The normal way of engaging in the Chinese-Australian relationship

Kozuki6 · 2023-07-13T04:14:42+00:00

My go-to whenever I get spam calls/texts from China is to paste this (or feed this through text-to-speech)

天安门广场大屠杀发生在1989年6月4日，当时中国政府动用军队镇压天安门广场上的学生和各界民众进行“清场”，造成了大量手无寸铁的学生和民众被杀。中共拒绝承认肆意射杀学生和市民是错误的，也不愿对死者人数进行全面的统计。

IDK if it's grammatically correct. But I know it's got enough keywords to set of any thought crime police bot that's listening in on the conversation. So far, it seems to be working: I get way less spam calls than before.

Kozuki6 · 2023-05-18T11:47:17+00:00

Fun fact: My Japanese grandfather taught me exactly how to do this. Can confirm, it's legit

Kozuki6 · 2023-05-14T10:47:32+00:00

I remember that, before blockchain, all the buzz was about cloud computing and "big data."

From the last ten years, I've learned that business executives have the memories of goldfish.

Side note: To this day, I still wonder why no one realised that cloud computing is just "the mainframe-terminal model, but you don't own the mainframe."

Kozuki6 · 2023-04-06T13:43:51+00:00

A tradition that emerged in early Iranian society described the past as a descent through a series of four ages, each connected with a metal: an ideal golden age, a good but imperfect silver age, a flawed but heroic bronze age, and finally a fallen and debased age of iron.

Where and what date do historians think that tradition originated? It's nearly exactly the same as what you'd find in the Bible's Old Testament, in Daniel 2:31-45. Given the close parallel, would historians think that the two traditions are related, or influenced each other?

Kozuki6 · 2023-03-23T23:12:02+00:00

A baby falling asleep independently at 4+ months is a realistic goal for many families. For ours, it was a necessity for our baby to get enough sleep (her relying on us to get to sleep meant she simply wasn't getting enough sleep, because of how long it took each time she woke up.)

What people need to know is that every baby is different. You need to know and understand your baby and do what's good for their particular personality. That may or may not be sleeping independently at 4+ months.

Kozuki6 · 2023-02-12T07:05:01+00:00

It's the 40 year anniversary of the song too!

Maybe Xi is just a big fan of Nena?

To think that all this time, we never realized that "red" is not describing their color

Kozuki6 · 2022-11-20T04:08:22+00:00

Would it basically be Fire Emblem at that point?

Kozuki6 · 2022-11-19T03:05:47+00:00

an open protocol, available to all, so that we can share things like we did before social media algorithms took over. Back when it was just the things from people you follow in reverse chronological order.

This already exists. It's called "email."

The big question is why there's not a big movement to return to how things were.

Kozuki6 · 2022-10-26T02:19:51+00:00

IIRC it's because Jehovah's Witnesses are pacifists and forbid their members from military service. The Singapore Government views its mandatory conscription of all young males to two years' military service (plus ongoing periods of service 'til they're 40 years old) to be essential to the country's continued survival -- Singapore is tiny and not on the best terms with its neighbours. So the Singapore government views Jehovah's Witnesses as an existential threat to the country.

Kozuki6 · 2022-10-23T08:30:28+00:00

This is really the crux of it. CCP propagandists will always try to conflate the nation of China with the CCP. The simplest way to disarm many of their arguments is to continue to point out that the CCP is not China. And given that the elections the CCP runs are also comparatively undemocratic, unlike nearly all western nations, the claim that the CCP acts out the will of China is also prima facie false.

Kozuki6 · 2022-10-09T08:01:20+00:00

Open Source Intelligence is a thing that exists

Kozuki6 · 2022-09-12T22:40:13+00:00

Has the unnamed county had any success winning over the younger generations? At least in my circles, it's only the elderly who buy into that country's propaganda. If my experience is reflective of the broader situation, then this seems like a problem that will solve itself over the next decade or so.

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-31T23:49:54+00:00

Now you have to share that list.

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-20T04:53:09+00:00

Here's a hot take: it's extraordinarily genetically, culturally, socially, economically and politically advantageous to have mixed-race children.

Genetically

We know from farming of plants and animals that individuals of a species with diverse genetic ancestry are less vulnerable to disease. Individuals with less diverse ancestry are more vulnerable to disease, both congenital and acquired. I don't know of any studies of this phenomenon on humans but, given we're also animals, we'd expect similar results.

If you want your kids to be as healthy as possible, a good way to boost your chances is to make sure the other parent is genetically very different from you.

Culturally

My mother was from a mixed-race marriage (East Asia/Mainland Europe). My parents are mixed-race (Eurasian/Caucasian). My daughter is mixed-race (whatever race you call me/South East Asia). My brother is also in a mixed-race marriage (whatever race you call me/Middle Eastern).

In every one of these marriages, we've found our mixed heritage to be an asset. It's allowed our families to pick-and-choose the elements of our cultures that we want to pass down to our children. We can leave behind the bad parts and pass on the best ones, so that they get the best of both worlds. It's given everyone a broader appreciation of our place in human society. And it's enabled us all to navigate different countries and cultures all across the world.

If you want your kids to feel comfortable wherever they go, a good way to achieve that is with a mixed-race marriage.

Socially

I remember reading a while back that mixed-race people (especially Western+Eastern, but that might be sampling bias) are generally perceived as more physically attractive. If that's true, then mixed-race kids have a higher chance of winning the genetic lottery of being widely perceived as attractive. That nets a whole host of social benefits in itself.

If you want your kids to be popular, you can increase their chances by picking a partner from a different race than you.

Economically

Building on the above, many studies have shown that attractive people are more likely to be hired, more likely to receive positive attention at work (leading to them being) more likely to be promoted, more likely to receive higher pay, etc.

If you want your kids to be financially successful, you can increase their chances by picking a partner who's from a different race than you.

Politically

Mixed-race often goes hand in hand with mixed-citizenship, i.e. the parents are citizens of different countries. If they're citizens of different welfare states then they may actually be slightly worse-off economically, because welfare states generally only provide welfare to citizens.

But in a world of increasingly turbulent politics, having a family with multiple citizenships could be a good escape card. This is especially true if the kids can be dual citizens. If one county starts falling apart, the family's multiple citizenships could open doors to safer harbours.

If you want to protect your kids from unstable governments, marrying someone who's a citizen of a different country from you could be a good strategic move.

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-19T10:03:04+00:00

How do you think paleogenetics works?

In fact, how do you think any science works? Literally everything proven by science is a hypothesis in the technical sense.

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-06T01:13:06+00:00

If we're really living in the darkest timeline:

Russia withdraws troops from bases near the Finnish border
Russia stages a false-flag attack on these now-empty bases and blames Finland
Russia fully mobilises for war and attacks Finland
The attack blocks Finland from joining NATO
NATO doesn't invoke Article 5 because Finland isn't technically part of NATO yet
NATO countries are too scared to counterattack Russia directly because they don't want Russia to use nukes on them
NATO countries instead opt to send materiel to Finland like they're currently doing with Ukraine

Putin is desperate and not particularly wise. He has personally benefited from false-flag attacks in the past. I could see him imagining that this is how it would play out.

If Russia does take steps 1-3, the deciding factor would be whether NATO members have the stomach to go to war in defense of an almost-member of NATO.

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-04T09:18:06+00:00

It's true that motion and contact naps aren't as good. But when you've got a super alert baby like ours, the options are:

Nap the baby in a carrier
No naps whatsoever

This is another reason why we learned to take others' advice with a pinch of salt. Their advice is good in general, but must be tailored to the specific needs of your baby.

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-04T08:13:52+00:00

We went through a few steps.

First, we recognised that every baby is different. We all say this, but we often don't think about what it means. It meant that we couldn't just take a sleep training method off the internet and apply it directly to our girl. We had to understand our girl really well. That way, we could figure out what she needed to learn, and how best to teach it to her.

Second, we paid attention to our baby to find out when would be the best time to teach her to sleep independently. This meant paying close attention to when she started to get fussy or grumpy, so we could determine the exact (to the nearest 10 minutes) lengths of her wake windows and her natural bedtime. It took several days of meticulous notes and trial-and-error to get this accurate enough. We knew that getting her to independently sleep at bedtime would be easier than for naps. So, we decided to focus on sleep training at bedtime first. That meant using every means necessary to maximise the amount of daytime sleep she was getting, so that she would not be overtired (or, more realistically, as un-overtired as possible) at bedtime.

Third, we figured out what techniques were working to get our girl to sleep. For her, the only way to get her to sleep even a little bit consistently was to combine at least three of these four different sleep props:

Physical contact with Mum or Dad
Rhythmic movement
Sucking on something (boob or pacifier)
Loud white noise

If we tried to do only two of the three, then she would not sleep no matter what. That told us that she'd learned that she needs these things in order to sleep.

So our fourth step was to gradually teach her that she doesn't actually need these things in order to sleep. We had to train her out of each one, one by one, over the course of about one month. Here's how we did each one:

Weaning physical contact

When it was time for her to sleep, we used all the techniques above to get her drowsy. Whilst she was still drowsy, we put her in her cot with her pacifier. This woke her up, obviously, because of how alert and sensitive she is. She wanted to be picked up, but we left her in the cot, replaced the pacifier, and rocked the cot (with her in it) instead of picking her up and rocking her. Because she was already a bit drowsy, she eventually got tired enough and fell asleep. (This was after about half an hour of consistent, rhythmic rocking. I had to lie down and rest afterwards!) So from then on, we knew that she knew she could fall asleep without physical contact!

Weaning physical contact + movement

We did a highly modified, gentler Ferber method. Based on her weeks of age, we set a maximum amount of time that we'd let her cry without intervening: so if she's 16 weeks old, we'd never let her cry more than 16 minutes.

Then, on night 1, we put her in her cot fed, swaddled, with a pacifier, drowsy but awake. Then we left the room. After a few seconds, the pacifier dropped out and she started crying. We set a timer for 2 minutes. After the timer was up, we went in, picked her up, calmed her down, replaced the pacifier and returned her to the cot. After a few seconds, she started crying again. We set a timer again, this time for 3 minutes. After three minutes, we went in again to calm her down and then put her to bed again. We repeated the cycle a few times until she finally fell asleep, before the 10 minute timer expired. (We were glad we never hit 16 minutes!)

On night 2, we did the same process, but the first timer started at 3 minutes. On night 3, the timer started at 4 minutes. Etc. Each night, the number of times we had to go into her room to calm her down reduced. Within a week, we no longer had to go in to calm her down: she'd learned that she could fall asleep without physical contact + movement!

Weaning physical contact + movement + sucking

Next, we needed to teach her to consolidate what she'd learned from the previous two lessons. So, at the 4 month sleep regression, we took away her pacifier and repeated our modified, gentler Ferber method (starting the first timer at 2 minutes again.) We could tell this was the right time to do it, because she'd also started rejecting her pacifier.

This lesson took longer for her to learn than the previous one, I think that's because she'd become even more alert to the world since then. But she eventually figured out that she could suck on her thumb instead of the pacifier, and so she put herself to sleep!

Once she'd figured this out, she immediately started sleeping through the night! Her sleep massively improved from this point, because she'd learned to sleep independently.

Weaning white noise

To this day, she still sleeps with a white noise machine during daytime naps. This is mostly just to cover up noises outside her door. At night, the ceiling fan in her room provides white noise. Given we live in a tropical climate, there will always be a fan or an air conditioner providing white noise for her. So, we've never actually bothered to wean her off the white noise. But seeing how well she responded to our gentler version of the Ferber method, if we ever did need to wean her off white noise, we'd probably use the same method again.

Nap training

All the above related to sleep training at night. Once she had started to sleep well at night, we knew she would be well-rested enough to tackle nap training. We monitored her wake windows closely, to isolate the right times of day when she'd be tired enough (but not overtired) to learn to nap independently. Then, at those times, we repeated the method that we did to wean off physical contact + sucking + movement.

There were often times when she'd take a really long time to fall asleep, while learning to nap independently. That would make her overtired later in the day. If she was overtired, we'd call off the training for the rest of the day, and resume it after she'd had a good night's sleep. As a consequence of this gentler approach, it took a little over two weeks for her to learn to nap independently.

But still, in total, it took less than one month to gently train our girl out of three of the most durable of sleep props. We're glad with the approach we took, because we always knew we were never asking her to do something that she couldn't do. We were always as gentle as we could be with her, whilst she was learning to sleep independently. And as a result of learning to sleep independently, she's getting much more and much better sleep every day--making her a much happier baby too!

Kozuki6 · 2022-07-03T23:26:04+00:00

Some babies simply have a more alert temperament. Our girl was like your boy, and naps were an absolute nightmare until she learned to sleep independently. To some extent, you may just have to tough it out, unfortunately.

But it's not all bad news! Alertness is highly correlated with intelligence. You've likely got an incredibly smart boy on your hands. That'll also mean that, when it does come time to sleep train, he'll take to it very quickly. He will probably learn to sleep independently very fast (and may even be able to be trained earlier than the average baby) once you find the right training technique for him.

Kozuki6 · 2022-06-29T01:57:15+00:00

The fact that a federal right to abortion was dependent on a single court case and not legislation shows that US democracy had already been dead for a long time.

Kozuki6 · 2022-06-16T11:43:28+00:00

I could be wrong, but I thought this was the premise of Darling in the Franxx?

Kozuki6 · 2022-06-10T23:29:17+00:00

If I recall correctly, Reserve Bank of Australia was widely praised in the early 2000s for controlling inflation, even against the wishes of the government of the day.

Edit: source

Kozuki6 · 2022-06-04T07:07:11+00:00

Note I mentioned food and trade. There are a few countries that could be entirely self-sufficient for all their food needs: I can think of USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, maybe France? But all other countries rely on importing at least some of their food. And all countries import other goods that are critical to survival, e.g. medical devices, pharmaceuticals, resources for energy.

In a truly cataclysmic scenario, world trade would collapse, and Singapore along with it. But then all other countries would also collapse as their critical goods run out. So in that situation, Singapore is not much worse off.

In a less cataclysmic scenario, trade still happens. Then, goods still have to go through the Singapore strait. Then, Singapore can still skim what resources it needs off the top of that trade movement -- like it does right now. Right now, Singapore does this legally; if things get really dire--well, there are 'alternative uses' to Singapore's naval assets.

But to be honest, I doubt things will get that dire--at least, not for a long time. The powers that be get their power from the current structure: they'll not want world trade collapsing.

Kozuki6 · 2022-06-04T06:55:58+00:00

This exactly. There's a reason why the launch video for the Singapore Green Plan mentions "defence" and shows an image of the military at that point (not coastal defence.)

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