Barley Blair

Orange is the new Black Monday

Strikes me as great news for the UK. Chinese students bring $10.6bn per year to the US and for many the UK is the second choice.

Down for me too

I’ve only been in China a week but keep hearing that Americans are rushing to embrace the Little Red Book.

The US has always demanded control over their sphere though. So I guess the question for me is whether the US is planning to be seriously expansionary or if this is just bluff and bluster?

But what does that mean? That he just wants to be like Putin and that the US is going to be an expansionary warring empire?

It seems like it’s just going to push allies away from the US. It makes no sense. Unless they genuinely think they can rile up the MAGAs in other countries to oust the mainstream governments there instead.

I am genuinely so confused about this. I don’t get what the endgame is with this Greenland, Panama Canal, Canada and UK rhetoric. Is it serious expansionism? Or just bluff as some opening gambit? Or just to sow chaos?

So you would say this is genuine expansionism? That they seriously think this is a valid play?

Does anyone have insights into what they hope to achieve by this? Why are they attacking allies in this way? Just to rile up their base, or an opening gambit in negotiations, or to put other nations on the back foot, or genuine expansionism? What is the endgame here? I feel I am missing something.

Not just news. Apple’s email summaries are often far less helpful than the old snippets of the first few lines.

People looking at engagement metrics, I expect. Isn’t that all there is in these companies?

Fair criticism, thank you!

Yes, all very fair points, thank you. And a lot of non-Katakana Japanese is arguably loanwords too, from a long time ago. Although my perception is that Japanese is getting more of them more quickly than many other languages. I have no evidence to back that up though!

Why without irony? Genuinely curious.

I love Ridley, but his biggest problem is that he can’t tell the difference between a good script and a bad script.

Going to be a busy January for US politics

Usually on products to look cool in my experience.

You’re right of course, but there does seem to be an outsized amount of loanwords in Japanese. I find it especially irksome when they replace beautiful words like 苺 with cumbersome versions like ストロベリー.

Biden was only 4 years earlier too, in 1942. The 1940s have had a bizarrely outsized influence on US leadership.

Also the arrows are pretty subjective too. Are they sure boomers are going to continue downwards, which seems to be the implication?

Just anecdotal, but most people I speak to want their voices heard, but don’t think they are in current democratic systems. They believe that their vote doesn’t change key things they’d like changed. So I think it’s better democracy, rather than something else.

From an old book about London that my wife picked up at a charity shop.

Inspiring work ethic

FUN FACT: Even the most modest Goat-Based Elevated Light Rail System has 10 x the throughput of a Tesla Tunnel.

That’s a sure fire way to piss off Trump. He hates being outshined by the minions.

Lisa

I didn’t see that coming. And I suspect he didn’t either.