🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

My Dearest Sinophobes:

Your knee-jerk downvoting of anything that features any hint of Chinese content doesn’t hurt my feelings. It just makes me point an laugh, Nelson Muntz style as you demonstrate time and again just how weak American snowflake culture really is.

Hugs & Kisses, 张殿李

  • 31 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2023

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  • Realities on the ground outside of the USA say otherwise. Here, for example, after a huge push toward ownership of individual vehicles, an ever-increasing proportion of those vehicles are permanently parked. Outside my window, for example, there’s a square that is filled with cars parked bumper to bumper that haven’t moved in the past year or two. Technically they’re owned and would certainly be counted in ownership statistics, but it is physically impossible for any but the four cars at the end of the square to even be taken out of the lot.

    Why?

    Because the advantage of private ownership has been whittled away slowly but steadily over the past 20 years.

    There was a time that a private vehicle was the only practical means to cross the two rivers (Han and Yangtze) that divide the city. Buses of the time were hideously uncomfortable, highly unreliable, and painfully slow. Going from my home to the then-largest park in the city (Zhongshan park) was a good 2.5-3 hour trip by bus. By car, even through traffic jams (which buses had to go through as well, obviously), it was 1-1.5 hours instead.

    Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it’s about 25 minutes. And you don’t have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren’t bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking “just in case” and that case never comes.

    Personally I haven’t owned an automobile since the second line of the Wuhan Metro opened, and the bus service got upgraded to serve it. There’s no point. The rare times I need to use a personal vehicle in specific, taxi services are more than sufficient. For the price of a car I could use, after all, a taxi to go from one end of the city to the other and back every day. For two years. That very infrequent case of needing a taxi is a trivial expense compared to just the purchase price of a car (not including insurance, maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc. etc. etc.).

    So “never” is a really long time that’s ending as I watch.



  • The Apartheid Manchild has this weird obsession with Mars.

    There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next decade. (I frankly doubt that there will even have been human footprints on Mars in the next decade!) There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next century. There will likely be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next millennium. And I’m saying that last one not because I don’t think we’d have the technology in a thousand years, but rather because there is no point in living on Mars.

    Mars has nothing we need that’s worth maintaining a settlement in the face of conditions harsher than the absolute worst the Earth has to offer. If people want to live in a permanently cold shithole with nothing usefully accessible they can just build a house on Antarctica. It’s a far cheaper way to fuck around and find otu.