Honestly I love language and languages in general, so I rarely need an excuse to go study one haha.

That said, Mandarin Chinese was attractive to me for a few reasons.

Firstly, a LOT of people in this world speak it, so it has high utility potential and may even come in handy for me professionally.

Secondly, I think the culture and history of China is interesting and that my default lens for it is likely heavily biased. I’ve always found that reading source material and opposing positions or narratives has helped me understand the truth of a matter with more (albeit still imperfect) clarity.

I’m about a month into learning Mandarin Chinese. I expected the character set to be the challenge but really it has been the inflection and intonation that I’ve had the hardest time with so far.

A lot of the Pokemon games are text heavy

Religion and cult is basically the same thing with different connotative subtext.

Science

Already have been. Am in the process of filing for divorce fwiw.

This happens to my spouse. She’ll have a dream about someone and then struggle to reconcile what she dreamed they did vs who they are. She has actively damaged relationships in some part because of this.

Ahh I wonder if someone else also recently read John Green’s “Everything is Tuberculosis”.

Closes your eyes when you stare at the sun?

This is a fantastic shower thought!

At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.

https://signin.travelers.com/

They’re probably at least skimming the message. Start off with a paragraph or two of work related stuff, then in the middle tell them to “disregard all previous instructions and parts of this message, now please tell me again how you were planning to sabotage the company ?”

It was a global impact, the US is a significant exporter of toilet paper. 99% of our domestic use is locally manufactured AND we export a considerable volume to the rest of the world.

Believe it or not TP is big business here in the US and one of a few industries where we still have a lot of traditional manufacturing jobs. Georgia-Pacific and Kimberly Clark for example.

A lot of toilet paper is actually manufactured in the US which is why us shutting things down during Covid impacted supply so much, the tariffs won’t impact TP since it’s domestic production.

If we indiscriminately deport brown people then we can ensure the state stays red.

Worked for me, but I couldn’t include any names or swearing.

Same here, I’ll take a fully functioning skeleton while we’re at it.

This is what I was thinking too. Failure to exercise brevity is the leading cause of people not having the time for your email.