My story is essentially a movie trope now. I was sitting in my local pub with my dad who was in a wheelchair, it was during the midweek (in Scotland), early evening, so it was pretty quiet, just a handful of middle aged guys, me and my dad. 4 young yob lads came in, if you’re in the UK you know the type, baseball caps, tracksuits, swaggering like Liam Gallacher, thinking they’re hard men.

They’d obviously had a few drinks before coming in, and after a few pints and us putting up with their shit tunes on the jukebox, they started getting a bit rambunctious, getting progressively louder and more aggressive as the evening turned to night.

One of the old guys, having gotten sick of their “doof doof” dance music crap got up and stuck a few quid in the jukebox, putting on some old 60’s 70’s rock music. One of the young team took offence to this, and got in his face, he started mouthing off at the old guy, who just stood there, impassive, and after a couple of minutes of this abuse the young team joined in, so one of the other regulars got up off his bar stool and stood behind the young team, and as if on some unseen signal, the old guy who was backed up against the jukebox just stuck the head right on the lad who was in his face, while his friend grabbed 2 of the young team and pulled them away, as the boy who’d been nutted reeled back, the old boy went for his friend, knocking him out with a left in the gut, and a hard right to the side of his head as he doubled over.
Meanwhile his friend had knocked one guy out with one punch, and when he turned his attention to the last guy, he blocked a punch and hit the boy so hard he flew over the pool table!

Turned out both of them were class fighters in their day, and some things you just don’t forget.

Morale of the story is, be respectful to people you don’t know, because you don’t know their history, and don’t know what they’ve done or been through.

Never saw those lads in the pub again, and they weren’t missed!

Very safe! In fact, you can increase that number to 40 or 50 and it will still be true.

I lived in a Chinese village with a Chinese family for one month as part of a homestay program. I started my journey from Shanghai airport, and the entire stretch of road leading to the village was smooth, with no potholes, no litter, and not once did I see anyone driving their vehicle on the wrong side of the road, or see stray dogs and cattle hold up vehicles.

Every house in the village had an attached toilet, 24×7 electricity, and the houses all had modern appliances like washing machine, refrigerator, TV, Wi-Fi etc. And I had visited quite a few houses.

Every classroom in the village primary school had a TV which the teachers used to teach their students. The secondary school had Wi-Fi.

All the villagers wore helmets while riding their electric scooters. Every single one of them could read and write Mandarin, and none of them littered or spat or peed in the open.

The women all wore jeans, dresses, skirts etc. and no one judged them and shamed them for “aping the west”. What mattered was their ability, not what clothes they wore.

It was completely safe to wander around the village after dark. No one got harassed for their gender, nationality etc. None of the female participants in the homestay program ever mentioned that they felt uncomfortable, or were stared at by men for wearing shorts. None of us faced any racist taunts.

I’m not saying that China has no problems, but this Chinese village had better services than most Indian cities (we can still only dream of uninterrupted power supply, or 24×7 water, or pothole-free roads).

I cannot say with authority that all villages in China are like this, but I would wager that many of them are. The cities are of course in a different league. I stayed in the suburbs to the north of Shanghai for a few days, not a tourist area. The neighbourhoods were clean, with excellent roads, and footpaths were not cluttered by hawkers. People followed traffic rules. I went to a side street where there were stalls selling street food, and it was clean. No one littered, there was no garbage anywhere.

It’s not just their GDP or infrastructure. It’s their mentality too that has helped China zip ahead.

My step father came into my life when I was 8, and treated me and my siblings badly without a word of interference from my mother for the rest of my childhood. I left home at eighteen, and got together with the woman I’m married to at age 25. She had two children, a boy of three and a half and a girl of six months, so I got an entire family in one fell swoop. A year later we had been on holiday with the children, and dropped by my mother’s cabin on the way home. We were supposed to sleep there before driving the long way home.

My step father was drunk, and proceded to be nasty to our son. I got mad as a wasp, and informed him he was not allowed to talk to my children like that. There was a huge quarrel, he and I shouting, my mother claiming “He didn’t mean it”, the children crying, my wife watching it all with her mouth open, utterly appalled. It finally calmed down, but he kept mumbling nasty remarks through dinner, so we decided to leave. I also decided I would no longer spend time in his company. After that I have seen him at weddings and christenings, and that’s it.

I wish him well, but will not allow his poison to infect my life any more.

In terms of losing its engineering chops and becoming an overfinancialized blue chip play?

Yes.

However, Boeing’s problem ia execution, whereas Intel’s business model is facing obsolescence.

Both are in danger of ebbing away in the uncertain future ahead, though Boeing’s decline will be back stopped by the government, given its role as a key arms contractor and America’s only builder of airliners.

Boeing is one or two crashes from a PR nightmare, especially if it happens on the Max.

Intel’s product mix appear unsuitable for an ai-heavy world, and arm is projected to make huge inroads to the windows ecosystem in the coming years.

Intel needs a radical rethink, because the chips act cannot save it from drowning when the market moves decisively against a product portfolio. This is made worse by the poisonous politics that has reshaped demand in East Asia.

I don’t envy Intel at all.

“How serious was this threat?”

Let me put it this way: the People’s Liberation Army could have taken back Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War, long before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and long before Deng met Thatcher.

The 44th Army of the PLA chased the fleeing Kuomintang forces all the way to Shenzhen. Their troopers were at one point gathered at Hong Kong’s Lo Wu border. They were literally one river crossing away from the British colony. Hong Kong only had a few thousand colonial troops stationed at the time. The battle-hardened 44th could have easily taken the city in about a day with a single well-timed bayonet charge. Two days at the most.

Sir Alexander Grantham, who was the governor of Hong Kong at the time, recalled that the PLA didn’t even need to attack. All they had to do was cut off food and water supplies to the colony, and the British would have to surrender in less than a month.

But neither of these scenarios ever happened. Chairman Mao ordered the army to stop the attack and turn back, stating that he had “other plans for Hong Kong”. Premier Zhou Enlai himself personally oversaw the situation with Hong Kong, and made sure that nothing went amiss with its supply of food and water.

History vindicated Mao’s decision to not take back Hong Kong immediately. He had the vision and the sense to play the game of geopolitics.

1. Mao knew that China was poor and underdeveloped, and was soon to be sanctioned by the United States and the rest of the imperialist west for being a communist nation. A gateway to the west was desperately needed.
2. The British Empire, likewise, also needed Hong Kong to serve as its gateway to the east. By letting the British keep Hong Kong for just a little while longer, Mao prevented China from being isolated by an anti-China alliance of western powers completely, which was what would have happened if the British had been beaten and sent home crying to Uncle Sam.In 1950, the UK became one of the first capitalist countries to formally recognise the PRC.
3. Mao was worried about the overwhelming influence and control the Soviet Union had over the Chinese Communist Party. He did not want a communist China to be freed from Fascist Japan and the Imperialist West, only to answer to a red Russia. Having Hong Kong as a gateway to the west, meant that China would not have to depend entirely on the Soviet Union.History proved him right, as evident in the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s, and the fall of North Korea in the 1990s.
4. Just because Mao let the British lord over the people of Hong Kong for a while longer, doesn’t mean he had forgotten about the welfare of its predominantly Chinese populace. The city’s status as a gateway between east and west was the sole reason its economy flourished in the 20th century.Hong Kong’s success was never a “miracle” or the result of British rule, but a by-product of the times, geopolitics, and external factors greater than the city itself – a lesson most people in Hong Kong, both young and old, have forgotten

Article 5 of NATO would not have been China’s main concern, because the article could only be invoked in case of an attack on a NATO member’s own soil (i.e. Europe or North America). In fact, the first time it was ever invoked was after the events of 9/11.

In any case, China did play a major part in the Korean War, fighting the coalition forces of the United Nations to a standstill, so I doubt the formation of NATO would have changed the course of history too much – and that’s assuming NATO was willing at all to waste money and lives defending the British Empire’s interests. There’s a reason why Article 5 was never invoked during the Falklands War.

The fact remains that the PRC never planned to take back Hong Kong by force in the first place. They had no illusions that the sun would never set on the British Empire. They knew Hong Kong would become Chinese again eventually.

Addendum:
Chiang Kai-shek actually wanted to take back Hong Kong from the British after the Second World War. He rightfully saw the the Treaty of Nanking as humiliating to the Chinese people, and negotiated with the UK and the US to have the treaty abolished in 1942. The British Empire rejected the proposal, Chiang refused to relent, and so the matter was dropped from the agenda.

However, another agreement was formed that whoever entered Chinese territory previously under Japanese occupation first, would get to keep it for themselves.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, both the British and the Kuomintang scrambled to send forces to Hong Kong. KMT soldiers were apparently the first to enter Hong Kong’s New Territories, which was disputed by the UK.

The UK referred the matter to the US. President Truman wanted to ally with the UK against the Soviet Union, so he betrayed Chiang by declaring Hong Kong was never part of the deal. The KMT had to withdraw their forces, and Hong Kong soon became a British colony once again. So close, and yet so far.

This is actually a snapshot into what China was like under the Kuomintang government. Yes they were founded on great ideas by great men, but they were also de facto puppets of the Imperialist West, and therefore unable to give the Chinese people the rights, liberty, dignity and respect they deserved.

Hong Kong would very likely still be British today, had the communists lost the civil war.

I’m sure I’ve told this story before…

Quite a number of years ago I was out shooting at a public range when a family showed up. Mom and dad, two kids, and even grandma.

They pile out of a pickup truck… and, well, to complete the visual here, they looked straight out of central casting as a Mariachi band. Now, I’m like “you do your thing, I’ll do mine”, but to say that this group was attention getting understates it by several orders of magnitude.

Dad had some cowboy guns, a revolver and a lever action rifle. They also had a grand total of one set of hearing protection between all of them. No eyepro is present.

They proceed to set up their “targets”, which are just a bunch of milk cartons filled with dirt…. Whatever, it’s a public range and people shoot all sorts of random shit. The boy takes a couple of them downrange, sets them down, and steps about three paces to the side.

Dad starts blasting. Yes, kid is still downrange as fuck.

I immediately decide that I don’t want to have to deal with the paperwork when one of these idiots shoots someone, and start packing up. But I’m doing it slow, because I’m keeping one eye on these guys, and keeping my very loaded rifle slung and ready because I’m also somewhat concerned that I’m going to have to shoot one of these idiots myself if the stupidity level goes up another notch, and I want it to be very obvious that if they point a gun at me they are pointing a gun at a man with a clearly loaded AR.

After they blast some rounds in the dirt, the kid eventually comes back behind the line, and the kids pull out the revolver to take turns shooting.

The boy walks up to the line with the revolver and the girl sits on the bench next to him, looks right at him, and I see the next few moments in slow motion. The boy pulls the trigger and the girl gets an absolute face full of cylinder gap, and screams.

I chose that moment to exit, stage left, but that whole scene is burned into my brain, as assuradly as hot gas was burned into that poor girls eyes.

Hunter Discovers 29 Human Body Parts in the Desert

https://youtu.be/AFboKFzJza4

Cabbage Rolls

Ingredients

• 12 large leaves cabbage
• 1 cup cooked white rice
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup minced onion
• 1 pound extra-lean ground beef
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/4 teaspoons ground black pepper
• 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Instructions

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Boil cabbage leaves 2 minutes, just until pliable; drain.
2. In large bowl, combine rice, egg, milk, onion, ground beef, salt and pepper.
3. Place about 1/4 cup of meat mixture in center of each cabbage leaf, and roll up, tucking in ends. Place rolls in slow cooker, seam side down.
4. In a small bowl, mix together tomato sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over cabbage rolls.
5. Cover, and cook on LOW for 8 to 9 hours.

Foreign Woman Meets American Women & NOW Understands Why Passport Bros Exist!

The look on their faces when she said she understood why men are traveling out the states. The salt was real in that room!!!

Why did the Prime Minister of Bengal quit her post and fled the country?

She has no choice but to fly away; the country has already fallen into a downward spiral.

On the surface, the recent unrest in Bangladesh appears to be due to civil service positions being skewed in favor of military families, but this is just a trigger. Even if there were zero reserved positions for military families, there would still be hundreds of thousands of university graduates competing for very few positions.

The essence of the problem is economic decline and public dissatisfaction.

Bangladesh is in deep trouble.

Firstly, there is a population explosion. With such a small land area, it has 170M people. China has a large population, but Bangladesh’s population density is nearly ten times that of China! Russia’s land area is 116 times that of Bangladesh, yet its population is 30 million less.

The total population of these red areas on Earth, compressed into a very small point, is Bangladesh.

With such a large population, the vast majority are engaged in agriculture, which has very low added value.

Bangladesh is the second most disaster-prone country in the world (the first is the Philippines).

Previously, population growth was slow, relying entirely on the harsh adjustment of natural disasters.

During the last major famine, 10 million out of a population of 40 million in Bangladesh died of starvation.

After entering the modern era, pesticides, high-yield seeds, fertilizers, and vaccines have caused a sharp increase in the agricultural population.

Unlike China, which has implemented family planning policies, a democratically elected government in Bangladesh cannot do the same. As a result, the population continues to grow while land area remains fixed, and frequent natural disasters make it difficult to develop a secondary industry on a large scale.

The world’s largest and most dangerous ship-breaking yard is in Bangladesh, but it can only accommodate 200,000 workers, and the value added to production is extremely low.

The country’s pillar industry, the textile industry, has little technological content and faces extremely fierce international competition.

In fact, it is at the bottom of the international division of labor.

Another mistake is the excessive emphasis on higher education. At this stage, the country should focus more on basic education rather than higher education.

After receiving higher education, many young people are unwilling to settle for low-income jobs.

What’s worse is that the country has invested significant resources in cultivating a highly educated population, but most of them are liberal arts graduates.

In China, for example, when I was taking the college entrance exam, the ratio of STEM students to liberal arts students was about 8:1 to 9:1.

There was even some discrimination against liberal arts students at that time; those who failed to compete in STEM fields were the ones considering studying liberal arts.

Even today, the ratio of STEM students to liberal arts students in China is still about 1:1, and STEM students generally have better job prospects and salaries compared to liberal arts students.

(To this day, on the Chinese Internet, the phrase “Are you a liberal arts student?” is still clearly mocking and contemptuous.)

(I believe Vietnam should also learn from this. Today, in Vietnam, the ratio of STEM majors to liberal arts majors is about 1:2, which is far too high for liberal arts students.)

With so many liberal arts graduates, who have broad perspectives, they are naturally unwilling to engage in hard work after graduation, leading to unrest.

Democratic governments and parliamentary politics are not very suitable for late-developing countries.

If Bangladesh cannot make the most of the remaining value of manual labor before AI and automation technologies become dominant, and cannot push for more industrialization, the future of Bangladesh will be very concerning.

GUANGZHOU IS SO MODERN! | An INDIAN’s First Time In CHINA