Yeah, small businesses were already suffering at the hands of big box stores, stagnant wages, and online purchasing.

And now there’s a downturn.

Anything made in the USA (though that is not primarily because of cost of living, only partially). I used to stop off at various street food vendors for a snack on the way home every second day or so, but now I maybe do that once a month. And that is cost of living related entirely.

I think you’re missing the point. An American will see the “impact” of the “US President” “globally” while someone in Nigeria will have completely different concerns for what the Big Thing™ will be, and it will be Nigerian-centric, while someone having this same “itch” in Finland will have something Finnish-centric (say, Russia invading again) as their version and so on and so forth.

And yet, historically, when a Big Thing™ strikes it strikes from an unexpected direction from an unexpected place with unexpected outcomes for the overwhelming majority of humanity.

They also tend to think the Big Event™ will be in their geographical area and will think it’s based on their cultural concerns.

Or, alternatively, this is word salad and you’re falling for the oldest trick of the book: “it uses loads of big words and I don’t understand it so it must be profound”.

I know which direction I’m betting on.

In the summer, beer. Ideally an import (unless there’s a good microbrewery outlet nearby) because most commercial Chinese beers are terrible. For special events, baijiu. For winter, heated rice liquor.

Uh … what?

Before my eyes glazed over and I scrolled to the bottom it seems like this is baby’s first steps into Buddhism with a side of Daoism as written by someone who understands neither. But as the word salad kept getting tossed and tossed and tossed it just blended together into a word soup.

Is there a coherent description of this concept somewhere, or is word salad all we have?

It’s started.

I’ve got new socks on.

Anybody on the outside would think I live in the midst of utter chaos. Yet if they ask me where something of mine is, I can unerringly go to it.

So the only answer I can have for your question is either “无” or ☯.

Ouch! That hurts!

I know. That’s why I was so touched!

Getting some decent flower pics since the spring explosion has started finally.

It’s a bit lame tbh

Why thank you! 😀

I just drink tea nowadays. Brewed tea at home, not bottled tea with ten tons of sugar per tenth of a serving. It took me about ten months to move from exclusively sugary carbonated drinks to tea, but now I don’t even enjoy the former anymore.

UNMARKED POLICE SURVEILLANCE VAN

I can appreciate æsthetics independently of emotion.

But I need emotion to get “turned on”.

So I’m in this weird space where I can admire the looks of people (in about the same way that most people admire scenery) without wanting to fuck same (in about the same way that most people don’t want to fuck a forest … or a couch).

But logic isn’t innate. It’s a pattern. And human brains are basically very good at patterns.

But there are many, many, many patterns in life and logic is only one of them (and it isn’t even particularly useful if you don’t have some other patterns backing it up).

It was pretty common in the Zhou Dynastic period, being the official name and all that. That’s 789 years. I think we can consider it firmly established usage from that, no?

Bough, dough, slough, slough (yes, two different pronunciations!), rough …

It’s a mess, isn’t it?