🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

Half-German, Half-Chinese, Half-Canadian, all-bad at math, currently living to her consternation in the People's Republic of China.

偏见蒙眼盲
无知恨中华
若知龙之美
悔恨泪满颊

Pronouns: 同志 / 同志 / 同志的
Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/317266702658310144
Writefreely: zhang.dianli (npub1ukc…z88m)

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Last Notes

2025-02-06 17:51:27 CET

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Well thanks for making my feed more interesting instead.

2025-02-02 19:04:29 CET

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Try to buy local if you can. If you can't try to buy at least in the neighbourhood of local. If that's not workable, try to buy direct from producer (especially but not only for farm products).
NEVER buy from the USA.
NEVER buy from anybody who supports Canadian MAGAts.

2025-02-01 10:07:08 CET

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Europeans have more options available and can shift easier. If they stop finally bending the knee to the USA they could make huge bank by dealing with China, for example.

2025-01-30 19:25:28 CET

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Fair enough. I'd also have to get SO to sign on to this as well and that might be a bit troublesome.

2025-01-30 19:18:40 CET

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Polygamy is a thing, you know.

2025-01-30 15:59:16 CET

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I disagree here. Employers follow fads. Fads by their very definition are short-lived. That means if you graduate in 2025, by 2027 you'll be unemployable because employers will want different fads followed and you never learned fundamentals.
University should be where you learn theory and some carefully-selected praxis to ground it. Employers should be the ones teaching the praxis of their particular enterprise.

2025-01-30 15:55:14 CET

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I have nothing against letting 19-year olds choose because the alternatives are all worse.
I just think the courses should be harder and failure rates should be higher. The degree should *mean* something. As things stand you can sleepwalk through most humanities and social sciences and get a solid B. This needs to change.
And from the opposite end, employers need to stop being idiots requiring degrees that aren't actually necessary.

2025-01-30 15:53:06 CET

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Ah, that's where the miscommunication happened.
Canada produces too many of those *and* too man "computer science" graduates to feed the scam that is the tech sector as well.

2025-01-30 15:40:19 CET

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Even you talked about bus drivers and librarians having Masters degrees. **THAT** is almost the very definition of devaluation.

2025-01-30 15:39:41 CET

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The devaluation comes from the glut of supply.
In Canada I watched as credential creep happened to the point that you needed a minimum of what Americans would call an "associates degree" (or some such thing—the three-year thing you mentioned) **TO ANSWER TELEPHONES**. All the people going out and getting degrees didn't get jobs related to their degree (because there's a finite number of these, typically). Degrees just became Yet Another Hurdle To Jump to get employed at all.

2025-01-30 14:26:08 CET

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To me this represents a watering down of educational credentials' value.
There was a time, just barely in my lifetime, where having a *baccalaureate* was an accomplishment and something to be proud of. Now having a B.<whatever>. is just a source of wallpaper. A Masters is the minimum for respect.
And it looks like Sweden speed-ran the devaluation of education and now Masters degrees are the wallpaper level. (I assume baccalaureates are toilet paper?)

2024-12-10 02:55:12 CET

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This is why I put "western" in "scare quotes". 😉

2024-11-26 05:00:50 CET

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It used to be really commonplace here to let ivy grow on walls of apartment complexes. Until there was a spate of massive fires in ~2005, give or take a few years, after a heat wave dried the ivy and turned them into perfect tinder to completely envelop a building in flames before anybody was even aware there was something needing escape.
A lot of people died, but hey, at least the buildings looked great before they turned into smoking husks!

2024-11-25 23:47:02 CET

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Most people looking at that picture: "That would be cool and oh so green!" Me looking at that picture: "Holy shit is that a fire trap!"

2024-09-09 09:50:22 CEST

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I was brought up in a household where Abba was the spicy fare. Mostly my parents played things like James Last, Nana Mouskouri, Heino, or other elevator music like that.
My wake-up to a world of music that wasn't tedious was, surprisingly, The Police (Ghost in the Machine) to be specific. Then, being prone to obsession as I am, I started hitting the record section of the library and listening to a little bit of EVERYTHING until I found my main jam: hard and heavy.

2024-09-08 11:11:01 CEST

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Pity you didn't ask me about '70s bands though. I could have gone on a loooooooooooong list there including influential bands nobody's ever heard of (The Adverts) and such.

2024-09-08 11:09:55 CEST

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<HanSolo>I know. I have excellent taste.</HanSolo> 🤣
Thanks!

2024-09-08 11:01:01 CEST

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Hmmm... Good question. Technically The Who and Santana are '60s bands, but most people would associate them more with the '70s when they had their peak outputs. It would be cheating to mention them, I think.
Maybe CCR? The Doors? Wasn't B.B. King at the height of his powers in the '60s? If so, he's definitely on the list.

2024-09-08 07:50:26 CEST

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Ah. You know my feelings about the Beatles, apparently.

2024-08-31 03:13:38 CEST

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What else would you call it?

2024-06-21 06:34:38 CEST

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One of the things that repulses me all the fucking time when I see westerners talking about China is the removal of agency from Chinese people. The way even well-intentioned westerners babble, you'd think the Chinese were programmed robots.
Any time I see people talking about the Chinese as if they were docile robotic sheep, my mind instantly gives me the sentence "Tell me you've never met a Chinese person without actually saying it."
🧵 (8/n)

2024-06-21 06:31:30 CEST

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I've actually written about this before¹. Twice². The Chinese have five thousand years of recorded experience with despots. That means the despots have five thousand years of experience in knowing how to do despotism right, but it also means the people have five thousand years of knowing how to deal with despots.
(Protip: Sometimes dealing with them gets REALLY fucking bloody!)
🧵 (7/n)
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¹ https://wordsmith.social/zhang-dianli/china-and-authoritarianism
² https://wordsmith.social/zhang-dianli/palliative-hotel

2024-06-21 06:28:14 CEST

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This leads to astonishing diversity in styles of leadership and management and leads to things like people who see, say, how COVID-19 was handled in Shenzhen extrapolating GROSSLY inaccurately to how it was handled in Chongqing or Wuhan or Beijing or Shanghai or Kunming or ... you get the drift.
So let's move on to the next misconception. #3 is only peripherally related to #1/2: the Chinese live in fear of their government and follow its dictates without question or thought.
🧵 (6/n)

2024-06-21 06:24:46 CEST

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It is literally impossible for a single person or small group to navigate the fractal complexity of Chinese local culture. Attempts to do so in the past invariably led to disaster. And since the Chinese are almost obsessive record-keepers, these failures are all well-known to the current despots in power.
As a result the Chinese style of authoritarian governance is to set policy and goals and leave it up to the local authorities to get it done.
🧵 (5/n)

2024-06-21 06:23:34 CEST

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And this leads to misconception #2: the government is a monolith.
This is very hard for people to understand who haven't experienced it, but despite China being a massively authoritarian state, there is almost scary amounts of local autonomy. Part of this is cultural¹. The rest is practical.
🧵 (4/n)
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor_is_far_away

2024-06-21 06:19:03 CEST

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This gets down to weird levels. For example the two dialects I have the most direct experience with (Wuhanhua and Jiujianghua) are both Mandarin dialects, and most of the time they're mutually intelligible, but either can, at the drop of a hat, switch into a mode where mutual intelligibility is gone. In this regard it's like German. It's all dialects of Hochdeutsch in most of Germany, but ... when they want to people in Bavaria can make themselves unintelligible to others.
🧵 (3/n)

2024-06-21 06:16:08 CEST

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(For those interested, that's Mandarin, Yue/Cantonese, Min, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Hakka, Jin ... and two others I can't think off off the top of my head at the moment.)
Famously Yue and Mandarin differ about as much as French and Portuguese. But even within the groups there are mostly-unintelligible dialects. For example Min has Minbei and Minnan (north and south), and these are about as different as, say, Spanish and Catalan.
🧵 (2/n)

2024-06-21 06:13:03 CEST

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The single #1 misconception I keep seeing, and the one that underlies most others, is that China is monolithic.
It isn't.
Even within the (overwhelming) Han majority of China there are huge differences from one group to another. Evidence: language is the carrier of culture. There are ten mutually-unintelligible major dialect GROUPS in China alone. That's a minimum of ten cultures sufficiently differentiated that they need what amounts to different languages.
🧵 (1/n)

2024-05-20 08:54:52 CEST

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That's very similar to my final conclusion on PbtA-style games: not for me. For very similar reasons.