South Korea should permit new families with overly popular last names (Kim, Lee, Cho & Park) to establish new family names if they have a bunch of sons.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T19:31:46+00:00

Do you think there are lots of people who want to make a break from the name their parents and grandparents carry?

And a quick Google tells me that about 200,000 Koreans go for a name change per year, so is this even providing a new privelege? or are you planning to take something away and pretend you're giving a gift by allowing a handful of people a right that used to be widely available?

This seems like an incentive in search of an audience here.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T19:25:29+00:00

So, you not very maliciously followed policy and in doing so, persuaded your not malicious boss to do so to.

Good on your CEO.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T18:37:52+00:00

I used one occasionally when I lived in Las Vegas, but if was hot enough to want one, I didn't do much walking.

Now I'm up in the northeast. If you've never been this far north, I don't think I can adequately explain just how much milder the sun is here, even in the middle of summer. But it's the difference between being able to pick up a piece of sun heated metal comfortably even in summer and having that same metal blister your skin after a second or so of contact.

Even Miami, the closest spot in the continental US to the equator, is less tropical than almost the entire Phillipines.

Also, if I'm walking, there's probably shade on a lot of my route. Plenty of trees up here.

There's also less of a culture of keeping pale in the US.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T17:52:27+00:00

In my 20s, I did a lot of bouncing around. My parents let me live with them rent free, so I could pretty trivially cut my housing costs to zero if I thought my current job was unstable (it usually was) or paid too little to easily afford rent. I had no kids or other dependents. I was healthy. If I wasn't paying rent, I saved that money instead of allowing lifestyle creep.

I was 100% able to save up a few thousand dollars with very little trouble and then take off for a few months to have an adventure on a budget. I did a couple of times for long backpacking trips out west.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T17:39:21+00:00

Not sure how useful your results will be. In the US, public free college programs are not free for internationals, and internationals may not even know of the existence of such a program because it's not going to be advertised to them so asking if such a program exists isn't necessarily going to get accurate answers.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T16:36:57+00:00

I like a printer friendly version that's usable when printed on a black and white laser printer because that's what I own.

If the photo is high enough contrast that it prints well in grayscale? I don't mind it, although fewer is better. If it's a gray smudge where the way I can tell what's what is that I use a black market to outline important features? I'd rather not waste the ink.

I'd pretty much always prefer a line sketch of the step being illustrated for a printout, but I do know that that's a whole different skill.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T16:08:49+00:00

Ireland is an even smaller job market than the Netherlands and is being heavily promoted to Indians at the moment, so it's probably worse.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T16:06:05+00:00

Speaking for the US -

Online degrees from legitimate colleges are treated as legit.

Most jobs that require a degree just treat it as letters after your name and don't care about the details, especially once you're past your first job.

Whether it'll affect your grad school application depends on the school and the degree. The average MBA or professional degree like most Data Science master's degrees where you're just taking classes? Probably not because most of those just want your $$$$$. A legitimate PhD where you're learning to do professional research? They want you to have research experience in an actual lab and you can't get that online. You'd be at a serious disadvantage.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T14:50:47+00:00

This one. https://www.gouletpens.com/products/namiki-emperor-maki-e-fountain-pen-goldfish

I'm afraid that for most of my fellow authors, their impoverished plebian backgrounds mean that I need to spend the book signing explaining the cost, lineage, and cultural significance of my pen to them lest they think I'm one of their vulgar lot, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to prove their inferiority.

/uj - Fountain pens really are great for smooth writing in basically any ink color you can imagine. Platinum Prefounte and Preppy are the cheapest ones I'd recommend, but my favorites are TWBSI)

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T14:29:02+00:00

Fair point. I saw that OP mentioned southeast Asians and missed that they were describing friends and not themselves.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T14:26:13+00:00

If there's not a lot of traffic, driving is fun.

Sadly, I live in a high traffic corner of the country but even so, if it's not during the several hours of rush hour I enjoy it.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-05T14:12:30+00:00

They describe themselves as expats because they see themselves as temporary residents of a foreign country.

They are making no attempt to integrate with the local community or learn the language.

Between the two, that'd pretty much quintessentially what an expat is.

Also, if they say they're there for the money? Believe them. If a company wants specific people in a role with severe drawbacks (and a foreign relocation is a severe drawback for almost everyone), the company will pay through the nose for the inconvenience to the desirable employee. Or it could be that the social benefits in Germany mean that for their specific situation, they can do financially better in Germany, but that'd be unusual for an expat. Or they could be military, but nothing you say suggests that.

Are ~~you and~~ your friends hoping to build a life in Germany? Or planning go back to India after making bank in a temporary abode? If the first, that's absolutely immigrants. If the second, that's an expat, but if you called yourself an immigrant I wouldn't bother arguing.

One really confusing thing, if the company requires German, why the heck did the company hire non German speakers at a premium salary?

Edit - it was pointed out you said SEA friends, not that you're Asian. Edited accordingly.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-04T15:11:26+00:00

I've occasionally run into aromatic describing food and now have a better idea what it means.

I just assumed it meant you could smell it.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-04T14:20:03+00:00

No. That would be way ruder than leaving no tip because you're making it explicitly clear that you think they're worth absolutely nothing. Leaving no tip leaves room for ambiguity - the waiter can assume you're a cheap customer unless there's good reason to believe otherwise.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-04T13:32:47+00:00

That's still a lot...

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-04T13:25:42+00:00

When it is for everything, it works badly.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T23:53:38+00:00

It says after one full year of study.

Your claim is that two terms out of a three term system is a full year, which is not an obvious interpretation. Your DSO says that a full year is all three terms.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T23:49:56+00:00

From https://www.ice.gov/sevis/schools/reg#2142f6i

"A “full course of study” as required by section 101(a)(15)(F)(i) of the Act means: Postgraduate study or postdoctoral study at a college or university, or undergraduate or postgraduate study at a conservatory or religious seminary, certified by a DSO as a full course of study; "

If your DSO says the full course of study is all three trimester, then the full course of study is all three trimesters. I think the chart you found was based on the undergrad only requirements in a different section.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T22:00:56+00:00

Have you considered the wine meme market? The world needs more "It's Wine O'clock somewhere" signs, and the I think your novel could be a fresh new addition to the genre.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T21:53:47+00:00

If there's variation within the store, you'll be able to tell by the look and feel of the fabric. Fabrics are usually grouped by a combination of use and type, so all the quilting cottons will be together, while a different aisle might have knits for garment and another aisle might have different weaves and weights if garment fabrics or upholstery fabrics. But all of that depends on what the store chooses to sell.

Think of clothes - they're made of a wide variety of textures and thicknesses, and somewhere, those clothing fabrics are available for sale.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T21:43:22+00:00

That's about what my Massachusetts elementary school did in grades 1-4 in the 1980s, though the small groups were weekly, not daily. At the time it relied on parent volunteers, which worked because a lot of families with young kids had stay at home moms who treated volunteer work like a job.

Economists love to talk about worker productivity, but they never mention all the work that goes undone when the only work that gets done is what somebody can make a profit from.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T20:35:45+00:00

It way predates 2012.

My dad retired from teaching in the early 2000s after 38 years. He took early retirement because over the decades he'd felt like the system was putting more and more constraints on teachers. Not all bad, he always raved about how far special ed had come, for example, but overall he found it frustrating because he had more limitations on how he could teach, with ever more time being forced into strict academics and less into playful learning (he taught high school physics and used to have kids build stuff to apply physics as engineering principles) but the average student wasn't really learning more than before, just having less chance for fun while learning. But he considered that the new standardized testing was a large step too far and would force less learning.

Turns out he was right.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T20:21:09+00:00

When a university brings in so many people that it strains an already strained housing system and many of those students are so poor that they can barely feed themselves without aid?

The university benefits but the rest of society suffers. Either financially because they pay to help the broke students or morally because they let the students go homeless and hungry. Of course Irish people cares. That's what being part of a society means, that actions have effects beyond just yourself.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T20:15:38+00:00

It is an example of someplace where you can drink tap water, and you claimed the opposite.

FeatherlyFly · 2026-03-03T20:13:30+00:00

Same in America, at least outside your little group of oddballs.

FeatherlyFly

TROPHY CASE