megane-kun

That’d be giving in to Chinese provocation. They’ve been doing this harassment in hopes of the Philippine government giving up and complying with the Chinese demands, or the Philippines getting riled up and firing the first shot. The latter will give China the “moral ground” or at least ammo for their propaganda.

IMO, what the Philippine military has been doing is a good countermeasure to this harassment: asserting their rights (as per the arbitral ruling, which China refuses to honor), publicizing Chinese aggression all the while building up its defenses and network of allies.

Punching a bully in the face might feel good, but this bully is also crafty and sneaky, that some care is needed dealing with it.

Their “unity” is a lie. Even among the supporters of the Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte tandem, it is viewed as nothing more than a marriage of convenience. But when it stopped being convenient, it’s back to the usual mudslinging.

I’d also be wary of Duterte’s promises with regards to China.

In the 2016 election, one of his campaign promises involved going by jet ski onto the disputed islands to personally protect them, a promise he later dismissed as just an empty promise and mocked those who bought into it as stupid. His promise of pushing a claim cited in the OP article might as well be one of those empty promises made to increase their dynasty’s chances of winning the elections. Their actions show where their priorities and loyalties lie. What was promised to be a “protect our islands” stance, turned out to be an “embrace China” stance.

Marcos Jr. isn’t in the clear either, with the Marcos dynasty trying to whitewash and erase from history their wrongdoing.

Moreover, his 20 PhP (~0.33 USD) per kilogram of rice promise is just as ridiculous as Duterte’s Jet ski promise. As with Duterte’s jetski, Marcos delivered a ~600 PhP (~10 USD) per kilogram of onions reality instead and later on, dropping to ~20 PhP / kg (~0.33 USD / kg) as local onion farmers had their harvests.

Of note here is the fact that the Marcos Jr. held the post of Secretary of Agriculture at the same time as him being President until November 2023. Meanwhile, the price of (well-milled) rice is around 60 PhP (~1 USD) per kilogram—thrice what was promised. For context, the average daily wage is around 620 PhP (~10.33 USD).

Not that Duterte had the best handling of the economy, it was however, overshadowed by his bombastic statements and pro-China stance.

I personally would have enjoyed watching their (word) war of the dynasties if it were not for the healthy chance that one of them would win (because any politician opposed to both practically obliterated and rendered irrelevant).

NOTE:

All currency conversions were made assuming 1USD = 60PhP

I thought the term sounded familiar, and it is!

It came into our language via the Spanish, and came to mean some sort of an ogre who tends to hang out on trees, smoking cigars. Yikes!

If you have such a problem with too many people existing, do something about it. IDK.

Both can be true, that we’re experiencing record low birth rates globally and that the global population is still increasing at the moment.

How?

1. While birth rates in many countries have fallen below replacement rate, it’s still not zero, which means people are still having babies.
2. Due to advances in health science, the death rate has fallen.

These two factors, especially decades earlier, mean that population hasn’t yet fallen. However:

3. Non-existent humans will not produce babies.
4. The older the population is on the average, the higher the death rate will be.

This means that if I don’t produce offspring, my non-existent offspring will not produce babies. The less babies are produced, the older the population would be, and the higher the death rate will be. If current trends continue, the death rate will overtake the birth rate, and the population will shrink.

Outside of a worldwide disaster that kills off people of child-bearing age, population will still rise before it levels off and then fall off as more and more people find less and less appealing to raise children. This is just a consequence of us humans not dying immediately after childbirth, and us humans as a whole making offspring at a certain age (say, 20 years old). These two factors explain the lag between childbirth figures and population growth.

There’s this saying “a fish is caught through its mouth,” and this is an illustration of what it means. This pope might present this ‘cool’, ‘modern’ image to the public, but his words spoken in private amongst his peers reveals his real stance about these things.

Edit:‌ proofreading.

Target is one creature the caster can touch (can be self). The target can make a wisdom saving throw against the caster’s spell save DC. If successful, the spell ends without having any effect on the target. Otherwise (or if the target chose not to make the wisdom saving throw), the target will immediately taste some really well-made lemonade gin mojito that will linger for as long as the spell is in effect.

For every turn the target takes after this, the target will have to make a constitution saving throw against the caster’s spell save DC. A successful constitution saving throw will restore one first level spell slot. A natural 20 will increase the spell slot level this spell will restore. A failure will end the spell. A critical failure will cause the target to deplete all of their spell slots and the spell ends. Every turn increases the save DC‌ by one.

Investigators also spoke to the priest, who said the woman had been told at an earlier Mass on Sunday that she had not fulfilled all the requirements for receiving communion and could not participate, officials said.

When she returned for a later service, the priest says she “attacked” him and “grabbed” a tray of communion wafers from his hands, the affidavit says.

“She informed the priest she did in fact do the steps necessary and is now accepted by God, thus, granting her the ability to participate,” an affidavit reports.

That’s when the priest “became upset and tried to ram the ‘cookie’ in her mouth,” she told police.

“In response … she attempted to grab another communion bread which (the priest) was holding. However, (he) grabbed her and bit her arm,” the affidavit says.

AFAIK, the priest does have the power to refuse communion to someone. But then again, a quick online search to confirm this gave me the following:

Can. 912 Any baptized person not prohibited by law can and must be admitted to holy communion.

Can. 915 Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.

Can. 916 A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or receive the body of the Lord without previous sacramental confession unless there is a grave reason and there is no opportunity to confess; in this case the person is to remember the obligation to make an act of perfect contrition which includes the resolution of confessing as soon as possible.

(Taken from https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann879-958_en.html#TITLE_III)

Not a Roman Catholic priest, let alone a Roman Catholic canon lawyer, but I think any baptized Catholic can take communion unless:

1. They are excommunicated.
2. Explicitly declared to be barred from participating in the sacrament of communion.
3. Obviously manifesting grave sin.

And then, Catholics are enjoined to refrain from participating from mass or receiving communion if they’re aware of committing a grave sin and haven’t yet done the sacrament of confession.

The only way I can justify the priest’s prior actions given all this is if the woman has been explicitly (visible to all the people in the church) committing grave sin. Or is known by the congregation that the woman is committing grave sin.

However, from the other places, it seems that the advice is to privately convince the person to refrain from participating in communion. Assuming the priest has done this in that previous mass, and the woman escalated the situation by reaching for the communion wafers, I could understand the priest going wild. Afterall, the priest has a duty to ensure the sanctity of the communion wafers.

That the priest’s first impulse in this situation is to bite the woman still is funny to me though. Was his hands and arms already otherwise occupied?

Of course, all I’ve said above (TL;DR: the priest can possibly bar someone from participating in the holy communion, that the priest has a duty of keeping the sanctity of the consecrated hosts) still doesn’t excuse the priest from being charged with assault and battery. I feel this part needs to be said out loud.

And since I’m already quoting the Roman Catholic Canon law, I think this one’s most apropos:

Can. 909 A priest is not to neglect to prepare himself properly through prayer for the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice and to offer thanks to God at its completion.

In one campaign, we started out using tokens of some kind on a battle grid. However, as the campaign went on, we stopped using it. For most part, it went okay. However, keeping track of where everyone can sometimes be too much. In particular, my character, whose modus is either hiding or healing, sometimes both, lead us to a situation when even I forgot to inform of our DM that I was hiding behind a huge statue that fell over. I was too busy keeping the rest of the party alive that I forgot where I was. Thankfully, when it was brought up, our DM just asked me to do an acrobatics check to confirm that I managed to roll out of the way and another check to see whether or not I kept myself hidden.

Keeping track of everyone’s positions also became less important because our DM got a bit more lax about imposing those area of effect rules.

Thanks as well. It’s certainly a POV I didn’t consider (that it’s akin to a protest) having grown up in the culture that produced such practices. Again, thanks!

Ah, my bad. I didn’t mean to imply that it being done in a religious context invalidates it, just that the religious context would inform us more about the man’s intent and whether or not they’d continue on doing so regardless of the result.

I used the term “pledge” earlier, but maybe it’s better to use the word “vow” to refer this. The term in Filipino is “panata” (which wiktionary translates to “vow”). It usually isn’t as dramatic as this, however. And as far as I’ve observed, a lot would do these vows after they deem their prayers to have been heard (usually recovery from illness or accidents, or recovery from financial ruin), and thereafter, no matter what, they’d try to fulfill their vows, whether that’d be a crucifixion reenactment, or attending processions, or even just as simple as foregoing alcohol or vices or letting their hair grow.

edit:

I must clarify my position here, I‌ guess. I am neither in favor nor against the practice. But having grown up in the country where these practices occur, I just felt I have to clarify some things. Personally? I don’t mind. They’re doing these things with good intentions, and they’re hurting no one. As far as I know, they don’t force anyone to join them, but rather, make sure that those who are following their footsteps are sure they want to.

I agree with your sentiment, but I felt compelled to comment on one crucial element here: what he has been doing isn’t a protest, but some form of a religious pledge. It just so happened that this year, he’s praying for world peace. This is akin to some traditions in India and other parts where self-flagellation is part of religious ritual, but only for those who pledge themselves to it. It’s touched upon in the article, but he’s been doing it since the 1980’s as thanksgiving for his survival in an accident. Some people just do it once, but some devote their lives to it, and it seems to me that he’s one of the latter.

Whether or not his actions will lead to results doesn’t matter, as far as I see it. He’s already devoted to the bit, and only old age (and poor health) will likely stop him.

Thanks for the explanation.

It reminds me of the concept of depreciation in accounting, in which you’re accounting for the “loss of value” of a piece of machinery as time goes on. I guess it fits how the capitalists view people (labor) as yet another kind of machine. I dunno how it fits with what you’re trying to explain here, but it somehow clicks for me. So that the factory owner can keep buying machinery, they must allocate some of their funds not just for the upkeep of the equipment, but also save up for the cost of buying a new one.

Admittedly, I’m not very well-versed with neither accounting nor the theories put on display here, but we learn something new every day, right?

(PS:‌ I’m still working through the pamphlet you’ve linked. I might have gotten a lot of things wrong, and in that case, I apologize.)

I was like “(companies) paying parents to have children” belongs to a caricature of capitalism, but here we are. (My bad, it’s companies paying parents to have children, and not some bigger entity, like the government. I already edited the previous sentence for clarity.)

If you don’t mind me asking though, what “marxist theory in action” do you see in this article?

“If I can’t have you, no one will.” – China, apparently.

And as usual, no one will do something decisive about it because China is a huge bully and is using its reputation as the world’s factory and its economic heft to intimidate anyone who thinks of doing anything about it.

I expected someone to make this joke, but this still made me chuckle. Thanks for the laugh!

This one, right?‌ https://micro-editor.github.io/

Reading about it, it’s to Kate what is Nano is to… hm… Notepad? 😅 Just looking at the screenshots, I could easily confuse it with something like VSCode.

I’m probably one of those weirdos who use VSCode, Kate, Nano, and sometimes KWrite all in their different niches.

I do most of my programming work in VSCode, but most of my shell scripting in Kate. When I edit configuration files, I’m usually using the command line and thus use Nano (sorry, I’m too stupid to use either Emacs nor Vim, let alone Vi). When I’m just looking at text files (or doing a quick edit) via my file manager, I use KWrite. With the exception of VSCode, they’re all provided in my installation by default.

Having said that, trying out different editors will enable you to pick the editor that better fits your requirements. Kate is too powerful for what I use it for, but since it’s already there, the additional features are nice to have. I actually had to explore a bit before I‌ settled on VSCode for my programming work, and while there’s probably one that better fits my needs, my workflow has already adapted to working with what I currently have.

Isn’t that making the problem worse though? If you have a tool that resolves your problem for you, wouldn’t that make you dependent on it, and thus, be even more helpless when moving to another ecosystem (like, yeah, Arch)?

Arch is built for a particular kind of Linux user though, btw. It’s probably the worst choice for a “not a computer person” move into, issues of dependency hell aside.

Having learned how to use computers via MS-DOS, then growing to mostly use Windows machines, and then moving to daily-drive Linux in the past handful of years, I think the problem is more about context. If I see an error message, it’s not that I don’t read them. ‌Rather, if I lack the context to understand what it is trying to tell me—and more importantly, what I‌ can do to resolve the problem I’m having, I’m out of luck and I’d have to ignore it.

It was when I switched to using Linux that I’ve picked up the habit of searching the error message online, and then browsing the various pages (mostly Stackoverflow, sometimes Arch Linux wiki pages) which might or might not lead me to the context behind the error message. If I get lucky, I could find a clue to resolving my problem on top of understanding what the error message is about. Other times, I end up being even more confused and give up.

And then there’s the monstrosity that is the logs. I’m pretty much illiterate when it comes to them, and reading them might as well be reading arcane records of eldritch daemons keeping my machine working (in a way, they indeed are). Copy-pasting some snippets from them into an online search is a crapshoot. I may find something that fits my context, but a lot of times, it’s for a different problem. It might not even be for my OS/distro/package/version.