There are about 20 cities in China with at least 5 million people and each of them have specialty cuisines they are known for because the food culture has been developing for thousands of years. In the west, you only really get a handful of those available at Chinese restaurants. The western Chinese dishes (General Tso's chicken, etc.) were created during brutal repression of Chinese communities in America after the Chinese exclusion act when Chinatowns were in survival mode building neighborhoods and modifying their food so that it would appeal to westerners so they were less likely to burn everything down and murder them. If you're interested, one place to start is to try the Ten Great Noodles of China (中国十大面条). It's a fun cooking adventure if nothing serves them in your area but you have access to a Chinese or maybe Pan-Asian grocer.
azanra4
probably color revolution in Russia followed by balkanization into western vassal states ripe for pillaging
climate change is literally a planet-sized problem. solving it will require nothing short of epic public investment in infrastructure, technology, and changing patterns of production and consumption. That’s not going to happen fast or fairly enough under a neoliberal, unipolar world order. Changing that will be a slow grind over the next 10-30 years, carried out by countries outside the imperial core. Building a mass movement to rally behind that change in the global order is probably a good path forward, like a radical anti-war movement in any NATO+ country.
Another idea specifically for america would be to radicalize urbanism and transit nerds to build a movement for dense public housing and transit to replace suburban sprawl. that idea could be extended to other things like veganism, biodiversity conservation, etc. where you help radicalize a left-ish movement that moves in the right direction for planetary longevity.
An estimated 40% of Native American women (60,000–70,000 women) and 10% of Native American men in the United States underwent sterilization in the 1970s.
scanning chinese media and english and chinese wikipedia the tldr seems to be: there were state incentives for having just one child wrt healthcare, retirement, etc. After first child it's mandated that the woman has an IUD or one of the partners is sterilized. After the second child, sterilization is mandatory, and there is a hefty fee (multiple years of rural income) for the second child for the state to support them.
There were a decent number of exceptions: rural populations could have 2 if the first was a girl, and in sparsely populated provinces, rural populations could have 2 no matter what. Critically, ethnic minorities were exempt, so it only applied to Han people. The enforcement was primarily in urban areas. There were other exceptions too and they changed throughout the course of the law.
I heard they're actually doing this to trigger a new ice age and DESTROY the west with GIANT ice sheets!
This was my childhood 🥺 damn i'm old now
It's nice to see traitors get what they deserve
MrWeebl is the best thing that ever came out of the UK.
I've learned a decent amount about this in the past. Like others have said, it's about living somewhere without a legitimate grocery store (no fresh produce) within some radius, so the residents just wind up buying junk from the convenience stores. The sinister twist is that they actually have tried interventions where stores with real food are opened up in underserved areas, but they all go under because the residents are so hooked on junk. Furthermore, they have been eating convenience foods for so long that they no longer know how to cook for their families. It's a truly bleak reality.
Yes, these stores sometimes still carry rice and beans, as well as frozen fruits and vegetables. But the options are limited and you have to be extremely disciplined. Here's a blog that suggests that. Spot-checking dollar general, out of 28 pages of frozen items, I saw 6 frozen vegetable options (and 0 fruit options), and these were probably intended to be side dishes. As for rice and beans, Americans don't really eat those because the western diet is crappy. This shows up in epidemiology studies as the "Hispanic Paradox" because Latinos are the only people in America who regularly eat a healthy bedrock of the diet: rice and beans.
Once again, this problem is a baseline crappy western diet teaming up with an undereducated demographic (some spots have < 50% high school graduate population) that is usually working 60 - 80 hours a week to barely make ends meet, combined with a lack of fresh produce availability, and you get food deserts where people are just trying to make it to tomorrow buying the junk in front of them because it's one of the only sources of solace in their lives.
Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a banger
You need human capital for a society to function. All of these necessities for someone to live a dignified life amount to investments in human capital. The economy cannot function without a workforce that is healthy, educated and housed. It's like saying people who suffered under chattel slavery demanding to be fed made them entitled and lazy. To have a shortage of these necessities is tantamount to abandoning some subset of the population.