With the Trump appointed supreme court it definitely won’t hold up, but maybe it could delay whatever meaningless charges he can come up with long enough for another election. If we’re lucky enough to have another real election that is at least.

At least for DC it was near freezing and rainy yesterday, so I suspect that significantly lowered turnout.

Even larger NYC apartments frequently don’t include a kitchen for whatever reason. I know if I worked there I’d likely just always get carry-out since it’s much more reasonably priced than in other large US cities despite the salaries being so much higher.

Wechat will always be allowed overseas and is the main method of communication, but the account creation process is of course a little more detailed than simply signing up with a phone number.

They drastically reduced all visa requirements last year to promote tourism. Even US citizens can do a visa-free transit for up to 10 days (provided they stay in the region they landed). They also added support for Visa and Mastercard to Wechat and Alipay making it practical for a foreigner to travel the country without being accompanied by a citizen for the first time since digital payments took over (albeit with a somewhat complex ID and visa verification process).

I’d love to visit as a tourist sometime but you can’t have both the business visa and tourist visa at the same time, so to go as a tourist I’d need to cancel my 10yr business visa which simply isn’t possible for my position where I rarely know when I’m going to China more than 2 days in advance.

I wish they’d book Four Seasons Landscaping again. That was hilarious, a good indicator of the chaos and incompetence which followed.

Unfortunately for the majority of them it won’t be a problem. He’ll perform exactly as desired “owning the libtards” and getting rid of “the immigrants”. I wish I had a more optimistic outlook on the next 4yr but frankly we already know how it will go from his last term. At least to an extent.

They sell perfectly acceptable flicker free LED light bulbs at the dollar tree now. This totally isn’t worth the time and effort.

This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)

Brain worms for everyone!

There does come a point where the inconvenience slowly moves the masses to other platforms. It’s not that difficult to access the full internet in China with any data-only esim being unrestricted by default and many VPNs working just fine. But it’s just difficult enough to do this that the masses don’t. Piracy functions the same way, if piracy were truly broad in scale then it would be taken much more seriously.

Conveniently just in time for Trump to blame it on the Democrats even though he started the process during his previous term.

Starbucks coffee isn’t even good anyway. But without more coworking spaces or some other alternative people like me will occasionally be forced to work from one for one reason or another. In the towns around military bases especially you frequently see spouses of those who work on base in Starbucks doing their remote work since it’s the only possible place they can work from if they were staying in a hotel the night before.

It probably also saves them a bit of money so from their perspective it’s a win-win good business decision.

Any China market tablet can install douyin even without a SIM, most even come with it installed by default.

This is an amazing idea I love it

Absolutely this. I’ve never seen a CEO golden parachute anywhere near being under $2m before. To most large company CEOs $2m is pretty much nothing relative to their regular stock options.

If you’re going past it anyway it’s perfectly fine as far as roadside attractions go imo. A lot of it comes to expectations admittedly.