Limo

Going out on a limb here and say you’re white.

This is God’s way of telling you not to show your toes in public.

Not to get all Zeff, but I’m told Black people tend to find this an apt description of the justice system of the US. Imprisoning foreign nationals to exact revenge on their governments is a medieval level dick move, though.

While that is good to hear, the Chili report I alluded to above talks about mobile morgue units that are needed because the regular hospital morgues are overflowing. So severe cases after vaccination are still possible, it seems.

My friends (HK/Shenzhen, Xian, Beijing) found it quite ok. Their companies took care of everything. And I do mean *everything*. This would surprise me. I'd imagine - but I don't know if this is true - life is easier if you're white than if you're Chinese looking but not actually Chinese. Dunno. Like I said, with a few weeks of not particularly rigorous self-study I could do the basics and to this day if I see someone speaking Mandarin on tv I can make out a lot of what they're saying. And I know plenty of Westerners who managed a lot more. Which isn't surprising as Mandarin really isn't all that difficult of a language. The phonology is limited (especially compared to Western European languages) and the only "weird" feature is the tones, which are difficult to discern if you're not used to having tones but otherwise not complicated. You just have to learn to be a bit sing-song-y when you speak (in the correct way, of course). And if you don't use them, a lot of people will still be able to make out what you're saying - they don't cause any more problems than homophones do in other languages. The writing, of course, is terrible, but it's terrible for native speakers of Mandarin as well. Luckily you do not need to be able to read - or write - when conversing with people. Just speaking and listening is enough. Not every deadbeat teacher will bother to learn how to do this, as they would mostly interact with people who speak at least some English, but it's certainly not beyond them - and very convenient for going about parts of their daily lives that don't involve their place of work and their other expat friends. Especially after ten years. Anyway, I have to go do some work.

Friends of mine have lived in China. I’ve only visited. And picked up enough Mandarin for the basics. Tones were probably awful, which is why the further away I got from big places the harder people found it to understand me. But in ten years, you should be able to do better. Unless you’re living in an expat bubble in which case you have no need to speak Mandarin at all. Most expats are not hired for their skills in speaking the local language, after all.

Since ramen noodles are pre cooked that would in fact surprise me. Also, uncooked ramen noodles are delicious. Salty and crunchy. Hmmm.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/04/02/chili-wij-zijn-de-waarschuwing-voor-de-rest-van-de-wereld-a4038376 In Dutch, I’m afraid. Respectable newspaper, though.

Running a Youtube channel isn't rocket science. Neither is sticking around for 10 years if at home it's flipping burgers and your parents' basement for you. Speaking Mandarin, finally, isn't all that hard, either, especially not after 10 years (*reading* it, on the other hand). This is true.

Yes. Of both varieties. EDIT but my main point was: don't use YouTube videos for evidence of anything. They're mostly made by retards.

Must be. There was an article about Chile the other day that said the vast majority of the country had been vaccinated (admittedly for a large part with Sinovac, but still) and yet their hospitals were overflowing again. Not good.

With due respect ... during the teens China was an absolute magnet to the absolute lowest the West had to offer. Sure, lots of skilled, sane people went there to do serious, high-paying work in fields the Chinese did not yet have expertise in, but an even larger number came over because they could earn something resembling a living wage for no other reason than that they were white and could speak English. The place was absolutely swarming with mentally unhinged degenerates that spent their days pretending to teach English to elementary school children, trying to bed naive Chinese girls dreaming of mixed race babies and working up a serious alcohol habit. The people in the first group did not have YouTube channels.

True. Strange enough, for me that does not happen with Renoise. I never feel like I'm connected to something resembling work when that boring, boring screen with all the numbers pops up. Even now when all my life takes place through a screen. Ableton I can't stand but Renoise is no problem at all. Teensy, apparently.

No, I think it's very important that it has fewer buttons than a laptop and a smaller screen than a phone. I've been looking at the Polyend and at this thing with great interest and desire and to talk myself out of spending money on one I've decided that putting a piece of software that was specifically made for a large computer screen, a mouse and a full computer keyboard inside a box with a small screen and a limit number of keys is Stupid (tm).

So it’s a small portable device with a touch screen. Hmm ... ?

That would be *very* cool. In a couple of years. The cool thing about Serge is it only uses bog standard parts. Also the circuits are fairly simple so stripboarding them seems perfectly feasible. So if that 73-75 Home Built panel + pcb doesn’t come back in stock soon, stripboarding is what it’s going to be.

Ooh ... *very* nice. How is the availability of parts for Buchla systems? Nice. I think that ‘ll be the first thing for me as well. I’ve got some Eurorack stuff to get out of the way (Muxlicer and a wave folder I still need to finish the stripboard layout design for) but then it’s off to Serge land I’m a gonna go. Ideally before that time the 73-75 home built will be back in stock but if it isn’t I’m going to start, other than with a power supply, with a half panel with a DUSG and an SSG.

We need a barf smiley Imagine eating all those eggs

Awesome plan. I have a similar one, but with Serge. Probably from CGS designs. Do you have a link for the “pabz 208p”? Google comes up with nothing.

Sigh ...

Isn’t that just the old school technique of storing something sped up and so it is shorter and then pitch it down?

Yup. Packing things together on a PCB is very cheap. You set up a machine to do it, which in itself is actually somewhat expensive, but then the additional costs for each unit you put out are negligible. Behringer are really good at leveraging economies of scale in this way.

I’d imagine this is because they contain densely packed circuit boards. That does not make them flimsy or anything, just really, really hard to repair. Meaning you’d spend more on labor costs than the thing cost new. A lot of electronics is like that nowadays.

So do I. Then I quickly correct myself: oh no, he's the *pretentious* one.