Podcasts are just mp3s (or whatever other audio format like ogg). Authors/pod casters should just host them on their site and be done with it. Why let some other company take a lion share of your ad profit. We need less centralized services and more distributed services. Use lemmy or mastodon to promote them. :)

I use Firefox exclusively. It is fast, responsive, and works on all the sites that I visit. So I don’t really understand why the share of users are so low. What sites are ya’ll visiting that doesn’t work on FF?

“We’re too busy f***ing ourselves, so cannot advertise on X” - Advertisers, probably.

He’s a victim of his own purging culture. I’m sure he is afraid that when he is out of power, he will be purged, just like how he purged his competition.

Same with Xi of China.

There’s good evidence though. When you drive from Incheon Airport into Seoul, you see a ton of new apartment / condos going up. Every time I visit, I see more and more buildings put up.

The press just can’t stop talking about Trump. I feel like they wouldn’t be so popular if they didn’t receive so much press coverage.

I knew some bank folks. From what I heard, large amounts of the PPP loan money sat in the bank because some banks had trouble giving the money out. That extra money earned the banks a hefty amount of interest, and the C-suites of the bank made-off with a huge chunk of year-end bonus as a result. So while it isn’t directly the PPP loan money, the bankers made a lot of money off of it.

The PPP loans that they were able to give out went to some small businesses and a large percentage of that money were forgiven. But some small businesses also had some trouble getting their loans forgiven due to either bad documentation / application / or the bank that gave them the loan did a poor job of filing the paperwork. So some of those businesses were stuck with a loan that they had to pay back or is waiting for it to be properly processed.

And of course there are a lot of fraud, too.

We voted Trump out. I say it is robust. But a democracy is only as good as the people within it. And only if the people vote. So there’s work to do.

The male safe space? :-)

One issue is, I’m ethnically Chinese, but been living in the US for more than 35 years (in my 40s), that when I try to speak my limited Chinese, I sound like a child. So to a person from China, I’m an adult Chinese person sounding like a kid, so it may look like I’m some type of a mentally challenged person. So it can be very difficult. And then if they found out I can speak English, they’ll be like “just f-ing speak English” and get it over with already. Of course it depends on the situation and person. But that’s the general difficulties of being Asian American in Asia (who is trying hard to blend in).

For non-Asians in Asia, they all say “everyone is so nice and patient with me”, and that’s because they are obviously a foreigner and its still a novelty for someone in China to be able to interact with a foreigner (maybe not in big 1st tier cities), so they will give you the time of the day.

I learned Zhuyin (注音) in Taiwan when I was younger, but then stopped using it when I immigrated to the US. At some point, I wanted to type Chinese on smartphones, so I started to learn Pinyin and used Pinyin for a while to type Chinese. The issue with Pinyin is that it uses the alphabets and that collides with English too much, I think as a English speaker, you naturally would try to use English’s way of pronunciation to try to sound out words in Chinese, and that creates problems for me because its a mismatch.

But recently, I started to use the Zhuyin system again, and it is just a lot more natural. Of course for me, I’ve learned it before as a kid, so it wasn’t that difficult to pick it up again. But it would be a steep learning curve for someone new to Chinese. But I still recommend it, it would be like someone needing to learn Hiragana and Katakana when learning Japanese. I’ve also learned from some of the older Chinese people from China that Zhuyin used to be taught in China as well, which was surprising to me. I guess that was the system in use before Mao decided that China needs to “westernize” and go with roman alphabets with Pinyin.

A lot of developed countries are going to see a decrease in population starting in the next 20 years and that will probably go on until the end of this century.

Our growth-minded economics needs to shift. Maybe we need to focus on how to gracefully decline. A decrease in revenue does not mean a company is not profitable. So that mindset needs to change.

We really need to focus on geriatric care, there will be a lot more old people than young people, so we need some way to get care to all the old people without over-burdening the young. More robots? Or robot-assisted care so that is it not so taxing on a nurse? I recently had to help a neighbor who was in declining health and mind, and man, I do not want myself to be in that state burdening my children and family. So we need some legislature to allow assisted suicide for those with terminal illness so I can go and die with dignity and grace.

Then we need a new de-construction industry that is focused on removing old buildings and old infrastructure and restoring the land back to its natural state. Otherwise we will have a plague of urban decay if that’s not managed well.

Now that Eric Johnson is a Republican, he should immediately denounce the Republican Party for the crimes of his city. After all, the mayor is a Republican. And then immediately switch party to the Democrats. Rinse and Repeat.

Get those lubes ready.