Liquid IV. I’ll bring a few packets if I know I’m going to be sweating. It’s also great for a hangover.

I need to leave this thread. Interstellar is my favorite movie of all time.

I shared that experience. I also was actively excluded from all sorts of things (including essential services) because I was a foreigner. Whenever a group of expats got together, at some point in the night, the conversation would be about how everyone got discriminated against recently.

Japan simply is xenophobic. I lived there for 2 years. That’s just a fact.

You’d be surprised. I used to work in a rural factory. All the big burly red-neck older men were on tiktok during their smoke breaks.

They claimed that the government was focusing on this one issue when really it was a small part of a much larger legislation. Whether it’s good or bad is a separate judgement.

This was part of an overall package including aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan.

Personally, I just find it really disappointing. This Tik Tok issue could have been an opportunity to improve privacy and reduce data collection across the board. Instead, it’s a surgical strike in order to not disrupt American tech companies doing the same thing.

What will happen is that Bytedance will sell the US Tik Tok to an American VC firm and it will continue data hoarding as before. This time, the US government will be getting the data instead of the CCP. I’d rather nobody got it.

I could not disagree more about Contact. I read the book first. I found it to be an incredibly realistic depiction of what contact with alien life might look like. The clashing of world powers, science, and religion are central themes. The movie slimmed down the story as you would expect, but they completely changed the message at the end. The book ends with Ellie finding actual evidence for some divine being which eliminates her conflict with faith. The world governments had already been forced to cooperate much more. Now with the final conflict resolved, it’s implied that humanity can move forward in a more unified direction. The movie has her just believe in God, more or less. The Christians were right…

She had to resign and register as a sex offender for a decade. It’s not like there were no consequences. Also, the mother agreed with the sentence.

During the Obama administration, the national security director (I think) created the policy of “duty to inform”. The idea being that American intelligence agencies had a duty to inform a target if they knew about an upcoming attack (even an adversary). A big exception is when the warning would compromise the source of the information.

When I worked in a factory, all the old country maintenance guys and techs were on tik Tok during their breaks.

I used to live in South Carolina and recently moved to Chicago. Despite there being many more police in Chicago, I’ve actually had less of a feeling of police anxiety because I don’t drive here. The cops are on the roads pulling cars over. They aren’t in alleys and side streets following pedestrians (at the same rates, anyways). If walking and cycling are normal and built for, police are less of a problem, imo.

Conspiracy nonsense. The alternative is everyone having having government drivers licenses and publicly displayed identifying license plates. My feet, bike, and transit passes don’t require any id.

Grocery stores aren’t open at night. Also, it’s usually a lot faster to get stuff from a convenience store than a grocery store. If all you need is some snacks or toilet paper, it’s nice to have a way to quickly get that done.

Nasty tricksy hobbitses

I’ve never thought about it but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it cooked.

People cook it?

This is just a standard fact of life for expats in Japan. I lived there for a while. I realized any meeting of foreigners would eventually devolv into everyone trading stories about how they’d been discriminated against that week. I met so many Japanese who were friendly and open and wanted to get to know me. But when you needed to get something done, you’d find office-workers, managers, cashier’s, post office workers, etc would rather just not deal with you. We called it the gaijin card when you would be especially rude and assertive to get your way. It often worked but it sucked having to be a dick just to get basic respect.

You good bro?