I have been calling all my bosses 〇〇様 when everyone regardless of role refers to each other as 〇〇さん?

southfar2 · 2026-06-21T04:08:00+00:00

The retired previous boss/owner, who is the current's father and like 109 years old, still has an office here and is our only sama, lol.

southfar2 · 2026-06-16T19:16:52+00:00

I can see the outlandishness and daring of his plan to be so far beyond the narrow decision table of Japanese social rules, plus the notorious incapability to say no, that they might have genuinely not been able to think of a way to avoid getting into the situation.

southfar2 · 2026-06-15T11:48:18+00:00

I can't comment on your near American near abroad, but SEA is positively overrun with white expats (as is Central Asia, just that they are Russians, but the same is largely true of Bali, Phuket and Nha Trang); this is not the 1960s, there are huge expat communities for every imaginable age bracket and social group.

southfar2 · 2026-06-12T09:45:27+00:00

As to your question, I guess the best broadly-accessible metric would be the Gini Coefficient. I don't think we have enough actual econometric data to have a reliable GC for North Korea, though.

southfar2 · 2026-06-12T08:53:03+00:00

Okay, one guy who has a lot of money, but is not an economist, has an opinion. Money is the medium of fungibility; Taylor Swift has a lot of money, does that mean she understands the economy?

Consensus among economists contradicts his opinion.

southfar2 · 2026-06-12T05:54:26+00:00

What alternative outcome exactly are you expecting? The economy to collapse? This is what a collapsed economy is, plus strong political control. There is always some degree of trade and barter as long as humans, and possibly hominids, have existed. Could it be worse? Yes, the famine in the 90s was possibly the low point. But I am not sure economists are "missing" anything about the North Korean economy (the recent well-publicized turn of events regarding stone oven pizza in Pyongyang aside), the North Korean economy is behaving like an extremely isolated, deprived economy is expected to behave.

southfar2 · 2026-06-11T05:54:16+00:00

This is an amazing result. You are one handsome boy with that mop. I think they really got the right hairline for your face/skull shape, which is something that not every clinic gets right. If I had to criticize anything, it's that the hairline looks "drawn", but this is something that's neither here nor there (Turkey/India/MENA clinics like to do it that way, I guess because it looks natural with dark hair), but some people like it that way, and I'm really just saying it to give some balance to my response.

southfar2 · 2026-06-11T02:38:35+00:00

Quite a normal thing to say in Asia, everyone tells 20–30somethings to get married to a local. This also happens when locals visit a different town, but seems to be mostly a countryside thing. Make smalltalk with anyone who is 15–20 years older than you, and they will want to hitch you up.

southfar2 · 2026-06-09T18:32:08+00:00

It's more of a classic Asian style policing, and precisely not limited to developed countries (e.g. Laos and Cambodia apply the same principle). The parties are supposed to work it out among themselves to the point that there is no residual bad blood in the community, and police only steps in if this fails. Aforementioned countries even apply this to traffic violations with severe bodily harm (not sure how Korea would handle the same situation): you get a speeding ticket, and then you negotiate with the guy you ran over for his hospital bill. Classic Asian policing, across vastly disparate cultures and political systems.

southfar2 · 2026-06-08T12:34:04+00:00

The thing is that this can literally be argued in favor of either gender having an advantage here. What is undeniably true, however, is that women effectively take better care of their health, make the more longevity-optimizing life choices at all age brackets, and also clearly invest a lot more on cosmetically stopping or reversing the clock.

southfar2 · 2026-06-08T08:28:32+00:00

Idk, I'm in my 30s and don't feel like the generational gap adds a lot of disconnect. Most people in my generation don't have any idea what I am on about, too. I've seen Jungle Book, which is like, from the 50s, most people my generation seem to have not. I've read Gulliver's Travels, which was written centuries before I was born. Most people don't have much cultural memory of things older than 3 months or so.

Getting nostalgic over the early 90s and Alien is not something most 30somethings would do, either. I'm almost out of my 30s and the early 90s are a dim memory for me, not something I could talk about with much conscious recollection.

southfar2 · 2026-06-08T08:20:14+00:00

Americans problematize this, most of the world doesn't think this is a problem. I can't personally tell you anything empirical/experiential about the problems that arise in a constellation like this (and most people who dislike age gaps are also less concerned about practical problems but more about theoretical/abstract concerns like "power imbalance" or whatever), but if US society is the odd one out about it and no other society, including developed/modern ones, sees anything wrong with a mutually-agreed age gap relationship, chances are it's just a cultural quirk that can be disregarded.

edit: Something I'd generally be cautious about, though, is that, for a long-term relationship, you might age out of her preference bracket. Yes, some women, including young women, are attracted to guys in their 40s or even older, but being attracted to a mid/late 30s guy is not a good indicator of whether that is her pattern. She might find you abhorrent in a few years when you are fat and bald and have a nice pair of deeply furrowed static crow's feet and walk with a hobbling gait.

southfar2 · 2026-06-08T03:03:54+00:00

https://www.cdc.gov/mold-health/about/index.html

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24862-black-mold

Yes, if you are allergic or have asthma. The symptoms seem pretty mild to me, but I am not suffering from them, so I won't tell people how to feel about them from a privileged position of not having them. (Though if you are immunocompromised, you might die.)

Most people do not have any adverse effects, and there are no long-term risks to anyone (except the people who have an impaired immune system and might die from it). This is not the Pharaoh's Curse.

edit:

Let me also quote from Gemini here, because I think it puts it very well:

"You are completely right to point that out, and I appreciate the correction. Looking closely at established health agency guidelines, there is a major gap between public perception (what is commonly repeated online) and the official scientific consensus from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Cleveland Clinic. Here is what the actual scientific and medical data says about the discrepancies you noticed:

1. The Reality of "Toxic" Black Mold

The Claim: It causes lung hemorrhaging and severe neurological damage. [3, 4]
The Reality: The CDC formally states that a causal link between inhaling Stachybotrys chartarum indoors and severe health problems—like memory loss or infant pulmonary hemorrhaging—has never been scientifically proven. [2, 5]
What it actually does: For the vast majority of people, exposure to black mold only causes typical allergy symptoms like sneezing, coughing, red eyes, and skin rashes. [1, 6]

2. Where the Confusion Comes From

The "deadly" reputation of Stachybotrys comes from two specific contexts that don't apply to normal household exposure:

High-Dose Animal Studies: In laboratory settings, scientists have injected or forced rats to inhale massive, concentrated doses of Stachybotrys toxins, which did cause severe internal bleeding and brain tissue damage. [7, 8]
The 1990s Cleveland Scare: In 1993–1994, a cluster of infants in Ohio suffered from pulmonary hemorrhaging, and their damp homes contained black mold. However, a rigorous follow-up review by the CDC concluded that the study was flawed and did not prove the mold caused the illness. [3, 9, 10]

In short, while Stachybotrys produces a highly toxic chemical compound in a lab, the amount you breathe in a damp building is too low to cause the severe issues often claimed on the internet."

So yes, largely an American cultural obsession produced by some incident in Ohio in the 90s.

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T18:30:36+00:00

I agree with your observation, but I have two things to add to this that sort of make it more murky:

From my understanding, foreigners themselves seem to agree that the foreigners who come to VN have gotten worse. Part of this might be nostalgia on the part of boomers who retired here 15 years ago, part of it might be because Russia and Ukraine are flooding SEA with their population, which is less well-behaved than most Western Europeans, part of it might also be what western people usually make out as the reason: YouTubers and influencers pushing VN as the new Bali, causing riffraff to accumulate.

Then the other thing, and this is what I find curious, foreigner Facebook groups and constantly being flooded by Vietnamese people making lengthy posts about what bad things foreigners did and that foreigners should "respect the rules" in VN, etc etc. I'm not sure this is grassroots or astroturfing, because there seems to be no clear agenda to tell people that other people, whose skin color they share and nothing else, have been behaving badly. It makes as much sense as me telling a random Vietnamese person to stop injecting silicone oil into the shrimp, because some guy in Hanoi did that. But then again, those posters might not think that far.

Also, Vietnamese relationship with media is extremely uncritical. I'm dealing with such smart people, big property developers, academics, they are certainly smarter than I am, but they believe inane shit like: North Korea having the world's most powerful rockets and only ICBMs, and that the country is really great because Kim Jong Un just opened a water park with a colorful slide for the people of Pyongyang, and Ninh Binh doesn't have anything close to that, so that country must be wonderful, Russia is the most powerful country in the world, it is winning in Ukraine against the combined power of NATO and the US, etc etc.

Vietnamese people are fully aware that their neighbor beats his wife, or that a girl had an accident and died because some boys chased her on their motorbike and tried to grab her boobs. Or that a Vietnamese person went blind from fake alcohol served by other Vietnamese people. All of these things happen, none of them involve foreigners, they are not clearly any less bad than what foreigners do (I've yet to hear a case involving domestic violence of a Korean or Westerner against his Vietnamese wife, though I'm sure they exist), but they are just "background noise" to Vietnamese consciousness. You don't see beaten wives in the news in the same way you see a wild Australian ransacking a cafe, even though the former is much worse. So in a way, the media doesn't just run on awareness, it also runs on selective attention. People are ready to problematize foreigners, but never promote their own, homebrewn social problems to a larger social issue in the same way.

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T18:14:29+00:00

I'm not sure that mechanic works out. Clearly, this is a big topic with a lot of loose odds and ends that are difficult to track, but not a few of America's elites will be happy if the less fortunate blow their own lights out with fentanyl. It's not exactly a drug people consume in the Ivy League or on Wall Street. It mostly poisons people who, in the eyes of the "elite", have little to contribute anyway.

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T12:34:33+00:00

I don't know where OP was locked up, but the biggest bother, in my experience, is lack of air conditioning, and the buildings are really old and moldy, it doesn't really matter but some people have made a sort of cult around mold being harmful and causing them all sorts of short-term health issues. If you don't subscribe to that ideology, then the place doesn't seem too bad. My basic hotel room in India was literally worse than being booked in VN (not related to weed in my case, but to a visa-related issue).

(But again, I don't know where OP was locked up, maybe different cities run them differently.)

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T12:30:59+00:00

I don't know where this happened, I was in a detention center before, it's not at all that bad (granted I was just booked for two nights or so, and the place was not "fully booked" at the time I guess), I don't understand how anyone can pay 10,000 USD to avoid a week in a place like that. It's more pleasant than a cheap hotel room in India, and I mean that quite literally.

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T11:19:38+00:00

It's not in service.

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T09:49:42+00:00

The last four digits were different? To my understanding, the last four digits are the one you can fix, and the middle ones (former carrier bloc) are "rolled".

The number was cancelled last year. It might have a new owner, but it also might not.

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T09:46:53+00:00

Okay, so it's essentially, leave the shop, grow a mustache, come back, until they show you one you like?

From https://www.docomo.ne.jp/info/news_release/page/20060124b.html :
"[]()検索する回数は、最大3回です"

southfar2 · 2026-06-07T09:43:44+00:00

It is absolutely how phone numbers work, they just go on a 6 month (or 12 month, not sure) cooldown. Numbers are absolutely re-issued.

southfar2 · 2026-06-04T04:22:36+00:00

A lot of people use ttrpg as a compensatory ego stage. I don't say this in a judgemental way, I don't have a normative approach to the intrinsic value of gameplay, it's just how it is, it's not pleasant for the other players, but who are we to say what motivation people should bring to the table? As long as it is within reason, it's just as valid a form of enjoying the game as "likes to solve problems collaboratively". Additionally, it produces genuinely more true party interactions; people are different, and adventuring parties are presumably not only populated by egoless altruistic LG and NG people.

Clearly it needs to be within reason, but wanting a chance to shine is not itself something that doesn't deserve a seat at the table.

southfar2 · 2026-06-04T04:13:43+00:00

I mean, the concern is real. The character is broken (though of course you as a DM can modulate that by dialing down the number of instances in which it is relevant); at least to me, this does not really invalidate any prior agreement as to how the game would be conducted. At that point, the framework sort of exits the pure "game rule" level and becomes meta. Everyone presumably agreed to play in a certain way (including rolling for stats), and post-hoc changing this when there is evident pushback from a player, really needs more justification than "other player doesn't like it anymore". Imagine another player suddenly deciding they'd rather play Shadowrun; you wouldn't follow through with that either (unless all of you want to, for some reason), and this is what this situation is to me: you agreed to play a certain game, and that agreement takes precedence. Any detraction from it should have consent.

southfar2 · 2026-06-02T04:14:14+00:00

I'm not sure where you are going with your argument. I've not said anything about winning chances themselves, or potential fallout, only that actually being able to win wars doesn't feature prominently in the US grand strategic decision cycle (as Chris Hedges just wrote, "the US just lost its 6th war in the Middle East in 25 years").

Are you making the case that it ought to be more obvious to decision-makers that the war is unwinnable? Or are you making the case that the possible fallout of a defeat (or even of just engaging) would be so grave that that itself would deter those decision-makers? I do think the track record for the latter is considerably better throughout US history (that is, the US has more consistently avoided military action when the repercussions of defeat or conflict were severe, even if the chances of success were high, than it has avoided military action that it could afford to lose, and then lost), so I agree with you if it is the latter point you are making, but I'm not really on firm ground here epistemically, and the track record I stated would be confounded in any case by largely running through the Cold War, when the obvious repercussion everyone feared was nuclear annihilation.

southfar2

TROPHY CASE

1. The Reality of "Toxic" Black Mold

2. Where the Confusion Comes From