I remember various medicines from my childhood that were really tasty. Don’t remember what they were, though (I don’t get sick much). Probably for the better, my self control with tasty treats is abysmal …

Many dogs I see bark at people, while many other dogs are quite happy meeting other dogs. Probably depends on the breed and whether the owner is a dipshit.

Dressing up as a guy is kinda hard, the widely accepted options tend to have much less variety than women’s fashion. You pretty much have to get weird to make it a little fun, and that’s risky.

I guess that actually makes it easy to dress up, it’s just depressingly boring.

One issue is that Japan was treated with kid’s gloves after WW2 unlike Germany, the Germans were made keenly aware of how much they fucked up and the allies spent some effort to “denazify” the country - even if it was incomplete, it was still a lot more than what was done in Japan.

Now that I think about it, it probably also helped a ton that the EU wasn’t just two countries, but pretty much from the very beginning a round table of more-or-less equals. Really takes the edge off animosities between any two countries in a way that’s probably impossible when all you have is bilateral relations, even when there’s a guarantor like the USA that would prevent any active hostilities.

I suppose I took it for granted how well my own country was able to deal with that kind of situation.

Most of these have actually quite different political systems. e.g. Putin’s Russia is a dictatorship, while Ukraine is a somewhat imperfect democracy that has been on the road to become more similar to EU countries. Trump might despise Canada, but is that true for Biden and other prominent Democrats, too? Was that true for pre-MAGA Republicans? Either way, Trump’s USA is a rightwing dictatorship while Canada is a democracy.

Also, even if a set of relatively similar countries isn’t actually friends, it would still be very beneficial for most them, certainly more beneficial than going to war with each other.

Japan and South Korea have similar political systems and similar human development indexes, which implies relatively similar sets of values. And they’re fairly alone with those in their corner of the world. They both have to deal with being adjacent to Russia, China and North Korea, which aren’t exactly the best neighbors. And they face similar social issues, e.g. extremely low birth rates.

In short, it would be very beneficial for them to be friends.

… they weren’t? Is it really just down to WW2 history and chauvinistic sentiments, which are the only concrete issues the article mentions? Looking in from the outside, that’s pretty absurd.

Yeah, it’s definitely the ‘pretend you’re not alone’ part that’s pushing it into cringe territory, though even that shouldn’t be enough to even metaphorically bring a delivery peson to tears …

Maybe she ordered more than reasonable for a single person … ?

It’s barely worse than Germany, which doesn’t currently have a fascist takeover (it’s getting there, but it’s not quite there yet).

There’s a bunch of autocrats who didn’t last that long, so that’s not nothing. The issue is that autocracy is pretty much categorically unethical.

I like to think that I’m not that dumb anymore, but I’m definitely still afraid of misinterpreting something as romantic/sexual that was meant in a friendly way.

One of my hobbies is making and drinking cocktails. I’m spending kind of a lot on it and I have a bit of an issue with actually storing all the bottles I buy (see: housing is expensive), but if I was drinking even half of those cocktails in bars I’d be spending several times as much. Drinks in bars are expensive, proper cocktails even moreso, and if you want ingredients that are better than bottom-tier …

One backup copy isn’t enough anyway! The more the merrier, just make sure that enough of it is automated that your backups don’t get stale, and ideally stagger the timings so you don’t immediately overwrite all the automated backups with trash data once something goes wrong.

At one point I accidentally deleted a file, but I could conveniently copy it from the copy in my fileserver that automatically gets updated every two weeks.

physical offline backup you control at regular intervals, that you’ll actually do.

ouch, right in my executive dysfunction!

Always, always backup. And frequently! Don’t trust your local harddrive (especially if it’s a device you frequently take with you), don’t trust flashdrives, don’t even trust your local fileserver if it doesn’t have built-in backups (and even if it does, check that those backups actually work). If it’s not saved on at least two physical places (two drives in the same PC/server count, but it’s sketchy on its own), it’s not backed up!

If you dodge 99 bullets and get killed by the last one, you’re a great bullet dodger but still dead. Did anyone count how many bullets were shot at him that didn’t hit?

I mean like literally controlling who people talk to and how often, and without most people being aware of how much they are being controlled.

That just sounds like South Korea, which AFAIK is doing worse than Japan on most quality-of-life metrics - they work longer hours, have even less sex, population is shrinking even faster and AFAIK the common Koreans aren’t exactly getting rich off it, either.