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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: March 29th, 2025

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  • Chinese culture has the concept of ‘eating bitterness’ and it is universal. It’s about being able to take the suffering, loss, pain, humiliation, and all the other bitter stuff that life can throw at you, enduring it, and building character, strength, and resilience out of it. It’s a virtue. It’s a universally admired trait.

    North American culture is not great at eating bitterness. The culture here is more about eating sweet, or living the good life, and when people have to eat bitterness, especially those expecting to eat sweet, it is viewed as shameful and castigating rather than normal, and it easily turns a person towards grievance and a sense of injustice that makes them bitter inside instead of resilient and optimistic.

    This is why I think men in North America, especially white men, have turned to characters like Jordan Peterson, or in worse cases, Andrew Tate. Jordan Peterson at least tries to help these men develop a sense of responsibility and strength that can be constructive and meaning- making. Guys like Tate, on the other hand, exploit their grievance to make them socially nihilistic. One is obviously much better than the other, but neither is a substitute for having a common social value place upon eating bitterness.

    The “manosphere” gives aggrieved, frustrated, disappointed, and angry men stories to help them process their emotions, but they still rely upon self-centered and egotistical tropes like the hero’s journey or misogynistic worldviews. These don’t address the deeper and more universal reality that none of us (male or female) are heroes from Marvel movies, that deep, painfully-bitter experience is part of the common human journey, and that eating that bitterness with humility and without expectation of any award for being special, is a virtue that helps you develop character.




  • You know, people who aren’t very bright can usually easily make up for that by just being diligent, such as by reading a bit more before posting. People who aren’t very bright and who are committed to ignorance because it confirms their ideological biases have a much harder time figuring things out. I see that’s where you’re at, so you’re not worth interacting with further. Hopefully you overcome that hurdle some day.

    Good day.




  • It prevents tariffs on inputs, which lowers costs of goods sold for products sold outside the US. Goods sold into the US would still be tariffed, but if the inputs are largely from China, it would still likely be cheaper to manufacture outside the US, not pay the 125% tariffs on inputs, and deal with the lower tariff rate into the States.

    I mean, if your costs on inputs are going to go up from 125% tariffs by being in the US, but you can manufacture somewhere that the US is only charging 10% tariffs, it’s a strong incentive to move manufacturing to that low-tariff destination and only face a 10% tariff on what your selling.

    What works for any specific company would come down to their own mix of inputs, target markets, and other factors.













  • “New” as in September of last year, not something done under Carney’s leadership. Carney also just recently made a statement that Palestinians have an untouchable right to the territorial integrity of their land in the same way that Ukraine and Canada do.

    My hopes are not very high for the Liberals to be as strong on opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria as I would like, but with circumstances in our relationship with the US having changed dramatically, I think there is an opening for new leadership to go in a new direction. At least with the Liberals under Carney there is some hope. With Poilievre, there would be no hope at all.