You ever watch Requiem For A Dream?

Go for it, bud.

Explain it so my inferior intellect can understand.

How do free market economics completely circumvent digital piracy?

I am all ears.

Right. And piracy is legitimate competition that enshitification drives users to.

Just following that free market, right?

Sunfish.

They are enormous wastes of flesh and evolutionary effort.

Taiwan’s position is no longer that it is the rightful ruler of China. That notion died with Chiang Kai-shek and nobody with a shred of a brain truly believes it.

The PRC won the fight over who “legitimate China” is when the UN gave them the seat for China. Also, one of these is an international superpower and the other is Taiwan.

This mostly correct.

But the US isn’t responsible for Taiwan’s increased interest in independence. Taiwan is.

After the Sunflower Movement and witnessing what happened to HK, young Taiwanese are overwhelmingly in favor of independence. So much so that independence has become all but stated as the platform of the DPP. The KMT is now the pro-unification party, but outside of the last mid-terms, they have been getting slaughtered in elections and had to tone down their pro-China rhetoric.

Status quo is definitely still the overall majority, but that is going to change with demographics and the next generation overwhelmingly favor independence.

As they should. China was not the first owner of Taiwan, and over the course of Taiwan’s history, their control of the island was relatively short. This is not even speaking of the Indigenous Taiwanese who are always left out of the conversation about Taiwan and have never been citizens of China or had Chinese heritage.

It also “arbitrarily” has its own currency, government, military, flag, infrastructure, foreign policy, trade deals, etc.

And anybody who knows the history of Taiwan and doesn’t perceive it to be an independent nation is willfully ignorant.

I love everything else about island life.

Except the fucking roaches.

I’m getting some cats this weekend and I hope they “help” my problem.

I now live in a climate with HUGE roaches.

I grew up in a climate where they were rare. I never saw a roach in-person until I was in my 20s.

For the first year in my current apartment, it was rare for me to see a roach. Maybe an odd one every once in a while.

Now, I get multiple every time it rains. Which sucks on its own. But, they’ve all taken to the same habit of crawling up the back of my couch and staring at me 3 inches away from my face to say hello.

When this happens, I transcend beyond fear and anger and enter a blackout rampage mode. Move all my furniture. Couch cushions. Hunting until I’m absolutely certain that every single one of them is dead.

I’ve bought drain covers. I’ve bought roach traps. I’ve cleaned my house top-to-bottom. I’ve checked the seals on my door and windows. They’re nowhere in sight on a dry day, but every time it rains, they’re fucking back.

It’s genuinely starting to fuck with my head, because whenever I see peripheral movement out of the corner of my eye in my apartment, I think it’s a roach. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Are those a pair of little antennae poking out from behind my couch, or am I imagining it? I don’t know until I’ve done yet another sweep.

It’s harder to fall asleep. I keep having brief bouts of imagination wbere bugs are crawling and swarming all over me. I constantly do visual sweeps of my apartment. I can feel my stress level rising on rainy days. I feel like I’m losing my mind.

I fucking hate roaches.

I flew Air Canada once and it was the worst experience flying that I have ever had. I fly international on an annual basis.

Never again.

I’m your huckleberry.