognize. This is not what gossip is. Gossip mentions names (directly or indirectly) and deals with people that all parties involved know.

One very unpopular truth that I learned in life that tends to get me cancelled in some circles when I dare express it is this: No human being has intrinsic worth. Your worth as a human being is the value you bring to others. (Note: "Value" here is not pecuniary. If you make someone laugh when they're unhappy, that's worth. If you draw stupid, quirky little stick figure diagrams that liven up the office space when you paste them on cubicle walls, that's worth. Only in sociopathic circles is "value" equated with "money".)

To me it sounds like the friends you're talking about have ceased bringing value to your life. They are not worth the attention and energy it takes for you to be friends. It's absolutely fine to distance yourself slowly (or quickly, if that's what you want) from them.

I finished the Classic of Tea, but am still struggling through The Legend of Darkness. As my backup brain-resting book I've now got The Thirty-Six Strategems on the side. It's an interesting new edition that has all the strategems and classic commentary examples but also adds more modern ones from around the world and from spheres other than the military. It is, as so many of my books in this vein are, trilingual: the original text and commentary are in Classical Chinese, modern vernacular Chinese, and English. The examples are bilingual vernacular Chinse and English.

Yeah, this amazes me everywhere. The Chinese government also wants people to have more children.

But children are fucking EXPENSIVE. Having just one child, once only school fees are taken into account, is so expensive that most families see a significant drop in their lifestyle from having one. This doesn't include food, clothing, medical care, etc. Just school fees take middle class people and make them live unskilled labour lifestyles. (You can imagine what it does to unskilled labour...)

If the Chinese government wants people to have more children, they're going to have to address that somehow. Like free schooling. Free healthcare. Maybe also fix the education system so that there's not this perceived need for thousands of hours of expensive cram schools. That kind of thing.

And then we have the Big Brains of Business sounding the same alarm. All while they do everything in their power to make people poorer and poorer so that even in the west people simply can't afford to have children. But they want people to have more children.

This is literally insane to me.

Possibly around the 275 price point, more likely at the 250, and almost certainly before 200.

If those numbers keep going down, he'll be facing margin calls and a death spiral.

Not exactly "rare" as such, though certainly not particularly common, I do think this one qualifies instead as "weird".

My boss is pretty decent. He gets dumb ideas (like we all do), but he recognizes when they fail and doesn't try to force them for face-saving. It's because of that that we survived the COVID-19 disasater and the pivot away from American clients (my initiative) without disappearing. He doesn't appear to have the usual ego of a businessman.

It's not "Distance Raptor" or "Time Raptor" or even "Veloci Raptor". It's Distanceraptor. All one word. Or Timeraptor or Velociraptor.

I mean otherwise it would be:

D~~i~~stanc~~eraptor~~

T~~i~~m~~eraptor~~

And that leaves us with:

Dstanc

Tm

Spoke too soon, I see. 🤣