I once told an embarrassing story on a public forum.

“Oriental Beauty” is an English name for a tea blend for English people. CHECKMATE! :D

What? Even for green, yellow, and white tea?

As the current Chief Executive shows!

Or you can go for Liubao which doesn’t get bitter no matter how strong you make it or how long you boil it. Or there’s Hunan’s Anhua Gold Flower Black Tea that’s like a pu’er with more umami in the aftertaste.

Coffee: Like I take my men: strong, black, and hot. (OK, OK, I know, old joke. Strong, hot, no milk, no sugar.) Tea: strong, hot, no milk, no sugar.

I also rarely, if ever, drink mass-market versions of either; essentially only if I’m forced to. I get my coffees and teas directly from estates and sometimes individual farms when I can wrangle it.

Isn’t that what I said? 🤣

Except that it looks more like a blackletter “s” to me.

There are still people who will claim that this isn’t a Hitler salute.

Hitler disagrees.

Let me prove it:

Awesome! The USA has already obliterated its education system through incompetence and neglect, and now it’s going to take hostile action against it to set it all in flames!

I give it a week or two.

It’s funny. I’ve been called a “tankie” too for stating truths about China that are uncomfortable to its critics.

It’s almost as if “tankie” is a word that has no intrinsic meaning outside of “you are someone I disagree with and I need an epithet”. Pretty much the same as every other political epithet this way.

So I pretty much take anybody using the term “tankie” unironically and give them as much credence as I give anybody who uses words like “woke” or “DEI” or even “sheeple” unironically. I assume they’re a) ignorant cunts, and b) assholes.

There’s an easy sentence to learn: “AI doesn’t help.”

It’s only three words (or four if you want to be pedantic) long. And it is true so often that the very few times it isn’t true are a trivial statistical quirk.

I’m hammering out a set of solo RP oracles for actual publication. The first two (of four) are completed as of today.

Yeah, you have to be really careful who you choose as a travel partner. Bad partners destroy any trip.

The dealership in our case was fine. They even apologized profusely for that Albertan service centre’s behaviour. But if the core company is vile, I don’t buy their products. Neither my parents nor I bought a Chrysler ever since. My father bought two Toyotas and a Nissan. I bought a Pontiac and an Acura. My stepfather buys Nissan only. To his dying day my father refused to even look at a Chrysler as an option. They made literal life-long enemies with that.

If u break your leg - is hospital going to turn u away?

They will do the minimum amount of care to stabilize you and if you can’t pay, send you away.

If u don’t have insurance - are u going to owe 200k for broken leg?

Not 200K. Not even in RMB. A broken leg will be a few hundred. But yes, if you do not have insurance you’re paying.

If you cant pay for treatment - do they take your house?

If you can’t pay for treatment you may just die. A student of mine got hit by a bus and took tremendous head trauma. The surgery for this was 30,000RMB. He was from the countryside so he and his family didn’t have 30,000 RMB. He got no treatment beyond basic stabilization until his classmates and teachers gathered up a substantial portion of that 30,000. Then they saved his life.

In. That. Order.

I think u maybe confused about what universal health care is.

I think you may have no clue what you’re talking about vis a vis China.

Now all that being said, if you’re employed at all, by anybody, anywhere, you automatically have health insurance, mandated by law. And, being state-run insurance firms, they’re not the utter steaming shitpile that American “health insurance” is. But if you’re not employed, or if you’re self-employed, you either get insurance on your own, or you pay out of pocket. There is no universal health care.

P.S.

An AMERICAN telling a CANADIAN that she doesn’t know what universal health care is is hilarious. Also, an American telling someone who’s been living in China for almost a quarter of a century how China really works is even more hilarious.

What’s next? Are you going to tell me what the city of Wuhan is really like?

Oh, we had emergency supplies. And plenty of warm clothing. But yeah, it was something that could easily have gone totally pear-shaped.

In the '80s my family piled into our brand new (maybe two months old) Plymouth Caravelle for the long trek from central Saskatchewan (Regina) to northern B.C. (Prince George) to get to a family Christmas gathering.

In the middle of nowhere, during a mild snowstorm, the transmission just stopped. The engine worked fine. Everything in the car worked fine. Except the transmission. So in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of the Christmas season (this becomes important) we were stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Now thankfully the engine worked, so we could keep the car heated. And the gas tank was full so it would be a long time before we’d face actual cold. My mother and I, thus, were left in the car while my dad bundled up and started walking to the nearest town (according to the map) to get help. His idea was to hitch-hike, actually, but … Christmas. There was no traffic. So for hours my mother and I sat in the car getting increasingly worried as the sky darkened before, finally, we saw headlights off in the distance in the direction my dad had disappeared in.

It was a tow truck. My father had reached the town, found out that no tow truck operators were even in town and had to get someone to drive him to the NEXT town to find a place that had a tow truck in operation. We got hooked up and pulled onto the flatbed and driven to where the nearest Chrysler service centre was.

Now it’s indisputable that we were under warranty. The car was two months old. If we’d driven non-stop for the entire time we’d not be anywhere near out of warranty yet, but this didn’t stop the Chrysler guys from trying to deny us warranty service. (There were complicated reasons for this caused by Chrysler’s bizarre incentive structures for service.) It got to the point of my father calling a lawyer and just as that conversation started the service centre collapsed and decided to do the service as required. AND supply the loaner vehicle (which was a New Yorker because that’s all they had on the lot at the time).

It took a while for it to sink in that had the engine failed we’d likely have been either dead or seriously hurt by the cold.

I’ve never even looked at a Chrysler product after that. Not just because a brand new car failed so utterly (shit happens) but because the company’s shenanigans around service are simply unacceptable … and I do not forget, nor forgive, such behaviour.

China does not have universal health care (if that’s what “uhc” means).

Source: I live here.