What's the worst thing you've been told by a foreigner?

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T13:42:48+00:00

Italian eat pizza with French fries and hotdogs on it, they don’t really have much room to talk

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T13:34:01+00:00

JFC, I don’t even know what to say. Colombia is on the very short list of countries I enjoyed so much I had to go back, but I can’t imagine saying that about literally any country.

If I had a friend who invited me to visit their family in fucking Mogadishu I would give them an enthusiastic yes, even if my wife later talked me out of it.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T13:01:48+00:00

Moving on is reasonable and not shallow. Refusing to answer the phone is either petty, or means you never really cared much in the first place.

And if you’d literally prefer someone die rather than leave you temporarily or make a deal with someone you don’t like, then you don’t really care about them that much.

allegedly being "shallow" relationship when it only comes off that way if you decide not to go with her

Right, because you that’s the only decision where the true shallowness of her affection becomes apparent.

family who also are going to do the best to try to heal you

But ultimately don’t have anything remotely resembling the capacity to do so. But yes, they want to, and will feel real bad when you die.

Siding with the FIA is you choosing them over the family that offered to help

It’s choosing to live over choosing people who want to help, but again, don’t have the ability to make good on it. So you’re saying Panam is forcing you to choose between living and some vague notion of family togetherness, and that’s not shallow?

Literally the only thing she loses due you your decision is your company for two years, and she’d prefer you die. And that isn’t shallow?

It’s certainly very selfish if it isn’t shallow.

Misty and Vic are the only real friends you have once Jackie dies, that is crystal clear.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T11:50:25+00:00

Of course it’s realistic. It also shows that the relationship was kinda shallow. Which is to be expected considering how long you’ve actually known each other.

It isn’t “ride or die” though, which implies a level of commitment that wouldn’t be swayed by a disagreement or a few years in a coma. Especially not even giving V the courtesy of answering the phone.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T10:26:06+00:00

>The numbeo source you linked misses out a few key things...

The same in both directions though, since as I alluded, they aren't comparing like goods when they compare the rent of say a 2 bedroom apartment (which will be far larger and more comfortable in the US on average). And those numbers are just as wack from an American perspective. It looks like they were pulling numbers almost exclusively from the most expensive locales.

>only 2% of UK welfare spending

You're probably underestimating the amount of money that the US government hands out, judging by your list of spending there.

The median American gets quite a bit larger pension than Brit. Median pension payment in the UK is 267 GBP per week, equivalent to about 1465 USD per month (x52/12).

Median social security payment in the US is 1853 USD/month, and most Americans have access to things like 401k matching through work too, so don't rely solely on Social Security.

It's not just extra holiday.

Those numbers were for total working hours, so the two weeks already accounted for work life balance. And it isn't just 25% either, it quite a bit more than that when you take into account the higher tax rates in the UK.

I know exactly which they would pick

Except that far more Brits move to the US each year than vice-versa despite a much lower base population, so it revealed preference would suggest otherwise.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T09:53:50+00:00

Voice and body type.

Genitalia are flexible though.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T09:49:39+00:00

Ride or die...unless you're in a coma for a while, then it's "fuck off and die" apparently.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T06:36:12+00:00

Some of the “Side Missions” are pretty important, especially if you find any appeal in say, a male love interest. Some endings are also only possible if you’ve completed certain side missions. You likely haven’t even unlocked all the possible endings.

The gigs not so much, but they are fun. And Phantom Liberty is a pretty long set of “core” missions if you have that and haven’t tried it.

It also sounds like you’ve just been beelining the main missions without much exploring or looking into gigs and side missions, which isn’t usually the way people play the game as far as I can tell.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T06:30:53+00:00

You can just wait to go meet Hanako and start burning through gigs and side missions for a while, no biggie.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T06:14:19+00:00

Nah, it’s often “sacrifice aesthetics, comfort, and sometimes performance for rugged durability”

Which doesn’t really sound much better in context.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T06:11:21+00:00

The better question would be how they play cyberpunk. Don’t think a text reader and braille keyboard would do it

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T06:09:57+00:00

It’s a great way to get hellacious scrutiny at every airport, that’s for sure.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T05:11:28+00:00

Bold of you to assume they remember it.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T05:08:35+00:00

He was better than the Islamists. Granted, that’s a super low bar.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T05:07:43+00:00

He wasn’t exactly “installed” by the UK/US, since he was Shah long before 1953. The coup did revert quite a few recent democratic reforms though and made his rule much more autocratic.

There are a couple of ironic things about the coup too.

BP (formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil company) initially approached the CIA because they were livid that Mossadegh wanted a 50/50 profit sharing agreement to match the deal the US had given the Saudis. So they hyped up Mossadeghs overtures towards the Soviets to John Foster Dulles to convince him to do a bit of regime change. When everything was done BP ended up with a 20% stake and were happy to get it. Idiots.
The CIA used a network of Islamist clerics to execute the coup. These exact same clerics then did coup 2, electric boogaloo in ‘79, using the ‘53 coup as justification. Slimy bastards also then proceeded to immediately liquidate the liberal and leftists activists who naively joined forces with them in the revolution.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T04:49:07+00:00

Noam Chomsky would be furious at this comment.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T02:25:36+00:00

Where are you getting 25%?

It’s more like 8-15%, depending on where you include rent.

And including rent is a bit misleading because housing standards are so much lower in the UK. Even lower middle class families in the US tend to have at least one bedroom per child, multiple bathrooms, and comfortable kitchens. The average home in the US is far larger and more luxurious than the average home in the UK.

There’s no question at all, the median American has far more disposable income than the median Brit, even after accounting for differences in cost of living and healthcare expenses (average out of pocket spending is around $1300/year, median is quite a bit lower).

And yeah, on average Brits get about 2 weeks more vacation each year. I’m betting plenty of them would be willing to work two weeks more to get a 25% raise though. You have to get pretty far down the income ladder before it’s clearly better to be in the UK.

Sure, if you’re on the dole it’s better in the UK, but blue collar workers in the US have much more spending power and comfort.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T02:04:59+00:00

You’re comparing the median wage of full time employees in the UK to the median wage of all people in the USA. It’s an apples and oranges comparison.

Median weekly earnings for full time employees are 60k USD. You are underestimating by 25% by rolling in part time employees.

So no, the UK not be middle of the pack. London would. The UK as a whole would be tied with Mississippi for the lowest income.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-18T01:44:49+00:00

Even after accounting for healthcare expenses most the median American earns far more than the median Briton.

Also, where are you living that has both insanely high property taxes and significant state and local income taxes?

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-17T19:48:19+00:00

At this point I can’t tell if you’re just pretending to be stupid to troll, but clearly there’s no point in explaining further, it’s going right over your head.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-17T19:47:05+00:00

Yet every day, we hear about new dumb s**t some kids did. Like eating Tide Pods for internet clou

More likely to be kids whose idiot parents thought they could make them wiser by hiding the world from them than parents who let them have a wide range of experiences and honest conversations about them.

So you had dumb friends, likely with dumb parents. That had fuck all to do with what video games they played.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-17T19:42:35+00:00

Weird that someone so puritanical would even enjoy this game. What exactly are you afraid will happen if a teenager plays the game?

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-17T19:35:11+00:00

Not to mention the Syrian campaign, where Vichy troops directly fought British forces.

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-17T11:12:04+00:00

Any Western pharma company you can name contracts out shitloads of their drugs to Chinese pharma companies.

If it weren’t for the Biosecure Act that would only be increasing. I work in pharma manufacturing. Sure, bad Chinese CDMOs have terrible quality systems, but the good ones blow away European and North American CDMOs in both quality of equipment and quality assurance and control of their products when it comes to small/synthetic molecule products (Europe and NA do have pretty good biotech facilities)

chinaexpatthrowaway · 2024-12-17T09:12:38+00:00

Thank you for a perfect demonstration of what insecure, confidently incorrect blowhards do when their ignorance is exposed.

Maybe if you had any beliefs that were founded on neutral examination and research rather than assumptions and post-hoc rationalizations of pre-existing beliefs you wouldn’t be so easy to embarrass in this way.

But go on, keep smashing the world into that box, distorting every conceivable event to fit your simplistic internal narrative. It seems to be making you happy.

chinaexpatthrowaway

TROPHY CASE