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That's very much country dependent. I live in a country where anyone middle class has a house keeper either from Phillipine or Indonesia (cost about 10-15k usd a year if you're not an asshole and don't pay the lowest possible salary). That housekeeper's work is to take care of the children and do the housework. Upper middle class people have two. Then the next level up is to also have a private driver.
Governor/Governess is after that, I know two people who do it, they hired someone directly from UK for about 45k usd a year. That person takes care of their child and helps with education/homework etc.. Main advantage compared to the housekeeper is that the governor is more educated and so will be able to actually teach things to the child. But it's not necessarily super common and I know plenty of rich parents who decided not to do that and instead invest more heavily on tuition/activities and later (starting from 9-10 years old) summer camps at Oxford, Cambridge, John Hopkins, etc...
Birkin bags are also actually better products for more money, they can last quite a while with minimum care. They are display goods for sure but there is a qualitative difference between a good quality handbag from certain brands and a much cheaper one.
Just as an example, my wife's only handbag is a balenciaga bag that she's had for 12+ years, she's been using it to carry back food from restaurants, put anything she needs in it, etc... and it's still in good shape. In the end, her bag has cost her so far 60 usd/year.
So yes, it's not obvious to people not in the know but even products that seem to be display luxury category can actually be worth it from a quality perspective.
The oven is mediocre at best, my Annova Precision Oven is much much better, much better control of temperature, heats up much faster, has more features, infinitely cheaper.
The range hood needs to be repaired because it makes a lot of noise. Repair of Miele appliances are super expensive.
The only appliance I'm impressed with is the wine cave but that's a white labeled Liebherr
- https://ko-fi.com/post/Childrens-picture-book-1--Sheep-Villa...
- https://ko-fi.com/post/Childrens-book-2--Guardians-of-the-Sh...
- https://ko-fi.com/post/Childrens-book-3--The-Twelve-Warriors...
I haven't found the original version in Chinese.
With and ad blocker, the new url is better formatted but man, the number of ads if you disable the ad blocker...
Of course, pure speculation, but this way of writing reminds me of what I've heard in the past from people in cults.
Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
Ok, so if you don't even know what Wechat is (weixin in mainland) and have never talked to Hong kongers (and I'm talking about Hong Kongers) then you're just spouting off nonsense without knowing the situation.
> I didn't say everyone was paid. Protests require organization and that was obviously funded by foreign sources.
How so? Why would you think that only foreign sources have money? Hong Kong had plenty of financial tycoons who were involved in the protest and pro-democracy movement. Just as example, the owner of Apple Daily (one of the biggest newspaper critic of the CCP) was sentenced to prison over it. Why would you believe that money only came from foreign sources??
So yes, you're right the pro-democracy party needed money but there's no need to start imagining conspiracy theories that that funding necessarily comes from US/UK/EU. Plenty of rich people in Hong Kong are unhappy with the CCP and people here are perfectly capable of using their money.
> "democracy". Sure. The only reason hong kong has a democracy in the first place is because of the "CCP". Lets not forget britain never gave hong kong democracy in their 150 years of colonial rule. It only came after the british left or was liberated by the chinese - however you want to view it.
Democratic reforms were first introduced before the handover under the last Governor Chris Patten. Also, that's neither here or there, the fact that UK was an imperialistic power that didn't exactly promote democracy is completely orthogonal to the fact that locals want democracy (they also never had it completely and what they did have was taken away from them)
> Is sedition legal anywhere? Covid? The "protest" was done in the fall of 2019 when the foreign funding was blocked. I remember the media going crazy over it ( wonder why? ). Now you hardly hear a peep about it. I'm sure in a few years when we want to agitate the chinese, we'll being funding protests again somehow. That is after we are finished funding protests to destabilize myanmar, venezuela, another middle eastern country, african countries, etc. Or maybe we'll be too busy destabilizing ukraine to bother with china for a while. Lucky them.
Once again, you show that you weren't there and have no knowledge of the situation in the city. There were still a lot of protests up til early 2020 and protests were bigger and more intense from December 2020 to January 2020 than in fall 2019. Once covid hit, people were more reluctant to meet due to covid (people in Hong Kong were definitely more scared of Covid that in Europe due to the prior experience of SARS). The government also used this as an excuse to disperse protesters.
The national security law was passed on June 30th 2020 and that pretty much made any pro-democratic movement illegal. It became a lot more dangerous to protest but still people went out to protest on and some got arrested.
Still, the pro-democracy primaries in July 2020 that saw a massive turnout for the primaries of a political party. it was the most-participated primary held in the history of Hong Kong since the 1997 handover, despite the government's threats of the organisers' potential breaching of the newly imposed national security law. This resulted in a massive wave of arrests by the government.
So you have the timeline wrong and no fall 2019 it was not over or done at all. Was it less covered in other countries? Certainly at that point there was covid and a lot of other things to cover.
It's funny, you criticize colonial powers for not bringing democracy back when there were colonies, yet you seem to think that people wouldn't be able to do anything without funding from the west?
"Is sedition legal anywhere? "
Well, in a lot of countries, criticising the government is not considered sedition. There's plenty of people in opposition parties who criticise the government safely. The law is incredibly broad.
> I realise that I live in one of those cheap, unappealing parts of the world, but that kinda money would easily cover me and my family's rent every month, and then some. Do you realise how much of a mental weight that can take off a persons shoulders? To know rent is covered over and above your day-job earnings?
Well yes, exactly that's the issue with comparing salaries without thinking of cost of living. I live in a smallish apartment that's most likely smaller than the OP but pay 4k usd a month for rent. It changes your point of view of what's decent compensation and does mean that to cover the typical expenses, I have to have a much higher salary than in a lot of countries...
It's all relative, is living in a high cost of living environment nice? Yes, in my case because I'm careful and still try to save a lot of my income but it does require me to take certain type of jobs and reduces my ability to take risks. It also comes with a probably less enviable work/life balance..
It does show that if Apple switches to arm, the value proposition will be significantly reduced since I will have to have a separate PC for gaming and testing things on windows.
Once he joined the company he proceeded to actually be completely unable to write a single working piece of code. Everything he wrote needed to be reviewed and had major glaring issues. When confronted about it, he would say that he couldn't figure it out so decided to just commit his unfinished code.
That guy was senior, had worked for 20 years and is really good at talking but when it comes to actually developing software, he is completely utterly incompetent.
Quite interesting