08/30/24 - So, the MIL was able to have a child through her DIL and her husband? Then her previous son does seem kind of unnecessary.
[I wrote up this post last night, when it was the 30th, and couldn’t find a good opportunity to post it before I got too tired and went to bed. So here’s your makeup post. Sorry.]
“China is so safe! Finance told me to go run an errand at the bank with her, and I never thought it was to pull cash. 800K is actually super heavy. Filled up a whole canvas bag. Then we took it to a Bank of China near the company to save up again. I asked her why she didn’t just wire it, and she said that a wire cost 50 RMB in fees.”
Comments say, “She didn’t tell you the truth. She embezzled the peanut oil.” [Banks will do promotions where they give out household consumables, like rice or oil or flour, for new customers with big accounts.]
“I assure you she didn’t go to all that trouble just to save on wire fees.”
“Wait, you get oil and rice for saving money? Why haven’t I ever gotten any?”
“This is outside of a middle school in Xinyang, in back to school season. Two fruit stores are competing real hard, and that’s great for the students. But why are watermelons so cheap in Henan?”
[In the first picture, each half watermelon+spoon is being sold for 4-5 RMB. In the second picture, the half/quarter melons are being sold for 1 RMB.]
Comments say, “You can buy watermelons or peaches from Henan farms for just under 1 RMB a pound.”
“When I was small, they used to be 30 cents per pound, and you can barter for it with grain.”
“Taking a screenshot to go bully the Japanese and Koreans.”
A video of a “perfectly good leopard coral grouper being utterly ruined”:
Comments say, “No Cantonese person can stand this. Leopard coral groupers should only be steamed, with some thinly sliced green onions and ginger and soy sauce. And a sprinkle of hot oil on top afterwards.”
“People can eat whatever they want. Nothing’s set in stone.”
“Some Cantonese people can shut the fuck up. Is anything other than steaming ruining food??”
“It’s so stifling living with my parents!!! I’m done! I can’t take anymore! I can’t breathe! Why do my parents like to bring everything home so much? They’re constantly bringing random trash home, and if I throw anything away, they ridicule me for being wasteful. I don’t even dare to buy any clothes because there’s nowhere to put anything! Nothing in my closet actually belongs to me! What am I supposed to do?”
Comments say, “How many people live in your house!?”
“I actually really want to know, how much organisational and cleaning abilities do kids who grow up in this kind of family have?”
“Just keep throwing things out. They bring something back, you throw it out. Don’t spoil them.”
“In the end, it’s precooked food that’s won in the takeout world.
Saw a bun restaurant on Meituan [one of the two biggest takeout delivery apps], and the pictures looked like it was a store ran by young people, so I bought some and tried it out.
It was super tasty! And it was obviously hand made, very clean. I left a 5 star review.
But the owner replied to me that they’re about to close down soon…
I feel like restaurants who are actually trying with their takeout never manage to survive. It’s always stores using shit ingredients and selling them for dirt cheap that end up with 1000+ orders every month.
Sigh…”
Comments say, “We had a stir-fry place near my place which was goddamn delicious. They had the most business in their store all around too. But they only sell a dozen or so orders on takeout apps. I took a look and the stir-fry over rice meals they sell in the store for 20 RMB costs 35 RMB on the app. You can’t use any coupons, and they don’t give out free drinks and free sides and discounts for 5 star reviews like all the stores using precooked food. Because they use high quality ingredients and cook it fresh, they just can’t win against precooked food on price.”
“As someone who works in the restaurant industry, I can saw that most people in China have a budget of 20 RMB when it comes to takeout meals, if not even lower. After delivery apps take their cut, minus ingredients, rent, utilities, and labour, there’s not much left. There’s maybe 2-4 RMB’s worth of profit in each order, but if you take more than 50 delivery orders a day, it’s going to affect how well you can take care of your in-person customers. So at most, you’re making a profit of a little over 100 RMB. More, and you’re increasing labour costs again. Stores that only do takeout can increase their output without adding to their labour cost by just using precooked food packets.”
“All the supermarkets near my house have basically closed down, and all the restaurants have came and went. The only businesses that have never died are the two pharmacies nearby.”
“I saw tons of couples in Seoul. Things don’t seem that tense. But in the five days I was in Seoul, I never heard a single kid. You don’t see kids at all in public spaces. It’s like they’ve collectively gotten sterilised. The only time I’ve seen little kids were with foreign tourists. That’s something I’ve never experienced in any other country. Everyone has a dog though. All the baby strollers are filled with dogs. There’s dog stores all over the streets. Never saw any baby stores.”
Comments say, “I saw that a lot on Jeju Island too. I’d see a baby stroller from far away, and walk up to see it’s a dog. And there’s nothing good to eat in Korea either. But it really was a totally child-free vacation experience.”
“But their adults are even louder than babies.”
“After I started keeping a dog, I feel like it’s really similar to having a kid. It’s even made me reflect a lot on myself. I arrived at the conclusion that dogs are much easier to keep than kids. When you take kids out to play, they don’t want to come back in and will throw a tantrum, but even when my dog is absolutely going wild sniffing all the new pees outside, if I yank on its leash, it won’t really protest or anything lol.”
A compilation of experiences of the river ride in Guizhou:
Comments say, “It took three hours to finish the whole course. I managed to let go of a lot of things I was hung up on.”
“It’s three hours, and you can’t drop out half way. You gotta sign a waiver, and if you accidentally fall into the water, the lifeguard will fish you back out and put you on the boat and make you keep riding. You have to get all the way to the end.”
“I mean, we survived, but…”
“The only difference between this and the Normandy landing is that there’s no Germans shooting at you.”
“It looks like company bonding time, but it’s actually company layoff time.”
“If you survive, you can pick whatever shoe you want.”
“Guizhou river rides have never gotten any bad reviews though.”
“Customers: If they’re running this event, it must be safe! Company: If they’re signing up for this, they must know how to swim! Insurance: I’m sure everyone read the disclosure agreements beforehand! And it’s just a bunch of people blindingly trusting in each other.”
“Can any Guizhou natives tell me what percentage of people survive this?”
“The best comments I’ve seen about Guizhou river rides is, “Ride in the morning, get fished up in the afternoon, hold a funeral in the event, and get burned at night. And once the sun comes up, there’s a new grave on the hill.” XD Sounds thrilling.”
“I’ve been. You won’t die. I fell in for three seconds and got hauled up and put back on the boat.”
“Rode the whole thing, fell off multiple times, got fished up multiple times. We started with a family of five in one boat, and I ended up on a boat where I didn’t know anybody.”
“The most unnecessary thing in this ride is the boat. They could’ve just thrown a life jacket on you and just dropped you in the river.”
“The year before last year, I got mild depression, and started feeling like it didn’t particularly matter if I died or not. Purely by coincidence, I ended up going river riding with some buddies, and man, it filled me with survival instinct. Once I got off that boat, I was just so grateful and contemptuous of my former self.”
“I hate people who scream on these rides. I’d only just passed out and they’re waking me up again.”
“I trust that anyone who’s taken the ride once will never take it again no matter what happened to them. It’s not an exaggeration at all to say that you’re riding the line between life and death. The whole process is like some kind of apocalyptic flood survival horror. There’s no enjoyment, no safety belts, no wheel, no brakes, and it doesn’t stop until you reach the end.”
“The most shocking divorce case I’ve ever heard from a lawyer friend was a guy who had a kid. He found that the kid doesn’t look like him, so he got a paternity test, and sure enough, it wasn’t his. So he came for divorce proceeding.
But his parents wouldn’t agree to the divorce. After a whole lot of fighting, it was eventually revealed that, shock and horror, the kid was actually his dad’s and his wife’s. The reason the paternity test said the kid wasn’t related to him at all was because he also wasn’t his mom and dad’s biological child. His mom knew everything, but since she didn’t have any children of her own, she wanted to keep this baby, and she wanted to give all her money to this baby too. She refused to let him get divorced, or else he can fuck off.
He still got the divorce at the end. But with a single paternity test, he lost his wife, lost his kid, and even lost his parents. Nobody’s on his side now.”
Comment say, “So, the MIL was able to have a child through her DIL and her husband? Then her previous son does seem kind of unnecessary.”
“Shock me for a whole damn year.”
“What a tragedy…”
Question: Does China have an oversupply of high speed rail?
Answer: “Of course. Honestly, the rail system has made the same mistake as 5G. High speed rail should’ve only been used for main lines. 200km combination passenger and cargo trains forming a capillary network makes much more sense for other areas. But instead, we just have high speed rail everywhere now. But these high speed rails can’t actually carry that much cargo, can’t develop the local economy, and not only is it a waste, but it drains local finances too.”
Comments say, “That makes some sense to me.”
“Makes sense to me. How about we start by dismantling your hometown’s high speed rail then?”
“That’s so right! In 1981, Bill Gates thought a 640k RAM was enough for anybody!”
Minor: Fiancé [not Finance told me to go run an errand at the bank with her]